openness

holiday reflections

had the chance to relax and reflect over the holiday, it was wonderful.

got to read a heap of books that i’d not found the chance to get into, my favourite of which ended up being fredrick forsyth’s ‘the afghan’ which i thought was both well written and an exciting story. i just need to finish a paul sussman book called ‘the last secret of the temple’ which looks to live up to its promise of being an intelligent darren brown.

i also got to have a proper listen to all the drum n bass cd packs that i’d been buying over the last couple of months from slamminvinyl.com and from these, i thought i’d share what i consider to be the best; my favourites:

live dj: nicky blackmarket

studio dj: friction

producer: calibre

back 2 back djs: andy c and hype

scratching: hype

double dropping: mampi swift

remixes: shy fx

mc: presha

mc duet: ‘the dynamic duo’: eksman and herbzie

if you look at this list and go “huh?” then i recommend having a listen to this stuff, the very darkest of the uk dance music scene. dnbshare.com will get you started, and then slamminvinyl.com is the place to purchase after your taster.

i devoted a lot of time to playing around with my new camera, and reading the instruction manual to find all the settings hidden away in bizarre submenus and behind combinations of button/shortcut pushing. as i’m typing this, the machine next to me is whirring away uploading a 560mb chunk of my experimentation to my flickr. more will follow over the weekend if i get a free evening, and i’ll get round to rotating and organising into sets on monday all being well.

considering the compactness of this s12, the quality of the images stunned me and the options for lighting and colours are vast. i still feel i have a long way to go before i familiarise myself entirely with it. you’ll see on my fickr that there are some repeats of certain objects, where i might have adjusted something or changed to a preset to see how different it was from manual. it took me an age to realise that one aspect i was toying with to digitally zoom closer to the subject was greatly lowering the quality of the image and as a result my early photos are only around 1mb each, similarly as soon as i had killed digital zoom the filesize was around 5mb each.

i’m excited, i believe i’ve made a great start with this camera and i feel my enjoyment of photography will only grow.