Talk talk talk

Sometimes I feel that I go on a bit too much about Toastmasters, like one of these born-again Christians who are always telling you how much better their life is since they met Jesus and all I can do is stop myself from rolling my eyes to heaven at such remarks yet here I am preaching the words of the Master of Toast (mmmmm, toast….)

On Friday I gave my eighth speech.

I’m beginning to get a bit self-concious about the number of speeches I’ve completed so far, I’ve done eight speeches in 5 months, that’s a lot, some people only do four or five in one year. It sounds really stupid but sometimes I worry that people will think I’m a bit of a swot for completing so many speeches!

The main reaction is “wow, you’ve done that many speeches”, maybe I should slow down a little but it’s so much fun and I’m keen to start on the projects in the advanced manuals, there one manual that is about reading out loud where you read poems, stories, a famous speech and even act out a play, it’s sounds like great fun, I can’t wait to start on that!

Friday evening was really good, it was at the Amsterdam Toastmasters at the Hilton, the place where I gave my first ever speech, so in a way it was a kind of a homecoming and I was curious to see how much I have progressed since then.

I gave a speech called “Taking Better Photos”, the project was designed to help me learn about working with visual aids and props, so naturally photography and showing off my photos seemed like a good idea.

As I’ve become happier with the progress I’ve made with my photos and their increasing quality, a seed of an idea has been slowing germinating, that maybe sometime in the future I could become a photography teacher. This was the first step.

There was no point talking about aperture and shutter speed, I needed to pick three quick tips that people without fancy cameras like mine could use. I settled on three simple ideas:

1. Stop and think about the picture you want before even taking out your camera.

2. Control your background, try to eliminating any distracting elements and if possible use a plain mono-colour background to highlight your subject.

3. The rule of thirds – composition, putting your photo together to give it strength and balance.

It went really well and I was very surprised by the reaction I got from my listeners, some of them used the words “inspirational” which was very interesting since I hadn’t intended it to be that way at all. One people even said I was overacting a little, which was great since I’ve never ever in my whole life been accused of that!

It was so good that I’ve been on a high ever since…

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Doing it the Old-Fashioned Way

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Words and Images

Words and images fill my days.Written words being this month’s book group choice “Maps for Lost Lovers” and I’m back to the usual race against time, this time I don’t think I’m going to win. It’s not a book that can be rushed. He writes in such a style about a Pakistani community living in England that he makes it seem that they’re not really in England but living a normal life back in Pakistan. He deals with the conflict between the parents views and that of their part-Pakistani and part-British children. But it is his language that charms, he creates such vivid, beautiful images with a mere scattering of words. It’s such a joy to read, it’s just not a quick read.

The images are all in my mind’s eye as I plan and observe the skies, assessing the light and the possibilities, the chances for the perfect shot. This morning on the train, about five minutes outside Utrecht, I had the perfect picture. Well, perfect except for the fact I was speeding along in a train without a camera but it was beautiful all the same.

My photography club has a competition running through the year, it’s made up of a set of monthly competitions. The theme for the October is Sunset/Sunrise and at the moment my focus is on these changeover times, this morning’s lovely image of the sun shining through misty trees is something I’d like to try and capture as a sunrise shot.

I’ve already made an attempt on a sunset shot though I’m not so happy with it. It was on a beach in the west of the country where they had an International Kite Festival. I soon lost interest in the kites (too high, too fast, too boring) but there was plenty more to catch my eye , the most exciting being a full set of photos of people silhouetted against a golden sea…

More words are the ones that I speak on my way to and from the train station. I’ve found that time it takes to walk to the station is just the right amount of time to practice a speech. I have another Toastmaster speech scheduled for this Saturday afternoon, my fourth and this time I’ll be telling people about the journey taken back to the Base Camp by the three men Scott hadn’t thought good enough to go all the way to the Pole.

My speech giving doesn’t end there, next Friday we have the Humorous speech competition and so since for some reason I think I’m funny, I will be speaking then too. If someone had suggested six months ago that I would be giving two speeches in the space of a week and getting excited by the prospect, I would never have believed it but here I am, working on these two speeches and getting ideas for more all the time!

Words and images fill my days.

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People’s Photography – Day 2

As we had breakfast we looked worriedly out the window at the threatening clouds. As we were packing the car, the clouds gave up with the threats and let us have it. The drive into town was filled with dread, thoughts of spending the whole day sheltering from the rain sitting in the corner like an elephant in the room (or car).

One thing we discovered was that everyone else had the same fears as us, there was hardly anyone there when we arrived but it seems that we’d been given the perfect spot as our part of the railings was fairly well sheltered, the rain didn’t matter.

And then the day slowly started to get better, the rain eased and then stopped, the sun even came out and so the second day of people watching began…

With the “Learning to Snap” Pavillion safely back in Belfast i annexed the extra space and filled it with shots from the Pride Parade in Amsterdam and the ScotFest in Tilburg as wel as the mix of photos from yesterday. The Pride photos certainly had an interesting effect. People take a glance and literally stop in their tracks, it was amazing how it seemed to reallt catch people’s eye!

No sales today so it back to normal again.

Another exhibition over, now I need to start planning the next one….

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People’s Photography – Day One

 

Day one was always the hectic day, the long days of wondering about the hanging strategy are over, the photos need to be hung and that’s all there is to it!

