2011 is almost upon us, another New Year and hopefully yet more new horizons for yours truly. Having a fairly low key celebration with brother and sister-in-law at one of the local eateries but looking forward to that. I hope you all have the most wonderful time and I wish you all happiness, success, love and good light in 2011 :)
Wishing you all piece and happiness for the festive season and the best of all things good for the coming year :)
Music of the moment
Dungen Skit I Allt and Laetitia Sadier The Trip
A musical interlude, two favorites or rather one favorite and one prospective fav for October 2010. I’m loving the new album by Swedish band Dungen, eclectisists, post progers or just impossible to define? Skit I Allt marks yet another excursion into a slightly more jazzy realm for the band though not quite as modal as some of their earlier albums such as ‘4’ which mixed full on jazz styles with more conventional rock forms and hinted at something more Soft Machine like. I love the qualities of good Scandinavian music and especially their angle on jazz and this psychedelic rock; it seems to have a totally unique character.
Stereolab’s front woman Laetitia Sadier has just released a new and rare solo project and again like much of the Labs best stuff this also seems to be in a limited edition with no download — yet? I have heard samples of a couple of tracks and it all sounds wonderfully pretty, just as I would expect!
The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble Miles Away
Discovering quite a lot of interesting new music at the moment. The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble is a project by Jazz, Hip Hop and ‘World’ cross-over supremo Madlib and ventures into the realm of heritage jazz with tracks dedicated to the pioneers. Everyone from Horace Tapscott to Pharaoh Sanders is cited for inspiration in this album and interpretations are just as cool as you would expect for something touched by the hand of Madlib. Incidentally, I only just discovered that Madlib stands for “Mind Altering Demented Lessons In Beats” and I like that.
Also checking out Rio Hunuki-Hemopo and last years’ winner of the World Wide jazz album of the year award; Robert Mitchell and also really looking forward to the release of a new joint project by Bugge Wesseltoft & Henrik Schwarz — all good stuff.
Not really sure what to do with this blog at the moment as I do tend to feel more compelled to put stuff on Blogger now, then maybe eventually host wordpress on this domain but I want to use a premier template for that. Despite everything this page is still getting a lot more traffic than my relatively new Blogger site.
Lots of ideas for photography on the go, including an essay which will attempt to discuss my perception of the contemporary idiom as manifest in artistic photography. These are complex times for the medium and creative photographers are devising ever more complex and esoteric ideas and methodologies for keeping one step ahead of the ‘noise’ of mass consumed (and deployed) camera technology.
As an aside: got to get out on some long rides very soon, the canal route into Staffordshire beckons once again!
Total mileage: 11,160
It’s about time I made one of my quirky little videos about one of my favourite local spots, the iconic White Nancy on top of Kerridge Hill overlooking Bollington.
This video constitutes something new for me, it is the first (to go online) which actually features a sort of reflexive monologue, it also has a few unique technical features which attempt to off-set the very lofi characteristics of the video from a Sony W50 P and S camera. I have recorded the monologue sound direct to the computer with a high quality system then spent hours re-syncing it with the video, loads of trimming and ‘nudging’ was required. Unfortunately, a couple of shots were lost (ha – accidentally deleted) so there are a few unintentional jumps in the flow. The idea was just to make homage to White Nancy in my own inimitable poetic style. I do like to create something with technology that is less than perfect and where some degree of technical coaxing and invention is required — and this is very definitely an end product of that kind of activity.
New Gallery format I have also updated / reverted my new gallery page to old-fashioned html page displays for the large versions of the photos rather than having them come up in java lightbox effects. It has taken the best part of two years for me to realise that lightbox was preventing my images from getting into the google image search results. Hopefully this new (old) approach will do wonders, it also enables me to write much more in depth descriptions / narratives on my photos which is always a good thing.
