Cute or just weird

I love finding places like this. I'm the Loyd Grossman of abandoned buildings. Sort of. 

On a trip to the south of Spain last week, ostensibly to help my mate Mark out with a bit of concreting on his finca, I wandered off up the rambla in search of things to photograph and came across what appeared to be a disused quarry hut. Two rooms, a shower that still worked, a few pieces of furniture slowly taking on a covering of pigeon shit, rotting clothing on hooks on the walls, a bag with a flask, a half-empty bottle... in fact everything seemed pretty much as it had been left by the last quarrymen, and it seemed they left in a bit of a hurry.  The calendar on the wall doesn't have a year, but February begins on a Thursday and the paper is still pretty clean, so in all likelihood it's from 2007. But more interesting than the calendar is the soft porn on the walls. There's always something interesting about rotting, faded, blueing porn, but these were all the more fascinating for the odd rubbing marks around the rude bits. Did the quarrymen touch them every morning for good luck on the way out to work? Or when they had showered off the dust, changed and were on the way home? Did the marks show while the building was still in use, or have they only appeared with the passage of time, the sweat of fingers rotting the paper gradually in betrayal of some secret fetish? 

Photoshelter Folio Widget

OK, this is a test - one of the handy things photoshelter provides is this little widget for embedding slideshows into blogs and websites. Great for viral marketing they say. Anyone can click on the little triangle (bottom right) and add it to their blog or site, and that way the word gets around. The cute bit is any click on the slideshow leads straight back to the Photoshelter gallery. 

Well, here goes with a folio gallery....

Mish Mash Muse

The Wessex Muse Magazine published some of my pictures of the Mish-Mash arts group in Corsham, along with an article by Sarah Singleton. I haven't seen the folding version, but it looks like they made a pretty nice job from the layout. 

Folio Site Update

Ok, now I'm on a roll...

My photography folio site is now updated with lots of new pics and an improved interface. You wouldn't believe how long this stuff takes when you're doing it yourself, but as I'm having a quiet month I thought I'd better get it done. The site's put together in flash with a custom slideshow thing which hopefully improves the experience by pre-loading the next slide while you're still viewing the previous one. At least that's the theory. I'm no expert with coding flash, but it seems to work. I would love to be able to point the slideshows at a database and have them pick the photos and captions automatically from the metadata, but that sort of cleverness is beyond me. 

Anyway, here's a screen shot....

www.martinphelps.com/folio

New Website

Well, not exactly a new website, more a re-organisation of existing websites to bring them under one umbrella site. It'd all got a bit spread out and disjointed, what with my folio site (www.martinphelps.com), a nascent wedding photography site, portraitfolio.co.uk which was my old domain for selling drawn and painted portraits before I took up the camera but which might as well be put to use as a vehicle for portrait photography, this blog and the recently added photoshelter archive, not to mention a couple of thousand pictures on flickr and 1,600 or so on Alamy. 

A bit of rationalisation was called for, so I hope this looks like a rational front end for the whole thing....

www.martinphelps.com