In 2006 I came across a new way of taking photos. At an early Birmingham Flickrmeet Stuart Parker was wielding a cardboard tube with an old camera stuck at the bottom. He poked his digital camera in the slot and clicked away. Later we saw his photos on the Flickr group and next month half the group were wielding these contraptions.

Through The Viewfinder, or TTV, photography was invented by an American going by the name of “Mr E” (who has since dropped off the radar). Around 2005 noticed the viewfinder of vintage cameras had interesting distortions which, when photographed with a digital camera, made for interesting images. He stuck a few on Flickr, others copied him and the TTV group was formed. In time the technique became fairly widespread but, thanks to Stu’s early involvement and the Flickrmeets, Birmingham probably had the greatest concentration of TTV practitioners for a while. For more on the history and practice of TTV see Russ Morris’ tutorial.

For me the technique scratched two itches.

Firstly it got me away from the need to make “perfect” photos. While I loved digital photography for the possibilities it gave me, I was becoming bored with how it drew me towards making pixel-perfect images. Photos could be degraded in Photoshop or Lightroom by increasing contrast and mimicking film, but that was too intentional. I didn’t want that control. I wanted the ghost in the machine to make the image, and for me to learn how to work with that. TTV gave me that ghost.

The second itch was my need to make things with my hands. I’ve never been a craftsman by any stretch but I do like hacking at things with tools. TTV needs a contraption to hold the two cameras at the right distance and block out light and making that contraption is as much a part of the process as taking the photos.

It also put me in a small community of photographers who were scratching the same itches, which given my lack of connection “normal” photographers was immensely helpful. I felt at home.

My first contraption was a Fuji Finepix bridge camera, retired from everyday, attached to a Kodak Duaflex II.

I shot with this from 2006 until December 2009 when I slipped on the ice and broke the Fuji. Because a contraption is build to the optics of the top digital camera this contraption was now useless and I retired it. My 2010 exhibition, Homage To Contraption, consisted of every photo I had taken with these cameras mounted on a five metre board.

This marked a useful break in my process as I had to make a new contraption for my Nikon which give me much more control and a different aesthetic. Throughout 2010 I pushed the TTV technique further, developing the “grids” which became a trademark.

Also during 2010 I embarked on a series of markets, selling prints of my work at art markets throughout Birmingham. I secured a regular pitch at the Moseley Art Market and was a regular at the Handmade markets in the centre of Birmingham. I also had an Art On The Railings pitch at Artsfest. I also sold my work at the Created in Birmingham shop in the Bullring I was managing with Chris Unitt.

While trading as TTV Pete broke even it didn’t pay me a wage and after a year I decided to stop. But the experience was immensely valuable in a number of ways.

• I was able to get immediate and visceral feedback to my work.
• The realisation that market stalls are very cheap public exhibition spaces with hight footfall.
• Time spent with my camera leads to interesting experiments.

A case in point for the last one, during a horrible snowy market I had a go at making low frame-rate movies using the contraption. I stitched three of these together and made a moving triptych.

Following on from other experiments in TTV movies this triptych took my dominant style of photography, the grid, to a new place. This lead to being asked to exhibit in the Dead Space show at Birmingham Library by Claire Farrell of EC Arts. I showed new moving triptychs in a custom-built sculpture of monitors, cardboard and duct tape.

This experience stretched me artistically and it took a long time to not see it as a failure in many ways. I felt I had become distracted by the form, the structure, and not thought about the content. But ultimately it was a positive experience, pushing me out of my comfort zone and forcing me to think of my responsibility to the audience.

It also had the side-effect of ending my TTV practice. To make the movies I took tens of thousands of photos and soon after the shutter on my Nikon D70s gave out. The contraption didn’t work with my new D7000 and, feeling the tool had become an aesthetic crutch, I decided to stop. TTV Pete became Art Pete, the remaining prints were sold off and a new chapter stumbled around in the dark.

Last year I built a website for Francesca Millican-Slater, a performer who had recently relocated to Birmingham. When I visited her to discuss this I was struck by how batshit crazy her flat was. Converted from offices above some shops in a suburb of Kings Heath it had post-war wood panelling and the maddest carpet (which we used as the background on her site). Coupled with Fran’s packrat detritus it made for a fascinating space.

