Sticky Fingers & Taurus

Abi: I went out to try to find something local and interesting as the basis for my first image in this project and came up with nothing. Beautiful as the Devon countryside is, it is hard to be inspired when it is dark and drizzling. Looking up at the gathering clouds, I decided to go home and give it up as a bad job. I was climbing over a gate when I spotted, just above my head an amazing, untouched crop of Blackberries. I must walk this lane 3-4 times a week and its amazing how we can look but stop seeing. Proof indeed that you can find good things in the most unexpected of places. Sort of sums up this project really so I guess its apt for my starting image.

Note to self: look up more. Tall people like Seb must see so much more.

Seb: The original plan was to ‘welcome’ you to my little corner of the world in Sussex, with the tried-and-trusted ‘Welcome to…’ village sign, with the beanie baby casually hanging from it.

But it looked a bit shit. So I went sunset chasing instead! And found a lovely view over a gate and across a farm. Unfortunately it’s not a cow farm; that would’ve been neat! We do get all our eggs from them though!

Why the beanie baby? Well… I have a few stuffed toys! Not many people know about them. Only the few people that I let into my bedroom — and those friends and lovers are few and far between. And I guess you too now!

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[This photo contains a lot of pretty photos. Just scroll down if you don't want to read stuff.]

Before your very eyes the format of this blog is shifting. Tuesday will now be, ’til the day I die, the day I forget to charge my camera battery, or the apocalypse, ‘Photogasm Day’ (I reserve the right to change the name at a later date if it no longer suits the image I am trying to project…)

Let me tell you about the new format for Tuesday!

First, I’ll link to the new installment of whatever photography project I’m working on — which is 52 Weeks at the moment.

Then I tell you how my current photographic projects are doing. 52 Weeks is going well! I think Abi and I are both surprised that we are a) actually keeping to the Monday schedule and b) still friends. There have been a few touch-and-go moments when she’s got all diva, but mostly things have been plain-sailing! For next week, I have a great homage to Halloween planned. All I can tell you now is that it’ll involve a large pumpkin and my face. It could go monumentally wrong. Those self-portraits you see at the bottom of the page may turn out to be the last known examples of what my face looked like before the Pumpkin Incident.

Next, to excite and tantalise, I’ll tell you about any upcoming photographic stuff. Which currently… is not much. I’m pushing my boundaries though. Pointing my camera at things I wouldn’t even have glanced at previously. I have promised a few local girls (I know that makes them sound like prostitutes, but they’re not — at least as far as I know) some portrait work. Or at least photos of them. Not necessarily portraiture. And I actually want to get out on the STREETS and take some photos there, the cut and thrust, the back-alleys. I suppose I should go into London to do that, or Brighton. There’s this whoooole area of photography (photojournalism, candid portraiture) just waiting to be… shot…  and I’ve not done much of it at all — and I really should do more of it! You saw some stuff in the summer (the Ray Ban Kid), and a few last week, but other than that… not much. So you might see some pretty-local-girl photos in the coming days and weeks.

Talking of local, I also want to get some more of my photos hanging  in nearby cafes and cinemas, or galleries.

And finally, in each and every Tuesday Photogasm, there will be lots of juicy photos: ones I’ve taken in the past week, or shots I’ve dug up from the archives. Enjoy!

Note: Some of these haven’t made it to Flickr yet. Consider them an ‘exclusive’. Also, in the bird photos, are those crows, or something else?

(This one came out really red for some reason… not sure why. It’s over-exposed I think, and not perfectly-sharp. Not that I’m complaining… it’s cool! The leaves in the top right are almost the right colour, incidentally.)

This last one is the first of my ‘50mm landscapes’ — an entirely new concept for me. Landscapes… but with a telephoto lens. Makes things feel more… compressed? Compact? More detail, less negative space. Incredibly hard to take too… but I think this photo proves that the concept works, so I’ll be taking some more!

And that’s this week’s Photogasm.

[Lots of pretty photos if you scroll down. If you fancy some ranting on photography, read on...!]

As I write this it’s 4am… so, again, excuse any mistakes I might make. I feel fairly coherent, but it’s just the silence before the storm. The sleep deprivation will catch up with me in a moment and I’ll start jibber-jabbering about useless bollocks. Oh, I might start writing chiefly in British-English too, but that won’t be a problem, a’ight? It actually takes quite conscious effort to write in universal English that everyone can understand! I don’t think I’ve written ‘bloody’ even once in the last year of blogging — that’s how dedicated I am to making my blog accessible…!

The photos this week come from the last four days — I was at a LAN party, if you didn’t already know. I had a go at photo journalism. Or simply ‘people photography’ I guess.

