00352 Collaboration on the sand

So six of us turned up to try out the idea of doing some rake art at Vazon.

Lovely day, lots of rakes. Not a bad result, although it was the abstracts that really worked for me:

Food for thought

00346 Rake patterns for the Gallery

Gen at the Gallery has asked me to look into a collaborative rake pattern event with a view to running team building workshops. Sounds good to me.

So I'm thinking up ideas for us to try out when meet up for the trail. Now, I don't really like the idea of circles, but they're as good a place as any to start:

Meriel had this really cool idea about having a game of snake. If it works out, I'll post up the results.

We'll be able to cover alot of the beach, considering five rakes are better than one and ten are better than five.

00328 Rakey, rakey

Did I say I had a new rake? Poring through catalogues of rakes online was coming a little too close to browsing rake-porn, so I bought a child's rake (portable and surprisingly manly, not) and mum gave me her old gravel rake. Good old mum. Did a bit on the beach, KAPed it up etc.

I wonder how many other people are suffering from "image processing backlog blues". Just me again? Thought so. The bigger, wider versions of this are in the queue (isn't that a weirdly spelt word?).

00285 Staff Picks

So I looked at the list of books picked out by the staff at Blurb and mines on it.

'Course, I don't know if it's any good, seeing as I haven't got mine yet.

But it's on the way.

Tee hee.

00284 Ordered

I put up the book on Blurb and ordered a copy. I'm obviously obsessing too much over this, otherwise I'd have time to do and write about something interesting.

Here's the book's page.

idle hands

Sand and water cre...

By Lenny

Book Preview

00282 Booky booky

It's getting close to the time when I can hit the "order book" button, which is proper nice.
I'm just struggling through the last bits that bother me, like whether the images will print out as I want them to, what colours (if any) to use and what words to put in.
When it's all done, it'll be 160 pages long. That might be too big for most people, but for a cheap hardback photo album, it'll suit me just fine.

00272 Sequence of destruction

Here's the rakeart on it's way to becoming obliterated by the incoming tide. Lucky I had enough images left on the memory card to capture this much:



and here's one of the photographer/flyer:

00271 Taking to the rake once more

Went down to Vazon to kitesurf, but the conditions were too marginal. Lucky for me I always carry a set of rakes in the car. What kind of a person am I turning into? Scary perhaps.





It turned out quite well, especially considering that it was relatively large, backbreaking work and the tide was coming in really fast. I'll have a string of images of the tide coming in soon - it looks quite cool, i'll post it up next. It was a real rush to get it finished, then rig up the kite and then get the camera on it in time.

The video definitely needed to be set on a pole (or higher up at least):

00208 Spikey and the pine cone boat

Spikey & Maxi
Originally uploaded by Lenny & Meriel.

Got down to Petit Port on Sunday and scribbled out a quick one with the new small (children's) rake that I thought might work. I'm getting used to it and maybe if I extended the handle and shortened the spikes, it might be a worthy successor to the old favourite.

I also managed a Pooh Stick Boat at Helen and Richard's place. Three hulls and a pine cone - pity the light wasn't up to much:

00206 Flames

Flames
Originally uploaded by Lenny & Meriel.

At Petit Port again. I'll definately be doing more here - there are loads of high rocks from which to get a good vantage point over the work.

00190 Brake the rake

Slither

I managed to get out on a windless day and tried a reasonable large, fully shaded pattern down at Vazon. Haven't posted up any pics of the whole thing, mainly because it was a bit experimental and I wasn't entirely satisfied with the results - also my rake broke whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

00189 Quick scribble

Cluster thingy abstract

Managed to get something down on the sand at Pembroke yesterday, but it was really quick. Fortunately I'd at least had time to think of something to do. Not a bad experiment, but rushed, too small and could have done with something for scale. Not to mention the fact that it was blowing way too hard for decent KAP.

