A new low...

I think I've hit a new career low. It's 12.30am, and I'm waiting for a graphic to render that includes the text 'Basingstoke's premier business location'.

It's fair to say there are many, many, many things I would rather be doing right now.

A-Line

Just. How. Fun. Does. This. Look.

Uppity

During my new and slightly extended daily commute I have loads of time to consider everything that is great about British rail travel. Overpriced season tickets that last seven days instead of five for example (and having spent all five working days in London, why wouldn't you want to visit on both days of your weekend as well?). Today's excitement is all about not having enough seats. Everyone has paid a fortune to be on this train and yet many are standing whilst the little 'first class' section remains largely empty. I've always admired the fact that in the event of a crash it will be these selfless first classers who try to deflect some of the impact away from us plebs by acting as a small but rather fleshy (and they are ALWAYS a bit fleshy) cushion/train sandwich down at the front. However, if it's empty this won't happen, so I have decided to sit down in there for now. The strange uppity folk that inhabit this exclusive area have clearly marked me down as a bit too plebby to be in here. They are having quite pointed conversations about fare dodgers and how they are mortally offended by people who 'chance it' in first class. I am quite enjoying the fact that I've annoyed them. It's making my journey go much quicker. It must have been so much simpler when you could just thrash a peasant in the street and have him put in a workhhouse. Until after the next election at least, they'll have to put up with me.

Face of Doom

Took yet more photos of yet another sunset view (there's one every day apparently) but when I looked back at these ones, I realised that instead of a sunset, there was in fact a huge scary evil face lurking in the clouds.

Charlie Brooker's latest thoughts on the cult of Mac (of which I am a fully paid up member). Very funny.

A very Finnish adventure

Today I did an advert for Intel, which involved pretending to be in Finland. All the extras were Finnish, lots of people were speaking in Finnish (very smug about understanding the counting in Finnish that was involved, and the continued use of the word for 'now!'), and I got to wear my "Suomi' T-Shirt with pride. Best of all there were two people on set who were actually called Finn (including me). The other one was actually a Norwegian. We both agreed it was an excellent name. All in all a MegaFinn kind of day. And the ad should be pretty cool too.

I Love the Argus

Vile rightwing local paper The Argus never fails to amuse with it's headlines. Always worth a look to see what cutting edge news stories are really affecting the city.

I'm sure he waved at me...

Was busy bleeding air out of my brakes, covered in Shimano mineral oil and wondering how to hold a syringe, use a spanner and attach a hose to a caliper, when the flat was shaken by a near miss from the Red Arrows. They're in Brighton for the crazy sports thing on Madeira Drive this weekend (either that or they are massive show offs with nothing to do on a Friday). They spent about 20 minutes whizzing about the place, dive bombing Sussex Heights, spewed a fair bit of patriotic coloured smoke around and flew off to wherever they come from. Cool. One of them kept putting in turns right over the flat. Was covered in oil so didn't manage to grab my camera until near the end. Great to watch though. I am still not bored of finally having a view of something from my flat.

Pan or Rama?

First very quick stab at a panorama of 'The View'. Albeit a limited section of it. Not that great but worth a bash I thought. Full size is 130cm wide so a full panorama of the entire view would be bigger still. Cool. Just need a good sunset.

Spotlights

I'm not bored of this view yet.

No work is getting done

This is the view from my desk tonight. I am doing an exceptionally small amount of editing. I've been here a week or so now and I just can't get enough of staring out the window like a moron. I've just watched clouds for about an hour.

Viewings

The view from my new 'office' this afternoon. Surprisingly enough, just after this it rained. A lot.

British Telecom - Pile of Bastards

Congratulations to BT, who have regained their rightful place at the top of my hate list. I can't be bothered to go into the details, I just want to express my renewed hatred for this bumbling fuckwitted monopoly of telecoms. They are a bunch of thieving, conniving little bastards. I really want someone to set fire to them all. Moving house is expensive enough without being charged to cancel a service you cannot possibly use anymore, or being charged even more money to install their turd of a service into your home. I wish them all a long winded and unpleasant demise.

