Animal Lover

I came across Martin Usbourne's beautifully wistful photographs of dogs and feel in love with his work.

His book, The Silence of Dogs in Cars, has gone straight to the top of my Christmas wishlist.

Reading his website further, I found out that he'd set himself a year-long challenge to see how many animals he can save - and as is the modern way, has a blog charting his progress.

And if it wasn't enough that he is a brilliant photography, his writing is frank, funny and inspiring.

If you like animals, but don't consider yourself an out-there animal activist, I wholly recommend reading his blog.

B is for Bicycle

I haven't been on a bike since I was fifteen (I've mentioned this before) but I'm increasingly drawn to bicycles. I found myself enjoying the Tour de France this year (mainly because of Bradley Wiggins) and aesthetically I find bicycles very pleasing. I think it might be the spokes.

After laudrettes (again I've mentioned this before), bicycles are my second favourite thing to photograph.

And bicycles feature on so many pretty things:

Bowls, cups and other colourful ceramcis from Circa Ceramics

Silk cushions by Ferm Living

and the B mug in the Urban Alphabet range by Big Tomato Company.

A project associated with my work fixes bicycles and the other day I found myself casually asking how much they sold the refurbished bikes for. Perhaps my days as a non-cycler won't last much longer.

The Flickr Game

The Flickr Game, originally uploaded by sanddancer1.

The concept:

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker.

The Questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

(idea taken from Bibbity-Bob)

I love the Southbank

Last week work involved a day working on the Southbank. I arrived far too early to go into my event, but I didn’t mind just ambling around because I love the Southbank. It is especially nice early in the morning when there aren’t too many people about.

I had my camera with me so decided I’d take a few photos. Of course, the views around there are really incredibly touristy. I couldn’t resist taking photographs of Big Ben and the London Eye. Much to my embarrassment, a man stopped me and asked if I wanted him to take a picture of me with the Houses of Parliament in the background. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I wasn’t a tourist, so I just said “No, thank you” in a way that I hope sounded like English wasn’t my first language (I’ve been accused of this before anyway) .


Lots of people hate the buildings on the Southbank. Prince Charles ranted about the National Theatre buildings. Admittedly, they aren't the prettiest. But I love them. I think it is possibly because my university (UEA) was designed by the same architect so it feels like home there amongst the Brutalist concrete structures.

I wish I worked there as I feel nothing bad could ever happen and I'd be happy to go to work everyday.

The Streets of...

I'm back from San Francisco. I loved it. England seems very cold and flat in comparision.


I wondered if there were would be enough for us to do over a week but it really wasn't long enough and despite a packed schedule, I'm sure there is so much we didn't manage to do and I'd definitely go back - tomorrow if I didn't have to work!

As it was our first visit, we did a lot of tourist sites, which has resulted in the obligatory cliched photographs:




Cable Car turning around
My new favourite mode of transport. Yes, its expensive, slow and chilly, but I loved it.












Lombard Street
Really who thought it would be a good idea to build a city where there were so many hills? My feet still haven't recovered.









Alcatraz
I feared it would be tacky but it wasn't. It was fascinating. As its now a national park, they were keen to stress that there was more to the island than the infamous prison, but that is still what most people wanted to know about.






City Lights Book Store
The shop associated with The Beats. We stopped by and bought a few books, despite the OH's mutterings that Jack Kerouac was the most over-rated writer ever.











Haight Ashbury Sign
It had to be done, even though the old Sixties hangout is dominated by shops selling tat.









Coit Tower
An exhausting walk uphill and up stairs to reach the tower, which apparently gave the best views in the city. But with so many high points, the view weren't really that much better than from anywhere else and after the Alcatraz boat, I felt like the tower was swaying. so we didn't stay up there for long.








The Bay Bridge at Night
The less famous of the city's bridges, it apparently won't withstand another earthquake.









Wine Country
I don't normally like the countryside but even I loved it here. Unfortunately we couldn't really bring back any wine but I did sample plenty and lots of gorgeous food too.









The Golden Gate Bridge
Regular readers may recall that I don't like bridges. I made it a little way across this one before I thought I was going to vomit. The fact that there had been a ten car smash up the day before didn't help. It really would be a good idea for them to put something in between the two directions of traffic.



And some perhaps more unusual pictures:



A Man with a Basketball for a Head
We went to watch the Golden State Warriors play Houston. This was my third basketball game and I really enjoyed it this time.








A Giraffe
Not native to California - we went to the zoo! The OH said that the giraffes reminded him of me. I'm taking that as a compliment.











Giant Broccoli
A plant in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. It looked just like my favourite vegetable.









