Another sunset photo.
I tried to capture the change in colour here. It wasn’t as balanced as I’d hoped, but I think I still got something. It’s pleasant and easy, I think, and sometimes that’s enough.
I hope you enjoy.
This is Sean Meadows of June of 44.
I like this photo as it doesn’t feel much like a gig photo.
It might have to do with the lighting and the hat. Not sure.
I hope you enjoy.
This is a photo of Taka during MONO’s recent performance at Manning in Sydney.
I took this during “Riptide” which was the opening song of their set.
I think this is just a good action shot. There’s a stillness and there’s a nice amount of space, and in working with rather than against the red I feel I was able present form in a way that’s striking.
As a side note, here are some photos of Taka from when MONO were in Sydney in 2020.
This is my submission into the two hundred-and-forty-second Lens-Artists Photo Challenge. The theme for this one is “New Experiences“.
Whilst having seen MONO prior to this performance, shooting at Manning Bar was something new for me as I hadn’t shot there before. There’s also some of the material being different due to touring in support of their 2021 album Pilgrimage of the Soul leading to an experience that felt familiar and new at the same time and now has me thinking about differing forms of repetition and how those differences are experienced by performer and audience, but I digress.
Another reason why I feel this counts is having another opportunity to shoot MONO as it allows me to try and capture something that is new and not quite the same as what I’d captured of them before.
The host of the Lens-Artists challenges cycles weekly between the following people:
Week 1 – Tina
Week 2 – Patti
Week 3 – Ann-Christine aka Leya
Week 4 – Amy
Week 5 – John Steiner
Week 6 – Sofia Alves
Week 7 – Anne Sandler
Week 8 – Donna
Week 9 – Guest host
Anne is curating this one. The next one is curated by Donna, and I think there is a hint in Anne’s post about what Donna’s might be. Best to go check it out.
I recommend participating in the challenges. They’re open enough to allow for a fair bit of thinking about approach and closed enough to keep focus on meeting the theme of each one. If you don’t participate, you should still check out what others of the Lens-Artists community are submitting.
I hope you enjoy.
Gonna try and do something today that’s not an hour of power. Just gonna try and get a few things cleared out of the way so they no longer are sitting here, staring at me as I need to clear a few things out of the way so I can get on with other things, but let me tell you, I am exhausted.
It has been a long year and I feel as though in it I have lived eons and grown into something else. It hasn’t been long at all, but I am feeling it and all I can keep doing is pushing through everything and hope that things ease up a bit sooner rather than later.
It’s a slog but you get through it. You push and you keep trying and all that, but that’s not what I want to be diving into at thee moment. I want to try and express something a bit happier, or at least a bit more neutral. We’ll just have to see if that happens, however.
Well, we don’t. We don’t have to see at all. I just need to not write about shitty stuff and it’ll all be good. Maybe I will write about shitty stuff, however. It won’t do anything good, but it may be a good thing or something. I don’t know. I think of things to say and then I don’t think properly about saying them, though sometimes I do and sometimes that creates a situation where things are good, or something. Sometimes it creates a situation where things are bad.
It creates situations.
What am I even going on about here?
So I was sitting at my desk and I was throwing stuff at the wall and even though nothing was sticking I still ran with it all as that’s what you do sometimes. Sometimes you just use whatever and it may form something that you can use. Of course that doesn’t happen all the time, or sometimes most of the time, but some of the time it works and so therefore you just do the best you can. I think here it hasn’t helped at all, but that’s neither here nor there so I’m just gonna keep on thundering forward in the hopes that I can make it all work.
Falling back on bad habits. Need to push on forward. Need to think of something sad and miserable to write, then turn it into something happy. Maybe there will be some more reflection. I don’t know and I don’t profess to care to know right now. I started this writing and now I feel I’m in too deep and so I don’t know as to where else I can go from here.
Maybe I can just go over there and sit there for a while and see what happens. That could work. Maybe I’ll get to see some fish doing some fish things, or maybe I won’t.
Maybe I’ll just read a book for a while.
