All this week, a few of my photographs will be on display in the Print Room Café at UCL. Along with photos from Dan Swerdlow, they represent just a fraction of the activity of UCLU’s Arts Societies over the past twelve months.

The exhibition is part of this week’s Arts Festival, showcasing the work of the arts societies at UCLU. My photos cover last June’s Quad Play, and the Modo fashion show and the UCOpera production of Genoveva from this academic year.

Dan’s done a great job mounting the prints – I’ll get a shot up on the blog when we’re done putting them up.

This was  a shot I took of our tree last year (during decoration  - it wasn’t actually that bare, honest!), but I felt it illustrated nicely the festive message I wanted to convey. So, merry Christmas to you all – my apologies for not posting terribly often any more, it’s on my New Year’s resolution list!

(It’s also a shot from last year because I broke my 50mm f/1.8 back in July when I was demob happy after finding out my degree result! Buying a new one hasn’t been the top of my priority list – a brand spanking new 27″ iMac – but it’s just the kind of lens that’s perfect for low-light Christmas tree shots. Plenty of bokeh!)

I was passing through Trafalgar Square last night (as one must when travelling from one side of the city to the other during a tube strike) and finally got to see the upgraded fountains. They now pulsate with myriad different colours, which is not only quite an attractive thing for them to do (not to mention opening up the possibility of themed displays for patron saints’ days and so on), but also means you can get some cool nighttime shots of them in action. There’s a few more on flickr.

Also, in unrelated news, I must stop being so parenthetical (using brackets so much [like this]).

I ordered some new cards the other day from Moo.com, a fantastic London-based print company with some really cool little features.

In my 100-minicard pack, there are cards featuring I think 11 or 12 different photos, showing off some of the varied work I’ve done. This is great because it gives contacts an idea of the kinds of things you do, as well as not tying you down to one particular image. Moo also offer great Flickr integration, so I could load the images directly from Flickr to crop down, rather than uploading so many rather large image files first.

The cards come in a recycled plastic box, and are printed on recycled paper. I’ve given out quite a few already, and expect to give more out soon.

Yesterday I popped down to Covent Garden to catch a couple of the Team GB rowers lending their muscle to UCLU Boat Club’s 48hr Rowathon in aid of Comic Relief.

Tom Wilkinson, Will Satch and James Ourne all gave 30mins of their time to row one shift on the machines in the cold (and wearing very little, as is their wont as rowers!), while members of the Boat Club did their best to drum up cash from passersby. Jack Stonehouse, who organised the event for the Club, did a fantastic job to resurrect this event after last year’s planned event failed to materialise.

I’ll update this post when I learn how much was raised over the two days; if you want to see the rowers in action, they’re in Covent Garden until 10pm tonight!

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Just a quick one today, no photos. (London is far too cold for me to leave the house. Cities should never drop below 15º, and that’s a fact.)

Thought I’d live up to the social name and point out a couple of my friends who’ve recently started blogs. I can’t promise they’re of any discernable quality, or that they’ll post anything interesting. That’s their job. I just wanted to say hello to Alex and Katie and their blogs:

• I hope I don’t post when drunk, Alex’s blog about… In his defence, he’s only posted once so far. I’m looking forward to seeing what he posts; he’s an interesting chappy.
• The stories that really mattered, Katie’s blog about films and films and, er, films.

Anyway, I’ll update this as and when more friends join the blogosphere, or when these two give up and drop out.

Being in the passenger seat of a car going up the M1 from London to Huddersfield isn’t the most exciting thing on the planet, I must admit. (At least, before the conversation about how one of the other passengers buried a pickaxe in a childhood friend’s back started…)

So, I decided to take some long exposures of the lights going past. Call it cliché, but I was bored and had the camera with me. Most of the shots I took came out with a lot of blur (I blame the driver), but a couple were just about usable, so they’re now up with this one on Flickr.

What a rubbishly witty title.

Anyway. Today I was at a shoot for student models at UCL. I say at – it wasn’t my shoot. I was there mainly as an observer at the invitation of a friend. Since I didn’t want to get in the way of the main shoot, I decided I’d get there nice and early to watch the models getting ready. Turns out there were only a couple, but still, I think I managed to get a few interesting shots of the preparations for the shoot.

What I realised, too, was that I actually rather enjoy taking photos of people doing their thing. Taking a few shots of the shoot itself wasn’t as fun for me as just wandering around the back of the studio and capturing the natural interaction of the models, the make-up artists and the various stragglers and hangers-on. I did get in the way a couple of times, but a quick apology and an even quicker move back out of the way kept me out of trouble.

So, photographing people standing quite unnaturally in a small space in a studio under uncomfortable lighting isn’t my thing. It’s interaction, and people’s natural backgrounds (I was going to write, habitats) that I’m more interested in. Oh, and food.

The great pacifist died just over 60 years ago, and there’s a somewhat forgotten statue to him in Tavistock Square, practically opposite the site of one of the 7/7 attacks for those on the irony hunt. I passed it on the way to meet a friend today, having gone via the British Library in the hope of catching some good angles or interesting light on the statue of Newton there. Disappointed with what I found, I was pleased to remember this little landmark on my way through.

It’s a great statue, with a niche underneath it that has a plaque and often candles in it too. I don’t know who puts them there, or for what specific reason, but it’s a nice little place. Gandhi actually studied for a while just round the corner at UCL, in case you’re bewildered as to why the Indian indepence hero and sometime enemy of the British Empire should be commemorated there.

For me, the squares of Bloomsbury are fantastic places to get out of the hustle and bustle of the city and spend some time quietly reflecting on life – the statue is of Gandhi meditating, fittingly. We should also remember his message. Too often today we see people trying to change the world (for better or for worse, but in their minds always for better) through violent means. Gandhi knew the best way to overcome resistance to change was not to fight violently against the oppressor. It was simply to allow the oppressor to opress, in the knowledge that in the end, the oppressor would exhaust himself. It worked in India against what was then a world power, and it is still, I believe, the most effective form of action.

I took a walk along the Regent’s Canal through Camden today, and came across this architectural wonder. It looks like it should completely out of place amid the tall, white modern buildings, but somehow it just fits.

I’ve no idea how it came to be there – the internets don’t seem to want to tell me – but now it is a youth and community centre who do kayaking and things like that. All I can say is that to me it looks Victorian – who else would build such a folly? There’s even a wall that goes alongside the road, between the main building and the turret on the left.

The canals of London are a great place to walk – so many hidden things like this that you might just pass by without thinking by bus or car. The narrowboats are all rather pretty, and just being below road level means you can get a new perspective on established landmarks (I’m thinking the Lock market in Camden as one example).

You can see more of my Regent’s Canal walk here on Flickr.