Canon Ixus 120is

Back in the 90’s I traveled for a good many countries with a Canon Ixus. Great optics but as it was an APS camera it was next to useless. Expensive film processing and a format that although compact, didn’t survive.

My first hands on look at what Canon are are doing now with their Ixus range came from @ilicco at the Tuttle club when he showed me his Ixus 110is

I was really impressed with the build quality, the size and the video. I shot a burst of HD video, dragged it to my macbook and had to stop for a moment. Not only was the exposure spot on in a really difficult environment, the sound was great for an almost invisible mic.

So.. when passing Micro Anvika on the Tottenham Court Road I saw the Ixus 120is.. I had to have a play.

The friendly staff let me pop my SD card in and shoot a test video. Once again I was blown away. This is a 12.1 megapixel ultra-compact camera the size of a pebble. It feels rock hard and it has a 28mm wide angle lens in it. Really very easy to ensure you are in the frame when video blogging.

It was just too tempting I had to have it. I didn’t want to pay the street price though. I always feel the sign of a decent store is that they are flexible and willing to bend a little if you choose to haggle. There is very little movement on new camera prices and you will almost certainly get better luck when asking for a discount on memory cards etc.. Nevertheless 5 minutes later I had a new twitter friend and a camera in a bag for a price I could afford.

The best camera you own is the camera you have with you when you need it. For most it is the camera on their phone and I see no reason why you cannot manage with the one in your mobile.

This is (at early impressions) an interesting bit of kit. Enough flexibility in the controls. A great wide-angle.. digital zoom (which i normally never touch) when filming and great ergonomics. Optical zoom whilst filming would have been way better but there are not many cameras on the market that will do that.

I will know more in the long run.

Compared to my favorite pocket HD camera the Kodak Zi6, the Canon Ixus 120is is clearly the more compact. This has meant these last few days it has been my EDC (Every Day Carry). I have shot loads of H.264 video and transfering the .mov files to my mac via the sd card slot is no less convenient than a flip out USB.

This is not only a serious contender to the HD pocket cams we all love to use. This may well knock them for six. It’s not a pocket video camera you can shoot naff photos on, It’s a quality 12 megapixel ultra-compact that shoots decent HD video.

Ask me when you see me or on twitter or pop into my Vimeo channel to see how I am getting on with it.. I may be having too much fun to blog a follow up.

Makoto – A New Kind Of Photographic Agency

My friend Phil wrote to me from Kirkuk, he’s researching this story on the Arab-Kurd situation. It’s slow going, but he summarises it all with one sentence. No one wants to compromise, there’s a low level war already underway and things could get more dangerous in a year or two. All sort of grim.

For months now he has wanted to get a photo agency together. It’s a collaborative effort between himself, his brother Chris Sands and Emma LeBlanc.

They wanted to start a small independent photo agency (called Makoto) specialising in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria – the places they live and work.

The idea grew out of a certain frustration over the photography of which we see more and more, particularly on the internet – Images divorced from context, divorced from the world and, in fact, divorced from any real meaning they might otherwise have had.

Too often photos are not even captioned, and those that are don’t always seem to offer enough explanation. They reduce everything to the 125th-of-a-second that the photo was taken in, without offering any of the before or any of the after.

Without this, the images become very disposable. With the glut of photos out there, it just becomes a morass. Click, click, click your way thoughtlessly through to the next link, the next meaningless photo. Everyone seems preoccupied with the image that punctuates the ‘breaking news’ too concerned to be first to really care about the story.

It’s the opposite of what journalism, or photo journalism, or documentary photography – whatever you want to call it – ought to be.

Phil talked to me of how the conception of ‘Makoto‘ gleaned inspiration from the book ‘Vietnam Inc‘ by the late Philip Jones Griffiths. A man I was fortunate enough to meet at The Frontline Club a few years ago. He says.. “What makes it so important is that his photos were accompanied by these incredible, searing, passionate, insightful explanations. He gave the context. That’s one of the reason it was all so powerful.  In that book Philip Jones Griffiths sets out the marker that we should all aspire to, the standard to aim at.”

