The Conversation - Episode 9

memento vs. raheny_eye

From your entertaining journal we can tell that you are a devoted husband, dad of three, and a very hard working man, so I appreciate the fact that you agreed to be interviewed even more!
 
Not at all Memento. Thank YOU. I am honoured and delighted to be here in the hot seat. Devoted husband? Hard working man? Wow, I'm impressed. The propaganda campaign started a little over 440 days ago does work!

Mrs Raheny is always threatening to start her own journal to expose the truth behind the scene... But then I point out to her that once all the kids have been put to bed, the dishes washed, the lawn mowed, the clothes washed and hung, the next day's meals cooked and the oil change done on the car, she may not have all that much time left to take and post a photograph, let alone divulge how lazy her husband truly is. That's what saves me really.
 
Your journal name, 'One day at a time', seems self explanatory but for those blippers who don't know you yet, can you tell us why your 'non de plume' is raheny_eye?
 
"One day at a time" because I was kicked out of the AA for asking some of my new mates around to the pub after my fourth meeting... And also because this is the way I live.

My Dad died of lung cancer at the age of 44, when I was 21 and had just about become an adult (not a responsible one but legally an adult). His death helped me to realise from an early age that this is it, the life that we have is not a dress rehearsal but the main show. And I know how to take pleasure in all the little things of every day life. Life is not a film script. I don't really believe that there is a build up of events leading to an unrealistically happy end. I don't rely on tomorrow for a perfect happiness, instead I milk the little bits and scraps and droplets of joy that I find in the present, on an almost daily basis.

Raheny_eye because I was not all that inspired to find a cool user name on the day I signed up on blipfoto. If I was to it all again from scratch, I would keep "One day at a Time", but I would opt for something a little more dashing, like the Mighty_Iris, the Golden_Cornea or the Pupil_of_Destiny...

By the way, in a former life I would have felt compelled to point out to you that the correct spelling is "nom de plume". Oh bollix, I've done it again. I gave up teaching many moons ago but it isn't that easy to shake it off... Am I turning into David77?

Taking it 'one day at a time', is sound advice for anyone and seems to be your life- as well as your blip philosophy. You don't?seem to stress too much about finding the perfect shot. Your powers of observation are highly tuned, and you have the most unique, comedic way of injecting humor into even a serious subject. I think of your journal as a sure provider of daily comic relief for me and many others who admire your hilarious entries. 

Have you ever considered being a stand-up comedian and who's your favorite funny man in business right now?

I actually did do some stand-up comedy for a while. It happened by accident really. I had run out of ideas for adrenaline rushes after having done sky diving over Mission Beach near Cairns and survived a meal with 13 accountants in Montpellier (the splitting of the bill at the end was a scary moment).

It must be said that stepping onto a stage (albeit a very small one in a very small venue) with a microphone in hand and the sole purpose of making people laugh is still the ultimate scary moment for me. I did maybe a couple of dozen solo spots and then co-wrote a few sketches taking the p*ss out of the low-cost airline industry with a mate of mine. It worked quite well. Most of the time we were the only act with no swearing and people found that refreshing.

We even made it to the Irish Final of the Channel Four "So you think you're funny" contest and we got a spot in the grand final at the Edinburgh festival. It is still painful just to think about it. Reilly Air (that was the name of our act) crashed that day in front of 400 people. There were no survivors. And not one laugh during our 12 minute spot. The 12 longest minutes of my life. I wished the ground could have swallowed me and spat me back out somewhere far away, preferably off the coast of New Zealand...

I do like "cringe" humour though. The Office was brilliant, I also liked the Extras even if it did not get the same success, and there are some truly brilliant scenes in the Alan Partridge episodes. My favourite recent comedy series is Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. For stand-up comedy, Eddie Izzard was by far the best at creating surreal scenes (followed closely by Ross Noble, who can be brilliant on a good night and just ok on a not so good one...)
 
Your black and white shots are elegant, to say the least, ranging from simple, striking compositions to strong, graphic images, worthy of any wall in any home.
 
