Love, Flowers

Rather like this. Was shot with on-camera flash and stupidly small aperture to black the sky out.

Right…

After conducting a thorough strategic and tactical review of my online presence across all channels After getting bored of my websites and deciding to break things I’ll be making some changes. Photography will move to www.speckunderthesky.com where it will be happy and free and be able to get on with its life. Music is now  at www.singularityjones.com/music, where it also will be happy and free and able to get on with its life (singularityjones.com is now set to redirect there). There are some new tracks there, for anyone who’s interested.

I think it’s just getting confused here (when I can even be bothered to update it) and doesn’t allow me to adequately promote either strand, plus it prevents me from posting random witterings and amusing pictures of cats here, which is, after all, the entire point of the blogging phenomenon. This blog will revert to its original purpose, which was supposed to be a workblog/notepad/place for random witterings and amusing pictures of cats. These things will happen either shortly, in the long term, or never. We’ll see.

Some early stage and portrait work on here… Michael is a very fine chap and a very powerful actor.

Michael Sabbaton – Actor, writer and theatre practitioner.

Yeah, I love the little Leica. Yes I do… these were taken on a lunchtime walk last week, around the Charterhouse Street/Smithfield area.

Baby Leica got its first proper outing this morning to the Hillier Arboretum at Romsey. Frost not as severe as I’d hoped – Romsey seems to be less exposed than Winchester, but got some nice stuff all the same. Pretty pleased with the results, quickly edited and processed this evening. Yeah, I’m happy with this thing, think all the agonising over it was worthwhile.

Leica had its first outing today. Top pic is the vie w from Waterloo bridge tonight, quite a bit of fog which is obscuring the top of the Eye. Lower pic is Smithfield Market. A whole chunk of the damn thing is derelict, it’s all black and soot covered, and wigs me out like nothing on earth. I’m loving the camera so far, the lens quality is incredible. Just getting used to the settings, haven’t played at all with RAW yet. Nice that it fits in my pocket and can go everywhere, you also look like a tourist with one of these and don’t attract too much attention from the paranoid paedo-terror spotters.

I’m going to Hell in the express elevator. I’ve taken the credit crunch and made it CRUNCHIER, baby. I have a new Leica D-Lux 4. Haven’t played with it yet, but play with it I shall, and there will be pictures. Yes. And love and joy, and yeah, hell, I have to pay for it some day, but there’s still a market for kidneys isn’t there?

Shiny shiny… jackdaw genes have got me again and there’s a rising lust building in me for a new toy. I had a Fuji F30 that I bought a couple of years ago which was meant to be my ‘always in the pocket’ camera, but I never gelled with it and ended up handing it on ‘permanent loan’ to my partner. It didn’t shoot RAW, and the jpegs it did shoot I found too garish; shutter lag was a bit long and I realised that it was never going to really be what I’d hoped it’d be. But that was two years ago… I’ve missed so many opportunities because I simply can’t carry round my sodding great Nikon everywhere, and if I try and take a film SLR I never get the films developed.

So I’ve been starting to feel the urge to get another digital compact, although the camera on my phone is pretty good, a compact that takes proper pictures and works like a camera. I’d thought about the Nikon P6000, then spent hours reading reviews and realising that it probably wouldn’t do. And then I came across this:  Leica D-Lux4. Worse, this shop is less than a mile from my office. Yes, I know it’s a rebadged Panasonic, albeit with a better warranty and apparently better jpeg processing, but it is a thing of beauty, and I am a simple creature, easily beguiled by baubles and trinkets. I wants one.  I will either manage to beat myself up enough to resist, or next week, I’ll be marching off down the road with a quivering credit card. Pray for me…

If I recall correctly, she was a little bit perturbed by the possibility that Woozles might be abroad in the woods, and that they may exist on a diet of little girls.

July 2008, Bull Farm, Kings Worthy

Shot on Fuji Velvia. Underexposed slightly to get that richness, just caught the last rays of sun one evening this July while out settling my nerves during the long wait for my baby to be born.