Tim Gander's photography blog

July 26, 2019 by Tim Gander

Storms Now, but Storms Ahead Too?

Lightning in the sky at night illuminates a large tree to the left of the photo.

24th July 2019. Lightning storm over Frome, Somerset, UK.

Two nights ago we experienced the weirdest lightning storm anyone seems to remember witnessing. I had only seen something similar once, about 30 years ago in Germany, but even that was nothing compared to this more recent event.

Accompanied with Biblical rain, for almost an hour lightning lit up the night sky with astonishing frequency with BBC Weather reporting some 48,000 strikes nationally. It never struck Earth in my bit of Somerset, it was all cloud-to-cloud, which is what made it and its accompanying Hollywood thunder noise all the more eerie.

It happened to be the day we learned Boris Johnson was to be our new prime minister, and some speculated that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were about to burst through the clouds and lay waste to all that lay before them.

Of course politics and the weather are not so closely related. Setting aside political decisions which might cause or reduce global warming over generations, we can safely say this lightning storm and Bojo’s appointment are not that intertwined. However, as metaphors go its timing could not have been better.

So what of this new political future? Are we moving to the sunny uplands? Or hurtling towards a terrible storm? Anyone who knows my politics will be aware that I happen to believe Brexit is a very bad idea (putting it both mildly and diplomatically). However, it seems that’s where we are headed and whether we are inners or outers, we’re going to have to deal with whatever Brexit means.

It’s practically impossible to know how Brexit will affect my business. I know it will affect a great many people whose work takes them regularly in and out of the EU and their futures more than mine will rely on a sensible deal being reached about freedom of travel. For my part, looking back at my books over the period during which we were meant to leave, I’d say the uncertainty has definitely affected the willingness of businesses to press ahead with new projects. It’s been a real stop/start year so far.

Perhaps with a definite date in mind clients will feel better able to plan for October 31st and freer to make investment or expansion decisions. Sadly I suspect there is still a great deal of doubt about what Brexit will ACTUALLY mean. For all Mr Johnson’s energetic promises, he still has to deliver what Theresa May couldn’t and it still might not be the Brexit some people had in mind (while still managing to be the Brexit many never wanted).

I worry about the effect Brexit will have on those who have less control over their lives and fewer resources to deal with any negative consequences. I also know business will carry on one way or another. What is absolutely certain though is that nobody, not even Boris Johnson, has any real idea what to expect on the other side of all this. I think we can assume Boris will be ok, but beyond that, not much can be said with any certainty.

Possibly the most inconclusive conclusion I have ever written.

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July 11, 2019 by Tim Gander

Sweet Luxury

The other day I was asked to come into a business in Bristol to undertake a portrait session so members of staff could post to Twitter and LinkedIn with fresh, up-to-date (and importantly, professionally-taken) profile photos.

The pictures were taken at the end of an in-house social media training seminar, and I suspect this helped convince attendees of the importance of a decent avatar portrait. I believe this kind of training is an excellent idea for businesses wanting their staff to help promote the brand on online platforms, and of course a clean, clear profile photo gives their posts greater gravitas.

What made it for me though, apart from the lovely welcoming people I got to work with, was the huge amount of space I was given to work in.

Photo shows a portable photographic studio lighting set up with three flash heads and a reflector in an empty office space.

This office in Bristol had space and clean walls!

If your business has just taken over larger premises and you haven’t quite expanded into it just yet, take the opportunity to make headway on your headshots. While the entire office isn’t crammed with furniture and people, it makes a great space to work in and I can light the portraits better than if I’m shoehorned into a stationery cupboard, or a board room with an immovable table filling it.

Of course once you’ve filled the space, I’ll need to come back to photograph all the newly appointed team members. Don’t worry though, as long as there is room enough, I can make the lighting work. It’s just so much nicer when there’s space a-plenty.

June 21, 2019 by Tim Gander

It’s all happening here!

Yesterday was pretty eventful as a couple of projects finally came to fruition.

I was in the middle of setting up my exhibition of prints from What Happened Here at Black Swan Arts cafe in Frome when I noticed a mention from Ilford Photo on Instagram to say they’d just published an article I sent them a few months ago.

The article was a fun little thing about how to get extra creative with a Konica Pop, a classic 1980s point-and-click camera. I’d rigged one up so it could fire a flash that wasn’t built into the camera and some of the results were (I thought) pretty interesting.

The exhibition and the article aren’t really connected, other than they both involve film photography, but they’d both been planned some time ago. I just hadn’t expected them launch at the same moment, but that’s no problem, it’s all part of the fun!

black and white photo of a young male and female couple standing looking at each other. She is holding flowers wrapped in paper.

Andy and Natalia posing together on Valentines for my Pop project.

