Autophoto

I have decided to try and get a few car pics for my portfolio as it were. My mate Rob fancies himself as a bit of a rudeboy. He pretty much owns Bracknell in his Civic Type R and has the fastest recorded time round the Bowlplex car park. I managed to tear him away from the McDonalds Crew and 15 year old hangers on just long enough to get a couple of pics of his shiny red toy.

This is my first real attempt at this. I must say I struggled for ideas a little bit. But i guess when I do a few more I'll get in to the swing of things. I'm going to go and buy a car mag and see what they do in there for ideas, which weirdly enough is exactly how i taught myself how to take BMX photo's! Well i never.

I added a hard light layer with 35% opacity to pop the colour and contrast a little bit.

Lemme no if you are a rudeboy an you wouldn't mind me practicing on your piece of tin.

Bet you didn't expect to see an update did you?!

I think that may be a new record. HAPPY NEW YEAR! IT'S SNOWING! etc etc, that's just to make up for all the stuff I've not written since the last one.

Anyway, believe it or not, i have been doing some stuff here and there. i still haven't got round to redesigning this website, mainly because I have forgotten how to use Dreamweaver and I'm a bit scared that i'll do something bad and irreversible. I really have no excuse for not updating or anything, seeing as i'm currently unemployed, but you know it really is hard fitting in things like that between 60 minute makeover and Jeremy Kyle.

Actually one day the electricity was off because i'd run out of washers to put in the meter, so I had to resort to making my own entertainment. This involved photographing drops of water and a bit of smoke (not simultaneously of course!) some of the results are published below










I have been using my beloved Bronica a fair bit lately too. I recently went to Prague and popped off a couple of rolls there, the results of which should pop through my letterbox in the next day or two. before that though I just went round farnborough a bit. I'm going to put the majority of the film pics on my town in a little gallery on the new website whenever i get round to it, but here's a couple anyway.

Willy

I dunno what's in here. Gas maybe?

I took some photo's of this old tower on a disused cement works too. I returned a few days later with my digi because i wanted to mes around a bit with some filters and flash. The tower is subtly lit with three flashes and I used grad ND and grad tobacco filters to colour the sky. I'm pretty happy with this one.


Does anyone remember the 'Big Freeze?'. Remember? We had a bit of snow. Remember? The whole of Great Britain was totally fucked for two weeks because it snowed. Of course you remember it was only the other day.
It's a great excuse to dust off the old ski's and take a trip round Asda carpark behind Hagglers van, or try and learn to snowboard on a skate deck, or indeed verbally communicate with strangers simply because it's snowing. What did they call it.. Stockholm Syndrome or something. No wait that's to do with abduction... umm oh yes, the 'Dunkirk Spirit!' I think that's it. Slightly over the top I think, likening 2 weeks of sledging to 6 years of poverty and war rations, but I guess it's as good a name as any.
Bruza made the most of this time off work to build something productive, i.e. the snowbike. Can't say too much more on that for now, but here's a pic or two to prove it does exist and that it did indeed snow.


It is worth mentioning here that not only did Dayson not reach the seat, he also did not reach the bars upon landing. Needless to say he ate shit as the front ski bit in to the snow.

Anything you can think of with a flat shiny surface was present on that hill.

And finally, I decided to get some of my prints done on to small canvasses and staple them to wooden 10x10cm blocks. Just a bit of an experiment really, but I guess they make fun little things to hang on the wall if you were so inclined.

Email me if you want some.


That's it. See you in August.

Durka Durka!

My friend Lee, AKA the Hessian, is currently in Iraq. He's been sent
there to count sand, but I heard that he gets confused after a hundred
so keeps having to start over.

Anyway, on one of his counting excursions he stumbled upon these
pipes, which he thought would be fun to ride. He didn't however get to
ride them because he doesn't have his bike there, so he just sent me
the pic as is.

Maybe he inadvertantly stumbled upon those WMD's that were all the
rage six years ago?

Vert=good

So we here in Fboro have started a new club. It's called Vert Club. It's quite simple; we go and ride vert ramps and scare ourselves. This all started a few weeks ago at Corby when me and Ricardo Chippervelt thought it might be fun to have a session on their monster ramp, and indeed it was. Having got over the initial scary dropping in bit it was just really bloody good fun, so we returned a couple of weeks later and now we're all on it.
Riding vert is good for two reasons: Firstly, because it's massive and scary one isn't expected to be throwing whips and shit left right and centre, so a two or three foot air is in fact an acheivement. This is good because I can't whip.
Secondly, other vert riders we've met tend to be a bit older, therefore a bit friendlier than the salty font wheel dancing kids we all know and love (who may or may not have had their locks recently cut and now resemble a young lesbian).
Oh and as a bonus I get to wear my old Bell fullface lid again which I've had for about 10 years. Love that.

