Chez Spud

Back to black & white again today. And the iphone. Lugged the Big Camera out but the battery ran out [basic schoolgirl error].

Presenting the River Deben where it meets the sea. Taken at Felixstowe Ferry, looking across to Bawdsey. Felixstowe Ferry is the weirdest place I know, a collection of ramshackle huts and grotty boats…bleak in this weather too. I’m really not at all fond of it although it’s worth the trip for fantastic fish & chips a the cafe. We had a blowy walk along the beach and found hundreds of beautiful shells, beach glass and other treasures. Diggy’s best favourite one was an old Tic Tac box which he clung to like it was the Holy Grail.

Another rather tough weekend of unpacking/sorting/chores/building furniture/putting up pictures and mirrors and all that jazz. One more weekend and it will be done. Then we’ll have a few months of relative calm before every bit of the house gets ripped up/hacked in to because we’re re-wiring AND putting in a new boiler/new heating system throughout. Pass me the gin someone.

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Uh oh…I’ve discovered yet another way to waste hours of my life. I have such a talent for unearthing time robbers;  if only such a skill had a commercial use. Instead all I can do is shrug my shoulders, embrace the robber and then pass it on to you guys…although you will be spared if you don’t have an iphone.

I’ve become an avid reader of the iphoneography blog which is a MUST READ for iphone snappers. Today I found and downloaded several cool applications but I’m immediately smitten with FotoMuse. Such fun for transforming photos in to ‘artworks’ with contrast adjustments in colour and black & white, borders and textures. So this cafe scene, which I snapped in the City early one morning thinking it looked kind of moody… but I was disappointed with how it turned out:

turned in to this, which is probably trying a bit hard but it’s a huge improvement:

And this, Julochka‘s Rolleiflex snapped at Bee’s house at Blog Camp 1.5, which wasn’t particularly well composed, focused or lit (um, so rubbish then):

turned in to this which, again, is probably ‘too much’ but quite fun?

I’ve had a LOT of fun messing with FotoMuse today. Mind you, the rest of my day’s highlights included cleaning my oven and the windows so it didn’t take much. But if you fancy trying something different and need a time robber in your life  (and can bear the $2.99 price tag) get FotoMuse!

Also, news just in…I’m over Camerabag. I’m now in love with Chase Jarvis’ Best Camera application. LOVE IT. I’m also flirting outrageously with EffectsLab but have nothing very useful to say about it. So I’ll shut up.

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Giddy. That’s what I’ve been all day, giddy. I went to London. On a trip. On my own with no husbands or children or pigs or pigs ‘n’ wigs or anything. And it was absolutely blissful. I spent the day with my ‘wife’, BFF and brilliant photographer Lyanne; we went to an exhibition, we walked miles in hurty shoes, we took thousands of photos, we had lunch, there might have been wine, we giggled, we gossiped, ears must have been burning…hell, some of them must have been SMOKING.  She taunted me with her shiny new 3G iphone and I tried hard not to collapse in a rage of jealousy.  It’s been a rough week Chez Spud but I feel so much skippier now (it’s a word), and all nicely buoyed up for my cheeky little jaunt to Paris next week.

I could witter on but I thought I’d do the day in pictures. There are a LOT, so if photography’s not your thing..move along…nothing to see here…see you tomorrow for another treasure.

Here I am at the station REALLY living dangerously. Look! Little Miss Goodie Two shoes has a foot (only one mind) OVER THE YELLOW LINE!! Note to self; those chucks are nowhere near as comfortable as you think they are. Relegate to ‘only wear when in a very good mood’ pile. This one is an iphone/camerabag photo:

Hoorah, here we are in London Town. A camerabag photo of the station roof:

First on the agenda was a trip to the National Portrait Gallery, and a twirl round the BP Portrait Award 2009 (we were stalked around the gallery by a museum ‘bouncer’ after getting a bit too close to a few of the paintings…Julockha are you reading this?) and the brilliant, brilliant Gay Icons exhibition. Alas no photos allowed but you can imagine: gallery, people, whispering etc.