Tall, yellow-flowered weeds rise up in the foreground with a concrete barrier and blue sky visible behind.

From What Happened Here

So now you have a choice of physically seeing a bit of What Happened Here in Frome (just 13 prints for this show), or virtually seeing my article on the Ilford site here: https://www.ilfordphoto.com/making-photos-pop/

Of course you have the choice of doing neither, but I hope you do. They’re very different projects, but I hope equally entertaining.

Whatever you end up doing, have a fun and safe weekend.

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May 23, 2019 by Tim Gander

What Is Commercial Photography?

Three ceramic products in a row, an oil bottle, a jug and a garlic roaster, on a blue cloth with broken garlic bulbs lying next to them.

While I’ve been having great fun with personal projects, launching a new website and planning for an exhibition, I feel it’s time to bring this blog back to the subject of commercial photography. Which already raises a question: What is Commercial (note the cap C) photography?

Strictly speaking, I don’t often do Commercial photography. If asked to put myself in a pigeon hole, I describe myself as a corporate communications photographer. This is because although I take pictures for (lowercase ‘c’) commercial gain, Commercial photography in its strictest sense means pictures taken to be used in advertising. This distinction can be an important one in certain contexts.

For example, many people believe that a photo taken for a newspaper or magazine editorial article is automatically Commercial because the photographer got paid (hopefully) and the publisher is a commercial enterprise, but this muddies the waters when it comes to describing such issues as data protection and rights to how a photo can be used.

If I go out and take a photo in the street to illustrate an article, it is covered by editorial standards and can be used without obtaining the permission of every single pedestrian who happens to appear in the recorded scene.

Likewise if I take a picture for a personal project, this is covered by an artistic right for the work to be taken and exploited by me. There would be a vanishingly rare chance that the image could infringe anyone else’s rights provided I didn’t use it in a defamatory context. Or, and this brings us back to my central point, a Commercial context such as an advertisement.

Commercial photography with that now familiar capital ‘C’ refers to pictures taken for the purpose of promoting or advertising a product or service. This extends to advertorial, where a business or organisation pays for the placement of an article within a publication which is made to look like it was written by a journalist, but these by law have to be clearly marked as ‘Advertisement”.

Of course the waters get muddied further by images used in social media where the client may have paid for placement, such as on Instagram, where it’s sometimes less clear. All sponsored posts on Instagram are marked as such, but if a client commissions or buys a photo and puts it on their Instagram feed or on Twitter with a view to it bolstering their brand, well that’s now transformed the image from editorial to commercial and we have to be wary of this.

As a rule, any client who commissions me to take photos for their corporate communications (which includes social media feeds), needs to ensure they have all permissions in place at the time I take the shots. It is the client’s responsibility to organise this and it may include property rights too.

So yes, that capital ‘C’ can make all the difference and it’s important to know and respect

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May 9, 2019 by Tim Gander

More New Plans!

As if the launch of takeagander.co.uk wasn’t exciting enough, I’m now also preparing for an exhibition!

On June 20th I’ll be launching a small show in the cafe space at Black Swan Arts in Frome. Rather excitingly, the exhibition will run for a month and will span the very busy Frome Festival period (5th – 14th July) and will feature a very select choice of prints from my Saxonvale (What Happened Here) project.

Alby's van, Jan 2018.

The prints will be certificated one-offs printed on fine art paper and simply framed, matted and ready to hang. I’ve yet to settle on final prices, but I’m hoping to keep them as accessible as possible.

At this stage I’m very keen to hear from local businesses or organisations interested in part-sponsoring the exhibition. It’s worth noting that the Black Swan cafe is extremely busy at any time of year, but come Frome Festival it is almost always full to capacity, so an excellent chance for some valuable exposure.

With or without sponsorship, the exhibition will be a really exciting first public outing for What Happened Here and I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes down, especially from people who aren’t from this area or familiar with the Saxonvale story.

If you or anyone you know is looking for some additional publicity in conjunction with what I promise will be a beautiful and thought-provoking photographic exhibition, do drop me a line tim@timgander.co.uk. At the very least, let me know if you’re planning on coming down and perhaps I’ll see you there in June.

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May 1, 2019 by Tim Gander

Tah Dah!

Close-up of a dirty and damaged red card with the word Life written on in marker pen.

From the series 'Found Notes'.

Well I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, but I hope you’ll think it’s worth it. My new site takeagander.co.uk is now live!

The name comes from my Instagram handle, takeagander, and since that’s where I’ve been posting work from my personal projects it seemed fitting to create a website which tied in with that. I was also incredibly lucky that the business which was holding the URL takeagander.co.uk had let their subscription lapse and they didn’t renew it before it expired. Get in there!

