Dead Ringers

Getting a new mobile? Apparently there are seven billion mobile phones in the world and only 1.3 billion users (from this BBC Online article). That’s quite a lot.

Fortunately you can get your old one recycled.
(End of public service announcement)

slide

I just discovered this Flickr / Flash widget from slide.com. It only took 1 minute to configure and get the HTML code to copy and paste. A bit large for some purposes perhaps but quite a nice way to show your recent photos:

Overnight Success

One of the things I love about Flickr is the way that occasionally a photo will catch everyone’s eye and its popularity explodes like wildfire.

The photo above is one such example. I took this in Livigno, one morning on the day of a whiteout. Looking at the piste from the cafe at the bottom it reminded me of one of those L.S. Lowry matchstick men paintings, so I zoomed in and managed to isolate just the people on the slope.

I posted this (and a few other photos) to Flickr last night just before I went out. When I checked back this morning it had 27 comments, 450 viewings, 39 people had added it to their favourites and it was on the homepage of Flickr's Explore section!

Quite a pleasant surprise – and totally unexpected – though I suppose the photo did come out quite well now I think about it.

Gridrunner AKA Firstperson

Back in 2000, when I was at university in Leeds, I stopped writing tunes. Now I know that in my Ableton Live post I said I was starting again, but in reality I seem to get round to such things at a near-glacial rate. Yes, I’ve had a few attempts, but there are no anywhere-near-finished tunes yet.

But anyway, between 1995 to 2000 I put together a few tracks using my PC at home and various bits of kit at my 6th form college and university. Only about two or three of the tunes are actually any good but I like them all for their sentimental value and naivety.

I recently recovered a few of them off cassette and I’ve posted them up on Last FM under my old pseudonym Firstperson. There's one ‘EP’ (better) and an archive selection (older):

Firstperson – EP1
Firstperson – Archive

Make of it what you will. Console is the best tune IMO. They’re all a bit long though!

Back from Livigno

Well I’m back from my snowboarding holiday, which actually turned into a skiing holiday. I just couldn’t handle playing out the new media cliché. Well, that and the fact that I went straight to the top of a mountain, tried to snowboard down and spent over two hours falling on my arse. I got to the bottom of the run and decided to swap the board for skis. I just couldn’t be bothered spending the week learning when I knew I could already ski really well. I could do the same run in under 20 minutes on a set of skis.

All in all it was a great week. Lots of snow, lots of skiing very fast, a bit of getting stuck off-piste, and the predictable splashing of booze.

Here’s the photo set, which at time of writing only contains about half of my Ixus photos. I’ve not even looked at the one of the SLR yet. Check back in a week or so if pictures of snow and mountains are your thing.

So, back to normal now. Dunc’s back from his adventures in Honduras too, which sounds like it was pretty much amazing.

Going Snowboarding

I’m off to Livigno in Italy tomorrow morning for a week of snowboarding. I’ve been skiing before and was pretty good at that, though I realise that snowboading is completely different. I actually tried it for one day at the end of my skiing holiday and after a few hours I was doing OK. So hopefully I’ll be able to pick it up in a couple of days.

The only thing is that most if not all of the other guys going are quite experienced snowboarders so it’s probably just going to be me on my own on the baby slopes or doing lessons until I get the hang of it. The other beginner (my mate Robin) had to drop out due to a mix-up over dates and the subsequent clash with his trip to America.

Anyway, I’m very excited about it. I’ll be back in a week (hopefully in one piece) to bore everyone with lots of photos of white stuff.

Ciao,
Ade

dare’s new home

Dare, the digital marketing agency I work for, is bursting at the seams. We’ve outgrown our current premises and don’t have space to seat the people we want to hire. So we’ve recently signed on a new premises over the road.

Unfortunately a lot of work needs to be done on the interior so we’re not going to be able to move in for a few months. I went over there with a small group to take a look at the place in its current state. It’s HUGE compared to our current place: four floors each of which is double the size of our current three working floors.

And I believe we’re getting rid of those horrible carpet tiles!

Predictably, I took some photos:

...and made a set on Flickr.

