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As southbites rightly pointed out, I seem to have a serious obsession with creating new blogs. There's no reason why my cameraphone photos shouldn't just come here. So from now on, they shall.

Freelancing

So... lots has changed, really.

Firstly, I don't seem to be updating my blog any more (again). I think this is ultimately because the desire to share with the world 'what I'm doing' is now being satisfied by the rather lazier Twitter. Those micro-chunks of mundane information collectively form a sort-of-blog, though admittedly it's probably not going to appear in the shortlists for any literary awards any time soon. For those who have no desire to sift through what is effectively a massive collection of SMS messages, here's what else I've been doing.

I have departed from the mighty Dare (just in time to miss them winning an impressive five Campaign Digital Awards), and am now a freelancer once again. The last time I was a full time freelancer was back in 2002, when I had no portfolio, no client-list worth speaking of, and only a nifty little Flash game and a few mates' websites with which to prove my abilities. In fact, it was even before I started this blog (just).

This time round things seem to be completely different. The only real problem I seem to be facing at the moment (touch wood) is the risk of taking on too much work. I made that mistake recently and the result was more than a week of working 9-6 at an agency followed by, on average, an 8pm till 2am shift every evening. Still, it'll pay for some time off when the cheques turn up.

It's been good to work in a handful of different agencies, though I'm equally keen to escape the world of agency work wherever possible. This week and next I'm doing some photography and design work directly for a client. Cutting out the project manager, and account manager has its pros and cons but this client has been relatively well behaved so far, and it's nice having fewer cooks to spoil the broth.

In other news, I'm no longer living in Camberwell. I'll miss it in many ways, though there are clearly some aspects of SE5 that I'm glad to move on from – the immovable junkie collapsed in my doorway a few weeks ago, for example. The main reason for the move, though, is that fact that I've finally escaped the world of landlords and rent and have bought half of, and subsequently moved into, the house of my lovely girlfriend Rachael.

Fortunately, being in SE4, it's not too far away so I'll still be oft found slurping cold Heinekens in a Camberwell pub with superior blogger and old pal The Eyechild.

As for the blog: I'll try to post more often, though it's rather dependent on not having a hundred other things to do instead. I started writing this post over a week ago and have only managed to complete it today. Having a large to-do list keeps life interesting though, I find.

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Sent using a Sony Ericsson mobile phone

Moblog

My new mobile photoblog, because I didn't have enough blogs already, right?

'This Exists' on Flickr

A This Exists Flickr Group now exists. Submit your own photos and they could receive a prestigious spot on the This Exists blog. How exciting!

Get joining »

Thirty Thousand Streets

I highly recommend Thirty Thousand Streets – peculiar short stories based around the experiences of a young man living in London. They are written by Zeno Cosini and feature excellent illustrations by The Eyechild.

There are only two installments so far, though I'm led to believe that more are on the way. Just the thing for your next tea break.

thirtythousandstreets.blogspot.com

Fire!

At about 6.45 this morning Rachael woke me up saying that something was burning. Something did smell a bit dodgy but I'd been ignoring it in my sleep.

As soon as I left the bedroom it was pretty obvious that something was on fire downstairs. I'd left the windows open in the living room and the air outside was thick with smoke, some of which was billowing into the flat. I shut the windows and Rachael called the fire brigade. Apparently they'd already had a few calls about it.



Anyway, the fire brigade shortly arrived. They took about 30 minutes to put it out. It was a garage two doors away. These photos were taken when it had pretty much been extinguished. Had I been able to take them earlier they would have looked like some grey smoke.

Anyway, thanks to Rachael for having such a keen nose. And nil points to the smoke alarm, which usually goes off at the faintest whiff of browning toast, yet failed to produce a single beep in the presence of a toxic fumes from a burning building.

My Twitter

Recent, strangely compelling discovery. Seeking fellow Twitterers.

I'm here: twitter.com/_ade.


If you have no idea what this is about then, well, don't worry about it.

Surrealist House

_MG_2725, originally uploaded by *ade.

Back in May, I photographed this strange unfinished building. It lies on a piece of wasteland, by the roadside, in a resort otherwise comprised of wealthy British golf enthusiasts' villas.

Strangely, I can't find anything about it on the web. I was told that it was a project by "the daughter of Van Gogh" to build a surrealist house. But a quick search tells me that he didn't have a daughter and, anyway, this looks like it was built in the 1960s so the dates clearly don't add up. Unless she was born in 1890 and built it in her 70s, I guess.

Anyway, I guess either the money ran out or they realised it was never going to work because it's still an empty concrete shell. I bet it would have been fantastic inside had they ever finished the roof and interior, but as it stands it's extremely barren and unwelcoming.

It's roughly here on the map.

View the photographs

Tour de France

I'm loving these posters – a clear reference to the sleeve design for Tour de France by Kraftwerk.

New Ventures

After seven years spent in full-time employment in the digital media industry, I'm going freelance again. I actually did a short stint working for myself in 2002 when I first moved to London, though at the time I had very few contacts, and in those days people were, understandably, being rather cautious when it came to investing money online.

But things are different now, and everyone seems to be busy. I certainly have been. So I'm going it alone again. Only this time I'm taking on photography work in addition to the Flash, video and web work. Within a year I aim to have developed the photography side of things to a level that I can get by on that alone. But for the time being I'll be frequenting the digital agencies of London for short-to-medium term project work.

I've still got a few weeks to go at Dare, where I've been since September 2005. It's a company of extremely talented, dedicated and busy people, and so it's no surprise that it's grown as much as it has in the last 18 months. So a big thanks must go to everyone at Dare. The standard excessive after-work drinking session will be arranged soon.

