Pete Ashton's Weblog

Available in three flavours.

Take your pick. (And let me know which one you like!)

Previous Quadtych

Ooh, I do like snow! Christmas I can take or leave. Birthdays are nice but no big deal. But a forecast of heavy snow has me giggling like a kid and, for once, waking up really early so I can catch as much of it as possible. Maybe this is because I lived in Singapore until the age of eight and, reportedly, didn't get on with the heat. Snow was what I wanted and you don't get snow on the equator. You just get the same temperature 365/6 days a year.

Now Birmingham doesn't get a huge amount of snow. Yes, we get snow, but for some reason not in any large quantities. Maybe it all runs out before it reaches the middle of the country or something. Last year we got a light dusting and that was it. The year before there was an inch, maybe. On Wednesday six inches were reported to be due. Even allowing for journalistic integrity and lopping 2/3 off that it's still an impressive amount of snow. Then, the night before, the forecast showed heavy snow starting at 4.00am and continuing all day. I put out the alert on Flickr. Big snow coming. Set your alarms.

Thursday morning came and, despite only getting four hours sleep, I was up like shot at 7.00am. By eight I was in the city centre. Everyone on the commuter train was miserable. I'd forgotten what commuting was like. Poor fuckers, I thought. As luck would have it I immediately bumped into Matt who'd started out at seven, the hardcore bastard. We then proceeded to walk the city, shooting it like it was all new. Which it was.

From Digbeth through the Cathedral past Victoria Square under the library, along the canals, into Brindley Place, across Broad Street, towards the Peace Gardens and down to Smallbrook Queensway. With our cameras hidden under our coats we trudged through the storm, seeking out the shots and taking them. Come midday we were starting to lose it. Our feet were cold, our faces red and our eyes sore. But we'd gotten the goods and went our separate ways.

Matt's put his photos here, though he hasn't processed them all yet. Here's my set (slideshow probably best) which contains 75 photos. 75! It's like shooting fish in a barrel - everywhere you look the city is beautiful and new and the contrast is built in. The Flickr Birmingham folk are adding their photos to this thread and, in theory, using this tag if you want to wade through all of them.

Today it snowed it Birmingham. And it was good.

Bournville / Selly Oak, November 06

I got my first film taken with the Vivtar Ultra Wide & Slim back last week. These shitty little cameras are quite popular at the moment, especially in the West Midlands thanks to lo-fi king Harri B scoring a box load and distributing them for a quid each. I understand they're quite hard to get hold of generally, especially in the States, so cheers Harri!

The camera itself is nothing special to look at - a standard plastic compact that takes 35mm film. What's cool about it is the very wide lens (22mm) and the appalling quality of said lens. Not only do you get a great warp but the lens flare can be quite fantastic. It also requires a hell of a lot of light. The above photo was take on a fairly sunny day, albeit in the shadows. You need bright direct sunlight for this baby.

I haven't quite got it to work yet, probably because I put slightly expired Ilford PAN 400 film in which is a bit too grainy and contrasty to really get the benefits (though I really like the feel of the PAN and will certainly try it again in the Nikon). A roll of 10 year expired colour is at the labs so we'll see how that worked out next week.

Naturally there's a Viv group on Flickr which is one of my favourites. Actually, as Flickr gets busier and more prone to the madness of crowds these lo-fi / mod groups are quite the oasis.

Jug of Ale, Moseley, November 12th
Full set of 24 photos

Went to see Dufus on Sunday. They were very good indeed as were the support Mr Bones & The Dreamers who I intend to check out again on the 30th. I'd seen Dufus supporting Jeffrey Lewis last May and wrote about them here but that review can pretty much be discounted as representative of this gig as the lineup was completely different. Except the drummer. I think he was the same. Looking at their recent CD I realised that Dufus is basically lead bloke Seth with about 24 other musicians who come and go so every tour is probably different. Last time they were a bouncy bloke-heavy party rock band. This time they were more of an intense, performance art-ish folk-rock band. Maybe. Definitely on the odd side of the spectrum and in a really good way. The monstrous beard that Seth has grown in the last 18 months only added to this dissonance and it was only when they played songs I recognised from the Ball of Design CD that I was 100% they were the same band. It was a terrific set lasting for what seemed like a good hour or so and I'd highly recommend seeing them again, whatever their construction.

This was also a slightly different gig for me as I'd been asked by Mark of Iron Man Records to take some photos of the band in return for some quality schwag, the closest I've gotten to a paid shoot in this regard. I've done gig shoots on a pro-bono basis before but this felt different somehow. Kinda professional and very enjoyable. It helped that Dufus were a very photographable band but I'm really pleased with the results (slideshow). Of course I can't take all the credit. The new 50mm lens did most of the work and I took 580 shots so the chances of them all being shit was slim, but even so I think some kind of corner has been turned and it's got me pondering. This, of course, is assuming Mark is happy with them.

Five new prints in Pete's Print Shop

(I think I may have to widen the selection as it's getting hard to chose just 16)

I can always tell when I'm getting over some kind of illness or funk. I start changing my environment. It's not so much tidying as radically moving everything around. In the last 36 hours or so I've piled all the small press comics and graphic novels in the alcove of my attic garrett with the intention of eventually thinning them right down. Meanwhile the space that used to have shelves now has a new desk. Currently it's piled up with non comics stuff that used to be on shelves and now has no home but we'll deal with that later. This new desk is for photography - building new contraptions, sorting out (and eventually selling) prints, that kind of thing. You'll have picked up a subtext here.

I never did write my Farewell to Comics essay. It would probably have been very long, somewhat tortured and rather dull to most people so it's probably for the best. Farewell comics. You did good by me and I hope in my small way I did good by you.

That's not to say I've quit reading comics. If anything I'm reading and enjoying them more. Brendan McCarthy's Solo was terrific and Scott McCloud's Making Comics came through from Amazon this week. On first read it's very good and rather dense with a lot of interesting ideas which can be applied to artforms outside of comics, not so much pushing you to new adventures but codifying and crystallizing things you already knew but were having trouble putting into words. Naturally I apply to them photography since that's my big thing right now.

The big one for me was his notion of four tribes of comics culture. Briefly these are:

Classicists: "Excellence, hard word, mastery of craft, the quest for enduring beauty."
Animists: "Putting content first, creating life through art, trusting one's intuition."
Formalists: "Understanding of, experimentation with and loyalty to the comics form."
Iconoclasts: "Honesty, vitality, authenticity and unpretentiousness. Putting life first."

What this told me was I don't need to worry about my recent move away from "perfect" photography (classicist) towards more fucked up experiments like Through The Viewfinder (iconoclast), partly because they're both equally valid forms of expression but also because, goddammit, the comics I was into were rarely if ever in the classicist camp. Give me Tom Hart over Hal Foster any day. So it makes sense that as I get more comfortable with that art of taking photos and start pushing my own envelopes I'm going to be drawn to the stylistic equivalent of the scratchy free-form cartoonists I love.

One possible reason for my confusion is that I don't really know much about photography. Everything I know now has only been learned in the last year or so and my awareness of the masters of the artform is negligible at best. Until recently photography was about recording and replicating reality. There's an interesting thing - I shall make a record of that thing as accurately as possible. Now it's something else and I don't really have the vocabulary yet to express what it is without sounding like a tosser. I suspect it's Art and I've never really considered myself to be an Artist. Maybe it's time I did.

-- -- --

Illness update: Really bad fever on Tuesday, kinda weak on Wednesday for the blood test but didn't go green which was odd, much better Thursday (hence the room rearrangement) and a clear head for the first time in ages on Friday but still planning to take it easy over the weekend. Will get results from doctor middle of next week. Could be, after all this, that all I needed was a bit of down time physically and mentally. Or not.

Movie update: A History Of Violence, watched this evening, is a terrific film. No big surprise given it's Cronenberg at the helm but worth saying all the same. I think I need to go on a Cronenberg binge again. I taped most of his back catalogue from the Alex Cox Moviedrome days but they're lost now and it's been a long time since I saw Shivers, Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, et al.

Weather update: First couple of rather chilly evenings have injected themselves into our balmy September. Here it comes...

At the top of your Flickr account, should you have one, is a count of the number of "views" you've had. This, I believe, counts the number of times your photos have been loaded up on their own pages on Flickr and doesn't count remote hosting (such as when I post to this blog) or viewing in RSS feeds. Last Monday my views passed 100,000. To put this in some perspective, most of the other Flickr users I've asked (which, to be honest, is about four) have between 1,000 and 6,000 views. I was rather chuffed.

A week later I had 102,000 views. That's two thousand in a week. That's actually quite a lot. I got a bit suspicious.

There are a number of explanations for this.

1) I'm a shockingly popular and everyone loves my photos. Actually I've got a fairly average rep for someone who's been on Flickr for two years. 186 people have me as a contact and my photos get between 5 and 20 views in their first day or so of being uploaded. I've also been concentrating on the Birmingham photo scene a lot this year and don't post to themed or popular groups that much. I might have a tangible rep within my niche but I'm no Laura Kicey. So that's not the answer.

2) I'm a Pool Tart. Check this guy's photo out. It's a pretty good photo and its owner is somewhat proud that it's been viewed 9,250 times. But look down the sidebar at how many groups he's submitted it to. I don't do this, partly because Flickr make it quite longwinded to spam the groups and partly because it really fucking annoys me when people spam groups I administer. So that's not the answer.

3) I'm a Tag Whore. Generally I like to tag my photos properly. Some people don't. Like this cock who has tagged his stupid Flickr Badge with seemingly every word in the dictionary and then some. I found this because he'd used one of our deliberately obscure Birmingham Flickrmeet tags, jqfm2006. The prick. By polluting the tag system he's gathered 1,970 views for this "photo". Needless to say I don't do this, so that's not the answer.

4) The hits are coming from somewhere else and have nothing to do with my activities on Flickr. I think this is the answer.

Here's a mirror of my Most Viewed Photos page (you can't see it on Flickr itself unless you're me). You'll hopefully notice this doesn't have many of my "better" photos and bears no relation to my personal Top 100, something that has often bugged me. Number one is the Working Gloves montage with 2050 views which gave me an enormous clue. The related Working Gloves blog post on this site is one of my main Google honeypots, gathering (until I closed comments on old posts) 67 messages from Pakistani glove exporters who thought I was a shop which in turn got it indexed as the prime directory for Pakistani glove exporters, so the Flickr views are probably coming from here. Down at number nine is Polysics - Fumi, taken at their Barfly gig last November (and, I should add, one I'm quite proud of). Out of curiosity I Googled polysics photo and there it is at number three. Same goes for (sigh...) Monkey Penis.

Nuff said.

So having made stats watching utterly pointless for my blog Google has fucked up my Flickr stats as well, which isn't that surprising given how much I link to my Flickr stream from here. It's kinda ironic that while half the world is scrambling by means fair or foul to get up the Google tree here I am with PageRank of 6 (which in turn has given my Flickr stream a PR of 5) and it's a mild irritant.

