So the Irish Web Awards were on last Saturday night and I would like to convey some opinions I have of the event itself.

This is its second year running and to be honest, I found the whole evening awfull, I shall go more into that in a while, but it may help to know more about the preceeding weeks beforehand. The guy above is some guy called Damien Mulley, he runs a blog (click the link if you are bothered) and seems to organise awards too, one for his mates in the blog world called the Irish Blog Awards and then this crap the Irish Web Awards. It seems anyone who wants can be nominated for these awards, then a bunch of Monkeys from what I can gather judge them and make the longlists into slightly smaller longlists, which he claims are shortlists! The scoring system for these seem flawed to say the least, you rank them by how pretty they are, “oh I like green I shortlisted that webpage” or “well there was a really attractive woman on the home page” were two reasons judges gave me for their decisions!

This formula is so wrong for starters monkeys cant decide what makes a good webpage, and also a webpage is not just a homepage there are other pages lurking in the background!

Onto the night itself, the hotel was lovely, unfortunately full of these nerdy geeky sorts who have never been let out of their bedrooms, it was horrible, chaotic and just plain ugly. The fashion also really sucked, it was just embarrassing. Eventually after these geeks had 2 drinks and were all plastered from lack of ever drinking before, they were cordoned into the main room.

A 2FM DJ called Rick O’Shea who is also a blogger (see the connection, bloggers seem to stick together like snails and slugs) took to the stage and proceeded to tell us all in binary how to behave ourselves because people from the real world were also there (I think that may have been the hotel staff) and would not know how to cope with geekdom. Then the pain began in a huge way, Rick told everyone that a bad powerpoint presentation would be used to announce the shortlisted few, this had the hall in stitches laughing (must be an in-joke or something) what Rick did not tell us was that he would be the worst ever compare for an awards with crap gags, crap microphone technique and that the awards would take an eternity to get through.

What seemed like 4 hours later they came to an end thank god, geeks accepting awards is something I hope to never experience again, the acceptance speeches had me totally baffled it was like being at a nerd convention, I understood nothing they spoke of, captured really well by Ryan Whalley

After this pain I took myself to the lobby where the drunks huddled around me obviously knowing I was a real person from the real world, they were like zombies preying on me, and I was scared.

So what about this Damien Mulley chap, well I hope that this has taught him a lesson to never hold an awards ceremony again, it was badly organised, under staffed, the food was revolting, the sweets from the 80’s was obviously another in joke that went over my head, as for throwing crisps into the audience do you not think these internet people eat enough crisps and pot noodles and crap on a day to day basis already, lets not forget the in-joke acronym tshirt with funny shit like “lol” and Britney f!cked” or my favorite “I am a bot” printed on them, how tacky was that!

So would I go back to the web awards again, to fucking right! As you all know I have been to every awards event Mr Mulley has held, from blog awards 1 to web awards 2, and he is incredible at what he does. I dont think some people realise that this guy does these events off his own bat, he makes very little from them some times nothing at all, one year even making a loss!!! yet some people out there bitch, complain and moan about these nights! Yes the awards are not your normal awards but that is what folk love about it! its casual, fun and memorable, if you dont like it well then dont come again! go to the stuffy awards instead and fall asleep during the presentations, pay the ridiculous price to sit in an uncomfy suit and eat a shit meal at a round table with other stuffy folk rather then eat chipsticks thrown by Rick into the crowd etc etc.

It maddens me to see and hear people complain about these nights. Oh yeah I did the powerpoint that went on and on, I spent 2 weeks at it, it ended up as a 166mb PPT file and had a hell of a lot of coding in it to get it to work, even though it may have looked cheap and nasty it was actually more complex then you think. So if you hated it or got bored of it I don’t care, it was done for free and in my spare time and I am actually proud how shit it looked, but at the end of the day its what so many of the people out there want to do to help Mulley along, and yes Damien I will help out any way I can with anything else if you ever need it, just never powerpoint again!

Finally thanks to Stephen Boyce for teaching me how to switch powerpoint on and all the rest, Jenny Greene for her fantastic voice over work and Alexia for ensuring the presentation ran as planned!

Well what a day, busy in work but the excitement for me was at 2pm today, where I was invited as a blogger to the launch of Vodafone 360. What an amazing device it seems to be, totally down my road since it is a social media whore on a very nice samsung phone.

