If you’re from around Derby, or are especially into photography and live in England, you may have heard of the FORMAT festival. It is a supposedly annual photography festival, based in Derby, England. It took it break last year whilst the organizers had new premises built, but it’s back this year and it is the biggest yet.
I’ve been doing some stuff with QUAD, the festival’s organizers, for the past year or so. As part of this I’ve been asked to contribute towards an exhibit in Derby Museum and Art Gallery during QUAD. I’m working with a group of four, and together we have chosen the FORMAT 09 theme of ‘tension and suspense’ and have based our pieces around the sub-theme of masks. Each photographer is creating a series of three images. Here is an in-progress version of the final frame of my piece.
I uploaded it here because I wanted to gauge perceptions before I went further. I showed this to the youth officer at QUAD and she was pretty disturbed by it. I’m guessing the vibe that people get from this is going to be fairly varied according to the viewers’ attitudes and life-experiences.
This frame is actually a composite of two separate images. Yes, Nat really is bound with duct-tape and stuck under a park bench. I took shots of Nat in multiple positions under the bench, and Phil in various positions on and around the bench. This gave me a wide choice of positions to choose from for the final images. Obviously this means that the shot above is actually a composite of two separate shots. This is actually an easier process than trying to get both subjects to pose perfectly for the same picture, but did throw up some problems.
Firstly, although I shot this with the camera on a tripod with a remote shutter release, the flash – which was being held high above the camera on a coiled cord – pulled the camera in such a way that the images were slightly misaligned. Much harder to fix was the differences in white balance, due to me forgetting to set manual white balance settings, and harder still was the variable output of the flash, which I had also forgot to set to manual.
Last Monday was the one year anniversary of Rhianna Page’s death. Rhi was a student at Landau Forte College in the year above me. I knew her from hanging around with her in a group of mutual friends at the square, walking back home through Morley with her, and her supporting The Lowlifes before we quietly faded into the background.
I’m not going to pretend that she was my best mate, that I think about her every day, or that I presume to know what she’d want people to do now she’s gone, because frankly I think all those things are an insult to her memory… although clearly she touched the lives of many people. What I will say is that she was an immensely likable, gentle but fun girl of wholesome character, without whom the world is a slightly darker place. Read more…
A couple of weeks ago I promised to myself that I would stay awake until my I.T. coursework was finished. I ended up working from 6 p.m. , way past midnight, had a break for some munchies about 4 a.m., ran a final spell-check at about 9.30 a.m., printed it, and was in college for 10.30 a.m. I had a 10 minute nap during a free in the afternoon, was rudely awakened by the head of year, and remained awake until 9.30 p.m. All in all I was awake for around 38 hours. Why wasn’t I tired? Read more…
Why is it that such nuisances as A-levels must distract me from my geekery? That in the distance is my computer, and in the foreground a short essay that has been bothering me for the last couple of hours. It doesn’t contribute any marks towards my final grades, but nonetheless it was due in about a week ago and people are still going to get very annoyed if I neglect it for much longer.
But alas, I can’t find the bastard plan for it which means I have to continue it by ear, not something I want to be doing at midnight when I have much much serious IT deadlines.
I guess this is what you get for procrastinating. And now I’ve taken the time to write a blog post and edit a photo. What a failure I am.
Something that we were shown in college today. It’s a bit lengthy, but if you actually consider some of the points… it’s quite an eye-opener to the amazing and evolving world we live in. Stick your speakers on for full effect.
My personal favorite: “It’s estimated that a week’s work of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th Century”.
There’s a US version updated for 2007 with more up-to-date facts available, but this older, UK version has cooler music.
This is an interesting question that it is easy to dismiss. Along with 9 other often overlooked questions regarding faith, a blog asking this question made ‘most interesting blog’ on Myspace today, attracting over 30,000 views.
The questions are as follows:
Why won’t god heal amputees? There are cases where people claim to have been healed by miracles. One can’t help but to notice that these are in almost every case things that might just have got better anyway.
Why are there so many starving people in our world? If you propound that God listens to you and answers your prayers, how can you believe that he answered your prayers for a raise and yet allows millions to die from starvation and disease?
Why does God demand the death of so many innocent people in the bible? There are probably more than you realize – the demands listed in the post (to kill anyone who works on the sabbath day, homosexuals, girls that are not virgins when they marry etc.) just scratch the surface. And ‘the bible corrects itself elsewhere’ isn’t a defence; how can you full heartedly trust something that contradicts itself?
Why does the bible contain so much anti-scientific nonsense? Such as the idea that the universe is only a couple of thousand years old, that Jonah lived inside a whale for 3 days etc.
Why is God such a huge proponent of slavery in the bible? The post includes examples of how ’slaves should obey their masters as they would obey Christ’, amongst others. Personally I would substitute this one for something else. Perhaps ‘why is God so jealous and unforgiving in the old testament?’ Read more…
Dan wishes writing essays was as interesting as dipping chocolate sicks into a jar of crunchy peanut butter :-(. (Updated 24 minutes ago)
Dan wonders if anyone is/anyone fancies going to Focus on Imaging tomorrow. (Updated 1 day, 22 hours, 18 minutes ago)
Dan loves how Katrina Harrison's dad apparently sounds like some sort of comedy woman. Like Dane Edna or something. (Updated 2 days, 22 hours, 50 minutes ago)
Dan loves how Katrina Harrison bends space time with her legs and hugs. (Updated 4 days, 22 hours, 47 minutes ago)
Dan OMG STEAM/SOURCE FOR MAC. Fucking what. Valve spreading their own rumors. I now have practically NO need for a windows partition. Fuck you windows, hello steam/source for mac :D. (Updated 6 days, 9 hours, 42 minutes ago)
