"Film" at Tate Modern

I went to a private view of Tacita Dean's piece in the Turbine Hall on 22nd February with my friend, the novelist Emma Darwin, and I see she's just posted a piece about it on The History Girls Blog.

This is so much more eloquent and poetic than I could manage that I'm just going to tell you to go and read it. Not only because it's about how older technologies are being superseded by the new (and in publishing, that's just as true with eBooks supplanting paper and physical media), but because she uses it as a jumping-off point for a much broader perspective.

She recognises our place in a continuum where no matter what the current technology is, we as its users and creators gather to talk about and guide its future in the same way that the clergy and stonemasons in a cathedral would have gathered to discuss the continuing construction of their building in the fourteenth century. Their object would have been to make the best possible version of a building that they could, and a group of cinematographers and artists talking about film and its future are concerned in the end with making the best possible image they can, no matter what's behind the lens being used to capture it.

The event was called "A Celebration of Film" and we were guests of ARRI Media, Kodak, Fuji, the BSC, Panavision and various other industry bodies, our thanks to them for an unexpectedly enlightening evening.

Hay, February 2012

The Brecon Beacons from below Twmpa yesterday

A Walk on the Dorset Coast

Something I do fairly regularly, yesterday we walked from Worth to Durlston Castle and back. Unusually the breeze was from the North so we were very sheltered in the lee of the coastal ridge, and the sea was as calm as I've ever seen it at this time of year. The picture looks West a couple of hours before sunset, the colour in the sky and the light were more like a late summer evening. We started the day in down jackets and woolly hats, but it warmed up enough for a couple of layers to be adequate protection. A good day...

Moving to Squarespace

Since the blog at Blogger and the website as a whole weren't getting much attention from me (or anyone else) I thought I'd go to a managed site where I can make updating it as friction-free as possible. Previously, Time Into Light dot com was hosted at Zen, which was fine, but since I'd hard-coded the entire site myself, adding new material seemed like one more thing to have to do. Not to mention I'd learned exactly the right amount of CSS to make everything just a little bit harder than it should have been, and was coming back to it so infrequently that I was essentially having to teach myself all over again each time.

I helped a friend design a site for her Sound & Energy Healing Workshops and used Squarespace after hearing it repeatedly puffed on various Tech podcasts, she was so grateful for the ease of use, after a strong initial reluctance to manage her own website, that I realised I might as well give it a try.

So with the gap in work around Christmas I am dragging some things over from the old site and adding some new stuff, and actually enjoying the process. As I write this, I haven't gone live but I'm hoping the transition will be seamless.

Flickr Albums

The most recent album I've put on Flickr, from my trip to Scotland in December.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24291842@N04/sets/72157623073282195/ will get you to the previous trip's album.

(Posting partly to stop my blog being considered a 'dinosaur' in my newsreader...)