Rain threatened for most of the day but apart from a mild drizzle around midday we were very lucky, with a bit more luck we’ll avoid the rain again tomorrow!

We werre situated on the Northside of the Green just opposite the Shelbourne Hotel which was a very nice spot, not the hectic busy of the section near Grafton Street and not the quieter East and South sides of the Green, it was as, Goldilocks would say, just right.

It was a bit of family affair with myself and my sister exhibiting, and the rest of the family and friends hanging around to keep us company throughout the day. Mr “Learning to Snap” was down from Belfast for the day and duly adopted into the family.

We did well in sales, for the first time in all the time I’ve exhibited I sold a photo, that was bit strange as it wasn’t one of the photos that I would have thought would have been a popular one but I guess there’s no accounting for taste! Paul sold two and my sister had the highest count as four but she’s a national saleswoman!

And then tomorrow we do it all again!

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Today

We spent over an hour flying into a perpetual sunset until finally we descended into a Dublin nightscape, it’s been a good week

It’s been a long week, a week filled with getting up early and going to bed late, I’m sure all this sleep deprivation will catch up on me soon, perhaps tomorrow when I spend the day sitting back on Stephens Green people-watching.

The day has finally come, the day of the People’s Photography, all the anticupation, all the plotting and the building excitement has led to this, the chance to show off my photos to the people of Dublin once again, it’s going to be good.

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Pieces of Amsterdam

One of my photography projects in Ireland was something I called “Pieces of Dublin” which was an effort to look at my home town in a new way and make taking photos there exciting again. It worked really well and I took some really nice pictures.

Today I took to the streets of Amsterdam to see if I could work the same magic on the city and the fact that it was raining only made it more challenging. I decided to stick to just one lens, a fixed lens, so that zooming in or out was a case of walking closer or further away. It was an interesting experience and necessary too as I haven’t been very excited by the photographic possibilites of the place.

It was while wandering the streets that I encountered little Miss Boop:

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PP ’08

Strewn around the room are photos, mounts and various pieces of paper, the preparations continue.

The countdown ticks.

The photos have been selected, most have them been put into mounts, a few more still need to be printed and mounted, more mounts need to be bought and then I need to look at hanging strategies, will string and clothes pegs be enough? Or will some more complicated technique be required?

Photo choice and styles of display are the hot topics of conversation these days, the days draw closer and soon the waiting will be over and I will be relaxing again, people-watching, discussing my beautiful prints and maybe even selling a picture or two…

People’s Photography Exhibition, Stephens Green, Aug 30th & 31st.

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Street Shots – Part 1

The street photography session in Antwerp has gotten me fired up about photography again (if the last few posts haven’t already been an indication), I surprised myself and took some really beautiful shots but the questions of legality and invasion of privacy was always there so it was a case of find your subject, mentally frame the picture and then very quickly put camera to eye and click. It was quite exciting, knowing that you could only take one shot and then move on, you have to get it right first time, every time.

Before, when it came to street photography I asked myself the question that helps millions of troubled people around the world, I asked myself “What would Jesus do?” and after careful study of all four approved gospels and various apocrypha, I discovered that apart from looking amazing (he was, after all, God’s gift to women (and men), so he had to look good) Jesus never actually owned a camera.

I moved on to the back-up question “What would Buddha do” and you’ll never believe this but Buddha didn’t have a camera either, and you wonder why people say that religion has no relevance in the modern world?

Back to the bible and I found “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” , basically  a clever reworking of the Jewish “an eye for an eye” idea but it worked quite well as “Don’t take pictures of people if you don’t want people taking pictures of you” and this was the philosophy I followed for many years and my pictures from all over the world are filled with trees and mountains, buildings and fountains but no people.

After Saturday’s session I’ve changed my mind, mainly because I took some really nice pictures of people, pictures that they themselves would enjoy and so my new philosophy is that people can take pictures of me as long as they make me look good and I promise to only take beautiful pictures of others. There will not be the gritty realism of heroin addicts and poverty, instead it will be the glorious reality of a sunny day…

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Tunnel Vision

“We could go to the Tunnel House”, he suggested.

It didn’t sound like an particularly exciting photographic location, after all we were in Antwerp to do street photography, not to go crawling around in smelly tunnels and I couldn’t even imagine what a “tunnel house” could be, so I shrugged and followed the others as we made our way to the Tunnel House…

The tunnel house brings you down into the depths down to a tunnel that passes under the river and it’s a wide river so the tunnel looks like it goes on forever. On cue, the cameras came out and soon the satisfying click of shutters could be heard.

The tunnel was not just a mere place to see, it was the way across the river, pedestrians would stream off the escalators and into beyond, cyclists erupted from the lifts and sped their way under the river, it was not the place for a tripod.

In the old days of film I would have just stood back and wished I could have used a tripod but now I have a digital SLR, I can be a bit more flexible. Since I’ve gotten the camera I’ve been scared of “noise”, I keep my ISO setting at 100 and only tentatively increase it to 200 or 400 (I get really nervous when I have to increase it to 800) so I’ve never really tested out the high ISO settings.

The setting was so high, they had run out of numbers, using Hi.03 (about 2000 ISO), I took some shots. Not all of them were perfect, blurring was a problem in some and lack of definition in others but I did get some nice pictures. This is one of the good ones:

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