Month: February 2007

Absolut Lomo

Holga cameras started out as a cheap way for working-class people in China to be able to take photos of their families. Because the materials used to make these cameras is so cheap the results are over-saturated colours, blurred and dark edges, light-leaking and weird double-exposures. Strangely this look is so distinctive and often striking that it’s acquired a bit of a cult status and people with expensive digital cameras will often doctor their clean images to imitate the Lomo look (you can include me in this group…examples above).

Caitriona has a competition on her photoblog that’s running alongside the Absolut Lomo competition. They sent her an email out of the blue to say they were giving her two Holga cameras, one for her and one for the winner of any competition she wanted to run in return for some publicity for their own campaign. Now why doesn’t anything like that ever happen to me? I’d be happy to link to the Apple website if they want to send me a couple of iPods.

Caitriona explains the rules over on her blog but basically you just need to submit a photo to the Absolut Lomo Wall and then email her either the link or the photo so she can choose a winner. The photograph can be of anything at all as long as it follows the 10 rules of Lomography:

1. Take your LOMO everywhere you go & whenever you go.
2. Use it anytime â€” day or night.
3. Lomography is not an interference in your life, but a part of it.
4. Shoot from the hip.
5. Approach the objects of your lomographic desire as close as possible.
6. Don’t think.
7. Be fast.
8. You don’t have to know beforehand what you’ve captured on film.
9. You don’t have to know afterwards, either.
10. Don’t worry about the rules.

Ireland Photography

Ghostly Road

Taken last Sunday just after noon believe it or not, the fog was really thick and cold and this little corner of Greystones was deserted. Spooky.

Photography

ArtSmoke

My first attempts at creating artsmoke (as inspired by Graham Jeffrey of Sensitive Light). I would have liked the images to have been sharper but unfortunately my lighting wasn’t the best. I might have to go and buy myself a good strong lamp so I can experiment a little bit more.

Ireland Photography

Waiting To Cross

After my bouncy bridge happy accident the other night I wanted to experiment with some more long exposures. This was taken on O’Connell Street with my camera propped on the top of a bin so I could set the shutter speed to eight seconds and capture the light trails of the traffic. The larger version shows the ghostly pedestrian a little better.

Eve

On Sleep Deprivation

Eve, December 2005

I just found this old article from the New Yorker by John Seabrook. It’s fairly long and it’s about the whole co-sleeping versus Ferberizing debate that new parents (myself included not so long ago) are obsessed by in the quest for more sleep, so you might not be interested in the whole thing (unless you’ve come here while trawling the internet at 4am desperately googling “how do I get my baby to sleep?!” in which case you might find it very useful). This paragraph brought me right back to those early months…it’s such a perfect description:

After four months of co-sleeping, the situation began to deteriorate. His polyphasic habits did not seem to be shifting toward our monophasic sleep. Instead, the opposite seemed to be happening: my formerly unified block of sleep was now broken into two parts, according to the baby’s schedule, but, unlike him, I couldn’t easily go back to sleep once I’d been awakened at 3 A.M., and spent the rest of the night in a hypnagogic state between sleep and wakefulness, with surreal images drifting across my unrested brain. Then his four-hour sleep phases shortened to two hours. Instead of sleeping in his crib until 2 A.M. and coming into our bed, he was coming in at midnight. He still seemed to be getting the sleep he needed, even if he wasn’t learning to do it by himself. My wife and I, however, were beginning to exhibit symptoms of sleep deprivation: the burning eyes; the band of fatigue that tightens around the skull, a sensation some liken to the feeling that you’re always wearing a hat; the irritation–at each other, at friends, at the cat’s water bowl, which I kept kicking by accident; and astereognosis, or the inability to recognize things by touch, which is a classic sign of sleep deprivation. There was a sense of growing distance between ourselves and the world. Did I go out this morning to get the Times, or was that yesterday morning? I glance at the weather report in the top right-hand corner of the front page, and it says “Interesting clouds.” Hmm. Interesting clouds. Never seen that forecast before. Then I realize it says “Increasing clouds.” But “Interesting clouds” made perfect sense.

Eve is sleeping peacefully in her cot right now and will do until about 7:30 tomorrow morning. There was a time when I would have paid a lot of money to know that she would ever do that.