I’ve taken photos of Duncan a few times before and wanted to try something different this time. My original plan was originally to get a good action shot of Duncan Doing Science, but there was a disappointing lack of Blinky Lights or Foaming Green Stuff In Beakers available. Dunc demonstrated the water channel that they use for simulating the flow of air over a plane wing and gave me a tour of other Science Machines – some of the more interesting shots I took can be found in this Flickr set.

As with my previous C is for Can shot, this is one that was a natural shot that I then staged to try and get a better version. Both times the first shot has been the better of the 2.

8:55:15 PM: Fed and watered and filled in my sweepstake predictions. Show starts in 4…

9:01:28 PM: That’d be a slightly awkward lily allen kicking off the show then.

9:03:53 PM: Excellent. Peter Kaye’s mic isn’t working

9:05:35 PM: Was that intentional? It wasn’t clear if it was a gag…

9:06:20 PM: Rememberable? Law bless ya, Sam fox.

9:10:16 PM: So I’m 1 from 2. Spice girls get best performance (wrong), dizzee gets best UK male (right)

9:23:05 PM: 2 from 3. J-zed gets international male

9:28:01 PM: Boo. 2 from 4. I went for the verve for best radio 2 listeners’ album. It was, inevitably, oasis. I am being outdone by a girl.

9:29:34 PM: I hate kasabian

9:32:23 PM: Apparently i’ll get it when I’m forty

9:40:23 PM: Bugger. 2 from 5. JLS get best breakthrough, which seems generous.

9:41:26 PM: So Courtney love has had a bit of work done then.

9:46:38 PM: Oh, that’s ok. For a minute I thought lady gags might not show us her upper thighs

9:53:57 PM: I quite liked the gaga performance. Was a bit odd though

9:54:58 PM: Motherfucking stringer bell.

9:56:13 PM: I hate kasabian. 2 from 6

10:01:24 PM: So I had gags down for best intl female, not breakthrough. Am a loser.

10:07:44 PM: I can’t sum it up better than Peter Kaye’s “annual experimental duet”. Not a mash up so much as two people performing different songs.

10:13:46 PM: FInally! Gaga gets best int female

10:15:49 PM: Crap. Lily allen gets best britsh female and I again pull behind the pack. Shut up.

10:28:28 PM: J-zed just kicked all the performing asses.

10:31:23 PM: One up, finally. Gaga gets best intl album.

10:38:30 PM: Cheryl Cole is. Not a Pop star. She is an Awkward Solo Project. Unfortunately jls win best single.

10:43:50 PM: I’m now past knowing whether I’m up or not. Florence wins the album award, I need to find more red wine.

10:46:51 PM: Fearne: anything to say? Jls chap: no, nothing. Fearne: he literally cannot speak.

10:55:29 PM: So Robbie seems to be going down the medley route. But he’s taking it to town.

11:02:16 PM: And it keeps going. Hit after hit after occasional non-hit. Cheesy, but he’s idio enough to pull it off.

11:02:31 PM: hehe. Pull it off.

9:38:12 AM: Eeurgh. My head hurts. I have vague memories of armwrestling Ellie from HR in the hotel bar. That can’t be good.

I was determined to get my C picture at the Bombastadors gig on Friday night (I have a couple of ideas for later letters which are reliant on me being in a certain place at a certain time, so i need to keep the pace up), so was snapping away at anything that fit the bill and ended up with two that I’m really pleased with. Again, both of these are taken with my recently-acquired 50mm 1.4 lens and I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it.

C is for Can was taken reasonably early in the night, as Ben and I kicked into celebrating mode. I took one which was candid and one which was posed, but I couldn’t actually tell you which one this is.

C is for Cherry’s Feet was taken post-gig, as everyone was milling around and packing up, so the house lights were up and there were big shadows, which lent this a nice contrast I thought.

Lessons learnt from this shoot :
When dealing with a group rather than one person, have a number of ideas ready to go and know how to execute them (the ideas, not the group).
Don’t be afraid to tell people where you need them.
Pay attention to backgrounds as much as the subject(s)

Thanks to Duncan, Dave, Rob, Tim and Dan.

I’ve been wanting to do something with high-contrast backgrounds for a little while and the snow we’ve had recently gave me the perfect backdrop for it. Aly came prepared dressed in blacks and whites and wasn’t worried about getting cold or damp as long as she could keep her gloves on! My new f1.4 lens made it really easy for me to blow the background of the shot out and get the hat to bleed into it.

