Category Archives: Projects

How to Draw With Light

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The other day I came across some images from Life Magazine, showing Picasso drawing with light. It looked like a fun project, and since my daughter is currently studying light at school, I persuaded her to play along. The result is above. A few people have asked how we did it so I thought I would write a brief “How to”. It’s not difficult, but you will need some specific equipment to make this work.

What you will need:

  • A camera with manual controls. Specifically, you must be able to control the shutter speed, and preferably also switch off the autofocus.
  • Some sort of off-camera flash. I used another camera.
  • A completely dark room.
  • A willing assistant.
  • A torch or other light source.
  • A certain amount of patience. We didn’t get this right first time.

Instructions:

You need to put a camera on a tripod, or some sort of stable surface, and set the exposure to, say, 10 seconds, or however long you think you will need. Manually focus on the subject. It helps if you can do this so that the camera doesn’t ‘hunt’ while it tries to find something to focus on. It also helps to set the ‘ISO’ ‘film speed’ number, rather than leave it on Auto. We settled on ISO 1600, but you will need to experiment with your setup.

Get your off camera flash ready. You will need to experiment with placing it to get the best result. In the image above the flash came from below and to the right, casting a nice big shadow on the wall. If you don’t have a flash gun of some kind, you can use another camera. You’ll need to experiment with making that work. Some cameras use a red light to assist the autofocus, while others strobe the flash. You need to switch all that off somehow.

Switch off all the lights, and in darkness, open the shutter. At this point the subject waves the light about. Arrange beforehand where your subject’s hand will stop. When she or he reaches that point, fire the flash, which exposes the rest of the room. Everyone then holds still until the shutter closes.

It took some experimenting to get the ISO right, and the positioning of the flash, but most important is to communicate while the shutter is open and you are floundering around in the dark. If we do it again we’ll use a less bright light I think. We had a lot of fun with this experiment, and I think the picture has come out pretty well. To see what is possible when a great photographer and a great artist come together to do this, take a look at the efforts of Gjon Mili and Pablo Picasso below. We had to experiment a lot to get this right, but of course in 1949, they were working with film.

More Picasso images at Retronaut.

Clouds Gathering

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So the summer is almost over and I thought it might be useful to put down, in public, what I’m planning to get done this autumn. I’ve never done this kind of thing before, so deep breath:

  • Finish off writing entries for the 100 American Crime Writers and 100 British Crime Writers books which I handed over to Steven Powell and Esme Miskimmin when I was at a low ebb late in 2009. Steve has put a lot of work into the Venetian Vase blog, and it’s becoming quite a nice thing.
  • Teaching–among other things–a course on the History of American Ideas (up to about 1865) at the University of Liverpool.
  • Overseeing English courses in Continuing Education at the University of Liverpool.
  • Once the crime fiction pieces are done I’m planning to get back to the Scoresby project, finish off my outline, and start writing. Very excited about this.
  • I’m also going to revisit my PhD thesis on Raymond Chandler. I think there’s a book in there somewhere, and dammit I aim to find it.
  • Put together some teaching materials in the form of a series of short non-fiction e-books. This is partly because I need to get the material together, and partly because I want a trial run to see how e-books work from a production point of view. I’m probably going to begin with a short annotated and introduced collection of Edgar Allan Poe Tales, to go with my Poe lecture. There will be Melville and Thoreau material coming along too, if all goes well.
  • Start working on a series of short pieces on researching and writing essays and articles, to go with a study skills/composition course.
  • And somewhere, somehow, I need to think about what happens when my contract at Liverpool ends in January. There will be some occasional teaching, but I’ll need more work. A return to freelancing? We’ll see.

No promises, but those are the plans. There are a lot of ‘starts’ there, so it will be interesting to see which ones work out.

Digitisation, Copyright, and the British PhD Thesis

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In the autumn of 1997 I submitted a PhD thesis, with the snappy title Modernity and Identity in the Detective Novels of Raymond Chandler, for assessment at Newcastle University. Some time later, after it had been examined, copies were deposited in the university library in Newcastle, and at the British Library. In the days of paper and hard covers nobody gave a second thought to handing them over. Now though there is a plan to digitise and make available online every British PhD thesis written since the 1600s. I am happy to be included in the scheme, but I have misgivings.

The vast majority of PhDs–mine included no doubt–lie unopened and unread in one of the British Library’s vast warehouses. In truth, few are worth reading in their raw form, though many are later rewritten as books. PhD theses are pedantic and technical, written for the examiners to prove the writer’s ability to corral a set of knowledge and sustain an argument. Books are written for their audience, whoever that may be, but PhD theses are no fun at all. They are written to meet a set of academic requirements, not for wide public consumption or the all-seeing eyes of Google and Bing.

It is natural to be a little bit afraid of having such a stunted, constrained, and raw piece of work on display, but the real issue here is one of choice. What I find irksome is the assumption that everyone will be happy to have work published online even though it was never intended for publication. This is work some writers may no longer endorse, or feel comfortable about. There is a way to opt out, but it depends on authors knowing they are involved in the first place, and university libraries do not seem to feel obliged to tell them. There is also the question of whether the choice needs to be a binary one. Why have PhD authors not been given the chance to license their work, allowing different levels of freedom to share and copy, rather than just the option to remove their work from the digitisation scheme?

The current copyright system clearly doesn’t work well with this new environment in which vast quantities of data are being made public, and the Library’s attempts to reassure with talk of copyright agreements, and tracking the recipients of downloads, miss the point entirely. Since most authors have not granted permission for this kind of distribution it is possible that the participating libraries themselves are the primary copyright abusers, but in any case, hard-line copyright statements are not really in the spirit of open access.

The expectation of wide availability will change the nature of the PhD thesis, and that is probably a good thing. In an open access environment there needs to be a reconsideration of who this work is for. But before that can happen we need to find a more sensible way of licensing this material, perhaps using Creative Commons licenses on all new PhDs as a matter of course. Trying to ignore the issue (and the rights holders), and hoping for the best, as the British Library seems to be doing, is not good enough. Like most people in this situation I don’t mind my thesis being part of the process, and I will be glad to get hold of an electronic copy when it becomes freely available. Even so, it would have been nice to be asked first.

Cain's Revisions and the Temporal Paradox

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Over the last week or so I’ve been working on the revisions I had to make to Cain’s: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint. Although the amount of writing and revising wasn’t much in the scheme of things, it wasn’t easy. When you plan and write a book, you have an idea in your head of what is going to be in it and to some extent what order it will take. The memory of writing it is mixed up with all the memories of the time in which it is written, so returning to it at a late stage with new information feels a bit like going back in time and meeting with yourself to discuss the future. As every time traveller knows, that’s not good.

What has been useful though is having the chance to reflect on the events not only of the last few months, but further back. We read the past from the point of view of the present after all. This is a brewery and a city with a long history that includes many events like this. Rewriting the story has allowed me to get in perspective what a great achievement it was for Robert Cain to make the brewery a success in the first place, but also to think about the idea that over 200 years of history it is the myths and stories that linger.

As of today the work is done and the book should be on the shelves in about a month. I am very keen to have a real copy of the finished book in my hand but I very much doubt that this story, or even this part of the story, is over.