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It looks like the “Digital Photography Revolution” has claimed another scalp. Another of London’s professional labs has, it seems, ceased trading. It was a shock to receive an email a couple of days ago informing me that Panther Imaging, from whom I had received some prints only the day before, had ceased trading.

Going to their website, Panther Imaging, all you find now is a single page with a note. I quote some of that now as it highlights one of the negative impacts digital has had upon the photographic industry…

” It is with great regret that after 10 years on this site and over 30 years in the Clerkenwell area Panther has had to close its doors and stop trading.

All of my staff are passionate about what they do and we hope this has been evident in the level of service and care that we have always strived for when undertaking your work. We are all saddened by our demise and would like to thank every one of our clients, for their business over the years . “

I don’t think I’m that unusual as a photographer to find that over the years I collected more and more equipment. Aside from the allure of the “shiny & new”, as your photography develops , the markets you work in and the clients you work for evolve and change, so do your photographic equipment needs. Digital has added fuel to the fire to this accumulation, as kit is out-of-date and loses monetary value faster than driving a brand new car off a garage forecourt. This need to upgrade doesn’t just apply to the big ticket items – the latest Digital Medium format back, the latest Canon/Nikon/Zeiss lens that you “must” have, but also more humbler items. In days past there would have been a cupboard in my office holding blocks of Neopan, Tri-X and Reala complemented with a fridge holding boxes of Ektachrome and Velvia ( with some in the freezer ). Now for the digital equivalent of film, CompactFlash cards (CF),  there are three Pixel Pocket Rocket wallets and a forgotten drawer that I discovered this morning.

The cards range from a paltry 160MB to a whooping 32GB but are all identical in size. Four of them are the IBM Microdrives, a system that lost out to the CompactFlash card as the latter’s capacity increased. They show a progression using digital since I jumped onboard in 2001 ( the horrible days of digital with magenta skin tones ). My latest addition, the 32GB cards cost me £130 each and looking at an old invoice from 2004 for a 2GB card, I paid……£172!!! Using cameras such as the Canon 1DS MKIII and the 5D MKII has prompted this progression. Shooting both RAW and large jpeg files in the 5D MKII, gives me a capacity of over 900 images on that one card – and all the ‘perils’ of having so many files on one card – but after a long shoot recently in which changing cards was not easy, these cards will give me options – it’s not as if I haven’t got lots of smaller cards to use if the doubt sets in. All seems a long way from the days when my Domke bag pockets were stuffed full of Fuji rolls each with a ‘large’ capacity of 36 images!

It’s May 1st – May Day – summer is around the corner. So it’s a Bank Holiday weekend ( do banks deserve holidays anymore? ) so here’s comes the rain and temperature drop just to keep us all in our place and put those barbecues and sunglasses away. The morning of May 1st also spotlights the great British eccentrics keeping alive traditions that go back to our pagan past on the isles. It is the heralding of summer and fertility ( summer officially starts in June ) dating back from the Roman festival of Flora and beyond. From the anglo-saxon, Þrimilci-mōnaþ, to the Christian mass of Roodmass – Christianity loved to piggyback on pagan customs and claim them for the new religion. To oncoming days of May day queens, maypoles, morris dancing, English country pubs, real ale, garlands of flowers, well dressing, the start of the cricket season. This morning to Oxford and the broadsheets’ favourite, the early morning song of the choir  atop the Great Tower of Magdalen college ( followed by the more recent ‘tradition’ of some bright-young-things jumping off Magdalen bridge into the river Cherwell and potential paralysis ).

I had hoped to post some images this morning of a notable tradition here in Sussex, but having hurt my back ( running ) a couple of days ago I am currently doing an impression of a very unsprightly ninety year old man, so couldn’t make the early morning walk up the South Downs to Chanctonbury Ring. The remains of a small Iron Age hillfort and a Roman temple, the ring is now a landmark thanks to the trees planted by a landowner in the eighteenth century. Many of these trees were felled by the great storm of 1987 and the replanted ones are slowly restoring this feature. Like many geographical features locally, it is connected to the Devil – very supersitious lot they were in Sussex it seems. By running around the ring seven times, some say twelve, in an anti-clockwise direction the Devil, by some versions, as the church bell in the plain below tolls, it is said will appear in the branches of a tree to offer you a bowl of soup in exchange for your soul. Seems pretty cheap to me but this legend has encouraged my kids to walk up the hill and try to run around the Ring to summon up the Devil – not worked yet! But back  to the tradition of May 1.

