Photos, many, many photos

I've been really busy with the project I'm working on at the moment. I think I throw myself into things a little too completely sometimes, I can entirely lose any other aspects of myself. This weekend I've purposefully taken two whole days off - the first time I've done that since I started this thing I think. It's actually allowed me to regain a big chunk of myself - I read the paper, wrote a little, sorted my photos, played with my camera...all of those things I had completely failed to even think about for far too long.

I'll still be busy here for a little while. But these couple of days have reminded me that I have so much else I'm interested in, and I need to make time for all of that soon.

Here are a few photos from today's Great Camera Clean Up (the bulk of my entire last year's photos were on it - 2500+):

This is actually taken today. I've been playing with camera settings, and as always I love the light blur.

This is trees taken through the grass. I tried this a few times, it's a nice effect, but I want to see what else can be done with it.

Best pig ever.

I was trapped by these cows - the whole herd charged across the field to where I was walking, and the cows were fighting over the gigantic bull. I took lots of photos but discovered that cows are not very photogenic. They pulled a lot of faintly unhappy faces.

This was the blossom outside of the tree-house compost loo. How I miss that place!!

Cold, so very cold

Apparently it's going to get down to -9 degrees here this week. It's been snowing a bit today, but not enough to make it worth getting down to that temperature. The only real upside of it being cold here is that it's beautiful. Sure, I have to sleep with 3 blankets, 2 quilts and 2 hot water bottles and I'm still cold. But in the mornings, the whole landscape is transformed.

Here's some photos from the last time it was frozen here, if I survive the weather this week, I'll get some more on here:

Back at the Farm

I'm back at the farm now, and I've brought my laptop with me so I can get back to blogging properly! I've also got my camera here, so for my first post here, I'm just going to put up lots of lovely photos of the place I live:


This is the path down to Caravanland, where I live.


This was my beautiful white trash Christmas tree. It was a plastic promo thing that I painted green and I put the lovely fairy lights on it that my dad brought me when he came.


This was a picture I took of the sunrise not long after I got here.


This is my lovely caravan! It's before I made some renovations to my porch, but it still looks beautiful.

Beautiful Photo

“Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932″ by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

via

Cheat sheet

I am absolutely loving this photography cheat-sheet. I love my camera, but I readily admit that I don't really know how to work it.

It's from Living in the Stills, via My Modern Metropolis:

Origins and new things

I work in the sort of place where a lot of 20 somethings who don't know what they actually want to do seem to gather. In some ways it's like being at university, especially in the way that everyone is so like you that you sometimes struggle to get out of yourself in any way.
Someone there passed the address of their blog on to me and it was a nice reminder that there are different people at work.
When I get onto a new blog, I always like to see their first post to find out where they started. With this one, I noticed that it started just a few days before mine, which feels nicely symmetrical. I don't tend to have many friends who blog, so it's a new experience to peer into someone's thoughts in this way, and it's pleasing to know that it doesn't feel intrusive at all. If you want more from the author, here's some music.

I'm reposting a link I found on the blog to an interesting article in which several authors give their rules of writing. It looks like there could be some things in there that trigger inspiration. I have quite a free weekend so I'm hoping to get some writing done. In a way though, I don't feel like I need to get into anything too urgently. I know how much better my writing flows when I'm away and mentally I'm already there.


Here are some graffiti photos I took in Germany last year that I just downloaded from my camera:







I took other photos as well, of a more standard kind. I'll post those soon I should think, but these stood out as my favourites since I took them all while exploring back streets by myself and I can really remember the free feeling of these places.


Finally, something fun and innocent.

Last Days of the Arctic

Thanks Silvie for this, it's beautiful:



by Rax

Time lapse

Thankyou to the wonderful Steve Alvarez for having this on your blog, it made me smile within seconds and I watched it three times through back to back:

Photos

No new photographs for a while, how rubbish of me. Here are a couple from Easter, when we went for a walk in some woods...I do have pictures of the people I went with, but they didn't look as good as wood and fungus:






(hmmmm, quality ruined by the enlargement, meh.)

Success

No more house viewings necessary, I found a great place today, with a man who is going to be in the Olympics - which must be good.

To celebrate, here is another picture of me and my lovely brother, who is being kind enough to help me move. I think we're in Amsterdam here, a year or two ago. I am the one on the right, moving faster than the speed of light.



In other news...there is no other news. But here is a link to something someone reminded me of recently. It is truly wonderful, and must be seen to be believed.

Something Happy

As an antidote to the feeling of my previous post, here is one of my all time favourite photos. It is of me and my brother, and the world's bubbliest bath:



(wonder if I can still pull off an all-bubble outfit?)

On the theme of photography, read this (thanks Simon for the link)

Diversify Your Reading

Following up from a previous post on diversifying my reading, I've also been recommended this site which collects together 'blog reviews of books by authors underrepresented in English-language publishing today.' It looks like a really good site so I thought I'd pass on the recommendation.

