Further Archive Thoughts
Hello again and welcome to this blog, as we hurtle towards the end of the year and as always happens you start to look back over the year, with end of year image reviews incoming. Specifically this process lead to further thought about my archive and how it can be viewed, shared and discussed in line for future endeavours. The idea is to collate it and when I’m gone pass it onto my kids to see if they can make anything of it.
To help with this process next year I thought, possibly once a month, I’ll revisit an image taken from the archive that was made in that month, so for example I could look at an image taken back in the January of 1999, this could lead to interesting debate/thoughts. I’ll try and pick randomly an image from the myriad of jobs I’ve covered over the years. This will predominately be the digital archive as the negative archive will take a bit more work on dates etc but I will try and include where I can. Hoping this will give me further impetus to sort, categorise and explain the archive even further as if I have to blog about it every month, then that will lead to more organised thoughts and hopefully give people insights into the archive.
Main question though is, what do people want to know?
Thinking back throughout the years people have asked so many different questions about my work, some of these have been quite left field so trying to answer these in advance may be difficult. Initially I’m thinking that the most interesting thing to include will be the stories behind the images, such as they are in some cases, but they may be on interest later on possibly? But what about the technical? Is the data behind the image, the technical requirements needed to get them of any interest? How many historical reference points do I include? What about the more academically minded nuggets of information? Should I include the random thoughts? What about image dissection?
Questions, Questions, Questions… Guess I’ll just have to have a go, see what works and what doesn’t, your feedback on this will be much appreciated.
Allied to these musings this week I’ve been working on making stock images, what with the light being what it was these last few days, it’s been fun. Take this image of the beautiful heat capture exchange feature near the town hall, I believe the purpose of this is to capture the by product from electricity production and turn it into heat for surrounding buildings. Anyway I often look at it and think how fantastic, especially on this day where the light has caught its work magnificently. Now the question is, should I remove that bird silhouette just making its way into frame or does it add a certain level of authenticity?
The Civic Quarter heat exchange network, Tower of Light in Manchester City centre.
This is a preview of next year’s blog direction as going forward my main areas of concentration will be making stock and archival work. Now I know how that can read so please don’t take that as an indication that I’m not available for work, NathanPhoto will still be doing the usual mixture of events/portraits as per. So If there is any work that you’d like to enquire about then please do contact me, speaking of which, I do need to update the portrait folio and make some new work in that area with some specific example portraits, as the ones I’ve got are either quite old or not suitable, I will do a bigger call out next year but if anyone reading this needs any portrait work doing and wants to shoot something, then please drop me a line.
As ever many thanks for reading and as ever any feedback, questions, comments or suggestions then please get me via the usual channels.
Thank you.