There's much to do in the meantime, starting with updating my CV and portfolio.

If you want to get in touch, you can find me here on LinkedIn or at my website.

Antique French single bedframe for sale

I'm selling this:



View on eBay »

New Minute

It’s been a while since I worked on the Minutes project. This is largely due to the failure of my compact camera, and my subsequent failure to replace it. I had been intent on investing in an HD camera but right now the budget doesn’t allow for one. So I replaced the defunct Canon Ixus 50 with a shiny new Ixus 75. And I must say that it’s a great little camera.

It arrived yesterday and, as I’m now living in a new flat with a decent view, I thought I'd point it out the window and capture one minute of the mostly unremarkable goings on in the street below.

If you have a spare minute you can watch it here.

Information Overload

No more Web 2.0 / social networking / community websites please. It's getting silly now. And besides, my toolbar is full.

Let's get back to monolithic, static Flash websites with long intros, pale grey pixel fonts made with GIFs, on a slightly paler grey background. And title bars [ :::::::::: that l00k l1ke th1s :::::::::: ]

Those were the days...

New London 2012 Brand

Oh dear. This is absolutely awful. And this video just makes things worse.

According to their news site: “The new Olympic emblem is based on the number 2012 - the year the Games take place and includes the Olympic Rings and the word London.”.

Yeah, we got that much. Now what's the rationale behind the mess you made out of it all ?

some nice pictures

I know, I've not written a blog post for ages. I've been really busy. I'm not going to write one now either. Here's a cool link though:

thecoolhunter.net/architecture/

News escalation on the web

I’m not going to comment on the story itself because that has been done to death, and the issue appears to have been resolved (at least with Flickr). But the series of events surrounding the alleged theft (and subsequent sale) of photographs from Flickr photographer Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir is a classic example of how the plight of one individual can end up on an international news site such as the BBC.

It started when Rebekka discovered that a company in the UK had been selling prints of her images without her knowledge or consent. In protest, she posted an image on her popular Flickr photostream and outlined her situation in the description.

There was an outpouring of support from the Flickr community who posted comments beneath the image. However, some apparently went to far with their use of language and threats were made toward the company at the centre of the row. Flickr staff subsequently deleted the photo as a result of the threatening comments.

To keep a long story short, suffice to say Rebekka was outraged at Flickr’s response. She posted this photo in protest, and the story was also picked up by blogger Thomas Hawk. This article was also submitted to Digg.com, one of several news sites where the more a story is read and given a ‘thumbs up’ by the reader, the higher up the news listings it moves. Within an hour or so it was on their homepage.

In addition to this, a thread was started on Flickr’s main forum, which again received hundreds of responses, and eventually there was an official response from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield: “...we screwed up -- and for that I take full responsibility...”.

A couple of days ago I casually mentioned to a friend that this was the sort of thing that would end up on BBC News. This morning it has appeared in their technology section and I’d imagine it will be mentioned at some point on BBC News 24. Quite a lot of exposure starting with one photo on Flickr.

This sort of thing is happening all the time. Web 2.0 (I’m sick of that hearing name, but that’s the umbrella term) empowers the individual like never before. I think this means that companies and corporations need to be more careful with their dodgy dealings. Rather than just one disgruntled individual who is unable to afford a lawyer to deal with, the accused company, Only Dreemin, has been named on an international news website. That’s a whole lot of bad press.

This is a small company, and – I don’t know – they could be ruined by this. The question is, when it comes to larger corporations, do they really care about public opinion?

Red Bull Air Race 07

I’ve just bought tickets for the Red Bull Air Race 2007. I won’t repeat here the tale of woe that was my visit to the cancelled event last year, but the fact that it’s going to be in London this year (over the river between the dome and Canary Wharf) is definitely a massive bonus. Even if the British weather does its worst again, at least this time there won't be a wasted 12 hour round trip into the countryside.

And it is nice of the organisers to be offering a priority purchasing period to those of us who were disappointed by last year’s last minute cancellation.

I'll be taking a camera, of course, with the hope of getting some better shots than I did last year (we didn't see a single plane, even on the ground, and it was so wet that I feared the rain would ruin the camera if I took it out of the case).

I'll be overjoyed if I can take anything even nearly as good as these shots taken by Jim Skea at the event in Rio last month. These are awesome:

Red Bull Air Race Rio (3), originally uploaded by Jim Skea.

Red Bull Air Race Rio (6), originally uploaded by Jim Skea.

Red Bull Air Race (4), originally uploaded by Jim Skea.

MySpace cocks up my final, simple request

So, as you may know, I hate MySpace. This is about 60% to do with it being a kind of sad popularity contest, and 40% to do with it being (in my, considerably educated, opinion) utterly broken beyond hope. So when I came to delete my account earlier this morning it was both ironic and inevitable that it wouldn’t go so smoothly. It told me I would receive a confirmation email containing a link that I needed to kill the account. Two hours later the email has still not appeared.

It reminds me of past frustrations with Microsoft Windows when it wouldn't shut down. “All I want you to do is go away, and you can’t even manage that for me.”

And I’ve not come across the word berestored before. Maybe they should get someone to proof-read their copy before putting it live on a website used by millions of people? Just a thought.

QR Code

Thanks to Eduardo for the blog post about this.

This is the QR code of my photoblog's URL. It's essentially a 2D barcode for encoding information. You can read QR codes using your cameraphone with The Kaywa Reader.

QR Codes on Wikipedia