Do you ever look at a scene or shoot it with the desaturated image in mind? When you decide to go from color to mono during processing, do you have a favorite software and technique for creating your richly shaded and textured images?

Some shots I "see" in black and white even before downloading them to the computer at night. It's often the case for places with strongly contrasted light (the Dinosaurs Forest comes to mind), or a gloomy feel or a timeless quality. It is also my treatment of choice for male adult portraits (it reinforces the lines of the face and adds expression and depth).

I do not use fancy editing software, I mostly use the RAW converter that came with the camera. I have an old not-exactly-legit version of Photoshop that I got from a former Iraqi colleague of mine who did not really believe in paying for software. I have used it for a few selective colouring blips.

I'd like to know PS more in depth but I just simply do not have the time for it - or the budget for a recent fully legit version. Post-processing is a side of photography that I would like to explore more and more.

Disclaimer: software piracy is a crime. Raheny_eye does not condone it in any way*

* Unless you are absolutely sure that you can get away with it and will only have a minor impact on the balance sheet of multi-billion developers who create monopolies with the help of the big PC manufacturers.

For its beauty, its fun superstitions and the fabulous accent, your country of Ireland is the stuff that romantic dreams are made of! You're always poking good-hearted fun at its "fabulous" weather but you can't fool us, we know you love it dearly.
 
We all know there's no place like home but would you want to live anywhere else and why? Is there a place in Ireland itself that you can hardly wait to photograph?

Home is a strange notion for me, It is somewhere between Longwy in France (the place where I was born and educated... well, raised at least) and Dublin, Ireland. I moved to Ireland when I was 23 and have never regretted it. I must say that where I come from in France makes Leeds look like Disneyland. I would describe the place as being primarily post-industrial. The whole area depended totally on the steel factories which employed, directly or indirectly, the vast majority of the population.

I still work with a lot of French people and one can safely say that the French are not exactly known for being barrels of laughter. Well, the area where I come from, Lorraine, is considered austere by the rest of France (!) We would be considered very Germanic in our approach to fantasy and light-hearted fun... Put it this way, the trains always run on time but the driver won't dazzle you with his smile...

I enjoy living in Dublin. The proximity of the sea and mountains (ok, big hills...) make it a very versatile place. At the weekend, you are a short drive away from several very different habitats (during the week though the place is one big traffic jam). I haven't exhausted yet all the photographic opportunities Dublin has to offer, let alone the rest of this beautiful country.

There is one portraits project that I missed once again this year: photographing the zombies emerging from the annual Trinity Ball. I've got a feeling it would make an ideal before/after series. It is supposed to be a glamorous event with all the participants dressed up in tuxedos and sparkling evening dresses but after a night of hard partying, alcohol and substance abuse, the creatures that emerge from the old courtyard of this old university around 4 or 5am look like something out of a Tim Burton movie.

Next year again I'll try and set up my alarm clock, see what happens... (this year was the usual: switch off the alarm, ponder for 2.3 seconds why I'd come up with such a daft idea and fall back into a slumber populated by zombie nymphomaniacs in lamé dresses).

You are a busy picture taker and I often follow the links to the other images you took on the same day. Did you appreciate the power of a camera as a youngster and did you enjoy 35mm film photography at all when that was all we had?
 
Since joining blipfoto, the number of shutter movements on my 350D has indeed increased by about 3000%

I started taking photograph with a 35mm around the age of 17, with my parents' Pentax. But is it when I bought my first SLR when I lived in Liverpool in 1991 (Canon EOS 500) that I really started to take photographs. I must have realised that my regular partying while in the English capital of fun would take its toll on my memories of the place and hard evidence of where I had been, what I had done and the people I had met was needed.

I've had one very bad experience with the 35mm format. Nothing to with the camera but with moron in the photolab who had destroyed my 8 rolls of black and white film in the colour machine. I worked for an airline at the time and I was just back from a one month round the world trip. He destroyed all of Los Angeles, New-Zealand and part of Australia. I was gutted. I had no other option but to go back to all these places and take more shots [martyr's sigh].

