the tricycle and the turtle

down the drain.

antique shops don't seem to last very long which is kind of a cruel irony for antique dealers. this one's been up for sale for a long time. pity, peering from the street into the dim interior it looks like an aladin's cave of curios.

orange! - from the soup that brought you 'yellow'.

inspiration! not influence

illustration friday's topic this week is feet. yes, i was thinking about it... but nah!

just doodling around with some images i took last week - never chuck anything away - i got a card reader to go with the new camera and it's handy for downloading off the ixus while at work; get a useless lunch hour, do a photodoodle.

anyway, they're a good band, look out for the album...

thursday challenge: vision

originally titled 'intimacy'

I know it's not trying that hard but it kind of fits in with the this week's theme at thursday challenge.

I was reminiscing over an old pentax camera I have which, sadly, no longer works and I took this through its viewfinder using my trusty ixus400. the camera it's looking through is an me super SLR with a pentax 100mm telephoto. the image is of the ash trees i see whenever i look out the front window.

I hope it gets a better response than 'photo friday'. any reaction is welcome - just tell me you hate it! :o)

photo friday: red

first light of spring

well that's what I call it. :o/

no, I haven't posted the same image twice by accident - I see yellow, some see red but we're all equal so this is for the red seeing guys.

the reason is I've been recommended a site called Photo Friday which is not unlike illustration friday only for photos, obviously.

first light of spring

funny how one purposeful action sometimes delivers unintentional results.
i spied the daffs on the table by the window, catching the early sun. i put them on the floor to give the picture a less fussy background by drawing the curtain behind slightly. prostrating myself on the floor - as you do - to get personal with the blooms, it wasn't until i stood up that i noticed the stripe created by the shadow of the table and curtain.

now here's a question i don't know the answer to; the actual geography of the room is the mirror of the image shown but i think it looks better this way around. we favour reading the image left to right, this way we see the flowers before the shadow which makes a better story.

reasonable theory or talking bollocks - what do you think?

yellow

colleague

...and now i've narrowed the options down to one and soon i shall be a single lens relfex photographer again. the ixus is a superb little camera but it has limits - namely the speed and the zoom. i composed this portrait in my mind a few days before i had the opportunity. the ixus let me down slightly on the zoom - i couldn't get close enough and it's at its full extent; i was imagining a crisper profile. oh well......so to distract from that, i colorized some complementaries.

sunblaze

the weather's been varied, but one thing's constant: when it's been good, I've been stuck in the office. still, the days are now showing signs of drawing out. this evening's sunset was a magnificient one which i caught driving home from work - unfortunately, my route has few safe and legal stopping places; this is the best i could find before it was too late...it's probably better to regret not getting the perfect image than not getting one at all.

i want my m-me

I've had my little ixus for two years and two months now and I'm considering if it's the right time to get back to a serious camera - if only. Many moons ago, I saved up my pennies and got myself an MEsuper, and it was super! It was fun; it was serious. I had interchangeable lenses; I interchanged them. It had dials, the dials had little numbers on them, you had to do little sums in your head with these numbers, and you had make little assumptions and all while sharing a little dark space with your subject; it was all very intimate. It was also very expensive. Sadly, the photographer had to put it all away when he settled down and money had to be spent on sensible things like mortgage and toilet cleaner...

But five years ago, things were looking up and I got out the camera again, had it professionally serviced, took it to Italy and...

dropped it on a concrete floor inside a bag with two bottles of cheap vino. I don't even know why we bought the vino - it's not like you can't get decent chianti at a fair price in the UK!

So here we are; Two years and two months ago I was presented with a little ixus400 and here we are.

intimacy

just curious to see if the ixus could see what I could see looking through the me's viewfinder. it's funny but it worked better than I expected. the only thing you can't see is the little column of numbers at the edge which flicker (when the battery's working) advising which shutter speed works best with the f-stop you've chosen.

Well, I went to the shop yesterday to see several contenders but what struck me most was how cheap and disposable they all felt: I tell you I had to look around to check I hadn't wandered into the toy shop next door and was, in fact, handling the latest Fischer Price. I imagined the salesperson was going to ask me to press this button sir and a yellow and green snake would shoot out! What have we done to deserve this? - it's crapitalism at its worst. As you can see, I got home and dragged the corpse of the pentax out for verification and, even though it no longer performs as a camera, it still feels and operates better than all those new ones do!

Still, I know I'm like this with new shoes and I'm sure I'll get used to it like I do them. So I will bite the bullet but I'm not as excited as I was about it last week. Btw, my ixus has gone up in my estimation as a result - it's a fabulous little camera and it won't be made redundant even if.

checkers

One of the old images taken with the me super. Unfortunately, they had to be scanned on a basic scanner to get them digital; well, the scanner's all right but I'm a complete numpty at scanning, so what I mean is it was basic scanning!

Odd that their board is 12x12 squares, but the game seems to be regular checkers. There were a few games being played in the main street, quite a few spectators had gathered sitting on old boxes and whatever else they could find - it was serious business. It wasn't until this game was over did they realise a stranger was in their midst. They gave me some curious glances, I made my excuses and left. Maybe they thought I was spying for the opposition!