Fran was fully aware of this and it currently working on a performance based on the flat which has just been stripped down to be refurbished into a proper living space. Before this happened she asked me to document it with my camera. I’ve done this and sent her the pics which will no doubt be emerging as part of her work soon.

But I also wanted to try my hand at something new. I’ve long been a fan on Matt’s panoramas, stitched from hundreds of individual photos taken at different times and fancied having a go myself. The room seemed to lend itself to this so I started clicking.

Once I had enough shots it was really just a question of slogging through them in Photoshop, followed by a return to the flat to fill in a couple of gaps. Ideally I would have done a number of shoots in different lighting conditions to really get a sense of the room but this was effectively a trial run, just to see if I could do it.

I’ve put two treatments of the montage on Flickr in colour and black/white. You can download the original file from there if you want to have a good zoom.

This was a nice way to record all the nooks and crannies of the room and to use some mildly cubist notions to give a new understanding of the space but I’m kinda itching to make something with a bit more meaning to it next.

Update: Due to snow and a lack of Spring I’ve decided to postpone this until falling in the river is a less frightening prospect. It will happen though. I promise.

I’ve had this idea for a walk and it’s not really to do with photography so I’m going to do it as an Art-Pete thing, in preparation for some ideas I’ve been having about walks as performance and stuff. None of them are coherent yet – that’s kinda the point – but the end goal is hovering in the haze ahead of me.

The walk will be along the River Rea, Birmingham’s main river which, for our purposes, runs from Longbridge to Spaghetti Junction before merging with the Tame.

What makes this different is I intend to walk along the middle of the river in wellingtons. In dry periods this should be eminently possible, though the levels do often rise after a downpour.

The point is to travel the city on foot from a completely unique perspective and see what it looks like from there.

When I mooted this a while back a few people expressed an interest, so this is a slight formalisation of that. If you’d like to join me on an exploratory walk, from Kings Norton park to the Mac, please leave your name, email and mobile number along with the dates you’re free on and I’ll be in touch.

Needless to say you do this completely at your own risk. I have no idea what it’s like down there and there’s a very good chance you’ll slip and fall (Yaktrax or similar are recommended). This is an exploratory walk to see if it can be done en masse in the summer. If it’s a success I’ll test out the Mac through Digbeth.

Ant asked me to do something with the Bring Your Own Beamer: Birmingham photos. These were his instructions.

* 1 minute long
* 640 x 480
* No audio
* Jump straight into photos i.e. no title screens or fading
* Keep effects to a minimum
* Make it awesome

I sat on it for a week and eventually, on the cusp of the deadline I insisted he give me, came up with the above.

There are 300-ish photos running at 30fps. Every 10 seconds they look and zoom in to 400%. I guess it evokes the experience of BYOB where you can get up close to the projections and it’s all a bit overwhelming. Or maybe I was just desperate.

If I didn’t mention it already, Ant and I have agreed that we’re going to do this again and this time I’m taking the lead. Given my current workload that means it’ll happen late summer, early Autumn at this rate. Anyone interested in hosting it or partnering with us (like Flatpack and Vivid did) please get in touch.

A quick piece based on a series of files which caught my eye on my Mac. This is intended to be printed at A3.

Here’s the video I’m projecting on the walls at Bring Your Own Beamer, and event I’ve curated with Antonio Roberts. It’ll run on a loop for three hours.

It takes place at Vivid in Digbeth, Birmingham, on Friday March 16th from 7-10pm. I believe we have 21 projectors confirmed, all running at the same time. Should be fun!

BYOB Birmingham is also part of the Flatpack Festival, which is a superawesome collection of filmic delights you should check out.

(Due to utter idiocy on my part I can’t be at this event I’ve organised. So please go and let me know how it went.)

I did an hour long interview today over Skype. The video was sent to me for reference (I very rarely remember what I say in conversations so it’s handy to review in case I said anything stupid or useful) and I was intrigued by how static I was. Partly because it was done relatively early in the day for me but also because I was thinking a lot and I tend to shut down expressionism when I’m thinking. Apart from rubbing my head, obviously.

So I extracted a frame from every 15th second which roughly came to 240 frames which fits nicely in a 12×20 grid. Not my usual ratio but it’s good to experiment. Click on it for the full resolution version (4.1mb)

I also turned it back into a 15fps video lasting 16 seconds. Enjoy.

Now, I wonder if I can extract 240 15th/sec audio clips every 15 seconds…

How To

I extracted the stills from the video using Quicktime 7 Pro (not Quicktime X which comes with Mac Lion and lacks loads of features.)