With the 35mm, I always had a preference for black and white. It was not easy to find semi-decent processing that would not bankrupt an airline employee (the travel perks are great but they pay you in airmiles, bowls of rice and kicks in the butt). I would have liked to try and process myself but I never really found the time/budget to do so.
 
In looking through your journal, I gathered that your place of work overlooks Dublin Bay. I find it endlessly fascinating and you must too, since it is the subject of many gorgeous images. I particularly enjoyed the time lapse sequence that occurred in a single day, showing the wide swing of moods a single location can have.
 
Have you encountered another location in your daily travels that you could shoot every day and never tire of?

I take a lot of photographs of trains, and commuters, and platforms and billboards. There is always something going on in a railway station, people passing through. I like people passing through in the photographs I take. I never realised this until Flick pointed it out (Flick is my cyber mentor ? sorry Flick, I don't want this to be a cause of stress for you, you can resign any day). Rather than wait for people to walk out of a shot, I wait for them to walk in and become the focus of it. Our lives are full of passing people, little electrons flashing by.

Is there a place in the world that you would jet off to right now just to photograph?
 
There are several. For photographic purposes, it would have to be the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. It is such a pity that I did not yet own a DSLR the first time I was there. I love the place. It is the closest you'll ever get to walking on the Moon. It is the driest place on Earth. Some places have no sign of life whatsoever for dozens of miles. Not a tree, plant, shrub, lichen or moss even, not an insect, nothing.

My initial thought was that it would be very intimidating, scary or depressing even, but I found it serene to the extreme and very beautiful. I went back with Mrs Raheny, Luca, my mum and father-in-law. It is the type of place that you want to show to the rest of the world. But it is on your own that you truly get the beauty of it. Rent a camionetta for a couple of days and head off in the desert (but make sure that it is a camionetta that will actually start at the first turn of the key in the morning...)

And there are dozen of other places that I would love to go back to for the photos and food (my two favourites sources of instant gratification): Tobago for sunsets and rotis, New-Zealand for lamb roasts, giant green mussels and coastal train tracks, Tokyo for sushi and sashimi and tradition/technology dichotomy, Bangkok for grilled tentacles and medieval crafts in the bowels of the old Chinatown, Buenos Aires for grilled beef and that old tango place with the 84 year old waiter, Costa Rica for chicken and the gun shops' windows, Patagonia for the dried mussels on blades of grass and the penguins (as photographic subjects, not food... I may carry a French passport but there 2 or 3 types of animals and a few minerals that I do not eat).
 
You are very good at photographing humans in everyday situations. At the very beginning of your journal, you blipped a young man named Ace on the commuter train. I love that blip because after telling him about blipfoto, he actually responded by signing up, and he even kept up with your journal for a while! 

Have you seen or heard from him since?
 
No, I haven't since that last link. It's a pity. I was absolutely thrilled when he left his first comment. Ace, if you read this, please let me know. I'm not coming on to you, I swear!

There are other people I have blipped whom I bump into quite regularly. There is the lovely lady from Ash Wednesday, Brian and Paddy of course - I meet them almost every second day (they live in the pub), and the lone jogger on the pier (he was quite happy when I e-mailed him a full resolution copy of the file, he always gives me a little wave of the hand as he runs by).

If you could blip one globally famous person, dead or alive, who would that be what kind of portrait would it be?
 
Iggy Pop. With a face and body like his, you cannot go wrong. The deep lines, the diaphanous skin, the insane eyes and grin, the super toned skinniness. All the right ingredients for a striking portrait. And it would give me the opportunity to tell him that I was the lone idiot who got kicked out of the post MTV awards party in Dublin for stage diving (post MTV award parties are not exactly stage-diving friendly I found out...). I just couldn't help myself.
 
There is no debating the fact that you adore your children. They are the willing subjects of some of your funniest and most endearing blips. You are, in my opinion, a very unique and talented child portrait photographer.