Every May 1st, the Chanctonbury Ring Morris Men, arrive atop the Ring to dance at 7am and welcome the sun and ‘summer’. As I say I couldn’t make it this year, but here the weather looked cloudy and it is starting to rain as I write so not sure how it went today. But hopefully next year I’ll get to witness a sunrise there as I did in 2005 as seen in this small slideshow below.

A corporate shoot in The City for Schroders from last week. The latest in a series of shoots for them over the past few years, photographing various key personnel for their image library with intended use in both company literature and for external editorial – to accompany interviews in business titles for example. With a fifteen minute window for each subject, which is rarely actually the full fifteen minutes, the idea is to get a variety of shots. What sets these shoots apart from many other such assignments is the ability to use their boardroom as a location.

Unlike many, this not only has a view  and plenty of space but also has a reasonable amount of natural light, as the sun arcs across the London skyline. Previously for these shoots I had shot one setup with my Profoto 7b’s and a very large Chimera softbox, grids, etc, as well as shots by the window with a reflector and more natural looking shots using the window light – shooting into the boardroom with the windows behind as a large ‘softbox’. Sticking with the last two setups, this time rather than using strobes I enhanced the natural light with a my Interfit Monstar 3 light with it’s Octobox attached. A daylight balanced continous light source – I hope to discuss this light soon in a forthcoming post when it was used in another slightly different corporate shoot last week . I have usually used this light to “lift” the light in a room when shooting the sort of “reportage” meeting shots of executives beloved by annual reports rather than have a flash constantly going off which can distract the subjects.  When it has the octobox diffuser panel attached  for portraits the output isn’t great but it emits a soft light that enhances the natural light in the room without overpowering the background. The result is similar as with a flash/softbox, but I can shoot with a more open aperture to seperate the subject from the backdrop to, hopefully, create a clean, natural looking and flattering lighting. Both the octobox light and light from the window is also bounced by a couple of large 48″ Lastolite sunfire reflectors. Clicking on the portrait below should start a slideshow of some images from this shoot.

In Ancient Greece, THE MOIRAI (or Moirae) ‘were the goddesses of fate who personified the inescapable destiny of man. They assinged to every person his or her fate or share in the scheme of things’. The Gods would toy with the destinies of the mortals like a child plays with it’s toys. One whimiscal action could determine the destiny of an unsuspecting mortal going about his business unaware of the changes to come out of the sky.

Fast forward to the 21st century and Google, is now sat in the clouds as ‘Olympian Gods’ – their search engine’s complex and fickle alogrithms, largely a mystery unto themselves  – can determine whether your website is seen or not by potential clients. For over two weeks now my website www.martinbeddall.com has disappeared from Google’s search engine. You would expect that typing in my name, the usual way people find my website rather than more obscure keywords, would lead you to find this site top of the pile, but no. My other websites, this blog, my photoshelter archive site, even my comments on a forum about this problem are readily served up but not this key, fundamental website. It appears on Yahoo, but then ‘to yahoo’ isn’t a verb , such is the frightening dominance of Google these days.

This site is designed and hosted by Livebooks and until now I had been very happy with the service, it ain’t cheap!  The design was even tweaked a few months ago. But they seem to have no answer. The numbers of Livebooks customers affected is growing daily as they appear on the Livebook forums asking where have their sites gone? The numbers are still small compared to the overall customer base, which may explain the slow response from the Livebooks CEO. It appears this happened in 2008 and despite investigation nothing was determined as to the cause bar Google’s whimisical formula. It seems the advice is just wait it out,  all will be okay in a few weeks – easy for Livebooks to say, they’ve been paid. Meanwhile my site is over 40% down in hits, not ideal to say the least in the current economic climate.

So what to do? Certainly I am learning more about SEO – hell, I’m a photographer, now it seems I need to be an internet SEO expert too – it goes beyond a few pertinent page titles and tagged keywords it seems. Yes, I know about Flash and search engines, but Livebooks trade heavily on how SEO friendly their good looking flash sites are. But this disappearance is not about searching for my website with clever SEO friendly keyword combinations , ” gifted portrait photographer in the UK” , but my name – how simple can it be? I don’t blame Livebooks, but do I need to now get a new website designed elsewhere?

So, just in case, if you have a website out there that is fundamental to your business, ‘google’ your name to check you haven’t fallen off the edge of the world!

UPDATE: 13-4-10  It’s back, at the top of the pile after just over 3 weeks invisibilty!! Were The Gods listening?

