photoconnecting

Party photography

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:41:00 +0000

There's nothing like going to a party to get over the demise of a business in which you've invested a hunk of time for no return.

Particularly when you are paid to attend.

Images by me and Meeyoung Son from a party in a humble Sports and Social Club in Wallington are here - party photographs - thanks to Jeanette and Lorraine for providing a great group of party animals to celebrate their 30th birthday.

Photoshelter Collection closes its doors

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:20:00 +0000

Images approved, but like Photoshelter, not live.

It makes me realise that photoconnect is still here. Six years on and a fair few photographers have actually sold photographs. Some might even think it a successful investment of their time. Which pleases me.

Because for all the bluster and initiatives like Shoot the Blog and Shoot the Day, not one of the thousands of contributors could have made remotely enough money to repay the time spent shooting and for some loading thousands of photos. Of course the vast majority made nothing.

Photoshelter, as exemplified by Shoot the Blog, was an agency run by luvvies who knew how to use technology and create a buzz, but not what to sell. Or how. If only Alamy could move their technology at one tenth the speed of Photoshelter, they might be dangerous.

London by Thames Clipper

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:19:00 +0000

Monday was my wedding anniversary so I spent the day with my wife zipping up and down the River Thames on the excellent Thames Clipper service, so fast once downstream of Tower Bridge and at just the right pace to get photos of London on the upstream side.

Easy access to all the pics (including Shirley, my wife) on Flickr but otherwise the images have been added to photoconnect - unfortunately another cloudy day with a short sunny period towards the end.

South Bank

River Thames

Canary Wharf

Greenwich

Transport in London

Events in London

Dublin's fair city.....

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:49:00 +0000

.... is sometimes best appreciated indoors. Well a lot of the time if my experience is anything to go by!

I was booked by a client in July to get images of their School in the centre of Dublin. The trip was called off at Gatwick airport when a call to Dublin confirmed the BBC's forecast of solid rain all day. So at the start of August I made a second attempt, this time deciding to stay on an extra day to catch up with some friends and spend that extra day seeing more of town and getting some stock photos of Dublin.

The day of the client shoot was dull and rainy but there were at least some dry spells. The next day was solid rain from the go so it was off to that faithful standby the Guinness Brewery until some blue sky was spotted on the horizon. After eating I had about an hour of sunshine to whizz around Trinity College and get a bus to the airport from O'Connell Street. So probably not the best 'photo day' (I bet there are thousands of images of Dublin in the rain) but it was a damn good pint of Guinness.....

I have put a few shots from the shoot in my portfolio on flickr.

Notting Hill Carnival - London 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:01:00 +0000

I spent a few hours today at the Notting Hill Carnival - now officially the London Carnival - by the time I was getting into the groove I had to go. I've loaded several images up to Alamy (where they are guaranteed to miss the press deadlines even though Alamy are now on a 24 hour QC period. I'll load a few to Photoshelter later as 'breaking news' so they may be available in the USA before the UK. Except of course they are available on Photoconnect now!

Notting Hill Carnival 2008

Why do magazines have shrink wrappers?

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:01:00 +0000

And I don't mean those on the top shelf!

Answer: Because if you skim the content on the newsagent's shelf, you'll find it's not what you were led to believe from the cover.

For the first time this month I bought Black and White Photography magazine. Quite prominently on the cover it stated "45 B&W digital papers for you to choose" - I thought how useful, a commentary that I'll be able to use as a reference.

There was a free supplement . "Printing for Digital Photographers" - "Features both Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom".

So what was the problem? Well, the Digital Paper article turned out to be a product listing, one product per line, with less information on the qualitative aspects of the papers list than you'll find on a retail website. And the supplement was frankly useless. It was a puff for a book, contained NO content for Lightroom users but one tutorial on Apple Aperture!

I find this more and more with magazines. Misleading information on the cover - and then the more secret the content, the more it is likely to disappoint.

The landscape route to Wales

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Wed, 28 May 2008 10:53:00 +0000

It was not that the M4 motorway was blocked but I thought I'd take a more leisurly route to give me an opportunity to get in some shooting. So I've added some photos from along the A4 including Hungerford, Marlborough, the Kennet and Avon Canal, and Wiltshire landscapes including one of those chalk White Horses and the famous neolithic Silbury Hill.