In some ways it's nice to be this visible but in others it's a bit of a pain. I'm sure a significant number of valued long-term readers came here via a random Google search but they only add up to a few dozen. The hundreds of thousands of others mostly come here by mistake and take the blog completely out of context and I could do without them. The reason I closed comments on all my older posts wasn't because of spam (touch wood that's reasonably under control right now) but because idiots who couldn't read were leaving comments that showed off their inability to use a keyboard and it was getting boring. That said, I'm not ready to enter the gated community environment of LiveJournal or Vox or to strip down my RSS feed and stop search engines indexing me. I'm kinda stuck in the middle ground.

Moan over.

I've mentioned Through The Viewfinder before on this blog but this morning I took the £3.50 Duaflex camera scored on eBay and built my own TTV Contraption...

And in the afternoon I took it out on the bus for a test drive...

It's all terribly exciting!

(If you're not already aware, the Duaflex is one of those old box cameras where you look through the top and through the upper lens via a mirror. The film itself is exposed through the lower lens but we don't worry about that. Instead we point a digital camera down onto the viewfinder and shoot that. The contraption is necessary to hold the digital in place and keep any stray light from reflecting off the viewfinder. This weird combination of lenses trying to work together creates unique effects and colors not to mention being great fun to use.)

Some gigs and things I'm going to in the near future.

This Thursday is Jeffrey Lewis at the Jug of Ale, Moseley. The last time I saw him his guitar was about to explode and the History Of Communism had reached the Russian Revolution. Support is from The New York Howl and Will Tattersdill, aka Faceometer, who, as it happens, was supporting Lewis when I saw him in May 05 and I'd been wanting to catch him again ever since.

Next weekend, being September 2nd / 3rd, is the Moseley Folk Festival which sounds terribly tweedy but should, I think, be rather awesome. Most of the acts I don't know (not historically being a folk fan) but those I've recently seen (The Destroyers, Circulus) have impressed no end. Tickets are pricey (£38.50 for the weekend) but what the hell.

Way in the distance on November 9th is The Flaming Lips at the NIA. Tickets are £23.00 and are available here but watch out for the 37.5% booking fee, the buggers. Still, it'll be well worth it.

It's also my intention to check out A Slice Of The Pie, an intriguing gig/club/event thing held at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth on the first Sunday of each month. Here be some photos.

In photography land the Birmingham Flickrmeets group has started stretching its wings with a couple of impromptu meets. On Saturday we're doing a night shoot with tripods around the Brindley Place canals and then next Friday afternoon we'll be shooting the Midlands leg of the Tour of Britain cycle race as it ends in Birmingham.

The big one, however, is Artsfest, a weekend of free arts events in central Birmingham on September 8th-10th where the Flickrmeet group have been invited by the organisers to documents the event with press passes and everything. Which is, of course, fucking cool. The photos will be in this group after the event.

And that's about it for now.

So I'm looking through the 24 (so far) comments on last Wednesday's Final Step post and I'm wondering what to make of it all. Perhaps the lesson to be learned (other than that Matt B is the new Andy in ubiquity terms) is opinions are like rain when it comes to photography and we might speculate that this is inherent in an artform that depends on technology. We might be wrong in that but, hell, it's a vaguely interesting notion.

I also learned that people take blog postings, or at least some of my blog postings, as something more than off the cuff blurtings of a mind trying to wrap itself around new concepts. And also that unless your relatively longer posts are carefully structured people will skim them and miss the qualifications and suchlike, leaping instead for the blunt and more often than not mistaken conclusion.

And such is life.

So let's try some short paragraphs which aren't intended to tie together and form an "opinion" or a "truth".

For me, at the moment, photography is moving from recording the world to something else. I don't know if it's something more but I think it might be. While I'm happy to ride this train without overanalyzing it, it is, perhaps, useful to take notes along the way.

I always knew it was wrong but even so, seeing lovely photos on Flickr I had this sense that, beyond the composition and depth of field, the camera itself was responsible for the image. Having now used one of the more commonly used professional-esque cameras I know that to be false. It'll focus perfectly and the image is pixel sharp at 100% (something the Fuji S7000 never managed) but the colors, while better than most, ain't good enough for me. Let me repeat that. They're not good enough for me. At this stage in my journey through camera land. I want more from my images. The camera alone isn't giving me that.

This is all subjective. This is why it's all good. If it wasn't all subjective it'd be dull as fuck and I'd be doing something else. I might also add that subjectivity works through time as well as on people, and I'll let you figure out what the hell I'm on about there for yourselves.

The Wedding Crashers is actually not a bad movie, when considered amongst others of that ilk. Ilk. There's a word you don't see used enough these days. Ilk. What a nice word. Makes one think of beasts roaming the grasslands of a far off country. Ilk.

Ilk.

Yeah, cameras themselves process the image and there are all sorts of settings you can use. I don't do that. I'd rather mess with the photo myself with a little control. But even so, that processing is still something that happens after the image has been digitally recorded. I confess I have no idea who I'm agreeing or arguing with on this and what the point was to begin with.

I refer a number of people to paragraph 11, the one that starts with "Important note" and continues thus: "This is not to say every photo has to be messed around with. Judging that the photo doesn't need any more work is the same as working on it." This is one of my favourite photos taken with the S7000. It came out of the camera like this and needed no post-work whatsoever. On the other hand, this looked like shit before I played with the curves. I am a fan of raw photos when the raw photos look good. I'm also a fan of taking a somewhat dull but interestingly composed photo and making it dazzle. So, um, there.

Are you bored? I might be. Tea break I think.

[time passes]

Ahh... Tea...

Actually, I was thinking this was a processing-good vs processing-bad argument but looking back I don't think that's what I was on about. (No, of course I don't know what I was on about. It's a blog post. By me. Durrr!) It's really about something bigger which I think Fran touched upon when she emailed me the quote that Goodwin posted. To save you the scrolling: "Digital Imaging has released photography from its obligation to be truthful... The digital revolution in photography is leading us into a new medium, exceedingly exciting, but one that we shouldn't call photography at all. It comes with its own distribution system, that of internet and screens...it hasn't been named yet because it hasn't been properly defined yet." It's more about an awareness that photographs aren't and never have been truthful which, of course, everyone knows but somehow conveniently forgets. And I include myself in that. Both those photos I linked to before the tea break are false which is why I love them so much. They create something new from the reality which, I guess, is what art is all about. I guess the desire to record reality is strong because, as photographers, we are initially struck by something we see with our eyes and try to copy it with our machines. Personally I'm getting less happy with the results where I set up a shot and more happy with the accidents, with the process of discovery that Photoshop allows me. I have this desire to learn what it was that happened during those "accidents" and to try to replicate that without ruining it. I have no idea where I'm going with this paragraph so I'm going to end it.

Nick Knight, by the way, probably knows his way around a dark room better than most given that he's been around since the early 80s.

I referenced film a lot in that post. I might be able to summarise that a bit better. When I shoot film I hand over complete control to the chemicals. Other than the odd crop and the very occasional touch of lightening I don't do anything to the images once they come back from the dev shop. Partly this is because I have no desire whatsoever to go into a dark room and partly it's because I'm happy to let the chemicals do their unique work so it's a combination of ignorance and happenstance (if that's the right word). With digital photography my ignorance of the "digital darkroom" is rapidly decreasing and I don't trust the processing tools within the camera to produce interesting results. There's a menu in Photoshop called "Filter". With a small number of exceptions you don't want to be bothering with most of the tools therein as they are blunt presets. You want the fine control of Image > Adjustments. And a whole lot of time. Letting the camera pretend to be film rather that just letting it record the raw data is blunt. It may work wonders but it may not. I'm at the stage where I'd rather do it myself.

I probably didn't make it clear enough that I was really only talking about colour in that dread post, not composition, lenses or anything else. So consider this a clarity moment.

Another thing that springs to mind...

Oh, sod it. This post is long enough.

I'm about to reveal a secret. But first the science.

Cameras are, in essence, very simple machines. There's a hole at the front which lets light in, a barrier in the middle which raises on command and a receptor at the back which registers the image. Everything else is just stuff to make things easier and give the user control over the outcome but even this pretty much boils down to two thing: changing the size of the hole (aperture) and varying the amount of time the barrier is raised for (shutter speed).

The most important part of a camera is not the body. It's the lens and the receptor. A fucked lens and shite film will not give you a good photo (traditionally speaking, of course) no matter how expensive your camera body is. It's all about how the light gets in and what you've got recording it.

All film is not created equal. They all use different chemicals which react to the light in different ways, be it subdued tone or saturated colours. This is why film photographers pay more for their rolls than the average snapper of yesteryear - they're after a certain effect.

With your modern day digital camera the operation is nearly identical but the film is replaced with a sensor. This, when exposed to the light, records the light and creates a binary file which, when interpreted by a computer program, produces the image.

All the digital sensors in all the digital cameras pretty much produce the same sort of photo. Yes some are more crisp and detailed than others (and don't forget about the lens) but the basic colour balance, assuming the computer in the camera hasn't adjusted it, will be the same.

So when you see a lovely photo on Flickr with rich deep colours that looks somewhat unreal yet still beautiful it wasn't the camera that produced that. Either the subject was lit in a certain way or the effect, which previously would have been the result of the film used, was probably done in Photoshop*. That's the secret.

This is one of the reasons folk come to the conclusion that digital photography is "boring" compared to film. All their photos look the same - very crisp and perfect replications of reality with no depth or soul. And they're right - a digital camera on its own will produce the same sort of photo again and again because it's designed to do that, automatically correcting the exposure and white balance to preset levels. It soon gets very boring.

What's odd is how very few photographers admit to tweaking their digital photos in Photoshop and if they do it comes over as an admission of failure. There's this notion that the only pure photo is one that came out of the camera fully formed while that can be true for film it's a fallacy for digital.

Think about it. The chemical reaction that occurs on film (not to mention what happens in the dark room) is analogous to processing a digital image in Photoshop. If you don't do the latter you're missing out a step which is why your photos are boring.

(Important note: This is not to say every photo has to be messed around with. Judging that the photo doesn't need any more work is the same as working on it.)

So it's somewhat misleading that Flickr shows what camera was used on the sidebar of each photo page. Other than handling issues (which are important for getting a steady shot and twiddling the settings in a timely manner) the meat of the work is done by the lighting, the lens and in Photoshop. But none of these are recorded in the EXIF data which Flickr takes this information from so everyone thinks the Nikon D70s or Cannon 350D or whatever is responsible for the beautiful colours. But it's not. It's all done in Photoshop.

And that, I think, is a not a problem.

* or some other image editing software.