The time it took to write five-hundred words: 05:44:03
If there’s something I’ve gathered from this bit of writing, it’s that my ability to write at an accelerated pace has suffered a little more than I’d hoped. A fair few more spelling errors than usual resulted and I think it might have to do with various injuries flaring up a bit. Not sure.
The quality of the writing itself is poor. Aimless and meandering with no intention to be aimless and meandering, and does little to convey much. Does a lot to convey a little, however.
Written at home.
One listen for this one.
Early on into this I felt unsure as to what I could write. This is a piece of music that effectively creates atmosphere through minimalism and I don’t think I was able to switch off from actively thinking about what I was writing. As such, whilst I covered the song, I think this bit of writing could’ve done much better in that covering.
Yoshino Aoki’s (青木佳乃) “Bitter Air” (“苦い空気”) is from the soundtrack for Breath of Fire IV, Breath of Fire IV: Original Soundtrack.
I hope you enjoy.
—
Bells, or at least something bell-like rings out among a dulled space. It rings out in an eerie melody and it forms a pattern, and occasionally something like a still air blows around, or at least seems to in a fragmentary manner.
A tension weaves its way through and spreads out, and those bells continue ringing out, soft but prominent, and they leave space and continue on as the tension seeps on outward from them, and they soon fade out as the song ends.
This is a photo of one of the members of A Broken Sail when they played at The Lansdowne last week supporting June of 44. I hadn’t shot at The Lansdowne before and so, being unfamiliar with the room and the lighting, ended up with a lot of photos such as the below.
It’s moody and it’s in colour, and I know little else what to say. I think the person was firmly in the moment here, but the photo makes it seem far more dramatic than it was.
I hope you enjoy.
Here’s a recent sunset photo.
I think it was a warm day. Can’t quite remember, but I think it was.
The colour mostly came through in processing as the sky didn’t quite look this rusty on the day. In a sense this is more stylised than how it “should” look, but I’m fine with it here.
I hope you enjoy.
I took this photo shortly before heading into Manning to photograph MONO on the ninth inst. I wanted to capture some of the building and this was the best of the few photos I took. There were some others that showed a smaller portion of the building which I liked, but overall they didn’t turn out well.
This is my submission into Leanne Cole‘s “Monochrome Madness” for this week. Participating is pretty straightforward and something I recommend. If you do, then include the tag “monochrome-madness” in your post.
If not participating, then at the least check out Leanne’s photography as well as what other people submit.
A lot of what people are submitting will likely end up here.
I hope you enjoy.
Alright, so there’s a possibility that I wrote about this at the time, but I haven’t been able to locate it, though admittedly my titling is pretty crap most of the time and I’m no feeling like diving into every post I did around that time, though admittedly there aren’t too many and it’d take me a few minutes at most, but I’m lazy, so I won’t.
2015 was a good and a bad year in a few ways, and I might end up writing about it a bit as I think doing so would benefit from the distance. Today’s writing is about something that happened in 2015 so I should probably stop procrastinating and get right into this tidbit.
Actually one more thing; Whilst this story involves them, I am neither for nor against drugs. I believe that people should be allowed to make informed decisions about what they put in their body and I think that decriminalsation is important. Through this there’d likely be more care available for people who overdose or have an addiction. Furthermore, we need to stop pretending that alcohol is safe as it’s not. Just because one is more openly socially acceptable than another, doesn’t mean it’s harmless.
Anyway this happened in 2015; the year I went to Japan, the year where I was working between ninety and one-hundred-and-twenty hours a fortnight up until that trip to Japan and the year where, after said trip, I started working on taking photography much more seriously than I was. It was the year I read Finnegans Wake, and the year someone and I went our separate ways a second time in a manner that I could’ve handled in a much more mature fashion. It was the year where I started full-time study, and the year I was made redundant from a place I worked for seven-and-a-half years to the day.
Including all the small stuff, it was a pretty packed year.