Italian diversion

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Sun, 11 May 2008 07:47:00 +0000

A long time since the last post but I've been to Italy for a holiday, did some stock photography and have posted the results:

Flew to Pisa:

Leaning Tower of Pisa, Duomo etc
The rest of the city

Train to Lucca

Duomo and other churches
Lucca - people and streets

Train to Florence

Cathedral, Duomo Santa Maria del Fiore. and other churches
Streets, people, views and Ponte Vecchio

Jilted on my date with Naomi

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:56:00 +0000

I was writing earlier in the week about heading to Terminal 5 to get some photos yesterday - sure enough I was there yesterday afternoon; what I did not mention (because I keep these things to myself) is that I was meeting up with Naomi Campbell to take a few pics and discuss how I could help further her career if I could take a few pics of her doing lifestyle chores around my house. You know, hoovering, ironing, dusting.....

Anyway, while I was there, handbags happened.

So I had to make do with taking pics of the terminal. Which I can't load to this post because Blogger is being temperamental. So I put them on Photoconnect.

Heathrow Terminal 5 stock photos

Sorry, no photos of Naomi.

Assignment sales update

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:33:00 +0000

While the internet advertising continues to pull in a few enquiries the major play I will be making is to make direct contact with second tier design agencies in London. Yesterday I took receipt of 500 postcards designed to attack the market for the photography of "Real people" in "Real locations". It's what I do best and generates photography for brochures, websites and annual reports.

I am convinced that companies and the better designers will soon realise that yet another brochure or website populated with sterile iStockPhoto images will be a disaster. High budget shoots with models are, well, high budget.

The best people to project a business in images are the company's own people.

Tomorrow I take delivery of 800 address labels for these second tier agencies.

Tomorrow, however, is also stock shooting day. Right now I'm looking at Heathrow Terminal 5 and some unglamorous West London industrial architecture. I am anticipating that Terminal 5 will be so chaotic that no one will notice me.....

Alamy stock photo income on slide...

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:31:00 +0000

Earlier posts this year will have suggested that Alamy is not working as it once was, but this month has hit a low in that I will be getting no cheque for the first time in years - while there were only 3 sales totalling $292 gross (yes that's before the 35% commission) from 2786 images online.

Downloading sales information from the site and evaluating it in a spreadsheet shows some interesting statistics. I look at rolling six month periods to smooth things out statistically and get the following results - all are gross sales:

December 2004 - $2.44 per image per year
June 2005 - $2.99 per image per year
December 2005 - $4.87 per image per year
June 2006 - $5.81 per image per year
December 2006 - $5.40 per image per year
June 2007 - $5.20 per image per year
December 2007 - $3.75 per image per year

For the last quarter sales are in fact $1.67 per image per year....

So what's going on?

For Alamy, if the growth in images online is not matched by increased sales then the income per photo will fall. And Alamy's sales growth shows every sign of flattening out - you can see that in the graph on their site. With the number of images online more or less doubling since the peak in my sales it is not surprising that my return per image is falling.

For individual photographers, directing more images at Alamy is not the solution. As the per image return falls it becomes a nonsense to throw more images at them. Let's suppose all photographers did that then with the doubling in numbers online the return would halve yet again!

As for the economics, let's say a day's stock photo shooting gets 50 good images, there's about another day to process and keyword and submit all those. At $3 per image per year gross, that's £1 per image per year net or £50 per year in future income for two day's work. Over 5 years discounted, that's a value of about £100 per day. That's before I think of any costs associated with the shoot.

At £200 per day the economics are quite different!

But the interesting thing I have noticed is how RF income in particular has fallen off.

In the 6 months to March 2007 I pulled in 17 sales for $3233 gross. In the 6 months to January 2008 8 sales for $1413. Whereas RF outnumbered L in the halcyon days, L now makes up 75% of sales. This is in particular hitting the sales of some of the shoots that I have done with models with the more commercial market in mind. Here one has to think of microstock as being the major cause.

If one streamlines one's workflow and submits to multiple stock photo agencies then the economics become better. Perhaps then £200 per day is achievable again. But unless Photoshelter takes off, there is no obvious supplement out there in terms of non-exclusive agencies.

