We Feel Fine

Day 54: Close to hand and heart, originally uploaded by Fanboy30.

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)."

I have been lucky to be featured on the website with my 365 image about my Mum, where I used the sentence " I feel I have lost one of my best friends, a super mum that touched everyone she met. ".
Over the past couple of years a book has been in development and I was lucky enough to be asked to be included.

The book is titled We Feel Fine: an Almanac of Human Emotion and is scheduled for a December release. It will be published by Scriber and a launch party will be held in New York. The authors have been very good at keeping me informed and promising me free copies and invites to the party (although its unlikely I will attend due to work).

It's always a boost to the ego when your work is recognized and this particular image means a lot to me so I gladly share it with the world.

Check out their website for more details

The Carleton

The Bar, originally uploaded by Fanboy30.

Recently I was contacted by a graphics company called Concrete Orange which I had spoken to around the time I moved to Canada last October. They were currently redoing a website for a local bar/restaurant called The Carleton and needed some interior shots. I gladly took the project even though my style of photography is usually about detail rather than the wide open spaces.

I took two cameras with me, armed with a wide angle, 50mm and zoom lens because you never really know what you will be faced with when entering a shoot blind. I met with the owner Mike whose background is in the music industry and on MTV. He welcomed me warmly and was very excited after seeing my website.

The main areas to shoot were the bar, restaurant and function room so I set up my tripod and composed some test shots using the wide angle. The place is an L shape so it was hard to get the whole space in a single shot so I suggested that if needed I could composite two shots later on Photoshop.

It's very hard to give a still room life, so we added some candles to the bar area to create some ambiance. This was repeated in the function room because the only room that was fully lit was the restaurant.

After two hours and three hundred shots I decided to call it a day. I managed to send Mike eight shots fully processed which he was extremely happy with and asked for a disc of the rest.

The image you see on this post was used for an advert in an in-flight magazine so maybe I will get to see it when I fly home in October for a holiday?

Update: Did another shoot for them this week, this time at night to capture the place busy.