Photo Catch-up

The one problem with taking loads of photographs is that you end up with a massive backlog. Because I mostly shoot in RAW format I need to do a lot of manual adjustment to get each final image as I want it. If shooting on a compact camera then taking the reulting JPEGs straight off it is the digital equivalent to taking a film to be processed at Boots, then what I do is essentially the digital equivalent of processing your own film in a darkroom. And it takes ages, an average of 20 minutes per image though sometimes as much as an hour.

Over half of that time is spent waiting for the computer to load the image, reduce noise, render adjustment layer settings and finally save it. So I could do with a faster computer. The problem is that resolution will probably keep going up so computers will always be slightly behind. Also, I said I wasn’t going to buy any more gadgets for a few months, so, hmmm. No I’m going to hold back for a while.

Anyway in this post a couple of weeks ago I said photos from my brother’s jam session performance were forthcoming. The shot above is taken from the set and the rest of the set is here.

Still being quite new to the whole photography thing I made a couple of glaring errors with the camera settings so there’s a fair bit of motion blurring and ghosting going on, but on the whole I’d say they’re not too bad.

Glow Party

I took this on the way home from Camberwell on Sunday. Glow Party, this Friday at The Swan in Stockwell.

Doesn’t it sound awesome? Not only are they giving out free glow sticks but there’s a Robbie Williams tribute act on too. I know which bus stop I’ll be alighting at on Friday. See you there*.

(*somewhere else)

I hate Arctic Monkeys

There you go, I’ve said it now.

Sick – to – death of that guy’s voice. Irritating prick.

Happy Valentine's Day

And what a wondrous celebration of love it truly is. Even the tube was oozing with it this morning – a subtle difference in the way people shoved past each other, to cite just one example.

And don't forget ladies, there's still plenty time to get your cards in to me.

Actually, the one Valentine’s message I've received so far today came from the staff at Clapham Common tube station. They'd affixed a couple of heart shaped messages (addressed to all commuters) to small notice boards at the entrance. I was going to stop and take a photo of it for this blog post but I was running late.

I hope that's not the only message I get – there's something slightly bleak about getting a Valentine’s Day message from London Underground.

Lenses, Fish, Jazz

Those are three of the keywords that I would use if I had to tag my weekend.

I went to London Aquarium on Saturday with Andreas, with the intentions of: (a) seeing some aquatic life and (b) taking some photographs of it.

I was fairly successful, despite (with hindsight predictable) huge midday Saturday crowds obscuring the tanks.

Andreas brought his impressive assortment of lenses, most of which I tried on my camera. It made a huge difference. The main advantage being the availablility of f/2.8 aperture. My 17-85mm lens only goes to f/4 or f/5.6 at its full 85mm focal length.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with camera jargon, a smaller f ratio means that the hole that the light comes through is bigger relative to the length of the lens – i.e. more light gets in. This means you can use a faster shutter speed and/or a lower ISO (sensitivity) setting. All of which results in less blurry / less grainy images.

The image above is my best one of the day so far. There are more that still need processing (from RAW files). See my aquarium set on Flickr (unfinished at time of writing).

The rest of the weekend was cool. On Saturday night I went to my mate Sam’s night It’s Bigger Than. It was their (2nd?) birthday party and Tom Middleton did a guest DJ set. He did a good job – I’ve never seen such a DJ get so enthusiastic before! Erm, actually I once saw Mark E.G. dancing behind the decks clenching a 12” record in his mouth. But that was more insanity than enthusiasm. But anyway – Tom Middleton - he’s probably my favourite all-round DJ. I actually met him about five years when I did the DJ slot just before him in a bar in Leeds. Very nice chap, not to mention a musical hero of mine!

On Sunday, The Eyechild and I met up with the Camberwell Flickr Group, in a bar in Camberwell. They were a really nice bunch. We sat in a bar, supped Guiness and generally waxed Camberwell lyrical. As I’ve moved to Clapham, I felt a bit like a deserter though! My excuse was that I still go there all the time (which is true).

Sunday was also my brother’s birthday. After the Flickr meet-up Tom (Eyechild), Dunc and I went up to visit him in Wood Green where we grabbed some food then went to a pub in Southgate where there was a jazz jam on. He got up and played on a couple of tracks. Photos from that to follow...