Thursday is my timetabled two weekly stock shooting day. This week the weather may be fine. I'm not out of the stock market yet because it can be such a pleasant way of spending the day that even if one earns nothing then it seems OK. In the worst case it's an enjoyable day off and that's the way one must approach it, but don't forget, the processing is hard work and has to be fitted in somewhere.....

Alamyrank and pseudonyms

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:05:00 +0000

This is a piece of irony for the statistically obsessed elements on Alamy.

Alamy ranks photographers according to pseudonym. The general message is to delete weaker images, or as I did, at least put them into another pseudonym.

So that is what I did to some extent - until I got bored - about 6 months ago. I put my weaker images into a separate pseudonym, Scott Hortop Images.

Now I have found that the click through rate for these images is 1.31%. And for Scott Hortop (my "better" images) 0.99% (that's measured over the last year or so).

What is going on? Why should my rubbish images (that really do not sell) have a better click through rate than my good images (that do sell)?

I can only now think of one answer right now - image content clutter. In choosing what images to put into my second tier pseudonym, I chose the images that had the most unimpressive cluttered thumbnails. Where it is clear what the image content is - a nice clear image - buyers don't need to click on the new larger thumbnails. So click through rate goes down. Where the content is fuzzy, buyers have to click to see what is there. So click through rate goes up.

Just a thought. The main point is that it's unpredictable how buyers behave.

One thing is sure, had I not carried out this exercise the CTR on my main pseudonym would be greater than 1%. And I think that being less than 1% has sent my Alamyrank over the edge into a lower tier so that my good images are ranked lower than my bad.

So beware! Meddling with pseudonyms can be less than productive...

Control

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:02:00 +0000

Just been to see "Control", the Ian Curtis biopic in Kingston. Yet again am bowled over by the photography, all stark black and white making terraced house interiors and exteriors.

I'm realising that I tend to be rather more influenced by great cinematic photography than stil photography - at least in the sense that great photography in a movie has a longer hold on my brain than great photography on a wall.

It's not static v. dynamic, it's more that during a movie that contains great photography I find myself clicking in my head, thinking about which moments I would capture and there were many dazzling moments in this film. Not to mention the great Joy Division music & recreation of some great gigs (all of which I missed).

Love Will Tear us Apart, but the descent of a great talent (being able to lead a creative lifestyle I might only dream of) to suicide at the age of 23, was far more complicated than that.

It was also curious how someone so talented, now so famous, earned so little money from his creativity. At least I have one of these things in common.

Getty submission done and dusted

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:23:00 +0000

It took a lot of effort so the envelope of stock photos that I posted to Getty Images (in Ireland) today had better be worthwhile. Understandingly the requirements, figuring out how to package the images onto a CD (no online upload here), and the time taken to prepare the images was over a day. Much of that was cataloguing the model releases - I am only glad that most of the property releases were for my own home! Still, to avoid pedantry at the receiving end, I completed four releases, one for each shoot, each with a photo of my own house, just in case I forget what it looks like presumably.

This will be an interesting experience. But first to get accepted.....

Dancing with the devil (part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 11:14:00 +0000

If part 1 was Getty (yesterday's post) then part 2 is Getty on the cheap, iStockPhoto.com.

I do some web development and some of my clients ask me to buy stock photos from iStockPhoto. When it comes to business you have to leave some morals behind so I go ahead and do it. Yesterday I received a notification that I had 4 credits remaining to use within 3 days so I have gone off and used them.

Pic 1 was on the latest pics added section of the home page. If you think the shirt and tie combination is lurid then it's also available in pale green. No doubt also available in photoshopped lilac and mauve but I did not bother to look. To find this image searchers can use such keywords as "fashion model" "sex symbol" "modern" and "male beauty". But probably not pink. Somehow, I can't see the model in a pink shirt.

Pic 2 is a 'Sexy Russian Girl" and had just appeared on the home page after I refreshed it. My lucky day.

Just to be a little more serious about things I went off to find a couple of t-shirt stock photos for my client Pier 32 who prints ethical tshirts to use in his website or on his blog which I write. Contrary to what many pro photographers would have you believe, there are good images to be found on iStockPhoto and I'm looking for something a little classy and ethically sound. The sexy Russian girl will never make it although I'm sure the printing presses are up to dealing with skimpies. Or bear hats.

Anyway the last two images were the best I found in a search on "tshirt woman nature". They will have to do.

