Over a Stuck Between Stations there’s a great compilation of all those terrible music videos which you just can’t get out of your head. And, yes, Nimoy is there: “drawing a parallel between Hobbit and Vulcan strap-on ears was a gesture of fantasy brilliance”.
Author Archive for Dan Sumption
Just after I took this photo, the green guy in the underwear and the sandals came up to me and said "what are you taking photos for, paedophile?"
He then started to pull his boxer shorts down and say "photograph this, paedophile!"
People, eh?
Apologies for the slightly drab look around here. Just upgraded WordPress (from 2.0.4 to 2.3, in case you’re interested - quite a big leap). Everything looked fine, but there were a few small niggles. So I had to upgrade K2 as well. That’s when it all started going a bit screwy. I must have made lots of customisations to the theme last time I fiddled with my blog layout, so now I have to reverse-engineer all of them. Well… not now. When I find time. Meanwhile, please bear with me.
Anyone who knows me knows my beards. Until my wedding day (on 1/2/3 - or 2/1/3 if you’re American) I went clean-shaven for most of my life. But on that happy day, I got best-man Ed to carve something new in my face, inspired by my new Paul Smith suit complete with thigh-length drape jacket.
Ever since then, I’ve kept some variation on the same theme. Since Gill and I never did get around to exchanging rings (and since Ed had promised to make us wedding rings), I guess you could say that my facial hair is my wedding ring (NB: the same doesn’t apply to Gill). It has evolved since then though: through subtle changes in facial anatomy and less subtle rescue jobs on shaving cock-ups, it has crept around my face, grown thicker and thinner, stripes have changed position, angle and number. A few months ago at Razor Stiletto I had my face painted, tiger-style, with a couple of beard-stripes doubling up as tiger-patterning. When I got home, I thought I’d take the similarity further (forgetting that I had done something very similar exactly two years earlier).
Going tiger-striped seems to have inspired me to new shaving confidence, and to trust my facial hair to find its own shape. Shaving has now become an almost meditative activity, a sort of automatic-drawing but with a sharp implement, where I allow the contours of my face and the movement of my razor to conjure up new patterns of their own, with little conscious intervention from me. As a result, things have got sort of… well, fancy.
Here’s the latest result:
For the first few days after it shaved itself, I couldn’t help thinking that the design was somehow familiar. I was sure I’d seen it somewhere before. Then it struck me: it looked just like the logo for 70s French operatic prog-rock band Magma. OK, so it actually looks quite different now that I’ve seen the original again, but it was close enough to jog my memory.
Any suggestions as to which prog heroes’ logo I should carve into my chin next? Hmmm, carve into my chin… [thinks]… my face could become like some sort of prog-rock Mount Rushmore.
iTunes drives me mad.
It seems there’s hardly a day goes by without that Apple software update app popping up and ruining it for me. And of course, every time I update iTunes I then have to delete the now inoperative shortcut icon from my quick links bar (why they can’t stick the new version in the same location, like virtually every other bit of Windows software, is beyond me), I have to agree to another set of Apple T&Cs, and I have to wait while the new version “scans” my music library. Ah well, it could be worse: at least they seem to have given up on the habit of re-installing that utterly useless Quicktime system tray app, which I used to have to uninstall every time around the merry-go-round.
I’m not even sure what it is that I’m getting with these never-ending updates: I haven’t noticed any useful improvements in the last year or so. I can only assume that the updates just bolt on new ways for Apple to make money out of the iTunes store, which I never use.
I’ve finally taken the only sane route and disabled iTunes auto-updates, although it annoys me that I should be bullied into doing so.
Some time on Sunday, my email software went into meltdown. All of my emails received between Sunday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon went straight into the void. As usual, my computer was sick at the same time as I was, so it took me three days to spot this.
I’ve you’ve sent me an email recently, please re-send as I may not have got it.
There’s a great little movie on Youtube my friend and some-times collaborator Mozaz (AKA 0742, AKA Pretentious Artist, AKA….). As one friend described it “a sort of alt-Fred Dibnah”.
Filmed and edited by Dan Hart/Babydeltic.
On Saturday, I got to try out my most anticipated new feature of the EOS 40D - the three “user modes”. Yes, I know that for most people there are infinitely many other new features on the 40D to get excited about, and in fact everyone seems to have pretty much overlooked the addition of these three user-definable modes, but for me they were the killer feature of this camera.
A user mode is a completely user-definable setup for your camera: in the same way that most cameras come with pre-set modes for portrait, landscape, blah blah blah, user modes lets you define your own. And it lets you set virtually every single adjustable feature of the camera, from ISO, exposure and aperture to obscure custom functions, and save those under an easily accessible dial setting.
What’s even better is that on the 40D there is a menu setting which allows you to turn off flash firing (the 20D probably had this too, but I didn’t think to look). This means that, with my 580 EX flash mounted on the side of the camera, I could define my three settings thus:
- 1600 ISO, 1/80th at f/2.2, flash turned off - used for shooting candid shots throughout the nightclub.
- 250ISO, 1/20th at f/7.1, flash turned on - used for flash portraits with a bit of ambient fill-in light.
- 400ISO, 1/25th at f/7.1, flash turned off - used for soft & atmospheric photos of the spotlit performers on-stage.
The settings are easily changeable - for example, if the club is very dark, and setting number 1 still isn’t getting me decent photos, then I can just dial in a new ISO, exposure or aperture, go into the menu’s “camera user setting” mode (easily accessible because of the new user-definable menu) and “register setting”. Or if I just want to change the setting for a few shots, but retain the saved setting, I just dial in the new numbers as I would when shooting in manual mode - it will retain those settings until I switch to another mode or turn the camera off.
So I took the camera down to Stardust bar and (with a bit of assistance from Mozaz) shot lots of photos. Here are the results (they get better towards the end, as I was getting finding my groove with the camera settings).
zzz… tired. been on the train almost 11 hours today (and still on the train), with some stressful work and less stressful socialising/drinking in between. i’ve been in glasgow on a photoshoot, and I felt that it went rather terribly. but I just looked at some pics, and actually it went ok. not great, but quite passable. which, after my earlier despondency, makes me want to take more photos. so, when I roll into sheffield at 23.15 (i left home at 03.15), I feel compelled to go to the runaway girl to catch some photos of the indie hour’s birthday party, then up to bungalows & bears for ralph razor’s birthday party, then perhaps, finally, up the hill and home to bed.
Update: I got the wrong night for the Indie Hour party - that’s not for a couple of weeks yet. I made it to Ralph’s though, but didn’t take any pictures.
I will have three of my photos exhibited in an art show this weekend. The show is organised by Leonard Cheshire, an organisation who provide support for people with a disability, and part of the proceeds will go towards this cause.
The show is at:
Mickley Hall
Mickley Lane
Totley
Sheffield
S17 4HE
Opening is on Friday night (£6 tickets) and the exhibition continues on Saturday and Sunday (free entry, donations welcome). Click here to see a flyer with full details.
Other local artists will also be showing their work, including Pete McKee, Joe Scarborough, Trevor Neal and Geoff Kersey.
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