‘Pro’ Slideshow

Being rather handy at the old Macromedia Flash, I was going to make myself a photography showcase website using the Flickr API. The Flickr API is basically a software interface that enables one to get photos and related information (titles, descriptions, tags, sets, groups etc) from Flickr.com and to display the content on a different website. For example the little Flash widget on my blog's homepage is pulling my latest photos off Flickr and showing them here.

But anyway, someone’s already made one that’s quite neat so maybe I won’t bother any more. At least not for a while. It’s called Pro and here it is showing a selection of my photographs.

Totally Fu**ing Dental

A word of advice: don’t go too long without a dental check-up. I went a few weeks ago for the first time in about eight years (my previous visit was basically the last time it was free – as a student). He shook his head and booked me in for three appointments. It’s going to cost me quite a lot of money.

The first appointment was with a dental hygienist last week. That was fine.

But today I was in at 8:15 and had to endure six anaesthetic injections followed by an hour and a half of god-knows-what going on in my mouth. The only thing worse than the implements sticking out of your gob (and all the drilling) is those white swab things they pack your mouth with. Gah…

Less than pleasant.

And I’ve got to go back on Friday to get the other side done. Take my advice, get ’em checked.

Stock Photography

This may look like one of those awfully bland corporate Getty Images photos but, I’m ashamed to say, it’s one of mine.

I take a lot of photos. All the ones I put on the net are technically decent but, to be honest, only one in 20 or so are particularly interesting content-wise. Still, they serve a purpose. And the purpose is teaching myself to take better photos.

Anyway, the girlfriend of one of my mates happens to select and buy images for TheGuardian (and yes that was my HTML attempt at replicating their recently retired classic masthead), and she had a snoop around my Flickr account and said I “...have a good eye”.

Now, coming from someone that does what she does for a living, that’s a great compliment. But anyway, she went on to say that I should try making some money out of my photography. And suggested I sign up to stock photography site Alamy.

Some of my photos are mine, for me, to share with my friends and that’s that. But others, such as the one shown here, I have absolutely no emotional attachement to whatsoever. So I don’t think it’s such a bad idea to put them up for sale. If someone wants to give me £40 to put that on their corporate site I’m well up for it. It’s bland, but it could serve a purpose.

So here goes. Considering the amount of time I spend selecting, editing and posting photographs, it might make sense to see a bit of extra cash for it each month!

There’s nothing on there yet because they have to QA my images for quality and resolution, but shortly my images will be available to buy here on Alamy.com.

Lensbaby

My mate Andreas has kindly given me a new lens for my camera. It’s called a Lensbaby and it basically achieves an effect like in this photo (actually the first photo I took with it). You focus by stretching or compressing the lens itself with your fingers, and you can move the point of focus around by bending it.

Photography fun to be had – thanks Andreas! His Flickr photos are here, incidentally.

We met up yesterday in Camden to take some photos. Unfortunately the weather was awful. The plan had been to go along the canal and up to Primrose Hill from where there’s usually a great view of London.

We climbed it anyway hoping that the rain would subside. It didn’t. The view was rubbish. So we trudged back down and went into London Zoo (the logic: it was nearby, it has indoor bits). I did manage to get a couple of OK-ish pictures of some fish in the aquarium, and we briefly visited the giraffes before I hurried home for a – most welcome – roast dinner provided by my housemate Liam for me and a few friends. Thanks Liam!

Anyway, the photos from the day are here. Giraffes look quite camp, don’t you reckon?

Ableton Live

I recently installed a demo of Ableton Live on my laptop. It’s a fantastic piece of audio production software. I’ve still only had a couple of sessions with it and, because it’s a demo, I can’t save, but so far I’m really into it.

I used to dabble with writing music back at college and university and have a small number of semi-respectable (though now dated) mp3s to show for it. I’m also pretty damn good at mixing on a set of Technics, but music seems to have fallen to the wayside for me. I can’t put my finger on exactly why this is but it’s partly because it lost that excitement factor that comes with a new discovery. I remember first realising that I could edit samples and load them into the memory on my PC’s soundcard. I sat up all night with headphones on painstakingly putting a track together with Cubase. It was really satisfying.

