One of the advantages of being a camera club member is the opportunity to participate in regular competitions. And one of the advantages/disadvantages of our particular local federation is the two themed competition rounds each year.
Sometimes these are inspiring, sometimes off-putting, very often challenging. So far I've attempted street photography (quite far outside my comfort zone), contre-jour (shooting against the light, not a success), texture (oh yes, this suited me very well), bad weather (you'd think, living in this country, that that would be easy, but no), and infrastructure (a challenge, but I was pleased with what I managed).
The most recent themed round was food. This has been much more of a challenge than I would have expected, and it's taken most of the year to achieve just three shots that I'm satisfied with. But it has been fun.
The one at the start of this post is my favourite. It started as a picture in my head, and it had its title, Sugar and Spice, from the outset. The vintage spoons were a key component - from all my experience of shooting old cars, I'm very aware that photographing shiny metal is a nightmare because of the reflections. Once it stops being shiny, you get lovely patinas, and you don't see a tiny version of yourself and your camera in every piece. So I haunted antique shops both here and in the US until I had enough old cutlery.
The spices came from Belfast's fabulous St George's Market. The spice stall lady let me buy tiny amounts of all the prettiest spices, though she looked very dubious at my choices, obviously deeply concerned about what my dinner was going to taste like.
I shot three versions of the image, on white, red and black backgrounds. There was no doubt which was best, although I'd really hoped that the red would work.
And my living room smelt fantastic, despite the spice lady's concerned face, for several days.
The oysters also came from St George's Market. I had carefully sourced this lovely vintage, non-shiny, seafood-themed silver dish from an antique shop in Asheville. The shoot was in my garden in November, and the light was perfect for both it and the oysters.
I was particularly looking forward to eating the oysters afterwards. I'd never tried them before, but I love seafood - my favourite dinner is mussels, and my favourite place to eat is the Mourne Seafood Restaurant.
But I ended up being off work for a week. I don't really like looking at this photograph any more.
Finally, a nice little tomatillo, with no tragic aftermath. This one is from last August, lit by the evening sun in J's garden in North Georgia. With its comrades, it ended up as an excellent salsa for our homemade burgers. An ideal food item, attractive, well behaved and tasty.
So those are my three. You'd laugh to see most of the others, and I was slightly tempted to post some of them here. But it would be pretty embarrassing.
Food photographers deserve much more respect than I had realised. This was a serious challenge which produced a lot of failure - but proved a positive learning experience in the end.
And I'm seriously excited by one of next season's challenges - a photograph to illustrate a book or song title. Very much up my street.
Actually, I like playing scales. There's nothing like a nice long one to show off my delicately different shadings of timbre and phenomenal smoothness. I think we'd all agree that I have a very special lower range. But I had to suffer Shirley, Edna, Rodney, Roger, and Pauline before I got Caroline, who appreciated that. Sometimes she had Jackie magazine on the music stand as she practised, but I forgave her every time because I sounded so beautiful.
The Carnival of the Animals. Don't remind me. Betty Avery could only play in tune in first position, so when we got to the donkey section she just played the "Aws". Susan McMullan beside us was soaring away on the "Ees", E string, appropriately enough, high as anything. Mortifying.
Janet Osborne was sent into the store because she wouldn't stop laughing. Frankly, the laughing was fair enough. Had he even looked in a mirror that morning? She broke us off when she got bored. It was a bit of a relief. We had done one too many Grade Ones by that point.
Gillian Stanfield was my favourite. She kept me wrapped in a silk scarf and she always wiped the resin dust off.
I still feel bitter about Mrs Schulmeyer, who persuaded her to switch to the viola. I mean, the viola?
Please don't send me to be mended, unless Mr Broadway has retired now. Is there not something you could do with a cotton bud and some white spirit?
Everyone was in high spirits for that rehearsal. The concert was the next evening, and for once, for a school orchestra, it sounded, I suppose, acceptable. Malcolm Brown was showing off when he threw his mallet up in the air. Girls always seemed to go for percussion players, and he knew that all the fourth formers were watching. But his aim was terrible. I had never felt pain like that. You know what the worst thing was? Even Daisy laughed. Please don't photograph the scar.
He had his problems. OCD, certainly. Depression, probably. Possibly an undiagnosed alcoholic. We could see right through him. Anyone who spent that much time in the store?
14 March 1984, the best night of my life. We were playing the second part in the Bach double. The stars must have been specially aligned. Julie's right hand didn't shake, for once, and we blended together as smoothly as a dream.
When the movement ended, there was a moment of silence, like a sigh.
He was gathering his things together to go on the orchestra tour to Germany. That suitcase had taken all week to pack. For a boy, he certainly planned his outfits in detail. And I suppose the tour was successful on the romantic front. I hear they have a third baby on the way.
But he got into the car without me. They arrived back ten minutes later, laughing and joking about getting priorities straight and what would Mr Pugh say, and threw me in the back seat. That hurt.
Summer holidays - a great time to pursue random fantastical photo projects. Like this one - a deer skull we found in the woods, with some Queen Anne's lace to prettify him. Actaeon was the guy from Greek mythology who was turned into a stag, as punishment for something he may or may not have done to annoy the goddess Artemis...
A slightly mouldy wooden tray, a tin and a nice wide aperture made him seem a bit more magical in camera than he looked to the naked eye.
I take so many photographs that I couldn't possibly print them all. But when I do have prints made, like this pile of little 5x7s from this weekend, I always think that I should do it more often. Photographs are better in the flesh than languishing on a hard drive (carefully backed up, though, of course). And even more enjoyable spread out on my special £1 Homebase backdrop floor tile.
I spent a happy couple of hours with my camera at the Ulster Transport Museum today. I'm not interested in trains in a trainspotterish type of way (obviously I am way too cool), but I do love old trains in a sculptural, metalwork, design-ish sort of a way. Again, they tick my boxes of heritage, beauty and decay.
One of my great-grandfathers worked for the Midland Railway in the early years of the twentieth century. His role was looking after the horses in the railway yards, but I like to think that he might sometimes have climbed up into a train like one of these and admired the beauty of the brass work - and the hammer marks which make it human - just as I did today.
