Bingley Camera Club Talk

Invitation

On the night of Halloween last year (2023) I had a message from Michael Revill, a photographer I follow on instagram and someone who loves concrete buildings more than most others. He got in touch to say that he was interested in my work on the “car park” zone and wondered if I’d be interested in coming up to their camera club to present a talk.

The imposter syndrome inside me was yelling out to say “No” and that I was’t the right person for the job, I’m an amateur photographer who won’t provide anything of interest to a camera club in Yorkshire.

The last few years I have been trying to drown out this imposter syndrome spouting voice inside my subconscious. Partly by entering for TV Game Shows, volunteering for opportunities with Young Enterprise and pushing myself into doing things that might appear to be outside my comfort zone initially. So with this Angel on my shoulder whispering “you can do this” in my ear I agreed to do it.

With the support from the tutors at the University Of Wolverhampton I thought that I’d be able to produce a talk that might be of interest so I got in touch with the course leader Euripides Altintzoglou. We had a quick chat over email and in person and he gave me some advice.

“In short, you could focus on your work or a project in particular – aims, planning, and methodological approach – and those that have inspired you. Aim for about 30-45mins talk (around 20 slides), to allow for a discussion afterwards.”

Euripides Altintzoglou

I used this to base my presentation on at first and thought I’d leave it until a bit closer to the time before putting anything down on a slide page. I’d use the time to contemplate what I might talk about, how I’d talk about it, why I would talk about it and then get a set of slides together.

Following Michael on Instagram I realised he was a big fan of concrete and he released a zine called “Blessed Brutalism” which contained some wonderful images of brutalist churches.

I didn’t think much more about the presentation proper until a few months before the agreed date, we had decided on the 21st October at the Bingley Methodist Church in Bingley, Yorkshire.

By then I’d figured out that it might be worth focussing on the concrete car park that Michael initially contacted me about, and then include other concrete that I had photographed and why.

Initial Slides

I put together a set of slides, about 25 in total that I played through and spoke along with that took about 40 minutes. Then as it got closer I had an email from Marcus Rattray with a proposed timing plan for the evening.

• 7:00 Meeting Open
• 7:15 Bob To begin talk
• 8:00 break for tea and coffee
• 8;15 Bob to do second half
• 9:00 Meeting ends and closes

Wait, what? A talk before and after the break? I hadn’t planned for that. There weren’t enough slides for that, or there weren’t in the latest version. I had trimmed out some to allow it to hit closer to the time. Maybe I could use some of those and talk more about the reasons I started photography, and then about becoming an artist. I don’t mean starting to do pantings but thinking of myself as an artist.

I put together the slides in a powerpoint and then fed it into Chat GPT to see if it could help me with the order of the slides, and how to tell the story. It did provide me with a couple of ideas around the contrast between photographs of my early work and later photographs. I didn’t copy anything word for word from the OpenAi provided tool but did find it helped me to order my thoughts.

The slides fell into place better after this “advice” from the Large Language Model AI application and I noticed that I was telling the story of my journey as a photographer and artist. I titled the talk, Unexpected Journey with a subtitle of Concrete Creativity.

New Order

The order of the talk would be:

Origin Story – Introduction to me and my practice.

Year One – My early works

Appetite for Destruction – How I learned to like buildings under threat.

Year Two – picking up more photography, and running the works Photographic Society.

Dilapidation – A bit about being invited into the Flaxmill Maltings and then an epiphany about the physics involved with light. How I found a pinhole image on the roof of an abandoned room.

Contrasts between two sets of images was up next and how my early photos were more snapshot like and the more recent images were more thoughtful and composed.

Birthplace Of An Artist was the caption on the slide that introduced me learning to be an artist at the University Of Wolverhampton

A few slides on first things I did at the Uni and then a bit on the project using colour photography in the first year where I used digital and film cameras to capture night time and rainy images of mundane subjects, focussing on the local multi storey car park, where the rest of the project would be set.

I documented how I took the photos, how I developed them in the darkroom and made copious notes on the enlarger settings etc.

I talked about learning to see everything from a different perspective, noticing the unseen and finding beauty in the “ugly”, I talked of composing shots, layers, angles, semiotics, symbols, symmetry, and revisiting a scene many times at different times to witness the differences.