That was back in 1995. Since 2000 I’ve not done any new tunes. I’ve helped friends produce tracks and mixes and I still have the technical know-how but haven’t been able to motivate myself. The annoying thing is I have ideas for tracks all the time but don’t have the set-up to just sit down and make them happen. Hopefully Ableton will be the spark I’ve been waiting for. If all goes well with the demo over the next couple of weeks I’ll have to buy myself a copy.

Stockport Encounter

Nothing noteworthy has happened to me so far this year so I thought I’d share the last photo I took in Stockport before getting on the train home last week. I’m averagely proud of it, despite bits of it being too dark. There’s still lots to learn on the photography front but, hey, that’s half the fun.

Of course, Stockport being Stockport, seconds after I squatted slightly to take this photo, some prancing towny idiots leapt out of the shadows to the left and started coming towards me. One of them shouted: “Hey mate! What ya taking photos for?”

Then another one of them: “Go on mate, take one of me, will I be famous?” Followed by screaching laughter.

I ignored them, opting not to point out that his best chance of becoming famous would be to fall in front of the next train that came in.

Anyone doing anything (or just looking) slightly out of the ordinary is immediately under suspicion up there. People can’t handle it. The complete lack of this sort of behvaiour is perhaps the thing I like most about London.

Here we go again then

Another one of those year thingies. Roughly the 2006th since some guy showed up, did a load of tricks and said "Hey, be nice to each other", in fact. Or at least that's how the story goes. I so don't believe that one about feeding the 5000 with two fish and a loaf of bread*. It would have been more helpful in the long term if he'd broken his Magic Circle vows and told the world how it was done. But then I guess the fishermen would have gone out of business pretty quickly.

But I digress before I've even begun… In fact I don't really have a point. I'm back at work, back at my desk, feeling slightly bewildered as if I've just appeared here Quantum Leap style. The fairly crappy photo above was my point-of-view for most of yesterday: bank holiday films on TV (shown here: The Maltese Falcon) and Flickr.com on my laptop (the guy across the room is my housemate and friend Liam, by the way).


New Year's eve was a good laugh. The party at my bro's place turned out to be a fairly low-key event but that was quite nice in a way. We basically played records, drank booze and watched the London fireworks on TV at midnight. Fortunately some girls turned up as well so it wasn't just a sausage party (and yes I'm talking about definition #1, if you follow that link).

The low turnout didn't stop a few of us from keeping going till the next morning. I trudged home after some broken sofa-sleep at about midday. Later that evening I met up with a number of people in a North London pub to say farewell to a friend who's leaving the country indefinitely. Bye Renée!

Should you have a particular interest in other people's crap photos of each other getting drunk there are some pictures NYE here.

Anyway, time to get on with having a productive and prosperous year. That probably should involve wasting less time writng this!

*Actually I don't believe any of it. I'll go along with the "Be nice to each other" bit though.

And so that was Christmas

Well it’s New Year’s Eve and I’m at home in my flat in Clapham. I’m making a playlist to go on a friend’s iPod (yeah ok, at least I was until I started writing this). She’s moving out of the country so a few of us have pooled together to buy her one and fill it with our playlists.

My housemate Liam is still back in Stockport where I also spent a few days over Christmas. It was really nice to get out of London, brief as the break was. I got the train up late in the morning of the 22nd, and watched the film Run Lola Run on my laptop during the journey. Call me sad but “Maaaaan, I love my gadgets”. Good film too.

I came back down south on the 27th, and in between I generally enjoyed the relative slow pace of life of the man on holiday. Here’s a summary: Shopping in Manchester, Christmas dinner, chats with my Nana about stuff, not trying to explain to her what I do for a living, seeing people in the pub that I’ve not seen since I saw them there last year, and of course The Queen’s speech.

A much needed break, anyway – especially as, in the preceeding week, I worked about 80 hours on a massive new business pitch (that, incidentally, we won – hurrah!)

I also took my other new gadget – my Canon DSLR camera – with me up to Stockport and took a few snaps around town. I’ve made a set here on Flickr.

So all that remains of the festive season (before we plunge headlong into the highlight-free gloom of January) is tonight. And the plan is to go round to Dunc’s place for a NYE party. Should be a larf. And, in case I don’t get back to you in the morning, Happy New Year!