Thanks to Phil Campbell for the edit.

All three parts of the video are here.. Part One Part Two Part Three

Tags: imaging, photography, birmingham, nec

Thanks to Phil Campbell for the edit.

All three parts of the video are here.. Part One Part Two Part Three

Tags: imaging, photography, yellow snapper, think tank, nec, birmingham

Thanks to Phil Campbell for the hard work in editing this film and to Yellow Snapper for introducing us to some great Think Tank kit..

All three parts of the video are here.. Part One Part Two Part Three

Tags: imaging, photography, thinktank, yellow snapper, nec, birmingham

Tonight I got a call that the converted barn on my Dad's farm where Geek Retreat was meant to be taking place has been hit by a bolt of lightning. It's happened before. Such is the erratic and crazy Welsh weather

There is no major damage but it seems there are electricity and internet issues. It's a bit to close to the planned date for me to risk going ahead so I will have to postpone Geek Retreat for the time being.

I was a bit peeved to hear this but a postponement has two hidden benefits...

One: We all get to go to attend some of the many social media events happening in and around the same week.

& Two: We can hold Geek Retreat closer to the summer and therefore reap the benefit of some better weather. Perhaps with the added bonus of an outside fire with some kind of acoustic jam session. So if you are a player of anything that does not need plugging in.. Bring it along.

My apologies to all the people that had put the time aside to get over to Wales on the 9th and 10th of Feb. I will of course keep you posted on the Geek Retreat Blog and www.Twitter.com/GeekRetreat regarding any further dates that crop up.

It's the West coast of Wales. A beautiful spot with a view of the mountains and the sea. No charge for accommodation, just chip in with the coking and bring a bottle.

www.geekretreat.info is the main site. Email me there of here if you would like to be considered for a future date.

Tags: Geek Retreat, social networking, wales

Great phone.. crap network.

Am I asking too much to want my cake and eat it too?

The black Nokia N95 8GB is my third new phone in as many months. The first a sony K850i was sent back as it's user interface (UI) turned out to be too weird and fiddly with the Vodafone firmware. The LG Viewty bought from Hong Kong was sold on as I didn't realise it didn't have wifi and my latest tool/toy the N95 seems to be the mother of all phones.

I have only had it a day or so and am pleasantly blown away at not only the UI but by all the apps floating around out there.

The only issue that arose on day one was the realisation that the 'Unlimited Data' package I was sold by Vodafone was infact limited to 120meg.

Hang on.. let me pause for a moment so you can realise jut how ridiculous that is.

The Nokia N95 8GB prides itself on being able to use Vodafone's lightning fast High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA). Vodafone brags that their network can handle up to 7.2Mbit/sec.

So if my maths serves me correctly, on a connection running the mythical top speed of HSDPA, my entire monthly data allowance would last me around 17 seconds.

This is hardly what I would call unlimited. Especially when T-mobiles Web and Walk offer up to 3GB and an Iphone on O2 offers true unlimited data (all be it at 2G speeds).

So this morning I looked at my data-crippled phone as it chomped at the bit aching to behave as it was bred and decided to call Vodafone.

I got myself a hugh double scoop of coffee and dialed 191 expecting to be listening to some old pop track for an hour. Less than a minute later and i was talking to a human called Amy. This was a bit of a shock as I always remember Vodafone as being a nightmare for keeping people hanging on the line.

Within a few minutes she agreed that I had been duped into an unlimited contract that was nothing of the sort. She said 120 meg is nothing and that she would upgrade me to unlimited at no extra cost. I was in shock. This was all to good to be true. I asked for her to email what she had said just so as i had it on file.

I could only imagine that i was not the first to raise this issue and infact Trading Standards were in fact breathing down the necks of this mobile giant ordering them to make things right.

I was a very happy bunny and the call ended with me thinking all wrongs had been righted and that I was going to have to eat my previously harsh words in this very blog post.

Not so.

Twenty minutes later I still had no confirmation email and while mid call to a friend the phone cut off. I thought nothing of it. Perhaps he was driving and dropped the signal.

When it looked like I was not going to get an email i picked up my mobile and dialed 191. No connection. All I got was the error tones. I called a landline.. the same tones.

I could not believe it. I had been cut off.

Luckily I have a land line handy so i could call vodafone customer services. And i did.

