It says something when the first photo that appears on my Flickr is in the X-Team set and was taken on March 29th last year. It captures that moment in time when the gaggle were lowly year 12s, Jordan was still at Shenfield, as was Jo, Dale, Sam and Max were all little year 11s building up to their GCSEs, and ickle Piers Matt and Scott were just year 8s.
The photographs have progressed slightly, the later ones from shows are taken with a DSLR, some members who were in the team then have left, others have learnt much more, and we even have some new kids to do some work. But I have only stopped being a photographer, not a member of the X-Team so my reflections will be solely on that aspect of my career. There was a time when my photographs were taken from the rear of the hall with a 5x optical zoom on a Samsung S850. They weren’t perfect, but point and shoots weren’t designed for the sort of shots I was supposed to be taking, but the camera is surprisingly versatile, and stood up to the test.
Here’s the Flickr set of my first show as photographer. There are quite clearly two different types of photos here, ones of the actual show which was the reason I was there, and then the ones of the X-Team, and I always prefer those shots. There can however be only one favourite photograph from that show, and it is, unsurpisingly, of the techies. OK so one of them is no longer with us, but it is a photo that just keeps being thrown out as ‘fun’, I think Paul knows what’s coming up. Yes, it’s *that* one again.
Since that show there have been two Battle of the Bands (One last night), another Easter Concert, a Christmas Concert, an A Level music recital, a show in a London theatre and High School Musical. That’s a lot of photos y’know, all I can say is that I’m glad we have digital cameras because not only would changing film after 36-ish shots be time consuming, but at the rate I seem to take photos, very expensive indeed, I almost shot 300 photos at the message, and some how between Josh and me we filled up a 1GB memory card today.
I’ve never really thought about the reason I became the X-Team photographer until I was asked why I’d stopped being a stage crew guy and joined “film and photography”. The filming and photographing element of the X-Team only came a long a few years when the Expressive Arts department realised we had equipment in school to make our own DVDs. And after an attempt to grab photos from the DVD, it was decided a dedicated photographer was needed. At that point I was “head of filming” simply because the media technician was leaving and someone who “knew what they were doing” was needed. Quite why that was me I have never worked out, and the first few shows I was on a video mixing desk loaned from Jordan, and whilst it is always fun to play with a desk hooked straight up to a PC, I always preffered running around. And what better way to do that than become a photographer, so my rather fun sliding and rolling around have become fairly well known and are always fun to laugh at.
So then there is the ultimate question, which photograph is my favouretist ever? I find that to be highly unfair because I can’t just chose one, so I am going to exploit a loophole that will let me choose two, which is my favourite of a show, and what is my favourite from a show but not of the performers (so basically an X-Team shot), but then I will also exploit another loophole, I can chose four, because I need a runner up.
So my runner up of a show is this shot from the last Easter Concert, just for the sheer timing. And my winner is from last years battle of the bands. A little back ground, the shot is from on stage during the winning band’s encore and I just love the effect from the smoke machine so here it is, my favourite “in show” shot.
But now the real prize, my favourite “team” shot, so many to chose from, and because I didn’t actually take the team photo, I won’t count it, but I do like it none-the-less. Hoever the runner up will be this shot of Piers’ and mine fine effort to burn his hand off. And the winner, is that one photo, also from the message, which just showed quite what it is we do. We are all one team, but we all do different jobs, and this photo shows just how many different things seven people can do in one photo.
And that is it,, OK so there will be photos from June 3rd of our second trip to the Arcola Theatre in London, but that isn’t because I’ve been asked to. So, until my quick succession of posts coming up, I have just one thing to say.
MTFBWY
Filed under: Me, Random blogging