File -> Export then this dialogue:

This gave me 3,600 stills which was too many so I created a new movie from those still at 15fps.

File -> Import Image Sequence

This gave me a 4 minute movie which I put through the same export process as above, giving me the 240 stills.

I did go through the process one more time, just to see, and it gave me a rather disapointing 17 stills. So I didn’t do much with them. Although now I think of it, they’d make a GIF. So here’s a GIF.

I’ll stop now.

Last January I shot a video for Friends of the Stars, a Brummie / Scots country folk band whose Birmingham contingent live near to me. We went for a walk around the Lifford Reservoir and I recorded sequences through my TTV contraption.

Using the motor drive function I was getting about 4 frames a second and with each frame being an individual photo the automatic exposure and focus would vary slightly from frame to frame.

I lightly processed the photos with a sepia filter and stitched them together roughly to the beat of the song. Et, as the say, voila.

All I had to do was wait a year for them to release the track.

Railroad Towns features on Friends of the Stars’ new album Faiths Meat Kiosk which is out in April.

(I don’t currently do TTV photography but might be willing to go back to it if the idea was strong or the fee was right.)

As part of 11-11-11, a psychogeographic exploration of Birmingham’s Outer Circle bus route on November 11th in 2009, I chose to cycle the route and create a photographic record of the bus stops. By focusing identikit street furniture placed at strategic points along Europe’s longest bus route, I hoped to develop an understanding of Birmingham, from the echoes of the villages consumed by the suburban sprawl to the marks made by the city’s broad demographic. To the casual observer Birmingham looks like a single entity, but is it? This 82 page squarebound book contains all the photos in order, a map and essays by Pete Ashton and Jon Bounds.

Buy a print copy from MagCloud for $25.00

Download the PDF gratis (13.6MB) or view it online.

I’m currently involved with curating an event as part of the Flatpack Festival called Bring Your Own Beamer (BYOB) on March 16th at Vivid. BYOB is an event where artists bring the own digital projector and laptop and everyone shows their work at the same time in the same room. It’s the brainchild of Antonio Roberts who was behind bringing GLI.TC/H to Birmingham last year which I helped out with on the day causing us to consider doing more stuff together. In the end I accidentally booked a holiday on the day of BYOB because I’m an idiot but I’m still helping out with the prep.

Part of that is creating GIFs for the event Tumblr. I’ve dabbled in the art of the GIF but Ant’s demands are really stretching me, especially as I have no experience of knowledge of such mystical tools as Blender, Ant’s weapon on choice. I make my animations using a mix of Quicktime Pro (export as image sequence), Photoshop’s Contact Sheet 2 (to make my grids), Giffun (to make the GIFs and a lot of complicated file naming. So if nothing else this will be a good learning curve.

Above is a GIF I made yesterday which I’m actually pleased with. It uses video clips from the Prelinger archive of public information films which are in the public domain (copyright becomes an issue when you’re involved in a proper event thing). It’s more a publicity thing than a work of art, a proof of concept if you like. But I like the aesthetics of it.

If you have your own beamer and would like to take part, please fill out the form on the BYOB Birmingham site.

The other week I paid a visit to Claire Farrell of EC-Arts who was setting up the base for her current project 48 Sheet in one of the many empty shop units in the Mailbox. Claire, you’ll remember, was responsible for my exhibition at the Library last year which challenged me in such a way that I pretty much quit the style of art I was doing (TTV photography) and started from scratch again (the stuff you’re seeing on this site right now). So it was good to catch up.

I hadn’t submitted anything to 48 Sheet because I don’t think I’m ready right now but having talked to her about it I thought I’d see how I might approach it. With 48 Sheet she’s acquired a bunch of billboards around the city which artists can use as exhibition space. Some are alone, some are clustered. And that’s about it. The artists have a large rectangle to play with.

I decided to take the IMG_4228 piece as a starting point and downloaded 1,568 photos from a “Selly Oak” search on Flickr using the Bulkr app. A churned these through the same process as IMG_4228 and came up with this:

Which I then composited onto a screenshot from Google Maps (above). It’s fairly pleasing, though I’m not sure exactly what it’s saying.

The next step, I guess, would be to sample other areas in Birmingham and see how they compare. Maybe I’ll try that later.