Within a few minutes with the assistance of another advisor we had ascertained that Amy had assigned to my phone a data card tariff which had cut my phone services off. WTF.

Not only that, but the tariff I have been on for the last few years is now unavailable to me. I was only kept from migrating away recently because I could keep my pretty decent free minutes and texts with free weekend calls to both landlines and mobiles! They blocked me out from it and now I am not allowed to get back in! Surely they are in breach of some kind of contract here...

"Ok", i said. Trying to remain composed.

To cut a long and stress filled story short.. Vodafone have buggered up my contract and stomped on any faith I had left in them. To top this they have absolutely nothing bigger than 120 meg for on-the-phone data and I think this is just ridiculous. Especially when T-Mobile offer 3gb on an unlimited (fair use) tariff.

Vodafone's offerings are hardly cutting edge. Why advertise spangly new 'VMI' (Vodafone mobile internet) if all it is good for is downloading a few email headers and surfing wikipedia in the pub quiz?

So, the way things stand at the moment are they are offering me an extra 100 mins a month making it 300 free minutes to any landline, 500 free texts, Vodafone 'stop the clock', which means after the first three mins on a weekend and every evening I can talk for an hour at no charge. On top of this they will give me £30 credit on my account and a free month of the £7.50 bolt on data tariff to see if i like it.

This is the absolute best they could offer me. The only thing I really wanted is a few mins and a decent data tariff, which they don't can't give me. They can't even give me my old tariff back.

So i have about 14 days to make up my mind and in the first 14 minutes of this, my friend Giles has informed me that I can have a free Nokia N95 8GB on their Flex 35 contract (900 units, either text or mins) and for an extra £7.50 Web and Walk which is up to 3GB !!!

I seriously think that Vodafone are missing a trick here. If they really thought 120 meg was enough for anyone why not have the confidence to offer 1GB a month or even 500meg for starters? Why not put their meg where their mouth is.

Today mobile phones should enable us to leave our laptops at home. They have the capabilities to run a multitude of apps and stream data from cameras with decent resolutions. Never-the-less, some of our mobile network providers (namely Vodafone) seem to want us to stay in the dark ages.

Tags: mobile phone, vodafone, Contract, HSDPA

It feels like it has been days since I last posted. It is days, weeks. Days and weeks spent on Seesmic.

This is what I wanted to talk about today.. Not the fact that I need to work on my time management, not that I have been short of bloggable inspiration, but the fact I am hooked on a new video blogging application I have been meaning to write about since my first 'seesmic post'.

Initially I saw Seesmic as a video-polaroid. A place to sound off in a timeline with a random thought, question or instance of craziness. Then as more and more pre-alpha testers were admitted, conversations started. Then it became more of a Video-Twitter.

Look it up on Wikipedia a few days ago and you would have seen nothing.. today it says "Seesmic is a video micro blogging web application in pre-alpha stage being developed by French Entrepreneur Loic Le Meur" And it was Loic that gave me my invite.

Phil Campbell mentioned it in a twitter post so I DM'ed Loic and moments later I was in. I think that being on twitter already may have helped as Loic did not know me from Adam. He has spent more time hanging out with Bush than he has talking to me..

So now as videos were being batted back and forth at close to real time speeds. Comments made and themes formed, I realized this wasn't just a chatroom I was looking at. These were multi dimensional people not too dissimilar to me and I was getting to know them in a face to face kind of way. In a far more personal manor than on any other social network. The international timezones crossed have tested my ability to survive on only a few hours sleep as i have been facinated with the threads and conversations spanning the globe.

It is still early days for 'seesmic' At the moment it is in Pre-Alpha release and the number of people signed up and online have formed a tight nit community posting snippets of their opinions from their home computers, from there work spaces and sometimes even out on the road streaming through 3g networks or public wifi.

I feel like I have been a part of seesmic for a lifetime and I feel like seesmic has taken a chunk of my life and placed it online for the world to see.

Whilst podcasting I had previously made a point of not giving too much away about my life or my opinion.. Seesmic has really brought out the Jeckell to my Hyde the yin to my Yang and I find it very therapeutic. Cathartic I guess.

I could go on and on but I won't, Seesmic is a different application to all who use it and to really find out about it's intricacies you need to be signed up and a part of the myriad conversations helically intertwined across the globe between anyone with an internet connection, a webcam on a computer.. and of course.. the golden ticket.

