crazybobbles

Totorro, Totorro!

I’m an avid studio ghibli fan. My first studio ghibli film was probably Spirited Away and instantly fell in love with it. It was a mixture of vivid imaginations and fantasies sprinkled with a strong solid story and a cool heroine. After Spirited Away I started watching all the previous Ghibli films and fell in love with Cat Returns, Pom Poko, Whisper of the Heart, Nausicaä and Howls Moving Castle. My favourite one is probably the Cat Returns purely because it’s a nice and simple feel good movie, and it has cats.

My goal is to go Japan one day and visit the Studio Ghibli museum (my friends have, grrr). Anyone wanna join :p? But yeah, real big fan of them and like collecting cute little Totorro memorabilia, the soot sprites stamp being one of them. So yeah, if you haven’t seen any, I highly recommend it.
Posted from Flickr

Original photo here

Eeee, the happy fun cool guys at poketo.com contacted me about my photo of the wallet and how I use it for my Oyster card and are generously sending me a free poketo wallet as a gift!

Not only that, my photo is also featured on their site and blog! Check it out at www.poketo.com

Oh and if you like the designs, you should definitely get yourself one because they’re all kinds of awesome
Posted from Flickr

This wallet actually has a story to tell! Despite being a limited edition poketo vinyl artist designed wallet it also has a little ickle story I’d like to tell people. For those who don’t live in London, our transport system has something called an "Oyster" card which is essentially an RFID enabled card that we use to pay out travel fares and whatnot (so basically you put the card near a reader and *beep*, it takes your money out and you get through the barriers, most countries have a similar system but with a different name).

Anyway, originally I had the holder for this oyster card and used that for a while until I discovered that it was stupid carrying two separate things when I could simply put my Oyster card inside my wallet and just tap in with that. So bam, the oyster card is inside my wallet. However… the problem here is that the wallet is JUST about thick enough that if I tap in the wrong side of the wallet, it wouldn’t work since it’s not in close enough proximity.

My way of remembering it is to constantly tell myself "Sunny side up". Only one side of the wallet has that smiley sun on the design and basically, that’s my way of determining which way I should be holding my wallet. And tada, as you can see from above, it works!

To take this shot I had to go in and out of the barriers about 10 times to get the shot in focus! It doesn’t stay green long enough so most of the time I miss it and get an orange . Finally one of the shots was in focus (well kinda haha).
Posted from Flickr

I love playing the piano, but I have a tendency to play a lot of rubbish during day time, it’s only at night where I really feel inspired to do something on the piano. It’s probably because everything is so quiet at night that the air is just waiting to be filled with soothing music. The piano is probably my favourite instrument, though guitar does come closely second. Here’s an ancient recording of me playing "Save me" by Queen, sorry about the sound quality :$

oh and the words are from Phantom of the Opera. It’s one of favourite musicals of all time, I’ve seen it twice in the theatre already and wouldn’t mind seeing it again

I’ll see if I can record something at the weekend. Otherwise, enjoy this photo
Posted from Flickr

In case you’ve seen my photos at the project365 group, my main subject is actually gig photography, last year has been a hectic year for photos and now I think it’s starting to pick up again so expect some of my project365 photos to be of gigs I goto (no brainer shots hehe)

A nice and super late night with Pete Doherty.
Not sure why I went really, I’m not too much of a fan of Pete Doherty, I like a few songs from the Libertines but that was about it. After booking the tickets I discovered that the event would end around 1-2am and that Pete only starts at around midnight. Quite a scary thought one must say. I was tempted to sell it but near the end opted to go see them.

Not too sure if I regretted it or not…
I suppose it was nice taking photos of him, it’s pretty cool shooting people who are smoking (even though smoking is bad) and everyone knows his face so it’s pretty neat. Note that it’s illegal to smoke in public areas so naughty Peter, some guy from the crowd tried it but got told off by the security guard. Uhm… yeah, I suppose the show was ok, there was a neat reggae ska band who were pretty neat, the singer was dapper looking and carried a cup of tea (I hope it’s tea) on stage too which was awesome.

The worse thing however was when the show ended at 2am. Not only was I painfully crushed throughout the gig, there were fights during some songs (i believe they were arguing about the use of controversial art in today’s society and got into a fight because of it). Afterwards I was able to slip out and head hope via the nightbus, the journey was alright since I didn’t have to wait long for the bus to arrive until the 3rd bus where it was a 45 minute wait because the scheduled bus didn’t appear.

To top things off I lost my 50mm f1.8 lens during the show, I swore I put the thing in my bag so I have no idea where it is now. I’ll try phoning up the venue tomorrow but I have very little hope in seeing that badboy again! Originally this shot was going to be day 10 but since they played around 12.30, it became the day 11 shot, and since I went through all that effort to see them that late, i thought it deserved to be number 11 (there’s some great shots of other bands I saw today).
Posted from Flickr

As well as that, I thought I’d give you all some status on things, life is once again all kinds of busy so i don’t have enough time to blog and what not, sometimes i feel like not going to gigs just to avoid blogging about it haha!