Next we hit Trafalgar Square to watch the One & Other ‘exhibition’ which is too bizarre to describe meaningfully. Click the link to see it happening live! 24 hours a day, for 100 days, ordinary Brits are spending an hour up on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square doing ‘art’. We saw a man flying coloured paper airplanes out to the crowd. It wasn’t that interesting and my photos were awful. So I started taking photos of the wife instead:

Oh and she started taking photos of me. Who needs ‘art’ when you can take photos of your buddies?

Right around now we had a debate about the relative merits of matrix metering and spot metering. Because we are THAT clever. Conclusion? Spot metering is crap. Just in case you needed to know.

Things took an unfortunate turn when we stalked a photographer with some serious gear, only to find it was a Canon. Argh, soul…troubled…eyes…bleeding. We so we hoofed it from Trafalgar Square which was then sullied for us, we shall not speak of it again, and made haste to the South Bank.

And look! Something very strange had happened to the trees along the South Bank. More ‘art’:

A few yards on we found yet MORE street art, a photobooth. In we jumped, wrote a few words about ‘our time on the South Bank’ had our photo snapped and it was uploaded to Flickr immediately. Cool. Cooler…it was wine o’clock lunchtime.

After lunch we shambled up to the Hayward Gallery but didn’t make it in to the gallery, we were too entranced by the fabulous, newly painted bright yellow staircase. I’m not a big fan of concrete constructions but Lyanne adores brutalist architecture. I have to indulge her because, well, she’s my wife and that’s what you do. But the yellow was surprisingly appealing:

Not content with oohing and arrrring over it. We got in it! And then we took pictures of ourselves in it. Lyanne took pictures of me:

And I took pictures of Lyanne:

And after that things degenerated somewhat…

Oh no. And now what is she up to? What the HELL is she doing up there? Ah, right..sing along…near..far…wherever you are…

I recovered myself enough to take my favourite shot of the day, the underside of Waterloo Bridge:

And all too soon it was time to make the trek back to The Country, and my boys. The littlest of whom ran at me on my return and clung to my legs declaring, seriously, ‘Oh Mummy. I lost you!’. Final snap, a camerabag offering again, is the bridge over the tracks at my local station. I liked the pattern of the light.

Here endeth the lesson! And CHEERS to anyone that made it this far xxx

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As we all know, men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses…which is why I spent most of my 20s squinting. As, in my crazy head, the vague, distracted, squinty, wrinkled up nose look is an absolute WINNER.

I just don’t like wearing specs, it’s a vanity thing. I hate the way they leave a mark on your nose, or hurt your ears, or slide down your nose, and that awful ‘steaming up’ thing and the way they got lost and broken every 5 minutes. I hate the whole process of buying glasses as I have my Dr Spock eyebrows and droopy eyelids to contend with, plus ‘that’ pointy nose etc etc. Mind you I think these googly specs are quite something, don’t you think? Although they do make me look like Mitzi from The Koala Brothers.

I..hate…specs…but the specs are having the last laugh as the legacy of all that squinting is a whole bunch of deep wrinkles. Shakes fist angrily at the gods – curses to you ye gods of spite.

I also hate contact lenses and, on the rare occasion that I wear them, I am always very unpleasantly surprised when I look at myself in the mirror, wondering who the hell that old hag is peering back at me. One of the few upsides of being a Speccy Twat is that, with glasses off, you see a fuzzier, less wrinkled, less eye baggied version of yourself in the mirror. It’s generally quite pleasing. With glasses on, many of the wrinkles/eye bags are hidden and it’s reasonably pleasing. But with lenses in, and specs off, the full horror is revealed.

The only other advantage to poor eyesight is the ability to ‘take the edge off’ the world, without engaging in any kind off illegal activity. Specs off, and the world is a little blurred all over, it’s not unpleasant…like living in an impressionist painting. Best of all, you can deploy the ‘specs off’ trick to lessen the impact of a shouty email or letter. You know those times when you bang off a feisty email, telling someone how it is…you press send..you sit nervously awaiting their response…and when it arrives you can hardly bear to read their stinging response.

So, you pop your specs off, push your chair back from the desk and then just scan the email, just get the gist of it without causing yourself any unnecessary stress or emotional hurt by digging down in to the detail.Works every time. many a potential Grudge Book entrant has been saved by the ‘specs off’ trick – I’m sure of it.

No secrets this weekend, sorry folks! We are away, I will schedule a few bits but these secrets take more time and energy than I have today. Back Monday for more revelations….

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