DON'T BE A STRANGER

This year I'm hoping to expand my personal portfolio by making 500 portraits of mostly strangers, or at least people I haven't photographed before.  I've had cards printed to explain the project and will hand them out to likely candidates throughout the course of the year.  In some cases I'll be able to make the portrait then and there but others will require a longer setup.  The images will be published on the 500portraits.posterous.com microsite as I complete each one and eventually in a gallery on openphotography.co.uk/galleries/.

ESCAPING PLATO'S CAVE

I spent the last two days in the Whitechapel Gallery at a symposium called On Perfection, a subject close to my heart.  Lots of thought-provoking lectures and presentations from artists, academics and photographers, and most of it made perfect (sorry) sense.  But what I found somewhat disconcerting was the deference shown to the Are, Bure, Boke (rough, blurred and out of focus) images of certain Japanese photographers.  Perhaps I'm trying too hard.  After all, nobody's perfect.

NATIONAL TREASURE

Grayson Perry's Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum has been on my to do list since it opened in October.  I defy anyone to see his works there and not marvel at the skill and ingenuity of this incomparable artist.  As I exited through the gift shop (with a nod to Banksy) I was presented with this view and felt like I'd been transported to the passage that leads to the Treasury at Petra.  The exhibition has been extended to 26 February.  Just go!

SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING

A photographer I've followed for a while now is the Canadian Jeff Wall, whose large scale images of mundane subjects regularly command prices of several hundred thousand pounds.  He has an exhibition on at the White Cube Mason's Yard at the moment (and for the avoidance of doubt this shot is not one of the exhibits).  I was expecting to leave the gallery imbued with a desire to shoot something of my own and print it at a similar size, but instead I felt somewhat confused about what makes a photograph worth exhibiting.

TESTING TIMES

Something I do from time to time is to test the autofocus on my various camera/lens combinations but luckily so far I haven't had to make any adjustments. There are lots of charts available to download from the web and print out but my favourite is this image that's designed to be photographed from a laptop screen. It uses moiré fringe techniques to produce interference patterns with the camera's LCD, but looking at it at full resolution without a camera in the way produces other fascinating patterns, which is another good test, for my brain's autofocus system.

CASTING CALL

Surprisingly there are only two black and white photos in this year's Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize competition, currently on show at the National Portrait Gallery.  Last year there were five.  I think I'll submit something next year, although probably not in black and white (for fairly obvious reasons) and almost certainly not shot (like this one) with an iPhone.  If you'd like to sit for me, please get in touch.

LIVING THE DREAM

I was walking on the South Bank this evening and was intrigued by this projection on the side of the National Theatre.  It intrigued me enough to find out that it's there to promote a play (13) which opens with people across London (I'll guess there are 13 of them) waking up from an identical nightmare.  How are you sleeping these days?

ON THE ROAD TO UTOPIA

I spent a couple of hours yesterday wandering around the Degas exhibition at the Royal Academy.  He's justifiably famous for his ballet imagery but Degas was also an accomplished  photographer and there were lots of his prints and negatives on show.  Degas made portraits of friends and members of his family, as well as of himself, and also used photography as the basis for some of his paintings.  Of course I couldn't take any photos in the exhibition but in the courtyard outside there's a 10m high model of Tatlin's utopian Monument to the Third International, an unrealised structure designed two years after Degas died.  These brass figures are about 5cm high, giving some idea of how the 400m high tower would have soared into the sky above St Petersburg.

A MAN'S FACE IS HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I went to the theatre today, not to see a play but to take photos of my friend Charles Sharman-Cox, who lives a short drive away from my house.  Charles used to be an actor but now concentrates on writing and directing, and I'm hoping that he'll let me take some photos for a new play he's written about Oscar Wilde.  This title of this post is one of my favourite quotes of his.  (Oscar's, that is.)

FILM IS AN ALLUSION

Another day, another exhibition.  Today I dropped in to the Tate Modern to see the latest commission for the turbine hall: Tacita Dean's FILM, shot and edited on celluloid, unsurprisingly, then projected 42 feet high, sprocket holes left unmasked to enhance the allusion.  Some photographers hold on to a nostalgia for flammable plastic and I do occasionally miss the element of surprise that working in a darkroom involved, but for me, digital acquisition, processing and publishing (eg to here) continues to open up possibilities that can never exist in the analogue world.

FREEZING TIME

Back from another trip, this time to Scotland.  While I was there I was lucky enough to see Hiroshi Sugimoto’s exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, including prints from his Lightning Fields and Photogenic Drawing series.  Online you'll find lots of images and reviews of his work written far more eloquently than I could ever manage, but the highlight for me was being able to see prints from original negatives made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the pioneers of photography.  Like stepping back in time 160 years.  Magical.

CAFEINE SOCIETY

Just back from a week in Italy where I drank lots of coffee in very small cups.  When in Rome, as they say, although I took this photo in the village of Bevanga in Umbria.  I had to buy a new version of Photoshop to work with Lion, and thought about using it to paint out the receipt on the ground (I didn't drop it or the newspaper, by the way), but I think I'll leave it in so that I can remember the scene exactly as it was.  

BEWARE OF THE CAT

I downloaded OS X Lion last week, and although it has a few good features like re-opening apps where they left off and continuously saving files automatically, some of my software - including Photoshop - now won't launch and Adobe technical support still don't have a fix for this.  I think it's time for Apple and Adobe to call a truce.

IN THE DRIVING SEAT

Back from France.  I've been sitting down a lot today, mostly processing photos on my shiny new Mac Pro while my old Macbook Pro sits forlornly on the window sill.  This is one of Greg Hawkes, keyboard player with The Cars, and occasionally with Todd Rundgren.  Greg, Todd and the other members of Todd's band very graciously gave me some of their time recently at a music camp in the Catskills.  You can see other photos from these sessions on the Open Photography Facebook page by clicking on the link at the left of this page.

NEW WEBSITE

Today I'm redirecting openphotography.co.uk from my iWeb site to a new one hosted by squarespace.com.  If you have any suggestions for extra features you think I should add, please let me know.  The portrait is one I took of Alicia at Sacred Tattoo in New York last month.