Category Archives: ASH-10

Press Photos for Birmingham Opera

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A photography job came out of nowhere last month – taking some photos of the rehearsals of Mittwoch Aus Licht, the bonkers Stockhausen opera that Birmingham Opera were putting on. I’d previously shot their production of Life Is A Dream with nice results and they were looking for a similar approach with these.

The brief was to treat it as a documentary exercise – something for the archives primarily – and if any were useful for press then that’d be a bonus. Graham Vick, the director, was also keen that the photos didn’t give anything away so any photos that gave a hint would be useful.

The week I was shooting the Guardian decided they didn’t want the photos of the cellist and the helicopter that everyone else was using and I had to quickly prep some replacements. A couple of these were used by them online and in the G2 section. (My credit got lost in the rush, it seems, but no-one ever pays any attention to those credits so it’s not a bother.)

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Seeing it in print, in the first paper copy of The Guardian I’d touched for a few years, was an oddly empty feeling. It’s supposed to be a big deal, having your photo in a national newspaper, and I appreciate it’s a measure of the quality of the photograph in question that it was chosen, but the actual object, badly reproduced on newspaper, is a bit of a let down. But it wasn’t about my photograph. It was about the article and it served the purpose of illustrating and drawing attention to that so I’m happy.

A week later the Guardian did one of their online galleries, essentially posting 10 photos from the Press Pack with captions. My photo from the article was used again along with one of Kathinka Pasveer, joint director of the Stockhausen Foundation, who was there to make sure everything was done correctly.

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Now the opera is over (and for the best review I’d urge you to read Leo Chadburn’s magnificent review in The Quietus which pisses all over anything the broadsheet reviewers published) I’m able to show all my photos. Because it’s for the archives I’ve erred on the side of quantity – 135 so far and they’re not all up yet. The Flickr set is here.

I really enjoyed this job. Finding that sweet spot between access and unobtrusiveness is a fun challenge as were the lighting conditions. And the subject matter was constantly giving me more than I could have asked for. An utter delight.

If you’d like to hire me for a similar, or utterly different, photography job, please do get in touch.

This entry was posted in ASH-10 on by Pete Ashton.

The Edge of Something

I’ve been interviewed.

The other week I had a long Skype conversation with Chris Pinchen about what I do and how it all works financially as part of a series of interviews with people “making a living on the edge” for Edgeryders, a Council of Europe / European Commission project. I was extremely wary as it sounded like some kind of wankery, overblowing my stumbling attempt survival into some kind of utopian best practice, but I’ve known Chris online for a while and met him a couple of times and he’s always struck me as a good chap. And I realised talking about how I earn a living might help me figure out for myself how it all works, since I’m as in the dark as anyone.

Chris ended up with an hour of me talking and when I reviewed it the next day I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe because I was still a little dopy from a late night, maybe because Chris put me at my ease, but I think there are some genuinely interesting things in there.

Chris has edited them into four chunks and posted them with a text summary of the conversation.

Once Edgeryders have had the attention they require I think I’m going to chop them down further into 3-5 minute bites. I might even do some more little videos like this, if feedback is good.

I also made some art out of it, because that’s what I do.

This entry was posted in ASH-10, Post and tagged Edgeryders, interview on by Pete Ashton.

Birmingham Opera’s Life Is A Dream

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Having been in the volunteer chorus of their performance of Othello I am now, and forever will be, part of the extended Birmingham Opera family and while I wasn’t able to take part in their current production, Life Is A Dream, I was determined to go and see it. Fi and I have tickets for Friday but for some reason I found myself on the “press” comps list for the premier. Liking the idea of seeing it twice but not wanting to take the piss (I haven’t been “press” since giving up Created in Birmingham in 2008) I decided to take my camera and Do My Part for the family.

Having gotten 40-odd decent pics which I hope are good enough, I’m making them available for free use in the promotion of the opera. Usually I just slap at Creative Commons license on my photos which means anyone can use them anywhere for whatever reason as long as it’s non-commercial. Commercial use has to pay me. In this case I’m waving that in the context of this opera. So if a newspaper needs a photo to accompany a review they can use one of mine, and so on. Any commercial use that isn’t connected with this opera requires payment in the form of a donation to Birmingham Opera at the usual industry rates.

It hopefully goes without saying that the opera is fantastic. Yes. the storyline is complex and you’ll be lost if you don’t know the story but that doesn’t really matter. The set pieces are emotionally engaging and unlike the chaos of The Wedding (their last production) this is relatively sane and coherent. Relatively.

Because I was stuck behind a lens all evening, wrestling with some rather complex lighting, I’m not going to attempt a proper review. I’m going to wait until I’ve given it my full attention on Friday for that. In the meanwhile, here are three of my favourite photos. The full set is here.

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This entry was posted in ASH-10 and tagged birmingham opera, photography on by Pete Ashton.

Digbeth Photo Walk Flyer

Here’s a flyer Matt made for the free Photo Walk through Digbeth we’re running on Sunday 25th.

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Click on it for full resolution, and please spread it around the place if as you see fit.

We’ve got seven people booked and I reckon 25 is a reasonable number to take on a guided stroll. Full details on the Eventbrite page or book using this widget here:

Event Registration Online for Matt and Pete’s Digbeth Photo Walk powered by Eventbrite
This entry was posted in ASH-10 on by Pete Ashton.

A problem with newsletters, and a best practice list.

I quite like newsletters, when they’re used properly. The problem is using them properly takes a fair amount of care and attention to detail. Today I had three newsletters arrive in my inbox at the same time. Can you see a pattern?

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Gmail, and I think most other email programs, displays the first line of the email after the title. This is very handy when skimming through your inbox to see what’s worth reading. If you’re using your newsletter to get people’s attention you could argue it’s the most important part after the subject line.

Unfortunately most commercial email packages encourage you to use templates which clog up those first few lines with cruft. “View it in your browser” is a handy tool but it shouldn’t be the first thing you read. Yet there is it at the top of the page.

The problem comes from confusing the flow of text in a document with the visual priority it’s given by the designer. Here’s a pretty standard Mailchimp theme ready for populating:

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Looking at it you can see what are the most important bits of text – the title, the headings, and so on. But email programmes don’t read visual styles. Unless they’re being very clever they just parse the text in order. So the most important part is “Use this area to offer a short teaser”. Which is right, you should, but as we can see above people often don’t.

So watch out for that. When you test send your newsletter don’t just check it for typos. Look at how it displays in the inbox. You could try looking at the addresses in your mailing list and if there’s a lot of @hotmail.com see how it looks in the Hotmail inbox.


Related to this, I’ve been playing with newsletters a bit myself and someone asked me for some advice on how best to write them. Bearing in mind there are as many correct answers as there are newsletters and readers of newsletters, here’s my basic guide (which I rarely completely obey, to be fair).

  1. Keep it short. People get a lot of email and want to get through it quickly. Try and keep it to 2 or 3 paragraphs with a simple call to action like a link.
  2. Keep it simple. Don’t bundle up lots of disparate things in one email. Pick a topic and stick to it. If it is a roundup newsletter with lots of items, prioritise one and list the rest.
  3. Link out. Don’t put all the information in the email. Link to it on your website or blog. This helps keep the email short and sweet and also, if you’re tracking clicks, shows you what people were drawn to.
  4. Simple layouts. Don’t get carried away with fancy layouts. They often don’t display well, especially on phones, and are a distraction. I’m a big fan of plain text emails because they get straight to the point and can be forwarded easily.
  5. Look at your own use of newsletters. Do you read every newsletter you’re subscribed to? Do you click on every link? Which newsletters do you actively engage with? How would you approach your newsletter as a reader? You should also do a bit of user testing on your friends.

Finally, remember that while the contents of your newsletter is vitally important to you, it’s of passing interest at best to everyone else. Make it easy for them to get to your point and act on it.

This entry was posted in ASH-10 and tagged mailing lists, newsletters on by Pete Ashton.

New book news

Now the initial burst of excitement over the relative success of This Much I Knew has calmed down I’ve gotten back to thinking about the book proper, the one I was planning on writing and for which This Much was a test-drive. I’ve been using Workflowy to keep notes of potential chapters (they promise to have a revenue model and backup facility in place soon) and this is what I have so far:

  • Recalibrating success
    • Doing “media” stuff, be it music, writing, whatever, was an all or nothing game. Now there are gradients, but people still think in all or nothing.
    • Stuart Lee on finding a sustainable crowd that allows him to do his stuff,
    • Steve Lawson casestudy.
  • Building relationships
    • Metapod Connect stuff
    • Followers are relationships
  • Be helpful on your own terms.
    • Don’t crush your individuality for a broader reach.
    • www.schmutzie.com/weblog/2012/2/25/we-can-become-known.html
  • How to follow efficiently.
  • The personal in public
    • Levels of intimacy
    • Context
    • www.chrisunitt.co.uk/2012/02/trustfunding/
  • Personal responsibility for actions
    • Dont blame medium for allowing you freedom to behave badly.
  • Free vs Free vs Free vs Free
    • How can you charge in an age of abundance?
  • “how do I get followers?”
    • If you have something people want, be there so they can follow.
    • If you don’t, have patience. These things take time.
  • Advertising and the web
    • What’s wrong with advertising in general?
    • The web needs better adverts.
    • keyword driven ads only work when the intentions overlap. Doesn’t work for the good stuff.

It’s mostly ideas I’ve had in the shower or after reading something interesting and it’s by no means a reflection on what I’m going to write, but it’s a start and gives a vague indication of where things are headed. It looks like there are two strands (two books?) – how to do stuff and what it all means. I think the two are connected – you need to know what it all means in order to do stuff effectively, especially in a DIY scenario – the the how-to angle makes it more accessible and immediately useful to people.

I’m still pondering the revenue model for this. I’m definitely going to use Leanpub but that pays out quarterly and is still slightly after the fact. If I’m going to dedicate a good chunk of time to this I’m going to need some kind of advance, so maybe a crowdfunding model is more useful after all. That adds a level of complexity I’m not overly keen on (am I writing a book or running a crowdfunder?) but if kept simple and designed around helping the book get done it should be manageable.

Let’s have a sketch of what the rewards might look like:

Advance purchase of the book – This is a tricky one to do smoothly as ideally people would do this through Leanpub so they get updates. I guess they could download the book for free (the book will be available for free) and I could make an honour payment to Leanpub for those purchases. Basically this is a donation without a “reward” so it might be worth keeping the book out of it and calling it that.

Watch me write – I’ve been joint-writing stuff on Google Docs lately and have been fascinated by the live-updates when your collaborator is writing. As the letters emerge on the screen you really get a sense of their thought processes. I’d like to experiment with this by opening my writing up and allowing people to have a conversation alongside it. (If nobody wants to pay for this I might just do it anyway.)

Skype consultancy – Face to face consultancies tend to use up the whole afternoon I find, but a half-hour chat via Skype would be doable. Basically you have my rapt attention for that time to ask me anything, ideally something to do with the book which I can then turn into a chapter but not necessarily. Maybe you just want to run some idea by me or have a moan about the government.

Signed photo print – I’ve got nearly 10,000 photos on Flickr. 99% of them can be turned into a decent sized print which I could sign for you.

Sponsored chapter – This is riffing off a similar idea Fiona had and it’d need a lot of careful thought but the notion of a chapter about a subject someone wants to be associated with being paid for by them is interesting. Think along the lines of the Future of Local blogging I did for Talk About Local last year which was the sort of sponsorship I’m comfortable with.

That’s about all I’ve got at the moment and I’d welcome ideas, but be aware I don’t want to offer things that would detract from the writing of the book. Yes, I could do a photo shoot, but then I’m spending a day doing a photo shoot.

Also I’m not looking for a lot of money. £500 would be sufficient and I’d set the target lower to ensure I reach it.

(I plan to spend some time on the next edition of This Much over the next fortnight, so hold tight for that.)

This entry was posted in ASH-10 and tagged thebook on by Pete Ashton.

Book update

This Much I Knew has sold a bunch of copies. Everyone paid something different, from nothing to $20, and the grand total is currently $71.21. Add in the $10 someone wants to pay me who can’t use PayPal (we’ll do a bank transfer), throw it in to the currency exchange calculator and I’m over the £50 threshold. That means at some point in the next few weeks I’ll be revising the whole book and making it more of a stand-alone text, which will then be distributed to those early buyers at no extra charge. I was kinda dreading this part originally but skimming through it on my phone last night I’m quite looking forward to it now. The fact that other people are demonstratively also looking forward to it helps.

Here’s the breakdown of my readers and what they paid:

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Dubber, who is also leanpubbing a book, commented “That’s a really good strike rate. I’m currently at around 20% paid, 80% for nothing.” I reckon I’m getting more paids than freebees because this has a narrower, and therefore more intimate, appeal. It’s selling to a small number of people who have known be longer and feel more invested in my work. For some it will be payback for years of reading my work for free, for some it’s an investment, for some it’s something completely different. But there’s a personal connection. With Dubber his subject matter, and his reputation within that field, taking him to a much wider audience and intimacy doesn’t scale. Most of the people wanting his book don’t care about Dubber the man.

