It’s only Adam Fucking Wintle. Never heard of him? Me either.

Drunken portraits!

You can get vegetarian sushi, which is pretty awesome. I never had sushi before; the idea of raw fish didn’t appeal. The idea of raw vegetables and sticky rice definitely does, though.

Lovely, quiet sit in the (now-funded!) St. James’ Park before walking to work with Charlotte.

I know tilt-shift is going the way of HDR, but I’m always fashionably late to the game.

We love Birmingham. I would walk round there all day if I was on my own. I always feel like a pain in the ass to the people I’m with when I have my camera on me. Stop. Walk. Stop. Walk. Stop. Walk. Go this way. Shit, we’ve walked 5 miles.

These are all best-viewed as large as possible – they look a bit wrong small.

I’m misplaced. That woman has no trousers on. That guy spent too long doing his hair. The music I like is too loud. I spat in someone’s ear trying to tell them I couldn’t hear them. £7 for whiskey?! I don’t pee in gutters. Don’t put that picture on Facebook. Charlotte’s probably in bed by now. I can’t be bothered to walk home, but I’m not paying for a taxi.

Just a few of the criticisms.

Event photographers are like parasites. They get in your peripheral vision with their flashes and their barging and have a habit of inflicting a bit of annoyance on at least one attendee of any event they’re at. Gig photography, you can get away with to a certain extent; there are generally lights and noise and more than one bargy individual so you can blend a bit.

Tonight, however, I am a hypocrite. I wanted to play with my new flash stuff, so I threw self respect to the wind and took my camera. As a side note, it’s just my luck (and maybe an omen) that my camera battery began to die when I took it out of my bag! Nonetheless, it reaffirmed my suspicion that you can’t take artistically viable photos of someone talking in a room where there are flipboards on the walls! My shyness resulting from disdain at flashing cameras at events like this have not helped at all, but for what they are they’re ok. With that in mind, here are some blokes talking about some stuff, maybe even pointing at a screen. Enjoy.

Dan Griffey, the organiser of OpenWeb

Kev Wilson, talking about the iPhone app development cycle. Turns out it’s pretty similar to any development cycle, but with the added loveliness of the App Store.

Jof Arnold telling people not to write iPhone apps for profit unless you’ve got an ass-load of money to plough into it, you’re doing it for a client who has an ass-load of money to plough into it, or you’re doing it for anyone who’s prepared to make no money from it!

Paul Boag, pointing out the obvious. With crazy eyes.

If you’re wondering how I feel about my latest purchase, my SC-29 off-camera-flash-enabler, it looks a little like this:

If you’re wondering how Charlotte feels about it (and, indeed any other photography-related purchase I make), it looks something like this:

CLS is awesome, and and off-camera master gives you so much more freedom to experiment with shadows than using the built-in pop-up as the master. I am very pleased, and will be overusing this greatly in the near future. See more from this evening’s photoshoot at flickr.

Jake and Lynn came round. Lynn is camera-shy; Jake doesn’t have a choice.

It’s fun to purposefully mislead people; luckily, conversation is a great vessel for this.

As well as xkcd’s awesome example, I like to say “speaking of [something]” as a precursor to a topic, when said topic has never even so much as been alluded to. It’s best to do with confrontational people—you then get to try and convince them that you had definitely mentioned it and they probably weren’t listening.

Sometimes boredom is a dangerous thing.