I have to agree. The internet should not become a medium for shoving out more photos, at a faster rate, skimming ever more over the surface. It should be a way of accessibly going into more detail, of accessibly providing deeper insight. Micro/rapid blogging still has a place to disseminate but micro blogging should not mean micro context.

Makoto is also something of a reaction against parachute journalism, which has been really rammed home with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A decent number of photographers who were in Iraq for the war (the war that hasn’t actually finished) have now packed up and gone to Afghanistan, as if somehow one war is interchangeable with the next, as if the Afghans are the same as the Iraqis.

There’s surprisingly little commitment to sticking with a story. It’s as if everyone has Attention Deficit Disorder. Either that or photographers are generally on a mission to collect as many visa stamps as possible in their passports.

Makoto wants to make a point of not being like that; Chris Sands has lived in Afghanistan for coming up on five years. Back in 2005 it wasn’t remotely trendy but he was there, doggedly chipping away at his work. Learning about the people and the place. It’s now grabbing all the headlines but presumably it won’t be in a year/two/three/four from now. But he plans to stick with it. Similarly Phil Sands his brother arrived in Iraq in 2003. He has stuck with it since.

I feel that by concentrating on a place, by trying to specialise, it’ll pay dividends in the breadth and depth of their work, in the details. In a simple way that might show through in a photo essay that has images in it spanning two or three years, not one week or one month.

There’s also a matter of respect. If you are reporting on a place properly, you come to care about the issues, about the people. It’s hard to walk away from that and, if you’re doing your job properly, perhaps you can’t or shouldn’t walk away. That’s also an old fashioned journalistic axiom that is being abandoned – live on your patch. Try to live as close to the story as you can. How many times are Syria stories reported from Lebanon? One British newspaper used to report Afghanistan from Pakistan, for God’s sake, even though the British Army was (and is) at war there. Why not just report everything from London and have done with it?

So, context and commitment. These are their goals. Time will tell if they succeed in coming anywhere near hitting them.

I remember getting Phil an old Nikon 301 and giving him a five minute lesson on ISO’s before he flew to Iraq for the first time. He has worked wonders with that camera and every camera he has had since.. A wordsmith using pictures the right way.

But that’s the other thing about their photo agency. The key idea is that the narrative behind the photos is as important as the photos themselves. In journalism, what’s the point in a technically perfect photo if it’s just hanging in isolation; at that point it’s just an art object.

We need to know the back story. The subtext. We need the ‘why’ answered. The nasty, irritating, all-important why; that thing that no one much bothers themselves with these days because it just to much like hard work to understand. Again, if the photographer doesn’t understand that, how can the photographs hope to portray it?

This is the reason each photo essay on the site is an essay. They start with a written explanation that anyone looking at the stuff should read. The words say the things the photos cannot. And each photo is captioned. Not in some narrow sense of saying what the picture shows, but by putting it into a context – putting it into a place within the wider narrative whole.

The site is at www.makotophotographic.com Please spread the word.

If we are to protect ‘quality’ journalism when we need it most, we need more sites like this.

Were Secret Societies The First Social Networks?

I am not a Freemason but i have been asked more than once to don the apron and swear the oaths..

I have also been told that Freemasonry is not a secret society, It is a society with secrets.

Never-the-less, it was the thought of being admitted to a secret society that attracted me to the idea of joining the Freemasons. I have an unhealthy fascination with the unknown.

Freemasonry has a mysterious history going back hundreds of years and it’s symbolism and iconography is embedded within our language, architecture and history.

One thing I didn’t quite understand when visiting a Masonic Lodge during a recruitment meeting was the rule asking you not talk about work, politics or religion.

Now, arguments often accompany political and religious discussion, so i could understand why those topics may be frowned upon. But I thought this would be just the place for movers and shakers, the people in positions of power to ‘Get Things Done’.. Where deals were made and projects started. How can this happen if all you have is small talk?

