The end of the festival… with selected highlights …

The end of the festival…
with selected highlights from the middle of the fest.

I’m sitting on a beach.. well, close enough to it, nice an sunny and good coffee. I’m in Point Lonsdale, and hour and a half south west of Melbourne, staying at my uncle and cousins place for a couple of night.

Ok… what happened.

This festival started out bad, then got better and then petered out into a kinda not too bad but not all that great end of the festival. I managed to do 21 shoots and over half of them were done in the last week.

The Special Feature went together ok, about 70 people turned up and everything went as well as could be expected. I would have liked the projectors resolution set differently so the top and bottom were not cut off, I would have liked it to be a bit brighter too. I also need to learn how to record sound a bit better as the funniest presentation was also the worst audio quality. The assistant festival director loved it, which is a good thing and Andy Muirhead did an amazing job of MCing the whole thing.

This is good coffee.

The “May contain traces of nuts” exhibition finished up well, with a bit swell of people turning up on the last weekend. I might try to get the opening video up on the net at some stage… once I figure out how to get the video onto the computer.

I will also transpose some of the comments left in the guest book onto the blog with some photos of the exhibition for all to see (especially for those people who had the opportunity to see it and didn’t… not naming names… as there are too many to mention)

In total I sold 6 prints at the exhibition, which covered the amount I had left to pay for the gallery hire and also most of the framing… well… I was going to use it for that but it has found a more pressing use.

I kinda dropped the camera, at first it was all ok, still shooting well all functions go. Then the batteries went flat and the battery tray wouldn’t come out. So I had to take it in for repairs. The nice people at fuji (or the nice Graham Carter to be precise) lent me a new S3 to play with while my camera is being repaired. I’m interested to see how it goes, it will probably be the next camera I buy.

Might sell my old Nikon F2, fully manual camera. I havn’t used it since uni, and that’s now 5 years ago. I will have to look about and see what else I can off load on ebay.

Back to the festival…

I think I saw about 20 – 25 shows,

My favouries were David Callan in I Spied, Dave Callan and Sam Simmons in The Sunshine Factory, Lawrence Leung and Andy McClelland in Smewhat Secret Secret Society Show, Tim Minchin for Darkside was amazing and will also be coming to play in Edinburgh with me as he got an award to take him over.

Mt trip to the Uk to have a look and see how I will work my way into the industry over there has turned about a bit. I have been offered an exhibition space at the Guilded Balloon, which is one of the main venues of the Edinburgh festival. And the best part is that they are going to be paying for the mounting and framing of the exhibition. So, I’m excited now, I have an exhibition a year before I planned to and it’s going to be mostly funded by the venue. Can’t get a lot better than that!

In recent acquisitions… DVD :Psyco (originally B/W Hitchcock version) and Shaun Of The Dead (original best film of the year for 2004). On Cd, I have managed to aquire the Vasco Era Ep (with a T-shirt)(***next one will be even better), Architecture in Helsinki’s Before We Die (****) and New Order’s Get Ready (****) and Before the Siren’s Call (***and rising).

I saw The Vasco Era at their EP launch at the Espy a couple of weeks ago, Fleety had told them he wanted to launch the EP for them, I reminded him of this an hour before it was due to happen when he was still in the bar at the comedy festival. I then drove him to The Espy where we arrived about 2 minutes too late. The place was packed, they are on the rise, I can hardly turn on Triple J with out hearing their songs of mention of them. They gave me the EP and t-shirt at the end of the gig. I even played the EP to comedian Stewart Lee who also writes CD reviews for a major mag in the UK, he saw potential, bit shouty and really liked the last and slowest song on the CD.

Back to the festival

The last show I saw was Barry Castanola, it was the last night of the festival and his audience wasn’t the biggest, well, only 3. He bought us all a drink at the start and then got into the show in a much more casual way then he normally would. I can see how this show is great and would be so much better in front of a real audience, he had sold out shows earlier in the season so it wasn’t really a flop I probably should not have fallen asleep during the show( I has seen, or almost seen sunrise the last 2 mornings), I thought he didn’t notice, but he reminded me about it in the bar afterwards. I have a photo on my camera of Barry and his final audience. I’ll get it online when I figure out how.

I spent a whole day with my friend Tom Putt doing business type stuff, shareing of information and research. There was a lot of file swapping going on and spreadsheets on the go. It’s good to actually not do anything photographic and focus on the business side of things… of course, we did end up showing each other things on photoshop.

I ended this day by visiting a couple who’s wedding I shot in March. Had a bit of a massage (gotta love happy brides qualified in massage and willing to give!) and a bit of a meal too (gotta worry about happy grooms who go a bit overboard on the spices!) Again, another good reason why I do wedding, the people I meet can be really cool.

2nd Coffee…. Not as good as the first.

Well, that’s all I can think of at the moment… maybe I’ll think of more and add some details later. Stay tuned for my experiences as a guest judge at the Victorian Photographer Of The Year Awards