adetorrent; photography, lifestyle.

First day of April tomorrow.  GMT has been put aside till autumn.  Time to charge ahead head first into summer.  What summer 2014 bring?  No one knows.  What ever the case may be, to quote the Creator, let there be light! 

Every European city's got them, but they don't come any more captivating and grandiose as they do here in London.  Even if they're actually French.

In my experience, only about 20-50% of house party food actually gets consumed even when it seems as if there hadn't been enough food.

..you know, when you want nothing but just to get the heck out of the city.

Even the strongest trees lean to the power of the elements.

O, M, G! This is like toooootally a-maze-inn!

Awaking from anaesthesia is moving from lack of consciousness, memory and sensation to a world of confusion, colour blindness and excruciating pain. 

Happy birthday my dear friend.  I know how you're into your healthy, ethical eating, so here is a portion-controlled slice of a birthday cake for you.  There is also some fairtrade green tea in a recycled and re-recyclable cup for you to wash it down with.  Ah, but with all things, a little balance is essential. A little guilty pleasure, a little vice - so here is a lollypop.

That Monday morning, when you wake up suddenly after not having had enough sleep and the sun rays come blazing in through the window and every sound is amplified a hundred fold.  Feels like a light leak in your brain and everything looks like the devil's trident. Coffee. 

Bit of gentrification going on in the poultry farm got me thinking of the Joe Raposo classic. One of these things is not like the others,  One of these things just doesn't belong,  Can you tell which thing is not like the others  By the time I finish my song?  Did you guess which thing was not like the others?  Did you guess which thing just doesn't belong?  If you guessed this one is not like the others,  Then you're absolutely...right! Have a peaceful Sunday all.

Up until the camera showed up in my life, I had only been using rangefinders and point-and-shoot cameras.  I had gotten used to the parallax error compensation ‘slightly to the left, slightly up’ movement during composition.   I had also given up on all on-camera metering and usually shoot full manual mode, relying most of the time on Sunny-16.  That’s great of course, if all you’re doing is street or travel photography outdoors when you are mostly shooting at distances at which parallax errors don’t matter much, or the minimum focal distance don’t ever come in to play, and you have predictable good light. Like anyone else, I occasionally get the unexplainable urge to take a photo of my feet, or my coffee.  This urge is impossible to resist.  There’s nothing more photographed than own feet and cups of coffee.  If you ever wondered why this is, there is your answer, once and for all – it is a natural urge like thirst or hunger. Ba...

Ok yes, it's also the Spring Equinox, but that's to do with the night hours, so in theory that was yesternight. If it is the sunrise and sunset you're on about, then you mean the Equilux. Anyhow, that's neither here nor there.  Elegant is it not that the sun rose and set at the same time all over the world today, so long as you're on the same longitude?

And here we have it, the last day of winter.  Tomorrow is the spring Equinox, signifying the rebirth, new life, new perspective.

In the heart of east London, I found this green oasis.  

I've got so many things ongoing right now, and I'm soldiering on.  They say men can't multitask?  They are right :) I have a new found respect for women the world over.  I take my hat off to y'all.

Enjoy the sun, drink responsibly.

This is one of those days when my brain turns to face the wrong direction.  This was a result of over-compensation for rangefinder parallax error.  Oh well, I could always go back and snap this again some day. In my defence, I only had about half a second to grab the shot.  This is one of the busiest shops in one of the busiest parts of town, and this 'empty street' look only happens for a few microseconds at a time. 

Oh boy, has it been a long difficult week.  Very long hours at work, difficult problems to resolve on a daily basis.  You know what though, I've had so much energy all week and I've been feeling right on top of the world. I'm off to a very old part of England for the weekend and I am looking forward to it.  We have been promised lots of sunshine and spring-like, almost summer-like even, temperatures.  There will be a lot of photos taken, I can assure you that. 

Ideally, my weapon of choice should have been an LCA or Diana or something like that.  The shocking truth is, I don't own any camera from Lomography at all [I know right? What kind of hipster am I anyway?].  I do however own an original Smena 8m, which was one of the cameras that kicked this whole 'Lomo' thing off back in the day.  Had I used that camera for this shoot, I'd have had to re-title the post 'lomo on lomo on lomo'. Or lomo  ménage à trois - but this is a family show. I ran out of amo just as I arrived at the junction of  Commercial Street and Lamb Street which, serendipitously enough, is the location of Lomography's east London shop.  I popped in for some film, and a geeky chat with the kind staff as one does.  It was a sunny day, yet I opted for the Lomography CN 800 for 2 reasons.  Firstly, I had never used that film, and secondly, I intended to finally take some photos inside the shop following a comment on her blog...

Who said you couldn't have man-boobs and still be a fierce warrior?

It is an official word now, so why not use it?

The city of London has a mice infestation ‘ problem ’.  It doesn’t matter where you live, or how clean your home is, you have seen, or will see one of these little highly evasive rodents dash across your floor.  It’s inevitable. This mouse I spotted on a London Underground platform got me thinking; mice have always been a part of this city since before Roman times, and millennia before that.  In probable fact, they arrived here first.  Does it then follow that we have taken over their habitat? Is this city hence suffering from a human infestation?

I see things I tell you, random things.

Gotta love this city.  You live here for dozens of years, but the very day you take a different route, turn left, say, instead of right, a brand new world opens to you.  Other Londoners are laughing at me now, but can you believe I'd never heard of, let alone seen, the Geffrye museum in Hackney?  Believe. Took a wrong turn one day and there it was in all its magnificence.  To steal from the official website; " The Geffrye Museum is devoted to the history of the home, showing how homes and gardens reflect changes in society, behaviour, style and taste over the past 400 years. " Wow.  What a concept.  I was immediately mesmerised by the trees (of course) in the courtyard of the museum that I spent a considerable time studying them.  Thankfully, there were benches strategically located at points of wonder around the yard. The courtyard was eerily deserted, even though just outside the gates is a major road bustling with foot ...