There should be a guy who every morning rides his bicycle down to the main street and sets up a small glass case of beautiful cakes he has made. He should sell the cakes at a reasonable price to whoever comes. The cakes should be both beautiful and inspiring. They should be sumptuously iced and decorated with fruits and sugared flowers which are not only lovely to behold but genuinely delicious. He should sit on a low half wall and read a newspaper folded into quarters until the cakes are all sold. As soon as the last one is sold he should tie the glass case to the back of his bike and cycle to the market to buy fresh eggs and flour, chocolate, fruit, all the things he needs to make cakes for tomorrow. And then he should ride his bicycle home, where he should kiss the top of the low door frame leading into his widower’s cottage because it will always remind him of her. And then he makes the cakes for the next day. Now that’s what should happen. It should be happening already, in towns all over the country. Hell, all over the world. If it’s not then fuck it. Let the bombs fall. Let them turn the beaches to glass. Return us to hunter gatherers, cowering in caves. Miserable dirty people dying of cold when it rains for too long. Let us slowly work our way back up if we can’t get even that part right when it should be so obvious. See if the next crop are smarter. And if they aren’t then try again. As long as it takes. Let our distant descendents hide in the shadows of the brick walls we built. I don’t think that’s too extreme.
On Wednesday I shot installation pictures before an evening event in the cloisters and garden at Westminster Abbey. It was a such a beautiful environment to work in, particularly when the late afternoon light broke through the clouds, slicing through the arches and warming the stone. I loved the feeling of standing on ancient paving slabs, smoothed and rounded by hundreds of years of footsteps. Even amidst the buzz of activity, a sense of peacefulness and quiet suffused the space.
The cloisters reminded me of my favourite Serpentine Pavilion: Peter Zumthor’s 2011 black box which concealed a garden at its centre. I love architecture that is open-centred; that wraps around a tranquil, contemplative space. Think Moroccan riads, Mexican courtyards and ZenGardens. I particularly like courtyards with cloisters. They blur the boundary between inside and outside, creating a transitional space to rest in or pass through.
I’ve enjoyed following Jack Cheng’s progress through the Building Beauty course, which centres on the design and architectural principles of Christopher Alexander. In another life I might have been an architect, so it’s been so fun to read about the assignments that he’s been set and how he is working through them (and of course thinking about what I would do in his place!). My favourite so far is A House for Oneself — a project to design your dream house, anchoring the plan to your ‘project jewels’, the five to seven elements of a home that are most important to you. The post covers the whole process from staking out the site, scribbled plans, and on through building models of progressively increasing complexity. I love the approach of working through ideas using models not computers. The crudeness and inaccuracy of working with cardboard is a feature that one can harness to steer their creativity. It encourages experimentation with volumes and areas in search of a harmonious whole, without getting distracted by details and precision. I think that the ideas about balancing different elements, solidifying the relationships between them and enhancing natural centres have a lot of parallels with successful photographic composition and image editing and sequencing.
The edit was pretty brutal to turn around, even with a couple of days to do it. Lots of multi-hour straight-through editing and grading sessions. I was pretty square-eyed by the time I finished on Friday evening. Everything seems slower and harder to achieve with a baby, or maybe you are more aware of all the time that you aren’t spending with your new (beloved and sometimes nightmarish) addition, so the time spent on a project has more ‘weight’.
lots of baby viewings towards the end of the week and over the weekend. Great reviews from all.
ran errands in town on Saturday then walked back through the park. Decided to walk between all of my stops so that I could make use of the beautiful light and shoot some street. As it’s harder to go out for the whole day with baby, I’m trying to use the gaps between errands/appointments or the journeys to and from them, to shoot on the street and keep my eye in. A long time ago I read a (potentially Austin Kleon?) post about building margin into your day and using that time for your personal creative work. The writer gave the example of ordering food and immediately leaving to pick it up so that you can write in your journal or sketch while you wait at the restaurant. Not only do 10mins here and 20 mins there add up, but this approach has the positive side effect of making your life less stressful — you have some padding built in for life’s delays. Since I adopted this approach I’ve gone from being a pathological Latey-Matey to being early or punctual 90% of the time.
I’ve enjoyed posting random pictures and thoughts to micro.blog. It feels less precious that posting to my Instagram grid, which has to remain more of a curated professional space. This blog is intended to be looser and more playful — a place to work in public.
I keep trying and failing to make time to play around with the headless version of the Dirtywave M8 that I have set up on a Teensy 4.1. I’m looking forward to seeing how the tracker workflow fits with my brain. Who knows what the results will be, but I am very excited about the prospect of making some music.
The big goal this week: not to let work drift into the evenings when the flat is quieter, but instead use that prime time for personal creative projects or reading and unwinding. Likewise, I need to carve out some time for exercise and longer meditations as I’ve been letting both slide and they keep me happy and functional.
