Dave Hodgkinson Music Photography

While doing our guided rock pool forage, the guy mentioned that with the warming sea, the seaweed season was getting shorter and there was less of it about. We all nodded sagely and acknowledged our complicity in the death of the oceans. Then he threw in: “and the farmers have discovered it makes a kick-ass fertiliser and come down and harvest it”. Oh, right.

I’m a fairly renowned pedant and things like 10 Words you need to stop misspelling warm my cockles. Something to do with having a decent education and a love for this wonderful, malleable, subtle thing we call English.

But.

I wonder if it’s time to call time on such pedantry.

Provided the meaning is clear, which is should be if the words are read, and who doesn’t read aloud inside their heads, isn’t their a case for loosing such rules? As long as the overall meaning is clear, is it to much to expect, in this Twitter age, that we respect these archaic strictures?

It’s not raining.

Against all expectations, the agents turned up my suit which is now retrieved and hanging in the wardrobe. Result!

Louise also retrieved her sketching board from the bar we left it in last night.

We’ve now played ping pong on the shiny new and barely used tables in the basement and worked up a sweat. I won. Hah! I’m a bad winner. Can you tell?

Mixed results on the food front: very ordinary and overpriced dim sum for lunch today but a rather excellent kiwi burger for dins tonight, followed by a yummy ice cream from the mango ice place. The place that doesn’t currently have mango as they’re out of season. Ho hum.

Only the washing machine to be fixed now.

And it stopped raining today.

Anyone who knows me, know that I pretend to be a Nikon bigot: “Nikon make microscopes and Canon make photocopiers”. It’s a bit of a front, since I started on Canon.

So, since coming to Taipei, I’ve been itching to have a camera to hand to capture the day to day, and indeed night by night, oddness all around but I’ve not been carrying the D300 and the iPhone just hasn’t quite cut it.

Luckily, Canon to the rescue! I’d always had a sneaky hankering after the G9/G10/G11 series but for P&S boxes they are hellishly chunky. From passing through Hong Kong to arrival in Taipei there has been wall to wall advertising for the S90. Good timing.

So, I checked the price on the interwebs, walk into a store, pay a little more but pay on Amex but still less than the best price on Amazon UK, and walk out with a shiny little toy.

As far as I can tell, it has *everything* I want in a walkabout camera:

• Up to ISO3200. Sure it’s going to be as noisy as hell, but if it catches a decent histogram, it won’t be too bad (and from pics I’ve seen, this is true).
• RAW. Not entirely sure if the bit-depth is more than 8 bits per colour per pixel (it’s 12 or 14 on the D300). But it’s still RAW and all that entails.
• 28mm-105mm equivalent zoom range.
• f/2.0 lens. Depth of field baby, oh yeah.
• Image stabilisation – not something I’ve ever fretted about before being able to get sharp pics at 1/15s at up to 70mm on the big camera but on a small camera it’s a nice to have.
• Lots of scene modes. I know lots of pros and keen amateurs sniff at these but they’re a fast short-cut to what you’d choose for a given environment anyway so learn them and use them. I said so.
• Some fun in-camera processing like antiquing images
• Live histogram display! That was a surprise!

Everything seems to be in the right place and there are some nice ergo features like a ring round the lens for zooming.

All in all a very nice little package.

That didn’t go according to plan. We did our best and anticipated outcomes but the best laid plans and all that. So far, we’ve had:

• The serviced apartment was a bit shit. Paper thin walls and a snoring neighbour.
• I had the lurgi for four days.
• Left my good suit in the serviced apartment. They tossed it. It was worth more than the rent we paid them.
• The new apartment had dangerous electrics so we couldn’t move in.
• When we had electrics and tried the washing machine it flooded the floor.
• I had somewhat of a personal crisis which wound me up tight, but that was resolved happily.
• It’s been COLD. This doesn’t happen in Taipei. Saw blue sky once though but it’s predicted six days rain from now on.
• Jetlag. I’ve had 10 hours sleep in 3 days.
• The last Larsson “The Girl Who…” book was complete tripe. OK, not a showstopper, but disappointing.
• And I appear to have lost my headphones for no good reason. I haven’t taken them out since London.

I’m sure there was more. It’s felt like one thing after another. Still, we’re in the place and have internet so we’ll survive.

On the upside, we thought “fuck it” and booked into a decently priced 5* hotel last night and got a 100 square metre room with freebies which was awesome even if I did only get 4 hours sleep and we had to check out at 9 to meet the electrician.

Going forward (fnar) we have 4 festivals and Deep Purple to look forward to in Taipei, and a UK tour with Arch Enemy. So that should be fun.

Funny how things go. There I was, primed to make a commitment to property, and in the course of a few hours at Heathrow waiting for Louise to be unfucked by immigration, I decided to head off in a completely different direction: to the land of typhoons, earthquakes and cockroaches the size of your fist.

