Supercalifragieweddinglistic

Despite the fact I have a ton of work backlogged up, and I’m trying to get two new web projects underway, what I’ve actually been doing for the last couple of weeks is preparing for, photographing and then editing photos from the wedding of a couple of good friends – the awesome comic book writer Kieron Gillen and curator of fine poetry Chrissy Williams. It was an honour and a privilege to be asked to photograph their wedding, even though it’s a job way above my actual photographic skills.

Once they get back from honeymoon I’ll ask if they don’t mind me showing off some of the pics here, because I’m really happy with some of them. So much so, I’m actually thinking of trying to shadow a ‘real’ wedding snapper for a few days to see how to get the few shots I missed.

Also, I hope they’ll let me post some here because this is a post about photography without any photos.

The dangers of trying something new, though. Very, very time consuming…

The worst rate of pay yet?

I'd rather piss down drains for a living.Actually, I’m sure there are content farms that offer even lower rates than this, but I happened across a job ad this morning that just made me angry. A new site launch for some godawful reviews place called hittboss that’s offering $1 for 500 words. If you’re really good, apparently, you might get $2 per 500. I’m not going to link the ad for obvious reasons.

The chap needs 100 writers to churn out crap. The sad thing is he’ll probably get them.

One million Spotifers

 

As a big fan who pays a monthly fee to Spotify, I’m really pleased that they now have over a million subscribers. Given that that suggests a monthly revenue of £10m plus whatever they make from advertising, though, I do hope that there’s a plan to revise the rates that they actually pay artists in the near future.

I’d also like to see Spotify develop better tools for discovering and promoting new music. The ‘What’s new’ list always seems to throw up the same Miles Davis albums for me, while ‘Top lists’ is still utterly incomprehensible to my eyes, despite the fact I’ve been using Spotify since it launched.

Some old shots of a Field

 

 

These pics were taken a few years ago just outside Bristol, where the artist Richard Box created the installation ‘Field’ – 1300 flourescent light tubes placed upright beneath a pylon, which light up when the sun goes down. I’ve just got round to uploading them to Flickr.

It was an astonishingly beautiful thing to see.

I understand the whole magnetic fields and earthing principle behind why the tubes lit up, by one thing baffles me. You can kind of see in these shots that the lights lit up as the sun went down – ie, they weren’t on the daytime, and glowed brighter as it got darker. Was that an optical illusion or is there something else going on?

This is the professional me

Well, it’s one of my professional faces. There’s at least one other exciting project underway which I’ll be talking about soon on here, but in the meantime, here’s my new company website, areaofeffect.tv. AOE Media Ltd, as it’s otherwise known, is the company structure that I operate under and have done for nearly a year now. It’s all a bit nascent at the moment, but as I establish myself as more than a writer it’s a way of reaching out to (primarily NGO) potential clients for my multimedia work.

It’s all very Business 3.0, if you like that sort of thing. Behind the scenes of AOE Media there’s not just me, but several other talented freelances that come together on a per project basis to perform stunning acts of multimedia journalism as and when requested.

It was too good to be true

So basically, there’s a problem with one of the site plugins. There are quite a few, and you’ll have to bear with me while I go through them all one by one to find out the culprit. Firebug isn’t being much help at finding the small iframe that’s linking to a bad site, but I’ll get it in the end.

Normal service resumed

If I realised one thing this week, it’s that website malware is really, really annoying. Google flagged up this site as being infected with something non-specifically bad, which seemed to go away after reinstalling WordPress. Then the warning went away. Then it came back. Then I checked all the little pieces of code WordPress scatterguns  over the server for whatever was being flagged up by Google. Then I found nothing. Then the warning went away again. Then I realised the upgrade had broken the design (such as it is).

Gah.

–updated 7/3: Something is still causing problems, so I’m turning off a lot of the site functions for a while to see if it will help. May just stick the whole lot on Tumblr