We were going to have an end of financial year work party, but as we were being made redundant at the end of the year we were thinking of it as Christmas in July, or at least I was. I’m pretty certain we’d had mid-year parties before, or at least parties before Christmas, but right now I can’t quite remember and it’s not important anyway.
A lot of us were looking forward to the party and a lot of us were looking forward to redundancy. Me not so much as at that point I was in my late twenties and had been working since I was sixteen. I didn’t have much money and so the possibility of not having an income left me pretty worried. It didn’t get in the way of my looking forward to the party, however.
The plan was to head home and relax for a bit, then walk over to Darling Harbour as the party was focused on drinks and bowling there. As I lived in Glebe the walk was going to be an easy one so I had plenty of time to stuff around.
A few weeks prior to the day of the party I’d spoken to one of my coworkers – Macy – about having some pot cookies made. He had to think about it, but ultimately was fine with making them and so on the party day he came into work with a batch. Not having made them before (or, at least not having made them in a long time) he was uncertain of how effective they were and so he gave them to me for free. Macy also told me that he’d used an ounce, fairy dust, a bit of used stuff and threw in a fifty for good measure.
We each had a cookie shortly before leaving work and figured that, what with edibles taking a bit of time to kick in, we’d be fine, which we were. Macy gave me a lift home, we talked a bit about whether we were feeling anything and we kind of were but it may have been the aftertaste, and when I was getting out of the car we discussed getting to Darling Harbour at around the same time.
I headed on inside and I think I relaxed for a bit. Probably listened to music or did a bit of gaming. Not sure and whatever I did is immaterial to this recounting anyway. Life happened; I experienced life.
Eventually I started getting ready and I think the cookie properly started kicking in a little before. Of course it started slow and gradually increased in its intensity, as is the way with edibles. I was worried about going out with my eyes being bloodshot, which they were becoming and so I looked for eye drops. I couldn’t see any and so I called my housemate Jer as he was out, and he thought he may have had some but they would have expired.
The high kept on increasing and I kept on hoping my eyes would become less bloodshot and I kept trying to muster the courage to go out my front door. I messaged some coworkers to see when they’d be heading on out and kept going through the cycle.
It’s probably a good time to mention that this wasn’t my first time with edibles. I’d had them before and that was an intense time which I might write about down the track. I’d also tried making some butter myself once and that was a fair bit weaker than I thought it’d be, which was fine, but I knew that the high being strong wasn’t unexpected. The cookie I had seemed to keep on going. I’m sure it did eventually, but it was as though there was no peak to the high.
I’m not sure how late it was; it might’ve been around nine, but I messaged one of my coworkers, told them I was on my way. I did a bit more pacing, left my room, did a bit more hesitating in the hallway, then told myself I was going to do it and I was going to go. I walked to the front door and when I got there I turned into my bedroom and went to sleep.
The following day I woke up and felt pretty good. Had a decent sleep which was good as I had to go to work. Got ready, all that stuff. Headed off to the bus stop, resumed where I left off with Finnegans Wake. I’m not sure if it was on the first or second bus, but after a bit of time reading I realised that I’d read the same paragraph for a few minutes. I then realised I was still high so I put Finnegans Wake away and I can’t remember what I spent the rest of the time on the bus doing. Probably looking out a window.
The high didn’t wear off until a few hours into work, which is not what I wanted but had to deal with. I think I got some things done whilst still high, but probably not enough.
It was either that day or a few days after that I got to hear about what happened at the party, or at least a few details. My coworkers weren’t surprised that I didn’t make it, but they also were laughing about it as I kept saying that I was going to be there. The bowling went well and Macy, who if I remember correctly hadn’t been bowling before had a good time.
He got a strike after someone told him that the bowling ball was a cookie and I was the pins.
Over time the remained of the cookies were eaten and they were all intense. They were mostly good times and I’m glad they’re in the past.
I was walking around Sydney Olympic Park when I saw this cicada and decided to take a picture. I was a bit worried bout it but it flew off so maybe it was resting. Not sure.
Not the best photo in terms of focus but at least the cicada isn’t blurry.
I hope you enjoy.
Stupidity Hole 