This Sunday sees the fourth and final session (for me) of Photographing the City – Matt and Pete’s sociable, how-to photography course set on the streets of Birmingham and featuring a pleasant mix of arty/techy teaching, walking, socialising, photographing stuff (more egs below) and peer review.

The rain is due to clear up with both BBC and Wunderground (16 day forecast!) showing sun/clouds for this weekend. So if you’re twiddling your thumbs, why not book a slot? No need for a fancy camera. Even better, it’s a Photo School in a pub! (At the Victoria pub, which does a mean happy hour cocktail).

The rotating four-week sessions work as standalone lessons or as a whole course, depending on what you want to get out of it, and have gone from street photography to epic landscapes to abstract details. This week, it’s practical documentary photography.

I may be a bit biased but I have found each one to be a brilliant learning experience. And I’ve been taking photos for quite a few years, albeit stuck on P/programme mode ( the equivalent of auto).

I’ve blogged them all so far on behalf of Matt & Pete’s Photo School. But I was particularly happy with my Week 3 abstract detail photowalk. I played a lot with in-camera processing (see the lamppost trio up top) as colour theory was part of the teaching bit at the start, and then moved onto looking for details in the environment that would make interesting photographs in their own right.

Three favourites I took on the day:

1. Blue and orange – opposites on the colour wheel. Impact. Interesting shapes randomised by changing canal reflections.

2. Vertical and horizontal multicoloured stripes are splashes of colour in the grey-brown environment. Meets street photography. Meets Fibonacci spiral composition.

3. A colourful detail of Gas St Basin. With orange that pops.

There are also collaborations to be made between the images. I particularly like these three together, for example.

The critique at the end of the session is interesting and a chance to see what others in the group took on the same walk – different angles, missed details, new images. Here are three I really liked from the others in the Photo School Flickr group:

1. A thin blue line at New St signal box.

2. A beautiful detail.

3. What is the story? A win for freedom as no go zone bollards are caged and woman walks free. Or is it the woman who is in the cage caught by ominous no entry signs? Much to read into this one. Makes me ask: ‘why?’ Interesting.

What will this Sunday bring? To be blogg-ed.

A little bit of family history was made today. This afternoon Moselele (the ukulele band I play in) performed a gig as part of a sensory weekend for the kids at Acorns Children’s Hospice in Selly Oak.

There were four or five young people with Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties listening in, along with carers and volunteers. Music is one of the things that stimulates the children with PMLD and as we ran through our set, some were smiling or waving their arms response to the music. It was a lovely sight.

But it was a particularly poignant day for me because my mum was Ann Cullinan, the founder of the Acorns Children’s Hospice Shops. Here she is standing in front of the first charity shop in Cotteridge in 1987 – before the hospice even had a name.

When I got home from the gig, I went up into the attic to find a certain box containing a certain chapter of Acorns history.

Mum started fundraising for Acorns aged 60 when she retired from Cadbury’s. As she said in this newspaper clip:

“I used to work 16 hours a week – now I’m working 12 hours a day.”

I remember that time vividly. I was 18 and living at home, and life consisted of endless trips in the old Ford Escort to collect donations. We had a front room filled to ceiling height with black bags full of toys and clothes. And Mum was always on the phone organising events and interviews with the press to get publicity to help raise funds to build the first hospice. (I wonder if all that PR work partly fuelled my move into journalism?)

Whatever Mum asked for, she got. Acorns was the biggest charity cause in the Midlands at that time and people gave generously. Vans, shops, sponsorship. Once she even got an offer of all the conference carpet from the NEC. She took it – and turned it into cash, somehow.

The rise of the Acorns shops seemed meteoric. The clipping above in Mum’s scrapbook album shows the Cotteridge shop had been open 54 days and had already raised £21,000, in the main thanks to Mum’s drive with help from the shop volunteers, who became known as ‘Ann’s Army’. At its peak, I remember the shop raising £4,000 a week.

More shops opened, first in Stirchley then in Kings Heath (I think there are more than 40 now). Within two years, the shops had raised £350,000.

It felt like a triumphant achievement by the whole city when, on 14 December 1988, Acorns was opened by Princess Diana. Of course, we got a classic Di shot for the family album.

Mum gave up her work with Acorns in the early 1990s when her health became an issue. But she never stopped her charity work, turning her final months into a highly organised preparation for her own fundraising funeral to raise money for Huntington’s Disease.

Here is the letter she wrote – which she made me type – that appeared in her remembrance booklet. You can see she was very proud of all that Ann’s Army achieved with Acorns.

