Anyway, it’s a good excuse to re-post this cracking portrait of Neil that I took last year in the Coronet Cinema in Notting Hill, London. I was actually there to photograph Axelle but Neil fancied a couple of shots too. It’s lit with one SB-800 flash to camera right, with a Lumiquest Softbox III on it. Ideally I’d have liked another flash camera left to give a bit of rim-light kick but we had so very little time in the location.

Anyway, they have a really archaic way of registering my ownership. Rather than sticking a bit of invisible HTML in my site like some other blog-scrapers, they actually require me to place a ‘code’ in a post, essentially requiring me to make a completely pointless post like this one and then leave it up for as long as it takes them to pull their finger out and notice, which I gather can take months.

So, here it is: JBVXANH9Q3NP

And now I wait. And wait. And wait… Isn’t blogging cool?

Many folks use the internet as a valuable tool for research and connectedness, but also as a dubious source for ego-validation. Some of us are more vulnerable than others. How many of the following questions do you care to know the answer to?

How many people are following me on Twitter?
How many hits on my home page?
Has any high-profile blogger linked to me recently?
How many people are @responding to my tweets?
How many comments on my latest blog post?
How early does my name show up in a Google search?
How many people are buying my app/t-shirt/CD/craft?
Who left positive feedback on eBay/Amazon/iTunes?

If you’re interested in the answers to these questions, it’s probably because you are concerned on some level about whether you matter or not. But more specifically, when it comes to the internet and other people you may reach by way of it, all these questions boil down to whether you have pleased anybody lately.

I ticked ‘Yes’ to five of those, but only because the last two don’t really apply to me. Ouch.

Anyway, it was an apt article to come across as I started to feel very similar to Daniel a couple of months ago. I took a hiatus from the likes of Facebook and Twitter so as to get out of the cycle of checking and updating. I stripped down the number of RSS feeds I was subscribed to, sorted out email folders so I can keep the Inbox to single figures, got my most used files syncing automatically between computers; basically a whole bunch of stuff to reduce the amount of digital and online ‘noise’ distracting me.

The proof in the pudding has been that I haven’t missed the stuff I got rid of and can use the time saved overall far more rewardingly. Life was just peachy 5 years ago before the steadily growing methods of communication and my personality is far too addictive to look after them all. Plus, retrospectively I don’t really feel like I’m missing out on anything that’s arguably essential to my modern life.

I miss the variety of interesting links that can come up on some Twitter feeds, but there’s a very high level of noise and sense of having missed something amongst it all. Same with Facebook really – all that status update stuff can get addictive but it’s ultimately just pointless and, well, more than a bit attention-seeking at times, and that’s not a good look on anyone – least of all me. On the other hand, for a lot of folk it’s now practically the only network they use to keep in touch with each other, and it is pretty handy for finding and stalking long lost friends, enemies and relatives. I may have to reluctantly reactivate my account soon and see how strong my will power really is.

No real hurry though, eh? Let’s not rush into it.

But the benefit of the other tidying up has been great too in that there isn’t all that other digital junk that an online lifestyle attracts; unread news feeds, email clutter, file management, all those bloody passwords… I think the sense of calm that came from a practically empty Inbox was the most satisfying, though. I highly recommend it!

I still spend an obsessive amount of time using digital devices, of course, they’re just far too much fun to play with. And now I have much more time to do it. Win!

This week I’ve latched onto a lovely new theme called ‘The World in 35mm‘ for Pixelpost. It’s working nice over at The Daily Exposure and it basically solves my long-standing problem with comments and photograph info in that it elegantly hides and displays both below the photo, on the same page, with no fancy stuff that people using browsers like IE will struggle with.

My current info/comment solution was a hand-tweaked version of Lightbox, which is pretty cool but apparently doesn’t play so nice with said stupid browsers. I think this will work a lot better.

As I haven’t really got any idea how to run a test-version of my site privately while I tweak, I’m going to have to start faffing around with the live version so if you visit over the next few hours and days you’ll probably notice it looking a bit odd. Feel free to laugh at my appalling coding skillz as I tweak and tweak again!

Cheers, folks.

UPDATE: I’ve had a good look at how the template is written and the work that would be involved trying to make my current look fit into the way 35mm does things, and it’s far too much effort.

So, new approach: I’m going to try and rip out the info/comment code and implant it into my baby…

UPDATE 2: Holy crap this is far too much effort all round. I’m going back to my original plan – make 35mm look like my glass eye…

UPDATE 3: And it’s done! I need to tweak the About page as it’s not ideal (how the heck do you do columns properly without forcing their position?) and the News page needs to be tweaked to match the top menu properly, and I need to do the Dark CSS sheet so that the Styleswitcher works, but to all intents and purposes, BOO-YA. That was a whole morning of fun ;)

I hope your Christmas week is going nicely. I’m off to do some food shopping and to think about how to rejuvenate my blog sans comments and try to make it fun for me again…

See you round!

Well now I know what I’ll be doing all day today… :(

Lucy was just on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in the UK and is doing the publicity circuit now. Tomorrow (Thursday 10th December) she’ll be on The Wright Stuff on five from 9:15am, which I happen to be operating camera on.

Had a quick chat with the producer and it turns out knew about the film and hadn’t got any stills yet, so I was able to hand over a disc of lovely high res pics directly.

The movie isn’t by any means the only thing Lucy will be talking about but it’ll be nice to see Tristan’s baby start to get out into the public. Check it out if you’ve got a moment, 9:15am tomorrow on five.

Cheers for reading!

Anyway, despite the negative connotations of the story itself, it was pretty cool to see several of my shots in print in such a high profile article. On the way home I picked up the latest Empire and found they’d reviewed the film and in so doing had given me my first ever publicity still in print within their covers, which I’m pretty stoked about. I’ve had shots in plenty of listings pages and some industry magazines, which is very satisfying, but Empire is something else so I’m just riding on that little cloud at the moment!

Cheers!

Anyway I actually clicked the link today and it turns out that in February the guys at Blogtrepreneur listed me in an article entitled Ten Great Photography Blogs, along with some of my own favourites. Here’s what they had to say about my glass eye:

A unique portfolio with portraits, stills and editorial shots that express the unique viewpoint of the artist; one that captures real world images in stark honesty.

… which is nice! Thanks, guys.

Most excitingly, the film features several musical numbers, all rap written and performed by the actors themselves. It’s out in the cinemas sometime this year and has a website featuring several trailers and one of the songs, at 1daythemovie.co.uk.

Here’s the official blurb:

Flash (Duffus) wakes up to a phone call from Angel (Watson) announcing that he’s being released from prison and wants the £500K he’d left with Flash for safekeeping. Short of the full amount and pushed for time, Flash is forced to strike a deal with Evil (Duncan) who more than lives up to his name. 1 DAY follows Flash’s race against the clock as he’s pursued by a rival gang, the police, his three irate babymothers and his granny.