I feel I have so much to say.. but it's easier to show you.. to 'seesmic' it..

Check out the embedded post below and... "Seesmic ya later.."


Incidentally the Seesmic Crew have been kind enough to give me a couple of invites to pass on to anyone that has read this far and is willing to leave me a blog comment below telling me why they want to join Seesmic. Let me know..

If you want to see what I see.. Here you go..

Tags: seesmic, video blogging, internet, social networking, twitter, loic le meur

I still make an effort to read the paper but I couldn't help but notice this morning that whilst flicking through the Guardian magazines from yesterday, I seemed to need my macbook to supplement the supplements.

I love the touchy-feely experience of leaning over the paper with a coffee, skimming the bits that don't raise a brow and absorbing the others that do. Still, It was obvious I needed that extra dimension.

I know that if I don't check that link or search that person or view that trailer or check the price of that product.. I will forget and not get a grasp of the whole picture.

Feed reading is a new thing for me as up until a few months ago I hadn't found a feed-reader I liked. I try to avoid the homogenized world of google and was glad to stumble apon Vienna.

So today I was reading Stephen Fry's blog (which I subscribe to online anyway) and was fascinated by the 'Trevor Baylis Eco Media Player' he was talking about. It is the sort of device you will wish you have come the apocalypse and we are all living 'Mad Max' lives. A kind of windup hippy ipod with a torch, radio, phone charger, audio recorder and so on.. I got the gist of this amazing gadget but needed to see a photo to complete the picture. After 30 seconds I had not only viewed a selection of photos, but had also read some reviews and found an ethical superstore selling it for a much lower price.

With this mornings realisations I fear for the continuing purchases of my Saturday/Sunday paper. Perhaps I should have more faith in the RSS feed..

Tags: rss, feed, guardian, news, newspaper, print, gadgets, macbook, vienna

This time last week I was still recovering from sleep deprivation and the remnants of the hangover left over from the day before.

The hangover was a souvenir from 'up North' and the great night put on by Phil Campbell entitled N0shIT (Nosh-It).

This social media event was far more social than media and I had no issue with that as I got to totally exercise my Epicurean desires.


Great food great wine and great company. All of the people I met at N0shIT I already knew digitally from Twitter

Phil Campbell - Nick Butler - Jason Jarrett - Craig Marston - Rupert Howe

You would think that going to an 'in the flesh' social gathering would take a bit of the magic away from peoples content.. You get to see the reality behind the avatars, the hidden truths behind the great content and perhaps this can be slightly disappointing..

Maybe on bigger events yes, but on this occasion I can safely say all of these guys are so multi faceted, what you see in the flesh is just another dimension to a really deep and creative bunch.

They say alcohol brings out the worst in people.. At N0shIT though it just brought out some hillarious interaction in the most unexpected of flavours.

If there were any uncomfortable moments shared with these people I was only just getting to know, I don't remember any..
But then, I am famous for not remembering most things after a certain cut off point in any night on the wine.

I remember being really hungry and then loads of great food being placed in front of me by Dimitri of Mykonos then it kept on coming... Just like the wine.

I have to thank Rupert for jogging my memory with THIS.. I am sure he has been kind in the edit.

Me and Rupert ended up sharing one of the complimentary doubles that Phil had kindly supplied and my last memory of the night is of Rupert saying "Wow.. you have the video of David Icke on Wogan". Then he passed out.

Any way, I am inspired. Before and after the drinking we had made time for inspirational talk and the bouncing of ideas off one another and all the other times, we had fun.


Above all this, solid connections were made and the avatars that adorn the various web 2.0 apps we saturate ourselves in now have a living, breathing, flesh and blood person behind them.

I feel like I work with these people everyday.. Whether it be a clients project or my own meandering adventure in new media, the tweets, pm's and seesmic'd moments pop into my perspective like a call across the office.

Working at home has never been more sociable.

It's great to be able to choose your workmates from the millions of creative minds floating around out there... And I do so everyday with a click of a 'follow' or an 'add me' button. And if you want a bit of privacy from someone's mutterings.. It's as easy as closing a door.

This in many ways was a works night out with a few of the people I share my day with. There are a handful of others I have already met and a load more I can't wait to meet on another night like this.

Cheers Phil's for the great night.. After this I am inspired to create my own meeting of minds.. Perhaps a weekend somewhere even more out the way.. if people can spare the time..

