THE DANGERS OF NIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

BY FRANK ROONEY

In Liverpool a bag of charlie has a street value of £5. I’m not exactly sure what “charlie” is but I know it gets you off your face and there are people out there who would eat your spleen for the price of a bag. I toyed with the idea of having my forehead tattooed with the words… “MUG ME! YOU’D GET ENOUGH TO SCORE MORE SMACK THAN YOU COULD SHAKE A COLLAPSED VEIN AT”. But that seemed excessive and even with the receding hairline, it probably wouldn’t all fit. Instead I opted for the more socially acceptable option of buying about a grands worth of Canon camera kit and took to photographing the City alone at night (same outcome but without the risk of catching anything icky from a manky needle).

Out with my kids one day at Otterspool, I’d noticed that the flight path directed the planes taking off from Speke airport low over Garston Docks. As is usually the case, this modest photo opportunity evolved over time into something jaw-dropping. After the image had fermented for a couple of weeks in my imagination, I remembered the planes having to skim the roofs of tin huts and weave in and out of cranes in order to make their ascent. (For a reality check, see the accompanying pic). It was a shot I had to have! And I had to take it at night (or pretty close to dark).

I do a lot of night photography. I love it. The City takes on a new personality. It throws off its work clothes and slips into something more alluring, sultry. It sparkles and teases in unexpected places and there’s that voyeur’s thrill of getting a peek at something you are not really entitled to see. At its best, it is a tingle up and down the spine time.

But there is a price to pay. This renders me vulnerable to the swamp-life out there that would like to unburden me of my photography equipment. I was aware of this as I prepared for the shoot. Pulling on my second pair of socks I dismissed it with my usual bravado that goes along the lines of… “Want my camera do they? I’d like to see them try!” Because like a lot of middle aged men, in the comfort of my own home I am a Ninja assassin! Obviously, this opinion of myself has no basis in any kind of objective reality.

(Although in the interest of balance I should point out that I did once win a fight, but that was many years ago when I was still at school. She was in the year below me, wore thick Bakelite Nazi Health glasses and was still in callipers from being run over. It was a close run thing but that bitch will think twice before giving me another dirty look!).

It was soon to be brought home to me just how vulnerable we are photographing on the streets alone at night. I packed my gear and cycled to the Garston end of the River Walk. That is to say, I drove the four miles or so from home to the car park at Otterspool and cycled the remaining couple of hundred yards. I consider myself to be one of the few remaining genuine cyclists. I use the bike only when it is a less strenuous option than walking. Back when mankind was young, life was hard, so someone made it a little easier by inventing the wheel. More recently, someone linked a couple of them with a cross-bar, added a saddle and made life easier still. But today people spit in the face of this noble labour saving invention. They fill rucksacks with house bricks and go looking for hills to pedal up. Not this hombre! A similar thing has happened in the field of exploration.

Genuine heroes like Shackelton and Amundsen endured great hardships whilst doing everything in their power to make life as comfortable as possible. For them it was the ends and not the means that counted. Today the opposite is true. Everywhere has been discovered now, so you get English toffs inventing spurious records to break; like being the first to reach the North Pole dragging a cooker behind them and this is supposed to make us all bleary eyed and patriotic. Anyway, in the true spirit of Drake and Mallory, I got myself by car and bike to the photo op. (I omitted Scott of the Arseantics from my roll of honour because revisionist historians don’t rate him and nor do I. That feller [Captain Oates] who said, “I may be some time”, strikes me as a decent enough bloke though!)

It was mid-November and bitterly cold. Almost dark, the place was deserted. To my right was the Mersey: to my left the last of the rectangular grassed fields that run the length of the southern end of the River Walk. In front of me the paved walkway came to an end and the river was cordoned off by railings. Beyond those, in the near distance was Garston Docks. I leant my bike against the railings and got out my camera strap stand thing.

This was another reason why I wanted that particular shot. The, “strap stand thing”, was something to be used instead of a tripod, and the handrail that ran atop the railings afforded me the opportunity to use it for the first (and up to now, only) time. I had spent eight notes on it in the auction that we’d had at the club earlier in the year. Eight notes isn’t a lot of money, unless it’s paid for something you feel destined to go to your grave never having used. In that case, along with being out of pocket to the tune of eight big ones, you feel like a mug. Not wishing to go to my grave feeling like a mug, I left my tripod at home and packed the strap stand thing. It was a swine to secure to the handrail. I was clueless as to how it was supposed to work. It had straps and pullies and a mini vice clamp, all of which seemed to bear no relation to each other. I began to doubt that it had anything to do with cameras at all. I convinced myself that I’d seen the exact same contraption in a porno flick adorning the wrists of a young man who had a Satsuma in his mouth. (I couldn’t swear to that though. It may have been a billiard ball in his mouth.) Suddenly, everything clicked into place and my 350D with 75 – 300 lens was bolted to the handrail.

The planes steadfastly refused to skim roof-tops or weave in and out of cranes. (Passenger safety before the thrill of aviation; Douglas Bader would have puked in disgust!) I reasoned that I might still get a decent shot once it got really dark. I hoped to use a slow shutter speed to capture a light trail over the docks from an ascending plane. While I waited, I stamped my feet and looked at Garston. The time it takes to tire of looking at Garston has to be measured in nano-seconds. But I wasn’t bored for long.

