After possibly the worst day of my life on Friday I thought I’d alleviate the pain by going out with a few Fab friends for the evening. Little did I know that the day was about to get a whole lot worse.

The evening started off pleasantly enough with a light sprinkling of snow on my walk to the train station. As we all started to gather in FACT for a few drinks & to exchange Secret Santa gifts, we all admired the large flakes drifting down the the air & collecting on the ground. But the snow wouldn’t let up & those of us who were relying on cars or public transport to get home started looking a little nervous.

To cut a long story short, after being herded like cattle for half an hour, I eventually got on a Southport bound train which promptly broke down. We were stuck in a tunnel for an hour & a half as the temperatures rose & peoples patience fell. After being pushed to Sandhills station & told to disembark, I was then faced with a 4.5 mile walk home is the worst winter conditions I’ve ever seen in Liverpool, arriving home at around 2am.

All fun & games, so here’s some shots from the evening.

Moustaches have a bad reputation. Typically sported by dirty minded uncles, anorak wearing train spotters or pubescent teenagers trying to buy alcohol, the sight of a hairy upper lip now carries with it all types of unsavoury connotations. But there once was a time, a more noble time, when moustaches were sported with pride by dashing gentlemen carrying out heroic deeds & causing women to swoon at the sight of their finally groomed facial hair.

Historians will tell you that it was actually impossible to fly a Spitfire during the war unless the pilot could grow a suitable moustache & say “Chocks away Wing Commander. Let’s give Jerry a damn good thrashing.” whilst gripping a pipe between his teeth. To be a Hollywood legend of the 40s & 50s, such as Errol Flynn, Clark Gable & David Niven, it was absolutely essential to woo the leading lady with a stroke of the moustache followed by a ticklish kiss.

To reclaim the moustache as a force of good for all mankind, Movember was created by a few enterprising Australians back in 2003. The aim is simple, start the beginning of the month of November clean shaven & then grow the most amazing moustache possible as the month progresses. At the same time the participants generate as much money as possible for The Prostate Cancer Charity & raise awareness of this disease which effects 36,000 men in the UK every year.

This year was the first time I have ever tried to grow a moustache, & while my wife wasn’t exactly thrilled with the results, I was absolutely astounded by everybody’s generosity. By publicising my efforts through Twitter & Facebook, the people I’m privileged to call my friends donated £245 at the current count. Thank you all so much for laughing at my pathetic attempt at a moustache & kindly giving so much for a very worthy cause. You can still donate on my Movember page here or just have a good giggle at the other photos.

I was out last night in Liverpool city centre with my trusty tripod attempting to capture some urban landscapes. To be honest, I just wanted to have a play, learn a little bit & actually use my camera for a change.

Tuesday evening saw the latest of the recent Wirral Tweetups to be held in the fantastic Cromwells restaurant & hosted by the ever lovely Kay. This time it was rather special though as the event took place in their brand spanking new premises in Wallesy Village.

The main purpose of the get together, apart from just catching up with local twitter users face-to-face, was to raise funds for Shelia Britton. Towards the end of the month she will be taking part in the Sahara Stomp for the charity Childrens Adventure Farm Trust, walking across the desert to raise as much money as possible. You can find her Just Giving page here.

As is to be expected at these kinds of gatherings, there were plenty of other photographers present & you can see more images of the great time everyone had on Pete Carr’s blog or Phil’s & David’s photostreams.

On Wednesday night I attended my first Social Media Cafe event where discussion centres around all things social in the world of media. The venue, suitably enough, was the disused Rapid hardware store at 52 Renshaw Street. Suitable because for the period of the Biennial it has been taken over as the visitor’s centre, housing many of the exhibitions, & the topics of the presentations revolved around the role social media plays in promoting art.

First to take the microphone was Antony Pickthall, head of marketing & communications for the Biennial itself, & Alistair Beech, the art festival’s social media guru. They discussed how sites like YouTube first started making an impact on how they tackled marketing the event, when a amateur video of Richard Wilson’s Turning The Place Over went viral, gaining tens of thousands of views. Their latest strategy is to build up relationships through their Facebook fan page & Twitter followers, culminating in the real world Alternate Reality game Innovasion.

I suppose a marketing department has to have targets & produce statistics against which to measure their success but I found all the talk of “percentage increases” & “follower counts” a little bit at odds with the ethos of social media. To me it should be about interaction & engagement with your audience. But that’s harder to quantify & produce a colourful bar chart. I couldn’t help wondering how many of those new Twitter followers were actually mindless bots?