I talked of noticing light creating effects that don’t often get seen and understood, and how there is often a less obvious photograph waiting in the background if you turn around and look for alternative viewpoints.

Before going to the break I wanted to mention my influences. In the list were:

• Rut Blees Luxemburg
• Maurice Broomfield
• Mark Power
• Elliott Erwitt
• Liam Wong

As we went to the break I was goign to leave the audience with a question or two. As recommended by Chat GPT and also a good way of opening up discussions at the break.

Second Half

Part two, after the break would consist of photos that I have made from different locations:

• Shrewsbury
• Leeds
• Preston
• Southend On Sea
• Margate
• Barbican
• Blackpool
• Trellick Tower
• Balfron Tower
• Brunel University
• Tokyo

As a way of explaining that I am changing and becoming an artist of sorts I wanted to explain about some experimentation that I’ve done, including a camera obscura, cyanotypes, odd places to photograph and even getting cheeky and asking to gain access somewhere to take a photo.

As part of the them of journey I wanted to explain the other things that have happened as part of the travel though photography such as having an image used by a band on their single, creating a zine about the car park and getting it publicised on youtube, working on a riso printed zine of Uni of Leeds images, a zine based on my works after hours and then some exhibitions.

The first exhibition was the Level 5 Exhibition and the art that I submitted to that and then the Shrewsbury Arts Trail where I had three photos on display in a gallery.

Another opportunity that came my way due to the love of concrete buildings was working alongside SpacePlay with the Easter Egg Hunt at the Uni of Wolverhampton and how I had a chat with the team.

Before I finish the pack I wanted to explain that you can also have fun with art and I included two slides, one on the Vegan Negan story and another on the Wasp Nest Removal posters.Hopefully this would help the audience see that I do have a sense of humour, even if it is weird, and that you can do some stuff to please yourself and others whilst using the resources around you.

With the nearly last slides I wanted to get back onto the concrete and what had happened to me from just taking photos of buildings, concrete car parks and other random structures. I wanted to help others continue to have faith in their own journeys.

The last slide “Moral Of The Story” was a set of advice points that I had covered in the slides already and with a reminder to have confidence in themselves.

IT Solutions

I had asked the organiser Marcus how they would like the slides and he said in a PDF so that it didn’t mess up their free version of powerpoint. I know from my work in IT that if you use a PPT file from your own PC and use obscure typefaces/fonts that it can sometimes mess up the format, owing to the destination machine not having the fonts installed.

When Marcus suggested PDF I was grateful as I knew the fonts would be safe in this format, I had used Domino Mask typeface/font to add captions as if it were a comic book to each slide, rather than a list of loads of bullet points. I compressed the images that were in the slide deck, saved it as the latest version v10 and then exported it to a PDF, as well as a further export to an odp file for open office style software. I emailed these to myself, stored them on the onedrives for my personal and uni accounts, then stored it on a laptop desktop and finally on a usb stick.

USB sticks are tricky sometimes as I have a Mac and I know it can confuse some machines. SO with the extra locations I thought I couldn’t lose.

D Day

The day came, I finished University after having my tutorial with Sam about the Black Country Project and drove straight up the country, finding lots of roadworks and very wet roads.

It seemed to take ages to get there, but I was used to the road after a few years of back and forth with my daughter previously at the University Of Leeds. The meeting was to begin at 7pm and I was needed for around 6:45 to set up and check the presentation. I ended up arriving at around 5:45pm so parked the car, had a quick call with my wife to tell her how nervous I was and then picked up the camera and went for a walk. I noticed on the way in that there were a few mills around and the scenery was amazing, with some old school businesses and the lovely yellow stone houses. I posted a story on Instagram too that I was excited to be there and a shot of the church where I’d be later.

After a walk down by the canal and then back up through a part of the town I made my way back to the car. I changed my t-shirt for a proper shirt and then drove into the car park of the church. Once I’d seen a few people arrive I wandered in carrying a bag of stuff, maybe someone might buy a zine from me once they’d seen the presentation. You never know.