Oliver Wood in Prestbury Living Magazine
Prestbury Living magazine has done a feature on me this month, essentially following on from a number of photo contributions. I provided all of the content and most of it has been printed faithfully which is very good. I believe I may be the first and possibly the last person to have an article published in PL that mentions the concept of existentialism, at least in an artistic context haha. At least it should go some way to convincing folks that the strange guy who takes hundreds of odd photos of the area doesn’t have some kind of dangerous personality disorder — probably haha. The editor asked me to define my artistic motives and you can see my reply on my other blog here:Prestbury Living Feature
I tried to do some more night work over the weekend. This time I decided to go up to the fields on the west side of the village but unfortunately had to abort the project in mid flow because it was just too cold to work and I was unable to feel my fingers after about three minutes. It is impossible to operate a tripod and DSLR with gloves on by the way! Shame, because the objective was to try and get some interesting images with light painting effects under a bright full moon and clear sky — hence no sodium glare.
Generally I’m still struggling along with things, ex employers not paying me and the apparent scarcity of work in my field is proving to be an extremely stressful thing now! Hopefully this year will turn up more good things and progress will be a distinguishing feature of 2010 for me — lets hope so!
It is still very cold though most of the snow has disappeared. Things are proving to be tougher than ever for yours truly at the moment but as I always say I am sure I will prevail and better times are just around the corner. Experience has taught me that dark skies never linger!
I have decided to re-instate my blog on Google’s blogger site which now runs in conjunction with this but it is serving more as a proper “photo blog”. The idea is to embed my flickr work as and when new stuff is uploaded and to embellish that with narrative content. I feel that blogger will become a lot more active than these onsite blog pages.
{Transfigured Norms, A car passes by and the Christmas tree shines out across the way}
Snow and ice continue to be the dominant weather theme into the first month of 2010. It is all so photogenic and I have such a lot of work to upload and publish here there and everywhere else. More creative work taking full advantage of shallow DOF, manual focus, white balance, and long exposures at night is taking place on an all most daily (nightly) basis now.
I do like these conditions, the light is so much more effective with the added reflectance of snow and fascinating details in ice and snow embellished structures are all around.
I seem to have missed my usual pre-Christmas update on here this year so this entry will have to suffice. I’m still running other more ‘business’ orientated blogs elsewhere but have since decided to use the blogger space (may soon move to WordPress) as a sort of overflow for these pages as well as a place to post more theoretical photography and photo hardware related material.
I have had a very enjoyable couple of days with Brother and SIL, a much-needed down shift from the recent nagging worries and now I am back home immersed in the quiescent inertia of these days between Christmas festivities and the New Year. Toby and Lill of course will be over here for the usual New Year nosh up at one of the local restaurants.
The weather has turned pretty drab all of a sudden with rain instead of snow but it is still reasonably cold, of course it is also completely overcast and grey. They have promised more snow for the New Year, not sure if we will get it here.
I do hope this coming year will be OK, I have a few trials and tribulations to get through in January but I am sure I will prevail – I usually do!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all that chance by — quite a few apparently!
Snow in the top field Prestbury, yes I have had another session in the snow, I’m in love with it all! Snow is still lying on the ground as I speak. These are fairly unusual winter conditions in the UK now and again it all makes for interesting change, photography wise.
Christmas is almost upon us and as ever I am looking forward to spending the day with my Bro and SIL with a good nosh up. I’m just a little concerned about not being able to afford to offer much in return this year but I do intend to make up for this later!
Listening to GP at the moment, usual recanting of the years new (more or less) jazz orientated stuff. It dawned on me that I have most of these tunes on my MP3 already!
We are trying pet coke at Oliver Wood towers this year, for those not familiar with the arts of solid fuel heating PET coke is Petroleum Coke, it is not a naturally occurring mineral coal but a residue of the ‘cracking’ process in oil refining. It is ridiculously hot and turns the dog grate into an incandescent glowing mass of metal. I am concerned that this stuff is pretty bad for the environment though, it also makes a massive amount of smoke in the early combustion phase which drifts throughout the whole village, but nobody has complained yet?