Online directory listings are one marketing stream for a photographer to show off his/her work and as a link to their main websites. They seem to be taking over from printed sourcebooks, but do they work? On the whole they are priced more economically than large sourcebooks listings, ranging from £40 to £500 for on average 12 months online, but is anyone looking at them? Calling around some titles and agencies recently to gain old fashioned printed folio showings – if you manage to get past the receptionist ( I had one insist there was no picture editor at the title, some digging on the internet gave up the true details ) – a common mantra was to send in your website details first ( I did get some old  fashioned appointments though ). Is this ” send in your website details ” a brush-off or are commissioners actually viewing these listing sites also? I have gained good work enquiries and commissions originating from several online directories over the years but do editors/designers actively search these listings? What about approaching direct electronically – e-mailshots? Even e-mailshots have worked. Sure like many postcard mailings that hit the bin upon opening, e-mailshots can be declared spam, unsubscribed from, ignored amongst the hundreds of emails from photographers editors/designers get every week, your email address can even be blacklisted – but some are read and connections made to your website from them. But e-mailshot campaigns aren’t cheap and it is often a matter of luck – as with mailshots – that your work lands on their desk/screen and  is seen at the right time. The recent post about the Chief Medical Officer annual report was a commission that came about from such an e-mailshot, so that paid for itself. Other campaigns, you may get interest, a nice email back, etc but no work.

But listings are more passive. You are one of many in a directory, hoping that one or more of your images will catch the eye. You are dependent upon commissioners actively using them – past the first page! Looking at Google analytics, I see links coming in from these sites to my main website ( www.martinbeddall.com ) all the time and I have gained good commissions, particularly from US clients, from such listings. Here are three screen grabs of some listings that I am currently on, two of which I have just got onboard. They are Contactacreative, Select, and Creativematch ( this last one , rather than an online folio of 12 or 25 standalone folio images, has the portfolio arranged as projects, showing images from different assignments, which I like as a means of showing off your photographic style/versatility ).

These are the direct links to my listings as seen below: Contact, Select, Creativematch

Today was one of those quiet office days – reinstalling OSX on an old G4 that I’m offloading, scanning some transparencies, organising a lighting rental for a shoot next week, sending a camera and lens off to be serviced, kind-of completing my VAT return, etc. However, whilst rummaging through one of my filing cabinets I came across some old Press pass credentials. On the whole photographers are given loads of these, usually for no discernible reason, and nearly all get thrown away. But this one I kept, as it always struck me as ironic…a press pass to Omaha Beach.

I was part of the team of photographers from The Times, covering the 50th Anniversary commemorations of D-Day in Normandy in 1994. On the whole we were covering the British events – the parachute jump at Pegasus Bridge, veterans and the Queen at Bayeux cemetery and parades on Arromanches beach. Film was developed in the toilets of a local school with had become the press centre for Fleets Street’s snappers. But one day I was despatched down the coast to Omaha Beach to cover the big event with all the Heads of State and half the world’s navies parading out at sea in the background. Having to find my own way there, and my appalling French meaning I thoroughly confused, if not alarmed, a gendarme by asking for the way to the rail station but actually, I was told by a smirking journo nearby, asking for ‘the way to the war ‘! ( gare, guerre) The highlight turned out to be this pass. Robert Capa may have braved the bullets, got incredible shots, gained the fame, become an immortal in photojournalism but he never had a bright blue press pass saying ” Presse Omaha Beach”!

Driving back from Oxford at the weekend I had to fill up the car’s fuel tank, an increasingly painful experience. I can remember driving past a petrol station in south London one morning several years ago, surprised at seeing the price at £0.49p per litre – the average petrol price in the UK is currently is around £1.12ppl – I paid £1.14ppl for my diesel on Saturday! But back in September 2000 the country was effectively crippled by the petrol crisis. Led by lorry drivers and farmers, this first protest, there have been two smaller ones since, was a protest about the ever increasing cost of fuel and in particular the fuel duty tax that made up the bulk of the cost for UK drivers – around 81.5%, with vat, then of the total cost of unleaded petrol.

In a decade, vehicle fuel had gone from being some of the cheapest in Europe to almost the most expensive due to continual tax rises. A fuel price escalator introduced in 1993 by John Major’s Conservative government, ‘meant to discourage motor vehicle use and combat climate change’, set the annual rise for fuel duty at 3%, it soon changed to 5%. This increased to 6% under Tony Blair’s administration. Combined with the price of oil hitting $30 per barrel  ( current predictions see it reaching $100 this summer ) something snapped in the British psyche, or at least in that of the hauliers. In a very Gallic style protest, lorries pulled across the gates of oil refineries around the UK in direct action. Soon panic buying set in, long queues formed at petrol stations, with TV crews providing a distraction for drivers as they told others at home they were rather silly not to get down there too, join the queue and fill up before meltdown. Some protesters were calling for a 15 to 26p reduction in the pump price, effectively calling on the Government to cut the tax. Petrol stations began to close due to a lack of supply, some put up their prices, there was talk after four days that fuel would run out completely in 48 hours, even train services suffered. Often fuel was restricted to the emergency services.