Another thing to recommend is a new exhibit starting at the Imperial War Museum North soon. It runs from 6th Feb to 13th June. It's called Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin. It looks really interesting.

Excellent photoblog

This photoblog is so incredibly mixed, I love it - it's a total view into the creator's life. It has some absolutely amazing photos. I've been hearting like crazy.

Black Passport

Thankyou Steve Alvarez for the link to this video. It's possibly the best book trailer in the entire world, up there as one of the best videos I've seen on the web. It's for Stanley Greene's new book Black Passport. I have to warn that it's pretty brutal and contains scenes of nudity and violence, but on the upside it's absolutely breathtaking. It's like being strapped into a chair and forced to see what the world's really like. The video is so well done that I just want to make everybody watch it, and I will look them in the eye afterwards and we will all know that we know.

Spanish flour

These are two more photos of the abandoned flour mill near Granada. The light wasn't right...a little too bright. It would have been better coming on to sunset - longer shafts of deeper light would have been beautiful. But still, the angles of the (whatever that is that's left behind) are wonderful. The buckling of the floor, the tumbling down of the ceiling beams - the place had an incredibly inspiring feeling....and also quite scary to walk around.

Balancing on branches

No photos for a while, so here's one from the very first day of the snow this year.
The room was full of that bright white light that the snow seems to emanate and I knew from the moment I opened my eyes that there would be snow outside. Before any wind stirred up the day, there were lines of snow balancing carefully on the branches. It was so beautiful.

Because the beautiful girl doesn't allow comments, I'm posting here my appreciation of her link by re-linking to it: My Parents Were Awesome. There's something about the photographs, the way that you know that while now the people in them have grown-up children, back then, in the image, they are people of infinite potential. They are young and sweet and funny, they are naive in the best way. The pictures are so wonderful that I've hearted many, there's just such a genuine quality and energy in them. Love love love.

Bad Science and Good Photos

I read the original article in the Metro about the bad science in Ben Goldacre's latest post, the response he's blogged about is hilarious and requires no scientific knowledge to appreciate. Recommended.

Also, head over to Burn magazine for a new photo essay by Adrián Arias called Harvest of Man. It's really beautiful and interesting, and like most of the photos I've been falling for recently, it's in black and white. I think black and white can be a dangerous thing, it can often make scenes look mawkish. But it also shows off light effects much more starkly and to greater effect, as can be seen in this photo essay.

This morning I've been reading Doomed Love at the Taco Stand by Hunter S Thompson, as recommended by the wonderful blog of Max Dunbar.

Fifty Crows

Crows are everywhere with me today - I was reading the Ted Hughes Paris Review interview and he was discussing what a powerfully impressive bird it is and how it's central to many mythologies. The later, I came across a really interesting website dedicated to social change photography, it's called Fifty Crows. It has a really interesting and varied blog as well, which I'd highly recommend.

The website's not got very obvious navigation. You have to click on the photographers tab at the top and then click on the years on the left to bring out the photographer's names in little drop-down tabs.

I have to give a warning about this site though, lots of the images are difficult to look at (the Stephanie Sinclair ones especially so I found) - that's their objective, to be confrontational about socially important issues. Don't look at the site if you're feeling a bit fragile, save it until you're in the right mood to deal with it, and then try to fully take in what it shows you.


Edit: Another interesting photo-link, info on the Bang-Bang Club. See here for info on Kevin Carter, a member of the club, who killed himself because he was haunted by the things he saw while working as a photojournalist.

In awe of Alvarez

As always, I'm in awe of Steve Alvarez, who posted this image on his blog today. It's so claustrophobic but enticing, it really sucks me into that place in myself that feels trapped and lost.

Also, I've been looking at Margaret Bourke-White today, who just has every image you could have hoped to capture. She took photos of the most historically important moments of her era, she was incredible. Read a little about her here. (See here for a little more of something relevant, though not altogether flattering re her book about the Great Depression.)



My most significant quote of the day:
"Sometimes a novel can come pretty consecutively and it's rather like a journey in that you get going and the plot, such as it is, unfolds and you follow your nose. You have to decide between identical-seeming dirt roads, both of which look completely hopeless, but you nevertheless have to choose which one to follow." Martin Amis, Paris Review 146, 1998 (read in the Paris Review Interviews vol 3)

That is exactly how I feel about my writing at the moment.




I think it's interesting that so much of myself is focused on the external at the moment - I like it, maybe it's because I like to think it's growing me.

Here's a photograph of my own to compensate:


It's from the disused flour factory near Granada. The focus is off and the light isn't right - it would have been so much better at sunset, but it was just a cloudy wintry day. Still an amazing setting.



(PS I want to read the new book by Lady Antonia Fraser. I came across some letters from her when I was archiving Elaine Feinstein's stuff, she seemed like a very generous and gracious person.)