Inspired by Prof Cox and his astronomy television program, and on learning the planet Jupiter would be visible tonight, I wrapped up warm, slapped a long lens on the camera, set up the tripod and tried my hand as astrophotography.

It’s not easy. But while my photos might consist of blurry pixels I thought I’d have a play with them. Here’s a loop of 9 photos. The colour differences are the camera attempting to get the white balance right. (I should have turned auto-WB off.)

While I was watching this I had music playing and noticed it worked rather nicely with The Memory Tapes‘ track Treeship, so I slapped them together as a little movie.

After the IMG_4228 experiments I was pointed by Hannah to Jason Salavon’s work, reducing frames of a movie down to 1 pixel and displaying them in sequence. It’s similar in ways to the movie barcodes but visually closer to my final piece. So I thought I’d give it a go.

I’d recently gotten around to watching Koyaanisqatsi, the film by Godfrey Reggio which is essentially a collection of short clips arranged in sequence to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. I chose this as a candidate because of the music. I was interested to see how it would be affected if the imagery was rendered unrecognisable. The music would now be accompanying block of colour, cycling through the dominant shade for each sequence.

Initially I tried doing the whole 82 minute film but technical limitations prevented me from exporting 123,850 jpegs in to one folder. I decided to take a 10 minute clip from the middle of the film and use that. Here’s the stats.

Exported clip at 15 frames per second as 480×240 JPEG files.
Resized to 1×1 pixel
Enlarged back to 480×240
Created movie from JPEGs at 15 frames per second.
Extracted audio from original clip as AIFF.
Added audio to new movie.

Here’s the result:

This worked well but I felt it might be nice to draw a connection to the original piece, so I inserted a 64×32 pixel version of it in the corner. Here’s that one.

I’m in two minds as to the success of these, or where it might lead. I think more experimenting is needed.

After the last post I was going to leave this for a day or so but I couldn’t help having a go. The natural next step for me, having gathered a bunch of photos together, was to pixelate them in some manner. I tried a basic 12×12 but it didn’t do much other than create a blocky smudge. So I pushed it further, resizing each photo as a 1×1 pixel square. In other words forcing the resizing algorithm to chose only one colour. Though I don’t have any idea how it decides I’m going to assume for the sake of this exercise that it’s the average colour by some definition of average. At the very least it’s an extremely abstract representation of the photograph.

On its own the square of colour means nothing. But when I put all these abstracted versions of the IMG_4228 photos together we finally see something. The video has a nice shimmer but it’s the canvas that finally tells us something. Gone are the aberrations, the inconsistencies in cropping and framing, the mud of sameness and the jarring of distinction. Nor does does the lizard brain get distracted by provocative naked flesh nor the protective urge triggered by cute child faces. Pattern matching is useless. The intellect has nothing to hook on to. No themes, no cues, no templates to project on.

After working with the chaos of the IMG_4228 slice I found this canvas calming. I’d been wondering if I might find anything at all in a sample which was by its very definition free of patterns. These photos have nothing in common with each other but in order to understand that I had to remove anything that might lead me to think they did. Now I can see the chaos.

I feel the urge to get scientific now. I want to take further samples from the IMG_XXXX spectrum and see how they compare to this. And then I’ll need to take samples where the title of the image implies a connection. What would average pixel canvas look like for capital cities like New York or London? How would the average pixel canvas for people’s names compare?

I think I’ve stumbled upon something here. And I’m quite excited.

After slicing through YouTube using the filename IMG_4228 I thought I’d try the same with Flickr. As you might expect there are a lot more items on Flickr that haven’t been renamed from that machine-generated filename, 30,118 at the time of writing with 4 or 5 being added each day. My plan was to download as many of these as I could and then see what I’d got.

My tool for this was Bulkr, an program running on Adobe Air designed for downloading your Flickr account to your own computer (good practice as Yahoo aren’t likely to be around forever). By upgrading to Pro I was able to set a search for IMG_4228 and download up to 500 at a time. I could have figured out how to write a program to do this myself but for now £20 wasn’t a massive hardship to save some time. If I decide to pursue this technique further I will, of course, do some learning.

