More Fun with Granite

Despite getting cold, dirty and covered in crud, I have been enjoying this job for Lafarge aggregates.

Green Day

 

Not the band, but ‘wild green africa Day’ . Maggie orgasnised this at out boy’s school – St Anne’s. The kids came to school  in green mufti, bought cakes, had a raffle and all sorts of other exciting things to raise money for the sponsorship at Watu Wa Maana. They loved it, and raised well over £1000 which will keep the 7kids the school support going for nearly a year. That’s such good news. I filmed the day and interviewed some of the kids- it was really very moving.  The simple understanding of the English kids – the Africans need food, we have money, money buys food- therefore, we give our money.

If only more adults kept that simple open attitude to giving and actually just *did* it the difference would be huge. Yesterday the UN published a report stating that many governments, including the UK, had simply failed to do anything that they had promised to in terms of debt relief and aid money after thje G8 last year.

In other words, governments make great statements about how much they will donate or what they will release – and then after the journalists have gone away and the general good vibes generated have fluttered down and blessed the politicians, they simply walk away and cynically fail to act. I always thought that was called lying? The worst offenders are the USA who also give a pathetic amount of aid in relation to their GDP. While many people manage to personally give 10% (although generally not wealthy people who have better things to do with their money – that is a statistical fact I’m afraid – the richer you get the less you give away) most Western governments get hot under the collar when considering upping the giving to 0.5%.

Is it therefore any wonder that some leaders of the developing world have a healthy disrespect for the west? The biggest shame is that those nations who promise much but do little are often perceived as being the ‘Christian’ nations. Not only is the lack of giving hurting those who need it, the hypocrisy is also tarnishing the image of Jesus in the eyes of those who need him most.

Still, back to the original purpose of this post- gren day was fab and you can stream the video we made from here.

If you want to contribute, go to http://www.Grassroots.org.uk.

My Goodness, aren’t Quantity Surveyors attractive these days!?

They never looked as good as this when I was younger. (From a recent shoot at Waterloo.)

The Last of the Scientists

Working for CERN has been very educational on a variety of levels. The idea of the photos was to help dispel the myth of the ‘science nurd’ but in fact I discovered that most of the scientists I met did not resemble the stereotype in any way. (That, of course, implies that some of them do match the stereotype but they could just be a co-incidental statistical glich)

These guys at Imperial are making the data handling equipment hat connects to the other end of the stuff that is being made at RAL in Didcot. They were more like some kind of cool dot-com than cutting edge particle physicists, and the pub lunch confirmed that impression. They even agreed that $4billion is a lot of money to spend on something that the man in the street may never see benefit form, but we concluded that as it helps to keep us all employed it’s probably best to keep quiet and get on with it.

The best thing for me about this whole project is the amount of our world and life itself that science simply has no ideas about. The ‘science disproves God’ thing is widely believed amongst the university types that I find discussing these questions on the internet, yet the guys I spoke to who are at the cutting edge of the quest to understand the fundamental nature of matter and the very reason for the existence of the universe have no qualms in admitting that 1. they know only a fraction 2. that they are not even sure about some of that.

It is our philosophy that discounts God, not the facts. Its so sad that millions are missing out on faith, on their rightful relationship with their creator, because they think ‘the men in white coats’ know best, when in fact they know next to nothing and what they do know often has little to say about God.

Okay- sermon over!

Ipod Wars

These shots taken at the launch party for the spiffing new Samsung Z5 mp3 player, out to beat Apple at their own game. It has a shiny black aluminium body with a touch sensitive control panel. Seemed to go down well with both the journo’s and the busty showgirls (also with shiny black aluminium bodies) brought in to add a bit of glamour to the event at M1NT, a posh bar in Sloane Street that served rather fine asparugus wrapped in palma ham and totally disgusting pomegranite slugs.

With the Quarrymen

Have been out on the road day and night for 4 days working for Lafarge Aggregates. I am still, at 41 years of age, impressed with big lorries and diggers and trains and so this was a dream assignment (if you ignore the -6degrees temperatures and the fact I was shooting some of it at 1am in the morning and all my equipment got covering in crushed granite dust etc etc)

I could write a lot about this. Basically the granite is blown out the the grown at various qaurries around the UK, loaded into trucks and then crushed to make it smaller, then shipped out as rail ballast or mixed with bitumen to make asphalt for roads and so on. Its all very big and noisy and a tough business but everyone I spoke to seemed to love the industry.

A Rainy Night in Wandsworth

My wonderful friends at Samsung called on a Friday night 2 weeks ago and asked if I could get some shots of the roundabout at Wandsworth where they have bought some advertsing space. The shoot had to be done within 2 days, so I went up there in the pouring rain omn a Sunday afternoon with Buffy agreeing to hold the umbrella. It was actually a good shoot and we got something out of very little. The wet roads made them shiny and we used reflections and movement to add some life to the images. So pleased that the cameras coped with the soaking.

Even managed to get a great shot of my brolly toting assistant. (One day I’ll try and get pictures of some of my other kids on line and not just of number 2!)