Next on the bill was Peter Goodbody of our very own Fab Collective. After taking us on a trip down his own digital photographic journey & how a lucky punt on Lordi in the Eurovision song contest resulted in him buying his first DSLR, the presentation turned to the way photographers use social media. As well as talking about the power of online photo sharing sites such as Flickr to build communities & forums to gain feedback & constructive criticism, he also stressed how important it is to also use face-to-face interaction to achieve great things.

The last speaker of the night was Adeyinka Olushonde who enthused about his work with the Liverpool Arts Regeneration Consortium in creating an interactive map for Liverpool residents to find out about cultural & participative arts events in their local area. We also learnt about Feng Office, a powerful collaborative tool that operates on the back end. It allows members of the arts community to share information, organize events, seek funding & generally work for the greater good in furthering culture in Liverpool.

It was a great evening & evident that a lot of hard work had been put in by volunteers behind the scenes to make it such a success. Here’s a couple of other blogs to get a different perspective of the event. Can’t wait for the next one.

Feeling Listless

LDP Creative

After some thought about how the Flickr community is shaping my photography & how my current blog displays my images, I’ve decided to create a separate photoblog. The idea is that I only upload one image per post, hopefully selecting what I consider to be my best work, & the theme displays the images in a bigger & better format than you would get on the other websites to which I post.

Any feedback is always gratefully received. Just remember that subscribing to the RSS feed is scientifically proven to make you more attractive to the opposite sex, re-tweeting a link counts as one of your 5-a-day & posting a comment gives an angel their wings.

I’ve recently been inspired to do some more landscape photography & get back into the Great Outdoors. I also wanted to try something different. This is why I spent a couple of hours last night on Crosby Beach, in the pitch black with the Gormleys, trying out some long exposure shots.

It was the first time I had played around with the bulb setting on my camera & I found it really difficult to compose a shot that you can’t see & then get the focus correct. Had to judge the exposure by the stopwatch on my phone & patience is truly a virtue when you’re waiting 3 minutes between shots in the cold. Definitely something that I’ll be working on though.

When it comes to beer I usually play it safe & simple. I used to love to savour a smooth pint of Guinness, the advantage being that it contained all the major food groups, but I’ve recently develop a taste for crisp cold lager. One thing I definitely didn’t drink was real ales with their cryptic names & obscure micro-breweries. That was until last night when I went along to the annual Crosby Beer Festival after seeing a post about it on the Seven Streets Liverpool culture blog. Now in its third year the event is held in the Crosby Civic Hall next to the library & is running from Thursday through to Saturday.

Organized by the Rotary Club of Crosby, all the beers were kindly sponsored by local businesses, organisations & individuals, with a lot of the money raised going to worthwhile charities. The festival was incredibly well attended & with close to 40 different beers to choose from you can understand why. There was also a great mix of characters too, not just the beard stroking pipe smoking real ale drinking type the uninitiated might conjure up in their imagination. Highly recommended & I’m already looking forward to next year.

When I first developed an interest in photography I used to shoot everything I saw. Flowers, the sky, my dog, taps, a burnt out car, ducks & more ducks. Basically, anything that was lying around the house or that I came across during the day fell under the gaze of my camera lens. One thing I didn’t take photos of was people. I took plenty of photographs of family & occasionally friends but the thought of approaching strangers in the street & capturing their image  petrified me.

Until I made the decision to buy one for my wife, I had only seen a single Amazon Kindle in the wild. It was loving wrapped in an imitation leather case being read by someone at Manchester airport. People swarmed past him into WHSmiths to buy their 3 for 2 vampire themed romance novels to read on the beach but he looked engrossed in the reading experience, casually flicking through the pages with a slight movement of his thumb. But this was a first generation Kindle, nearly the size of a daily newspaper & as ugly as Wayne Rooney on a grab-a-granny karaoke night in the Sailor’s Arms. They were also expensive. For the difference in price between a normal paperback & the slightly cheaper ebook version, you would have to read the entire content of the British library for it to have made financial sense. There was also the problem that you would have to import a Kindle from the States, use Amazon.com instead of co.uk & everything was priced in dollars. When the Apple iPad was announced I thought why would you pay for something that only excels at doing one thing, when for a little bit extra you can purchase a device that does so much more?

Then the third generation Amazon Kindle was released & I bought one. Not for myself but for my wife who reads trashy chick novels like her very life depends on it & has been known to eschew a personal hygiene regime to read just….one……more……chapter. So why did I decide to stump up my own hard earned cash for this version? There are a few reasons: