Recently someone commented on this photo over at Flickr. "You've achieved here through a dirty window pane what others emulate in PS! Well seen and captured 'au naturale' !" It's no good, I've got to come clean.

bring it into photoshop, sharpen it up, boost the contrast, tweak the curves, slide the levels, dodge, burn, adjust, tweak a bit

Before I got all "pure" or lazy, depending on how you look at it, I would wrestle an image to the ground. I'd beat it into submission using any means necessary. Now this probably isn't the "done thing" in photographic circles, but what the hell, a good photograph is a good photograph regardless of how you went about it. Digital photography is brilliant, no doubt about it. But the thing you find is that you never have a result. You always have to bring it into photoshop, sharpen it up, boost the contrast, tweak the curves, slide the levels, dodge, burn, adjust, tweak a bit more… then tweak some more, until eventually a week later you're happy with the result. With film you always had a result. All the tweaking was built into the type of film you used. You developed, printed and had a result. Now digital photographers go to great lengths to replicate the endless limitations/idiosyncrasies of old film cameras. Now you can have an "App" on your iPhone to turn your snaps into a Polaroid. You can download scripts to mimic Lomo or Holga cameras. It's similar to record producers sticking the hiss and scratch into the mix to give it that old analogue vinyl feel. How ever much we strive for perfection, we still hanker back to the good old days when nothing really worked that well. There's a technique in digital photography called TTV, or Through The Viewfinder. You take an old camera, like a Kodak Duaflex, it must have that big bubble viewfinder glass on top. You construct a tube that fits over the viewfinder and slot your state of the art DSLR into the tube. Essentially you're taking a digital photograph through a rather crappy 60 year old lens. But the results are usually very striking. The way you frame a photograph is diferent as well. The Rule of Thirds more or less goes out the window, the periphery goes and you end up with a compact, impactful result (after tweaking, curving, levelling, boosting, cropping etc etc). But what happens if you don't have an old Kodak… you fake it. The image above was taken out of my office window. No matter how many times I tried to photograph it, I never got it right. When I closed my eyes I saw the deep terra-cotta of the brick, the patina of the copper, the mould and dirt on the window, the utter dereliction and neglect. But very time I photographed it, well it was always… well, boring, flat, badly composed, cluttered, I never saw what I saw when I closed my eyes, so I decided to fake TTV the result. Original Image Cropping process I closed my eyes and kept the parts of the image I remembered. Combining images Bring in your viewfinder image, I downloaded mine from the Noise & Dust group. You place the "dust" image over your original image. Here's the trick though, highlight the Dust layer and in the blending options choose "Multiply". That magically turns the dust layer into a lens, allowing you to see through to the image below. Some tweaking with the curves to give it that "green tint", check the Urban Acid group for some inspiration and that was more or less it. It's faked and it's photoshopped but I don't think it matters to be honest. It's a cracking image and it's exactly what I saw when I looked out that window.

…Lower Scotch Street. Family owned and run. They live above the bar. No bouncers. No juke box. No alcopops. No sessions. No food. No promotions. No swearing. No feckin' nonsense!

this how Coe felt when Ovett kept kicking on the home straight in Moscow…

We all went on a pub crawl 20 years ago. Every pub in Dungannon, all 23 of them. 20 of us put on suits, polished our best shoes and went for a christmas drink. "Down and out!" was the order for the day, meaning down your drink and head on to the next pub. McKees was second on the list and we all managed to get kicked out. Actually we got swept out with a broom. I can't remember the details but someone started effing' and blinding. Berine McKee, who was behind the bar that morning sweeping up, began beating Fox over the head with a broom. "Get that filthy tongue out of my bar"; "Fuck me missus" he says heaping more turf on the fire. You could see her blood boil as she swept us out along with the previous night's fag butts and dirt. Of all 23 pubs they were the only one who kicked us out. The others took the money and put up with the crap and abuse, even toward the end of the night when it got messy and Garfield got his head punched off. A proper pub crawl is like a 1500 metre race. It's all tactics and pace. Go off too fast and the pack will swallow you up, too slow and you'll be left for dust. The pack usually stays tight for the first half, everyone watching each other. Tactics are crucial, how's your opponent pacing himself? Is he on a bottle, bottle and a half 'un or a pint? By the 10th pub things start getting cosy, the banter's good and men start getting a bit too relaxed. Dixie's standing on a chair with his trousers around his ankles singing An American Trilogy by Elvis. "Down and Out!!!" Someone's just stepped up the pace. We've all been caught napping, we've almost a full pint in front of us as the pack heads out the door. Tip it down the neck. Gasping for breath you bolt out the door. Into The Cobbles, you order but the main bunch has already started. Pub 12, 13, and 14 the pace is relentless "DOWN and OUT!!!", men are now floundering, cheeks are blowing out in an attempt to keep up and keep the beer down. By pub 15 the pack is strung out across 3 bars. "DOWN AND OUT!!!!" and we're off to May Mullholland's in The Square. A man dressed in a large Garfield suit collecting for charity comes down the footpath toward us. "All right lads?", squeaks a voice from within. "Is that you in there Seamy?" says McNicholl. It was Seamy Casey from Dalriada, everyone pounces on him, a fist is swung and the big cat's head comes flying off, landing in the middle of traffic. "Feck sake… no call lads, NO CALL FOR THAT", says Seamy as we steam through the Square relentlessly. Mullholland's, Victor's, Images, The Dunowen, Hagan's, The Fort, Rumours, Donaghey's, Daleys… this how Coe felt when Ovett kept kicking on the home straight in Moscow, we dipped to the tape in McGrath's at midnight. Over the next hour the stragglers fall through the door, like big lanky Americans who crawl home 5 minutes after the Kenyans - they're just not built for it, for them it's the taking part not the winning. I'm a big lanky American. 23 bars and only one had the good sense to boot us out. Even then McKee's Bar had a fearsome, no nonsense reputation. They had standards and still do. For that reason alone I'd recommend a visit. an interior picture of McKee's Bar, Dungannon.

