West Pier

The West Pier is being torn down, which makes me sad. I took a lot of photos of it when I first moved here, including this one which came out looking like a ghost. I was using a very old camera that I was convinced was broken but I decided to take a roll of film anyway, just to check. They all came out looking like this. I think it looks cool, especially given the subject. I am not best pleased with Brighton and Hove council for tearing down one of the most unusual (and my personal favourite) landmarks. I hear they are replacing it with some statue that lights up. Call me stupid but I'd have thought there'd be better things to spend money on, and more important issues to address, than an old pier that's in no one's way and is actually pretty iconic. I could rant for hours. But I wont. As soon as it stops raining I will go take some photos before it's gone. (click on the image to see it larger). 

Brooklyn 120

Some more shots of Brooklyn taken with my Diana camera. I have to admit, it was my first time using the camera and it took me 3 disastrous films to get the hang of it. Needless to say, these are from the disastrous films. 

Brooklyn

I was reminiscing today about last summer and my brief time as a Brooklynite. I am having a disastrous time trying to get my American passport sorted out. Apparently hoop jumping is an important skill I am going to have to perfect if I am to become an American citizen. 

These are just a couple of snaps of some signs from around Brooklyn. I think I have some more on my other blog, daily miscellany. 

Degree show poster Part 3

These are my favourite outcomes. I did about 15 in all, just because I couldn't decide which I liked best. I submitted the top 2 ideas, but unfortunately I didn't get picked. I don't mind though, because I'm pretty happy with the result. 

Montague projects

I've been following Julian Montague's blog for a while now, ever since this time last year when we were set a project to do a cover for some books, one of which was his 'Stray Shopping carts of North America'. He's been doing something called Daily Book Graphics, where he posts covers and illustrations from his vast collection of old books. All of them can be seen on his blog, or his flickr set. There's some really great stuff in there, everything from psychedelic type to scientific diagrams. One day I hope I've got enough books to be able to post one cool thing every day. I'm getting there so watch this space... 

Degree show poster Part 2

So these are some of the shapes that I came up with for the degree show poster ( I will post some of the initial ideas for layouts tomorrow once I've scanned them in. The idea is that The degree show at the end of third year is the only time really that the whole University comes together to make something. All the different courses finally get to see what everyone else has been getting up to. It's also about the idea that courses and disciplines overlap and the work that goes into the degree show is not just from third year students but everyone else too. So I took that and tried not to make something lame (I was thinking of building something at first) and make this sort of shape made up out of small parts. the idea is that in places they overlap and make other interesting and unexpected images. I did a couple of posters for the crit on friday which I will post. I was really pleased with them, and on the whole the tutors were too, they just thought it looked a little like a 'corporate design for an oil company' and that the idea of merging a lot of images and shapes and colours is something you only do 'when they've given you lots of crap images to use and you want to hide how crap they are'... eeek. So anyway, I'm working on making it better for the deadline tomorrow. 

Degree show poster

These are some close ups of the more abstract and random images that I am working on now. 

Dungeness

It's been really lovely weather lately, really cold and sunny which is my favourite. These are a couple of polaroids I took in Dungeness last year (the bottom two were actually taken by Toby on another day). I've been itching to go out and take some photos for weeks now, but the heavy workload is preventing me. I am also missing my polaroids. I have 3 shots left of my last film, which has been ruined anyway when it went through security at JFK, so the photos have been coming out all yellow. I was really excited to hear a few months ago that a group of people at the impossible project are trying to bring back polaroid film. I would be SO happy if they did, I am so not prepared to pay £20 for a 10 shot film on ebay. 

Library of Congress

This is one of the most amazing resources that I have ever come across on Flickr. The United States Library of Congress has a flickr (here), how strange.  200 years worth of images (from family photos to adverts) all in one place. I have literally spent hours looking through all these images. These particular photos come from the set 1930s & 1940s in colour (here). Such gorgeous photos, and it sounds silly but it's really odd to see these things in colour. Apart from colour movies, the only images I can think of from this time are black and white!

Bending light

I thought it might be quite cool to share some of the masses of flickr sites, blogs and other online resources that I use or that inspire me. This one is a flickr set by Reciprocity called Bending light (see the whole set here), they are all analogue lensless photographs (kind of like photograms) of refracted light. It's really worth seeing the whole set, some of the stuff on Reciprosity's other sets are pretty amazing too.