Against this background, as I was about to go out to the park with my young daughter, I got a call from the Tesco Corporate Communications Department. They asked if I could leave right then and shoot images for a brochure that the company was preparing to document their staffs’ efforts during the crisis. It was a open brief to shoot what I found at three Tesco stores and a distribution depot, around the South-East. I was armed with a fax from Tesco HQ giving me access to the pumps if needed although disappointingly I had no need to wave this about. Some of the resulting images are here below. All this when petrol was almost 33p cheaper per litre than now and a barrel of crude oil a third of the cost it could soon become! ( PS: Check out the price of a loaf of bread in the fifth photo )

All images shot on a Nikon F5.

Interesting programme on Radio 4 last night, ” Overexposed ” ( on BBC iplayer until 1st Feb! ) by Miles Warde. Miles had been on the same postgraduate photojournalism diploma course as myself at the London College of Printing, in a dour tower block next to the busy roundabout at Elephant and Castle. We all graduated in 1991 and  went our separate ways and it was a surprise to hear from Miles, now a BBC radio producer, saying he was putting together a programme about what had happened to those that had done the course. As Miles put it in his draft intro,

Twenty years ago, another group of students were putting portfolios together for this same course. The year was 1990, and photojournalism, classic black and white reportage, was in rude health thanks to huge stories such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Newspapers, particularly the Independent, were inspirational in encouraging would be reporters to believe that there was a thriving market for their work. Today’s paparazzi fodder, such as Sienna Miller and Amy Winehouse, had barely entered school. There existed a real belief that photography could shine a light on our world.  So what happened to those students … what happened to that group ?

Graduates that year included Paul Jenks,  James Miller (documentary cameraman),  James Hill ( New York Times ),  Gary Calton ( The Observer ),  Alice Dunhill ( Reuters),  Ted Giffords ( BBC Natural History Unit ),  Sandra Balsells,  Geoff Crawford , Lesley Adams and  Craig Easton ( The Independent ) . The eventual careers of that year’s intake bear testimony to the talents of those on that brief course, capped off with James Hill’s Pullitzer and World Press prizes.

Miles’s account of those days on the course was very honest, although we learnt a lot from each other, it was often cliquey and very competitive. Talking at lunch after the interview, it turned out that I was remembered for often being in early to grab one of the decent Schneider enlarging lenses! Maybe I was spared the other comments!

The programme explores the deaths of two of our number doing this job, Paul Jenks in 1992 and James Miller in 2003. Both were killed by snipers and their deaths affected everyone. In particular the death of Paul, so soon after we had left the course. Paul’s funeral was the last time I saw some of those who had been on the course. Others I saw from time to time while I was shooting at The Times. Others I frankly had no idea how soaring their careers had become.

Miles has highlighted how different things were then from now for photojournalists/photographers,  not only that in those days you could drive to a warzone in a Renault 5!  There was no digital obviously – no CF cards, RAW processing, FTP, Wifi, laptop, desktop, Photoshop, etc -  we shot mostly bulk loaded TRI-X in little black plastic 35mm canisters. We printed as if we were at The Independent already – moody, dark, black and whites. It was to be published in places such as The Independent Magazine that we aspired and some achieved. Even autofocus was scorned – to be honest, it was pretty ropey back then. I shot my whole course on a Nikon F3HP camera with about three lenses – although this did include my favourite lens ever, the 105/1.8mm.

Listening to the programme and meeting up with others during the making of it led me to melancholy for past times, for what we were expecting then as we looked out at the world and our careers, and how the media world then changed dramatically around us. There is not only the sadness of two lives cut short as they rose in their profession but also it illustrated the loss to our culture with the subsequent seeming demise of photojournalism in favour of celebrity culture – it seemed so robust then. On a personal note also, as with any reunion, it makes you reevaluate what you have done in your career compared to what your younger self aspired to.

Great Britain + snow …never works. ( Actually I should probably clarify, southern England + snow ) Kids yet to go back to school since the Christmas holiday.  Cars skidding on the ice to get up the hill next to our house and yet more snow predicted to come over the weekend. Roll on a quick thaw! With a couple of shoots scheduled next week and one client getting unduly nervous about Monday morning ( I have been out on the roads and they’re okay  and I’ve never not made it to an asssignment ) I’m posting this shot from today as a sort of ‘cyber rain dance’ to encourage the thaw…

Canon 5D MKII, 15/2.8mm lens ISO 200 1/3200th @ f4.5