Posts Tagged Photography

Visual Review: Delia’s Complete How to Cook

deliaThe other half is an excellent cook. He received Delia’s Complete How to Cook for his birthday and since then he’s made one meal and one desert almost every weekend. I’m going to share some pictures of the delicious things he’s made, and as for the book, I’d recommend it to anyone! The resulting food is beautiful, the recipes aren’t excessively difficult and everything’s explained very thoroughly throughout the book, complete with excellent photographs. The information about eggs, fruits, veggies etc is also very interesting to read.

In addition to the recipes after the jump, we’ve also had leak and goats cheese tart and souffléd omelette. This weekend we’re having a blue cheese gratin and lemon roulade.

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The Resolution: Daily Photo

Jan 2nd - Students Are GrossSo I have two new years resolutions, one which will probably fail because I’d forgotten Mars eggs existed is the no buying chocolate resolution – see here. The second is Project 365 (I guess 366 this year).

The objective is to take one photograph a day to help you grow as a photographer, learn what’s important to you and to keep a visual memory of your year.

I only discovered this today so I’m a day late, but it’s a leap year so I’ll still have 365 pictures.

I also plan to blog about each picture, so here’s the first one, and it’s not pretty ;) Came home to my student house today, I’d left some wine glasses in the mister’s room because they were mine and didn’t want them breaking, turns out after a week they grow mold!

Gross but interesting. I also like what the flash did with the glass! I used my phone camera for this cause I had it handy ;)

And yes that is our kitchen sideboard, but we’ve not been here so it’s not our mess ;)

As an aside I had a wonderful, romantic new years and feel I started this year really really well. Happy new year everyone!

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This is amazing.

I was reading The Good Human today, and my attention was drawn to this collection of artwork by Chris Jordan. As he says:

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

It definitely does that – even from the images there a scary reality is easy to see. I can’t imagine how those must appear in reality… or how long they took to produce. I am terribly curious. I may well have a nose around the net tomorrow, if I get time. IF. That’s a big if. Check it out anyway, you may be surprised!

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Future of Web Design 2007

This Wednesday my Mister and I attended the Future of Web Design conference in Kensington, Londinium. I’d never been to anything like this before so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I found the experience really enjoyable, it was really interesting to be with so many people interested in that kind of thing, and the talks, whilst often things I knew or common sense, still helped bring my mind back to what I should be doing, and what the web’s about.

That said, I’m a student, I’ve worked in industry not even two years. From what I’ve read on other blogs the professionals weren’t as keen on the day as I was, but I do think that had a lot to do with the level of experience – I’m sure a lot of them have been to a lot of conferences. As it was there weren’t many students there at all, just our small crowd from Pompey and maybe one or two others. Definitely a professional day. I did enjoy it and I did find it interesting. I’m glad uni suggested it, and I think the experience was well worth the (hefty) 60 pounds…
I have some not so great photos I’ll probably stick on my flickr next time I’m at home.

These are some of my notes from the day. Made as coherent as possible, I was very tired that day :S

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Tonight we dine in hell… 300 Review plus…

Yesterday the other half an I went to see 300. He likes Miller and knows about these things, whereas I have no clue about things like graphic novels and was mostly going because I liked the trailer, and I’ve dragged him to every shitty horror flick that’s come out since October. I was surprised, I thought the film was amazing.

It was certainly visually stunning, although I’m not so sure I’d have been so accepting of the obviousness of CG had I not known it was based on a graphic novel. Either way, they really went to town on it. I especially loved this technique that I’ve only just started noticing appearing in movies, where, for example, someone shoots an arrow, the camera pans in on the arrow, time slows down and it moves around the arrow before it speeds up again, drawing you in and making you feel a part of something otherwise quite flat. It’s almost 3D without being 3D.

Gerard Butler was impressive, I’ve only seen him as the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera, it was very entertaining to see him do something so different, and do it so well.

The story wasn’t that strong, it was mostly about the fighting which is fair enough, but they did manage to put enough of a storyline in to have me crying by the end of it (I felt like I’d been hit with an emotional bus, but I think that may have just been me). There were some very touching moments, some downright scary moments, but mostly, a lot of bloody moments. But even then, they were well engineered bloody moments.

The soundtrack, the soundtrack, the soundtrack, I adored it. Rocky vs classical, always a winner with me. I thought it fit the movie very well. I’d recommend the movie, assuming you can deal with slow motion decapitation… or just generally a lot of slow motion. I read somewhere they filmed most of it at 50-150 frames per second – shows just how much slow motion they did or planned to use!

I realise now on DA you get a free prints account, so I just messed around with the options to see what would happen, as a result, this photo of the sunset over Southsea is available as a print.

All else is going alright. Got a lot of work on at uni, but it’s all good things. Thinking of things to write about for a dissertation, working up a design for a competition, running a business focussed on environmentalism (proper website and details available next week), it’s all good.

Thursday 21st March

Nothing!

Wednesday 20th March

Chocolate chips 0.49
Pizza 1.15
Broccoli 0.46
Butter 0.46
Chips 0.88
Enterprise Investment 30
Car Insurance 476.04 (not including this in percentages as it tips it too much, just included for records)


Totals so far…
£235.35
Necessary £179.96 76.46%
Unnecessary £55.39 23.54%

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You ARE Amazing

Things are good.