Chum-through-Flickr Harri B, who you might know as the guy who does the Through The Viewfinder photos amongst other left-field stuff, has turned out to be something of a renaissance man as he's also in a band called Routine. He sent out an email yesterday which I'll reproduce in full:

Hi,

As you may (or may not) know, I have a few audio projects that i'm involved with. One of them being "Routine" so I hope you bear with me while I outline it a little here. We are currently working on a show which has, at its heart, a new song called Everyone's Dying. Last week we recorded a live version with the audience joining in on the chorus (which was amazing!) and this is being mixed into the final track...We are also planning a picnic / party to record a video as part of the project.

Another part of the project is to have a photo slideshow, sooooooo, I'm getting in touch with my flickr contacts to see whether you would like to contribute an image to the slideshow?

We are looking for images that are personal to you, maybe people, friends family...An image which you may remember fondly for the rest of your life... that kind of thing.

It can be something from your stream or a new image if you like. All the images will have the title and photographers name during the slideshow. The slideshow will available for you online too once its finished. Also there will be a big link to Flickr should people wish to further check out your images.

(the whole shebang will take place at a local gallery late summer / early autumn...depends when we get everything finished!)

My problem is I haven't been thinking about my photos in this way for a while now - it's all been about the art/craft rather than the emotional resonance (yes, there is an overlap but not in this context) so I'm struggling somewhat. But I'm sure not everyone is a wanker like me in this regard so, with his permission, I'm extending the invite.

You can contact Harri (or Stu as he's know in reality) via Flickr or the band's site or MySpace, and needless to say, you don't have to be a Flickr user to be involved.

So I've been running these Flickrmeets in Birmingham for a few months now and it's been very good on so many levels, as you'll probably have picked up from the hyperbolic posts on this blog that follow each one. You'll note that they're called "Flickrmeets" being, as the are, meeting of people who use the photo sharing site Flickr. This is entirely accurate since none of these people would probably have met without their using Flickr, discovering the Birmingham group and finding like-minded souls on there.

Flickr was set up by a bunch of groovy folk in Canada a couple of years back. It quickly became popular because it was innovative and seemed to attract nice people who took good photos. Popularity in website terms is a double edged sword and scaling the service to deal with this new growth, especially as it was still in development (or beta, as it's known), proved to be a problem. Flickr was often slow and frequently offline as databases were stretched and more storage added. It looked like the service might buckle and die until Yahoo came along and bought it. Yahoo is pretty much a multinational corporation. While they left Flickr alone the service had become, essentially, a corporate entity. The founders of Flickr found themselves on the Yahoo board and everyone moved to California.

This is, of course, a good thing because it meant Flickr didn't die. A significant number of original users were up in arms, predicting a mass rape of the service just as Yahoo did to GeoCities back in the old days. I was pretty sure they were wrong as it was clear to anyone keeping a clear head that Yahoo didn't want Flickr - they wanted the people who created Flickr to make the rest of Yahoo more like Flickr and the only way they could do this was to adopt their baby and keep it safe. And it would seem I was right.

As Flickrmeets started to pop up all over the world the bods at Flickr noticed this as being an important part of the whole thang, so they set up a sidebar on the company blog and asked people to let them know when such things were occurring. In return they would send out some badges and stickers to persons organising events to distribute. Figuring free badges were free badges I duly gave them my address and a month or so later a large envelope arrived.

Flickr call this stuff "schwag" which, if you're somehow not familar with it, is a slightly sarcastic term for promotion items given to prospective clients at trade fairs. Those branded pens you've got that you have no idea where they came from - they're schwag. The t-shirt with a logo and vaguely witty phrase that you wear on Sunday mornings - that's schwag. By calling their offer of free badges and stickers schwag Flickr, probably unintentionally, played a postmodern gen-x slight of hand. We know you know these are promotional items and that our sending them out for free means we consider this to be a worthwhile investment in the promotion of our brand and we're not going to hide that because we're not a faceless corporate behemoth of a company. We're Flickr! We just found ourselves in the position to send you stuff so why they hell not?

But a spade is a spade and schwag is schwag and Yahoo is a multinational corporation with a net income of $1.896 Billion that does deals with the Chinese government.

On top of this I have something of a history as an anti-capitalist. Okay, typing that makes me cringe a little bit but I do have the first printing of No Logo, have been on a number of Reclaim The Streets and Mayday protests and had a subscription to SchNews. While I was never really a hardcore activist that was where I was coming from and in a number of ways still do.

And so here I am part of the street team for Yahoo.

You can understand my unease.

On the one hand I'm very happy to promote Flickr to those who might find it useful. I've gotten a hell of a lot from the service. In fact I'd say it's Flickr more than anything that's helped me improve my photography over the 18 months simply by giving me the motivation to take and post up my photographs and by exposing me to a wide array of quality images. The Flickrmeets too have been useful, allowing me to see how others see the same things I've seen. I would recommend anyone who is vaguely serious about the photos they take to get involved in a community that is friendly and supportive and doesn't have all the technobabble that usually comes with photographic sites.

And yet by organising these meets along with loosely co-managing the Birmingham Flickr groups to make them more useful and attractive to people, I am promoting a revenue earning division of Yahoo inc.

I've had this discussion with a couple of people and the general conclusion is it's not really a problem. The benefits do outweigh the moral dilemmas. As a user of the internet corporations like Yahoo and Google (who, I should add, I earn about $30 a month through hosting their adverts on my site) are unavoidable. But still, when I look at the photos from the last Flickrmeet and see everyone, including myself, branded with the Flickr logo pinned to their chests...

In conclusion the disconnect seems to come from how we use Flickr vs what it actually is. The system allows you to filter so that once you're set up you don't have to experience the millions of shit photos taken by idiots out there. You have your own small organic community of 100 or so people and the ability to follow leads to new interestingness. It certainly doesn't feel like part of an international corporate brand. It's more like a club or a gang, only new people come along via tags and the Explore pages. So a Flickrmeet just seems like a physical manifestation of this thing that we created online - Flickr just sold us the tools just as Jessops (or whoever) sold us our cameras. And, of course, online the Flickr logo is at the top of every page. Why shouldn't it be there in meatspace too? When I take photos the Fuji and Nikon logos are there loud and proud above my lens and on my strap. Flickr is just as if not more important to my photography so surely it has its place there? Right? Not right?

Y'know what? I wish I'd never sent off for that schwag...

The slow evolution of my Photoshop skillz continues and I feel I must share a new discovery, especially as I figured it out all by myself without using a book or nuffin.

You'll remember back in January I suggested using the Channel Mixer to convert colour photos to black and white because it gives you a fine control over each colour tone. (Or some shit.) The downside of this is it's a bitch of a tool to use.

Since then I've been using Curves pretty much exclusively as a layer, especially the Red Green and Blue colour paths to boost up the red and pull back on the blue without radically screwing with the contrast. Often I'd use this to prep stuff for black and white but having to flatten and desaturate to preview was a bit of a bind.

Then I had a flash of what now seems fucking obvious. Here are the steps.

1. Open your colour image.
2. Create a new Curves Adjustment layer.
3. Create a new Hue / Saturation layer.
4. Make sure the Hue / Saturation layer is above the Curves layer.
5. Pull the Saturation right down to -100 so the image is monocrome.
   (You can record these steps as an Action)
6. Go back to the Curves and start playing with the colours.
7. When you're happy, flatten and save.

Hope that comes in handy to at least someone.

As part of adjusting to this 9am - 1pm work routine (which may turn into a permanent thing but I haven't heard yet so we'll wait and see) I've noticed that when I get home around 1.30 my mind treats it as the "end of the day" despite having only worked for four hours. So I have a bit of food, putter on the 'puter for a while and at around 5pm start feeling a little sleepy. This, of course, is a bad thing. If I do try and get 20 winks they turn into 20,000,000 winks, because I'm shit like that, and I end up not getting a decent night's sleep. So to try and rectify this I'm experimenting with a brisk walk as soon as I start getting dozy using the camera as motivation to do so. I'm drip-feeding the photos into Flickr (most will end up in the Bournville set) but this one came out very nicely:

I always like that moment when you see something you know really well from a completely different perspective. If I manage to keep this afternoon walk thing up I expect this to happen a fair bit. Maybe I'll even hit that magic moment with that darned Rest House. Such an icon and so hard to shoot right...

Yesterday I set up a new Flickr group, Birmingham Graffiti and Street Art, because, y'know, vandalism is cool as long as it's pretty, and in the process put the standard "this is not Alabama" warning on the description. I think Birmingham is fairly unique in that it gets confused with its post-colonial namesake a fair bit, probably because the American Brum is not that large compared to New York or LA while the UK Brum is our nation's second city (no matter what the Mancs say) so given the geo-political weighting of the mother countries they're probably fairly equivalent. Only ours in more important. So there.

Prior to the glorious interconnected digital age in which we live residents of the two Brums rarely gave each other a second thought, but with advent of regionally-defined online social environments a spate of clumsy confusion arose with people offering their junk on Freecycle to folk on the other side of the Atlantic and getting all mixed up on Flickr. Hence the warning, which won't do any good because no-one reads warnings, but at least it's there.

Only... seeing it there a day later it occurred to me that I haven't seen a Birmingham Category Error for a while now. It could be I'm just not hanging in the places where Alabamians hang (though I am fairly active on the Brum Flickr groups - a Spring meet is being planned if you're interested) or maybe the fact that not only are they not the only Brum but that we're the more important one has seeped into their collective consciousness? On the whole the Birmingham bits of the net haven't been appended with "UK" so maybe this nightmare of rather insignificant proportions is over? Could this be an early indicator of the collapse of the cultural hegemony of the USA? We shall see...

Photo by my mum.

As you'll know, mum went to New Zealand last month and isn't doing anything specific with her life while there (you can think of it as a sabbatical). I was just looking through her new Flickr stream and my first thought was "boy has she slowed down!"

So there you have it. You want to improve your photography? Slow the fuck down.

I probably follow a good 150 people and groups on Flickr and when I see a photo I like a lot I mark is as a "favourite". I've now got 431 flagged as such and I was wondering, as I entered another into the pile, what the hell I would ever do with this collection. Sure, it's nice to flick through them once in a while (and the act of favouriting does serve as a silent "I like this photo" comment) but on the whole they just sit there.

Some people post photos they like on their blogs but I've never felt comfortable doing that. That said, my favourites page is a blog of sorts - a record of the photos on Flickr I've found to be notable - so it makes sense to share that.

Here's the thumbnails. There are 12 pages of them at the moment.

Here's the slideshow, probably the best way to view them.

Remember, these were added in an arbitrary manner, my reasons for doing so are not given and juxtapositions may be odd, but that's a good thing.

And no cod-psychoanalysis please.

The week spent in Winchester helping with the New Zealand emigration was somewhat blessed with sunny, frosty mornings and gorgeous evenings and the days weren't bad either so a fair few photos were taken, some of which I'm really pleased with. Like this one.

