Friday night into Saturday morning saw me join the 4am Project walk in central Birmingham where photographers took photos of the city at that rather odd hour. Here’s my slideshow:

We took in New Street Station (where tripods are normally not allowed) for a bit before heading to the slightly discombobulating bustle of the Wholesale Markets. We then finished with breakfast at the cafe there which was aburdly bountiful.

About 32 people came along, according to Matt‘s quick headcount, which would have been an impressive number had it happened at a more sensible time of day and is astonishing for 4am. And that was just for the Birmingham walk. By 8am I was seeing photos coming in from Birmingham, Leeds, Sydney, London, Watford, Harrow, Shanghai, S. Africa, Moscow and Singapore and they continued throughout the weekend.

The whole thing was the brainchild of Karen Strunks who did that marvelous thing of keeping it focussed and organised in a way that let as many people as possible get involved and feel part of it. Top stuff Karen. Can’t wait to see what you do next!

Today, while tinkering with cameras to clear the mind, I brought it into the orbit of the TTV contraption. While the thread on the S7000 is a slightly kooky 46.8mm the prism did slide rather snugly on the outside of the barrel. So I popped it on, shoved it into the ‘trap and took this baby:

Yup, that’ll work.

Later that night I was attending the opening of the Stan’s Cafe warehouse. More on that later as it’s very interesting indeed but since I’d TTV’d their Rice Show it made sense to give the new toy a spin there.

Here’s the set and here’s the slideshow:

And here’s a couple of favourites of mine:

For some reason I feel the need to make it clear that these were not montaged in Photoshop or anything. The composition is as it came out of the camera. I just cropped to a square and messed with the colour and contrast.

So, what do you think? Am I onto something here?

I’m particularly pleased with this one, capturing Stu dancing the dance of wedded joy.

I’ve already had another request to shoot a wedding in this way so may have stumbled upon a niche here. Not that I’ll be worrying my professional wedding photographer chums too much but if you fancy some fucked-up, blown-out, dirty square photos of your special day then do get in touch.

Been ill these last few days with a throat infection, as followers of my Twitter will no doubt be aware. Twitter is great for moaning about such things without worrying that you’re really annoying anyone – Pete’s ill, skim! – but it did bring a couple of angels to my door armed with soup and friendship, so thanks angels.

Woke up this morning with a bit of a stab in the neck area but after a brief doze it had gone by noon which was promising and after a fairly active day it looks like the sickness has passed. Hooray! Now I have to get back to work. Boo! But I like my work so that’s okay.

After a few hours catching up on stuff, mainly Custard Factory blogging since that’s my main bread-winning activity right now, it was off to Digbeth for the launch of The Secret Garden, a fascinating art installation on a pointless patch of land on Floodgate St that has been overgrown for 15 years. Three artists have cleared it and are using shipping containers and existing structures to do art and that. I only had a few minutes to hang there but I liked what I saw and shot some TTV.

Then it was off to the TIC to give a talk with Stef on Web 2.0 for the Creative Networks gang. It was being filmed so should emerge online at some point in the hopefully not to distant future (though I note the Soweto Kinch talk from last month isn’t online yet…) so I won’t try and summarize it here but I felt it went fairly well. It’s nice doing talks with Stef as we’re coming from the same mindset but from completely different directions, if that makes sense, so we keep each other in check, but I’m thinking I’d like to develop a series of these on my own as there’s only so much you can cover in an hour and we never seem to cover enough of it. I’m thinking a weekly course of six seminars going into some depth. Just need to find a venue…

Set on Flickr here.