August 2004 Archives

I really should write more here. I have a lot of thoughts, ideas, impressions that somehow are just too disorganised to write down. Showing my age, when I was a student (and after) I read a lot of Michael Morcock's Jerry Cornelius stories, which frequently revolved around entropy and general disintegration.

Seems familiar now.

ANYWAY, back to photography. I probably shouldn't write what I'm going to, because it isn't terribly constructive, and some people might take it the wrong way. But whatever, since nobody actually reads this stuff it doesn't matter.

Back in June / July, I participated in a photography workshop with a fairly well known leader. It was my first taste of "organised group photography" and probably my last. It was actually great fun from a social perspective - I got well away from the everyday slog, and met some great people, and enjoyed myself. But from a photography point of view it was a disaster. I'm not quite sure why, but basically almost all of my photos are not only dull but also technically flawed - frequently seriously so. I thought that it was because I'm still not as familiar with my Olympus E-1 as I thought I was, but then I looked back at previous stuff and found that, whilst still arguably dull, it was technically ok. So what went wrong ? Well partly I think photography is not a social/group activity. It's an individual thing. A workshop can be good if it focusses on tuition and discussion, but this one basically focussed on travel - a lot of travel. So the net effect was of 16 photographers hurtling around the landscape and stopping off every now and then to line up and take identical photos. Because I was so obsessed with trying to get an original take on things, I lost track of the basics, like making sure the tripod is correctly locked up, and I'm using the appropriate settings.

All in all in has given my self-confidence a big kick (not that it was so high to start with) and has actually ended up with me feeling really fed up with photography - which is a problem because it has been my only creative outlet for some time.

Probably I was just naive to think that working with a "name" photographer would be rewarding: in fact, and inevitably, it just amplifies and highlights one's own failings.

Well it's finally here: PhaseOne's Capture One SE with Olympus E-1 support (or C1SE for short).

I've been watching PhaseOne's web site like a hawk, waiting for this release, which feels long overdue. C1SE is reputed to be the best raw developer on the market, and with the shortcomings of Olympus Studio and of Adobe Camera Raw, I was hoping it would solve the raw workflow problem. I've been using it extensively over the last week - here are my first impressions.