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I took a holiday up north to meet my brother and decided to visit a place I haven’t been in a while, I thought I’d write a short story I made up to accompany my photos I took of that place so I hope you enjoy. I’ll upload all of this in flickr and link them on this post for you to read and comment. Excuse my writing if you find it sucky, I’m never good at writing anyway, but I like writing random stories and whatnot so I thought I’d showcase a bit of it via the blog and the lovely flickr using nice illustrations from my trip up north.
I’ll post 3 photos up each day (probably at different times during the day too) with ickle thumbnails for you to click on. But yeah, get a flickr account anad check them out, it’s cooler (plus you can comment and fav them ;))
Update: I completed a rough drafty type thing of the story so yeah, give it a read and tell me what you think!
Say hello to Eve, my lovely G9 camera
Ladies and gentleman I would like you to meet my new camera, a lovely Canon Powershot G9 compact camera. She’s new to this world and was assembled in the land of the rising sun. She’ll be my companion whenever I go to gigs where my big old DSLR is frowned upon and ridiculed. Not that it will stop me from smuggling my DSLR, I’ve got my smuggling technique down to a science (from ickle venues to stadiums and festivals), it’s just when I’m at the heart of the battlefield, the enemies (being security guards) can see me equipped with something banned from the lands of a mid sized music venues, that’s where they usually give me an earful and try to take me away from the DSLR 
So in comes my backup camera, G9 (or Eve as I call her, my slender camera mistress with a HUGE 3inch LCD screen (is there such thing as camera pornography?)) She’ll handle the venues that are more strict on DSLR’s and hopefully take a few videos in the process too (you know the ones you get in youtube that you can hardly hear a thing because you’re right next to the speakers and it’s distorting the music altogether but you still listen to it).
One my of friends introduced me to a band called Das Pop, mainly because they were from Ghent (where he lives), they’re a mish mash between belgium bands (Soulwax, Millionaire etc) and europop, and did I say they were from Ghent? The thing with me is I tend to like a band after I see them live, usually that’s the quickest way for me to judge and like a band (not saying the only way mind), my friend himself hasn’t really got any of their albums but highly rated them when he saw them live, so why not? The tickets were pretty cheap and it was near from where I worked.
So yeah, Hoxton has a lovely venue, the lighting is quite limited but the acoustics aren’t too shabby. The support band wan’t too shabby either, I was caught sitting at the front (they had a lovely cushioned bench placed right at the front) reading when suddenly some guy approaches me and introduces me as the lead singer…
Part 2 of this epic adventure that is V Festival 08 (though I doubt you have more anticipation for it now since it happened quite a while back haha). Mainly a photo dump of the actual gig. Anyway, the lineup sucked so badly that all I saw were Sugababes, a bit of Stereophonics and Muse, so lets get straight down to it
Welcome to my lovely two part post on V Festival 2008, thought I’d separate the social part of v festival and the gig part of v into two posts to make things easier to digest, granted there’s not much to talk about in the gig section so it will probably be photo flooded whilst this one will most likely be content orientated. So yeah, after being guestlisted for the lovely v festival at Staffordshire on a Sunday, I had arranged all the travel and accomodation a few weeks in advanced to ensure things go well (”well” being i can actually get there and have a place to stay), I booked a lovely hotel at the Wolverhampton Quality Hotel (where quality is oozing from the hotel so much that the word quality popped into the name of the hotel, that’s how awesome it was!) and some tiddly train rides to Wolverhapton (was about 3 hours to Wolves but 2 hours back, silly trains). Fact was I was going for the day and wasn’t really keen in heading home early or camping (that wasn’t allowed anyway what with the wristbands and not having weekend passes). The hotel seemed like the best (and warmest) option and I was surprised that it was only £48, including bed and breakfast. I had booked a holiday for Monday to ensure I had sufficient amount of rest once I arrive home (besides I don’t think work would appreciate me coming into work all muddy and bloody from the festival (mm soft skulls).
Lovely view of London, and look it's the ever so phallic gherkin
Well if babylon was the thames river. Anyway, a few months ago I went on a cruise around the river thames to witness the ever so hectic views that is Mordor Lundun. The entire afternoon/evening was lovely, the sky had a nice shade of blue and there were enough clouds to imagine a biblical army taking place in the skies (if the army were blobs of white stuff anyway). There was a free bar and a wonderful blues duo who played all the oldskool tunes in their own bluesy and oldskool way, the singer reminded me of a female version of thom yorke due to her lazy eye, she also had that swaying dance you can only get from our quirky lead vocalist from radiohead (but a more toned down one, it was more about the lazy eye i think). Her microphone was the proper condenser microphones you get back in the 60’s (not that I remember much of the 60’s) and they had a cute little mixer that routed to the PA system (the kind that makes you go awwh, it only has two channels teehee and then probably cause a social faux pas by mentioning anything technical).
Of course don’t forget about the food, though you might as well have to be honest, we had canapés (which i insist on pronouncing it as can-apes (just without the pause if that makes sense)) but that consisted of cold sandwiches, cold chicken drumsticks (with tin foil wrapped at the bottom to prevent any uncouthness), cold samosas, cold springrolls and more cold sandwiches. Luckily I was able to ninja in a bacon bagel before I went in (mmm hot food) so dinner was sorted. I suppose the rest of the evening was spent lounging about and taking underexposed arty portrait shots of people and having folks take staged random portraits of me.
Photography is all about fun and creativity, and sometimes the old ideas and tricks work, in this case we’re talking about pinching things, I genuinely find the whole thing cute and fun. Just stick your hands out, shape your hands so it looks like you’re pinching something afar, take a shot and bam, instant illusion. It can be anything you want, the bigger the better. My entire Paris trip was actually spent doing that with all the famous buildings (that were pinchable anyway), and of course it doesnt have to stop there, pinching people is just as fun, and they can’t run away from it (mwahahaha). So yeah, here’s some of the pinching stuff I’ve done, hope this inspires you to do some pinching of your own, and why not post some if you have already?
