Trick photography

It would be easy to imagine that I have a touch more get up and go than the average girl, but the fact is, my desire to move is far weaker than my Scottish penny-pinching habits. Sure, I want to learn new things. I genuinely want to improve myself and the things I decide to do always sound really appealing. In theory. In practice, I just want to quiche. I'd pretty much always rather go home and eat mini Babybels. Tell me about a new fun activity that's happening in a couple of months and I'll get butterflies of hypothetical excitement. Ring me up at 5pm on a day when I have no plans, and ask me to join you, free of charge, and I'll mutter something about needing to get my eyebrows threaded and totter off home to lounge in front of the TV in Primark velour.

Over the years, I've worked out that the only way I can force myself to do pretty much anything is to pay up front; if I don't book, I don't go. I find a course I want to do, I shell out in full; theatre and gig tickets are bought months in advance; cinema seats are booked asap, even when I know there'll only be about six of us in the screening room. So I reserve my space, and I schlep along grumpily, wondering why the hell I forked out for another STUPID course, and then I turn up, and everyone's really nice and I learn things and I go home and I'm so full of adrenaline and new-found enthusiasm that I can barely sleep.

This totally happened last night. I was sitting on my sofa at 18:15 hours, thinking I would pay £99 not to have to stand up and go on the After Dark photography workshop I'd merrily paid £99 to attend when I booked it six weeks ago. I'd been excited about it for six weeks, but now that I was on my sofa and it was due to start in under two hours, I suddenly wanted to do it about as much as I wanted to drink a mug of someone else's mucous. Actually, that mental image is too far even for me. Apologies.

But because I couldn't bear to waste £99, I stood up and went, and dealt with the vague humiliation/kudos that I'd had the cajones to turn up even though my camera wasn't an SLR and was the cheapest in the room by several hundred pounds, and the tripod that pre-dates me that I'd borrowed from my mum was described within minutes by the course leader as "particularly shit", and everyone else pulled their equipment out of expensive padded bags, whereas I have jettisoned my case as it's too fiddly for quick access, and now store my beloved Canon G11 in an old sock, one of a pair taken from a Virgin Atlantic flight back in the days when I was a pop journalist and used to accrue cool anecdotes about my job that I could impress people with at dinner parties.

And everyone else had amazing lenses, and apparently zoom lenses are rubbish for night photography as all the layers of glass create 'noise' or 'flare', but I did what I could and I am pleased with some of the results. My camera definitely has its limitations, but it fits in my handbag and if I even if I had an SLR I doubt I'd use it because I couldn't be bothered to carry it round. Although I'm not denying it would be fun to try.

This first shot is taken in the deserted Petticoat Lane market, looking towards the City. The brief was to capture the emptiness. I just put my camera down, allowed for a fairly long shutter speed and this was the first picture I took:

Just F everyone's I, if you're interested... On a shorter shutter speed, the same photo came out like this:

Then I moved my tripod to take a different photo. This was the best one I managed. Could have improved on it but the group moved on. The guy in the jeans was our teacher.

Then we went to the Gherkin. It was really hard to get an interesting shot of this in the dark, so he suggested we leave the shutter open and up the exposure as much as we could. The maximum shutter speed my camera allows is 15 seconds, but it's interesting that, whereas in my earlier shots, the sky was totally black, here there is so much light in the London sky that it appears to be almost daytime. (Possible point of interest - our teacher's longest ever night time exposure was seven hours.)


By now it was nearly 11pm, and we walked to London Bridge. Here my camera failed me - shots of the next bridge along, Tower, simply didn't have enough clarity, the lights were blurred and it just didn't work. I'd need a prime lens for that, I think (ie. a lens that has a fixed length and cannot zoom), but like I said, the zoom is inbuilt in my camera and most of the time I'm delighted it's there. You win some, you lose some. Instead, I turned around and took the old favourite: long exposure of traffic as a bus passes. The vehicle moves too fast to be captured, but the lights make an impression and streak. It's cliched and hack, but I bloody love it. That's Southwark Cathedral in the background, and my night was worth it just for that shot.

So yeah. I get home after work and I'm floppy as if I've had a skeletonectomy, and all I want to do is stay draped across the sofa. But I've paid in advance for something, so I have to go, and I do, and it's great and I get home buzzing. It's just the law of my land. My guess is that we're all mad; the challenge of life is to work out the best ways to trick ourselves into behaving like people we respect and with whom we can live. Just call me Debbie McGee.