I’m slowly putting together a portfolio for Wednesday’s interview. The guidelines recommend some images form a project/series, and I was struggling with this until Lynsey reminded me of my A-Level coursework. It was all hand-printed in a darkroom, and I think its lack of binary content resulted in my forgetting it existed! My Dad dug the large boards out of a cupboard this afternoon, and upon inspection it’ll do nicely¹. I’ve chosen 24 of my favourite digital images that look good on-screen and I think will look ok printed. I only need 10, but I don’t want to risk choosing something that turns out to have less impact on paper. Unfortunately my printer is broken, and given the little time remaining I’ve ordered 10×8 enlargements of each. I’m wincing at the expense, but I want to have an impressive a portfolio as possible. I’ll pick the best ten prints, and put the rest on my walls
I’m impressed with the speed of delivery: Snapfish.co.uk allow you to pick up prints from a local Jessops, and claim that an order placed at 2330 on a Sunday evening will be available to collect at 1000 on Monday morning. Pretty swish, if true. The Express service takes the cost of each print from £1.20 to £1.40, which isn’t all that excessive.

1. Ben - you are once again a star [↩]

Last weekend saw the annual Canalway Cavalcade festival at Little Venice in Paddington. The Ham & High local newspaper wrote up the event, and used four photos I took last year:

Yay! I didn’t get credit, but I’d given the organising committee permission to hand over the images regardless. I’m happy enough they thought my pics were good enough to print. It’s a shame they’re such low quality - it’s like they enlarged the ’small’ flickr versions or something - but is cool nevertheless. The guy standing on the front of the top-right boat is my Dad, so it was an entertaining discovery all round. Many thanks to Liz from the organising committee for asking my permission and being so friendly about the whole process.

I’m trying to get an overview of contemporary photographers in (hopeful - I haven’t heard anything yet) preparation for the degree interview. It’s slow going as I’m easily distracted by the beauty of people’s online portfolios. I think I might have mentioned George Lange before, but it’s worth repeating: his 2006 flipbook has had me poring over portrait photography articles all year. Then there’s Dave Hill, whose stylish and immediately recognisable images twist the definition of ‘photograph’. The always cool Annie Liebovitz recently photographed the Queen, and the resulting image was unveiled today. It’s oddly rare to find a photo going for grandeur rather than ‘the real person behind the throne’.

It’s only a couple of days until 24 Hours of Flickr:

On May 5, 2007, grab your camera and whatever else you need, and chronicle your day in pictures. The group’s photos will be featured at Flickr events around the world this summer and in a companion book, which will contain a selection of photographs chosen from the group

Sounds like fun! I’ll be taking part. Thankfully Friday should be slightly more visually interesting than normal, as I’ll be heading down to London in the evening.¹. On Saturday I’ll be at the Cavalcade boat show at Little Venice, which has been promoted using some photos I took at last year’s event. I’m promised that this year will be completely Scientology-free, after I and apparently many others complained bitterly. They’re all busy, anyway. Vultures.

Finally, Damien has some excellent link fodder and great wedding photography tips over at the always interesting Wedding Photography Blog. The ‘get in close’ advice is particularly relevant to me: I find myself cropping almost every photo I take, but forcing myself to close in while ‘in the field’ is surprisingly difficult.

1. edited due to muppetry [↩]

I’ve always thought carousels are cool. I have various shots of carousels from around the world, and was about to start a new Flickr group to celebrate them when I found an established one. It has over 1200 pictures. It is Good Times.

This lead me on to looking at images from the House on the Rock, a Wisconsin tourist attraction that has one of the world’s largest carousels - horseless, with 20,000 lights and 269 handcrafted carousel animals - and plenty more besides. I’m particularly intrigued by the:

200-foot sea creature engaged in a struggle involving an enormous octopus and whaling expedition. The sea creature is longer than the Statue of Liberty is tall. Over 200 museum-sized model ships are on display in the nautical building, along with an enormous collection of scrimshaw

The ‘museum’ was featured in American Gods, in the appendix of which Neil Gaiman says:

Most people think I made it up, whereas in actual fact I just toned it down a bit so people would believe it. Because being a real place it has no obligation to be likely. So I left out the 120 piece robot orchestra and other stuff.