Bulkr can only do what its permitted to do by Flickr’s servers and eventually I noticed it seemed to be hitting walls. But by this time I had over 3,500 photos to play with. Next step was to clean the data. I removed the following:

• Duplicates. While I was downloading people were adding new photos meaning the last photos in one batch might also appear as the first photos in the next batch. This was done manually so I probably missed a couple.
• Non-photos. I was pretty liberal in what I allowed but screenshots and scans didn’t seem in keeping with what I was trying to do.
• Icky nudity. There’s a fair amount of cheesecake in there and I’d switched off the “safe search” filter but I didn’t think exposing people to a butt-plugged hairy arse and balls was the right thing to do, so I removed it.

Bulkr had also prevented me from downloading any photos where the owner had explicitly said they didn’t want them downloaded, which was about 60 per 500 batch.

The final count was 3,537 images posted to Flickr with the title IMG_4228 between June 3rd 2011 and Jan 15th 2012.

Finally I used the Mac’s Automator to resize and pad the images into 480px squares, while also giving them sequential filenames. This gave me a consistent shape to work with.

In order to figure out what these images could tell me I had to try and look at them as a whole. For now I’ve taken three approached.

The Giant Poster

Seen at the top of this post and full-size in this (low-res) 20MB jpeg, this has allows you to scroll around a giant contact sheet and, by pulling out, notice any patterns when the photos are really teeny. On the whole it looks pretty random in the abstract, which is exactly what you’d expect from a neutral-criteria slice through Flickr.

The Sequential Slideshow

A simple video sequence rendered at two speeds. 2 seconds per frame lets you look at each photo and lasts for half an hour.

15 frames per second only lasts for four minutes and starts to compress the images together into a single object.

Contact Sheet Slideshow

A compromise of the above. Twenty five contact sheets shown for two seconds each.

More?

There’s plenty more ways of looking at these photos. Loading them randomly, sorting by colour, pixelating them, statistical analysis of the contents… I may do some of these, I may not. The first stage, as with the videos, is to figure out if there’s anything worth looking for or if it’s just a random selection of 3,537 photographs.

This is a work in progress. Other itterations of this project may emerge in time.

I recently uploaded a video to YouTube straight from my camera. The filename was “IMG_4228.mov” and I didn’t change it immediately. By the time I did the suggested videos in the sidebar included a significant number titled IMG 4228.

I clicked on a few. They tended to be of nothing in particular, snapshots of life across the globe that were significant enough to upload but not to bother adding context. Often they had zero views. After a comprehensive search I found 12 with that title. I posted them to a Tumblr to keep track.

Amongst all the billions of videos uploaded to YouTube these 12 shared something. They were the 4,228th item to be recorded by their creators. Other than that they had nothing in common. It struck me this was a random sampling of an area of “user generated content” from way under the radar. The flotsam and jetsam of personal media.

I like to think of this technique as inspired by geology. To get a sense of the makeup of sedimentary layers scientists will take a core sample by drilling out a cylindrical shape. I chose to take a core sample of YouTube by aiming at IMG 4228 and slicing through time and space.

The sample has been taken. Now I’m working with it to see what these 12 videos tell me about the world. The first piece is the above video where I attempt to juxtapose the videos on a single desktop. Riffing off Jon Satrom’s performance at GLI.TC/H Birmingham where he used the OS desktop as his performance space, I opened all 12 videos in Quicktime 7, set them looping and minimised them to the dock. The “performance” consists of me maximising them and moving them in to position.

Unsurprisingly the processor couldn’t keep up with 12 videos running simultaneously and there was lots of delay in switching between them, but this adds something, I think. It’s not a huge success but I like it enough to share. Next up… something else…

A couple of days ago I saw a non-fox hunt while on a country walk. Looking at the photos I took I saw some of the figures were tiny so I cropped them out. Here are the results, each followed by the original photo from which they were cropped.

As I work on making these I’m putting them in this Flickr set.

What’s particularly interesting is the different qualities of scratch, from fine shallow lines to rough staccato gouges. Each place left its own mark, a journal of the places I’ve been.

A video from 2010 which was done as a test but which I think holds up well.

Using my old TTV contraption I tracked a sailboat as it moved across Edgbaston Reservoir taking 2-3 photos every second. Next I layered them in photoshop and matched the horizons. Saving each layer as an image I then created the animation.

The music is by Friends of the Stars.

A short film from last year when we discovered a nest of relatively endangered bumble bees were nesting under our floorboard. They came and went through a airbrick which I positioned a video camera in front of. While the bees are pleasing I’m also interested in the fixed unblinking gaze and the ambient suburban sounds.