I love a contact sheet

Contact sheets are my favourite things to make in a darkroom. The photographs are so small you can't really see the imperfections that you know are there and you will eventually see when you enlarge them. On the contact sheet every image looks like a perfect little self-contained universe, neatly arranged and segmented along with the others around it. They tell a story in a way the single image can only really hint at - like the short synopses you'd read at the start of each chapter of old adventure novels. Plus, they're real easy to make and sort of satisfy the need for instant gratification...

These are all quite badly 'scanned' (I just photographed them with a digital camera), hopefully I'll get to use the scanner at school and get some decent files, but for now I just want to make sure I've recorded them. The one above is about the trip I took to Limerick and Cork supporting the 202s and Patrick Kelleher. About half the images were destroyed either by my increasingly fault-ridden camera or just by a freak roll of film, which is pretty disappointing but I'm happy with what wasn't destroyed.  

Christmas at home, taken with a borrowed camera.

I had the idea one day when I was home and killing time before work to just quickly take vertical photographs of windows, but it branched out to include rivers and archway entrances, and then I kind of forgot about the windows a bit. I had the resulting contact sheet in mind; I think I liked the idea of applying uniformity to subjects that were only tenuously related... I had the word 'Ways' in my head while doing it. It was fun, running around trying to spot specific subjects, and I tried to continue taking only vertical photos for the rest of the roll, though I obviously forgot what I was doing at one point.  

Ghosts of Miscellaneous Past II

One triple-exposed roll of film.

The first layer was done around last summer to September-ish, the second and third layers were done on Christmas day, hence the appearance of small children aka my niece and nephew. Multiple exposing rolls of film takes the brains out of photography; you relinquish control over the final product which when taking the photos is totally liberating. Any meaning or significance or lack of in the image is completely down to chance, it's complete freedom.

Some light and some shoes and some

I'm pretty proud of this one; it was one of the first digital photos I took that I was really happy with, though it was an awakening of sorts to the danger of digital - I took about 25 photos of this rock and when I got home I had to sit down and pick the best one... So I don't take many photos of the same thing anymore, and if I do I delete them in camera at the time and decide there and then which one is the best looking one. Much less time in front of the computer, more time for porridge ymmm...












Lost shoes have been a favourite thing of mine for as long as I've been taking photographs. Not just the inherent small mystery of them but the fact that they look so expectant. A friend summed it up with the phrase "empty shoes".








I'm beginning to get the hang of the whole format of this blog, hopefully I can make it a little less all over the shop, though not too much so. I think this is sort of influenced by this (by Ralph Gibson as part of his "Somnambulist" series) which is one of my favourite photos.















More second hand sunlight, though this one might just be a little too subtle. I've been trying out some brightness/colour things, quite liking the results so far though some practice will be good. I wonder if someone looking at this photo would actually see anything of worth in it. Not, I mean, that it would make a difference to me; I'll still take these photographs, I suppose I'm just wondering about the nature of seeing in general. It's enough for me at the moment that I like it.

Handling

More second-hand sunlight... I'm really not sure about that phrase but the longer I leave it the harder it will be to dislodge it.

Bus, beds, church, coffee

I've taken a few photos of people on buses looking out the window. It's a bit of a cliché already I guess but I like to indulge sometimes. I think what draws me is the frame-within-a-frame aspect of having a window surround a body.

This one above is from my last night at home. The scene sort of looks like how I felt at the time, or maybe more what I wanted for myself at two in the morning and still some packing left to do.

Wall and floor