00184 National Geographic comes calling

Got a mail from National Geographic about the Rake Art, which was nice. this was the correspondence:

NG: "My name is Jenna Pirog and I work for a Photo Editor here
at National Geographic magazine. We found some of your rake pictures on Flickr and find them very intriguing.
Would you mind writing me back at ****** to discuss what size these files are, what kind of camera you use, etc.? We have a page called Visions of Earth that we think some of your photos may work for if they are the right size for production. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, ** Photographic Coordinator National Geographic magazine"

I said: "Ooooooh, what a lovely idea, let's do it." (or words to that effect)

NG:"Hi Lenny,
This is a really wonderful idea and you have very striking photographs and make beautiful designs with the rake, but unfortunately the files just aren't large enough for our publication purposes. We require a digital file that is at least 20MB for our Visions of Earth section.
Good luck to you!
Sincerely, **"

Well, it was nice while it lasted, but really, how am I going to hoist a 12MP camera up there? No wait, I can do it, but how can I afford it? No wait, where can I get a 12 MP camera? What? Online?

Oh, ok.

00183 Tree thingy at Petit Port

Tree thingy

I can handle snatching an hour every now and again to do this sort of thing, but this is the only chance I've had in recent months to get the rake out. It's indicative of the situation that it's been taken from a staircases running up the cliff face and not from a kite.

Still, as long as I've got more ideas than time, it'll always be quality time when I get to the beach. The only thing is that I sort of promised that I wouldn't take the rake & kites to the beach together, because it rules me out of being sociable when I get there.

00177 Rakeart goes BoingBoing

Cara in the middle

Well the rake art shots made it onto BoingBoing. Now, the wierd thing is that I don't know how popular BoingBoing is, but I get the impression that it's quite prolific. I've subscribed to it for a year or so and it was Dave (aka Mobilexile) who Flickrmailed me and pointed it out.
Either way, it's on another blog and it's right here.
Whatever it means, I certainly got a sudden surge of interest in the set.

00172 A magazine comes calling

I got a Flickrmail from Andrea Ferrer about printing some rake art in a new magazine called "Pretty Fcuking Good Magazine", which I guess can't be bad. We'll see how it pans out. What I really need is to do some more stuff. I've got a couple of ideas, but it's a worrying thing that if you plan too much with these things, they never turn out as nice as the thing you planned. It seems that it's usually best to just go out there and do it spontaneously.

00170 Rake art in third blog shocka

The rake art set has appeared in another blog, this time its Lost art. Cool

00168 Rakes

Mmmmmmmmmmm rakes.
Perhaps I need to get out more.

00167 Whispy

Whispy

Got out on Friday to do some rake stuff. QUite like this one, but I'm sure that the larger the image, the more whispy and uninteresting it will become. Also the larger the piece, the more time it takes and that is something I never have enough of to complete these things.
Caroline saw the kite on the beach and came over with the kids, so she and Jack are in the middle of this one.
I got a response from Geoff Manaugh, who runs BldgBlog, a lovely blog dealing in architecture in all it's forms and interpretaions. He's posted up a very flattering entry about the rake art and was good enough to ask permission to publish the images.
He in turn, apparently found the images through another blog by the name of Spy's Spice. Here's the article.

In other news, the shooting started really badly with a 31-1, but after a few words of friendly advice about butt placement (fnarrr), I turned up a 35-4 and a respecatble 33-4. Hope it picks up for the Jersey match next week. Signs are good.

00165 Two things (one of them a thingy)

Wheeee and the compass thingy

Covering two (or perhaps even three) of the obsessions I currently entertain:

1. Rakeart - Grande Roques. I was walking down the beach with a rake, headding for the nice flat featureless sand further down the beach and decided to stop on the way to try out a couple of things. Naturally I didn't get any further and ended up drawing the compass thingy (I've got to find a more suitable name for these ... thingys. See, that also brought the KAP into it. The Maxi Dopero was flying like a dream, so it seemed rude not to capture a few shots from the air. The fact that I roped Meriel and Cara into the shot was just a bonus.
Really pleased with this one, but I think things are going to get better. It's all down to confidence with the rake, and that's going to come from practice.

2. Shooting - Fort le Marchant. Up and down today. 32, 35, 32. So 99 out of a possible 105. I just couldn't seem to get them in, although they were all really, really close. I'll take some advice and improve.