I have just earned the photographers 20 cents per image. I feel better now. If not exactly ethical.

Getty for Easter

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 08:28:00 +0000

This week I have been doing a fair bit of work around the house. If I've not mentioned it before, in order to live the way I want as a photographer (my wife too, doing her thing) we are looking to sell up and more or less pay up the mortgage. So with the competition to find a buyer ever escalating, I've sorted the bedroom and am now dealing with the bathroom.

This, and the weather, has played a little havoc with my work schedule this week. The shooting stock photos day has become 'a laying the bathroom floor day' and I've also fitted in painting and other stuff....

So, not going away at Easter, I have turned to the little job that I have been putting off, getting in a submission to Getty Images 'Lifesize' collection. "Paying to play" will cost me $250 (half price for the first ten images!) so, with Getty's 70% grab on the proceeds I have to sell $833 of images to get my money back.

Can it be done? The images are sold as 'rights ready', an allegedly easy to understand for the photo buyer rights managed concept. $833 will require about 4-6 editorial uses or one commercial use. Money back in year one is what I want - anything more is a failure because I have to make money.

To test things I'm submitting ten images which cover a broad range of subjects - nothing special about them, ultra low budget productions in and around this house and a few shots of London. I suppose the common feature is that I took them on the Canon EOS5D because Getty turn their nose up at Pentax.

Getty sell lots of images. Many images sell many times each year. While some organisations have buyers who take hours to find a cheap image, many send their buyers to Getty because they know that they will find something quickly. It may be lazy but it is also cost effective.

And I am lazy too. I'd much rather prepare a few images than hundreds to see a return. The shear time effort of making money elsewhere in stock is now not justifiable other than as a sideshow or hobby. Getty does make money despite recent turmoil. Lots of it. Can I get a slice of it? We'll find out.

If they have me.

Sometimes I take photos for pleasure

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:02:00 +0000

Something I too often forget to do. Last Thursday's shoot - while hanging around waiting for things to happen.

Alamy crunch

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:24:00 +0000

The re-ranking of stock photo search image order at Alamy was just over a week ago now. Just peaking at the ordering of a few random searches was not encouraging for me - now I can look at the 'Alamy Measures' statistics for the last week to find that the number of images viewed in that week are 37% of what they were for a random week pulled up from a month ago. Photos 'zoomed' (inspected at a larger size by potential buyers) are down by a similar amount.

At Alamy one has to generate $250 in commission in a month to receive a cheque. That commission is traceable back to sales first reported a few months ago. So when I look this month and see that I might not be receiving a monthly cheque for the first time in perhaps 18 months and couple this with the new image ordering I get more a little concerned about how things are going.

Right now I have more pressing things to get on with than to worry about Alamy. But I do keep rudimentary statistics to give me an idea of results and whether they make it all worth the effort and I will update these soon.

Photography and the credit crunch

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:56:00 +0000

In my new disciplined time management regime, Thursday is due to be my "stock shooting" day or "awayday" as I sometimes put it. A day to get out and do some stock photo shooting - but it's going to be cold, wet and windy, surely a day to stay indoors?

No, hang on, after years of an artificial smile all over the face of businesses pretending that all is well, bonus induced smiles on the face of those who just happen to to have been in the right place at the right time (while there, just following the herd), and a smile on the face of all those dollar stock photos being sold for identical uses on the websites and brochures of businesses pretending to full of 'nice' people, we suddenly face a crunch. A reality check. Thursday should surely be the day to get out into the City of London and take photos of miserable people on a miserable day....

Except it's not like that. It's Joe Ordinary who suffers when the people who run the City fantasy world get things wrong. Joe Ordinary sold a loan by the commission led salesman, who got a bonus on his commission because he sold Joe an insurance policy that won't pay out, a salesman who worked for a company with a huge call centre and a $1 photo of a girl with an artificial smile on its website, a company that got the money it lends through a multiplicity of clever deals all organised by clever people at another bank to stay (just) within the letter of the law in terms of the policing of a marketplace where all is geared up to give overpaid and under-talented people big bonuses for making more clever deals.

