If you’ve read previous posts on the subject you’ll be aware I’m now the proud owner of a completely ugly and quite scary looking machine to help me control my sleep apnea. Since I’ve been given the machine my mind has been ticking over with ideas of how I could use the machine to create some creative self portraits. Last night I decided to start fleshing these out on paper.

click to enlarge

My sketching powers lead a lot to be desired but it all makes sense to me. I want to shoot myself wearing the mask and carrying the machine round in a variety of everyday (and pretty bland) environments.  I’ve made the decision I want to be the only person in the frame. Having passers-by milling about in the background would possibly be quite cool but it would add extra challenges to shooting that I don’t want to have to contend with.  Sketching out the shots though has been a useful exercise as I’ve already settled on several different framing options and shooting positions for each shot as I want them to be slightly different to add variety and I’ve also made some descisions on wardrobe that I probably wouldn’t have considered if I’d left it to chance and shot on the hoof.

One thing I haven’t settled on yet is whether to solely use natural light or to add a bit of sparkle with strobes,  I almost think they would give it too much kick as I would like the images to almost look mundane apart from the oddity of the machine. If I light it just right and get a nice balance strobes could still improve the shots without detracting from this goal. I guess as I’ve planned more I will have more time to try various options when I actually come to shoot. Hopefully I may get chance, weather permitting to try and bag at least two of the shots next week whilst doing my regular photowalk with my very talented best mate Darren. These sketches will also serve as a useful reference to him (from an assisting point of view) in knowing whats going on in my head and what I’m trying to achieve…I shall keep you updated on progress.

How do you plan shots like this? Do you sketch? Am I crazy? be interested in your thoughts…

I’ve spent much of the last 48 hours sleeping solidly, not because of the machine, but because I’ve had a really nasty cold/flu bug which has left me completely wiped out. My asthma is driving me nuts and I ache all over. Today I have to say I’m feeling much better than I did yesterday but I’d be telling porkie pies if I said I was anywhere near 100% power.

I realise this all sounds a bit depressing. Life really isn’t that bad I’m just feeling the bumps in the road this week. I guess on a positive note Paul (@fwump) sent me a tweet earlier in the week to let me know the prints they’d got from the wedding shots I took turned out alright, Which is cool and it’s clear from the off-the-hook stuff that Nathan Pask (@bigcrustyape) is posting on his blog and portfolio that the site I created for him is working well (and he’s having WAY to much fun shooting cool stuff). I also spent a little time the other week helping the legendary music photographer Simon Pollock (@gtvone) take control of his blog and gallery space and that seems to be working well for him. So thats all pretty cool. All that good karma should come back and bite me on the ass soon right? I’m sure it will. Until then I’m off to take another lemsip and cough up a lung!!

Since then though an opportunity has arisen to take a sideways step into a completely different team doing something completely different.  The role is to deal with roles and authorisations within SAP which is like the mother of all resource planning and finance tools which the council (like many other big organisations) are trying to implement. The opportunity in no way guarantees I am safe from the axe but I think it at least improves my chances of having a seat when the music stops playing. It’s quite a big culture change for me  to move from a support environment (where you deal with variety) to move into a project role focussed on one area but they do say a change is as good as a rest and it seemed worth a punt, with only six months of service under my belt I really don’t have many other options.

I moved at the tail of last week but I’m still very much finding my feet (and my desk?). I’m going to really miss the team I’ve been working in for the last few months though. It has been the most fun I’ve probably ever had whilst getting the job done and I don’t think I’ll be lucky enough to be in that situation again. I’ve met some great new friends. I’m sure they won’t miss me half as much but it was nice to have the opportunity to go out and get steaming drunk with a few of them on friday night .

All this job changing though has put a huge big dent in my best laid plans of getting back up to speed at photographywired.com and also spending some time on some new photography and web projects. I’m away for three days this coming week getting some SAP training near Heathrow but after I get back and start finding my feet in my new role and location I hope to start getting back into things (but I shall refrain from making promises I can’t keep). Wish me luck!?!

