Contacts

Here are a few more photos, scanned from the contact sheets rather than the negatives...

Chain mail

What is it with people and chain emails? Why do otherwise perfectly charming and reasonable folk think it's okay to send you a pile of sentimental, pseudo-spiritual drivel finished off with a threat?

It's not like they'd dream of sending an email than ran along the lines of:

My granny drank a lot of coffee. Every major event in her life was accompanied by coffee: weddings, christenings, births, deaths. Apparently she drank 10 pints of the stuff the night my mother was born and had to have her stomach pumped. But she really valued the near death experience this brought on and the memory of it gave her an air of zen-like calm (apart from the constant slight vibration of her person caused by the coffee).

Let me know if you want to meet up for a coffee in Tinderbox next week sometime.

If you don't meet me for coffee something really bad will happen to you.

Prints of Darkness

I finally got along to Street Level again and made some prints of the films I developed a few weeks ago. Apart from leaving me smelling faintly of vinegar and rotten eggs for the rest of the day (from spilling chemicals on myself, not that I was starting to decay from too long in the dark) it all went quite well.


The end of the Odeon

Weird advert

Julie

Alison and teapot

Michael about to do some archaeology

Morag

Misc. Art, Poetry, and Music

I saw the art equivalent of a "Warning: contains nuts" label on a packet of peanuts the other day. The National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh is advertising an exhibition called The Naked Portrait which points out at the bottom of the blurb "Please note this show contains nudity." D'you think?

Meanwhile, Wordsworth's Daffodils has been turned into a rap to attract more teenagers to the Lake District. And someone has written a poem (or possibly another rap actually) accusing someone of a murder committed in Bath. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have led to any progress in the investigation so far, but
I liked the line "You can wipe your bloody hands in the grass, till they bleed..."

Finally, I found a set of online fingerstyle guitar lessons. Perhaps if I follow these and actually practise a bit it will improve my fairly awful playing, and ward off more nightmares where Art Garfunkel decides that the only way to help me is to tie my hand to the neck of the guitar...

Double Exposure

I had another go at doing double exposures on my film SLR and this time I remembered not to wind the film all the way back at the end of the first run through. You don't have any real control over what will be superimposed on what this way (unlike with the Holga), but there are one or two surprisingly apposite conjunctions...
Fair and pirate ship with snow covered mountains (or stones at the side of the river).

Giant teacup in the Clyde.

Very lucky double of the back and front of the Clydebuilt museum.

Stripy stall and azaleas.

Daffodils and chute.

Dandelion and whirly fair ride.

Kyles and Paisley Road.

Stripy

The sheep-colouring craze has now spread as far as Iona, where Alison photographed these stripy sheep:

Red sheep at night...

So, one of the less awful features of Cambridge was the presence of Julian the Pink Sheep and his wooly brethren around the town:




And now a farmer in Bathgate has spray-painted his sheep red to liven things up on the M8:



You can see them here clambering over the M8 Pyramids. You may not have been aware that there were pyramids on the M8, but they are truly the 3,459th Wonder of the World...