Eliot Shepard’s photos on Slower.net were always an inspiration for my early party photography, his back catalogue begins (or, rather ends) here. Well worth a peek if you’re into oddly beautiful street photography with a dash of genius in his messy (and fairly spontaneous, you’d imagine?) compositions.

I snapped, this [above] slower.net-esque photo on Friday at the Leith Festival programme launch (that’s right there’s a launch for a glossy booklet). The photo is not my style, anymore, but it’s fun. Don’t-cha-think, and hey that tray is 4 years older than me!

I don’t have a clue how to explain my 9-5 life. Recently I’ve noticed, when trying, I either play-down the creativity (and freedom) I have in my job or fail to mention it at all. I think I’m a graphic designer, but I’m not really sure… the deal is I work for a small family-run (not my family) print/design place in Edinburgh (Leith to be exact). We’re a busy, happy bunch, the company is very much established and our customers are all sorts- from nice nobodies looking for a one-off poster print for someone’s birthday, to the ‘clients’ who are mainly architects or local businesses who don’t have in-house designers (a flyer here, a brochure there- mainly business cards) then there’s the advertising agencies or PR firms who need rush print jobs or print finishing and then we have the nobodies who think there somebodies who don’t want to spend any money, but want it now – miserable rich bastards, Edinburgh’s full of them.
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I live that phrase! In my office-life it is all about 300DPI+, high-res, uncompressed, EPS original please –or else. Putting together my photography portfolio (most of which comprises of photos taken in the last 2 years or so) its amazing how you can stretch the old ‘quality in/out’ rule when it comes to publishing online. In the last few years I’ve been shooting everything JPEG at the Highest setting; now this is important kids- why? Because you may want to print your photos someday and for that you need as many pixels as you’ve got. Only recently have I started with RAW files- which has some amazing processing options I’ll talk about another day.

Shooting in RAW, worrying about the highest quality sensors, lenses and tripods (at times) its amazing that I find myself including a few photos from my old Sony handycam thing,  a few photos have made it to the portfolio taken on my little Panasonic Lumix and even one from my iPhone! I’ve recovered a photo or two from over-exposure and dust with photoshop, but I don’t think there’s a extreme amount of editing in there, I just noticed one photo (taken from a 35mm scan) has made it completely untouched, un-cropped  even for about 5 years, that’s in! Not quite finished- I’ll keep you up to date. See if you can spot the image that I’ve included taken on my iPhone, is it obvious?

The advertiser’s arsenal is one of cliché, bright colour, drop-shadow in fact any obvious visual prettifier of the ‘that’ll do’ variety… overuse of the ellipsis, empathy and emphasis all play a part – blonde norweigan women with perfect shimmery hair do their bit also. The one-liner is the one for me.

Zing, gotta make it zing. “I’d like to teach the world to zing”, nah that’s rubbish. The punchy concise working through of an idea into a marketable, or at least intriguing, sound-bite is both attractive and deceiving… that’s advertising? No, but its a great trick.

This new ‘take’, this new ‘branch’ shall we say, upon the Meta Comment line is as much an aide as a funky new concept. The idea is simple- you type in the box then press enter, and *boom* its saved. For all to see. For all to see, and type and save and do it all over again. Why?

Lets work that one out together shall we?

Talked to Billy last night. Both he and Stephen are well, they’re in Montrrey, North-East Mexico. Staying with a friend-of-a-friend for free in a wee back-room for the next 2 months, or so.

Billy’s days involve learning spanish (”until my head hurts”) and looking for jobs, Knighter says Bill’s his bitch and does the food (mainly cookies & pasta, he hasn’t started cooking the good Mexican stuff). They are looking for jobs right now – although he didn’t really go into this. Billy’s also keeping a journal, he writes an entry every morning.

Stephen was pick-pocket-ed while in the taking a slash, someone nabbed his wallet out his back pocket. Lost two credit cards, driving license and some dinéro. So no knife fights or whatever that I had imagined. Apart from that wee incident everything is coo’ and all.

Check out Billy’s Flickr.