I met Marcus who invited me to get ready on the lectern at the front of the hall so I landed my iPad with my slide notes on there, then talked to Chris and handed over the USB stick. They opened up the PDF but couldn’t figure out how to get it full screen, so they reverted to the ppt file. Only problem with this was the fonts were all messed up, but I said that would be ok and I’d be able to work around it. No problem, roll with the punches.

As I was doing this I noticed Michael who I recognised from his Instagram post and had a brief chat with him also, thanking him for inviting me to the club. Everyone was so lovely, but I didn’t spend much time looking at the rest of the audience as I didn’t want to make myself even more nervous.

They set up the IT stuff as they would also be connecting it to a Zoom meeting for those who couldn’t attend, I was mic’d up with two mics and then went to sit down whilst they prepared to start the meeting.

It Begins

Marcus opened up and talked about the club business including an article on Michael’s new Blessed Brutalism Volume 2 being published, and Neil Horsley who had a book printed on Mills Transformed. Then after a bit of normal admin he handed it over to me, here we go.

I explained that the typeface wasn’t working early on and that I was a Batman nut, so I liked comic book style and that’s why it was chosen. Then I opened up by saying i was disappointed to be invited 9 years too late, the Bradford Nad Bingley big concrete building had been knocked down then and I said that Lidl had taken it’s palce so I would be alright for som echees and a chainsaw later.

I went through the slide deck and before I got to the break in my pack it was 8 o’clock so I suggested I stopped for the coffee and tea. I said I’d pick up the slides after the break.

During the break I was chatting to a couple of people who were interested in the contents and one of them was Neil who said he had visited the Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings as part of his book research and was impressed with the end result of the refurbishment. I had a quick chat with a few people and before I knew it it was time for part two.

I opened up with the influences and then drove straight into the second part. I carried on and had a good time, explaining the photos that I had made and then the last part about me being mischievous before opening up for questions.

A couple of people asked me a question but other than that it was quite quiet, I had noticed that my bass drone had caused at least 4 eyelids to be a bit heavy so I didn’t expect many questions. One of them was about the lens that I used when I went out to shoot at night. Until I see the video of the talk I won’t know what the second question was, but I know there was one.

A few more people came up to talk to me after as they were breaking down the lectern and projector set up. I talked to one lady who had been to Japan with five friends who weren’t photographers and felt that she couldn’t keep stopping all the time. The same reason I went on my own in Jauary.

After giving a copy of the three zines to Michael and Marcus I made my way out, as they wanted to close up the hall. We chatted briefly outside that it would be a good opportunity to get someone of the Bingley people down to Shrewsbury for a walk around. It might be something I look into next year when I have a bit of spare time on my hands.

I put all my gear back in the car , changed back into the T-shirt for the journey and set off. I was thinking about things I could have done better or how I’d choked up with a dry mouth at one point, then listened to some podcasts from BBC and got home at around 23:45.

False Confidence

It had been a long day with a great deal of stress involved but I had managed it. I entered the church hall like General Zhukov in “The Death Of Stalin”, well not exactly, but I was putting on an act of self confidence that I didn’t really feel.

My initial thought was to act as though I was used to this and to not make excuses up front, I didn’t want to set expectations low so I behaved confidently, I think.

Only afterwards did I admit to Marcus that this was my first ever talk like this and I had been really nervous. I was told after most of the club had left that the talk had come across with humility and an air of being easy to relate to. They mentioned that I was probably the first person who’d given a talk who worked full time and then practiced photography part time. I probably spend more time taking and working with photographs than I do my full time job though.. Ha ha.

It was an experience, a lesson in how to be better prepared, and how to work with the leaders of a photography club and talk to people in this situation. I am not a big people person, which I mentioned too many times, so it was tricky to behave in a set way, and I put this down to me having a character that portrays a more confident side of me, almost the same person as when I used to perform on the carnival float or the fireworks MC duty.

I was a lovely club with about 50 or 60 in the room and another 10 on the zoom call and everyone I spoke to was lovely also. They all live in a wonderfully characterful area and I’m looking forward to going for a drive around the area at some point in the future.

I think I had enough words on the slides and had some key points in my notes that prompted me should I go a bit blank. The slides were plentiful and had some of my fave images on them which I hope might inspire others to go and take some photos of car parks and concrete.