I finally got my finger out, replaced a broken thermometer and developed a few black and white films that had been sitting gathering dust for a while. (Absolutely nothing to do with putting off writing my disseration, for the record.)
Turns out that one of the films was from when I went down to Birmingham for a few days back in January last year (2011), which I had initially thought had been lost and confined to history, and then later totally forgotten about.
This is Biduu and Ian, who I Couchsurfed with for the first night, and who took us to a crazy party at the top of some fancy hotel the next day.
Personally, I thought that this was an example of marketing at its finest.
This is my good pal Toby, who I met whilst on tour with the band Hold Your Horse Is for the first time. (whenever that was…). Bizarrely, he emailed me out of the blue just as I was scanning in these pictures. Maybe it was karmic energy, or something.
Either way, he is one of the coolest dudes around, and let me sit up ridiculously late in his flat before helping me find the Megabus stop. The journey back home was horrific, but he can’t take the blame for that.
Here’s Biduu having a swatch at the old Canon 7 with the 50mm f0.95 lens that I had for a while.
It truly was a thing of beauty, I often wonder whether or not I did the right thing in flogging it, and then I remember that it paid for my trip to Colorado back in September and all doubts go out my mind. I’d give up a camera for time spent with amazing people any day. What’s the point in being able to document moments in your life if you never have any?
We had beans on toast this night, as it’s all the money we had left in the world. Toby later revealed that that’s all he’d been eating for weeks.
This is Ben. He is definitely one of a kind. His life was a myriad of insane contradictions that you couldn’t make sound believable even in a fictional novel. He is ridiculously camp, was on some obscure TV programme about knitting, couldn’t cook, and turned up to that party we went to wearing a devil mask.
You can’t help but love him.
Hannah. The reason I went to Birmingham, and one of my oldest and dearest friends. This picture doesn’t really do her justice, but since it’s the only one, it has to be included.
For those of you that are interested in that sort of thing, these were shot on (what I think was) a Leica iiia with a Jupiter-3 f1.5 lens. Oh, and some pretty badly expired Fuji Neopan 1600.
Every so often Toby gets these moments of insanity that interrupt his usual calm demeanour, and a sort of crazed look takes over. I love this shot, as it sums those times up pretty well.
