I don't normally write anything on here about what I do when I'm not writing, because I do do other things apart from writing. In fact, the writing just fills in gaps between the other things I do. Apart from cooking, cleaning, shouting at a small dog and generally irritating my wife, my main other occupation is photography.
I don't think I'm a great photographer by any means. That's not just the old false modesty thing, you know, when someone goes "Golf, eh? Never been much good at it," right before they hit a hole in one and look smug. I'm talking about an honest technical appraisal of my own capabilities and my ability to operate the cameras I have.
I've owned DSLR cameras for about 8 years now and like most things in life I've played with them sporadically. I always shot with natural light mainly because I didn't know how to use a flash. But since the start of this year, a kindly chap has taken me under his wing and taught me an awful lot about how to do good photography and really it's not that hard. Most people go wrong because they're scared of all the buttons and settings, but if you take your time and learn what they all do and then do a bit of reading on how it all works then you will find yourself coming on leaps and bounds.
As a case in point, at the start of the year I was bumbling through weddings barely understanding what I was doing. Now I can shoot a full wedding, process the images, print and deliver them to a client and have them turn around and say how much they like the pictures.
It's that last part that made me write this. It's so nice to see people comment on a picture and say how much they love it. The praise is not directed at me; there's nothing to say who the photographer was. Instead, what they like is the mood and the emotion of the image, and that's what I strive to shoot. I'm not technically the best but I like to think I can capture how people feel, and when they come back and comment to that effect, it makes me feel like I've done a good job.
That said, I'm still learning the trade, and I will use the rest of this year to improve my skills. Next year, though, I'm going to be taking off and making some good money doing something I really enjoy, and you can't ask for more than that, can you?
Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Structuring an unstructured mind is like nailing a cat to a sail in a hurricane
The problem with having an overactive imagination is getting it to stop. I can be walking along when I have a great idea, concept, lyric, line or something that flashes across my mind. It's so great it puts the proverbial spring in my step as I let it run free and grow and build and I think 'I HAVE to get this down, this is amazing'. Then something happens - someone speaks to me, a child punches me in the groin or a car tries to run me over (all have happened) and the great idea evaporates away before it has time to fully form in my memory. It's a pain in the arse.
That said, a lot of idiocy and madness does survive that initial germination phase and makes it to a scrap of paper, a notebook, the back of a hand or any other place I can get it scribbled down, just enough to prompt the thought again when I look back at it later so that the idea is not lost amongst the noise of the world.
Even with all the loss, I still splurge out more ideas than I can realistically turn into worthwhile work. This includes stories, songs and often just throwaway lines that I put on Twitter or to a lesser extent Facebook. I've always written stories, even from a young age. A couple of things stick in my mind from that period. Both involve the same English teacher, Mr Milner, who taught me at Oaklands School in York. He must be dead by now, but he had a huge impact on my life, even though he doesn't know it. In return, I never gave him back his copy of To Kill A Mockingbird.
My first memory related to his teaching - oh no, wait, there's three, not two - was when we were given a sheet of paper with a series of drawings, depicting a guy who gets a motorbike. We had to use them to tell a story. I sort of cheated, because I cut the page up, rearranged the sequence of pictures and turned one of the characters into a policeman reporting on the untimely death of the lead character at the end of the story. Mr Milner wrote on it 'This is a work of the highest standard, well done.' That stuck in my head because a) he was right, it was good and b) I didn't get why nobody else did the same thing. It just seemed obvious to me.
Memory number two was a story about a raft. I wrote it from the point of view of someone walking through a forest a spying on another person building a raft. Mr Milner started reading that one out in class, much to my horror. At that point I realized that I don't crave attention or validation for my writing. I know when something works and when I doesn't. I don't need other people telling me that. If I let someone read something it's because I've gotten it to the point where it's progressed far enough to be presented to an audience. That doesn't necessarily mean its the finished product. That said, I do take onboard people's suggestions. When people read my story I want them to find plot holes or any deus ex machina moments that need extracting and replacing with decent story telling. I don't have a problem with that but generally by the time I have gotten to the point of letting someone read my work, such problems can be fixed with one or two lines of exposition.