Mum died in 2001. I remember ‘doing the PR’ for her fundraising funeral and the Evening Mail’s headline ‘Pennies from heaven’.

It was a terribly sad time. But now I remember my mother as she was in these photos: happy, smiling and unfailing in her efforts to help others.

So that is why today was a special day. Much of my teen life was wrapped up in fundraising for Acorns and yet today was the first time I went inside the unit and saw the amazing work that they do.

After Moselele did their set, I asked Pauline, the activities coordinator, how long she had been working at Acorns.

“Too long – 22 years!” she said. “But I never get tired of working with the children. And they’ve really enjoyed today.”

“I don’t suppose you remember but my mum used to work for Acorns – she set up the hospice shops.”

“Ann?!”

Coming full circle by doing something for the Acorns kids, remembering my mum (I can’t believe it has been 10 years since she died) and see the fruits of all that fundraising labour was fantastic.

But someone from Acorns remembering – that was the thing that really made my day.

Every year, around the time of renewing my Flickr account, I pick out my favourite shots. I don’t know if I’m getting more critical of my work, or not taking as many good shots, but last year I selected 75 for the final cut; this year it’s just 15. So what’s in them?

Well, seven water-based photos (eight if you count snow), two dogs, one swan, a flock of seagulls, three Petes, one Michael Grimes and a famous Berber. Two I included for reminding me of painters: a Vermeeresque hound and a Turneresque sunset. Two more are a direct result of Matt & Pete’s Photo School. Enjoy the slideshow (or the static set)!

PS. I think this one is still my favourite. It speaks of spies going to secret rooftop rendezvous, or is that just me?

Sometimes holiday snaps produce something a little bit more artistic. I particularly like this moody photograph (of Pete) taken on the top of the rainy Parking 58 car park in Brussels. Why were we on a car park roof in the rain? Find out here. More Brussels trip posts are on Tourist Vs Traveller.

The Fierce Festival is a wonderful art/performance thing that happens in/to Birmingham each year. But this year festival artistic directors Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison really outdid themselves with the promise of 40-50 sausage dog delegates attending a scale replica of the United Nations General Assembly.

The live art installation is by Aussie artist Bennett Miller – more info here… Wonderful to attend, amusing to watch and great fun to photograph.

The rest of the set is here: Dachshund UN.

Meanwhie tomorrow, as part of the Fierce’s Curious Sounds in Curious Spaces, Pete will be DJing his beepy 8-Bit Lounge set at the Birmingham’s Symphony Hall.

More strange events on their What’s On page.

So today was week two (of four) of Matt & Pete’s Photo School. Last month, we played with finding the decisive moment in street photography, this time it was landscapes and creating huge panoramic vistas using the iconic buildings of Birmingham.

One line I liked in Matt’s teaching bit was the idea of finding God in the landscape. I’m not religious but this encapsulated the concept of structuring a photograph to make people (last month’s topic of interest) seem small in the magnificence of the wide, sweeping landscape. To create a sense of the sublime, of epic beauty in the architecture and skyscapes.

I struggled. With the tripod – although I got to grips with its endless fiddly functions. And with finding a three-dimensional composition of good foreground, middle and background – I often only got two out of the three. But I think I did achieve a sense of the smallness of humans versus the built environment in at least some of the shots.

I also learnt that when restricted to a set (wide) angle, I’m no Ansel Adams. My photos were mediocre out of the camera but some have been made in the ‘dark room’.

My job as an editor may be a factor here. I don’t necessarily take good shots at the time but instead see the crop and how to make the photo afterwards, back in the studio in Lightroom. (Although now that I think about it, Ansel Adams was also all about The Print, and his work in the darkroom.)

Anyway, I enjoyed the day. Particularly the social angle of taking photos with others – one of the main pluses of Photo School. There are some shots of Photo School in action on my Flickr set for anyone interested in joining the next course.

As well as the top favourite pic, which combines looming archictecture with the decisive moment of street photography, here are the rest of my favourites from the day.

Holloway Circus subway – all angles and lead-in curves

Pagoda and cherry blossom – could be Japan?

Digbeth – nice colour palette and strong lines

Beetham Tower – Rad!

And this people-y one of tripod testing…

This is a monthly course being run in central Birmingham. If you want to know more or to sign up for the next one, here are the deets of Matt & Pete’s Photo School.

Some personal memories of Davy Jones, who passed away this week aged 66…

I became a Davy Jones addict aged 12-13 when the BBC started playing re-runs of The Monkees on a Saturday morning. They were like a human version of the Banana Splits. Davy was so… well, beautiful is probably the word, that I used to sit close to the TV screen and not blink so as not to miss a minute. After the show was over, I was gutted to have to wait another seven days to see Davy again. Puberty had arrived.