I’m on the mend now. Fingers crossed it stays that way. I made it into town the other day, and I’ve even been to Portsmouth and to uni. I was mortified about missing the start of that really. And also, I have so much work to do now, last semester’s, and this semester’s… but that’s ok. Because it’ll get done. So long as I can stay well. I still get fairly tired easily, but that’ll go. Thankfully the feeling depressed about it has passed, I think that went with the actually being able to do things again-ness.

South Park, good or bad?

I actually did something artistic the other day, it felt good.

I’m also reading Design Anarchy – finally managed to put my hands on it in the uni library (yeah, because I can afford £50 for a book). It’s good. It scares me sometimes, as do the Adbusters magazines, but it’s good. I like it a lot.

I finished The Modern Pagan: How to Live a Natural Lifestyle in the 21st Century. It came across to me as a little preachy at times, a lot of things are common sense, but it was alright. Not the best book in that vein that I’ve read, but still good to read all the same. I know I marked off some pages to go back to, maybe when I do I’ll think some more about how useful I thought it really was.

I started a Library Thing thing actually, though I’ve not had much time to play with it. I like the site and what it does, but not the interface so much. I don’t know. Anyone know of any similar sites? I guess it’s like last.fm in a way.

So it’s halfway through February. Anyone keep their new years resolutions this time? I didn’t make any. I stopped eating chocolate for a bit, but that went to hell when I got sick. I can’t count how many Mars eggs I’ve eaten – they have to be the best invention since…. cream eggs. Still, that needs to stop. Really.

Actually, that’s a lie, I did have a resolution in mind. Haha. Guess that went to hell too. I’ll dig that out and maybe start doing it. It involves cameras.

Happy belated Val Day world. Love is amazing. Find some.

I got an essay back that I wrote “analysing an image found within contemporary visual culture”. I got 70% which is really good, and some really nice comments. Considering I was in quite an upset/stressed out state the day I wrote that, that’s pretty amazing. I did put in some library time for that though, and it paid off, judging by one of the comments. I guess I might just live in the library this semester. It’s not like I don’t have too much to do.

Quite probably one of my favouritest photos ever. <3 Although it should be the other way around, as per the way it was developed ;P

I’m getting rid of my tellybox. That’s not to say I won’t watch telly elsewhere, I think that’s inevitable. And you know, the stuff I watch on the PC, but but but, I’M GIVING UP HOLLYOAKS. Properly this time. Yes. You heard. Giving it up.

24 is scary. It’s all going wrong. Fix it.

I should do the stuff I came home to do.

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Trolleys taking over Godalming…

I was browsing flickr late last night, as you do, and I found a trolley spotter. I’m very amused, but he does have a point. There’s a Sainsbury’s trolley right outside my house right now (which I may go steal and use for something, I don’t know. It’s been there about a week, and for the record, I guess Sainsbury’s is about a mile away).

Anyway, be amused, I was.

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Bladerunner Unicorn


Bladerunner Unicorn
Originally uploaded by snowtru.

I was looking through some of my old research, and found a photo of this – an origami unicorn I made when I was doing a project about Bladerunner. The site with instructions is here.

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4am Does Not Exist (Eurostar to Lille)

I went to Lille, France yesterday with my Mum to do Christmas shopping. She booked it up months ago and I’d forgotten. Therefore I failed at buying nothing, as I did end up spending all of the Euros I took.

Anyway, I’ll update this later, as I should be working.

The flickr set of photos is here, which will also be updated later. I do recommend you take a look, it has a dude on a unicycle, a giant plastic elephant’s bottom AND a headless dog.

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Play-Doh and Evils

Play-Doh is obviously one of the most amazing things ever. It celebrated it’s 50th anniversary just this year. There’s an entire group on flickr dedicated to Play-Doh (check it out for more amazing stuff like the below image). Everyone loves Play-Doh, and I’m pretty sure everyone’s tasted it, just because of that amazing smell it has. (You can deny it all you want, I won’t believe you).

I don’t know, it might just be me, but I think it’s wrong for corporations like McDonald’s to get in on the Play-Doh act. I was at Toys R Us just last night and they had a Play-Doh McFlurry maker. I can’t find it on their site, but it’s there. The ‘mercan site has the french fry one. McDonald’s do and will always target kids, but that doesn’t make it right. The little MickyD’s checkout sets freak me out and then some too, why would you give that to your kid? “Here Bobby, have this McDonald’s checkout! Aspire to be a checkout person, live your dream!”

If that was me I’d give my kid some paint, or something musical, or a book or a football or something. I mean seriously, who would give that to a child. If you would, I’d like reasons. It also makes me wonder what kind of kids would *ask* for that kind of thing. Why is that ok in society? Everyone knows McDonald’s is evil, everyone knows they’re bad for you… so why?

Society is strange.

I also appreciate the concept of propaganda, and that MickyD’s list of crimes may or may not just be media hype, but, if there’s even a grain of truth… I’d rather steer clear. And have done, for almost 18 months now. I can’t remember the last time I ate real fast food, and I doubt it’s something I’d do again.

Also, I miss Sesame Street. Where has it gone? WHERE!?!


Sesame Street
Originally uploaded by arkworld.

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