Reasons to love Brighton #1

As of last Friday, I am once again a Brighton resident. This is an exceptionally good thing. And if you're going to live in Brighton, why not find yourself living somewhere that has a view of the sea, the Downs, every sunset of the year, and an awful lot of sky. Not to mention my old sixth form college, the bank where I opened my first ever bank account, the roof of my Mum's old house, Shoreham, Worthing, my friend Jim's house, and (very oblique but it still counts) my junior school. The only view I had in London was a street or a wall. Things have improved. Here's the first of many, many, many of these. The first two sunsets I've watched from the comfort of my living room. Yippee!

Things in the way

Things I have mostly been doing during my weeks holiday in Dorset...

1) Driving very very slowly behind a 'period coach' from 1952 or some such very long time ago. It was incapable of going more than 10mph up hills. There are lots of hills here, and very few overtaking spots. Nothing has made me feel more like an impatient Londoner than the hour spent behind this thing today. Fortunately I managed to avoid coming across as impatient and irrational by beeping at him to the tune of Rule Britannia. I thought this would jolly things up.

2) Walking up the very delightful 'Golden Cap'. Apparently this cliffy bit of coast near Chideock is the highest point on the South Coast. I was convinced it was Beachy Head, but I was wrong. Although Beachy Head still wins on suicide potential. Falling off Golden Cap would be much more likely to just break you really badly. It was a very good view from up there though. I went twice.

3) Visiting Lyme Regis and marveling at the how people cram themselves together on the tiny bit of (fake) sandy beach at one end. Hemmed in a JCB digging out smelly mud from the harbour at low tide and the clearly undesirable but relatively empty shingle beach. People are weird. People in British seaside resorts on the hot days are the weirdest. And why do so many people now bring tents onto the beach? Weirdos.

Back on Friday to pack up the flat and move to Brighton!

I am very excited...

...about this

and this

amongst other things.

Lyme Regis

Was down in Lyme Regis for the weekend. Went out to go fishing, felt quite sick, came back and took photos. I also fired a gun. Pics of that later. Here's the harbour as the weather rolled in.

Rock Hammer

Supposed to be editing a corporate film today. It feels like I'm deliberately bashing my teeth out one at a time with a small rock hammer like the one from Shawshank Redemption. And for every minute of staring at the screen and not doing any editing, I lose a minutes sleep tonight when I have to finish it in time for a deadline tomorrow. Is it unprofessional to just abandon it?

In one of my many coffee breaks, I'm flicking through some pics from Brighton on New Year's day in 2008. In five or six weeks, I can actually visit this beach in one of my many coffee breaks. This will be a very good thing. One thing I've also noticed recently is how many pictures I take with two people in. I've got loads like this. I should diversify into odd numbers.

BRIGHTON!

We've given in our notice on our flat in London. One way or another I AM DEFINITELY COMING BACK TO LIVE IN BRIGHTON!

Radio Soulwax

Went to see 2 Many DJs last weekend. This is uncannily close to what it felt like. Keep clicking.

Earnings

I am pleased to report that since starting this blog (in 2006), I have earned a massive $21.50 from the Google ads placed on the page. Only another $78.50 (or 12 more years) to go until they send me a cheque, at which point I will be retiring immediately.

Steal my rant

These two articles from the Guardian poke some interesting holes in the arguments about filesharing. I've always thought it ludicrous to assume that every 'illegal' download is the equivalent of a lost sale for the movie, music or software industry. Now if they concentrated on making better music and better films, I might buy more. I am never going to pay for most of the rubbish that's made, and downloading it for free gives me the chance to realise quite how shit a lot of stuff is, and makes me feel smug that I haven't spent any money on it. But come out with something cool, and I'll buy it even if I've already got a download. Or make it really simple and much cheaper to buy it online and I'll also probably pay money. I buy TV episodes on iTunes, rent films for a couple of quid and buy occasional bits of music. All because it's quicker and easier than going to a shop and paying too much, or hunting out the torrent and watching it crawl along for two days. Blah blah blah. This has already been discussed way too much. Read a bit of Billy Bragg's ideas about it all instead.