And I was quite taken with this stone pig.

Winchester Cathedral was just glowing.

Anyway, here's the full set and here's the slideshow. Enjoy!

So I'm sitting on the bus wondering why I'm having trouble writing a fricking blog entry about my weekend in London when it occurs to me that, other than the gig (which I intend to write about separately later) I didn't actually do that much. This could be a damning indictment on my ever-so-exciting life these days that a weekend not really doing much in a different city to the norm is such a radical thing that I feel it must be blogged about at length. I was even contemplating a series of posts.

So here's my weekend in point form.

Friday

Arrived at Marylebone 5pm. Took tube to Whitechapel. Kath isn't home yet so go buy bagels on Brick Lane. Kath comes home, have dinner, Kath goes out on date, I go for walk around City and riverside at night taking photos.

Saturday

Get up around noon. Go to Spitz to help set up gig, pausing to take some photos around Spitalfields. Discover they don't really need my help so go for another walk through City, over Millennium Bridge and into Tate Modern to check the Rachel Whiteread exhibition. Like this a lot, but then I have a thing for cardboard boxes in absurd quantities. Spend about 10 minutes there and go back to gig.

Gig occured. It was great. More later.

Go home, chat with Kath about stuff and she introduces me to the frightening concept of using two points in the Photoshop Curves tool to create an S curve. Brain explodes. Can't sleep due to work shift patterns and got to sleep about 5am.

Sunday

Walk to Angel for Flickrmeet at 12.30. Was meeting Anna but she was late. Thought I spotted the actual meet itself but turned my back at they'd all gone. Give up on Anna and phone Andy Konky Kru, arranging to meet at the British Museum. Anna arrives and locates the Flickrmeet which has decamped to a pub due to the weather. Since Andy is mobile-free can't cancel so set up a proxy meeting with Anna for later.

Meet Andy in the Great Court. Pop over to Gosh!, the comic shop, for an hour or so, discovering that cartoonist John Chandler works there now. Realised I'm terminally out of touch with what's out in comics and could easily spend a grand in there just on graphic novels and reprint volumes.

Anna turns up and we go to the pub for a bit. Turns out Ade Brown has a spare ticket for a Jeffrey Lewis gig on Monday which Anna's also going to so make more proxy plans to go. Go back to Kath's flat, forgoing my strict walking rule and taking the bus as it's raining and I'm getting tired.

Monday

Got up and felt a bit lousy. Wondered what I would do before meeting Anna at seven or whenever our proxy meeting might happen. Realised I wasn't going to arrange to meet anyone else and was about to spend the next few hours moping around the cold empty house so decided I wanted to go home. I was missing Birmingham. I was missing my flat. Thought this somehow significant.

Got bus to Marylebone, got on train, felt a strange sense of rightness about arriving in Birmingham, got home about 6pm. Spent next 36 hours in Photoshop.

And that, dear friends, was my exciting weekend in London. As you can tell, it was mainly spent taking photos and I really should just let them speak for themselves, so here they are (first 26 in this set).

Went to London for a long weekend and was intending to write about it in all its glory today but having spent a good day sorting through the hundreds of photos I took I'm a little wiped out and need to get to bed soon.

So in the meantime, here are the general photos taken while walking around on Friday night and Saturday afternoon (this is a set for general London photos which I'll be adding to - the current ones are the first 26), while these are the photos from the Celebrating Andy gig which start off okay and get better towards the end as I got used to the venue.

Unless something desperately exciting happens on the bus journey tomorrow or at work itself I'll write more tomorrow night. So I'll be writing more tomorrow night then.

Photoshop is a great program but it's also an enigma. So many tools and not a clue as to how they might work. Thankfully you don't have to worry about them if all you want to do is crop, resize and save, which means you never actually get around to figuring out what they do until someone points it out to you.

I reckon I can't be alone in my relative cluelessness regarding Photoshop but I have, over the last four years, figured out a few things related to making photos look better and so I'm going to tell you about them.

Just to reiterate, I am not a professional, I'm probably wrong and you should always consult a doctor before embarking on self medication for major illnesses.

After two months I keep meaning to write about my new camera but I'm racing up the learning curve so fast it's hard to keep up. It seems like every time I take a bunch of shots I figure out something new rendering all my previous photos slightly substandard in my eyes. I'm also getting incredibly critical even if I'm not quite sure what it is I'm not happy about, and while it's tough keeping track of all the subtle variations in exposure, white-balance and ISO it's also pretty satisfying to be teaching myself something and actually getting somewhere with it, even if I know I've still got a hell of a long way to go.

Today I opened up a whole new can of worms by buying a basic flash gun in the Jessops sale. The main reason for getting this was to bounce the light off the ceiling which gets around that nasty harshness you get from normal fixed flashes and my main reason for wanting to do this is because I want to start taking portraits.

I didn't make any real resolutions this year because that kind of shit is pointless for me but I did say out loud so I can be held to it that this year I want to start photographing people with their permission. For some reason I've always been incredibly reticent about asking folk if I can photograph them which explains why my Flickr stream is full of photos of bricks, street furniture and junk, so this is a hurdle I need to jump, especially as those few portraits I have taken over the last three years are some of my favourites.

So I'll be looking for volunteers. Get in touch if you're interested.

(I do intend to write about something other than gigs and photography at some point!)

One of the appeals of digital photography was not having stacks of useless prints that cost lots of money cluttering up the place so what with most of my stuff being digital for the last few years I haven't bothered getting prints made until quite recently. I'd been recommended a place in town as being fairly cheap and they certainly were at £5.00 for fifty but fell foul of their desire to lighten and crop as they saw fit which was terribly annoying as I'd already prepared my photos to the correct dimensions and had no idea what degree of lightening they'd used. Sure, if you just want your basic snapshots developed then the Kodak place opposite Moor St Station in Birmingham is fine but for anything vaguely advanced my advice is to steer well clear.

I've tried a few online services but the best by far is Photobox, as recommended by a professional studio photographer friend. Their 6p a print offer is slightly misleading as you have to buy 1200 credits to get that price but £24 for 300 works out at 8p which is cheaper than the high street even with postage. And most importantly the quality is very good indeed with a rapid turnaround (my photos were dispatched within hours of my placing the order). I will be using them often.

I've been mainly getting my gig photos developed so I can put together a small portfolio to take with me when I'm photographing bands. Related to this is my using my MySpace page again purely to push the photos to musicians who might be interested. While MySpace is still an appallingly badly constructed service it does appear to work very well at this concentrated level and I'm even making use of the blog (rss) on there, though only for the gig photos. The main draw is that this is where the local bands tend to be so since I want to track and contact local bands I kinda need to be there. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out.

Pelican at the Capsule Xmas Party

Ironically I wasn't that taken by their music...

Here's the rest of the photos. Report to follow.

This has been bugging me for a couple of days now so I have to share.

The following photo was taken by Pixeldiva in Manchester on November 21st. I was not in Manchester on that day. But my doppleganger was.

Hairline, stubbly beard, leather jacket, glasses, squinty grin while taking photo, posture. It's all there.

Brrrr...

All week I'd been hearing reports of snow in parts of the country surrounding Birmingham but nothing here and it was getting rather annoying. Birmingham traditionally gets the mediocre weather, rather like merging a bunch of lovely paintings together to produce a grey splodge, and it seemed like again we'd miss on the beauty.

But lo! Lunchtime today I noticed the clouds had a yellow tinge to them followed by a brief flutter, which turned into a heavy flutter, which turned into a storm. So, as per usual, it's out with the camera and on with the coat...

The storm stopped and the settled snow started retreating and I thought my plan to go out again with the camera at night would be ruined, but come dusk the snow picked up again, and it's still going. It's my intention to pop out about midnight and see what's what...

So I'm lying in bed at about 6am and I can't get to sleep. I've been reading some book on photography tips, specifically stuff about dusk and dawn shooting so I'm wondering if I should get up and catch the dawn with the tripod but I'm tired and my feet are cold and can't really be bothered. But I can't sleep and a daft weblog post is ratting around my brain so I figure I'll go exorcise it for the benefit of those who like my daft weblog posts and are getting a bit sick of all these gig reports. By now the sun is up and I open the curtains to see the first major frost (to my knowledge - I've missed a few dawns) of the year.

Yowzers!

I immediately get dressed grab the camera and rush outside. Not only is the frost beautiful but the light is stunning. My fingers are numb and my eyes are droopy but I manage to rattle off abut fifty shots. Here's one:

More to follow on Flickr when I'm awake enough to process them. And yes, the daft weblog post will be written. I have notes and everything.

Well, despite what I said I had another look at the slides from the Nikon F2 and they weren't so bad. The later ones were actually quite passable in places so I've stuck ten on them in this photoset.

For the record they were taken using Astia 100F colour slide film and scanned using a Nikon Super Coolscan 4000. I did a minimal amount of tweaking in Photoshop, resized to 1028 wide, sharpened once and saved. The black border was produced by the scanner and I quite liked it so it stayed, hence no cropping. This is pretty much how they came out.

I'm going to leave the Nikon be for a month or so while I play with the Fuji's manual settings but it'll certainly come out again.

After three days getting up a 6am to catch a bus to Erdington to lug boxes around for eight hours before traveling all the way back to Bournville, I was, well, shattered would be a word for it. The job itself wasn't that bad - I quite like lugging boxes as a form of exercise, though the guy I was working with was a miserable bastard with a black heart so that was kinda exhausting. He wasn't a bad man, in fact he was pretty generous and his back heart was in the right place, but he was bitter and twisted and he liked me so I was stuck with him and his moanings, which made me all moany and complainy which is never good, especially when my defenses were weakened by the number 11 bus. So we shall speak of it no more.

On Wednesday night, having decided enough was enough and that I wouldn't be going back, I returned home to a big Amazon box. It was finally here. Once my tax rebate cheque cleared I'd ordered a Fuji Finepix S7000 from Amazon which had caused my bank to go into spasms as it was the largest sum I'd spent on my card since neolithic times which then led to my first experience of phone banking ("I'm phoning India and this isn't a problem... I'm phoning India and this isn't a problem... Christ alive, I'm phoning India!") to unfreeze everything, and here it was, all lovely and new and with a respectably large instruction manual which was digested with glee all evening, the bad vibes of the week to date suddenly banished.

This morning I'd arranged to meet Andy and Alex at a local cafe for breakfast at ten but the knackerdness of the past few days had caught up with me and I was woken at ten by Alex's text telling me they'd be a little late so I rushed down to the Last Chance Cafe in Stirchley on what was an uncommonly warm October morning. The greasy spoon was suitably greasy and full of men in hi-viz jackets. I'm at work, my sleepy brain said, and I ordered the Full English and waited. No sign of Andy and Alex. I ate my breakfast (not bad but nothing to write home about) in the slightly bizarre cafe (rockabilly theme with random kitsch on the walls in such magnitude it transcended mere kitsch and came out the other side) with still no sign. Breakfast finished I phoned Alex. They were in a different cafe on Bournville lane that I'd never noticed was there despite the massive "Cafe" painted on the wall. So I trundled over there for another cup of tea and to show off my camera. "Have you given her a name?" asked Alex. "I don't think it's a girl" said Andy as the somewhat phallic lens extended. For future reference their breakfast was judged better than mine.