So now I have a site where I can bring projects together and offer high-quality fine art prints of the images, which I hope will fund new projects in turn. Of course that’s the dream and it’s very early days, but with the site having been launched less than a week ago, I’m thrilled to have made sales already.

I’ve kept the offer simple for now, just two paper types and a range of sizes, but if there’s anything you’d like to see (framing options, canvas prints perhaps?) let me know and I’ll look into the possibilities.

The galleries are set to grow in size and increase in number as I add new images and entire new series, so I hope you’ll bookmark it for regular visits. You can even sign up for updates, which I promise will be kept infrequent.

Of course this is all in addition to my on-going corporate communications work, but I have found that personal projects have really helped keep me fresh and energised when tackling commissioned assignments. It’s great to have both sides of my career up and running.

Please do let me know what you think of the new site, or perhaps more importantly the photos on there. I have to say the quality of display is impressive compared to how images render pretty much anywhere else on the web.

Of course if you see something you’d like to hang on your home or office wall, I’d be thrilled to make your custom, but you’re welcome to just say hello.

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April 12, 2019April 12, 2019 by Tim Gander

Nothing to see here… yet.

Black and white view of a youth striding off to the right of an open area while to the left in the background a bonfire burns, a thick column of smoke rising into the late afternoon light.

Print available at www.takeagander.co.uk

A large dog holds a stick, larger than itself, in its mouth.

Print available at www.takeagander.co.uk

A Charolaise cow seen side-on, standing in a grassy meadow, looks to camera.

Offering something different in fine art.

Fragments of ceramic casing, the waste by-product of bronze casting, display the impression of gecko feet.

From: Skip Art

Don’t you hate it when a brand shows you a shadowy teaser photo of some slick new product? Often weeks or months before the product is on the market, Camera companies do it all the time and I’m sure other manufacturers do it to.

Well the good news is, I’m not about to show you some largely obscured piece of high-tech loveliness. No top-lit, low-key photo of a stippled aluminium surface designed to make you want the thing even before you have any idea what the thing actually is.

However, this week’s post is a little bit of a teaser (I almost typed “little teaser”, but decided that had unfortunate connotations).

Cutting to the chase, I am “this close” (holds forefinger and thumb of right hand approximately 1 3/4 inches apart) to launching a new website.

The new site is quite separate from this one because I’m very much continuing in the corporate communications photography business, but I felt that after 30 years as a photographer I should be stretching my creative wings even more.

The site will feature many of the works I’ve posted to Instagram, including chosen works from the Saxonvale and Skip Art projects and a lot more of my personal film photography, but re-digitised to a standard more suited to fine art prints than was originally the case.

Saxonvale was mostly scanned on a flatbed scanner which was destined for landfill, which while poetic in the context of the project, didn’t really give me the file quality I sought for anything beyond Instagram.

Once the site is live you can be sure I’m going to be banging dustbin lids together until everyone knows about it, so watch this space for more news, or just listen out for the clanging of cheap pressed steel.

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March 21, 2019 by Tim Gander

Sound Move

In this post I’m back to talking personal photographic projects, this time with one of the quickest I’ve ever done!

A few weeks ago, the local record shop in Frome, Raves from the Grave, was preparing for a move to a new location within the town as they’d outgrown their current store.

In fact they were only moving a couple of streets away, but they’d been in the Cheap Street shop for 12 years (22 years on the same cobbled street and Catherine Hill even before that), so in all that time had become something of a local institution.

I remember my first trip to the Cheap Street store. It was astonishing, with CDs on shelves which extended right up to the ceiling, with more squidged in wherever there was a nook or cranny. The same with DVDs, though I was never a big purchaser of those. The real pleasure though was that they also specialised in vinyl, new and secondhand.

So when I heard about the impending move, I decided someone (me) ought to go in and capture the essence of the place – the heady mix of chaos and order, the colours, lines and hopefully some of the people too.

Of course being a personal project, it had to be shot on film, which also seems appropriate for a record shop (in particular, one selling vinyl).

I only had a two-hour gap in my day and three rolls of film with which to capture what I could, so there was a bit of a challenge, but as a series it sits together pretty well.

Of course Raves from the Grave and I were able to trickle the images out on social media over the course of a week and it was fun to see the reactions to the images. I even started meeting people in town who told me how much they enjoyed the series.

Now the move is pretty much complete and the old shop is soon to be taken over by a new business, a chocolatier I believe, so I’ve captured the end of an era. What with that and Saxonvale, I seem to have a knack of capturing era ends. Maybe I’ve found a new niche!

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March 6, 2019 by Tim Gander

PhaseOne PhaseOut

Screen shot of an iView Media Pro catalogue.

Bye bye iView, I'm sad to see you go.

Late last year PhaseOne announced they would no longer support iView Media Pro, the image cataloguing software which I’ve relied on for almost 20 years to catalogue my digital image library.

