The path to St Pauls

The path to St Pauls
Originally uploaded by James Cummins

Competition is healthy and can lead to some great things happening. Granted the arms race during world war two wasn't such a great thing, but it did lead to the early advent of the jet engine, canned foods, and computers.
I have always wanted to take better and better photos and by comparing myself to others and striving to be as good as them i (think) i improve every time i take a photo.
My friend James is one such person that i aim to be as good as. He hasn't been doing photograhy for long, i think he's only had his DSLR for about half a year, but has always exhibited a keen eye for composition.

This is one of his photos from his Flickr account, and i hope you can see why i think he's so good.
check out his other photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/24483638@N08/ (especially if you're into steam trains)

Photo catch up!

The last month was pretty hectic, doing photography at Guilfest, attending a wedding in bath, and a holiday in north Wales!

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Guilfest 2009

Its a scientific fact that nuns love rock music...


Guitarist, Trumpeter and Vocalist from District Six


Lead Wailer from According To Her

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Presenting Jon and Abi Fant!

Me and gilbert went to Combe Down near bath for the wedding of two friends, in a nice chapel, and Abi's father conducted the service!
It was a great day, and even a few moments of mild panic from both gilbert and I including the dilemas:

1. Will we get it set up on time?
2. The par cans are on Shucos and we need them on IECs! and who could forget
3. We've got half an hour to drive from the reception to the church that is miles away down little roads, pack everything up and get back to the reception before it finishes!

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Later in the month myself and my family went to Bala Lake (Llyn Tegid) in Gwynedd for a weeks camping and sailing and relaxing. The lake is a mile wide at its widest point, and 4 miles long. Legend has it that a beast called Tessie lives beneath its murky depths...
The photo below was steph's idea, she found a little stone and started writing on it. When she found out what the welsh for wales was she just HAD to add it for a bit of authenticity.

After all that excitement, i'm just pottering around ponty doing some photo stuff, some audio stuff, and admiring the view from my window.

Strange sights i've seen

Its handy having a phone with a camera, otherwise I wouldn't be able to share some of these with the world!

Sweet summer rain

It's been a bit warm in Caerdydd the last few days. The nice weather made setting up for the ball enjoyable, but somehow the easier task of taking it down seemed harder with the heat!
I burnt in all the obvious places, I now look like a clay bust that got dropped on its own sculptors head!

I've been mixing tracks for Cardiff LMS for their freshers CD the last few days, im up to about 8 tracks, some of which are the genuine thing, the real deal, a finely polished turd. On the other hand, some of them were really nice to mix and the songs were good!

Worry is starting to set in about getting enough work to keep me in wales. I've got sporadic union shifts, and im hoping to get some photography stuff from back home, but everything starts to go a bit quiet halfway through july. God's led me through difficult times before, even when i didn't know i was being guided, so I have faith that I'll come out fine.

Let's go see a movie

Today I got given a DVD of a film I engineered sound on a while back. It was a single day shoot involving over a dozen cast members all playing on character, one after the other.

The film "Delusions" was one of two films I did sound for that got sent off to the Cannes film festival, the other being a film called "Displacement", which was a final year film project for some film students.






















The shoot went really well, with a rigorous schedule kept to so that the younger cast members could go home at a reasonable hour, and with a good level of professionalism from the cast and crew.

Upon watching the DVD though, I despaired again at the ability of film-makers to discern quality from crap.

The sound wasn't uniform; they chose to use the sound from whichever shot was on screen, which meant on-board microphones for the other two cameras (the wide shot didn't have a microphone so that wasn't an issue.) So in one shot the sound was tinny, then another it was full and louder. There is one part where the shot changes halfway through a word and the second half is lost.
I'm not saying the sound recorded was amazing but all cameras were running at the same time so my boom audio could have been used for every shot.

Other issues included bad focus, panning, tracking, framing and some editing where it repeated a frame in the new shot.

I think i'll stick to non-video recording in the future.

The upside is that apparently BOTH films spelt my name wrong in the credits for cannes, so people won't know I worked on them if they say the sound is bad.

You learn something new everyday

During a quiet period at the forum the other day, Gilbert was playing with my camera and asked "what happens if you take take a photo with the lens off?"

This is the answer:

The forum's stage with no lens.

Now for the science bit:

The camera lens works just like the lens on our eyes, including inverting the image once it has been focused. The Photo sensor in the camera collects the parts of the image together and compiles it into a single image.

Here endeth the lesson, class dismissed!

Third Day @ The Forum, Kentish Town

Nearly every time i write something it seems to be about something i've done with Ignite, but my life isn't that interesting otherwise!

Ignite put on a gig in The Forum in Kentish Town in London, Third Day were headlining with The Sonflowerz supporting.



I had my whole morning routine planned down to what socks i was going to put on, but for some reason, which will remain a mystery to even the greatest scientiic minds, i didn't set an alarm on my phone!