We then wandered up to the deli on Linden Road and I continued up to Cotteridge to loop around back down through Stirchley to try out the camera. I'd noticed a load of interestingly crap shops from the top deck of the bus and they were indeed interesting even at ground level. By the time I got back to base I'd taken over 100 photos, 26 of which you can see here.

All of them were taken on automatic with no fiddling about. I did play with the zoom a fair bit because, hell, I've never had a zoom before. Zoom rocks the fucking bollocks! I was a bit concerned about camera shake but they all came out crystal clear, most astonishingly this leaf which was taken from about three metres away. I'm not sure I can give an honest review of the S7000 because my experience has been like moving from an 100cc moped to a Ducatti but I'm incredibly impressed with the handling and control it gives, not to mention the quality of the shots. It's also worth noting that while most of my photos with the old digicam have been carefully tweaked in Photoshop these hardly needed anything.

But what of the Nikon, you might be asking. Well, I got my first batch of slides developed and scanned about half of them in using a dedicated slide scanner and I'm not overly impressed. Yes, I know it takes time to get the manual exposure right, yes, I know I shouldn't be overly critical of my first attempts, and yes, I know it's a wonderful piece of kit with great potential, but it seems like a backward step with far too much hassle involved. Once I get some time I'll have a hack at the photos in Photoshop to see if any are worth making public and once I've had a play with the manual controls on the S7000 (yes, it does fully manual exposure and focus) I may return to film just to see. But right now digital rules. Enormous potentials have opened up and I'm keen to explore them.

(In case you're wondering, the camera is a joint family combi birthday/Xmas present so thankyou mia famiglia!)

I seem to be moving through the Flickr cliches. Last month it was rusty junk, this month it's graveyards.

Of course this isn't really anything new. I've always been aesthetically fascinated by entropy and decay, the way that things settle into patterns over time. Conscious placement is nice but there's an honest beauty in the way leaves fall on the ground. It's notable that I never set up the subject of a photo - just frame it as it is from an interesting angle.

The graveyard thing wasn't a deliberate decision - having exhausted my usual haunts for the time being (once autumn really kicks in I'll have to return) I've been opening up the map and looking for new destinations. The graveyards were just the most obvious starting points. A tip, though, for anyone thinking of making a photographic trip - don't go on a Sunday afternoon. While I'm sure I didn't offend anyone wandering around with my camera I did feel a bit awkward and intrusive, trying to avoid the mourners. Thankfully most cemeteries are zones by date and the more interesting graves are the older ones, but some, such as Brandwood End in Kings Heath, are a little more mixed up.

The other problem with photographing graves is the whole issue of positioning. It's utterly irrational but I can't stand on the grave itself, even though the body has been down there for 80 years and has no doubt rotted away. Some things are sacred, or just rude, so much leaning is involved.

On the Nikon F2 front I'm waiting for the first roll to be developed before I take it any further. So far I'm not convinced by the joys of SLR film photography, though obviously it's early days and I haven't seen the results.

Went for a walk with the F2 today. I texted my camera-geek chum Lewis about it and he nerded out big time which was satisfying to see, so after a quick lesson in the kitchen, putting all the somewhat abstract stuff I'd been reading about into context, Lauren, Lewis and I set off down the canal into town. This was different in a number of ways - firstly I'd never walked down that canal - I've cycled it loads but it's a very different experience on foot. I'm going to have to train myself to cycle to a place and then walk around, or just start doing more walking. (The only downside was I had to get the bus home, but I did capture a nice cloud shot on the way).

More important was taking photos with someone else who's also looking at things in that photography way - another first and very enlightening. By the time we reached the centre we were both looking at Birmingham with fresh eyes, or at least I was. Maybe Lewis is just one of those people who sees stuff, I dunno. But it was good and bodes well for this Flickr Birmingham outing I'm trying to rustle together - essentially getting a bunch of local photographers to meet at a certain point at a certain time to stroll around taking photos. Non-Flickerites are welcome of course.

But the really weird thing is I've taken 20-odd photos and I have no fecking idea how they've come out. I want to plug the F2 into the Mac but oddly enough there isn't a USB port on the side. Apparently the film needs to be "developed" or something and that can't happen until I've used up all the shots. It's all very arcane.

It's stating the bleeding obvious but taking photos with an SLR is very different to a compact automatic. It's a bit like learning to drive in that there are a number of stages (focus, aperture, light metre, exposure...) which slow you right down until they become second nature. Eventually the camera will become an extension of my hand but right now it's very slow, meaning I messed up a couple of shots that would have been perfect with the compact. That said I did notice that the slowing down meant I took more time over the composition, which is a good thing. Right now though I can see both cameras having advantages and whatever the outcome of this trial run I think I'll still keep a pocket automatic to hand.

Since it was a camera kinda day we dawdled in Jessops for a while where we bumped into Matt and Marv who were buying a digicam. Some people might be weirded out by the coincidence, but I say when the coincidences stop, that's when I start worrying.

Dad popped over today to deliver some shelves and a special thing - his Nikon F2 camera. This manual SLR has been all over the world and done some serious work and I'm borrowing it for the next few months. It's part of a bigger plan which will end up with me owning a new camera and, more importantly, knowing what to do with it.

As I've mentioned before I think I hit something good photo-wise this summer, suddenly taking shots that I was very happy with. More importantly other people agreed. And then I started getting really critical of my photos, which is always a good sign, spending longer setting them up and processing them in Photoshop (I used to just resize and sharpen - now I spend a good 5-10 minutes on each one and I certainly don't resize or sharpen). I put most of this down to having taken over 5000 photos with my relatively shitty digicam but also to having had a lot of time to spend on photography this summer along with my drastically slowed down lifestyle. And you can probably throw Flickr into the mix since it's still populated by a large number of pro and semi-pro photographers, if you know where to look - there's nothing like constantly looking at good work to make you want to improve.

However, I've been slightly daunted by the world of serious photography. I really like the attitude of digital - no developing costs, instant replay and the limitations of a cheap camera give you immense freedom to experiment and just get on with taking photos - and I certainly wouldn't be where I am (wherever that is) without it. I don't have to worry about exposure or depth of field or any of that nonsense because it's just not an option. That said, I'm now at a stage where I want more control so it's time to learn a little (and to be honest it's not that complicated, at least in theory).

The question, when faced with the stupendous array of kit out there, is where to go next. Do I go for a quality compact to keep the portability and immediacy with a small amount of control? The "prosumer" (god, I hate that term) high-end digital that mimics a film camera? A serious professional Digital SLR camera (way out of my price range but second hand should do it)? Or go back and embrace film again?

I'm erring towards the prosumer option with my current camera as backup for the everyday but in order to make the most of what it's mimicking I need to understand the basics, which is where the F2 comes in. I will use this for the next few months taking photographs with the care and attention never before known, principally because I will be paying for the developing of the negs. I've also borrowed Dad's neg/slide scanner (an impressively hefty piece of kit) so printing won't be an issue, but no more "take fifty, use five" for a while.

And then, once I know what I'm doing, we'll figure out which camera I should get.

Long time readers may remember my grids, photos taken mostly in London from March to November 2002 using a teeny little L'espion camera. The L'espion was quite popular amongst bloggers for a while as it was really cheap, the first low budget digital camera on the market (this was before mobile phones cornered the market for shite photography) and had a funny name that sounded a bit like "lesbian". The resolution was awful and it had no viewfinder but it came with a little belt pouch making it instantly available for taking pictures. And it was so small you could take photos of people without them knowing. Over that summer I took hundreds of photos and every time I had seventeen decent-ish ones stuck them online in a rather neat clickable grid which I'd copied from Matt Buddulph. 18 grids were produced before I got my current camera and became more interested in taking photos the looked kinda nice. But I've always had a soft spot for the lo-fi L'espion photos and occasionally think of buying another shit camera.

Anyway, I've stuck 313 of the L'espion photos on Flickr in their own set. The aesthetic is nice and it's a good record of my life during that period as I really did take this camera everywhere (well, everywhere I took my trousers). It's probably best viewed as a slideshow speeded up to one every couple of seconds. The photos are in the original groups but unfortunately not in date order. I may fix that and when I do I'll add captions as I can pretty much remember what they're all about. Rather surprising consider how drunk I was most of the time...

Jez and me went down to London Town on the train to see Mr Bob Mould play a rock concert.

He played some songs I didn't know and some I did. The encore featured old Hüsker Dü songs. Jez moshed. I pogo'ed. It was very good.

We then got the last train back to Birmingham and cycled to our respective homes at 2am.

Rock.

We just had the maddest sky here in Bournville tonight.

It's been humid and hot all day today, not in a terribly oppressive way, just like the weather wants you to be aware of it in a gentle prodding kind of manner. A thunderstorm kicked off about 6pm but must have been really localised because everything on ground level was glowing in the evening sun. Naturally there was a rainbow, a double one that what completely visible from end to end. We thought that was the highlight but we were wrong.

The storm clouds moved off to the south but really slowly given that we've had no wind all day. To the north of the flat the sun was setting into blue skies, blasting its dying beams directly into the dark clouds which reflected them onto the brickwork of Bournville. It was quite magical.

And then in the last few minutes of daylight this happened.

Wowzers...

Just has the weird experience of delivering a cup of tea to my flatmate Andy G's room to discover he's listening to my podcast completely of his own volition. I mean, I know people do listen to it but to actually be there in the same room... it's just kinda wrong and nice at the same time.

Anyway, speaking of flatmates called Andy, Andy Zoop pushed a book, Elmet comprising of poems by Ted Hughes with photos by Fay Godwin, into my hands the other day. Part of Andy's big thing, which he umbrellas under the label "Zoop" (hence the Andy-identification moniker), is examining not urban decay in itself but how the history of an urban environment exposes itself through it. I think. It's all quite complex and fluid and based around a fair bit of poetry, an art-form I've never been able to get to grips with. I can deal with an avant-garde non-sequitur comic strip but a five line stanza is just ink on paper to me.

As part of this exercise Andy goes out walking in old areas of Birmingham, the Jewelry Quarter being a favourite haunt along with patches of brownfield sites that are stuck in limbo before their inevitable regeneration, and had taken some photos but wasn't happy with them, it not really being his thing. having looked that the Plinth gig photos he strayed onto the rest of my photos on Flickr and evidently liked what he saw, particularly the canal photos with their mix of rusty metal and lush greenery.

