The Gentle Amateur

Damn his eyes! Not only has this man picked probably one of the best Flickr usernames ever, but he then has the temerity to take great photos to boot. Finally, in an act of breathtaking chutzpah, he writes a great blog as well.

You can really go off some people...

Sander Meisner

My name is Tom, and I'm a Flickrholic. I revel in the casual praise of strangers and spend far too much time looking at photos. On the plus side, as well as massaging my ego, it does also help to inspire and educate me.

One of the photographers I've come across is a Dutch guy called Sander Meisner. He takes the most amazing shots, most of which seem to have been taken at night. I'm massively jealous, but have also been spurred on to try some night shots myself (not as easy as he makes it look!).

There's a wonderful sense of calm and stillness in his technically brilliant work. Although he shoots these empty urban locations, devoid of human life, they don't seem desolate at all. Instead they seem (to me at least) quite warm and almost friendly, lit up by the traces of streetlighting.

There's a great little article on him here at Analogue Masters, well worth a look.

Belated Blogging

To all the thousands (if not millions) of dedicated followers of this blog, I can only offer my wholehearted apologies for being so tardy with my updates. Over the last month or so I've looked at my own blog from time to time and thought that it hasn't been updated in a while. Bizarrely, it's taken until tonight for it to click that actually I'm the one who should be updating it. I'd like to have some glamorous excuse for being absent since my last post on 18 August, but I'm struggling to remember what I've being doing for the last six weeks.

I'm sure that the secret of good blogging is – as with so many other things in life – to do it little and often. I've never been blessed with a great deal of common sense, so I'm going to do the complete opposite and try and write one stupidly long post to cover the last month and a half of my life. I've gone through my receipts, numerous Flickr uploads and the scribbled notes on my wall calendar and I think I can now put the last few weeks into some semblance of order.

I think it might be easiest to start with some kind of sub-Feltronesque facts and figures (but without any effort made to make pretty graphs):

Holidays taken = 1 (North Cornwall since you ask)

Cameras taken on holiday = 6 (Cosmic Symbol/Konica Auto S1.6/Agfa Optima-Parat/Konica Pop/Ricoh Caplio R6/Nikon Coolpix 5200)

Favourite Holiday Pic (So far, still waiting to get one film processed):



Or maybe this one:



Number of times I've kicked myself for not betting on Speech Debelle to win the Mercury after banging on about how good her album was = 7

Books read = 3 (Moby Dick (not finished)/A Clockwork Orange/Possession)

Films recorded, now languishing on my BT Vision box not yet watched = 5 (Raising Arizona/Pulp Fiction/Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead/London to Brighton/Munich)

Films recorded and watched = 2 (Point Break + District 13)

Cameras bought on eBay = 3 (Konica Auto S1.6/Konica Auto S2/Bronica ETR-Si)

Photographs taken = 62 (Not including 120 photos being processed at the moment/stuck in the post)

Museums and Galleries visited = 2 (V&A and National Portrait Gallery)

Number of visits to the East End = 2

Number of shirts purchased in the East End = 1

Number of stag dos attended = 1

Number of life-threatening hangovers = 1

Number of photos taken of Lizzie = 9

Best photo of Lizzie:



Best photo of Lizzie looking bored of being photographed:



Number of violins rented from the music shop in Putney = 1

Albums bought = 7 (The Very Best "Warm Heart of Africa"/Jamie T "Kings & Queens"/Mos Def "The Ecstatic"/Tru Thoughts "10th Anniverary"/Tru Thoughts "Shapes 09:01"/Quantic and the Combo Barbaro "Tradition in Transition"/Various Artists "Impossible Ark – A Compilation"

Competitions entered = 18

Competitions entered to try and win a new Olympus Pen = 2

That ought to bring things a little bit more up to date, with any luck I'll have more sense than to leave it so long between posts next time.