Happy Birthday, Cliff! and, more haste, less speed.

Today I won’t be blogging about Valentine’s Day, or Whitney Houston, although I will be recalling and honouring another great musical talent, taken too soon, in the greatest tradition of rock & roll.

Happy 50th birthday, Mr. Cliff Burton! Okay, I missed the date by 4 days. That doesn’t stop me celebrating your life, or your works though. You were the ‘quiet one’ in a world of noise. When the other guys in the band were goofing off at presscalls you were diligently tuning your guitars.

I was covering the Monsters of Rock Festival for All Action that year, and had a proper photo pass. Shot a few ‘interesting’ backstage pix, some from the photo pit (an area between the front of the 80,000 strong crowd, and the stage). Here’s Cliff having the time of his life; the bottles in the foreground are traditional gifts from fans, bestowed upon their heroes from long range (thrown from the crowd). Eg Def Leppard ‘bottled off’ at Reading Festival a couple of years previous – ie retreated under a hail of bottles.

As always, I had considered film developing a bit of a chore, and used to up the development temperature, to save time. Of course the risk of ‘reticulation’ ie cracking of the film base, was always present – as seen here. After removing the developer I flooded the developing tank with stop bath (which inhibits the action of the film developer)……it’s supposed to be around the same temperature as the developer but………you can guess the rest! On this small scan you might be able to make out the random cracks. Fortunately the colour transparencies which I shot for the agency were processed properly!

And the moral of this story is – it’s perfectly okay to make mistakes. Just learn from them!

First impressions last

I’ve always been very cynical about marketing. Or perhaps uncomfortable. Maybe it’s because I’m English. But I know plenty of English who are right up there with the best. So I have to change.

Google+ Crowdsource application is a good example of how to apply current technology. Have a look at it and you’ll see what I mean. I only stumbled over it by accident when perusing a list of G+ Inspirational Photographers. What I noticed however, was that around half of these photographer profile pix show the owner with a camera. I guess this is a visual cue, dumbing down to reach even the tiniest brain.  You can see I don’t approve…..what I then noticed, was that of these ‘Clearly I am a Photographer’ images, 99% were completely lame, some even looked like an afterthought. And yes, I know some of us are shy retiring types, but honestly, if you’re going to be putting yourself out there, on G+ lists, have a bit of respect for yourself and more importantly, your customers & contacts.

The 1% that made it, in case you were wondering: Alfie Goodrich. His profile snap is just head & shoulders (sorry) above the others.  Check it out.