At the moment Chloe is using the blog to post general info about family events etc but in the next few months she is embarking on a huge big career change involving what could be 4 or more years study to become a qualified mid-wife, I’m sure this is going to give her plenty to write about. So if your interested check it out and make sure you subscribe to her feed. It’s certainly going to be an interesting insight into the other (not so known) private life of the infamous disco~stu!!

twinkini interface (not who I follow incidentally! lol)

Most of you have probably heard of twitter right? if you haven’t then where the hell have you been?

I’m a complete twitterholic. I love reading whats going on in the world of interweb via my friends tweets, I love sending out my random thoughts into the twittosphere especially when I’m on the bus! One thing though that bugs me about twitter is trying to find the perfect app. It isn’t an easy task and new ones pop up all the time. Some of them I’ve tried and I hate, some just plain don’t work, some come close, but most have flaws.

For my Desktop twitter needs I use destroytwitter and that works pretty well for me, it has it’s annoyances but nothing I can’t live with.

Good mobile twitter apps though seem harder to find especially if like me you have a windows mobile device. iPhone users seem to get a much easier time of things (not surprisingly there is really an app for everything and everyone…grrr). So anyhoo I’ve tried lots from TinyTwitter to CeTwit to a whole host of java midlets in between them both…..most of them suck to some degree.

Today I started trialling Twikini….and so far I have to say I’m impressed! It’s not too bloated, it’s easy to use and better still  it hasn’t crashed on me yet (which being a windows mobile app is a relative miracle). It’s got all the features you’d want to see (twitpic, location, DMs, replies etc) and it’s pretty nimble which again surprised me as I’ve used some similar looking apps, which have been slower than slugs on heat. The jury is still out but I’d recommend trying it if your a WM user who is also addicted to twitter.

So what do you peeps use? interested to find out….from both a desktop perspective and a mobile one.

Soooo I’ve been fairly busy the last week or two dealing with various BIG issues at work (seriously BIG) and also building a new PC. Tonight I managed to finally get my old webcam installed on my new computer (running Vista 64bit). It was a bit of a messy process which involved editing some driver files to spoof the OS into thinking I have a different camera but it seems to work to a fashion, certainly beats having to go out and buy a new one in a hurry! anyhoo I thought I’d test it out with the 12 seconds website thing…Its kind if twitter for video…in that you record a video blog style thing but only have 12 seconds to say your piece (or not in my case). A interesting idea foshure. I’ll try and post a proper catchup entry soon…. Lots to update the world on. LOTS….

If you don’t know Nathan’s work then I recommend you check him out, he’s got some crazy good photography skills. In fact it’s also worth reading this interview with him on photographywired which was posted a little while back. I’m lucky enough to know Nathan personally and I’ve had the pleasure of hangin’ with him and his homies on a few occasions. Through various conversations about problems with his old site I ended up with the opportunity to give his site a makeover and I have to say I’m pleased with the results.

Nathan has worked in the design industry for quite some time so compared to most other people I’ve worked on websites for he had a very clear vision of how he wanted his site to look visually (and that was both refreshing and at times challenging ). He also wanted something which he could easily update which was not where he was at with his current set-up which was purely a flash based gallery.

If I’d tackled this project a year ago I would most certainly of used drupal, but since using wordpress for photographywired I’ve been surprised and impressed by it’s versatility. I don’t want or need to get into which system is better but I think in this instance where a blog was going to be a major part of the project and I wasn’t having to deal with large amounts of site members and community functionality then wordpress seemed like a better choice and I knew it has a nice easy to use back end for posting straight out of the box.

I guess the biggest challenges were both theming the site and coding the portfolio sections. The theme was challenging from the point of view that I needed to implement a single wordpress installation but have a very separate blog and portfolio style. Luckily this can actually be achieved relatively easily in wordpress using the page templating system and conditional template tags. I learnt a lot of stuff about themes and wordpress that I didn’t know previously during this project but that’s one of the reasons for taking something like this on!