This time, I lasted a whole 18 months in Camden which is probably some kind of record. And a great time it was too. It was a time of lots of gigs and amazing life changes for me and having something I never thought I’d have again.

So, I’m off to Taipei for at least 4 months, although I could well be back on business or even tour managing again. I will continue to work of course, my awesome team doing their amazing stuff too.

Exciting times!

After a burst of enthusiasm when I got back to Camden from Amsterdam, I’d been finding recently my enthusiam for the glamour of music photography was on the wane. I’m afraid the champagne lifestyle and the groupies just wasn’t doing it for my any more and if I saw the inside of one more plush, red-velvet VIP area ever again, I’d scream. Also, the brilliantly lit stages were like an LSD trip in their creativity.

Sadly, all of the above is a lie.

Despite my rule of only shooting musicians I like, and assembling a wonderful collective of like-minded snappers I realised recently that I really couldn’t care any more. Watching Simon work far harder than I have and still not get anywhere and especially his lament about not getting paid just added to the ennui.

So, I’ll shoot a few more gigs in October, tour manage the Chthonic UK tour in the first week of November then focus on my fine art work.

So with that in mind, I’ve put up ALL the 1* or better photos from this year in high-resolution (good enough for a 6×4 at least). The following sets out the terms:

The following sets are all high-resolution 1600-1200 images free for personal use. Bands are free to use them on the web with credit. Commercial use is subject to negotiation, but really, I don’t bite. I retain copyright on all images so don’t be naughty.

So there you go. Round about 750 images from 40-mumble performances for your viewing pleasure. There are some good ones in there too. 2008 to follow.

I’m shifting my photographic focus somewhat, starting back at Central St. Martins, working on refining my style, hell, working out what my style is, and building a portfolio. Trouble is, I like taking photos of lots of things: people, travel stuff, musicians, london by day and night, sunsets and so on. Jean-Loup Sieff is my hero, along with early Liebowitz, Newton, Tillmans and the lovely Cecil Beaton so people are definitely a focus. But! That’s me setting the scene. I’m wondering what gaps I have in my lens armoury. Oh, I’m seriously considering acquiring a film SLR too, probably a Nikon F4 or similar, which I’d like to also use my lenses on. So, here are the lenses I have:

Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 – slightly crocked in the auto-focus department but still a great lens
Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 – a great, cheap lens
Nikkor 80-200 f/2.8 – brilliant fast zoom and portrait lens
Tokina 17-50 f/2.8 – my walkabout lens, cheap, plastic, but has survived the pit well
Tamron 55-200 f/4-5.6 – walkabout zoom lens, cheap but good for the price

So in that lot, am I missing anything? There’s a couple of 35mm and 85mm primes that look interesting.

I don’t mind “legacy” lenses as long as they’re either auto-focus or the focus detection works.

Anyone?

I’ve been peripherally involved in music business stuff since the mid-nineties when I started running a fan site for a certain classic rock band. In that time, I’ve watched the music business bleed itself to death through completely not understanding what was happening in the world with free access to information and their preciously generated content.

Whilst the long tail has potentially become stronger in the last few years with savvy bands being able to employ the likes of the dread Myspace and more recently the much more useful Facebook to reach out to and engage fans, the 20% who are used to taking the 80% of the revenue are suffering.

Good.

Anyhow, that isn’t the point of this post.

I’m doing some work for the BBC which involves interfacing with assorted music retailers and attempting to give them the license-payer’s business in buying the BBC’s most excellent recorded music content. What has been boggling me today has been the wide range of clue across the various providers/vendors of aforementioned musical goodness. Some examples:

• A certain large high-street music retailer has no public API. We have a spec for the format we receive but the chances of that happening in a timely manner? Remote.
• Same for Play.com, The BBC Shop (oops!), Napster and eMusic. Hmmm.
• iTunes – you’d have thunk that someone so well embedded with people with loads of money and no sense would enable the web rabble to link and make money, wouldn’t you? Fat chance. The best they can do is a “deep-link making gizmo” and an affiliate scheme with “apple-designed” stuff. Thanks guys. WE want to give YOU the business.
• Amazon – they have an API and it’s been around forever. I’m actually struggling to find documentation on their Web Services site: they’re all about the cloud these days. Still, the perl modules still work and that’s all that matters.
• Spotify – have a C client library that only runs on a specific linux. WTF? What are you people smoking?
• 7Digital have a GREAT API. Much more data than we need and some of the data we can use to enrich our database. Nice work guys.
• Musicbrainz, while not being a vendor as such, are über geeks and definitely get the API thing and are an essential part of what we’re doing so that’s useful at least.

If I’ve missed some better options with these suppliers, I’m open to suggestions of course. Still, I’m amazed that in this day and age, so many whose livelihood is going to depend on reaching out to the internet have their heads buried so deeply in the sand.

I’m sure I’ll ramble more on this as I delve deeper.