And it’s time again for another Spotlight feature. This time we get to know a bit more about Owen Billcliffe of My Glass Eye.

Tell us a little about yourself

I’m Owen Billcliffe and I’m 31. I was born and raised in Scotland but moved to London in 2002 to pursue a career in TV and I’m now a freelance TV camera operator with a side-career in photography that’s just starting to pick up. I profess an addiction to videogames but these days hardly get chance to play them at all, and I’m a chronic Apple Mac fanboy…

When did you get interested in photography?

I’ve always been interested in taking a more creative photo than your average ’snap’ but never had a camera really capable of reliable results - usually just a cartridge film ‘point ‘n’ shoot’ so all I got were flashed-out faces and not much depth of field. Ultimately I guess I was more interested in videogames than in an SLR, film and processing costs. In 2004 I bought my first digital camera, a Canon Powershot A70, because it had a few more creative controls than the rest, such as aperture and shutter priority modes. In February 2005 I nearly melted my barely used credit card by buying the Nikon D70 with the 18-70mm kit lens, and then I was completely hooked and wished I’d done it years earlier.

When and, more importantly, why did you start photoblogging?

My first photoblog at Blogger and was called ‘i-Shot’ - I made the first post on May 16th 2005. I did it because I really wanted to share my pictures, I thought it would give me a reason to keep using the camera and to learn Photoshop, and because I was really enjoying looking at other people’s photoblogs and wanted a creative voice for myself. The two that really caught my eye at the time were John Waller’s The Daily Exposure and, fairly predictably, David Nightingale’s Chromasia. Eventually the Blogger template that I’d hacked around felt too restrictive and I started My Glass Eye with PixelPost to have more control.

Can you describe the style of your photoblog?

It’s hard to pin a ’style’ onto the blog because it’s content and quality and regularity of new posts has varied wildly depending on what mood I’m in, what I’ve got a taste for at the time and what I’ve been doing in my life. Mostly it’s urban shots, because that’s where I live and what really appeals to me photographically are little details from urban life. If I’ve had a particular project on or if I’ve been on holiday I post images from that. The one common factor has been that they have always processed in Photoshop - none of the shots are ’straight out the camera’ because for me the fun of photography has been hunting the shot and then getting a particular look or feel out of an image that I imagined when I took it but wasn’t there to the naked eye. That’s led to the occasional criticism that my posts have this unreal ‘plasticky’ quality that’s ‘all the rage’ and I suppose that’s true - in the process of learning Photoshop I’ve gotten carried away at times with certain effects that I really liked. Ultimately I do like contrasty, punchy images, but recent projects shooting stills on films have taught me to reign that in and I’m starting to enjoy less saturated images.
I’ve learnt that the blog shouldn’t stick to a ‘theme’ or a ’style’ - it has to be more of a visual diary for myself or else I’ll be trying too hard to replicate things that only worked once, and what’s more it will feel like work as opposed to fun. For that reason I started a portfolio site to put my best work in, relaxing the standards and pressure slightly on the photoblog.

What has your blog brought you so far?

‘i-Shot’ won ‘Best New Photoblog’ at the 2005/2006 Photobloggies, which was great! Really unexpected and a huge honour, as well as very encouraging. I get a few comments now and again from regulars and some from new visitors which is nice - it’s interesting to see which pictures really resonate with people, although the comments system isn’t that accurate a gauge of that because it’s not immediately obvious how to leave one!

One side effect of having my camera with me everywhere I went (it doesn’t go with me so often since I upgraded to the heavier D200) was that eventually people I worked with and for started asking me if I’d take photos for them, so I got my first couple of jobs taking photos at the TV studio I worked at. I got into film & TV ‘unit stills’ the same way, via a friend who was working on a short film one weekend.

Because of all that, I’ve started taking photography much more seriously as a potential side-career recently. It’s nice to have a bit of variety, something to fall back on when the TV camera work dries up for a while, and it’s great to be able to make some money doing what I really enjoy. I suppose there’s always the danger that I’ll start to not enjoy it as much if it becomes my day to day work, but that’s why I’ve tried to get into film stills as they allow me to stay creative and be around creative people.

