Damien Mulley

Got feck all sleep over the past few days due to music going on til 4am and 30,000 noisy fucking campers, my cough and cold got way way worse, a bloody nose for half of yesterday didn’t help either but despite all those MINOR things, the Electric Picnic lived up to the hype and more. Damn you Jim Carroll and your Pieminister nod. Filled up there more than once. Bjork was fantastic, shame the sound was shite. Chemical Brothers were absolutely fantastic too. Visuals at 1am just surreal. My Brightest Diamond blew me away I must say. Final Fantasy as good as ever though I fecked off somewhere else, can’t remember where. That would have been the absinthe. It’s a pity the cold and cough screwed me up as I found it too hard to stay for most shows in the tents because of all the people smoking them them and the heat. Super Extra Bonus Party, wow, they really rock. Sunday mass with the Warlords of Pez. Nice. Bats for Lashes I found to be quite boring and hyped. Skream was the last act I saw and worth the wait. Nice sound system.

The Go! Team weren’t impressive, though again I blame the sound system. Beastie Boys, yeah, whatever. Boring. I find these guys to be completely over-valued. I noticed that Derek enjoyed the Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pimp show, though I dunno were they as good as I had thought they’d be. They have lots of potential though. Loved when Scroobius Pimp when asked about playing their biggest hit, “If we play that now you’ll all fuck off to Sonic Youth right after, we ain’t stupid.” I think thought it was MIA for me that was the best show, her or Bjork. When I showed someone my list of want to sees for the weekend, they said “You love your women so.” and I guess I do.

Possibly more later. I need sleep now. This took me an hour to write.

John Williams is another genius behind a camera and I am happy to say that I have a print of his jelly people photo below and lots comment on it when they see it. Don’t forget to visit and subscribe to his site.

::

What an honour to be asked by Damien to talk about photoblogging, although getting down to typing what I may say is very scary, this would be one of the reasons I have chosen PHOTOblogging (no writing really needed) as my main way of blogging to the WWW.

Damien has asked that I pick out 2 pictures which I like and explain a bit about them. What a bitch, since I have over 400 images I like, so I ended up choosing 10 and let some friends vote, I have to say I was very pleased with the results since they pretty much matched the ones I had in mind. My first image comes from Glendalough.

This was one of my first entries to my photoblog, and one I can honestly say “I aint got a clue how I managed it”. It was taken on Saint Patrick’s Day when myself, my wife and my in-laws decided to venture down for a walk. Since the photoblog had only begun I decided to bring my newish camera and take some shots, which I did, and they were all pretty bad, all except for this one which was taken in manual mode where I had full control of all settings, which I still had no idea about and so I screwed up. When I got home and uploaded the photos to the computer it came out much darker then I had expected and had a great moodiness about it. Sometimes, as I have since learnt, the best photos come when you least expect.

For my second ditty, we have Jelly Babies.

This was an experiment I decided to carry out while sick from work one day, I have a very weird mind when my stomach feels ill and decided that I should try to take some food shots (why!) which I believe can be quite hard to light and get right. I am a useless cook but did find a bag of Lidl Jelly Babies. So I decided to allow them to be my model for my photos. They pose badly! in the end I just lined them up on a white card and created a Jelly Army. It is one of the most talked about images from my blog (not by comments as Treasa will understand) but by word of mouth. Also I have never tried to do food photography again since it sounds so painful.

I know I am taking liberties here, but I did also want to show one more image mainly due to the fact that it something a lot of people reading this can relate too.

This was taken at last years Blog Awards, and while the majority of people were warm indoors, drinking the night away, a lot of photobloggers went outside to capture the lunar eclipse that occurred the same night, and this is what I came up with.

Well that’s my lot, if you are reading this far congratulations getting through my very badly written blurb and many thanks to Damien for giving me the opportunity to partake in this guest post thing with so many established photographers.