Now I think I get it.

Perhaps In one way Freemasonry is one of the Wests first social networks. Albeit a little more exclusive than the ones we have today. The small talk like the kind we see in our online social media networks was and is vital to build trust.

I imagine the Lodge meetings to be formal in some ways. Packed with ceremony and learning and the bar/social time afterward, the place where I’ve been invited to sample the subsidised beer, is where you shoot the breeze and get a feel for those you are connecting with.

Some of us do the same online. Twitter is a good example of people getting involved in small talk before contacts and connections are formally cemented. It may be at a conference or a social media get together where things move on to the next level. A quiet corner is found and business is done.

Here is the five minute chat with A Knights Templar Priest that started me thinking about how we ultimately use small talk to feel around for those we feel we can trust. In business, in play, in life..

I am sure much of this is human nature, but there still seems to be practised rules of engagement and now, more than ever, we see a blurring of those lines of when we should and shouldn’t open up to strangers. How speaking your mind in a public place can get you noticed by many but only the few who share their thoughts, no matter how trivial, get to play the game.

We all may appear to be ‘open and transparent’ but I’ll wager many of us keep the finer details of our business transactions behind closed doors.

Bottle-Kicking in Hallaton

On the 25th of February 2008, on a cold bright morning, I visited the village of Hallaton in Leicestershire. I was told to expect something strange. A field full of violent people, small kegs of beer called ‘bottles’ and man with a rabbit on a stick were also mentioned.

How could I not go?

They were nearly right. The man actually had a hare on a pole.

Local folk law states that long ago two ladies of Hallaton were saved from a raging bull when a startled hare distracted it from it’s charge. Thinking this an act of God they donated money to the church so that every Easter Monday the Vicar would provide hare pie, twelve penny loves and more importantly, two barrels of beer for the poor of the village.

The villages would fight for the food and beer and on one occasion the residents of the bordering village of Medbourne joined in the chaos and stole the beer. The village rivalry continues to this day.

It is also possible that the custom dates back to the Pagan ritual of sacrificing hares to the goddess Eostre.

Bottle Kicking in it’s present form has been and annual event for over 200 years and has occurred yearly apart from in 2001 where the national foot and mouth scare canceled many rural activities traditions and sports.

I arrived in the village during the parade shortly after the massive hare pie had been blessed and chopped up. I then watched a parade of locals lined by photographers and press, march through the village with an ornamental hare on a pole, held high along with three bottles (actually kegs) of beer. One of which is called the dummy and made of solid wood.
Once a hill outside the village is reached (Hare Pie Bank) the chopped pie is thrown to the onlookers and shortly after, the chaos begins.

There are hardly any rules to Bottle Kicking. Each barrel is thrown in the air three times and then all hell breaks loose.

The basic idea is to get the beer over a stream boundary marking each village border. I wasn’t at all prepared for the melee.. Dressed for a walk in the country with my best shiny camera in hand, i hadn’t expected a 50 meter square rugby scrum to spin, surge and chew up the ground as it ignored barbed wire, trees, bushes and the injured holding their crushed limbs.

The emergency services were on hand with more than one ambulance and I saw people carried off bleeding and broken.

It still appeared that all were smiling in some strange way.. A nervous, insane kind of smile as a rallying cry would cause another serge. If you were lucky you caught a glimpse of a barrel, deep in the scrum through a forest of muddy-bloody legs.

I did my best to get as close to the action as I could armed with my precious tech. That said, my trousers were torn and muddied, i took an elbow to the eye socket and lost a lens hood in the fray.

If i were to visit again it would be with some kind of body mounted camera, filming the shouts and screams along with the action. I would probably also join the locals in having a few numbing beers before leaping into the scrum.

The whole spectacle is watched by families friends and the injured. Ales in hand, cheering madly. In the distance over one of the winning line streams on the next hill, more spectators can bee seen in the pub. Staying clean, dry and drunk. There is also the possibility I will be there next year. With a long lens.