In the street that abuts the last of the green fields, a car came to a halt. Two men and a dog got out. The dog was huge; real hefty. Its coat was milk-white and if I had to guess I’d say it was a Bull Mastiff. But that would be twee and old-fashioned of me. No thug these days would be seen out with any kind of breed that the Kennel Club recognises. It’s all hybrids now, mixes of anything big and mental. I knew straight off it was nasty. Dogs, especially city dogs, bound off when confronted with a bit of grass. It must ignite in them some kind of genetic memory of when they were free of the yoke of domestication. They go all stupid faced and playful and bound off. Not this one. This one didn’t bound, instead it stretched its legs, lit up a smoke and sauntered off; a meandering saunter that led inevitably to me.

I watched its progress every step of the way. Instead of a collar it had wore one of those things that wrap around the chest and back, the canine equivalent of a leather muscle vest. When it reached me, it stumped its smoke out on my shoe and went into its routine. The hairs along its spine stood up and it growled a deep rich purr, (like Barry White only scary rather than melodic.) Not content with invading my body space (which would have been frightening enough), it actually made physical contact! It leant its weight against me, forcing me against the railings and rubbed its shoulders and ribcage against my upper thigh. The rumble of that rich growl made my leg vibrate. The two Hillbillies who were following in on the same meandering course were in no particular hurry to reach us. It was just me and the dog. The theory goes something along the lines of…
“Show no fear and early on give it a swift unflinching smack to establish that you are the alpha male”. I decided that I would be the alpha male some other time with some other dog and instead settled for just not wetting myself.

When the Hillbillies eventually caught up, neither of them made any attempt to get the dog away from me. Hillbilly number one said something lame along the lines of…
“It won’t bite.”
The dog still growled: bared its teeth and pinned me to the railings, so as a reassurance and apology, “It won’t bite”, was pathetically inadequate. But then again, it was never really meant to reassure or apologise. I reasoned that he was a coward who enjoyed the fleeting power that terrorising people with such a beast gave him. Why walk the streets with a shot gun when you can quite legally achieve the same result with the Great White on legs?

The two men leaned against the rail either side of me and all three of us stared at Garston in silence. It crossed my mind to ask them if they could hear the sound of duelling banjos but instead I examined my options. I thought of grabbing my camera and speeding off into the night but that was a non-starter for a couple of reasons:

I wasn’t speeding off anywhere on that or any other bike. I’ve been known to fall off bikes by virtue of the fact that I couldn’t maintain enough forward momentum to keep upright;
The camera wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry either because it was bolted to the rail with that stupid bondage paraphernalia that I’d bought at the auction.

I took stock of the situation… The contrast between my earlier cocky risk assessment when I was at home and the reality of the situation was crushing. Two men backed up by a big nasty dog stacked against me armed with sarcasm…
Had he wished, Hillbilly number one could have informed me… “I’m having your camera; he’s having your bike and the dog’s after a new bitch. You’re it!”

(Of course if he had said that I would have responded… “Not in this life, Jethro! The camera and bike stay where they are. And whatever me and the dog get up to is our business and no-one else’s!” My mother bought me up in the belief that you can never have too many friends. I am however starting to question her judgement. The same woman now believes that elements within the Government want to close down Netto because the Cold War is over.)

The outlook was bleak.

From out of the gloom a man on a bike trundled up to where we stood, collapsed against the railings and proceeded to have a coronary. He was one of those who saw bikes as a way of making life harder. Everything about him and the bike was shiny new. It was all obviously bought on a whim in the depths of some fat bloke’s mid-life crisis! He had somehow squeezed himself into a Lycra Day-Glo Tour de France type outfit and wore one of those polystyrene crash helmets. Those things should have the same designation as the lifeboats on the Titanic: strictly women and children only. (A fractured skull is a small price to pay to maintain a bit of dignity.) I don’t know where he had ridden in from but by the way he wheezed and twitched, my best guess would be somewhere in the vicinity of Beijing. He looked ridiculous. (He was ridiculous.) And I’d rarely been happier to see anyone!

It was as if a spell had been broken. I fought the urge to kiss him and packed my kit away. I had nothing but time. The camera and stand came away surprisingly easy from the rail. I saddled up and embarked on the forty five minute cycle ride to my car, parked two hundred yards away. I felt a little guilty about leaving the psychedelic pear shaped thing on the bike, but when I glanced back over my shoulder the Hillbillies where headed towards their car and I know he was still alive because I saw his feet twitch. (A friend of mine who claims to know such things tells me that this sometimes happens post mortem. I don’t lose any sleep about it though.)

The thing is, for all I know the two men could have been model citizens out walking their dog. They may have accidentally scared the crap out of me. But the point is, they may have had ill intent. And if they had, despite my delusions of invincibility, there wasn’t a great deal I could have done about it. So to those club members equally prone to self-deception, I would like to simply say…

“Be careful out there, amigos!”

Please send any comments to Frank