Memory number three was a comment he put on a story about a deranged general trying to blow up a neutron bomb. He wrote at the bottom - 'hugely entertaining, worthy of Jeffrey Archer!' At the time I thought that was a compliment, but there will be more on that story later...
So that sort of brings me on to the point of this post. I have a lot of stories in development, but a lot of them are pretty closely tied together. In order to keep track of this, I need to set out a diagram of where they all fit together. Apologies for the formatting:
Brotherly Love
Valiant Shield
Satisfaction Ghostwalker
Sympathy for the Devil Ghostwalkers
Infinite Diamond
The Eye of Andromeda Scorpio
Northstar
Nemesis
Okay, I have more than I thought, that's actually eleven books. Given the length of book I seem to write, that's about a million words. Seeing as I do at least one complete rewrite per story, that brings it up to over two million words worth of effort to complete all these stories. Now you see why I see having too much imagination as being a bit of a curse.
Bear in mind that most of these are not written out in full, and that million word target is probably more around the three hundred thousand word mark at the moment. In fact, only Satisfaction and Ghostwalker are completed to a reasonable degree, with Infinite Diamond close behind. Brotherly Love has an outline and a few passages. Sympathy for the Devil has a start and a premise. Ghostwalkers has a premise. Valiant Shield is based on the story Mr Milner likened to the work of Jeffrey Archer, and is little more than a basic pitch. Infinite Diamond is the story I'm working on at the moment and is about half way through being rewritten. The Eye of Andromeda has an outline, as do the last three.
What links Valiant Shield through to Nemesis is one character. He's called Nathan Hayes and in some of the stories he's a relatively minor player, whereas in others he takes centre stage. The overarching span of these stories is really about his career, although you wouldn't see that reading any one of the stories.
The stories on the left don't involve Hayes and are a standalone little stories told from the first person point of view. This is by far and away the easiest and laziest way for me to write, because I'm basically writing in my voice as I see it and hear it in my head. If a character doesn't know something then they don't know. I don't need to go away and research a subject or try to describe something I barely understand myself. It really is much, much easier writing like this. It's pretty much the same voice I use to write this blog, only it's fictional. That's why when I start trying to publish, I'll be using thes stories on the left. That way if I fail, it's at minimum damage to myself. The other reason is to retain creative control. I know where I want the rest of the stories to go and how I want them to fit together. If I publish one of them without securing that creative control, it would run the risk of buggering up the overall structure that I have in mind.
The rest of the stories are very much more conventional fiction writing and range from thrillers through to straight action stories, mostly with a slight fantasy/sci fi element, although I don't include characters with names like Jxxfrkk or Gilfard the Great or anything like that. It's a little more grounded writing than that, I like to think. I do tend to write pretty visually and of course I think about how these stories could end up on film. I'm also realistic though, and I know there's pretty much a zero chance of that happening, since they would be expensive to make. So for now they will exist as novels, although another thought has occurred to me. Being very visual stories, they could do very well as graphic novels. I think the sort of stories I write could work in that medium and be marketed to the sort of audience who would pick up a graphic novel in the first place.
The only problem is that, like most things in life, I have no idea where to start.
That said, a lot of idiocy and madness does survive that initial germination phase and makes it to a scrap of paper, a notebook, the back of a hand or any other place I can get it scribbled down, just enough to prompt the thought again when I look back at it later so that the idea is not lost amongst the noise of the world.
Even with all the loss, I still splurge out more ideas than I can realistically turn into worthwhile work. This includes stories, songs and often just throwaway lines that I put on Twitter or to a lesser extent Facebook. I've always written stories, even from a young age. A couple of things stick in my mind from that period. Both involve the same English teacher, Mr Milner, who taught me at Oaklands School in York. He must be dead by now, but he had a huge impact on my life, even though he doesn't know it. In return, I never gave him back his copy of To Kill A Mockingbird.
My first memory related to his teaching - oh no, wait, there's three, not two - was when we were given a sheet of paper with a series of drawings, depicting a guy who gets a motorbike. We had to use them to tell a story. I sort of cheated, because I cut the page up, rearranged the sequence of pictures and turned one of the characters into a policeman reporting on the untimely death of the lead character at the end of the story. Mr Milner wrote on it 'This is a work of the highest standard, well done.' That stuck in my head because a) he was right, it was good and b) I didn't get why nobody else did the same thing. It just seemed obvious to me.