I managed to break away to grab a fleeting shot of the winning sprint down and across the stream.. I too would run that fast if pursued by a crazed marauding rabble.

The game was won by Hallaton. Everyone was happy. Some were bruised, most were drunk.

Who wants to join me next year.. with or without cameras?

Click this link to see more photographs of Bottle-Kicking on my Flickr page.

Polaroid PoGo Portable Bluetooth Printer

Polaroid Kindly sent me one of their PoGo Zink (Zero Ink) bluetooth portable printers to have a play with and over this last week i have done just that.

It’s not that bad, pretty good fun in fact and I can see lots of uses other than the ones they advertise.. but be warned some of them may get you into trouble…

There is no ink to buy as some kind of crystal technology is incorporated into the paper but at £2.99 for ten 76×50 mm photo stickers.. You may want to use them sparingly unless you have massive pocket money or a decent job.

I found the battery pretty good and love the fact i could send from my laptop’s bluetooth too.

As far as the print quality goes.. I found it as good as i expected for a device this fresh out. Make sure you occasionally place a photo in upside down to clean the device (or whatever it does) this seems to remove banding in the colours that can happen. Once again it’s the content that’s the star.

If Polaroid come out with a 6×4 version I would certainly buy one if the image quality was up to scratch..

Please check out the video for a look..

Don’t forget you can support this blog and then i can bring you more reviews, interviews and of course eat!

Nikon D90 video test.

The D90 is Nikon’s latest mid range consumer DSLR. It does everything a good Nikon does and brings relief to my shoulder that normally carries the weight of a D3.

Although compact compared to other 12.3 Megapixel DSLR’s it has most of the guts of the D300. It’s a DX format sensor and shoots up to 4.5 FPS with ISO settings up to 3200. More than most consumer users will need and enough to keep even some pros happy.

The screen is a hi-res 3″ LCD, and is a long way from what I remember on my first Nikon DSLR, the D100.

The sensor has vibrating dust removal and on the whole, the camera feels good in my hands, even if the layout of the controls is very different to my normal everyday camera.

It would be a great tool in the hands of any keen amateur and even a great back up camera for any pro.

This was not my reason for buying it though. The reason I bought this camera was that it’s the world’s first DSLR with HD video capability.

There are limitations yes.. and I don’t think i will be shooting any feature films on it, but this is an important time in the history of photography and I did not want to let it pass without getting absorbed in this new direction for the digital SLR.

Shooting film on the D90 is easy. Press the rear Lv button to get Live View, and then press the OK button.

There is no auto focus whilst filming so capturing anything that moves requires so much skill if you can manage it well, you have the dexterity of a professional Focus Puller.

This did not deter me in the least. This is for me to play with, to put some art back into my images and give me a different perspective when looking at scenes before me.

Get used to things being out of focus occasionally and instead enjoy the colours, shapes and textures captured by Nikons great glass in a way you may not have experienced before.. Moving. I have lenses 10 years old that still that cost more than this camera is today. Getting to put them on the front and shoot video is going to be a real adventure.

It is important to remember that this camera is just the first step. I think many of the much needed additional features may have been held back for the D3x or even the D4. Like more control over the exposure. I have managed to get over the randomly adjusting exposure by assigning the function button to hold the exposure when pressed. This is another moment where i’ve had to stop and think about what i’m doing. This is not a bad thing at all. We get far too snap happy and end up deleting a ton of pix. Why not take some extra time. You may even feel your photography improves through it.

I am not so keen on using the rear LCD as a viewfinder as this can be difficult in focusing, but it has made me return to looking at the markings on my lens which I have not done for an age.

The video clips are limited to five minutes, this apparently is so the cost can be kept down as the camera is classed as a stills camera that has video capability and not a video camera as such. I don’t mind as it keeps your clips easy to import/edit and stops things getting boring.

The sound captured by the internal microphone is a bit naff but ok just for an ambient holiday video postcard or the occasional blog post but I wish Nikon had had the foresight to add a mic input like Canon have.. Perhaps this will be another feature that comes out on the next model.