In short, he's commissioned me to go take photos. There aren't any specific instructions other than where to go. He'll then look through the shots and pick some to write about, hence the Elmet book where Hughes reacted to Godwin's photos with poems. (That's not to imply we're in the same league by any means, but it's a good reference.) Today was my first, well, assignment, I guess - a patch of wasteland that's been used for flytipping somewhere in Selly Oak (no, I won't tell you where it is - it's a secret).

It was a quite different experience, taking photos for someone else, even with completely free reign to do what I wanted. At first I was a bit cautious, trying to put myself into Andy's POV, but this soon became pointless and I went in the other direction, considering everything that caught my eye as a potential subject. What really struck me were the patterns that emerge as things are dumped and then smashed and decayed over the years. I don't like to pose things at the best of times but it was completely unnecessary here. There was a distinct order to the chaos and a real beauty in the details.

I took seventy photos in total and while I'm pleased with them I really felt I was just scouting the area, not really getting into the details. A few more visits will have to be made. That is assuming Andy's happy with the shots so far. He hasn't seen them yet...

You can see the pick of the photos here.

I have a quite substantial stack of photos sitting on my shelf. That's physical photos on glossy paper as opposed to digital photos in a directory on my hard disk. These photos stop suddenly in 2002 when I obtained my first decent digital camera and I never looked back.

It wasn't just the unlimited shots thing. I really had no use for these pieces of paper other than to scan them in which was always too much hassle so digital cut out the middle man. And after all, I could always get prints if I wanted to, right?

Three years on and I've never gotten a print made of any of my 5000 digital shots. At first it just wasn't that easy and then by the time services had sprung up all over I was sharing all my photos online, initially on this site then through Flickr. My mum occasionally desired hard copies of family related stuff and I sent her the jpegs but I never did anything myself.

However, it occurred to me that the guys might like copies of the photos I took of Plinth the other week since they were dead happy with them. So for the first time ever I clicked on the "order prints" button in iPhoto. Hmm, 15p a photo and £1.99 postage. Seems a little steep on the postage front. Ofoto which my mum had mentioned using, were doing an introductory offer of ten free prints and their postage was just 99p. What the hell, let's do it.

The photos came through yesterday and they've come out rather well. Admittedly they're deliberately grainy so I've no way of knowing how a nice sharp image will develop but I've suddenly got this desire to have hard copies of my work. The downside to film, for me anyway, was I'd pay a sizable amount of cash for an envelope of dodgy photos with only one or two being any good. Now I can pick and choose which ones I want. There's a bit of novelty, certainly, in having a physical object of something I created there in my hands, but it's generally a good thing.

Who knows, I might even start scrapbooking like my sister. Or maybe not.

In other news, Glenn Dakin and Rian Hughes now have significantly more substantial Wikipedia pages.

Another bike ride along the canal towpaths. Along with the route along the River Rea into town this makes up most of my cycling right now, both for recreation (ie getting off the frigging computer and out of the house) and just getting places.

Canal-based photos now have their own Flickr set which will be added to. Trees, water and rust. Lovely!

Today I discovered the Brandwood Tunnel which is very cold and creepy, as canal tunnel entrances often are.

Brrr...

Looking things up, I've discovered that Stratford-on-Avon is only 25 miles away by canal. That's do-able. Andy G reckons he'll be getting a bike soon. I know Matt and Marv have bikes. And Jez. And Lauren. Maybe we should have an outing. Fifty mile round trip with a break for lunch anyone?

Allowing for the fact that three members of the band are good friends of mine and two of them flatmates to boot, given that sort inevitable bias in my reaction to their first gig, I have to say that Plinth were quite frankly fucking brilliant. Well done chaps.

Photos were taken.

Andy/Zoop on guitar, Andy G on primal power vocals, Phil on drums

A rare full colour gig photo.

Look at all 17 and weep.

Fave piece of feedback so far (from mild-mannered colleague): "For the first few songs you were just playing with yourselves but in the last two you ejaculated all over the room." Lovely image.

Next gig on the 25th when they'll be headlining. Bring it on!

Photo were okay in a functional good-time post-Wire eyeliner kinda way. Shocked Elevator Family I was prepared to like until they butchered, and I mean fucking killed stone dead, a great Magnetic Fields song, at which stage I decided they sucked balls.

Every so often you stumble upon something on the web and wonder "what mad fool is this?" as you gasp at the enormity of time and effort they've put into some massive archive of stuff. It so happens that I know one such mad fool. He's a very good friend of mine. Annoyingly his name is Andy, like so many of my friends, and doubly annoyingly he refused use his real surname, or any surname at all. When in the mid 90s he appeared on the small press comics scene, which already had more than its quota of Andys, he was given the name Andy Konky Kru after the title of his comic. Since having a rather odd pseudonym is not that weird amongst cartoonists the name stuck and no-one thought any more of it. But Andy didn't just do cool little comics, he was also something of an academic, holding forth in debates about the origins and minutiae of comic strip art and backing them up with a somewhat encyclopedic knowledge base.

When Andy discovered the internet he did what a lot of people did and started cataloguing it. But being Andy he was incredibly focussed, concentrating on cartoonists he thought were good (he can be very specific about this) and looking for examples of early comics, early for Andy being pre-20th century, an era when most people don't think comics really existed. Of course the internet is a cruel mistress and despite his blinkers the tunnel of information was infinite and ever changing. The huge lists of links Andy would painstakingly produce and send to mailing lists would quickly go out of date as link rot set in, but Andy would go back and update them again and again. And these lists were huge things. Andy would present them to you and you'd feel obliged to visit every site, which of course you didn't so you felt a little guilty. But when you needed a reference to some cartoonist or publisher the lists pretty much always gave you a quality pointer.

Link rot was starting to bug Andy so, since I'd given him a directory on BugPowder to host the lists, he started posting the images he'd found directly on there so they couldn't disappear. Alongside this he started scanning and uploading samples from his early comics archive running from prehistory to 1900 which began to dominate the site, plus some samples of his own (excellent) comic art. Jez and myself just left him to it and were somewhat astonished one day to discover he'd used up over 100mb of space, back when 100mb on a website was a hell of a lot. Bear in mind these are generally not huge files. He was very conscientious, compressing the jpegs as much as possible and only uploading the essentials, but even so we quickly checked BugPowder's capacity, concluding that we were okay but that Andy had to slow the fuck down, which he did, but even Andy slowed down is still a force to be reckoned with.

While I appreciated what he was doing I must confess I never really got it, putting it down to Andy's somewhat obsessive nature. The site got some good plaudits but they tended to be from other obsessive comics historians. At the end of the day we could accommodate his work and it was obviously good work. People I respected raved about the site and that was good for BugPowder if nothing else. I finally fully got what Andy had achieved at Caption 2004, the annual convention for us small press and art comics types. With an laptop powered OHP display and a large piece of pipe (photo) Andy talked us through his history of comics and I, along with everyone else in the audience, was rapt. Beyond any embarrassment I felt for not noticing this earlier I was immensely proud of what Andy had achieved here. He, of course just shrugged it off but I was struck by the realisation that he hadn't just collected a bunch of images and stuck them online - he'd created a huge narrative that meant something and taught something new the rest of us high-brow comics nerds who thought we pretty much knew it all.

That's not to say he's not an obsessive loon. One look at his directory with it's thousands of carefully named files but no subdirectories confirmed that. Each of the hundreds of HTML files was carefully hand coded and cross referenced with no database backing it up. I toyed with the notion of automating it for him but it was so huge and complex I quickly abandoned that idea. The methodology behind its creation lay in Andy's brain alone. Us mere mortals could not comprehend it.

However, Andy's page had become something of a ball and chain for BugPowder. Currently the site lives on a server that is very cheap with lots of space but not overly reliable. Or rather it's reliable if you're prepared to keep up with updates and changes. If you just leave it be it'll occasionally b0rk big time, as happened the other week. We could move to somewhere less techy / more reliable but the issue of hosting Andy's increasingly massive subsite always put such notions on hold. Andy had mentioned that his uncle had a mass of storage available to him but he didn't want to change the URLs from BugPowder and since we were happy enough staying with the current host for now nothing more was thought of it.

That said, when BugPowder went down the other week a lot of people noticed, and the majority of them were looking for Andy's stuff. So to cut a (very) long story short Andy now has his own site at AndyBleck.com (No, this isn't his real name. I'm one of only two people in comics who knows his real name and I've toyed with killing Mardou to reclaim my exclusivity in that regard.) All the images have been moved to his uncle's site while the HTML pages are mirrored, pretty much, on his new site and on BugPowder. Nothing major has changed on the surface but we're now pretty much free to move BugPowder should be want to.

The whole process of uploading everything allowed me to accurately quantify exactly what Andy has built here. There are 5,369 images weighing in at 396mb. 3,185 (240mb) of them are history related sitting on 645 pages. These took 12 hours to upload. In his defense this has been built up over many years but even so!

Do have a look at Andy's site. It's a marvel to behold even if you're not interested in comics. Start off with the Early Comics Archive where each thumbnail takes you to a readable page of comics. If you fancy something a little more academic, check out the Speechbaloons in Comics and Evolution of Speechbaloons pages (the former being comic-specific, the latter looking at art generally). There also Andy's big find, Lenardo and Blandine, a comic from 1783 which blew the "first ever comic" stakes back a good 75 years. Andy's old linklists still survive in a slightly reduced but still comprehensive form here along with his selection of 90 Comics Without Words featuring mostly contemporary cartoonists. The first two issues of his tiny A7 anthology Flickermouse are online along with his own minicomics Konky Kru, Mumpitz, Unspanned and some of his more abstract works. Then there's the main focus of his creative output these days, the Realistic Drawings (for want of a better term). These really need to be seen in their full size glory and there are so many of them but this is a personal favourite. Finally there's his photography, the "best of" selection is here though there are many more, along with some sculpture and related abstract pencil drawings.

Phew!

Back from my nice long weekend in London which turned out to be a great example of how to stay chilled by really taking your time. Despite a rather hectic yet thoroughly enjoyable Saturday I returned Monday afternoon feeling oddly refreshed. So much so that other than bunging some photos up on Flickr I haven't really felt bothered enough to write about it in depth. These things will surely follow though as my life returns to its usual pattern of long stretches of tedium (punctuated by random oddness, of course) so expect so expect long rambles soon.

In the meanwhile, you can entertain yourself with new Magsheet photos, a whole 14 of the buggers added to the set. They're all surprisingly great but these three I particularly like:

Over the last year or so of temping I've lifted a number of momentos including a wide range of gloves. I've stuck this composite photo on Flickr with explanatory notes.

There's something about a good camera wielded by someone who really knows how to use it that makes even baby snaps look very nice indeed. This is my niece Isobel on her first birthday as taken by her maternal grandfather. Nice one dad!