Keep your eye on www.GeekRetreat.info to see if this happens.

Tags: social networking, twitter, Wine, food, n0shIT

When I wrote this article back in June 2007 I got a few emails telling me to stop being paranoid and just assimilate like everyone else... In fact I got many more emails in defense of facebook than I received in support of my concerns.

Is the tide now turning? Or is there always going to be a miniature backlash against the corporate Goliath's?

Yesterday Jon Swifts blog post came up in my twitter stream posted by Deek Deekster.

It talks of an account closure due to a real name not being used and then a total backtracking turnaround by facebook.
I imagine facebook suddenly realized they were playing with fire by banning a prominent bloggers account and someone in marketing decided it would be better to reinstate it than to face a barrage of negative blog posts as they pop up all over the net. They need your REAL name to collect REAL data on the REAL you. Wouldn't is be wonderful if we all signed up with another account under a false name and used some kind of ip masking to hide our digital identities..

Would this make facebook effectivly worthless?

I have a facebook account but it pretty much lies dormant. I only really signed up to research the phenomenon and to prevent 'Johnny identity theft' from using my name instead of me.

Anybody harvesting data from it would be pretty bored by now. Apart from a few ignored pokes and zombie bites there is nothing really to see.

There are loads of more interesting, less in your face ways to network and yes, perhaps they may all one day all come under the great empirical umbrella that is google, but as it stands today.. Don't add me or ask me to join the 'facebook owns me and my life' group.


I don't spend any time there and I don't miss it.

More Facebook links to browse.. link link link link

Tags: facebook, social networking, orwell, big brother, privacy, internet, twitter, blogging, blog

Today I was using and talking about twitter, as indeed I was the day before and the day before that.

As I said in my last blog post (when I talked about twitterposer) i am a self confessed twitterholic.

Reading that last sentence back.. Yes I do think It sounds sad, but it only sounds that way because twitter although a very apt and memorable name.. sounds silly.

Anyway, so when it comes to trying to tell people the benefits of using Twitter as a tool for social networking etc there are often smirks and sideways glances to one another as I carry on as normal uttering words which are now perfectly normal to me.

I love to use twitter, I am a twitterite, I tweet therefore I twitter.

Every time I meet a new potential 'twitterling' I find myself mentioning benefits and functions, techniques and applications of Twitter I did not mention to my previous converts..

Now, I am pleased to say, I don't have to. All I need do thanks to Caroline Middlebrook and her hard blogging, Is point them to The Big Juicy Twitter Guide.

Fantastic. All you need to know in one handy place.

Enjoy.

Tags: twitter, social networking, internet, marketing

I am a Twitterholic, that is I use the application 'Twitter' every day. I have met some great people and find it my favorite social networking site. If you have never heard of it, then Wikipedia explains it as such:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, email, or an application such as Twitterrific. Twitter was founded in March 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp.Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application.

In addition to that outline I found these two decent articles.. Article one and Article two.

Due to Twitter's success, a large number of sites imitating its concept have sprung up around the world. There have also been a number of other sites cropping up utilizing a mashup of twitter profile details and pictures. TwitterPoster.com is one of these sites.
It is basically a montage of twitter posters avatars sized relative to the numbers of followers each member has and how many posts they make.

As soon as I saw it I thought, Hey up.. If people actually give a damn about appearing on this site we will soon see an influx of posters posting crap for the sake of it and people trawling for followers in a myspace type 'please love me..add me as a friend', kind of way.
Luckily this hasn't happened.. Well not in my circle of Twitter friends.

TechCrunch said TwitterPoster is pretty but not much else and although I would like to see a little more statistical information mixed in with a little more imagination, I still was inspired enough to create my own spoof...

This is how I see TwitterPoster...

As TwitterPoser.. (i.e. Look how big my avatar is.)

Tags: twitter, twitter poster, twitter poser, wikipedia, social networking

I have really missed having a camera phone. Although I am only into day two of playing with my new toy, having been without one for a year, I forgot how bloody handy it is to have a camera in your pocket at all times.

I imagine you could be thinking.. "Wait a minute, this guy works as a photographer.. Surely he has a camera at the ready at all times anyway.. and a good one at that?" Well, just as a bricky doesn't take his trowel everywhere or the artist his brushes, I too neglect to carry around my very heavy pro kit, or even sometime my pocketable compact camera. I always seem to have my phone with me though.