When it all this cleverness goes pear shaped, Clever Jim won't suffer. At least not in a way that normal people use the word. He'll just get a reduced bonus, or perhaps none at all, but he still earns 10 time what Joe Ordinary earns. Sure, some Clever Jims will lose their jobs, the unlucky ones, but not many. The system will have a quiet year or two, a few more years of relative conservatism before swinging into action again in mutual cleverness because if you are not inclined to be clever (or lucky, or of course arse lick) you are left behind. The surest way of all in this environment to lose your job.

How will this affect the assignment photographer? At least in my line the number of assignments should not fall too far. But art budgets for brochures and annual reports may be slashed. I see this as an opportunity for me to compete in new markets; I don't want to present myself as being cheap, undercutting, but if I can get across that the way I work allows people to generate the images they want in less time and less cost because of my methods and lower cost base.....

If there is a move towards using more 'real' people (rather than the artificial smile) then I stand to gain. The 'real' message is one I intend to push. Will the photography market reject artificiality? There's a section of the market that will always do out and buy the $1 pretty girl but I think there will be many out there who see that it's time for a mood change. We will see.

Stirring it at Alamy

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 08:54:00 +0000

Stirring the image order that is.

The Alamy images presented to buyers are ordered by a programme called "Alamyrank". Every so often its algorithm changes - at the last change it boosted more of my images than ever to the top of the pecking order. This coincided more or less with a 50% reduction in my monthly sales that has continued for the last four months.

Now there has been a reordering again and my images have been pushed down again somewhere into the bunch. Let's see what happens to sales...

Alamyrank seems like an unregulated see saw. The boards even report images that have sold being pushed to the bottom of searches.

Meanwhile over at QC....

Alamy Quality Control continues to reject images from my Canon EOS 5D ("interpolation artefacts") while my images from a Ricoh GX100 tiny digicam continue to pass with flying colours.

Hey guys, those 'artifacts' are actually Christmas lights scattered amid the branches of the trees on Oxford Street!

Glastonbury - done!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:29:00 +0000

With just 24 hours to go until it closes, four more human beings have just been thrown into the great Glastonbury lottery. Some of them don't even want to go - well you don't have to, but be guided by fate.....

Family, who'd 'av em?

Classy photos though.

Photoshelter makeover shock!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:19:00 +0000

Many photographers will have received today's email on the Photoshelter redesign - with a big push on their new blog written by Rachel Hulin. Does her background at Nerve.com ("Original Essays and Photography on Sex, Arts and Culture") promise a new sexed up Photoshelter, I wonder? Indeed going into the current article on the blog "I Heart Event Listings" reveals naked flesh right up front and another (restrained) article on Nerve favourites Kate and Camilla. I wonder if Rachel chose my image that one graced the home page of Nerve? :-)

My own submission of naked flesh to Photoshelter has met with mixed results. This, in the same spirit as the pic on Rachel's blog got thrown out:

While this got in:

There's no accounting for taste.

Well there you are, the first sexed up Photoconnect blog posting! Don't hold your breath for the next one....

Enough S&M?

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:18:00 +0000

The timetable that I set up in my last post is still on the wall.... and more to the point I have been looking at it and trying to follow it! No matter that I've not spent as much time as I should on each of the business tasks, I have spent time on each of them that I might not have otherwise. I've also even found time to to some minor improvements in the home....

And I feel better because everything seems more in control, I'm in touch with all the important bits that I need to be in touch with and I have less to worry me.

So it does not matter that yesterday I did only a couple of hours of S&M. No Sales activity at all (because I'm still not 'there' to present my portfolio) but on the Marketing front I did choose and buy a more suitable portfolio box, and a nice bag to carry it in, so when I turn up at a prospect I can now actually look the part and just as importantly more confidentially feel the part.

I also prepared a few more images to go into the portfolio including the best one from the recent opera shoot and the one you see here of my daughter on a tram in Bilbao (I spent a little time on this one using layers to balance the interior and exterior light - a perfect example of the more personal image that is good for the portfolio).

Time management (or Who Knows Where the Time Goes?)

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:12:00 +0000

Who knows where the time goes? sang Sandy Denny - I am sure that she was referring to something deeper than the pressures on a photographer to move his business forward but it's a phrase that keeps going through my head...

Example. Decision is made that its a good idea to have an online backup of images at PhotoShelter. Sign up, load up images while doing other stuff - easy. Except once I get started I think - some keywording is useful to help find the images; enough to transfer them over to sell on the Photoshelter Collection. Doing this will save lots of time in the long run.