Must Stop

You can tell I've had a slow day. Two more before I stop and eat some food. These are from Whistlers Summit in the general direction of Mt. Edith Cavell (the diagonal strata looking snowy one behind the weird cairn). It's original name was 'The White Ghost', which seems appropriate. The good people in charge of Alberta early last century disagreed with me and named it after an English nurse from the First World War instead. Silly twats.

Maligne

More Canada. This is Maligne Lake. 14 miles long and frozen for most of the year. You can see tracks of avalanches in the forest on the side. Apparently they comes down the mountain, blast the trees out the way and then shoot straight accross the ice and hit the far side of the lake. Sounds fun.

Mega Crops

Quite a few photographs I have from Canada haven't worked all that well as I shot them, but with some serious cropping, there's some nice details to pick out. I usually try to keep my single non-panoramic shots as the native 3:2 aspect ratio, but it's always worth messing about with once a shot isn't working like that. I've always really liked the more filmic aspect ratios in video editing and sometimes picking something closer to 2:1 works better for a lot of landscapes. These aren't the best shots, but they have been improved dramatically by messing about with cropping and ratios.

Freight Train in Japser

Peyto

The amusingly ludicrous Peyto Lake. It actually is that colour. Something to do with glacial runoff.

Kayak

Here's a Kayak. Not a canoe. According to Wikipedia

"A kayak differs from a canoe in that the kayak typically has a covered deck (an extension of the hull), a cockpit covered by a water-tight spraydeck, and is propelled by a sitting paddler with a double-bladed (one on each end) paddle (most canoeists use a single bladed paddle). A double-bladed paddle allows for more efficient propulsion (higher stroke rate possible, etc.), but is more difficult to use effectively in a wider craft (canoes tend to be wider than kayaks). The spraydeck (also known as a skirt) is used to seal the gap between the deck and the paddler, making it possible to recover from a capsize without flooding the interior of the hull with water. In some parts of the world kayaks are considered canoes, and open-decked canoes are called "Canadian canoes".

So now we know.

Emerald Lake

One of the best days of the trip, kayaking on Emerald Lake. EDIT: Apparently this is a 'canoe' not a 'kayak'. I was too busy being chauffeured around a lake to really notice.

Standish

Still slowly working through shots from Canada last year. Here's a segment of a bigger panorama of the view from Mt Standish straight down towards the Simpson RIver Valley near Mount Assiniboine. These shots were all really rushed and the framing and exposure were a bit off, but I think I'm finally managing to get something out of them.

Just for comparisons sake, I've added a similar crop from the original panorama created straight from the RAW files off the camera. At this point the RAW files have had a few tweaks to try and match the exposure across all the individual images, and this has led to it all looking a bit flat. Between thsi and the final version you can see that all I've done is selectively adjust contrast and saturation to try and make it all a bit more interesting. A bit HDRish perhaps but I prefer it.

Appledore

No particular point to this except that I can't remember if I ever posted any of these shots from Appledore in Devon. We discovered it by accident but apparently I have some family down there somewhere. Odd. Anyway, yet another sunset.

4k Fun in the Sun

I've been in Hastings for the last couple of days filming a new comedy pilot. Very fun and very, very hot. Hastings is a deeply weird place, the Normans must have been quite disappointed. It does however have the country's largest beach launched fishing fleet, a strange miniature railway to nowhere, and pretty good skatepark full of feral boys with unbelievable skills on a bike. Brakeless tailwhips galore. They all turned out to be very nice though, and a couple of them might even end up on the finished edit.

This was also my first time on a shoot with the ludicrously amazing RED camera. So now we have a no budget comedy pilot shot on Steven Soderberghs favourite new toy. This is definitely the way forward. Looks lovely in the edit already.

Here's a pic of a BMX almost ending our shoot early by knocking our lead characters head off (not the RED in this shot though, more of that later).