I hate being ill. There's so much to do, and with flu (apparently) I've no energy to do any of it. It's also such a lovely day as I write this, there's all those phone boxes out there waiting to be photographed, and they'll just have to wait. Perhaps I'll upload some of the images I took over Christmas and New Year later today - I haven't looked at them yet. What I have decided to do is take out a subscription to the British Journal of Photography (see http://www.bjp-online.com/). It beats all the other so-called photography magazines (except Amateur Photographer) in my view. Their raison d'être seems to be to convince you that you can be a better photographer by buying all the expensive and unnecessary kit advertised in their magazines. No. You get to be a better photographer by taking more photographs. BJP is also the best window into what's going on in the world of contemporary photography at the moment.

Finally, I'm now in contact with a real red phone box nerd, thanks to Flickr. Have a look at http://www.flickr.com/people/robert_punk/ - he's Robert Ore, lives in Edenbridge in Kent, and has at least  four phone boxes in his garden including a Doctor Who Tardis and two K6s. What a guy.

Back from the hols yesterday. I took "A Beginning Light" by Katherine Hoffman with me. It's a biography of Alfred Stieglitz, American photographer, dealing with his early years 1890 - 1917. He was instrumental in making photography the modern art form that we know it today. His work is beautifully lyrical, and is teaching me a lot about interpretation and composition, not least to really look at how the image is put together before the shutter is pressed. One of my favourite quotes of his is "Nearly right is child's play". Probably his best known image is "The Steerage" (1907). His early work comprised a lot of what we would call today street photography, notably "Winter - Fifth Avenue" (1893) - left. Interestingly, the version of the image in the book has a pile of railway sleepers in the extreme bottom left corner, which Stieglitz brushed out in the print shown here. Nothing new there, then.


Oh, and I did take loads of holiday snaps, all with the GF1, for which I now have a viewfinder. But that's for a future post.

Busy weekend photographically. Phone boxes Saturday morning, then Elaine's Aurora choir in the Pavements in Chesterfield, then an afternoon going round the stalls on Chesterfield market. The society is working alongside Chesterfield Borough Council, photographing progress with the market redevelopment. My task last Saturday and yesterday was to go round as many of the market stalls as I could in the time, talking to the traders and taking pictures if they'd let me.

I suppose I talked to a dozen traders in the outside market yesterday. Every one of them was friendly, helpful and cooperative, and no-one declined to have their picture taken. The message I was getting, though, was one of uncertainty. They weren't sure what was happening. I got rumours varying from "it's all been cancelled" to "they're starting in January" and everything in between. With these sorts of projects, communication is everything, in both directions.

The society is thinking of trying to get a board up somewhere in the indoor section of the market, so that we can put some photos up. A number of traders asked what was happening to the photos we are taking, and this is one idea. We'll see. I might also just print some A5 ones off at Jessops and hand them out. That would be fun.

Finally, here's another phone box: this one's near Belper.

Looking back through the digital images that remain on my Mac, I see that the first image is dated 16 September 2002. I did have a digital camera before that (1999 I think), but it and the images are long gone. I remember paying about £250 for a 1 megapixel point and shoot around this time.

But my photography goes back a long way before, and I have my father to thank for that. He was an amateur photographer (nothing serious, he sent his films away to Boots), but I used to get the old camera when he bought a new one. I remember getting a Brownie 127 when I was about 9, and taking pictures of Blenheim Palace with it on a school trip.

This would have been in the late fifties. It's interesting to think that photography as a means of expression had been around only just over 100 years at that time. Here's a picture my dad took of me and a friend, age 9, being bossed around by my grandad on the beach at Weston Super Mare.

Thanks to Gary Clarke for a fascinating evening tonight on studio portraits and lighting. Interesting also to see Gary's influences, including the famous Edward Weston peppers. Steve Williams has agreed to do a short write-up for the Derbyshire Times Grass Roots section. This was the last meeting before Christmas. See you all again in the New Year.

My name is Geoff Hicks. I'm president of Chesterfield Photographic Society, and this is my blog. It is undergoing a severe case of conception, birth and development at the moment. Comments very welcome.