Result - I'm potentially sucked into doing something that is comforting in terms of keeping me busy but rubbish in terms of pushing the business forward.

The business I am talking about here is not a photography business (in the general sense), certainly not a stock photography business (it makes not enough money and makes it at some undefined time in the future), but an assignment photography business. That should be the focus.

All those old images no matter how potentially valuable (£'s or sentimental, if lost) should just be dumped onto Photoshelter for now (the important point being to have them there to recover if this house goes up in smoke).

So here I am on a Monday morning thinking time management, must do better, must not give into temptation to be busy.... On the recent sales course, the tutor showed us how he manages his time - he organises each day of his week in a standard way so that all the stuff that really needs to be done to run his business gets done. This is something that I had been thinking of getting in place for a while but having someone tell me to do it (particularly someone into sales) just may make it happen.

So here it is. It should really allow for three days of active client service activity but I'm playing catch up both in terms of developing the client base and catching up with important admin that always gets left behind so I'm allocating two and a half days.....

WEEK 1

Monday
AM - Planning for week; sales & marketing (that's me now!)
PM - Web design business (yes, I still have this to deal with even if i'm not looking to develop it)

Tuesday
AM - Shooting
PM - Shooting

Wednesday
AM - sales & marketing
PM - business admin

Thursday
AM - Shooting
PM - Shooting

Friday
AM - sales & marketing
PM - Flexible

WEEK 2

Monday
AM - Planning for week; sales & marketing
PM - Web design business

Tuesday
AM - Shooting
PM - Shooting

Wednesday
AM - sales & marketing
PM - Shooting

Thursday
AM - Awayday
PM - Awayday

Friday
AM - business admin
PM - Photoconnect / stock processing (a half day soft option!)

What's the awayday? It's getting out and pursuing my own interests - a mix of relaxation and stock photography or photography of something special for the portfolio. I can't do this every week but it's important to developing the whole so I'm setting up a two week cycle.

The half day's flexible slot on Friday allows for catch up if necessary.

Of course, things can be flexed to allow for client shoots but ideally I'll try to match them to the available slots. Such as this Thursday when I have a shoot.

Right now, in the background, I'm trying to sell a house - if I don't have a shoot (or really urgent web design work) then I'll use the time to do things to advance this cause in this time. Some might say that I should be doing S&M (that's what Sales & Marketing can feel like!) but it's time spent earning money in a different way.

OK. That's the plan. Print it off. Put it on the wall.

Can I stick to it? Where does all the other stuff fit in? Such as blogging - mine - my client's (I getting paid for that!). Reading emails? Checking on Alamy sales? Picking my nose? Today's FA Cup semi final draw? (Having outclassed Middlesborough, Cardiff are on the way to Wembley!).

I'm not sure. I'll find out and report back.

Tripping with Lynch

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Hortop) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 09:37:00 +0000

Photography is important to my enjoyment of cinema - in fact in terms of making an impression and influencing me in styles that I would like to emulate in still photography it possibly gives me more to think about than time spent wandering galleries. In the age of the DVD it certainly is more accessible.

Two days ago I started watching David Lynch's film, Inland Empire. Like many other Lynch films the dense hallucinogenic weirdness of the first 15 minutes, suddenly a mood shift, opening up into something approaching light reality (only Lynch reality) for the next 45.

Then last night, not knowing how long was left in the film I sat down to watch the remainder.....

After 30 minutes of a claustrophobic oppressive battering of the senses I did not have a clue what was going on. My son (15 years old) was watching too - he had not seen the first hour but I remember thinking that I probably know no more than he does. An hour later we were still both there watching Laura Dern's confused and horrified face echoing our own thought process of "What the **** is going on?". A half hour more and the trip was over - in total three hours of confusion, nausea and stunning photography (all captured with a handheld cheapo home video camera often held by Lynch himself) and it was over, finishing with a credit sequence with all the lightness of a pop video.

I've watched Mulholland Drive 3 times now. Lost Highway twice. But they have some narrative to identify with even if it does not make sense.

Inland Empire was a gruelling experience; Lynch letting rip with his artistic vision and damn the commercial consequences. Why do I want to go back for more?

(Want to understand it? Reading reviews does not help!)