But as a photoblogger why would I be excited, well Dita Von Teese was going to be there too. Happy days for my camera, or at least that wa the plan, its a shame though that one of the PR companies for Vodafone did not want me to take any photos of the event itself which for me as a photoblogger took all the fun out of it.

Ah well I got one shot in before being told this and yes Dita is a sexy as you think but smaller then I had her down as!

Anyhow it was a pleasure to have been invited and I look forward to seeing what Vodafone 360 has to offer!

Well where did all my August posts go, oh thats right I hardly touched my webpage during August, due to the fact as many know I was busy decking the whole of my garden by myself, but anyhow you dont really want to know about that since you are here for pictures.

So from one photowalk picture to another photowalk picture, this time with an incredible story to boot.

Over the past year or so I have been followed on Twitter by John Fair who is the corporate and sales manager of Mondello Park, Irelands national motor racing track. Now I dunno why he followed me initially but over time I found out he also has a love of photography and also lived nearby me too. He was planning on making the worldwide photowalk but due to work commitments he could not come along, but I knew he had plans afoot.

A month or so earlier when I first mentioned the photowalk he got in touch with me to ask me if I thought a photowalk of Mondello Park would be of interest to other photographers out there, I assured him that us free loading photographer types would love nothing better, so off John went to hatch up a plan. He emailed me a week or 2 later with an idea for the photowalk, which was to invite 20 photographers from Twitter along to Mondello Park for their biggest event of the race calender, give us a corporate suite for the day with coffee and lunch etc, but the highlight for me was allowing us all access all areas passage on the track!

I began writing back to him with “what the fuck are you serious!!!!!” but then decided to ring him instead and say those very words down the phone instead and yes he was deadly serious all he needed from me was names of who should be invited, I told him that between myself and Ryan Whalley we could come up with an interesting collection of folk for the event.

Well that was a long time ago now and it worked out well for Mondello Park, over the past month people on twitter have been bombarded with the #japfest tag thus providing Mondello Park with some good PR while for us 20 we were getting seriously excited at the prospect of taking pictures of really fast cars at such close proximity.

Unfortunately the day has come and gone, last Sunday we all met up in Kildare at 10am got a safety briefing to ensure we would not get killed, got shown around the track, shown best vantage points, how to get from A to B quickly, brought up to the roof of the control tower, it was just amazing, and they have even got a competition at the end of it all for us to enter into, where one of us will win a Mondello Driving experience where you get to drive a mazda 3 for 10 laps of the track, then 12 laps in a single seater motorcar!!!!

What do they want in return, to use any photos we can give them for their brochures etc etc, what a great organisation!

So Mondello Park and especially John Fair, thank you so much for getting in touch with me over this it has been great fun helping in the small way I did in organising this event, but more so thank you so much for giving all of us such an unique experience, it will be hard to match that!

Anyhow onto the photo its a car strangely enough, its one of the prodrifting cars sliding in a way I have never seen before around a corner. More photos can be seen on my Pix.ie page.

Well after all the planning across the world, Scott Kelbys 2nd worldwide photowalk got underway yesterday and I had the honour of leading a fantastic group of 46 people for the Dublin event. Rather then telling you all about it, everyone has been putting their images up on Pix.ie, many thanks to Marcus for allowing us to use the site for the event.

Looking though those photos will give you much more of an idea of what the day was like and can be found at this very handy webpage.

Thanks again to everyone for coming along and making the Dublin walk such a success.

(Photo above taken by Elliot Tucker)

I remembered today I have a photoblog so here is a picture for you.

Well I never thought it, wedding photos take a long time to process up, but I am back and posting again! I loved taking this photo when I was on holiday, it was the last morning before we had to fly home and I had decided to take a walk down to the port, the landscape is quite barren and when I spotted this red flower resting on a fallen pine cone I had to take the picture.

Another shot from Mallorca and marineland in Portal Nous where we stayed, this time of a seal jumping through a hoop during one of the shows on offer.

Well I am back from my holidays in Mallorca, and the wedding photos are now really starting to get processed. I brought my camera with me on holidays although it remained in the safe more times then it saw the outside world.

I did bring it to marineland though and over the next few days I shall be putting up some photos I took while there.

My last image to put up for the next 2 weeks. I have the camera with me so will hopefully have some Majorcan photos to put up on my return, so please dont unsubscribe yet give me the 2 weeks and I look forward to talking to you all again then.

Adios