Simon's Blog

Simon Marchini LRPS

Web: http://WWW.simonmarchini.co.uk

So far so interesting.  There is a huge amount of things to start to learn about facebook and I am just talking the first few steps.   It is quite intriguing though.  I have spent the morning working out how to link things to my account.  The afternoon was for play – wellies mud and catkins..  

One of the main things I have been working on is linking my web presence and finding ways of supporting each in the most efficient way.  This is where Posterous comes in.  Initially I used this service as an easy way to post blog updates from my iPhone.  It worked really well – you write a quick email and post it to Posterous and bang the content flows to wherever.   It was also posted to my Posterous blog site which, if I am honest, I never looked at as I was using Blogger.com.  However, with the arrival of facebook I am now not so dismissive, indeed there may come a time when I stop working on blogger and just use support Posterous.   This, though, is unlikely as blogger.com is part of Google and you would hope that this would give the service an edge when searches are made on Google.   The second reason why this might not happen is that Posterous is so easy to use that I don’t have to do anything and both blogs are updated.

Having spent the morning starting to understand facebook this afternoon I felt like doing something more creative.  On came the wellies and I was out splatting through the mud in my local park.  What is it with me and mud?   Well there was a serious reason for this.  I wanted to capture some catkin photographs and now is the right time to do that.  Sure enough there was a great show of catkins and I will enjoy working through the images over the next day or so.  Now do I publish them to flickr or facebook?  Decisions Decisions.
 

Simon Marchini LRPS

Web: http://WWW.simonmarchini.co.uk

This is part of a series of photographs I have made in and around the Staunton Harold area.   It’s a view from Dimminsdale across the valley towards the main house…
 

Simon Marchini LRPS

Web: http://WWW.simonmarchini.co.uk

There are times when you realise that your life has been very easy, your troubles are really trivial and in the great shake of things not really worth worrying about.   This is how the exhibition of Don McCullin’s life and work at the Imperial War Museum North hits you.

The exhibition is more a theatrical stage rather than exhibition space.  You walk through a maze of dimly lit passages ways, all the time surrounded by the images that made Don McCullin such a powerful and famous photographer and a continual loop of McCullin himself talking about his work in a very matter of fact manner.   However, beyond the photography there is the small items that perhaps are as poignant;  the telex from Lord Snowdon to McCullen when he was seriously injured in Cambodia; his light meter  that must have seen some of the worst action any light meter may have experienced – just how do you take a meter reading which under fire? 

Beyond the overpowering effect of the exhibition there were one or two problems  with the exhibition – all associated with light – or lack of it.   McCullin’s world is very dark in presentation as well as its content.  This makes experiencing the work more difficult in a dimly lit space.  This leads to the next problem.  Throughout the the exhibition there are illuminated advertising hoarding sized pictures that beam out in the gloom.   These have a great visual effect and added to the atmosphere – however, they do make viewing the individual prints more difficult as they can be partly obscured by reflections of the hoardings on the glass cover of each print.   One final point – McCullin’s colour photographs are nowhere near as powerful as his black and white work.  They have the same narrative subject matter but none of the punch – black and white is his medium and his mastery of it is superb.

All in all and great exhibition and well worth the trip to Salford to see it.
 

Simon Marchini LRPS

Web: http://WWW.simonmarchini.co.uk

Well I have gone and done it – I’ve joined Facebook.  At the moment I feel very much like a new boy at school – everything is very new and just a little frightening but I am sure over the weeks and months ahead this will change – I hope so anyway.

I have some help in this whole new endeavour – my son is a veteran facebooker – 4 years which I think makes him almost there at the start.  I am trying to link all my updates into one place so I am using Posterous to publish this to face book and blog.  If there was a photo attached then this would also go to Flickr as well.  This should make things a whole lot easier – lets hope so.

Well here goes – I just about to test the system.
 

Simon Marchini LRPS

Web: http://WWW.simonmarchini.co.uk