An evening in the Fire Garden

This set of pictures were taken at the Jardin Flambeau (Fire Garden) in St Ann's Well Gardens, Hove, as part of the 2011 Brighton Festival. It was an enchanting event, with all sorts of breathtaking fire installations and sculptures, plus an array of musical performances in near darkness - low-lit by the glow of the surrounding fires. Organised by French company Cie Carabosse, I'd never seen the likes of it before and was thrilled to have been witness to it.

Heroes Run, Brighton 2011

The above set is a gallery of pictures shot today at the Brighton Heroes Run on Hove seafront. The event has been going since 2005 and is organised by the charity Passing It On, in aid of schools in Africa. 

It was good to see so many people getting into the spirit of things, and there were some fabulous costumes on display. Obviously, there were plenty of Supermen, Batmen and Spidermen. Dig a little deeper and you'll find people dressed as characters from more obscure cartoon series. Even the Flintstones mobile made an appearance!

Moments stolen from last year

Kicking off this year is a gallery of a few moments stolen from last year. Contained in the above slideshow are a selection of Brighton pictures that never made it online last year, including of the Children's Parade that kicks off the festival, the Brighton Beach Boys from their concert at St. George's Church in Kemptown, snaps from Hove Champagne Festival and a few obligatory ones of the beach.

Over on my Flickr site, there's a few new pics of Tokyo too, coming before a stack more that should be due soon.

Dear readers, the stats tell me there's quite a lot of you out there, and from all over the place too. Do drop by and say hello from time to time - I'd love to hear from you!

Happy 2011...

Winter in Brighton and Hove

A good thing about the end of the year is getting to clear out all the stuff you've been meaning to do for much of the rest of it. It's rare to satisfactorily finish everything, but good to at least make some moves towards it. Having gotten a little more into making short films recently, there's a couple of them that have been in the pipeline this month that I wanted to get out before December is up.

The first one can be seen above and is a record of this year's 'Burning The Clocks' parade. The event is an annual one which brings a bit of carnival joy to a chilly seaside town, and offers an alternative to the shopping binge excesses of the commercial Christmas. Kids and adults parade through Brighton with lanterns made from willow and paper, and set fire to them on the beach at the end of the parade.

It was cancelled last year due to icy conditions making the streets too dangerous to parade over, thus T (wife) and I didn't get to make it. This year, however, the ice had melted enough (having come surprisingly early anyway) to make it possible. I'd been to one of them before - 2005, I think - but down in the thick of it on the street you don't get much of an overview. This year was all good - a great view on Marine Drive and getting to see the whole thing, including the fireworks show at the end.

It might be a modern tradition rather than a deeply rooted one, but one worth taking part in all the same.

The other surprise about this month was the amount of snow the country was hit by over December, both at the beginning of the month and prior to Christmas. Brighton doesn't usually get a great deal due to its location and the sea salt in the air, but this time it did. Having recently acquired an iPhone 4, it seemed a good opportunity to test out the video camera on it. I wasn't disappointed.

The short film shown above is named after the hashtag that has been used to create a user-generated live map of where it is snowing around the country - a fine example of the innovation that the Web enables. The map was created by programmer Ben Marsh in 2009 and it collates tweets that contain up to three items of metadata: the hashtag '#uksnow', the first part of a postcode (Hove's being BN3) and a rating for the degree to which it is snowing in that area (1/10 for very slightly, 10/10 for very heavily).

Of course, the thing about videos like this is that it is best to get them online as soon as the event has happened. That's not always possible though, so I've at least managed to get them up in the same month.

And now, as the end of the year draws in, I'll allow a slight wry smirk in having posted to this blog more often in this year than in any other. It's finally growing, if ever so incrementally. I've been asked to post for a blog at work too, so it's hopefully going to be a far more productive year here.

Happy New Year, wherever you are.

Snow in Brighton (and free photos)

Although I lived in Brighton for about 11 years prior to moving to Tokyo, I never really saw much snow in this town. This weekend, that all changed. Brighton is one the parts of the UK that experienced much higher than usual snowfall and it makes for a beautiful cityscape. You can follow live reports of other snowfall around the UK by following the Twitter hashtag #uksnow.

Yesterday, I went down to the beach with my camera and found that it too was covered in snow. To my delight (and to be expected for an arty place like this), the seafront was full of sculptures - snowmen, snowwomen and even a large snowcat. The above photo set shows some of what Brighton looks like in the snow.

All of the pictures are issued under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0). This means that people are free to share (copy, distribute or transmit) or remix (adapt) the pictures, so long as they meet the following conditions:

• Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

• Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

• Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

For attributing photos, please use 'Globalism Pictures' and link back to the following URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/globalismpictures/

I also took the plunge this week with the rest of my photos on Flickr and issued that same license for all of them. There are plenty more Brighton pictures, extensive collections of images from Japan, plus sets from several other cities and locations around the world.

Feel free to use them in blogs, flyers and posters, websites, presentations or other similar ventures, and please get in touch if you'd like to use a picture for commercial purposes (I'm happy to do that too, just would prefer to be asked before an image is used!).

Here are some of examples of what can be found:

Kyoto Protocols


The West Pier

B & W Tokyo: city views

Iguazu Falls


Kathmandu & Nepal


Saadani (Tanzania)


Barcelona


Korea

Creative Commons License disclaimer:

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New video: The Zamora - 'Harry J (Gunslinger)'

I get so easily distracted these days. There I was reading 'Wikinomics' whilst taking a break from working on a new website, when I came across the BBC's project for opening up its archive to mashups. Excited by the possibility, I put the book down and went to the Net to find out about it, only to discover that it had been a pilot project which doesn't seem to have been touched since 2006. A shame really, but it did lead me on to the BFI's site, where you can also make use of their archives.

A fair treasure trove I did find. Some dusty old reels from the silent era - a few of which were actually made in Hove! Anyway, grabbed myself a few and set to work on my own mash up.

Now, I've got material in mind for video projects for Control K and Shelf Life, so I was going to have to pull out something else that I actually had use of. Turned out that one of the tracks that was written by The Zamora, my old band from Brighton that gave me an early taste of life under media exposure (for all of a week or two), fitted perfectly.

'Harry J (Gunslinger)' was, in a few opinions, the best song that we did together. It was also the track that was most collaborative and so much more of a group effort than some musicians playing along to someone else's song.

I managed to knock the video together in a couple of evenings before Christmas. Better get back on with the website now...