What camera(s) do you use?

I still have my D70 but it serves as a back up to my D200 now. I also have a Holga 120N that I don’t use nearly enough, a Lomo Supersampler that is equally criminally underused, and a Sony T100 that I got for parties and stuff where I don’t want to be in control of an expensive SLR. I’m afraid to say that I don’t often use it because the image quality as a compact is so poor next to my dSLRs!

Which tools do you use for post-processing, and do you use a lot of post-processing on your shots?

Some shots are heavily processed, others are just tweaked here and there - never taking things out or adding things that weren’t there, but processing the colours and the ‘look’. I use Apple hardware, a Wacom tablet and pen (it eases the pressure on your ‘mouse wrist’ immensely, and is so useful for very fine detail work), and Photoshop - there’s barely any shots on my blog or portfolio that haven’t been processed in it. I now have sets of Actions for things like ‘cross processing’ style colours, ‘Lomo’ style contrast and blurriness, good B&W processes, sharpening routines, resizing routines, etc, and they nearly all use layers so I can go back and tweak them before I finish so nothing’s set in stone.
I used the books of Scott Kelby to teach myself the basics and some clever tricks, and then occasionally I dip into the web to learn how to do something I’ve seen someone else do - I know a lot of basic tricks and routines now but I’m always learning about better processes, quicker and more accurate ways to do things - and there’s always a new way to make a B&W conversion (although I’m a huge fan of my own…). Most of the time though it’s a simple case of a curve or two for contrast, duplicate layers and playing with blending modes and opacity, and nearly every shot in the last year or so has had some sort of vignetting. That’s a habit I need to think about getting out of…
Recently I became very frustrated with Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for sucking all the life out of my RAW files automatically so I’m looking at Nikon Capture NX for my really important RAW conversions. It’s slow but my files look exactly how they do in the preview on the camera without any work getting them there, and I find the non-destructive noise and sharpening filters are very powerful.
Sometimes, of course, processing can just be a drag and often that’s been the biggest sapper of my inspiration - sitting down to go through hundreds of RAW files can sap your enthusiasm by the end, especially if I know I’ve got loads more work processing them ahead of me, so I’ve been learning even more about my camera and photography in general so that I shoot with the right settings and get the images as correct as possible in camera. That way all I have to do is a white balance fix and a couple of exposure tweaks here and there later, and I don’t get bored of sitting in front of Photoshop doing correctional work as opposed to more creative processing.
And holidays/days out now get shot in JPG with the contrast up a notch

Do you ever have any lack of inspiration and, if so, what do you do about it?

Oh yes. Frequently. See above about the Processing Blues! Other times I just don’t feel like picking up a camera and going looking for shots. Times like that I’ve learnt to just let it go - spend more time with my girlfriend, read books, chill out, play a game, watch movies, not think about photography or processing, or anything at all.

Early 2006, after I’d left my blog unloved for a good few months, I did actually have to force myself out of the house and go for a long walk somewhere I’d not been before and just take as many pictures as I could. Once I’d got going it was great. Also, I like doing things like standing in one spot and seeing how many interesting shots I can get from there, rather than wandering, wandering, wandering. Guaranteed, however, that whenever I don’t carry my camera, I’ll see something I’d like to take a picture of.

Would you like to share one or more other photoblogs with us which you personally like?

On my newsreader I have: chromasia, mysteryme, londonrubbish, mute, John Washington, Kulay, the daily exposure, Light Infusion, Mark Power, moodaholic, Jon Swainson, trails of light, and Catherine Buca. That’s a fairly good cross section of photographic art, urban, scenic, personal and unusual. Sometimes I check them daily, other times it can be weeks and I only visit one or two. I like to see what other people are doing, and sometimes I steal an idea or two to try out or develop myself, although I don’t really get on with scenic photography myself, but I like seeing other people doing it well.

Oh - does strobist.blogspot.com count as a photoblog? It’s utterly brilliant for someone like me who’s still a bit scared of photographic lighting…

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 9:32 am and is filed under LPB Spotlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.