I’m really excited by this as the start of my 2010 project. Thanks to Aly for being such a trooper in the freezing cold. The Flickr pool for this project can be found here.

I cut it pretty close to the wire, in the end – I had to get my Z on New Years Eve. Fortunately, Porthcawl had a number of zebra crossings right on the seafront, so I amused / irritated our hosts Rich & Georgie by stopping at each one of them to take a picture. Then the sun came out so I had to stop at each of them again on the way back to take advantage of that. But job done and project successfully completed with only hours to spare!

This was like Fate intervening in my A-Z project. We left the house to go to Porthcawl with zebra crossings on my mind, and then spotted this sign on the way there. It seemed so unlikely that we would see such a perfectly-named road on the final day of the project that I had to get Rich to stop on the way home to get a photo. I think they thought I was a bit mental.

God, I love my new lens! I’m not sure if it’s the super-shallow DOF or the sharpness of the focus on it, but it’s lovely. I will be using it a lot next year, I think.

I was fretting about not being able to think of a Y to take a picture of and was running out of year, when I realised that the only plant I’ve managed to successfully not kill for any significant length of time starts with the right letter. It’s survived 8 years of being mistreated, inexpertly repotted, chopped in half, chopped in quarters and is still fighting fit – it’s even recently started sprouting new bits. It’s like Jason Voorhees or Swamp Thing or something.

Only one letter left, and only 2 days to take it!

A bauble on my Mum’s Christmas tree, taken with my present – a 50mm f1.4 prime lens. Have been playing with depth of field all day! Happy Christmas!

Nearly there, only three more to go!

I was most disappointed when my camera battery turned out to be flat when I got caught in a brilliant snowstorm in London at the weekend, so this shot of fresh frost and low winter morning sun on a safety barrier on my walk to work will have to do the job.

I’m starting to plan my 2010 A-Z; same deal, only all the shots have to have people in. Leave a comment if you ant to be one of the letters.

Album of a year by a country mile for me is:
Travels With Myself And Another / Future Of The Left Only half an hour long, but what a grating, loud, exhilarating, offensive, unapologetic half hour it is.

And the rest, in no particular order:

• Farm / Dinosaur Jr As good a record as they’ve recorded, for my money. It starts with a bang and a huge guitar solo and just never lets up.
• The Slew / Kid Kola & Dynomite D The album of the tour of the soundtrack of the aborted documentary, available to download for free at Kid Koala’s site. Massive, massive drums and bonkers scratching.
• Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion / Fight Like Apes McLusky-covering Irish synthpunks. Amazing live, and a debut album awash with nerd-culture references. UPDATE: There’s a live album available to download for free at their website.
• A Balloon Called Moaning / The Joy Formidable Initially, I thought of The Joy Formidable as a kind of less silly Fight Like Apes, but I lost this lazy preconception after seeing them live, where the synths take a back seat to a surprisingly loud shoegazey guitar assault. Their Christmas single is available for free from Music Glue and I also highly recommend their live album ‘First You Have To Get Mad’.
• Fantasies / Metric I seem to have had something of a year for synthey girl-vox albums, and this one completes the set of three quite nicely. Metric’s 4th album sounds like it’s designed to fill stadiums – I wrote earlier in the year that you can hear where the strobe lights and lasers should kick in.
• Born Like This / DOOM First new material from the supervillain since 2005’s collaboration with Dangermouse. He’s on fine form, and I still can’t get over the fact he finishes a rhyme with electroencephalograph.
• A Woman A Man Walked By / PJ Harvey & John Parish Unsettling performances from Polly Harvey make this a record that’s actually quite scary to listen to in places.
• Two Suns / Bat For Lashes This feels like Natasha Khan has started to find her own voice – it’s a lot less Kate Bush / Bjork than ‘Fur & Gold’.
• Moon OST / Clint Mansell Absolutely gorgeous vinyl packaging aside (and it is a thing of beauty), former Poppie and Darren Aronofsky’s go-to soundtrack guy Mansell has produced a soundtrack that’s as compellingly beautiful and intriguing as the film it accompanies. I’m not generally a big soundtrack fan, but this has been one of my most-listened-to records this year.

Honourable mentions:
Poetry Of The Deed / Frank Turner
Man From Another Time / Seasick Steve
Broken / Soulsavers

Recently acquired albums that may have made it onto the list if I’d become a bit more familiar with them:
Glass Rock / Tall Firs Meet Soft Location
Sainthood / Tegan & Sara
Embryonic / The Flaming Lips

And you?