The Jefferson Airplane section of a secondhand record shop

My favourite 1960s San Francisco band. We'll gloss over what they went on to become.







Warning Sign

Good advice found on the wall of Vesuvio bar.








The only bad thing that I saw (apart from those gradients!) was that the city seems to have a terrible problem with homeless people. Living in London, I thought was used to seeing people begging, but I've not seen anything on this scale before. It was really very sad and I wondered why all of these people had come to be in that situation and if it was similar across over US cities.

As the old song goes, I did misplace my heart there but I think my body clock is still somewhere over the Atlantic as I'm keeping very strange hours. At 4am this morning I watched the end of a Discovery channel documentary about the 1906 earthquake in SF which ended with a very grim warning for the future. So I'm glad I went when I did and that I didn't see the documentary before.

Par for the Course

I’m pretty busy at the moment with various things, one of which is my photography course.

The class started off as eight of us, but last week we were down to five. It may have been the torrential rain but at least one person hasn’t been since the first week, so I suspect our numbers are dwindling, which is always the way with these courses.

The other stereotype that the class is conforming to as that there is one person who talks too much. Every course I’ve ever done has had one of these, someone who talks lots, but says little of substance. The current culprit is a retired doctor, who is writing a book on medical history and is mainly interested in photographing slides. He is obsessed with the word ‘cataloguing’ and at least once per session will say it loudly.

I am enjoying the course but strangely I’ve been struck by an inability to taking photographs since it started. I am learning how my camera works properly and am aiming to move off using the automatic setting. At the moment I’m still getting to grips with the controls so it takes time to fiddle about with it to set it up. The other problem is that it gets dark so early so I’m reliant on practising at lunchtime. The difficulty with this is that I’m in central London which may have a wealth of interesting things to photograph but I can’t see them for the swarms of people and its hard to find a quiet space to get my settings right. Yesterday I was experimenting with various shots when I was spotted by some tourists who asked me to take pictures of them with their cameras. I was happy to help out but it seems to be an occupational hazard if you stand still for too long.

So tonight I’m hoping to do some still life photographs in the house and some night time shots in the garden to practice, so hopefully I’ll get a better understanding of the camera and be more confident in my lunchtime session tomorrow.

Step aside David Bailey*

I have enrolled for a digital photography course. Its something I’d been meaning to do for a while but was spurred on by Chocolate & Cherries recent post. Then yesterday, I discovered my local authority offer a course at a bargain price and a convenient time and location for me. So I stopped dithering and phoned them to enrol. I was slightly embarrassed by giving the course title as ‘Digital Camera’ as it is in the course information as I’m sure Digital Photography would be more appropriate, but I made my booking undeterred.

I was feeling slightly smug about being so decisive until I remembered that my past experiences with the local authority’s adult education department have not been great. I have attempted to enrol on courses with them in the past, but they’ve either not sent the appropriate information until after the course has begun or cancelled the course due to lack of interest. And perhaps it will prove to be prophetic that the woman I enrolled with was at pains to take numerous contact numbers for me so they could get in touch “if we need to cancel it or you know something else”.

The other thought that has occurred to me since I signed away my Monday nights is that two hours on an evening in the winter is going to limited what photography we can do. So if it does go ahead (still a big if), look out for hundreds of shots of the inside of class room and west London at night.

* actually I think Martin Parr would be more appropriate, but for the sake of the title I went with the one photographer absolutely everyone knows.

My Beautiful Laundrette

I've long harboured a secret love of laundrettes. From an aesthetic point of view that is. (I realise its probably easier to feel that way when I own a shiny brand new washing machine and don't actually have to use a laundrette myself, but nonetheless I do love them)

I've always loved the smell of them from outside too - a warm clean smell. But mainly it the sight of the rows of washing machines, the repetitive pattern they make and their essentially retro-ness.

It may have started after seeing the film with the above title, one of my all time favourites, especially the scene where the uncle and his lover dance in the laundrette. And I've been coverting the work of Corinna Radcliffe that features laundrette images for quite some time.

When I got my hands on the digital camera, one of the first pictures I took was of the laundrette near our home - surreptitiously snapped on my way to work so no great work of art. But I was pleased to have the picture of what, to me, was a thing of beauty!

I thought I was alone in this penchant until a couple of weeks ago, one of the winning pictures in the Guardian magazine's photography competition featured a laundrette. Then today, whilst browsing Flickr.com (how easy it is to lose hours on there), I came across a group dedicated to this very subject. And then several more for the American term, Laundromat. veritable feast!

It seems I'm not alone. And whilst I feel (a little) less weird now, I feel that something that was once just mine is now perhaps not that special.