while cleaning under the bed last weekend i pulled out a box of old photos, and found some early shots of alt worship that didn't get onto smallfire.org back in the day. there were various reasons for this:
1. they weren't technically very good. i was learning about film speed so they are mostly dark or blurred.
2. smallfire.org started back in the days of dial-up, when large and numerous images on a webpage were not welcome. so the selection was severely edited and the published image size was small.
3. online storage capacity was limited and slow to access.
4. they were prints, so i had to spend time scanning and processing.
but these constraints have gone, and the not-very-good pictures are now interesting, as records of how things/people were. and the good shots deserve a better viewing, and i'm better at photoshopping them.
so:
my very first alt worship photos were taken at the 'reimagining worship' conference 8th-10th may 1998, at the round chapel in hackney: some conference shots, the beautiful labyrinth by 'live on planet earth' [now l8r], and the closing service at grace 'whose alternative?'. my flash went off during the labyrinth - that was the first lesson i learned...
there are a few shots of the 'spirit' service july 98, with the rotary clothes line. and 'the sin of holiness' with mike riddell. you can see how we used to keep the church dark, because it was dingy and full of pews - our lighting came from candles, tvs and projections [slides not video!], and spotlighting for stations.
'communion - what's it about?' was our first experiment with holy communion and our first cafe-format service. the eucharist was the third course of a meal. this idea and the cafe would run and run. the prevalence of red wine as the drink in the grace after-service cafe is the continuing trace.
more later. there are a couple of more recent grace services that never made the cut for smallfire.org at the time, but which look good to me now. there is some early vaux stuff that i think i can do a better job with.
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