720p/24 is more than enough for the web and this is what i intend to use this camera for.

The main thing you see with the video results is how easy it is to throw backgrounds out of focus. This is what I had the most fun with.

I almost forgot during the test that this is a really competent stills camera. It more than holds it’s own with the D300 and is a great back up for the D3.

For the test film embedded, I only used the camera with a 50mm f1.4 AFD but the D90 works with every AF lens made since 1986.

If you want it to be wifi enabled you will need the amazing Eye-Fi card and you can expect your SD card to fill up in movie at a rate of 21.4MB for a 10 second clip set at 720p. If you don’t get the Eye-Fi explore with the built in GPS tagging, Nikon has a compact GPS sensor that can be fitted on the flash shoe and plugged into the side of the camera.

Keep checking back to the blog to see new photos and video shot with the D90. I have some Lumiere projects in mind and on the whole, having a lighter camera in my bag is going to mean my back feels the benefit.

Although pleasantly enjoying the present I am already saving for whatever amazing amalgamation of stills and video that may be on the horizon. Next year expect some really exciting developments from both Canon, Nikon and Red. I am not a purist when it comes to photography. A movie is just lots of stills.

In the not to distant future, we will be extracting out photographs from movie footage and the quality of these images will blow our minds.

Big thanks go to Ben Read for letting me spend longer in the bathroom than normal.. Mainly as I was filming it.

Don’t forget you can support this blog and then i can bring you more reviews, interviews and of course eat!

Independent Copyright Theft

Here is a phone call between the Independent Newspaper and myself as I try to resolve the issue of my photo being published without my permission in this story.

I must add that this is not the first time it has happened. I had to make similar calls regarding photography taken in Iraq.  Once a photo has been kept on file (with or without permission) it is impossible to know if it is being used unless you buy every newspaper every day. It is especially difficult, as in this instance, when a picture has not been captioned at all.

This is lazy journalism, but above all, disrespectful to those supplying you with the content to fill your pages.

I am writing an invoice to them now and will keep you posted..

Protect Your Content – Stream It Live!

After the UK Home Secretary’s recent statement green-lighting the harassment of photographers in public places, could it already be too late for us to reverse the attitudes of certain members of the law enforcement agencies and the general public?

At the bottom of this post are a few links to tales of photographic woe and more cases of people’s civil liberties being ignored as more often we are told “No Photos!”.

Should we continue to raise awareness with blogging, protesting and flash mobs?
Maybe we can do what this guy is doing..

Personally I think all of the above but also.. Prepare yourself for the worst. If the situation does start getting more and more difficult for photographers and video makers in public places, then at the very least I want to protect my media.

It used to be that I carried a crappy 16 meg memory card in my back pocket, just in case some over jealous policeman in a far off land tried to confiscate my data.

Now with some of the new technologies at our disposal we can safely stream our content either back to our laptops or straight to the web as we continue shooting.

I am not talking about the Pro range of Wifi kit available to sports photographers using top of the range Nikon and Canon cameras. I am talking about off the shelf consumer software and hardware like Qik.com for mobile streaming and the Eye-Fi card for rapid transmission of stills from almost any compact camera.

If these two methods of shifting data from your camera to the web are just the beginning, we are in for some exciting times.

I for one will continue to put both systems through their paces and do so while actively shooting footage and taking stills in any public place i find myself in.

If we don’t exercise our civil liberties, they will atrophy.

http://photorights.org/blog/42-days-and-hand-over-your-flash-card

http://maximumsorrow.com/writing/whyineverprintmyphotos.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/nyregion/29camera.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

http://trinyprada.wordpress.com

Big thanks to Photo Mart for lending me the Eye Fi to test.

..and something a little different.. Strictly no photography.

Do I look like a terrorist?

On more than one occasion, while out and about taking photographs, (mainly in London) I’ve been stopped for having a camera round my neck and looking like I might be about to take a picture.