Both situations have their advantages and disadvantages. While I’m enjoying the warm glow of my 11 readers I expect, and hope, to have a slightly less intimate relationship with those why buy my next book (which will have stuff like the above paragraph all through it.)

This entry was posted in ASH-10 and tagged thismuch on by Pete Ashton.

Book has sales

spacer Put the book on sale this evening and two people have bought it so far. Which is a relief as I wasn’t sure anyone would.

I’ve set myself a target of £50. If I generate that much in sales then I’ll dedicate a day to getting the next edition ready. That will mostly involve going through each post and ensuring it makes sense in the context of a book. Right now it’s just the text and links from each post, a process which took a couple of evenings. Next I’ll be making it more of a standalone item.

I set the recommended price at $5 but people can pay as much, or as little, as they like. They can even take it for free if they like. So far I’ve raised $18.50 which equals £11.62 at today’s rates. So I’m over 20% there.

Wanna buy a book?

This entry was posted in ASH-10, Post and tagged thismuch on by Pete Ashton.

Instagram’s gonna need a Report Spam button soon

I like Instagram. Some people are surprised to hear that given my TTV history where I created those sorts of images using a large and unwieldy hunk of cardboard, metal and duct tape but they forget that it was never really about the aesthetics. It was about the process of slowing my photography down and changing my perspective. The end result was just a happy aesthetic byproduct.

Similarly Instagram isn’t about the faux-vintage effects. It’s about the tone of community it currently enables. My Instagram feed is cozy and intimate, a peek into the trivial minutae of people’s lives. It’s the opposite of how most social media environments have evolved where the primary goal seems to be to get the most hits, the most followers, the most retweets and all that shit. I’m as guilty as anyone and it’s in some ways a necessary evil given this is where a lot of business takes place now, but it’s nice to have a refuge and currently Instagram is that.

But not for long, I fear. Here’s my News feed:

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Picadilly Opticians are an opticians in Birmingham who are posting pics to Instagram. While there is nothing wrong with that it seems pretty clear that they’re aiming to use the service as part of some social media marketing strategy hence they’re following 400+ people. In itself this is not a problem and there’s nothing offensive about it. Sure, I don’t like to think of Instagram in that way but my opinions don’t really have any weight and I don’t have to follow them back. But it’s the trickle which will soon become the flood.

Why? Because Instagram won’t be content with being the place people share intimate little photos with small number of people. Like most social startups infected with venture capitalist money they want to take over the world. From an otherwise positive article about them growing sustainably:

Instagram doesn’t just want to be bigger than, say, a competitor like Path. It wants to be Facebook big. It wants to become the indispensable visual strorytelling medium. It wants to be an entertainment platform, where people can come and consume. And getting there means getting on every platform, in every country.

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“I don’t like the idea of Instagram as a photo sharing service, and I don’t think it is,” says Systrom, “it’s very much a communication tool, it’s a visual communications tool.”

“The printing press did something really big for the world when everyone could get books in their hands and read. I’m not saying we’re a printing press, but I am saying technology pushes people forward in some way and unlocks potential. we’re not focused on how we can make toys, we’re focused on how do we change the world in some real way. Like, how many companies have been handed the opportunity to get 15 million users in the first year? Not many. We want to take this ticket and ride.”

That kind of attitude worries me because it’s effectively about the privatisation of social spaces. Yes, it’s great to develop new ways of communicating but it’s bad for those ways to be locked away on proprietary platforms. It’s like saying the Internet is great, except for all those things that enabled the Internet to be great.

But this sort of obsession with huge is also a problem because it changes the tenor of the service. As you get bigger you attract the marketeers and once the marketeers get on board the spammers creep in. Ironically it’s better to be a small, relatively unpopular service which isn’t worth the salespeople bothering with. I suspect striking that balance will be the major challenge for the next few years.

Right now, though, Instagram appears to have turned a corner. Reality has hit. It’s still a nice place to visit (just as Twitter is still a nice place to visit) but it’s not the same.

This entry was posted in ASH-10 on by Pete Ashton.

BlogSchool – Everything is a Remix

Kirby Ferguson has released the fourth and final part of Everything is a Remix, his documentary on copyright, sampling and how culture is created. All four parts are worth watching but the fourth, on how the copyright and patent system has been so badly corrupted by the notion of “intellectual property” from its original aim of enriching the public domain stands alone pretty well. So if you only have 10 minutes go straight to that one.

This entry was posted in ASH-10, Post and tagged blogschool, copyright on by Pete Ashton.