I’m trying to be charitable towards PhaseOne for this development as I understand the code which underpins iView is being made obsolete by computer operating system advances (32 bit to 64 bit for the techie-types), though I think they could have been more helpful and understanding in helping photographers make the transition.

Instead I was offered the eye-wateringly expensive option of subscribing to PhaseOne’s editing and cataloguing tools, which I don’t want since I already have LightRoom for editing, or using a third-party cloud-based library solution which is A) quite expensive, B) Cloud-based and C) Doesn’t reflect the way I work.

What iView allows me to do is locate any digital file I’ve taken since I went digital in 2000. A client can request a file from any year since then and I’ll be able to get my hands on it. iView was simple, robust and did only what I needed it to do (which is why it was simple and robust), but nothing lasts forever.

And so I’m looking at NeoFinder, the closest replacement I could find which doesn’t assume I am either an amateur with very small, occasional cataloguing requirements, or NASA with thousands of users and millions of digital assets to keep track of.

The switch-over isn’t going to be entirely pain-free. I had hoped I could just export my iView catalogue to NeoFinder, but to do that I need to have all my CDs, DVDs and external drives connected at once. Setting aside the 9 external hard-drives I now have, there’s the small matter of the 360+ optical discs which would all need to be mounted at once. It’s be fun to try, but it’s not happening.

As I write this, NeoFinder is chugging through my first external drive. That’s around 78,000 image files! This may take some time.

NeoFinder also works differently to iView and this is a bad and a good thing. I used to just select individual key images from a job and throw them into iView, but NeoFinder doesn’t work that way. You pretty much have to build a catalogue of the entire volume (hard drive).

While this can seem slower, it can be done in the background of other tasks – for example me writing a blog post about cataloguing software while my cataloguing software creates a new catalogue. It will also, I think, reduce the risk of important key images being missed, which was something I very occasionally managed to do in the past. It was always a correctible error, but good to know NeoFinder will be more belt and braces.

I appreciate this may not be the most thrilling, inspirational post for you to read so please accept my apologies and this virtual cupcake (non-redeemable anywhere and no cash value), but it’s one of those dull things you can’t live without, like Essential Waitrose Quinoa. If I don’t keep track of all the photos I’ve shot, it becomes a nightmare for me and a deep inconvenience for my clients.

It’s all fine though. I know once I’ve gone through this process, I should be good for the next 20 years. Fingers crossed.

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February 20, 2019 by Tim Gander

Cairncross Review Review (Part the Second)

Selective screen grab of the cover title of the Cairncross Review

The silence is deafening and so is the noise.

The problem with the Cairncross Review is that it tackles issues which should trouble us all, and deeply, yet I’m seeing very little discussion of it not only amongst former journalist colleagues and photographers, but also the wider public.

Much of the problem seems to stem from a general lack of awareness that it was even being undertaken. When I look through the list of organisations and individuals who submitted responses to the call for evidence, all the usual suspects are there (Johnston Press, Facebook, Google, The Guardian, News UK), but not a lot from individuals with specific interests in the industry.

From the general public there were 588 responses, but the report doesn’t publish more than excerpts of these submissions. On the one hand, that’s a larger public response than I was expecting. On the other, it’s pretty abysmal given the importance of a thriving local press sector for our freedoms and democracy.

This relatively low response will be a result of factors such as ignorance of the existence of the review, apathy and perhaps most understandably, an exhaustion brought about by the constant white noise of Brexit debate.

And even I am sitting here wondering why I care so much for an industry which has now given me less than half of my professional life. I’m too busy with keeping my own business running (as well as trying to expand my documentary work, which is in itself a response to the collapse in local journalism) to invest in a future which will be entirely out of my hands.

For now I just need to summarise a few points from my reading of a selection of the responses, in no particular order:

Facebook and Google consider themselves innocent in all this, indeed they claim to be putting masses of cash back into regional journalism and it’s the publishers which are failing to take advantage of the new opportunities open to them.
The publishers consider themselves innocent in all this and their sales were fantastic and revenues strong until the nasty digital boys came and smashed up their game.
Neither side can quite bring themselves to admit the truth, instead pushing positions which are self-serving and often delusional.
Government ultimately has no answer to this. Whatever they do will be wrong and will end in tears, corruption and a slow death for local journalism (followed some time later, probably a Wednesday afternoon, by national journalism).

Whatever happens though, I will try to keep an eye on developments. I can’t help it, and I really do believe that if you care for democracy and a diversity of voices in the many media available to us, you should at least make an attempt to bone-up on the broad outlines of the Cairncross Review and the developments which arise from it.

From next week though, I need to get back to talking about my own work and personal projects before the crashing silence and deafening noise get too much.

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