Yup, that’s all it seems to take now-a-days to raise the suspicions of some underpaid private security guard. Just be out and about minding your own photographic business, perhaps dangerously close to the threshold of some crappy shopping centre and as quick as it takes for a CCTV camera to rotate.. There they are, trying to enforce some imaginary law.

Normally I flash my press pass and tell them I know my rights. Sometimes I am feeling a little more confrontational and ask exactly what law it is they think they are enforcing? On one occasion a confused security guard told me it was one of the prevention of terrorism laws. The conversation then swung round to me asking.. “Do I look like a terrorist??

(Don’t answer that.)

I am not sure when all this started.. Perhaps it was just after 9/11 when everyones hightened level of paranoia needed to be justified by inventing some extra imaginary threats.

Most of the time, the least that happens is I’m looked at in a “I am watching you” kind of way. This is with a Mediterranean complexion, who knows what would happen if i wanted to go out with a camera and I was slightly darker skinned!

You may well have seen them yourselves, but once in a while I pass by a shop window and catch sight of those scarily Orwellian anti-terrorism posters asking YOU to be vigilant and to keep an eye out for people who use more than one mobile phone, or people who travel alot.. or who take photographs in a public place.

This kind of fear-mongering really pisses me off and in the past I have gone into the shop and asked if I could have the poster. Part of me could not believe the ridiculousness of it all and seemed to be wanting to gather these posters as evidence of crimes against common sense. Are the general public really so small minded as to report one another for doing normal everyday things?

Probably.

Anyway it seems like I needn’t have bothered collecting these posters as most seem to be available.

online to download.

I was slightly comforted today to read this article in the Guardian Newspaper. Bruce Schneier states that the Police’s ‘War On Photography’ is daft as.. in his words.. “..real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything.”

With that reassurance in mind, read the article to learn that perhaps ‘movie plot‘ threats are being concocted to have some kind of psychological grip on our already fear laden minds. We really must make a point of fighting for our photographic rights..

If you are out and about with your camera, be it video or stills, stick a printout of your rights in your bag and make a stand, just in case.

UK Photographic Rights

US Photographers Rights

Aus Photographers Rights

This topic and others relating to our rights and what denotes a public space in todays day and age will be discussed at the social media picnic on the 25th of June.

Photoshoot with the band ~ Talc

I have just finished uploading a few of the photos of the band Talc to my Flickr stream.

For most of Friday afternoon I had the pleasure of hanging out with the two awesome funksters Dr. Fun and The Gift.

They had imaginatively arranged for us to visit their local beer making establishment so as we could take some photos for their up and coming concept album and at the same time not be too far away from tens of thousands of pints of beer. (Probably more).

I have photographed these guys before and every time we meet we have a great laugh, always managing to bag a few decent shots in the limited time we have.

The Fullers Brewery (London’s last remaining traditional family brewer) was an amazing place of historical pipes and brass, leading us into a sci-fi setting of ceramic and chrome. They are obviously proud of their history and bent over backwards to see we had the freedom to take our photos unhindered. We worked our way through the factory, stopping to snap when we thought the setting inspired.

Our shoot wound up underground in a little private bar where, given a sleeping bag and a few pies, I could quite easily have spent a good few weeks sheltering from the outside world and saturating my body and mind with the various ales made on site and piped into this curious bar with no till and no way to take your money.

Paradise?

Even when my camera was back in the bag and we headed to the local (attached) pub for a debrief, our friendly guide saw that the round was free and we were to order what we wanted.

It’s just a shame i was riding the bike and had to maintain some form of sobriety as otherwise I would have had to stay and help the guys with their debrief lubrication.

Besides.. I had had more than enough motoring action earlier in the day to risk any more altercations with angsty London road users.

Thanks Talc for a great days photography and thanks to Fullers for not only letting us take photos but for going all out to make us feel as welcome as we possibly could.

Talc’s new album ‘Licensed Premises Lifestyle’ is due for release in July and will be touring Japan in September.

..for more information on the band check out www.TalcOnline.com (soon to be updated).

And here is the band talking and moving..

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