It was mine and Kat’s birthday last weekend, and we decided to go down to London on the Monday and Friday.  Kat took her ‘blad, and I took my Bronica.  Shot off a couple of rolls of Fuji Pro 400H, which I got back earlier today.  As an apology for the lack of content on here for the past month or so, here’s a free grunge wallpaper from our London trip!  Taken somewhere near Whitechapel if memory serves.

Click the image above for a better view, or right click and ‘save link as’ or ‘download linked file’ to save it to your machine.  It’s a 1440×900 file, as that’s the resolution of my 15″ MacBook Pro’s screen.

Most of the advice online falls into one of 2 categories:

1. Login using [blogroot]/wp-login.php instead.  This is the easiest method to try, as it doesn’t involve changing anything.  Once you’re logged in, you should be able to access your wp-admin dashboard without any problems.  If this doesn’t work, then the next most popular piece of advice seems to be:
   
2. Backup and then delete the .htaccess file from your blog root.  .htaccess files are the usual method for managing redirects within WordPress, so this advice makes sense.

It seems that a combination of these methods seems to resolve most peoples’ problems.  However, neither worked for me.

It turned out that the problems that I was having were related to a faulty plugin.  Without access to the dashboard I was unable to disable my plugins, so I had to disable them via FTP instead.  If neither of the above methods work for you, try this:

1. Login to your website via ftp, and navigate to /wp-content/.
2. Rename the /plugins/ folder to /plugins-backup/ or similar.  WordPress will be unable to detect them, and will deactivate them.
3. Attempt to login to WordPress using your usual method.  If your problems were due to a faulty plugin, you should now be able to log in.
4. Rename your /plugins-backup/ folder back to /plugins/.  Your plugins will remain deactivated on WordPress as a precaution.
5. You can now reactivate your plugins on WordPress one by one to find out which was the culprit.

A good friend linked me to this slightly unbelievable video, which demonstrates how to make a apparently very usable black and white film developer using just coffee, vitamin c power, water, and a little washing powder (via a post on Engadget).

It looks incredibly simple, and the results that the narrator seems to achieve are almost suspiciously good. You’ll still need conventional store-bought fixing chemical, of course.

I have personally been paying around £18 a litre for Ilfosol DD-X. I push practically all of the black and white that I shoot at least 2-3 stops, at which DD-X excels. This home-made processing chemical (which users have apparently named ‘Caffenol’) might make it worth shooting a roll or two at ISO 200 or 400 just to see what sort of negatives it produces.

This isn’t directly photography related, but I’ve just got back from a holiday to Cyprus with my girlfriend and am still working through the stuff I took over there.

I stumbled across this article on the Guardian through people linking to it on Facebook, and thought it was significant enough to post up on here. It’s recommended reading and explains the context behind the video better than I could.

There is a difference between preparing responses to an interview, and trying to hijack an interview and turn it into a party broadcast. This isn’t journalism. If a politician doesn’t have the capacity to form coherent answers in an interview, then they have no business pretending to be a politician. At best they might make a rather mediocre PR rep.

I do appreciate that the ConDem’s decision to systematically deconstruct the country is largely based on a report that Miliband’s party commissioned, but if he wanted his statement to have any sort of validity you would have thought he would have taken some sort of ownership over its delivery. A written statement would at least have been a little less embarrassing.

This man could well be the only alternative to the Conservatives and the Lib Dems at the next election. How depressing is that. I don’t really think that attempting to make a choice out of those options really constitutes a ‘democracy’.

With that out of the way, I wanted to share something I discovered at the end of last term – a service for Macs that creates a PDF booklet layout from any document. (feel free to ignore the rest of this post.  That link is all you need to print booklets.)

I don’t like making traditional ‘workbooks’ – you know, the ones where you document your progress, stick in your contact sheets and test prints, and talk about your influences.  Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy reading them, and they’re a good as a concept… it’s the execution that I have a problem with.  They’re supposed to show development and provide justification and influences for what you’ve done.  Which is great.

But it never seems to work out that way, and the act of creating the workbook seems to dominate the project – it becomes more about creating a workbook that’s very markable and grade-able, rather than creating a good body of work.  That has been my experience with them, anyway.  I’m sure that there are people that create workbooks as they go along, and use it as a documentary on the project rather than something that you do to jump through marksheet-criteria hoops.  Having said that, I know plenty of people who simply fake their workbook at the end of the project, which IMHO misses the point.