It's probably the most fun with your own children, but do you think you might enjoy doing it professionally?
 
Only if I got kicked out from my last job as a trout gutter or a landmine remover.

I'd rather fish for crabs in Alaska than work with kids. I mean they can't even manage a self-conscious grin or a bout of extreme lens anxiety. These "midgets on acid" (as they were once described by that tourette syndrome comedian Denis Leary) move too fast anyway, you can never manage a pin sharp photograph...

As a hard working man, your take on cubicle life is always a huge laugh but also poignant at times. Your social commentary is sharp and your observations make us think thatoutside our comfort zone might be a whole other world.

I don't speak for myself only when I say that your honest, documentary style of writing is brilliant. One blipper is quoted as saying "You write very well indeed. Perhaps you should write screenplays/scripts and suchlike." Another claims: "...your rant really made my morning, you really should have a column in the Times, just brilliant!!" This recent image and quality write-up confirms it for me.
 
If you don't move up to the fourth floor soon enough to your liking, to what publication would you send your writings to start your life as a freelance writer?

Ahhh, breaking away from the cubicle farm, what a heart-warming thought... You really have me blushing there Memento. Thanks a mil for the praise and the encouragement but realistically freelancing and 5 hungry mouths don't always mix together well. I am having fun writing my blipfoto entries. For the simple reason that this is what it is all about: having fun. Making a profession of it would mean losing some of that spontaneity that actually makes it funny (well for me anyway).

And I changed position for the better last December and I am now working with the most grounded team in the whole Company (I refer to the cubicle farm as the Company, a cross breed of heartless capitalism and soviet administrative practices...) I'll definitely reassess my position though, whenever I lose that job that I no longer hate. It could happen any day.

You seem to enjoy landscapes as much as abstracts and street shots. Do you have a favorite portrait that you took and is there a genre of shot you have not tried that you would like to?

My favourite portrait ever was a portrait of Mrs Raheny that I took years ago with the 35mm. It was a photograph of her 8 months pregnant with Luca, happy and naked in one of my favourite swivel chairs. I got it printed on transparency film and fitted as a triptic in a light box, between a shot of the first structural scan at 3 months (the day my grandfather died. I saw Luca's heart for the first time there on the GE Healthcare monitor and my grandfather's heart gave in that same day) and the first photo I liked of the baby when he was about 4 days old.

I entered that light box in an exhibition organised by a maternity hospital in Waterford around the theme "New arrival". The curator told me that they wished to buy it for their permanent collection but backtracked two days later as there had been complaints from members of the staff about the nakedness of the central character and the fact there is the tiniest strand of pubic hair visible when studying the photograph closely with a magnifying glass.

I was horrified that nakedness could be shocking to members of staff in a maternity hospital and I am delighted that this is not where our children were born as I doubt these people do a good job delivering babies with their eyes closed....

My favourite portrait since joining blipfoto is this one as it really captures the essence of my mate Chris.
 
Are there any photographers or artists that you admire and may have some tiny bit of influence in your style? Everyone asks this so I have to!

I'm not a great groupie (except when it comes to Iggy Pop) and I can't really name any major influence on the way I take photographs. Except for Flick of course. There is so much energy packed in her shots. She is the master of chaos. It looks so frantic and spur of the moment at first glance but she has a very strong personal style and the composition is always watertight. I love her monochrome treatment too. And the ultra wide angle shots. And her sofa looks so inviting. I'd love to jump on it with Henry.

Seriously, I'd be the first person to buy an album of the portraits of Archie that she has been taking since he was born. He could not wait for his Granny to start photographing him, he felt compelled to come out early.
 
Do you have your eye on any new gear or software for the foreseeable future?
 
I am not much of a software guy, although I do see how important expert post-processing can be. I love my old EOS350D. It's pretty basic but it is rugged and it gets carried everywhere I go.