It’s on my list of places to go.

In vaguely related things, there is a circus in Solihull. I am excited.

While walking around Charlecote yesterday, we took the following amusing picture¹. Seems innocuous enough, right?

I didn’t notice something at the time. If we look more closely:

It’s back! I blogged about Smart Water a year ago. I am no less creeped out by the concept today. Back then the sign was a long way from me. This is only five minutes drive from my flat! It’s coming to get me! I’m batting down the hatches and readying the sawdust.

1. amusing for perhaps three people, all of whom were there at the time. Let’s be fair, however, for them it’s damned funny [↩]

Three hours of dancing, a four-mile walk and a seventy mile drive is probably enough for a day. I was also at a party last night, at which a friend ordered a coffee and received this:

That’s one small beverage.

I’ve finally finished uploading photos from the Torquay dancing weekend. There are a bunch of images from our trip to Paignton Zoo, which aren’t of great quality as I hadn’t a telephoto lens¹. There are humping monkeys, though.

My favourite shot of the weekend is definitely this:

I love jumping pictures. There’s a whole flickr group devoted to them.

All importing, editing and captioning was completed in Adobe Lightroom (using heretical colour modes) and I’m very impressed. I’ll try to write a full review before the trial runs out.

1. I have plenty of other excuses [↩]

A late notice for today’s Day In The Life at Flickr, in which you’re asked to submit five photographs from your day. Last time I was walking around Central Park, so today probably won’t be quite so exotic. It’s a fun project, and always interesting to see what other people choose to document.

Flickr’s new ‘Collections’ feature was released yesterday. It enables sets of sets, an option that some people have spent literally years asking for. It’s a neat little system, completely controlled from the impressive Organizr. Aside from the five possible levels of nesting, it lets you create a mosaic from images within the collection and displays this as the collection logo. I’ve set up a few here, and I think I was first to report a bug involving gaps appearing in collection names exceeding 15 letters. Ahem. The only downer is that you can’t currently display both collections and sets on your (newly grey) home page sidebar.

They’ve also added the option to display 5 large images on your home page, rather than 19 smaller versions. I rather like it.

Happy Pi Day. Do something irrational.
(update: or you could leave it until July)

Given the large signs indicating the correct motorway exit, the presence of a sat-nav unit telling me to turn off and my having driven the route many times before, I wonder how I nevertheless managed to miss the M69. Oh well, doubling back only added twenty-five minutes to the eighty minute journey
I had a great and busy weekend with Abi, including seeing Coriolanus at the RST, a social dance¹ and trips to the Butterfly Farm and Shakespeare’s Birthplace. I knew nothing about Coriolanus before Saturday, but enjoyed it very much. It was surprisingly fast-moving and unpredictable, neither of which I’ve found to be common Shakespearean traits², and the production was beautifully lit and staged. I really recommend it, especially since balcony tickets are £12.

This was at the Butterfly Farm:

I don’t need to own anything with a name that includes both ‘giant’ and ‘hissing’.

1. that a whole bunch of my friends failed to turn up to, disappointingly [↩]
2. not a criticism, just an observation [↩]

 The Avon was as high as I’ve ever seen it today. My usual walking route was completely impassable, or so I thought…

The ground is far lower around the corner, but sadly he was out of sight by then.

A practically perfect photograph:

The tiger cubs and orang-utans have apparently become friends after sharing a room at an Indonesian zoo. Awwww. There’s video too.

As you may have gathered I was rather excited by the snow, and eagerly headed outside on Thursday to see how the world looked. The streets were very quiet and it was pleasant to walk around / stand in the middle of the road taking pictures. I headed down to Holy Trinity Church, which I thought might be pretty:

Continue reading ‘Wandering around Stratford in the snow’

There are people with sledges. I am so jealous.

Just back in after wandering around town for a couple of hours. My hands won’t move properly, my memory card filled up halfway around and I’m somehow bleeding, but goddamn it’s glorious out there. I’m just stopping in to empty the camera and grab some lunch, then I’m going back out.