It’s rather remiss of me not to have mentioned it so far, but as well as surviving my 30th birthday last week, I also reached the end of my photo a day project. In case you were wondering, this is what the last year of my life looked like:
I may not have taken the most exciting photograph every day (you may be able to spot for yourself the occasions on which I clearly got to the end of the day not having bothered to take a picture of anything, and so ended up taking whatever we had for dinner that night…), but I definitely enjoyed doing it. And already I look back at this photographic record of the last year and think: did I really do all that stuff?
Hopefully it’s also made me a better photographer.
I’m not sure I want to stop now, especially as I have a lovely new toy to play with.
So I think I’m going to carry on, for now at least. You can follow my continuing progress here.
One of the reasons for continuing is that I really want to learn how to use my new camera. Right now, I’m mostly letting the camera do the hard work, but I’ll get there.
I had my first test last night when I joined Rob, Claire, and Laila at the Bloomsbury theatre to see another Lou Rhodes solo gig. Knowing that Rob had booked the tickets (and therefore figuring that we’d probably be sitting quite close to the front), I thought that this might be a good opportunity to try out some gig photography…
Unfortunately, my initial efforts were a horribly overexposed blurry mess, so I was forced to stray from the automatic comfort zone and try changing the only settings I knew how to change–increasing the ISO setting; decreasing the ISO setting; increasing something that I later worked out was the shutter speed; decreasing it again. I had no idea what I was doing, but I eventually settled on something that seemed to work, and proceeded to fill up my memory card…
The support unexpectedly turned out to be someone I had heard of–Mark Morriss, formerly of Hounslow’s finest britpop also-rans, The Bluetones. I actually used to be a bit of a fan (somewhere I have all their early singles, including the relatively rare first single, Are You Blue Or Are You Blind), so I recognised him straightaway. I could have sworn that The Bluetones had their initial success over 12 years ago, but Mark Morriss somehow doesn’t appear to have got any older over the last decade. Perhaps he was about 12 when the band started, or perhaps there’s a copy of Expecting To Fly in an attic somewhere on which his wizened face is slowly aging…
Lou Rhodes was excellent as ever. I’d only listened to the new album once before the gig, but I’d recognised most of the songs from the performance we’d seen her give at Glasto this year, which has to be a good sign I suppose.
And she did that thing where she follows Beloved One with her cracking solo version of Gabriel… Lovely.