Photos from my weekend in London are up on Flickr. You can go to my photostream and scroll back, or just look at photos tagged London. If you're after photos from the Comics Festival only you can look for the relevant tag or check the Small Press Folks set which will collect pics from Caption and other events as well.

You might also be interested in the set Blob featuring, as it does, a blob.

And I just love this photo:

Flickr doth rock.

Kimmeridge Rocks, posted on Flickr.

Last weekend I was in Dorset in the village of Kimmeridge helping out on one of my mum's yoga weekends. In some spare time I walked down to the beach and, being a fan of rocks, decay and entropy, took lots of photos of the cliffs falling into the sea. Falling geologically that it. I didn't actually see any of them fall.

My brain is full to bursting. Caption 2004 was probably the closest UK comics has ever gotten to an academic conference, and it was brilliant. A full report will follow, but here's some photos

l-r Jay Eales, Steve Green, Phil Greenaway, Heather Honeypears, John Welding and Paul Rainey at the autobiography panel.

The final photos from the sailing trip the other weekend. (the others are here and here). Some family, some random pictures of things...

L-R: sister Lucy, Mother, cousin John with niece Isobel on shoulders, cousin Karen, uncle Derek, aunt Liz. Check out the mother-daughter postural echo. The lightship in the distance.

Part two of my photos from the boat holiday last weekend. The boat was a lightship, essentially a lighthouse on a ship, a ship with a lighthouse stuck in the middle of it. A lighthouse that floats and can be tugged into dangerous waters to warn ships. You get the idea. Decommissioned about 15 years ago it was bought by a trust who use it as a base for sailing from, running residential courses for schools along with retreats and the like in the salt-marshes of Tollesbury (see previous post for more on this strange area).

Being a ship with a specific purpose it's kinda interesting and I took a lot of photos of the deck. All the pipes and things that stuck out, none of which I understood, looked like they were meant to be within the structure but just didn't fit so they had to be bodged on the outside. That they were old and slightly rusty added to the charm.

Last weekend I went to Essex, not normally the most exciting of destinations, but it was well worth it. Along with a significant proportion of my Maternal family I was the guest of my Uncle Derek on a lightship moored in the salt marshes of Tollesbury. Many photos were taken which I intend to post up in batches. First up, the salt marshes themselves which were unlike anywhere else I'd been, despite being a 30 miles outside of London.

A vista of the salt marsh from the top of the lightship.

Digicam Dumpage.

Cartoonist chum Matt had been working at home all week and wanted to go for a walk in the countryside. The notion appealed so on Saturday we drove to Tanworth in Arden to follow a route in one of those countryside-walks-centred-on-a-pub books. It was very pleasant indeed and photographs were taken...

The Sea Life Centre in Birmingham is quite spectacular and I would highly recommend going. Do make sure you go when it's not crowded though as the swarms of kids did detract from the experience. It needs to be done in silence to really appreciate the displays so go first thing in the morning (it opens at 9.30am) and not during the school breaks. Jez wrote a good overview of the place a couple of years back so go read that. I took a load of photos, which was harder that expected due to the darkness of the tanks and the flash bouncing off the glass, and these really don't do the place justice, especially the tunnel which currently houses giant turtles.

At the Thing on Saturday Mark Stafford was there. He reached in his bag and announced he had a new toy. Some of you may remember the Mangifying Glass Photographs, a project he started a couple of years back taking photos of people, mainly UK comics types, screaming into a magnifying glass held a few inches away from their faces. If you don't remember it go check it out before continuing.

Mark produced what I believe is called a Magnifying Sheet, commonly used by the hard of seeing to read books, about A4 in size. I grinned. He grinned. I got out my camera. The first results of this glorious second part to the project follow...

Walking through the Aston University campus last Monday afternoon I noticed this sculpture which, due to it being in the relative shade, had remained partially frozen all day. Photos were inevitable...

When I got up this morning and saw the "different light" shining through the bathroom window my heart sunk. According to the weather forcast it wasn't supposed to snow in Birmingham today. Usually I greet snow like a small child on a sugar rush but this was the first time I'd actually be working in it. Turned out I was wrong to be concerned. It was bloody great fun! Not only did the baths slide nicely along the ice but we were able to piss about in the knowledge that we weren't really expected to do quite as much work today, what with most of the litter being covered in snow all morning. And it being a Friday. Still managed to get a good couple of tons though. Anyway, here's photos!

Okay, here's a day on the truck with Marc. Leave the depot at 7.30am. Drive to the first job. Have a fag. Start picking at about 8.00am, depending on how long it took to find the place. At 8.30, regardless of having finished the first job or not, go for breakfast, arriving at the cafe at quarter to nine-ish (stopping on the way at newsagent). At some point between 9.30 and 9.45 leave cafe and return to job getting there at about ten-ish. Finish first job and move to second job. At 11.45-ish (regardless of having finished the second job or not) return to depot for lunch. Have lunch in cab of truck as it's more confortable than the rest-room. Half twelve, return to finish second job if need be then move to third job. Probably have a wee break in between. Do third job. If third job is finished before 2.00pm go and check out next job, perhaps picking a small amount. If third job is finished after 2.00pm spend a while driving around before getting back to the depot not before 2.45 to tip.

And that's a busy day. In fact that was today and when I got home I was knackered, which is odd because when you deduct all the breaks and driving around I'm probably doing no more that four hours work a day, usually three. It could be this phlegmy cough I'm still trying to shake off, it could be the extra effort of doing manual labour while wearing four jumpers, it could be the bracing fresh winter air after months of warehouses and offices, or it could be that this is actually quite hard work.

I've had a nasty throaty coughy coldy thing all weekend so in lieu of any actual writing here are more cat pictures!!

Macy the cat is named after William H Macy the actor. This is probably not why:

Macy the cat had another epileptic fit this afternoon. I was in the kitchen making tea and I heard her scrabbling around by the computer desk, came back through and there she was, seizuring away with a long stream of dribble coming from her mouth and the warm smell of cat piss in the air. As she came out of it I gently stroked her until she became aware of me but she was definitely in shock, jumping at any noises and acting very confused at what had just happened. I gave her a bit of love and a few minutes she was better, curled up asleep on the sofa.

As I said when this last happened in October, Macy is a bit mental though in a highly affectionate way and I really like having her around when I'm at home. She also has many many quirks which just add to the whole experience of living with her, one of which is to perch on Sam's laptop. Here, then, are some photos of my cat. In all the years I've had a website I've not been able to post up cat pictures, and now I can!

While I was working at the bookshop in Leadenhall Market I noticed that the building site over the way was in fact giving birth to the fabled Gherkin building and so I decided to record its growth on a daily basis with my little wee l'espion camera. For some reason I never did anything with the photos until now, so here they are.

A daily, well week-daily, missing a few days where I forgot and to be honest a bit patchy towards the end, photographic account of the construction of the Gherkin tower in the City of London from 20th September to 30th November 2002 in 56 photos (1.1meg). Bear in mind I had no viewfinder.

[Update: Two Quicktime movies: Slow Fades (1.4m), Jerky Stopmotion (686k)]

Second batch of Xmas photos for your enjoyment.

I took a fair few photos over the Xmas period, as you do, and some of them might be of interest to people outside my family! Here's the first lot...

Photos of no real importance.

One of the more superficial advantages of getting Mac OS X on yer machine is finally having access to the full range of iApps: iTunes, iPhoto, iCal, iMovie, iThis, iThat, iTheother. The most interesting of these potentially is iMovie as to my mind there's never been a really simple, entry level video editing program on the market. I've seen a couple of professional packages but couldn't manage to load a movie clip into them let alone edit it, so this was of interest.

As I'm sure you heard at least a year or two ago, it's not that bad. Admittedly it's as slow as fuck on my old 333mhz G3 iMac but that's kinda to be expected. Once you're clips are processed and loaded in it's easier than Photoshop to crop, trim and shuffle them around, and so after an hour of playing, here's my first movie.

Yes it's 1.3meg of Macy the cat, but I'm kinda pleased with it. Video footage taken with standard digital camera in 15 second chunks with indoor lighting (hence the yellow). Soundtrack being Mad World by Gary Jules. The intention was to celebrate Macy's insanity but it's more a celebration of affectionate tiredness.

Hey, I made a movie! How much are proper DV cameras these days?

Having had no problems taking photos for most of this year, I've found myself with something of a block since getting to Birmingham. Initially I didn't even carry the camera with me and then when I did I was never that happy with the actual shots. So I've done a clear out of the last two months and picked out 11 shots I kinda like regardless of how good I think they are.

There's a big ferris wheel thingy in Birmingham at the moment. I was walking past at dusk and took some photos.

So I went to the hospital today to meet my niece for the first time and boy is it a kick-ass experience. Here's some photos taken, rapidly bashed up to Fotopic.

Aww.

I spent a lovely weekend with good friends Dave and Ruth and their little kids Alice and Grace a week back. Lovely and top and great. Alice has a doctors kit with plastic tools for inspecting and cutting people. One of them is a dentist's mirror. Whether I was inspired by the exploratory playmaking of the kids or whether I'm just that way inclined I'll leave you to decide but I looked at the mirror, I looked at the camera, I looked at Ruth and Grace on the sofa...

Matt Callow's Urban Textures photo site is worth a look. Lots of people photos seemingly taken covertly . A nice mix of portraiture, observation and espionage

Great photos by G, a translator and 'fixer' from Baghdad, friend of Salam Pax and now blogger in his own right. As with both their blogs these photos show the bizareness of the situation along with a normality which shouldn't be suprising but is.

I find I go to Salam's blog ever time something mahor happens in Iraq. His furious comments on the UN HQ bombing are a must read:

there is a friggin' Iraqi idiot now on Jazeera saying that the security responsibility should be given over to the Iraqi Governing Council. Fuck off, this is not about American presence in Iraq. these attacks have nothing to do with the so called resistance. These are fucking idiots who destroying all the efforts to help this country get back on it's feet. the fucking Governing Council could not control this mess the moment the Coalition Forces move out we are plunged in chaos. We have entered a dark dark tunnel and we have no idea what will happen now.

...

I am plunging into a fucking depression, do we have a future? is this country going to be hijacked by shit extremists who want to prove a point?

Inspired by mzdt's LiveJournal I've decided to use my LJ account (which was initially set up just so I could comment on other LJs) as a photoblog. I'll only be posting my favourite photos on there and probably not that often, but recent posts feed onto this main blog page in the sidebar so you can see if any new ones are up there. I've put eight 12 photos up so far including some experiments in black and white which I'm very pleased with.

I decided on LiveJournal not for the system (which I find quite restricting compared with Movable Type) but for the tight community aspect. I don't consider myself a great photographer by any means but I'm having a lot of fun trying to get better. We'll see if this helps.

It's seems Accordion Guy had a similar photographic experience to m'self only he was just taking a photo of a giant stuffed ant in IKEA.