Memory number two was a story about a raft. I wrote it from the point of view of someone walking through a forest a spying on another person building a raft. Mr Milner started reading that one out in class, much to my horror. At that point I realized that I don't crave attention or validation for my writing. I know when something works and when I doesn't. I don't need other people telling me that. If I let someone read something it's because I've gotten it to the point where it's progressed far enough to be presented to an audience. That doesn't necessarily mean its the finished product. That said, I do take onboard people's suggestions. When people read my story I want them to find plot holes or any deus ex machina moments that need extracting and replacing with decent story telling. I don't have a problem with that but generally by the time I have gotten to the point of letting someone read my work, such problems can be fixed with one or two lines of exposition.
Memory number three was a comment he put on a story about a deranged general trying to blow up a neutron bomb. He wrote at the bottom - 'hugely entertaining, worthy of Jeffrey Archer!' At the time I thought that was a compliment, but there will be more on that story later...
So that sort of brings me on to the point of this post. I have a lot of stories in development, but a lot of them are pretty closely tied together. In order to keep track of this, I need to set out a diagram of where they all fit together. Apologies for the formatting:
Brotherly Love
Valiant Shield
Satisfaction Ghostwalker
Sympathy for the Devil Ghostwalkers
Infinite Diamond
The Eye of Andromeda Scorpio
Northstar
Nemesis
Okay, I have more than I thought, that's actually eleven books. Given the length of book I seem to write, that's about a million words. Seeing as I do at least one complete rewrite per story, that brings it up to over two million words worth of effort to complete all these stories. Now you see why I see having too much imagination as being a bit of a curse.
Bear in mind that most of these are not written out in full, and that million word target is probably more around the three hundred thousand word mark at the moment. In fact, only Satisfaction and Ghostwalker are completed to a reasonable degree, with Infinite Diamond close behind. Brotherly Love has an outline and a few passages. Sympathy for the Devil has a start and a premise. Ghostwalkers has a premise. Valiant Shield is based on the story Mr Milner likened to the work of Jeffrey Archer, and is little more than a basic pitch. Infinite Diamond is the story I'm working on at the moment and is about half way through being rewritten. The Eye of Andromeda has an outline, as do the last three.
What links Valiant Shield through to Nemesis is one character. He's called Nathan Hayes and in some of the stories he's a relatively minor player, whereas in others he takes centre stage. The overarching span of these stories is really about his career, although you wouldn't see that reading any one of the stories.
The stories on the left don't involve Hayes and are a standalone little stories told from the first person point of view. This is by far and away the easiest and laziest way for me to write, because I'm basically writing in my voice as I see it and hear it in my head. If a character doesn't know something then they don't know. I don't need to go away and research a subject or try to describe something I barely understand myself. It really is much, much easier writing like this. It's pretty much the same voice I use to write this blog, only it's fictional. That's why when I start trying to publish, I'll be using thes stories on the left. That way if I fail, it's at minimum damage to myself. The other reason is to retain creative control. I know where I want the rest of the stories to go and how I want them to fit together. If I publish one of them without securing that creative control, it would run the risk of buggering up the overall structure that I have in mind.
The rest of the stories are very much more conventional fiction writing and range from thrillers through to straight action stories, mostly with a slight fantasy/sci fi element, although I don't include characters with names like Jxxfrkk or Gilfard the Great or anything like that. It's a little more grounded writing than that, I like to think. I do tend to write pretty visually and of course I think about how these stories could end up on film. I'm also realistic though, and I know there's pretty much a zero chance of that happening, since they would be expensive to make. So for now they will exist as novels, although another thought has occurred to me. Being very visual stories, they could do very well as graphic novels. I think the sort of stories I write could work in that medium and be marketed to the sort of audience who would pick up a graphic novel in the first place.
The only problem is that, like most things in life, I have no idea where to start.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
A smug and ill placed sense of self satisfaction...
Since moving to America, I've not really worked. This wasn't really through choice at first - it took me a long time to get a green card, but since I got that late last year I've applied to a lot of companies and gotten nowhere. I seem to be stuck in a middle ground, either over qualified to do entry level jobs or under qualified to do the stuff I know I can do. So life has been rather frustrating and demoralizing of late. I know eventually I'll land something but I'm having to try different things to make money.
