Film — Blog — Derek Clark Photography

I was asked to make a ‘Day in the Life’ film to be included in the latest episode of Fact Not Fear. Now on Episode 4, Fact Not Fear is a series on the Coronavirus pandemic featuring mostly retired journalists from all over the world telling the real story of the place they are living.

I started off by recording the music. The ticking clock was actually the foundation of the project as so much of this lockdown period has been about how slow and how fast time can move, sometimes at the same time. I then built up the track and finally adding the tenor sax part.

At the same time as recording the music, I was shooting video on my X-T3, GoPro, and Drone. I then put the whole thing together in DaVinci Resolve. You can see the full episode of Fact Not Fear above, and my contribution below. Our newest member of Kage Collective, Neale James, does the links on this. Neale is a photographer, but was a BBC DJ many years ago. Phil Payne has a film in this episode too, but he also puts these programmes together.

INTRODUCTION TO ONE FRAME

This is the first instalment in a new series called ‘One Frame’ where I’ll be taking a single frame from my archive or something recently shot and giving some details around it. That could be technical information, background, what was happening in the scene, composition, or even just trying to explain why I like a certain picture, even though some wouldn’t consider it a good shot. These single frames will often be street photographs, but anything goes in this series. I’ll keep it loose!

SCHOOL DAYS

The picture above was taken by me when I was in high school. My science teacher Bobby Heard actually set the camera up on a tripod and placed a chair behind it so that pre-growth-spurt me could reach the camera, look through the viewfinder and press the button. This might have been first or second-year pupils (12 or 13 years old) but I really can’t remember.

What I do remember is the thrill and fear of this experience and going straight to the darkroom in the science lab, processing the film and printing a few copies. One of these copies I still have to this day, mounted on brown board and kept in a bag with clear plastic on one side and paper on the other. I was hooked, and spent a lot of my school time in the darkroom when I should have been in English or Maths…probably why my spelling is so bad to this day.

The chemist that I bought most of my film off around that time was selling a Knome Beta II enlarger, so I convinced my dad (who didn't take much convincing) that I needed that enlarger, some trays and chemicals, to set up a darkroom in the house. I still have that enlarger and those trays to this day.