I want to be the girl with the most cake, its true:
Hole - Live Through This
Live though this is a pritty intresting album and often overlooked in favour of Celebrity Skin worth a listen if your in the mood for some mid 90s grunge.
When your on the wrong side of 25 and theres washing up to be done you can count on NFG to remind you what it was like to be 18 again and washing up was somthing your mum did.
New Found Glory - New Found Glory
Bit hetic these last few weeks but this weeks pic will surley brighten your day. Great album for some pop punk lovleyness of a circa 2000 vintage.
Millenclion - Pennybridge Pioneers
More album fun next week and as for this post; better late than never.
No spotify pick this week mainly due to busy weekend. What I do have is an intresting look at the amen break and how it spawned several subcultures. If your intreseted in any of the breakbeat generes this is a great little histroy lesson.
VERY Busy weekend this weekend not much time for tidying and as such not much time for a pic. This week I leave you a live album by permanently MIA band My Vitriol.
My Vitriol - Cast In Amber
Nice live album great band, unfortunately I wont be holding my breath for the release of their next album since its been in production for about a decade.
Ok I actualy managed to do this a day early, mainly due to cleaning my kitchen a day early.
This week I have ska punkers [Spunge] for you:
spunge - Room For Abuse
Its a great album with an amazing cover of No Woman, No Cry can you ask for more? Probably in that case I have somthing for you:
QOTSA - Go With the Flow (UNKLE Mix)
This UNKLE remix was a nice midweek find i found after listening to some soulwax stuff, enjoy.
Ive been using spotify for quite a bit and its turning out to be quite fun for rediscovering bands you used to listen to. The aim of this initiative is to present an album each week that quite fun to listen to while doing whatever it is you do on a sunday, In my case usualy washing up. Anyway In an effort to post more regulary and with Nick starting a new blog and giving me some inspiration Im going to attempt to make this a regular thing 
First album of the weekend Is:
Guttermouth Gusto
Admittidly its a rather strange album but I like it and yes, all the reviews are going to be this short.
Lots of things been going on over the last few months most importantly Ive picked up 2 new cameras a D40 and a Super Richoflex.
I was after a 6×6 Medium format camera where I could compose the shots to some reasonable degree also it needed to be cheap at the time I was getting a bit tired of the dianas shoot and hope for the best aproach. Enter the super richoflex a TLR camera from the 1950’s. Whats great about this camera is you can look though the top and get a really bright preview of your shot, whats not so great is that its in reverse this is a real problem if you use another camera then switch to the Richoflex. See below for a look at how it works
TLR In action
Im taking it slow on the medium format these days so Ive only taken 1 full films worth and comming up to complete on the second but so far the ricoflex seems so be pritty forgiving in terms photos actualy coming out even in not so great light if anything I ended up sligtly over exposing a lot of the shots on the first film.
Ive wanted a digital SLR for a long and I finaly ended up getting one for my birthday in may. I think the problem with digital SLR’s Is that its a crazy world of features, features you have to sort through and decide what you need also things you woudlent thing of as too imporant at face value eg how good the menu system is can lead to massive frustration when when actualy using the camera. Oh and megapixes dont mean shit
I wont go into the pros and cons of things here but suffice to say in my research there where some things that stood out the D60 for instance has higher MP sensor than the D40 but its base sensitivity (ISO) is actualy worse the only thing thats better is its self cleaning. In the end I opted for a D40 with 2 lenses which with some discounts came to about 300 quid. The nikon came with a Nikkor 18-55mm a great general purpose and fairly light weight lense which is good for landscape and genral use. The second lense was a Tamron 70-300mm zoom I got this for wildlife shots, it also has a macro function thats quite fun to play about with.
Shooting on a digital turned out to be quite fun becuase your not really forced to wait for the perfect shot anything rubish you can discard which makes it great for shooting when theres lots of stuff going on. This is both a blessing and a curse in some ways becuase you can end up just shooting wildly hoping somthing that might be a good shot comes out rarther than looking for it…
I’m still enjoying taking photos and still wincing everytime I get the bill for processing a roll. The diana is great but in a lot of ways your limited to what you can do especialy when you get the fear.
The fear is a strange beast its caused by taking pictures in low light with a diana. Basically the diana is terrible in low light so much so you fear that your entire film will come back blank a few months back i got 3/12 back, I didn’t want to take another film in low light for weeks after that. So the answer to this I surmised was to get a 35mm camera the film is cheaper and you get more shots per roll best of all I would go for a camera with a lens that wasn’t photo-phobic.
Some quick hunting around for second hand places my friend had recently picked up a olympus XA from a place in town described as “A small room full of cameras you have to get buzzed into”. Classic Photographics is what you imagine an independent second hand camera shop should be, the guy persumably the owner was great help managing to give me a few cameras to choose from that met the criteria “35mm rangefinder that was interesting”. After a bit of haggling i was the proud owner of of a FED-4 and paid in cash. Of course they didn’t accept anything else…
The FED-4 is a russian rangefinder loosly based on the leica cameras of the time. It looks amazing everything is mechanical bar the light meter that runs on science and it weighs about as much as a fully loaded 4 door family saloon. Oh and it came with a lovley (matching) leather case at no extra charge!
For my first roll I decided to go for some ISO 400 fim because ISO 400 was what I was used to and mainly because I had ‘The Fear’ having no idea how the camera would perform. The best part was the light meter only going upto ISO 320 so i had to kinda gustimate the calibration.
But as luck would have it I manged to shoot some passible shots in daylight and some blurry stuff at a gig not too terrible considering I was expecting 100% of the gig shots to come back blank.
If you have a FED-4 you might find the following handy:
http://www.cameramanuals.org/russian_pdf/fed_4.pdf
http://www.marriottcameras.co.uk/instruct3/fed4/with_pictures.htm
Meant to post infos about this a few weeks ago. Its a plugin for media portal that lets you view all your photos, groups and contacts just as you would on your flicker homepage. This plugin also uses the flickr api so any photos you have marked private etc will be viewable though this plugin.
The plugin reached its first milestone and has been released here; http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/plugins-47/flicked-flickr-plugin-mediaportal-53103/
Currently im awaiting the release of media portal 1.0.1 before moving on with development due to the plugin/skin revamp.
Im a web dev from Newcastle, UK; sometimes i write things and they end up here.
