The following may be of interest to anyone considering taking up the Picture A Week (PAW) project.

The basic premise of Picture A Week is simplicity itself - use your camera equipment. It seems a long time ago now but when I first started Picture A Week finding the next shot seemed a really daunting task. So much so that after only one week I felt I had exhausted all the possibilities in Northamptonshire and I decided that I would have to travel to get something to follow week one. I wrote at the time:

I left home at 4:30am for Hunstanton, a journey of about 90 miles, to try to get something for PAW week 2 (don’t miss my next project “Life in the Asylum”) only to arrive a good hour before sunrise. Even allowing for the fact that it was a snowy January, a little early in the day and a tad cold, the normal tourist facilities were, somewhat surprisingly, closed. I made a mental note to write to the Norfolk tourist board as soon as I regained the use of my fingers to complain about their cavalier approach to the tourist dollar.

I was at a loss as to how to kill the time when all I had to occupy me was a bag full of expensive camera gear and a beautiful setting moon. Eventually my brain made the connection, I can be a bit slow at times. I took a meter reading and it suggested something in the region of f0.5 at three quarters of an hour so I decided to wing it. Bristling with inspiration from a Christmas spent reading LUG archives I drew the trusty Leica.

I decided against f16 and sacrificed depth of field to the more practical demands of the moonlight. I finished off the film at shutter speeds bordering on insanity given that I was operating hand held and in the teeth of a gale. When I removed the exposed film I folded over the leader as always to alert me to the fact that it was exposed and it snapped off. I kid you not (an old English expression which incidentally predates “Waynes World” by a considerable margin).

I was mesmerized by this phenomenon, brittle film not Mike Myers, and repeated the exercise several times until I was in danger of pulling out exposed film. It didn’t occur to me that this film would stand out from unexposed film because it no longer had a leader but like I said it was bloody cold, all right!

Whether it was indomitable British spirit (cue “Land of Hope and Glory”), sheer luck or Tom Abrahamssons’ soft release I don’t know but I did get some scannable negs together with a strange error message from my scanner which read “error 475 : ever heard of light you cretin”. Puzzling because although I have never been there I always understood the light to be quite good in Crete.

That was in 2002 and the difference in my photography and the increased photo opportunities that I can see all around me is amazing. At the time of writing (October 2005) I have posted, for better or worse, 350 images this year and whatever anyone might think of them there can be no denying that my cameras are getting used.

I owe it all to the message preached by Kyle Cassidy which is 'keep pressing the shutter it will come unstuck'.

This is the shot that I took that day back in January 2002.