Personally, I prefer to word-process an extended statement about the body of work that I’ve created, and then print it out as a booklet.  In the past I’ve then had these spiral bound at the print shop at uni.  For the sake of about £2, it’s a tidy way to provide some context for what you’ve been working on.  For my last project, however, I ran out of time and knew that I wouldn’t be able to get to the print shop before my crit.

This probably isn’t something that you’d know if you haven’t tried to print of a booklet using more than one sheet of A4 before, but it’s basically impossible to print out a multi-page booklet from whatever program you happen to be using.  AFAIK, it isn’t possible with Word, Pages, Publisher… whatever.  With this download, all you need to do is print out the PDF document that is outputted on a printer capable of printing double-sided, and staple it in the middle.  Simple.

It has taken me a loooong time to figure out how to do this, which is all the more embarrassing considering how simple ‘Create Booklet PDF Service’ makes it.  Anyone who read that rant has more than earnt the right to benefit from my struggles.

Yesterday was my end-of-term assessment. At NTU these are done as full-group critiques, in which each student shares his/her work with everyone else in his/her group – usually around 12-15 students, plus a tutor – for feedback.

My final prints are 16×12″, which is too big to scan. So, instead, I’ve decided to post up something else that was in my crit: Retribution by Josef Pascoe. My work from last term was also in the form a video (albeit something completely different), so I can appreciate the sort of workload shooting something like this entails. This is also apparently his first time he’s done a video project for uni, which makes it even more impressive.

Beautiful aesthetics (the lighting and colour in particular are great), beautifully edited, and sick music. Contains nudity and erotic dancing, though, so NSFW.

Simon Dunn also created a video with an interesting concept, although he isn’t in my group so I didn’t get to hear the context behind it.

Project work has sort of taken a sideline to essay work recently, but with my essay now handed in I can spend the next (and final) week on my film project.  I was supposed to be out taking photos today, but thus far the skies have been really boring and I’m down to my last roll of film.  I’m waiting another hour or two and if the skies don’t clear up then I’m just going to have to do with overcastness and hope that the rest of my film arrives in the post tomorrow.

I’m still taking photos of residential towers, but I’ve found that using large format is prohibitively time consuming, not to mention slow, and time consuming.  And expensive.  I’ve found that it’s actually really nice to work with if you have plenty of time on your hands, so I’m going to try and persuade uni to let me take out an MPP over summer – you know, for if a situation arises in which I have loads of money and time.

Because of having to spend an awful lot of time on essays and stuff recently, I’ve been shooting a lot of medium format instead of large.  But I’m now out of medium format film, and I’ve been shooting a lot of stuff like this, which isn’t really relevant to my project:

…amongst other things, such as photos of Kat’s friend Kim eating, and Kat herself being very ill, neither of whom would appreciate having the photos stuck online.

…or maybe I will include it, I don’t know.  At least when I print it myself in the darkroom it won’t have those damn marks all over the sky.  Uni really should clean their scanners more often.

I discovered this video regarding the laws surrounding photography in public places by Reason.tv via PetaPixel.  If anyone reading this has a serious interest in photography and isn’t already following PetaPixel, I highly recommend it.  They’re a very active blog, and their posts are universally pretty interesting.

The video is completely US-centric, but it’s still an interesting video to watch, exploring the realities of the laws in America regarding photography in public places, and how myths arise that are taken as law but aren’t actually grounded in anything.  Well worth eight and a half minutes of your time if you’re into this sort of thing.

Two of the images I’ve decided to use regard a photograph of a 15 year old Haitian who was shot dead by police for the looting of two plastic chairs and three framed pictures.  The photograph, by Paul Hansen, won a Swedish award for best international news image.  Aside from the obvious controversy surrounding a photograph of a dead teenager winning an award, the image has recently received additional criticism in light of the existence of a photograph by another photographer named Nathan Weber, who photographed the girl from the opposite side, showing a group of photographers crowded round her.

The award has been put into question – why should Hansen’s photograph have received an award when, clearly, numerous other photographers may have captured almost identical images?  It turns out that photographs taken by other photographers at the time have also won awards from separate bodies.

I have included the photographs below for your considerations:

Fabiene Cherisma by Paul Hansen

Fabiene Cherisma by Nathan Weber

You can read further information on this topic over at PetaPixel, from which the two photographs above are taken.

One moment that I found particularly hilarious:

You can buy the DVD/Blu-Ray+CD as a combo bundled with merch from The Prodigy store, or alternatively you can get the discs standalone for slightly cheaper from Amazon.