One of those things is photography. I'm just starting out as a professional photographer. Photography is something I've done for a number of years, but I've really fallen by the wayside with it since moving to America. My camera sat dormant for a long time, until I got the opportunity to get into wedding photography. Last weekend, I shot my first wedding as a second photographer, assisting the guy who shot my wedding.
He's very good.
I'm not.
I'm really not, and that's just not false modesty. I found it incredibly difficult. I shot a lot of photos and most of them were crap, both from a technical and compositional point of view. I was really disappointed, but I also learnt a lot from being so bad, about what to do and what not to do, if that makes sense. I know that if I get another go, which I should, that I will be much much better next time around. Most of the stuff I got that I was pleased with were the detail or incidental shots, but then as a second shooter I suppose that's what I was there for. I reckon I got about a 30-35% hit rate, which is okay but I want to get 45%.
Most of the stuff I've shot previously has been still life or outdoors. This was indoors in low light and I really struggled to catch things, especially when everything is happening so spontaneously. I got better as the event went on, and it's kind of telling that my best shots all clumped around the end of the day.
In addition to this, I also drew my first money this week from selling microstock photos, which are just photos you sell the rights for online. Seventy dollars from shooting still life shots. I need to get into that more and sell some more of those.
As well as this, I've done a lot of writing. In fact, right before I started writing this I reached 70,001 words to finish the first complete draft of my third novel. There's a long way to take it before it's really completed, but I'm pretty pleased with it thus far.
Now for the tricky part. In the next few weeks I'm going to put together some packages, consisting of a cover letter, a synopsis and three chapters of each of the stories I've written. I'm then going to submit these to agents, publishers and maybe magazines to see if I can do something with my writing.
I really don't know how this will turn out. It's pretty nerve-wracking even thinking about it. Most likely, I will fall flat on my face and get nowhere, but I've reached the point where I don't want to see the chance of actually doing something worthwhile with my life slip by because I didn't have enough self belief. If I'm able to move to America and marry a gorgeous blonde, how hard can it be to get a book published?
That's what I want to find out this year. I'll let you know how it goes.
One of those things is photography. I'm just starting out as a professional photographer. Photography is something I've done for a number of years, but I've really fallen by the wayside with it since moving to America. My camera sat dormant for a long time, until I got the opportunity to get into wedding photography. Last weekend, I shot my first wedding as a second photographer, assisting the guy who shot my wedding.
He's very good.
I'm not.
I'm really not, and that's just not false modesty. I found it incredibly difficult. I shot a lot of photos and most of them were crap, both from a technical and compositional point of view. I was really disappointed, but I also learnt a lot from being so bad, about what to do and what not to do, if that makes sense. I know that if I get another go, which I should, that I will be much much better next time around. Most of the stuff I got that I was pleased with were the detail or incidental shots, but then as a second shooter I suppose that's what I was there for. I reckon I got about a 30-35% hit rate, which is okay but I want to get 45%.
Most of the stuff I've shot previously has been still life or outdoors. This was indoors in low light and I really struggled to catch things, especially when everything is happening so spontaneously. I got better as the event went on, and it's kind of telling that my best shots all clumped around the end of the day.
In addition to this, I also drew my first money this week from selling microstock photos, which are just photos you sell the rights for online. Seventy dollars from shooting still life shots. I need to get into that more and sell some more of those.
As well as this, I've done a lot of writing. In fact, right before I started writing this I reached 70,001 words to finish the first complete draft of my third novel. There's a long way to take it before it's really completed, but I'm pretty pleased with it thus far.
Now for the tricky part. In the next few weeks I'm going to put together some packages, consisting of a cover letter, a synopsis and three chapters of each of the stories I've written. I'm then going to submit these to agents, publishers and maybe magazines to see if I can do something with my writing.
I really don't know how this will turn out. It's pretty nerve-wracking even thinking about it. Most likely, I will fall flat on my face and get nowhere, but I've reached the point where I don't want to see the chance of actually doing something worthwhile with my life slip by because I didn't have enough self belief. If I'm able to move to America and marry a gorgeous blonde, how hard can it be to get a book published?
That's what I want to find out this year. I'll let you know how it goes.
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