Intentions.

In a desperate attempt to make myself draw more, I went out today and purchased a lovely little moleskin notebook and a couple of fineliners that will reside in my bag from now on. My intention is to do one drawing at least every two days. This can be a drawing of anything and can take any amount of time. A ten second continuous line drawing of my foot will be acceptable. I just need to get pen to paper. I really need to get back into the habit of drawing. No excuses.

This Guy.

Food.

Just home from Manchester. Had a good time with good family. Making an active effort to take my camera with me these days. Two things have become interesting to me to shoot. Animals and Food. I'm thinking of doing a series on each. I took a few photos of cows last week and that was fun but I got some shots of food over the weekend and I actually kinda dig what I came out with. Think I might try get more of this. Fuck it, it's something to do.

Home.

It's remarkable how, as you get older, you discover how it's the smallest of things that make you remember what it's like to feel at home.

Frustration.

I'm starting to lose sight of my thesis as I imagine an Alzheimer's victim loses their grasp of reality. Every day I find it a little harder to outline what it is that I want to say my thesis, and also that my thesis is about "saying" something. I mean, am I to pose a question and then answer it? Explore an idea? Discuss a trend? What annoys me is that I had all of the answers just a few months back and now they've seemingly disappeared. I was so enthusiastic about this at the beginning, and I promise that I have not lost my passion for the subject. I just think that now, when it actually comes time to start writing, that I'm finally stuck for words. Here's what I remember:

I want to talk about the social effect of social networking. In this case when I say social networking I mean the technological side of things. I essentially want to discuss how we all communicate and live our social lives, at least in part, through the internet. We all have a Facebook account which we fill with information. We deem our smallest of thoughts to be Tweet worthy, and suddenly a picture simply isn't worth taking unless it can be uploaded and tagged within twenty four hours. You're not officially in a relationship unless Facebook says so. You're not attractive unless you have at least two hundred followers on Twitter. None of this existed ten years ago and now we're all running out to buy Androids and iPhones just so we can feel slightly more connected to the network and thus feel more connected to all of our friends.

That's what I want to talk about. But I have completely lost sight of how I'm supposed to approach it.

Generator.

So I started a new job. I had been working in a large retail store called Homestore + More and I hated it with a passion. I had worked there for four years and I despised every inch of it. I hated the customers, the smell of the shop, the products, everything. I made sure to never do a shift there without using the words "I hate this place". So about two months back I was offered a job somewhere else and I jumped on it. I now work at Generator Hostel. The place is actually really cool and I quite enjoy my job, something I had previously believed to be an impossibility. It's build in an old building in the middle of Dublin but the interior design is really modern and colorful. Anyways, I thought I'd try my hand at some interior photography before the place opened up. This is the first time my subject has been a building rather than a person, event etc. so I really don't know if this is how I was supposed to shoot it but I kinda dig the photos anyway. Enjoy. 

Also, be nice to people who work in retail. They are in now way inferior to you. They have to put up with a lot of shit because you can NEVER be too good at your job when you're selling things to people.  You never know when you might have to depend on the good nature of people. 

Showreel.

I figure I better get this bad boy up now before it's outdated. Some of the work goes back about four years or so and some of it is as recent as May. So . . . yeah.

Faces.

I'm trying me best to carry my camera with me when I'm out, but it's not an easy task. Any DSLR is hefty and when you're heading out for a walk around town or something you don't want that hanging off you the whole time. I guess I just need to get back into the habit of carrying a backpack with me everywhere like when I was sixteen. Anyways. I find that when I do have it on me that I'm shooting faces most of the time. This is not as easy as you may think. People don't act naturally when they have a camera looking at them. You don't, I don't, nobody does. So generally I have to spend loads of time aiming the camera around and shooting everything until people start acting naturally. This means that I have to wade through loads of photos I don't particularly care for until I find that one that actually looks like someone. Here's some of those.