This I think is a really important point and on that basis alone, I feel I could comfortable argue that the camera phone is the best type of camera you can own.

How could this be? Well the best camera is the one that gets the shot. We have seen phone pix from air crash victims, protesters using mobiles to keep the police accountable for their actions, Burmese sending at one point the only news from their oppressed country and let us not forget the most famous pix from the heart of the 7/7 bombings.

It's all about being there.. with a camera. It doesn't really matter what kind of camera as long as you can push a button and some kind of legible image is captured.

Initially the first time I thought you could actually take a decent picture was with the 2MP Sony k750i and now I have the K850i I am really beginning to think we are getting there. We still need the leica lens's of this world and a decent sensitive CCD before the traditional camera can feel threatened regarding quality, but as it stands, we have some pretty decent tools at our disposal.

So there you are in the center of the action camera phone in hand. Do you trust yourself? Can you capture the moment under pressure?.. Or more likely.. after a few beers when tying shoe laces is hard enough?
Follow these few tips and you will stand a much better chance:

Get the most from your camera phone.

Keep things bright - Just as photography means painting with light, the better lit your subjects, the clearer and more defined your images are likely to be. Outdoors in the day will be much better than indoors at night, (obviously) even with a decent flash. Turning lights on indoors will help a little but you will get a bit of a colour cast depending on the kind of lights.

Use the best resolution available - Why anyone would want to take low resolution picture on an already limited format is beyond me. Memory is getting really cheep right now so stick the biggest card your camera will take and keep the quality setting on maximum to get the best resolution/image size. NB: Most cameras will automatically resize for texting so don't worry about texting large files..

Don't use affects - There is nothing you can do in the camera that you could not do later on the computer. If you want a picture to be in Black and white.. Wait and do it later so at least you have a backup copy of the original colour pic. Again, its easy to convert from colour to black and white but you try to do it the other way round.

Fill the frame - Don't be afraid of getting in really close. If you haven't got a lot of resolution to play with you don't want a little spec of a person standing in the distance. Fill the view finder (unless you have a distorting fisheye lens), get in as close as your focus will allow and you will get much better detail in your photos.

Avoid using digital Zoom - If you have a zoom feature on your camera phone it will most likely be a digital zoom. all this does is cut into the amount of pixels you have to take the picture with , rapidly reducing the quality of your final image. Use your legs where possible and just move in close. Where not possible, later on the computer, crop in a little.

Keep it Steady - The steadier you hold the camera phone the sharper you final image will be. This is even more important indoors in low light as the camera uses lower shutter speeds increasing the chance of blur. Try to steady yourself and the phone against something solid like the edge of a door or suchlike.

Be snap happy - You don't have to worry about the cost of film so let rip. Take as many pix as your memory card will allow and you will be more likely to capture that 'perfect moment.' Play around, experiment. Some camera phones have a 'best shot' setting, taking a number of pix when you press the button and allowing you a choice from similar moments.

Break the rules! - Once you find that the basic composition 'rules' (like the rule of thirds) gets you pretty pictures.. Break them! Some of my favorite shots happened when I was 'shooting from the hip' or through an object or from a strange angle. Try to get different perspectives from the norm to create an interesting picture.

..and finally, Be prepared - Having your camera phone with you is one thing, remembering how it can be used is another. Practice using every aspect of it from the macro (close-up) feature to switching the flash off and on manually. Once is all because second nature you are ready to grab that one shot you may be able to retire on.
Or at the very least, you will have a nice photograph of something.

*(the snaps in this post were all taken in a couple of hours between a dog walk and a trip to the shops.)

Tags: camera phone, sony, photography, leica

In my guise as a music photographer I occasionally get called apon take photos of bands for promotional purposes. I may snap them reportage style in the recording studio, on a location shoot, or occasionally, if needed, live.

I caught up with the band Farleigh At one gig of their local gigs in Leamington. There was hardly any light and all I had with me was my cheapy mpeg video camera (A Sanyo Xacti H2). Never-the-less in what turned out to be an awesome gig I felt inspired to grab a few minutes of low resolution footage for posterity.

The band have some really good tunes and not wanting the footage to go to waste, I dropped it in, along with a few photos I had from before, to Glen of CV21.co.uk

All I said was.. "Make it look better that a bunch of raw low res clips and he said.. "I'll see what I can do."