Through the Viewfinder

Kings Heath, Birmingham, June 17th

Saturday was the Kings Heath Carnival and I found it a little odd as it was full of normal people, which is a potentially wanky thing to say but there it is. That said, I also turned up on my own and my state of mind improved once I met up with Jez, and then Matt and Marv. I’m still not sure what to say about it but it was fun and lively (and very very hot). It just felt like I’d be transported back in time to some strange other England, one that never really went away. Later flatmates Andy and Alex arrived and we met up with Gareth, Julie and baby Max and an impromptu camera club emerged resulting, in part, in the above photo, taken with my digital through the focussing screen of Gareth‘s dismantled SLR. Alex has also gotten the camera bug of late with a salvaged Pentax MX and it’s good to have a photo-positive environment outside of Flickr, though I suspect the two will merge in time.

Speaking of which I recently became an Admin of the main Birmingham Flickr group along with Stef which should be interesting as we’ve both got lots of very different ideas as to how it should develop and I think the flexibility of the setup should accommodate our visions and enable them to feed each other well. We’re currently throwing long emails at each other to bash out some kind of general approach but hopefully interesting times are in the pipeline, and not in the Chinese sense.

Next Saturday is the Bournville Festival which I’m looking forward to a lot as it’s on home turf so we’ll be able to pop back home for tea, and I’ve recently discovered that Misty’s Big Adventure are playing the Cotteridge Festival (aka CoCoMad) on July 1st so that’s a no-brainer. Will probably pop along to the Moselely Festival afterwards (and definitely on the Sunday) as the lineup looks pretty keen. Unfortunately this knocks Northfield out of the running but a sheepdog rounding up geese only has so much appeal.