Nathan was keen that the portfolio would be very similar to his old site in that it would be completely stripped back to basics with plenty of white space to allow the images to speak for themselves. This actually was quite a long process as it’s surprising how much stuff we had to chuck out to get to that level of minimalism, we also spent some considerable time adding a bit of fluidity to the portfolio section so that it still displayed images and thumbnails at various screen resolutions. This was much more challenging than I envisaged when taking into account several browser types. The blog is kind of a polar opposite with lots of personality and clutter but also brought its own challenges in placing various background elements and images and keeping it xhtml valid. Nathan also got me to add a few easter eggs in the blog area which are well worth hunting for!

Coding the site was relatively straight forward with most of the site functionality being taken care of by available plugins straight out of the box with just basic configuration needed. Some stuff though was a bit more complex. Once again the process of stripping down and simplifying the gallery plugins and flash plugins and putting them back together again so that they fitted purpose was very time consuming and Nathan threw a few curve balls my way which I still managed to sort out fairly quickly (random images and no thumbs on home page and the ability to link to specific images in flash gallery amongst them). The result though is a fairly slick back end which offers Nathan the ability to manage his portfolio really easily without needing a degree in computer science.

In fact the workflow is pretty lean especially when you consider he now has the ability to manage all of his images on the fly from the same wordpress dashboard which he uses to update his blog posts and other static pages. I also spent some time tinkering with the user roles in wordpress so that Nathan can set up private galleries for clients for image proofing without compromising the security of the rest of his site. All this is tucked in behind a nicely themed user login interface.

I think Nathan is pleased with the site and I’m certainly proud of my accomplishments. It was really a team effort though with both myself and Nathan putting in some pretty late night work with phone conversations and live edit sessions taking place over the internet…. crazy sleep deprived goodness! well worth it!! we got the whole thing done in about 3-4 weeks whilst still holding down the day jobs which isn’t bad going. This includes the more standard stuff also such as SEO, XHTML validation, setting up feeds, backup management, spam protection etc etc.

If you have a cool web site project that you think would be right up my street, get my creative juices pumping, and your willing to part with some cash to get me involved then please get in touch.

What do you peeps think of it?

It transpires that they were watching the well known kids television channel Childrens BBC (CBBC) which is now available to us on freeview after the uber cool digital switchover and it was dress like your parents day! Robyn and Chloe decided to email in a photo I’d taken of me and Robyn during my 365days project and hey presto half an hour later there is me and Robyn featured on the tele! CRAZY WORLD!

Anyway I missed the action but luckily our new digi box has a built in hard drive which allowed us to rewind and watch over and over (and over and over) again. lol!……below is a rather horrible vid of said TV moment of glory captured on Chloe’s IXUS.

Fame at last……hopefully fortune isn’t far behind!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I still find this whole talking to strangers thing hard but I am gaining confidence slowly. Todays stranger was completely unplanned and as usual I stumbled over my words and must of come across as a total nob but hey I got there in the end.

This is Dave….

Dave works in the passion and pain emporium in Weymouth who stock a range of cool clothing and also operate a tattoo studio.

Chloe had popped in to get a bar to put in one of her ear piercings and Dave (above) was busily sketching out some designs behind the counter. I always find people sketching and drawing fascinating, so he grabbed my attention. I managed to start off a short conversation and before I knew what had stumbled out of my mouth I was pointing my camera at him trying to get a half decent shot. I only shot about 3 or 4 frames but managed to faff about and get my flash out of my bag and on camera to get this frame above. Not perfect but I’m quite happy with it, I’m more happy with the fact I have got one more shot toward my 100 and that I plucked up the courage and even passed on a business card so Dave may even find this photo! (if he does I hope he likes it).

practice will make perfect.

www.100strangers.com