Last week at Caption Bryan Talbot gave his very illuminating slide-show talk about the creation of The Tale Of One Bad Rat. In it he recounted taking reference photographs around Westminster Bridge in London and getting seriously questioned by the police because he obviously wasn't a tourist. We all laughed as he showed a photo of a police woman radioing his driving licence details to check he wasn't as terrorist planning to bomb the houses of parliament.

Same thing happened to me today. Well, kinda.

Here's a rather strange photo of Kate I took at her birthday in June.

• Setting up ComICA at the ICA
• Sunsets on the farm

Salam "that Iraqi blogger" Pax has a photoblog. Interesting because he tends to look at the everyday.

At the Art on the Green fair I was really taken by the photographs of Steve Gascoigne.

Available Light Photography is Steve Gascoigne's project to portray the Isle of Wight and its natural beauty. He is dedicated to producing vibrant photographs of one of the United Kingdoms most idyllic areas.

Lovely stuff, and good on him for having a project like this. How I wish I could... Sigh...

What it says, really.

Yesterday I took a short walk through Winchester and for some reason started taking close-up photos of walls. This continued until I had 31 of the buggers. They do look nice together and, who knows, might be of some use to someone!

Just pissing around on the Mirror Project and stumbled, randomly, on Jeremy's photos. As usual she excels on the description as much as the image.

Loosen the lips and blow:

First up, Dave noticed that the central supports for the Hungerford Bridge look like squids. Never noticed that myself before:

I'm now up to eight photos on the Mirror Project.

I've been trying to take quite a few photos of London over the last few days, since I won't be here for much longer. On Thursday, before going to the demo, I was wondering around the South Bank and was struck by the hugeness of the concreteness of it all. So I took some photos. I like that you can't really tell the scale of them here. They could be small, they could be miles high. And I actually like this kind of thing, in a perverse kinda way.

Here's my photos from the all day Stop the War demo on Thursday at Parliament Square. I got there about 5.30pm and stayed for about an hour. The sun was setting hence the dark photos. I then went back at 10.00pm to see what was going on and took a few more shots.

This is the first gallery I've put up on Fotopic which is proving a bit better than I first thought. Still a very dodgy user interface but you can't really complain about 250 megs for free.

Here's what I want to do. My digital camera produces photos at 1600 x 1200 pixels. I want to be able to upload these to a gallery-type site and in the process resize them to something like 400 x 300. I want to be able to do this online without using any software on the computer. Is this possible?

btw, Fotopic is proving useless as it won't let me sign in and do anything. So bollocks to that, I say.

Some nice photos from the South Bank of the Thames taken by Meg.

Later: fixed them. All nice and higher-res now!

Not often you see your name on a storefront. Even less often in this line of work...

Since the digicam means you can snap away and not worry about the cost of developing useless pictures, I've been toying with the professional technique of taking loads of shots of the same subject and then picking the best ones. Here's the six (of 31) that came out well...

On the way to Greenwich for sledging we drove through some pretty slow traffic. I took photos.

The trees along The Old Kent Road were covered in snow making them seem like they belonged in a manor house garden, not on the edge of a housing estate. Quite beautiful

Looked out of the window and it's snowing, like, really heavily and that. Woo! So I got dressed and went out with the camera on a round trip via Blackfriars Bridge, onto the beach of the South Bank, back up past the NFT and RFH, past the London Eye and down past Waterloo Station. Here's the photos!

While visiting Kate this weekend she said she hated having her photo taken because they always looked bad. I said that was because she wasn't relaxed in front of a camera. So I set about proving her wrong by snapping loads of shots of her. Eventually she stopped taking it seriously and these were the best three. See, she doesn't always look bad in photos!

A while back Dave and Anita bought me this rainbow maker which takes rays of sunlight and makes rainbows from them. It comes with this groovy lense which just glinted and caught my eye and a thought struck me. What would a photo taken through it look like? So I borrowed one of Anna's wee toys (right) and set to work...

I've decided to start my own photoblog. I like the idea of just collecting my favourite photographs in one place and adding to it over time, so here it is. Right now I've just used 6 or 7 random pictures to get the layout right and once I've built up a few more I'll delete them, but this is where you will hopefully find the cream of my photography, or at least some nice things to look at.

The most recent photo is also on the sidebar via the magic of XML. Now, imagine something like that for stripblogs...

Just been to see Bowling For Colombine with Matt G which I want to write about and will do tomorrow (it's late and I should be asleep) but we went for a coffee afterwards on Old Compton Street at Bar Italia which is a great place to go should you find yourself in Soho past midnight. (As an aside, I'm quite intrigued by the whole coffee shop culture - it has the chattiness of a pub without the getting pissed bit - shame about the caffeine but at least it's not fucking with my drugs.) While there I took a photo I'm rather pleased with...

On the train back from Nick's birthday last night. First up, Nick just as we left, then Mark, Tom, Matt, Andy, Matt and Mark. (larger version)

My mum came up to the big city yesterday for a few hours and we popped into Tate Modern to see the Anish Kapoor sculpture. It really does bring out a sense of childish wonder is everyone who sees it. We decided that, while it is big, it is necessarily big and not gross, which was a good thing. Mum said it reminded her of Spiderman which I found odd because it had never occured to me, or Anna for that matter, and we're both comics nerds It really bears repeated viewing as from every angle it looks different. Anway, photos were taken...

So, with childlike enthusiasm I bought my tube pass and headed towards St James' Park to catch the sunrise. Unfortunately, this being London in November, it was rather overcast, and I'd never done anything like this before, so the results were not stunning. Still, it's a start. I also realised I'm going to need a bigger memory card in the camera if I'm going to get snap-happy. 32 shots vanish very quickly when you're trying to catch a seagull in flight.

Grids might return, but not as part of this series.

Anway, here are thirteen of the photos I took.

New in Grids : Grid 018

Today I went to an electrical shop that sells refurbished stuff and bought a proper digital camera (flash, 16meg card, 2 megapixels, that kind of thing). While it was a bit of an investment (£150 quid) I figured that spending £10-15 on buying and developing the APS films was not worth it for the kind of photos I take and it'll pay for itself in a few months. What this means for the Grids I'm not sure - the l'espion lives on my belt and is good for taking very quick photos but I won't be relying on it quite so much, so if you don't see a new grid for a while, that's why. Maybe I'll reduce the grids from 17 photos to 9 so they fill up quicker. We'll see.

I do like old photos, especially naturalistic ones. Here's a load, mainly of sailors, that fit that category (via Haughey). There's something kinda alien about old photos, like they're from another age, which they kind of are more and more as time goes by. The fact that the people in them are probably dead or at least very old makes it strange to think of them acting 'normally' in a world similar but different to mine. I'm not putting this very well. I like old photos. here's some I found in a junk shop a couple of years back that appealed to me. Something about the eyes.

New in Grids: Grid 017

Nice to see another l'espion photo grid even if it is by Matt Biddulph who I got the idea from in the first place. Are there any more out there?

New in Photos: Reclaim The Streets - Mayday 2000 A photo essay by myself, written two years on.

"I wasn't facing the police line but as soon as people around me started the move I ran as fast as I could away from them. Waving the camera over my shoulder I got this shot of a girl behind me. You'll notice she's smiling. I was too. As I ran the adrenaline pumped through my body and I started laughing, a big grin over my face. I suddenly understood why people come to these things purely for a ruck with the police, why people go to football matches purely for a fight. I felt more alive than I'd ever felt before. My life was in danger, at the very least I could be cracked over the head with a truncheon or dragged off an arrested, but I fucking loved it. For one moment I was truly a human being."

September 19th 2002 - a 30th Birthday occurs. Here then is the evening of my entering my 4th decade in the pub with 'humourous' captions you will probably find annoying.

And now, to bed...

New in Grids: Grid 016

Just re-done the Grids page to show all 15 (so far) grids in miniature all at once. That's 255 photos on one page. It looks kinda neat but it takes a couple of minutes to load. There's still text links if you can't wait. Hope you like!

New in Grids: Grid 015.

New in Grids: Grid 014

New in Grids: Grid 013

New in Grids: Grid 011.

New in grids: grid 010

Another new grid. I delayed putting number 9 up for some reason so there was something of a backlog. All up to date now.

This one I fancy writing about a bit. The first couple of pictures represent a minor obsession with vacant shops I've got going on at the moment. Maybe it's because I've closed a couple and I know the thin but powerful facade retail fittings make, but an empty shop unit fascinates me. These are a couple from Winchester. The interior one is an old Boots cookshop while the shop front I liked because the very old Redifusion logo was still visible on the wood once the more recent shop sign had been removed.

Then you've got a load of pictures from Winchester mainly of things in my Mum's back garden such as her compost heap and a shot of Kate and bro-in-law Jeff walking through a nature reserve. If you look closely at shot 10 you'll see there's a guy eating his lunch under the stairs. Just along from him were the suits playing boules, which they've been doing all week for some probably-PR-related reason. Then some more pictures of my co-workers sleeping in their lunch hours. It's a tough job. Finally, I only realised today that the glass building emerging opposite the Lloyds building is the new gherkin tower. I will endeavour to chronicle it's rise as I get my sandwich each day.

New in grids: Grid 009

This one has a lot of shots of the sun setting on the way to Birmingham a coupla weeks back.

New in grids: grid 008.

New in Grids: Grid 007

New in Grids: Grid 006

New in Grids

Grid 005

New in Grids: Grid 004

Grid 002 - seventeen more snapshots taken with the l'espion. Again, full credit to Matt Biddulph for the idea.

Looking at the post for Grid 001 I notice I said "When Matt was over today I was telling him how easy it was to do HTML..." This was Matt Abbiss, not Matt Biddulph the latter of which I've never met. I'm sure Mr Biddulph knows exactly how easy HTML is to do...

Credit where credit is due. So taken was I with Matt Biddulph's manner of displaying l'espion photos that I have ripped it off wholesale because it's so perfect. Although I did write the HMTL from scratch if that makes any odds.

Here, then, be Grid 001 in a series, comprising the best, or most intersting, photos taken with the wee thingy over the last few weeks. More to follow.

Side note: When Matt was over today I was telling him how easy it was to do HTML with NotePad and a browser, and I realised I haven't done a page like this for ages, having become somewhat dependent on GoLive and the old click and drag technique. So I figured I'd do this in SimpleText (that's NotePad to PC-types) and check I could still do it. Interesting results. Firstly, I noticed I'd forgotten basic tags like colspan, which was worrying. I had to refer to a book for the first time in over a year. Secondly, I'm forced to keep my code simple so I can scan through it. Thirdly my eyes got much tireder quicker because I was concentrating more. I think the results came quicker because I wasn't messing around, plus I feel like I've actually achieved something. I can see why proper programmers like the command line so much. Think I might go back to basics more often, especially as GoLive uses 48meg of memory while SimpleText requires a mere 512k. (See older rant on this subject)