If I could swear on this page I would, but you, gentile readers deserve better so I won’t. My 100portraits.net blog is drowning in automated spam. every day I have to clear out 5 0r so comments which are just a bunch of links and advertising phrases hung around a bland comment such as “I have added your feed to my reader”. I have started getting the same on matthewboyle.net, but I have been using anti-spam plugins and doing my best to combat the vandalism. As a result I have decided to move the previous “100 portraits site content to this “matthewboyle.net” site to leave me just one site to protect from the automated spambots. Step one tonight was to populate a “100 portraits” gallery on this site and to arrange it to be in the order of shooting and recommendation rather than the default alphabetical order by name. I’ll port the rest over the next week and then remove the 100 portraits site and redirect the old address to this site. I hope this won’t dissapoint anyone; all the content will still be here under the “100 portraits” page.
What makes life fun, (or even bearable), is other people. I am always fascinated by the idea of talent, you know, people who are so effortlessly brilliant at something that they produce huge results and are totally energised by what they do. One such example is John, a colleague who is an elite class musician, a flautist as it happens, who now runs school music provision; John is simply the most stunning conductor of an orchestra, not to mention the most incredible motivator of young musicians that I have ever seen. I had the pleasure of watching his orchestra of young musicians serving up a “menu” of musical ingredients to a stunned audience under his expert supervision. I couldn’t get close since I didn’t want to disturb the young audience’s enjoyment so these are 70-300 telephoto shots; not my usual thing. I just wanted you to see what a fantastic person this is who is developing and supporting the talent of others so effortlessly and who should be world famous for what he does. You might think I’m exaggarating, but you don’t:
a) Still have the finale of the firebird suite playing endlessly in your head.
b) Know what the young musicians said about how brilliantly John guides and supports them.
I wish you could have seen the performance, oh, and in case it isn’t obvious, he has a sense of humour too!
After a mega busy week which has prevented me from posting here, I had a particularly pleasant experience last night. Some of the people I photographed came together for a night in “Arta” in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It was great to see the people who came along and it really reminded me what a great experience the 100 portraits project was. If any of you are reading this, then thanks for coming, it was great to see you.
Oddly I decided that taking my camera wasn’t important and that I should just chat with people and enjoy their company without concentrating on taking pictures. At the end of the night however, I took just 4 snapshots. Not exactly dedicated photography! I’ll only post 1 picture. There are three people from 100 portraits in it; see if you can guess who. I’d like to thank Lisa in the foreground though who organised the venue.
I am really delighted to be having an exhibition of my 100 portraits project from last year in “offshore” cafe and exhibition space during March. What I had not anticipated was the difficulty of printing and hanging pictures on a budget. If I print myself at A4 size, then the cost and sheer hassle of getting 100 prints done might turn my remaining dark hairs grey. Eventually I have settled on a local camera store, Deaytons in paisley which did 100 12 inch by 8 inch prints for £65 UK pounds; I don’t think I could match that at home and I certainly couldn’t drop off a usb memory stick (why has there never been one agreed name for those?) one day and pick up a bag of finished prints one day later.
Then there is framing. The cheapest frame I can find is at least 3 or more pounds and the nicer ones are about 5 pounds each. That’s at the very least I would spend. That’s £300 UK pounds plus prints for a one off exhibition that may never be repeated. My wife has kindly taken an interest as an occasional painter and between us we have ordered 100 card mounts cut to size for the 100 prints from a specialist web business in England which should arrive on Monday. I would prefer full frames, but this keeps the framing costs to something like £1 UK pound a frame. This will keep the total exhibition cost to less than £200 UK pounds which seems reasonable for a non commercial, vanity event.
No doubt in a few weks I’ll post a photo of the cafe exhibition itself and report on the success of the cardboard mounts in lieu of actual frames. 100 is a big number!
Larry was my 7th portrait from my project and I struggled to cope with the bright low sunlight. I had the same problems with Seg two portraits previously. Looking back, I was technically inept at dealing with high contrast bright sunlight. I would now use a helper holding a diffuser, use fill flash to even the contrast in the scene, or better still seek out the shade. In this picture I solved the problem by going in close so that there was no huge range between face and background. Larry has a really strong and interesting face that can easily stand close scrutiny. Having coffee and biscuits with Larry in his allotment was a red high point of the project for me !
Capri
