End of an era

On Saturday I headed out with my friends Shane and Siobhan for what is to be our last Shoot Experience experience. Regulars to this blog may recall several previous posts that involved much gloating and photos of winners badges, this time round you will find neither of those things, just a giant bunch of sour grapes and a realisation that things move on.

A brief background to bring up to speed:
- September 2007 I enter my first Shoot event with 3 friends forming a team of 4. 3 other friends also entered the event as their own team. We won a winners badge for one of the clues and were stoked to bits, never been prouder and pumped for the next event. This was the winning shot for the clue Emerald City



- A month or 2 later both teams enter a follow up event Shoot Brixton. Still chuffed from our victory we decided to raise the audacity stakes and named our team "Reigning Clue I Champions". Our rival team also decided to change their name, or shall I say declare war, when they registered as "Better than Simon's team". Clearly a preposterous statement, what with us already having a winners badge and all, but they ran with it. This was a successful event for both teams with winners badges all round (to put it in perceptive there are roughly 60 teams with 13 winners badges on offer). My then flatmate Dave took one for the team for this winning shot.

From Shoot Brixton

- The next 2 events saw us win another 2 badges, the good times continued to roll. The only downside was the success of our arch rivals which burned me on the inside - although I'll never admit it, especially on the internet. They managed to win themselves free cameras after Shane submerged himself in a polluted London canal for a photo.

- A couple more events passed, and for various reasons we didn't pick up any silverware (a technical mishap saw our photos omitted from the judging process in one event, and we just didn't win anything in the next despite having some AWESOME photos!). There was disharmony in the team, people has grown apart, one team member was leaving the country, we all shook hands and went our separate ways.

- The way it panned out our team broke up at the same time as Better Than Simon's Team, a few negations took place and the next thing I knew we had formed a super group in the ashes of breakups. The new team was called Simon Has Defected (not Simon Has Defecated as one of the judges thought) and we tasted immediate success with this shot for the clue "No need to cross the Atlantic for a flying fish or loaf shaped fruit"



This brings you up to last Saturday. I headed out for my 8th (yes, 8th!!) event and I have to say, all good things must come to an end. The giddy excitement of running round new, unseen corners of London, exploring the area, taking cool photos and fiercely competing against a rival team had been replaced by walking round familiar corners of London with a weight of expectation round my neck, no banter with a rival outfit and no buzz about the day. Don't get me wrong, I would heartily recommend the event to anyone looking for a novel way to spend an afternoon, but after 8 events and 18 months I feel that I, and my photography, has moved on. I'm all about taking classic, timeless images now, not the cheesy shots that tend to win prizes in these events (bitter much at not winning anything on Saturday?).

This is my favourite shot from the shoot just been for 2 reasons - firstly I like the shot itself, the framing, the light, the colours, but secondly becuase it has an awesome story behind it. The clue was "The unofficial start of carnival, a Horni man provided the land, some other Charlie made it a Pleasance experience" so we decided we needed some devils horns to represent a Horni man. Next we had to represent Charlie, and while no one in our team has even seen cocaine, let alone sampled it, we are street wise enough to know that it's known as Charlie in various circles, so we used some sugar at a cafe to represent this in the photo. The final step was the word Pleasance, we decided this had to be spoken by the devil in a speech bubble.

Sooooo, we were sitting at the cafe debating who would write the sign, all 3 of us had terrible hand writing, when all of a sudden the guy sitting at the table next to
us offers to do it for us on account of his excellent penmanship. We got talking to him (as we put him to work on the sign), he was from Sydney and was over here for a fashion show. Another thing about him was that he happened to look a lot like the devil. Perfect for our photo. After a little bit of arm twisting he agreed to pose for us, the result was great so we offered to email it to him. After googling his name later that night (as you do) we discovered he's actually a famous Australian fashion guru, he's been on Australia's Next Top Model as an industry expert and there's loads of stuff about him all over the net.

And we made him dress like the devil and endorse the use of class A drugs.

This is why I still love these Shoot Experience events, even if some of the magic has worn off.

From Shoot Portabello