I even found out that Canon, in their great wisdom, fit additional parts in their cameras. There is one at least that has been loose and rattling in the body of my EOS for the last six months and I haven't noticed any difference at all (apart from the rattly noise, obviously). It must be a contingency part, a back-up feature, like in airliners, which have up to 3 contingency safety devices on vital organs of the aircraft...

I bought a 50mm "sub-prime" lens recently and I have noticed a major difference in quality with the kit lens that I normally use (I keep losing lens caps so most of the time the lens is thrown in the bag unprotected and it has suffered some minor scratches).

Flick, with her ultra wide angle shots, has given me some rather serious longing for a 10-22mm lens but I find the investment required scary. I cannot justify this type of expense with a family of five and the very real possibility of losing my job any day.

Another object of desire would be a second hand 5D. The low-light capabilities seem to be rather impressive! But at the end of the day, my present camera serves its purpose at the level I'm at and I am happy with it. I can't see any hardware upgrade in the near future.

In a post 100th blip entry you state that blip is both a mental exercise, an endurance test. On your more recent, 400th blip, you pondered whether to keep going or not.

You did and it's still greatly entertaining to follow. Any thoughts on how long you'll be able to keep it up and why. We won't hold you to it!
 
I wasn't wondering whether to keep going or not. I was pondering whether I should jump in or not, and create some dramatic ripples in the stillness of the swimming pool!

No, I am in this for the long run. I ran three Dublin marathons and I managed to get through to an NTL customer representative on the phone one day and actually get my problem sorted, I am capable of a lot of determination...

I find that I have a lot less time for commenting these days. In the first year I spent far too much time on the computer when I could have been interacting with my family instead. I used to check most entries posted on one given day and leave comments on each one that stirred something in me (I have never commented for the sake of commenting, I usually try and say something about the blip entry I am commenting on).

I feel that I am missing out on new journals that have been started in the last six months. I'm not snubbing new blippers out there, I just find it hard as it is to keep up with all the journals I subscribe to.
 
If you don't see any of your own favorites in the links I've added, please tell us what they are...as many as you like or have time for!

You have done so much ground work for this interview, I am humbled. You must have spent ages!
The only two shots I can think of are two views of Dublin that really capture the spirit of the place for me:

North Circular Road
and T-Junction

If you have time for listing all-time favorites from other blippers, we'd like to know that too!

There are many strong pictures that I have seen and rated 5 over the last 440 days but I will be cruel and narrow it down to two, the first two that came to mind when I read your question, the two that I could picture in my mind's eye even before using the search engine.

They were taken by the same (extremely talented) photographer on two consecutive days, and they are so close to the bone that they hurt (well, I hurt when I see them, they are so powerful). It was extremely courageous of her to take and share these shots. They are Picture of the day 2008's portraits of her Dad and Mum
 
And if you don't see a question asked of yourself here, feel free to ask it and answer it!?I like this one, it will become the next blip conversation trend, I think!

"Do you really hate Nissan Micras and Fiat Puntos as much as you say you do?"

Why Memento, I am really glad you asked this question as it will enable me to dispel a myth. I am not really a Micra or Punto hater. Sometimes, for comedy effect, I may slightly exaggerate things, just to make people laugh, you see? I have nothing against Micras or Puntos.

As long as I am not forced to drive one.

I'd rather walk or cycle or get on the train (possibly the bus).

I spent 18 months in purgatory driving a Citroen BX, I am not ready for hell on earth just yet.

(my apologies to Dublin Shooter and Flick, two Fiat drivers who could have opted to remain anonymous but decided not to :)

Thank you for letting us share a bit of your life and letting us into your world...if Mr. F and I are ever fortunate enough to visit Ireland, will you please take us for a tour that would include a visit to the awesome dinosaur forest?

You two are most welcome! I'd be delighted. But the words of the very wise Joe Blogs come to mind when people started organising blipmeets through the forum (I'll quote in substance): "remember that people never look as good in real life"... Well the same may be true of cities or Dinosaurs' Forests. One thing is for sure. The weather is brutal here, this is the truth. Do pack warm waterproof gear!