A quick tip that improved my street photography and made me more comfortable working closer to people when shooting:
Make sure that you have a reason for taking a person’s picture before you press the shutter:
if you’re spotted, you have something to say. You’re ready to smile and say “I love your hat/style/energy/the way you were sitting” or “You look great” etc. It has to be genuine — bullshit is immediately transparent. This diffuses potential confrontations and creates a brief but warm connection. It makes the interaction feel fun and playful, rather than creepy and uncomfortable. Almost all successful people photography is about making the subject/s feel comfortable — and if you aren’t comfortable you are never going to set people at ease.
much of online ‘street photography’ depicts random people, shot from too far away, wandering around. There’s no character, drama, or humour on display. It’s boring. Making sure you have a reason for each picture isn’t just a hack to avoid arguments, it leads to better images. If you seek a ‘why’ for each picture, you become more selective. You aren’t merely snapping whoever walks past or seems less intimidating to you. Instead, you’re sensitised to what is notable about people and situations — strong emotions, interesting gestures, punchy outfits, characterful faces, strange juxtapositions. Like all creative pursuits — success is as much about refining your taste as it is about sharpening your skills.
lastly, if you might interrupt someone’s day you should have a reason for doing so. In street photography, you’re collaborating with the world — and so it’s important that you treat your subjects with the respect they deserve.
I decided to start writing weeknotes as a forcing function to help me release at least one piece of (low investment) writing weekly. The desire to write something ‘good’ for my Art + Attention newsletter means that I get stuck and have huge gaps between issues. It’s true that if I never release a new issue I will never release a crap issue, but this seems to be a suboptimal solution for someone who actually wants to release a regular newsletter. I hope that adopting a looser ‘catch and release’ approach to my ideas and posting in a space that feels less precious (i.e. I’m not bombing anyone’s inbox) will help strengthen my writing muscles and relax my perfectionism. I was inspired to write weeknotes from an old Interconnected post, A pre-history of weeknotes, that I read this week. Three of my favourite weeknotes writers are Phil Gyford, Disquiet, and Tom Stuart
Overview
I delivered my first post-baby shoot early in the week and then fell off a cliff productivity-wise. Or more accurately — I became very productive at doing everything that was at best tangentially related to The Important but Dull Thing that I had to do (sequencing and uploading images for my new site).
Choosing Simple and Done
I finally abandoned coding an Astro site to replace my current Squarespace portfolio. The final straw: an update left me unable to start my dev server with nothing but an impenetrable error to show for it. I decided to stop pretending to be a programmer and concentrate on what I’m good at: taking pictures and writing words. Better to go with a simpler no/low-code solution that I can spin up quickly and concentrate on making and releasing new work. In that spirit, I set up a 22Slides site.
In around two hours I managed to build something with 90% of the functionality of the Astro site that I’ve been faffing with on and off for months… HUGE shout out and thanks to Bryan Buchanan for the best and most responsive online support I’ve ever had. He even sorted some custom CSS to tweak the issues I was having with the stock templates.
I also decided to set up a micro.blog, so that I could get on with blogging, rather than waiting to start until I finished the new site. I like that I can use micro.blog to interact with people on Mastodon too, as the niche instances that I wanted to join weren’t taking new people. I plan to set up a ‘proper blog’ for long-form pieces in the future, at which point my micro.blog will be used for notes, single images, and interesting snippets; but for the moment I’m concentrating on writing and releasing.
It turns out that having a ~6-week-old baby is great to focus the mind and help recognise what is and isn’t a good use of my time. #productivityhack
Home
Put up some blinds that have been sitting in our hall for nearly two years. They were waiting for some much-delayed building work to be completed.
Two simple pleasures:
lying in bed and watching a slice of sunlight on the wall opposite grow into a square as your blinds quietly roll themselves up into their roost.
the feeling of an SDS drill zipping through concrete effortlessly, compared to your 12V cordless hammer drill grinding away in vain.
Stephen Leslie Street Photography Workshop
A slight cheat as I did this last Saturday, but it’s one of the more interesting things I’ve done recently.
I have mixed but mostly positive feelings about the day. I think I’ll write about it in a bit more detail and share pictures in another post. In short:
I enjoyed being out and about all day shooting and walking with five other photographers. Photography can be a lonely business, so it’s fun to hang out and shoot in a relaxed way. I love walking around London people-watching and soaking in all its chaos and strangeness. Even if you’re not shooting, just having your camera in hand makes you pay so much more attention to what is going on around you.
I’m not sure how much I ‘learnt’ and perhaps this might be what left me with a slightly anticlimactic feeling. I wasn’t expecting revelations and I think that Stephen’s central point is a good one — you need to ask yourself before each frame ‘Why am I taking this picture?’. I’ve been thinking about what I could have done to get more out of the workshop. I prioritised shooting and perhaps I should have spent more time walking with and talking to Stephen and the other students… But then the only way to really get better at street photography is shoot a lot of it. (Which leaves a nagging feeling that 90% of the learning experience would be replicated by going out and shooting by myself for the same length of time)
the other students were less experienced than me, which I found helpful. I think of my street photography skills as a weaker area, so it was nice when a couple of the other participants commented on how close to my subjects I was comfortable working. This is something that I’ve been practising since a trip to Japan in 2018 so I was pleased to hear that I was making progress.
I’m glad that Stephen talked me out of bringing a backup camera and other lenses. Instead, I went ultra-minimal and shot all day on the tiny but mighty Ricoh GRIII. When I photograph for clients I have to bring enough gear to cover all likely situations and some unlikely ones too. So when I shoot for myself it can be hard to escape that mindset. Even though I know from experience that the more barebones my set-up the better… Fewer decisions & less weight = more fun & better pictures.
the light was pretty flat all day and we didn’t see anything really wild. However, I still came away with a good selection of B-/+ pictures. Working on the edit of these images at the moment.