Therefore, at half 7, when i was meant to be meeting Dianne at the grape and olive so she could take me to Taffs Well, I got a phone call from tim asking where i was. my reply was "not quite left yet" which actually meant "I've just opened my eyes and now frantically rummaging around for some clothes to put on!"




As I'm part of the infamous techie crew, Gary decided that I should be in charge of the bus's sat nav, so I was sat in the front of the City temple LDV minibus with Anita and Doive! Did you know Anita can drive artics?

The load in and soundcheck were uneventful for everyone apart from gilbert, who had to fight with third day crew for mixer channels and soundchecking time.

Doors opened on time and thousands of people poured into the venue, it was quite a sight from the balcony!


The Sonflowerz played six songs, with Abi Williams drumming, and the bassist alternating between bass and keyboards.

I noticed something strange with both the Sonflowerz and Third Day bass arrangement, which got the signal direct from the bass and bypassed the amps completly!

This seemed a bit strange since third day had a really nice Ampeg valve bass head with two 8x10 cabs, and the sonflowerz had my Trace stack, which had to be taken all the way across the country just to look nice!


















We arrived back in ponty at about 4 in the morning, apparently I was the only one who managed to sleep the whole night!


Here's a question, would you rather sneeze marbles or fart confetti?

Thanks to Meg for that one.

Logos hope and other boats

Yes indeed, the OM ship Logos Hope is in cardiff bay and I, along with a motley crew from ignite, went to visit and put on an event.
I didn't take on a technical role this time, i took photographs instead. Though will was pretty impressed by the versatility of the techies. "i'll just take a photo, then re-wire a microphone, then hop on guitar for a bit"
unfortunately because nearly everything was set up and it was a small venue, the techie run hardly made an appearance.

BEFORE

AFTER

oh, and the bit about the other boats was just loosely referring to gilbert's shiny van he gets to drive to london tomorrow, its a cosy ride in the passenger seat, but they've got everything they need for a pleasant journey.

Hopefully get some photos up soon of third day in concert as well soon!

And where have YOU been?!

I've been putting off updating this blog for the last few weeks because, even though i've finished uni (completely) now i've still had loads of things on. Apart from ignite Hope Local, there has been a string of get-togethers with people who are leaving dear old wales for the real world, and a few worship evenings.

Ignite Hope Local was different from last years in that the local churches took the initiative to help with local projects and needs instead of being directly co-ordinated by ignite. As part of one of the film crews (soundie!) i was able to see a lot of the work going on around the cardiff area, ranging from painting school railings to playing parachute games and football in roath park.

Car Washing in Thornhill


Litter Picking in Penarth


Gardening in Llanishen


And on the monday to round off the weekend, everyone crammed into Cardiff SU for an evening of worship, talks, and magic tricks!

Myself and another brave soul volunteered to edit together the footage from the weekend in the 3 hours leading up to the event, pure video madness is there ever was need for an example of it!
Originally we were supposed to create a DVD, with an advert from Third Day in front of the feature. The third day footage didn't work, but was going to be played from a separate source without anyone telling us! The video was completed with half an hour to spare, which gave me time to take some snaps of the night.

The storm has passed

It was amazing going into uni today and seeing the faces and moods of everyone who only yesterday were in a mix of panic and sleep deprivation. Everyone was chirpy, cheery and wanting to get the rest of the deadlines out of the way so they could get their lives back to normal!

1/3 of this years marks will be derived from a joing honours group project, whereby Music Tech, Sound Tech and Media Tech all band together in one big techy mass and work in groups to create a product or business.
my group has created a Web-based project that attempts to join together people from all walks of life in the Cardiff music scene. It is this project that we are to present to a panel of 4 lecturers and a few dozen of our classmates on tuesday.

I'm not very optimistic about our groups presentation as the meeting today wasn't as productive as we would have hoped and because of various commitments acorss the group, we aren't able to meet up again until the morning of the presentation (the presentatation is in the morning).
The next few days will be a test of communication and co-operation as each member prepares his or her part, practises it and compiles it inot one stramlined presentation that flows as if i were actaully written as a group effort! Wish me luck.

On a different note, the reason i'm busy all the next few days is because of an event called IgniteHope. I mentioned Ignite in a earlier post, Ignite like to take on projects and events to promote the good works of christians in their community. One way of showing this is to take the Hope '08 initiative and keep it going every year.
The Hope '08 initiative involved christians going out into their communitys and doing various activities including painting fences, running youth clubs, gardening, building, washing and cleaning and cooking; all for people in their community who need help or just want something done. The groups aren't paid to do this, on the contrary the delegates PAY for the privilege of painting a fence or a scout hut for three days.

As part of the IgniteHope event I'll be going round some of the sites in south wales where the projects are taking place and filming them as part of a camera crew. The projects run from Saturday to Monday, culminating in an evening celebration at Cardiff SU.

Hopefully I'll have some photos or footage of the weekend up soon, but for now here's something from a site I came across earlier which may become a favourite of mine!