I’ll just come out and say it: I find it so, so hard for me to point a camera at someone. Perhaps because I hate people pointing cameras at me, and I’m a deeply sympathetic person. I’m quiet, because I hate noisy people. I don’t waste other people’s time, because I hate it when people waste mine.

So… to circumvent this… I usually try to ‘work my way into’ someone’s presence. If I want to take a photo of someone, I’ll simply hang out with them for a while. And then slowly… I’ll just fade into the background. Once people are comfortable with my presence it’s much easier to take photos. This can take some work, as I’m rather foreboding — I am very much a ‘foreground’ person, as opposed to the background-occupying grey-clothing types. It’s not through choice either. I’m just 6′5″ (197cm!!), hairy and stick out like a sore thumb.

There’s probably some ‘knack’ to taking photos of people. Getting people comfortable with you pointing a camera at them must be a large part of the trick. Me being comfortable at doing the pointing is probably the other major factor… but hey, I’ll get there. I just need to take more photos of people! Easy!

These photos should give you a rough idea of what a LAN party’s like. They tell a story, I guess.

I have some other ‘bonus’ photos (of me!!) that I will throw up later today, as I want to keep this post purely LAN-oriented.

Now time to rest the ol’ noggin so that I can write legibly tomorrow…

Love ‘n bubbles, dunked and dolloped,
-S

P.S. You can hover your mouse over each photo for my notes/observations.

(Is that a boy or girl? I am still undecided…)

You probably gathered from yesterday’s 13 of 52, that the photographic pickings are pretty slim at the moment.

It’s grey, windy, horrible — there’s about two hours of good daylight if I’m lucky, which makes photo-shootin’ pretty hard. I’m reduced to internal and low-light stuff now, unless the clouds clear and we get some nice, clear, wintry afternoons in the following weeks. But that’s OK — I haven’t done any night-time photography in ages, and trying to get the most out of overcast afternoons is my forte! (By virtue of living in overcast England…) That doesn’t mean the results are very good mind you — it just means that you get something rather than nothing. But you can see the photos in a little bit and decide for yourself.

Today, just to ram a nail in the coffin no doubt, it pissed down. Real rain — not the horizontal kind that we usually get. Just WHOOMPF, bouncing off roofs and roads and cars. The thundering pitter-patter that drowns out music and scares the cat. But who cares! Vertical rain meant I could get my camera and umbrella and go for a walk!

So in the name of art, and wanting to stretch myself a little, I give you ‘Catching Rain’. A series of images depicting England under the veil of cloud and assault of rain. If I’ve done my job right, you should feel like you’re being gently hit by soft, snow-like rain as you look at the following photos.

As always, hover over a photo to see my notes.

(That table is where I shot the pumpkin-on-face photos, incidentally)

(Look at the red and green droplets of water clinging to the branch! Depends what’s in the background. Cute!)

Which one looks better…? I’m actually torn between them. Both look great. Let’s just pretend there are two Vespas and this here is a diptych of them both…!

Roses & Satsuma; The Crystal Meth of Christmas

Seb: And so we’re into the festive season! But I seem to have missed the holly berries… or they’re still to come — I don’t know. Either way, this lone soldier of a rose hip was all I could find that reminded me of holly berries and cranberries and red currants — all that kind of… reddy festive stuff.

The background… well… let’s just say I’ve been working on my bokeh technique. It was very tempting to closely crop it somewhere on the left, because the right side is a little distracting, but I’ve left it as-is, straight out of the camera.

I’ve finally worked up the courage to do some people photography (or photography-of-people, I have no idea). I guess you could call it portraiture, but that’s not really my thing. Sounds too formal. Hopefully I’ll have some results to show you next week… unless I bottle it at the last moment, which is possible…

Abi: Argh, I LOVE Satsumas. If I had my way I would spend the whole month of December buried under an avalanche of orange peel. I don’t know what it is about these little guys, what it is about them that makes me want to eat ten in one sitting then look forlornly at the fruit bowl as if to say “why did I not buy another net?”.

I know they won’t be available for very long, and so I must eat my annual quota in one go, lest I risk vitamin C deficiency for the remaining months of the year. Scurvy is no laughing matter Kids!

It’s funny how things go. I was reading something ‘on miracles’ recently — the general gist: we forget every moment that isn’t miraculous. Take this weekend for example — no less than five of my friends were in London, all for completely different reasons. We just… ended up there. All roads lead to London, or something. Most people would say ‘oh, what’re the chances?!?!’ but… think about it — think about all the times we haven’t all ended up in London. Are those miracles too? How about all the times we brushed our teeth at the same time, or watched a TV show?

It’s only special when observed. Miracles seem unlikely, but they’re just unexpected.

