​Breaking the Deadpan: A Sunday morning exercise in Kilmarnock

​Tomorrow morning, while most of Ayrshire is still firmly tucked under their duvets, I will be slipping into Kilmarnock. The goal is to be on the streets by 5:30 am. It’s a tactical choice; at that hour, the pesky people and troublesome traffic haven't yet arrived to clutter up my framing. I’m looking for a clean, silent, and entirely empty slate.

​Normally, a trip like this would have involved a mobile HQ setup, but with Dezzy Bee recently moving on to pastures new, I'm hijacking my wife’s car for the morning commute. It's a shame, really - a bit of automotive red against the gray morning concrete would have made for some brilliant deadpan framing, but the show must go on.

​This isn't a travelogue, a city tour, or a "how-to" photography guide. It is a conceptual exploration of moments trapped within a frame. I am approaching this with a highly restricted, deliberate kit list and a desire to give the established rules of deadpan filmmaking a gentle, sexagenarian shove, while pushing my stills to a grander scale. Look at it as a form of later-life punk rock attitude. I am turning 61 next month, after all - if I can’t engage in a bit of creative defiance now, when can I?

The Photography: Sid Dee, Manual Focus, and High-Res Panoramas

For the stills, I am imposing a strict structural limitation. I’m stripping away the versatility of my usual workhorse lenses and heading out exclusively with Sid Dee (my Canon 60D) and a single 24mm prime lens. Furthermore, I am abandoning all filters. No polarisers, no neutral density filters to smooth things out. Just raw glass, ambient morning light, and the sensor.

​The 24mm prime forces a specific discipline. Without the luxury of a zoom, I have to move my feet to compose. Deadpan photography traditionally demands an objective, almost detached view—straight lines, flat perspectives, and sharp focus throughout. I intend to respect that entirely for the photography. There will be no lens blur or soft backgrounds here; I want these urban scenes as crisp and perfect as I can possibly get them.

​To guarantee that absolute pixel-perfect clarity, I am completely abandoning auto-focus. I’ll be reverting to manual focusing for every single shot. When you are employing panoramic stitching techniques—capturing multiple overlapping frames to stitch together later into massive, high-resolution windows—you cannot afford to let the camera make decisions for you. Controlling the focal plane manually ensures that the grand, sweeping lines of the empty streets remain uniformly sharp from edge to edge, preserving every ounce of gritty, industrial detail.

​To elevate this beyond standard snapshots, I'll be employing panoramic stitching techniques. By capturing multiple overlapping frames with the 24mm prime, I can stitch them together later to create massive, high-resolution windows into Kilmarnock’s architecture. It allows me to capture the grand, sweeping lines of the empty streets without losing an ounce of gritty, industrial detail.​

The Video: Sonny Cameran’s Avant-Garde Rebellion

While the photos will chase objective perfection, the moving images captured on Sonny Cameran (my Sony Digital8) are where the rules get broken. Again, we are flying completely filter-free.

The choice of Sonny is highly deliberate. The vintage grit of that old CCD sensor brings a textured, nostalgic digital aesthetic that modern, ultra-sharp 4K setups simply cannot replicate. It has an inherent honesty to it.

The video is where the punk rock ethos really comes out to play. Classic deadpan filmmaking relies on static, locked-down frames where the subject moves with rigid predictability—often walking into the dead centre of the frame, stopping, and staring dramatically out into the void.

I want to subvert that expectation through two distinct disruptions:

• The Depth Disruption: Unlike the sharp focus of my panoramic photos, the video will feature intentional foreground blurring. I’ll be allowing foreground elements - whether that’s myself or Sid Dee entering the frame - to hold sharp focus while the background subtly softens, breaking the flat convention of the genre.

• The Misdirected Gaze: Instead of stopping in the dead centre of the shot, I plan to walk right to the absolute edge of the frame before halting. Rather than a classic, symmetrical look, I’ll be executing a dramatic, off-camera gaze from the absolute margins of the composition.

​By playing with the boundaries of the frame, the video becomes less about Kilmarnock itself and more about the mechanics of composition and the viewer's expectations.​

 

 

Contemplating the Frame

By leaving behind the modern fluidity of the action squads and drones, and relying on older, more stubborn gear, the process becomes inherently analytical. Every shot has to be considered.

​When this footage eventually hits the editing timeline, the slow pace of the process will suit the philosophy of this project. It’s about stepping back from the instant-gratification culture, moving away from the hunt for digital "likes," and focusing purely on the relationship between the lens, the creator, and an empty Scottish street at dawn, with a "slow-web" aesthetic.

​Let's see what the Kilmarnock concrete has to say at 5:30 am.