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I need to keep busy over the Christmas break from University. Although the year is normally split into 3 segments, this year (the final one) is basically split in half. And I’m at the halfway point. So I need to keep up with making things, writing things and formulating what I’m going to do at the end of the year. Here’s a few things that I want to get on with.

Depressing Starbucks

I just got back from a trip to the city centre, I wanted to do some shopping, however I got the fear after about an hour of browsing and decided to abandon the mission and come home. It was quite good though, for the first time in ages I actually had my MP3 player with me, as well as headphones. Normally I don’t have the latter; a constant frustration. Meandering around, listening to good music, catching the occasional smile from a stranger. I really enjoyed it actually.

Just as I passed one of the many Starbucks in Manchester I was reminded of an idea I had when me and my sister were on a demonstration supporting Karen Reissmann.

During the demo we must have passed about 5 branches of Starbucks. Each one was populated with a row of people in the window seats. Their faces were long. Like horses. Their eyes full of sorrow. They weren’t brought to life by the caffein hit they were indulging gifting themselves. It was really extraordinary. It didn’t matter how man Starbucks branches we passed, these window dwellers mood never seemed to improve. For some reason those with a blue mood seem to congretate around in the stools by the windows. Those in the interior were not as woefully depressed-looking. I want to do a series of photographs based on this. A good excuse to use my zoom lens.

The Stile Appreciation Society

After becoming aware of some inspirational societies (Clouds, Pylons), and having an excellent brainstorm with Jody in the Music Box, I’ve decided to found the Stile Appreciation Society.

Over the Christmas period I’m going to seek out some of the stiles hiding around Keighley and maybe I’ll go up into the Dales to find some real beauties.

Photobombing

Photobombing was a great idea when I first had it, in the summer of 2007. I knew that it was good, and I really liked it, so I dived in head first. At that point I said that Photobombing was the utterly pointless act of attaching photographs to public places for random strangers to find. And I did it, I put hundreds of photos all over the place for people to find, each one was tagged with a label on the back uniquely identifying that image and asking whoever finds it to visit Photobombing.com and leave their comment and a new image that incorporates the old one. It worked pretty well, however I’d set up a very inefficient system. All the photos were stored on Flickr and the website was a Blogger blog – which allowed for very limited customisation.

Since then I’ve tried several times to rekindle my interest for Photobombing, but I’ve always run into some technical issue with the website that’s put me off. I think I need to return to my ‘gung-ho’ attitude that I had in the first place.

One key change that I’ve identified is to distribute the photos among people that I actually know, rather that relying on a random person from the off. Relying on people picking up the images from the street at random although romantic, in reality, means that the ratio of images to images with responses is really small.