Friends

A month ago, a lovely friend from Canada came a-visiting! So Skins Elliott, photographer and all-round Pretty Cool Guy, Katelyn and I went to the South Bank to amble around and catch up. Some photos got taken! I’m especially happy about how my little manual 50mm f/1.4 lens produces this really nice soft-focus effect in some situations. I need to work out what I did to achieve this!

A while ago, I joined this awesome collaborative production company called HitRecord. It’s a little bit different. It’s a collaborative production company. Think open source, Creative Commons and a whole bunch of delightful humans rolled into one package. Anyone can join. Anyone can contribute. As long as it’s your own work. It leads to some incredible collaborations like this: …that arise from someone writing a short story, then someone else drawing a couple of character illustrations, then someone else recording a reading of the story, then someone else recording a live green-screened rendition ...

My friend and I had a rather amazing game of Bananagrams where she was busy constructing elaborate ladder-type layouts while my word grid was doing its level best to impersonate the map of the Russian Empire. All in all a success, I’d say! Anyhow, I decided that what we needed was some dramatic macros of the whole thing.

In sorting through my stepdad’s stuff, I came across, amongst other things, a collection of old cameras and lenses (film, naturally), in the M42 mount format. For some reason unknown to me, I hadn’t thought of the possibility of using these lenses with my 60D until a week ago. In hindsight, it was obvious, given that my friend and fellow photographer, Matt Schultz uses a SMC Takumar 50mm f/1.4 lens on his 5D MK-II to great effect. ...

About this time last year, I shot a bunch of nude photos with a friend of mine for her life modelling portfolio as she needed to get pictures to people. It was such a delightful evening as there’s something really great about doing a photoshoot with a close friend and taking things slowly with plenty of breaks for wine and hugs and the like! One of the things I plan on doing when I go back to Canada is doing another glamorous photoshoot – maybe even somewhere in the woods for that added touch of wildness in the images. ...

So I figured I’d post a little trip report of my Canadian jaunt to see delightful friends. This will mostly be in the form of photos because I’m too goddamn lazy to write words today. Beaches make for gorgeous photos! We had a cozy bonfire on the beach made from driftwood and chunks of tree that were lying around. Also, wine happened. Lots of wine.  The sneakiest cottage of them all! ...

Some people run a shop to make money. Some people run a museum to preserve something. How about giving away moments or experiences?

A friend of mine asked me for a particular photo that I shot while we were in Austria last year, skiing. I love going over my old work and rediscovering the gems! Brings back awesome memories, that’s for sure. If you want to see more of my work, head on over to my flickr page!

My friend Katelyn played me In My Mind by Amanda Palmer on her guitar and it stuck. So now I’ve managed to track down the tabs and lyrics and am going to start learning it! The lyrics are a great reminder to live in the present instead of constantly planning and thinking about how things are going to pan out in the future. Hippy-esque rant over! Enjoy the tune! That and Amanda Palmer’s CD cover looks quite amusing! ...

It’s been an age since I got a clip of myself just jamming with my poi, but we managed to get one when I went north to Arbroath to visit a friend. It was an amazing day and there was nobody around for miles so we had ourselves a play session! While it’s not hugely varied, it serves as a nice reminder for me to mix things up some and to remember long-forgotten or little-used moves and patterns as at the moment, I need reminding that variety is the spice of life! ...

I came across this tiny snippet of a TED video on the youtubes and rather unsurprisingly, it’s stupendous! It sort of mirrors how I came to be at this point in my life – by saying “yes” to stuff and trying new things, even if they seem somewhat far-fetched. It’s how I got round to going to Burning Man, despite never having been and being completely out of my depth. ...

A friend of mine posted this on her Tumblr blog. So I’m sharing it too. Attach this to your mirror. Or don’t. It’s entirely up to you! This should be on mirrors everywhere.   

 Nom nom nomWay back – well, it’s been about 2 weeks – Karsten came over to the UK to hang out with us. We went to an epic free beach party and spent the wee hours of the morning wandering the banks of the Thames. We watched the sun rise over Tower Bridge and generally had a great time. That was Saturday night. Sunday morning, we crashed out, woke up in the late afternoon and then spent the day playing with poi. ...

Nick finally OK’d Karen’s video that’s been floating around the Facebooks in secret (shh) for the last month or so and I can now officially share it with the world. Honestly, don’t go to Bali. It’s a horrible place and there is no fun to be had there whatsoever. It’s really cold, wet, boring and there are no fun people there at all. Oh wait.

A friend linked this to me. It’s a spectacular piece of time-lapse photography. I can only imagine how long this took to shoot.

I’m currently in Aberdeen, catching up with some creative folks I have not seen for a long time and among other things, we’ve been shooting portraits and images of ourselves performing with fire which I would like to share! Enjoy! Spiral Wrap  

My friend Max edited together his videos from Bali and posted them. Contains humour and hilarity and scenes of a fun nature!

I shot this a good while back – about a year ago, in fact – in Bali but never got around to putting it up. It’s a beautiful tattoo a friend has – what makes it special is that it is done by using individual dots instead of continuous ink through a machine. It’s much more intricate and generally gorgeous. I think you’ll agree!