After Lesley Flower bought me a mini Diana camera for Christmas I have been experimenting a bit with photography.  Photography has always been in the back of my mind as a visual way to augment my ideas and music but wihtout some one to push me in that direction these thoughts never quite made it to the light of day….  After all, my musical work and ambitions take up more than enough of my time!

The Camera that Lesley bought me is called a Diana Mini and the reason behind her choosing it for me was that it has enough adjustable settings to teach me about how each change effects the picture being taken.  Of course, a digital camera has slots and lots of different settings, but as I have experienced with guitar-related technology, this seems to suck  a lot of the fun out of what you are doing and it’s so easy to get bogged down with messing around with settings too much rather than creating….

So, my first little outing with my new camera was actually a couple of days after Christmas of 2010 and I decided that I wanted to take some photos to go with my short story ‘The Alley’.  The real-life alley in question actually inspired the story and is located very near my childhood home in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire in the UK.  I started to mess around with the different settings and got some results that I was very pleased with.  My idea was to capture a similar mood as that of the story, thus hopefully enhancing both picture and prose making the combined effort greater than the sum of it’s parts.  Those of you that know about the musical projects I have in the pipeline will already know about an interest I have in enhancing things through combining different media…  Illustrating some writing may be an obvious choice but nonetheless it is something I needed to explore.

The invented term of Lomography created by the makers of the Diana Mini has a very interesting cult following and community surrounding it.  I think it’s a cool idea and I also think that the rules and philosophies around it would be even more interesting if adapted for music and sound…