Deptford Market in South East London is an open air street market jammed full of real people shopping for real things. "If you can't find it in Deptford, you can't find it in Europe" was the claim.

Scuse me son” he said, “if you want to go home with that camera I'd put it away”.

To be honest I didn't find that much but I wasn't really looking, I was a tad distracted by all the hustle, the faces and the accents, I'm just a country lad and I get easily distracted. The far end of the market looks like a number of skips had been dropped from a great height, then a series of tables arranged around the debris. Anyone in the market for some "art installation" involving a thousand broken mobiles phones should call in, or hammers without the hammer bit, a set of speakers with no speakers? Anyone? I'm sure the odd gem lurks within, but life's too short. On a normal shopping street people travel up and down, you're either with the flow or against it, this is largely dictated by the fact that 2 lanes of cars cut down the middle of the thoroughfare. There's some order to it but very little interaction. In street markets people travel up and down, left and right, diagonally, some stand still, some sit down, others stop and chat. There's very little order but a huge amount of interaction. I've never been in Deptford in my life but I didn't feel threatened, it didn't feel strange, whereas put me in the middle of Oxford Street and I feel rather out of place. So, with all this chaos going on I walked up Deptford High Street with the base of the camera tucked into the chest strap of my bag. It slightly disguises the camera and keeps it rock steady when you stop to take a photograph. The real close low-down stuff was taken at waist level from about 2 feet away, it's always tough to get that close and get something usable. Among the throng of people in a market you can disappear for a few seconds, stop and have a look at what's coming toward you. You can compose some sort of frame even though most of the time it's not through a viewfinder or screen, the more you do it the more familiar you get with the technique, the angle of the camera and the probable result. When I say no one noticed me, the copper at the top of the street came over as I was changing my battery. "Shit" says I, "here we go with the anti-terrorism-no-photography-nonsense." "Scuse me son" he said. "If you want to go home with that camera I'd put it away. The lads round here will have it off you in a flash". He pointed across the road where a group of young lads were standing, staring across at us and possibly the camera. Fair enough I thought and put it away. At little local knowledge goes a long way. The first batch from Deptford is over on my Flickr account.

Deptford Market, March 2009

Perched on top of a hill, Dungannon has been a garrison town… forever. The markets grew around the castles and survived for centuries. It's a market town now in name only.

It was the one constant during the 70s and 80s as the town was quite literally blown to pieces.

At one time it had one the liveliest livestock markets in the country, all that remains is a small flower market on Thursdays. The town quite literally grew around the various markets, one in The Square, another in Lower Scotch Street and a third in Ann Street and the Donaghmore Road. Pubs, barber shops, hardware shops, bookmakers, cafes, bakeries all grew around the Markets. It was the one constant during the 70s and 80s as the town was quite literally blown to pieces. Each entrance to the town, 6 in all had huge concrete barricades placed across them and latterly large security gates spanned the width of the road. As each car entered Thomas Street, it was searched for explosives and no car within the town could be left unattended, that way the security forces could identify which cars possibly contained bombs. Reading this back it sounds like another life but there it is… that was life. My Da would leave me in the car while he dandered around the town doing his messages. Bored and trapped you'd look around, all the other cars had small children in them, hanging out windows, sitting behind the steering wheel with hazard lights blinking and horns blowing, like one huge mobile creche. In reality we were all some form of human shield. There was always a buzz about the place though, as every day was some sort of market day, people came and went, faces changed as the countryside came into town. In the 90s the local Council, in another master stroke, moved all the livestock markets 4 miles outside the town to Granville. I'm not entirely sure why this was, probably because it stank a bit or too many tractors were double parked clogging up the town traffic. Either way since then Dungannon has slowly withered away. This may be a coincidence but I think they removed the very reason the town existed. I visited Granville for the first time. It's a cold and isolated big shed of a place but filled with those type of faces you don't see anymore. Men who could stick their arm up a pigs back side, pull out a litter of pigs and then sit down to a full fry. See more Granville market pics over on the Flickr acocunt.