Obv Corby is a bit of a mission, so Caterham is the closest place really, albeit a fair bit smaller. There seems to be a good little scene there, which was surprising to us as we thought nobody really rides vert anymore. This guy, Paul Meacher, was there. The guy doesn't even look like he's pumping the ramp and goes so high. Totally rad, I've never seen a one-hander look so good (not pictured this time I might add). When I get more time I'm going to shoot a few more, from slightly more interesting angles, but here's a couple of lazy fisheyes for fun anyway. Oh yeah, those rafters.... pretty much as close as they look.

Yeah we've all seen nine million whips. They are totally legit on very though.

Condor

Booomm!

Textbook!

In other news, I should be getting film No.2 back from the 100 year old camera tomorrow. Odds on the pics all being softer than a fieldmouses cough? Pretty high, but you never know. If i'm feeling proactive I'll scan them in and put them up right away, seeing as I finally got round to buying a desk and all!
Also for those who care, I came one step closer to becoming a fireman today. Don't like to blow my own trumpet, but errr... toot toot!

Later yeah?

Some Filum.

So here's some results from the 100 year old camera. As you can see there are a few 'sharpness issues' shall we say. But yeah I'm going to work on it because this camera is rad fun to use. One major thing I realised is you can't see anything through the 'viewfinder' when trying to take a picture. The viewfinder(s) is a small image projected on a frosted glass window no bigger than 16x12mm (you can see them on the top and sides in the previous post) so not only is it small, but in any sort of daylight you just have no chance due to glare.
I said the negs are a lot bigger than 120, which you can see on the pic of my light box. The colour ones are 6x4.5cm and the B&W ones are 6x8cm.

Emo film

Actually if you squint a bit, or stand further back, the pics are a bit clearer.




I got a 40mm lens for the Bronica the other week so went out to the Fboro ghetto's to try it out. I'm going to start a little project following this theme and put the collection up as a whole when I redesign this website. As much as this town is a depressing, commuter belt suburb, it actually has a very rich and interesting history, mainly in aviation.
The big arch is a replica of an airship hangar which once stood at that spot. Jet powered flight was developed at the airfield, as was powered flight in general. 'Thrust SSC' the current land speed record holder was designed and tested here.
Anyway, I'm not going to concentrate on that stuff, more just the depressing 1960's architecture.

Willy. Classic.


The U.G. (short for underground [carpark])


Airship Hangar.
Oh yeah, the final big scene of Quantum of Solace where the long building is all blowing up was filmed here too, and the Aston DBS dove past my old house, though I don't know if Daniel Craig was at the wheel.

Enough, I'm rambling.

There's life in the old dog yet!

I got a B&W film back after running it through this old beast the
other day. I'm not going to lie to you, they came out shit. None the
less, I am scanning some in and will post them soon. Now the main
problem is that they are either way out of focus, or I was moving a
bit. I shot hand held, so I may have miscalculated the shutter speed
and it is a lot slower than the 1/125 I estimated. Or perhaps I didn't
wind the film tight. Either way, it's a learning curve. I'm going to
run colour next time, and use a tripod, see where that gets me. I was
excited to see the physical size of the neg is more than double that
of my medium format! More to follow...

I say old chap, did one just acheive a full loop?

Holy crumbs is this another update? That’s like two in four days or something! Funny how I can never be bothered to do updates, then when I do one I get all motivated to do more. Like when the washing up builds up and up, and it’s a mountain of a job, but then when you’ve done it and your kitchen looks all tidy you actively seek out other untidy surfaces in the house to reveal them once more! Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, a series of links follows. The picture above caught my eye that’s for sure. It’s not a fake (from what I can tell) and it’s circa 1900 or something. Maybe it’s Morgan Wades great grandpa. So he’s doing a full loop, with no top half of the loop, on a big ass bike, with no padding, in a suit, sitting down. SITTING DOWN???!!! Two words. FUCK THAT!!

I saw it here on Falcon Motorcycles. I stumbled upon the website after Ozzy Adam (pictured below in the tunnel) told his friend Brian from TheLastPeople about Therollingimage to which he added a link. Now I must say that TheLastPeople is a website I had never been on, but it’s full of great things BMX, Photography, Design and Art based. Plenty there to keep one entertained.

Talking of Ozzy Adam, I do believe he will be submitting some kind of diary affair to Rebel Yell upon his return back to Oz. Adam contributes to the publication and an account of his travels will be available on their website some time in the future.

I’m trying to find a seamless link in to telling you that Sam King has revamped his website but I can’t. I will just tell you that Sam King has revamped his website. Oh and that you should go have a little look because there’s lots of good stuff on there.

The new sense of enthusiasm I am currently experiencing has lead me to make provisional plans on paper to re-design Therollingimage.com. See Below.

Don't hold your breath.