Episode 1: I realise our love can never be…

My other main love at that time was my dog, a Welsh border collie called Lucky. I took her for long walks along the River Rea – in the bit we used to call The Jungle before the council created a ‘nature trail’ – and I’d tell her my woes. My main problem was that Davy was now fortysomething; our love was doomed.

Episode 2: Jim doesn’t fix it…

Then the worst thing happened. The BBC took the show off the air. I got out my notepaper and envelope gift set and wrote a stern letter. I pleaded and begged for them to put it back on. They didn’t. I also tried Jim’ll Fix It, asking to appear in a show or meet the band, but there was no joy there either

Episode 3: I see Davy in real life…

The Monkees were then forgotten until 1986 when I found myself unexpectedly going solo on a road trip across the US at the age of 18. I got off the bus in San Diego, California, and checked into the downtown YWCA. I was all alone, probably for the first time in my life.

Then I saw it – my comforter. It was an advert for The Monkees reunion concert at the San Diego Padres baseball stadium. I dented my backpacker fund bigtime to pay for a ticket, went to my first baseball game and then watched as Davy, Mickey and Peter drove across the grass in toy cars to get to the stage. Of course, it wasn’t the same – they were older and tubbier – but hey it WAS The Monkees. And I got to see them. IRL.

Episode 4: A tribute song…

Fast forward to 1996, living in a joke flat in south London with an Aussie work colleague nicknamed Badlady. She turned out to be an even bigger fan of The Monkees and so naturally we spent our evenings playing obscure tracks and even going so far as to record our own version of ‘She’, called ‘He’.

Episode 5: The balm of YouTube…

Last week, Davy Jones suffered a heart attack in Florida. His sudden death seems to have hit quite hard, perhaps because he was immortalised on TV as forever young. Many friends posted their favourite tracks to Facebook as a sort of networked tribute.

Although Valleri – see opening video – was my favourite Davy song of the time, I found myself going from video to video this week, reliving all those album tracks that were chiselled from the TV show.

And thanks to socially networked grief, two other songs have stuck in my head, both from Badlady.

Beware, the first one is an earworm: Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow).

The second one is from The Monkees’ concept film Head, which we watched again tonight. The best song/video in it is the wonderful Daddy’s Song, written by Harry Nilsson and performed by Davy Jones together with a cameo from Toni ‘Hey Mickey’ Basil.

“Davy Jones’ greatest moment,” said Badlady. I think this shows what a consummate entertainer Davy Jones was and why he was the band’s frontman. It is an amazing video in itself but it also gave me the title line of this post.

R.I.P. Davy Jones.

Tonight I was privileged to see the (first-edit) premiere of ‘McCULLIN – a film by Jacqui Morris’. Here’s the trailer…

McCullin Trailer from Jacqui Morris on Vimeo.

This cinema-quality documentary film recalls the work of Don McCullin, the celebrated war photographer who has taken some of the most affecting war, famine and humanitarian photos of the 20th century. He is 75 now and made the film, well, because he was seriously ill and told Morris to come and film quickly before he died. (He has had an operation and is recovering well.)

McCullin tells the story of his own work through interviews with Morris. He talks about what it was like to be a photographer for many years with the Sunday Times – from his war junkie addiction to the sense of duty and integrity he felt in telling the stories of the victims (dead or alive).

It makes for a gripping documentary that is both shocking and relentless (reminsicent of McCullin’s own style) but also quite fascinating in terms of McCullin’s life and work. It is delivered with a strange mix of detachment and high emotion as it intersperses war footage and McCullin’s perfect shots of encapsulated horror, with the words of this gentle, avuncular English man, albeit words that often recall scenes of unimaginable horror.

I’m not sure when the film will get a release but it has been shot for cinema and director Morris, who did a Q&A after the film, hoped it might go mainstream. It deserves to. Not only is it an incredible record of Don McCullin’s work, an insight into the life of a war photographer and a reminder of the horrors of war, but the issues are highly topical. The events this week, with Sunday Times war reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik’s deaths in Syria, make it particularly timely.

In addition, Morris cuts in interviews with former Sunday Times editor Sir Harold Evans, raising an interesting thread on the changing ethos of journalism, one that moved away from the independence of the Sunday Times to publisher Rupert Murdoch’s money-raising agenda that brought in a more ad-driven era of upmarket lifestyle, celebrity and fashion editorial.