Sorry, that sounded a lot deeper in my head… it looks a bit trite down on paper. Ah well.

Wild weekend, anyway! Lots of walking, eating, and laying in bed. No sleeping though; I’m still not sleeping very well. Recently I replaced most of my bedding with really expensive Egyptian ‘300 thread count, long yarn’ cotton. I’d hoped it was something like that causing my quasi-insomnia… guess not. Turns out I didn’t sleep very well on a five-star super-deluxe mattress with an ‘OMG-this-is-so-lush’ (not my words) duvet. The breakfast though… the breakfast made up for the poor sleep. Seriously, check out a picture of the sitting room…

But it gets better — look at the ceiling above the sitting room…

Yeah… that ceiling is some 50 feet (15m) above you. I don’t think I’ve ever told you how much I love tall ceilings. There’s something about doors that are 15 feet high and fireplaces that you can walk under. Maybe it’s the being dwarfed that so appeals to me — a bit like the sensation when I see someone taller than me (very refreshing… and nice to not stick out quite so much…)

So I guess I owe you some bullet points, instead of some rambling thoughts from the weekend. Here goes.

• I finally got to wander around central London. Yeah… I live 30 minutes from the center of London, but I’ve never really got lost there. I used to traipse around it a bit when I was younger, with friends, but it’s not the same thing! I checked out all the monuments, and finally worked out how all the streets and parks connect around Leicester Square and Buckingham Palace. I had someone with me though, so I couldn’t get REALLY lost in the wending backstreets of old London… I must do that… soon.
• Finally, a five-star hotel… in LONDON! It’s not so impressive when almost every hotel in London is four- or five- star, but STILL! It was very, very posh. There was classical music genteelly oozing its way into the room when we entered. A card, written by hand by the manager, welcomed me to the hotel. There was even a little pouch of business cards with my name on them ‘Mr Sebastian Anthony, in residence, Threadneedles Hotel, direct dial number…’ – it was in the City of London, i.e. banking central. (Check the Google Maps imagery, so you get some idea of what the area looks like). As I said, I love big buildings.
• I saw Wicked… for the fourth time… Did you know there are now ‘premium tickets’? Or ‘more money than sense’ tickets, as the woman at the box office called them. £85! $130! Crazy shit, seriously. When I saw my first musical in the West End — ah, how fondly I remember thee! — it was only £40 for the top-top-top-mega-special tickets. That was only 10 years ago… — Wicked was great though. A black girl played Elphaba (Alexia Khadime) and she was awesome. Elphaba is classically a very souly part, kinda rocky (to contrast Glinda’s squeaky annoyingness), and damn did Alexia nail it. No one belts like a black woman, eh? The wizard aaaaan-aan-aand… I!
• The National Portrait Gallery is still very good. There are a lot of very good, free museums/galleries in the UK — the power of socialism, I guess — and the National Gallery (and its offspring) is probably the finest. The portrait gallery has some magnificent paintings, but more interestingly (at least for me), it also has some good photos. Only… I didn’t think the photographs were all that great… I was hoping to find inspiration, to improve my own portrait-shooting skills. No cigar. The paintings were probably more interesting and informative!

Darn, this was meant to be a short entry so I could catch up with other things. I have some photos (including a nice one of me naked, on a bed) coming up later today (52 Weeks), and tomorrow.

As promised, I’ve dug through the archives!

I’m not going to play all of my cards at once of course, but I’ve got one photo from 2002 and another from 2003. It’s hard to believe there’s only a year between the photos, but it’s true!

This is… I think… the day before a big party. A party that I have photos of… but I’m not going to share! It was a fancy dress party and I’m wearing a stick-on moustache (why??) — as you can see, my beard isn’t complete yet — I don’t have anything on my cheeks or neck here.

Next, two from my first term at university — about 18 months after the first photo. They’re taken with a webcam, but I think these are the earliest photos I have from university. I believe a friend of mine has a photo of me in a Viking helmet with a plastic axe… but I need to track it down.

This is actually at a LAN party… after two days without sleep! Ah, my youthful skin…

Finally, I have a bit of a bonus photo, from my A-level Photography project.

My first car! Eight years ago…

And no, I still can’t drive… (but I’m going to take my test this year! I swear!)

I just had my first solid poop in four days! To celebrate, here are a handful of pretty photos from all over Montenegro, the  pint-sized jewel of the Adriatic Sea. For a country with 600,000 citizens and an area of just 5,000 square miles — i.e. one of the smallest countries in the world — there sure is a lot to see and do here.

I’ll post a lot more photos once I’m back in England, on Tuesday. If you want to see more, visit Flickr. You can’t buy these photos just yet, but I’ll fix that when I get home.