She added that while she didn’t want to line up to take a pot shot at Murdoch, she thought the scene with Sunday Times owner Lord Roy Thomson summed up the change of editorial character perfectly. When asked how he could allow such pictures to appear in his paper, Lord Thomson would take a card out of his jacket that read how he would not allow commercial considerations to censor his editors from printing what they wanted. “You don’t want me to break my promise, do you?” – was his answer to controversy.

This theme is punctuated on a personal level by another scene when the new Sunday Times editor Andrew Neill fails to select McCullin to cover the Falklands War – his photos were too honest (for 1980s journalism). McCullin went instead to Lebanon but it was to be his final war assignment.

People always ask Don McCullin if he has nightmares about what he has seen. Only in the day, he replies. In the end, there is something ultimately quite poignant in his decision to take landscape pictures as a healing process, to fill up his head with new pictures and try to remove the horrors that remain and occasionally visit him when he is awake.

There is a Don McCullin retrospective at the Imperial War Museum – on until April.

It’s a disco but it’s on wheels. It’s roller disco! Back from the 70s/80s and currently going strong in 2012 at the old-school neon pink glitz of the Tower Ballroom by Edgbaston Reservoir in Birmingham. Tonight featured a very mixed crowd (from 18 to 70+), a punter being stretchered off to hospital by paramedics, the Cupid Shuffle line dance on skates, slamming into the bar, skating back from the bar with pint in hand, and lots of wibbly-wobbly laps. 10 out of 10. Go. Meanwhile here is some lo-fi vid featuring power ballads and Whitney-pop to whet the appetite…

Just found this much better vid of Birmingham Roller Disco:

One day…

Also here is Pete’s top summary of our fine night out (I’d forgotten it was my birthday request): Disco in Boots that Roll

Today was the inaugural five-hour lesson of Matt & Pete’s Photo School in which 10 strangers met upstairs in Birmingham’s Victoria pub to learn more about photography and how to improve our own efforts.

The framework of the day – after tea and coffee – involved an hour of learning a bit about the technical side of how a camera works, a bit about Henri Cartier-Bresson and a bit about the theory and style of street photography.

Then Matt and Pete set out three rules for our photowalk around Birmingham:

• use a fixed focal length on the lens (no zooming!)
• use the rule of thirds in some of the compositions
• frame your chosen scene, wait for someone to walk into it and then take the shot

On the walk, I found the rule of thirds pretty easy to apply. But having a fixed 50mm lens and trying to find a good frame was disconcerting.

The fixed lens also meant getting closer to strangers and taking the risk of being invasive, but mostly they seemed to be buried deep in their own worlds. The discomfort was more mine. This was not helped by a sticky shutter button – a known problem on some Canon DSLRs – which kept delaying the shot, leaving me with a lot of ‘nearly but not quite’ pictures.

I chose the one above as an example of that. I was playing with shutter priority and using a slow speed to create motion blur. Luckily, one of the subjects turned to face the camera as I pressed the shutter button, which created a nice focal point. Unfortunately the act of pressing the button shifted the camera slightly and all the static lines of the steps and Town Hall columns end up blurred rather than crisp.

I presented it as an interesting failure but was surprised that the photo got a fairly positive critique. Apart from the unintended camera shake, the overall effect is quite painterly, the feel was accidentally ‘very Cartier-Bresson’ and it led to some discussion about how boring ‘perfect’ photos can be in the digital world and how non-standard ones can jump out at you. I did take better photos but the critique at the end of the day opened up my thoughts about the emotional effects of a photo that isn’t technically perfect.

I don’t want to go into all the issues that I have with my own photographs but one of the main things I’ve realised is that apart from a couple of rules of composition and my own personal likes, I lack confidence in judging a photograph. I don’t have a strong sense of when a photo is good or not. The end result of this is taking an endless series of photos rather than taking control of the creative decisions and shooting less.

The other thing I learnt about myself today is that I need to slow down. I tend to get frustrated at missing the shot but perhaps I need to see this type of photography more like going fishing: set up the equipment, throw the line out, sit back and see if you get a catch. If you don’t, then just chill and start again. Enjoy it!

Or something.

It will be interesting to see what the others produced in the Photo School Flickr group.

The next session is in a month’s time and will involve stepping away from the ‘normal view’ to investigate wide angles, landscapes and a photowalk around some of Brum’s iconic buildings. Looking forward to the fancy learning, the practical stuff, meeting people and getting my head around ‘me’ as a photographer.

More info on how to bag a place is here.

Otherwise here are the other three photos I took today that I think have some merit: