Hoookay, so it's that time of day again ladies and peas, except that this is only the second time of day of this blog so I guess that doesn't really work too well but we'll go with it. I didn't really do a whole lot today except for work on The Tank and go into town with the parents, which was wholly uneventful.

Mr Brightside just came on on iTunes. It's possibly one of my favourite songs of all time, amid cries that it's been overplayed and it's too emo, it just meshes with me. It stirs a part of me that I tried for a long time to forget because it hurt too much. It hurt because it was good times but now they're gone, so I think listening to that song reminds me of the good times more than it does the bad that followed. It's amazing how so much can be wrapped up in a melody and some lyrics. Books are like that too, they dredge up emotions and feelings of times gone by and they show you parts of yourself that you never knew existed. You know when you hit a good book when you get to the end of it and you wish there was just a bit more, and a bit more, and a bit more because you can't bear to be torn away from your fantasy world yet. I'd like to have a library when I'm old. In my house I want a library crammed with amazing books that make me feel.

hazy memories dance in the evening sun, times gone by glorified by our mind's eye. dust floats lazily in shafts of yellow consciousness, the world breathing to the beat of our dying mind. the shadows lengthen in the twilight after the burning sun sinks we look back and realise how we have loved life and how we regret nothing. that is life. looking back and regretting nothing when you have nothing more to give

The people in this picture. I know them. I took the picture. What lies behind those eyes? What are the chances that one of these people will grow up to kill someone? Be rich? Be homeless? They all look so happy but for how many of them is that a facade? Will any of them commit suicide or live generally eternally unhappy lives? Will any of them find eternal happiness? How many of them will find that life doesn't live up to expectations and for how many of them will life hold so much more? So many questions to be asked of a single picture, a single frame of time which was captured in less than a 60th of a second. The souls behind those eyes locked forever within the lumps of information in the file in which it's stored on my computer. Maybe I'm too cynical. Maybe I'm too pessimistic. Maybe these people are all happy, maybe for just that moment in time they are happy and together and that's all that matters to these young minds. How would the future be different if I'd pressed the shutter half a second later? Maybe the difference would be invisible to the naked eye. Maybe we'd all have been killed by next Tuesday. You can't tell. That's why you never wish the past was different. Maybe we'd have all been rich and famous if I'd pressed the shutter half a second earlier instead of later. There are too many maybes to wish life away. Maybe I killed all of these people before their time by pressing the shutter at the moment I did, but if that's true then their time is their time and it was never anything else.

I suppose it depends on if you believe in fate or not. I don't think I do, certainly not in the way religion portrays. Fate is flexible. It allows us choice, but not control. There are too many factors and variables for fate to be fixed, but I think we still have choice. Maybe the illusion of choice is just in our minds and we, in fact, have no choice whatsoever but we like thinking we can have a choice. We like the idea of freedom. We fight so that enslaved countries might be freed. We fight for our own freedom (well, supposedly we do, but the way this country's going you'd never know it) and if all this fighting was for nothing then what would we have left? Without the concept of freedom we have no concept of choice either. If that were true, then who governs this path we follow? Is it a 'god'? If so, which god? There are so many. If it's not a god then we're left with the idea of it being 'the way of nature', like a marble in a marble run, or to keep the creationists at bay, the way water runs down a slope in the forest in rivulets in a storm. If you used that analogy then the choices are there but we are powerless to actually make them.

It's interesting how nothings as black and white as you assume it is. It's not a battle between creator and chance, it's so much more than that. I don't believe in the Christian God, or any of the widely accepted god's for that matter, nor do I believe in a 'power' or a creator, I don't really know what I believe. Pascal's Wager would lead me to believe in some sort of god out of sheer logic, but then which god? The choice is so wide and if I get the wrong god surely that's just as bad as choosing no god at all?

Without the presence of a god in my life for these past 18 years I think I've done ok. I've been nowhere near a perfect ideal of a human being, I've made so many mistakes and hurt so many people I don't think I'll be able to forgive myself for for a very long time, but I never hurt people out of malice. I never cause pain for the sake of causing pain. I think that's what's important. I know too many people who like hurting others, out of revenge or just to feel the rush of power and I think that's more despicable than anything else. The best we can do is get through life without causing too much pain. You're always going to cause pain. Someone told me that once, someone infinitely wiser than me, told me that whatever you do you're always going to hurt someone and you can't do anything about it. What you can do, though, is never cause pain on purpose and feel remorse for those you have wronged. I think that's all you can do. You need to accept that otherwise you'll spend the whole of your life beating yourself up and never letting go of the people you hurt.

I think I'll call it a day for now. That's a lot of writing all for one post :/ Ah well, I'm sure you'll all live. So long, and So love.

The other day I read a blog by this girl from NYC. I didn't really read much of it actually, it was more a photographic breakdown of her life. Actually, not even that. Just photo after photo of sheer and utter beauty. Each photo was just filled with beauty and emotion and it really hit me. They're the kind of photos I want to take but just can't somehow. Glare in the lens, sun ghosting the film, summer and light. People tell me I take beautiful pictures but somehow I don't quite believe them.

I've made a promise to myself to write here and post at least one picture of mine a day. Some of them will be old pictures and some of them will be new. My life is photographs so it seems fitting to document it through photographs.

Now comes the challenge of deciding which picture to post first. It's sort of like the opening line of a book where you decide if you want to read it or not. This photo will be like the opening line of my book and will make you decide whether or not you want to carry on looking or just hit that little back button up there in the top left of your browser. Maybe it doesn't even matter if you carry on reading. One picture will have been enough to alter the course of your life for all of time. Two pictures doesn't alter it any more or any less, it's just another fork in the road where you go either one way or the other.

This is my first picture. This is the closest I've ever got to beauty in an image I think, beauty in the way I meant it. The way the sun catches the bubbles, the sun catching the red hair, the blue sky behind her, the silhouette caught in the sun, this is beauty to me. Not quite yet though. It's not perfect yet. I haven't yet found beauty in my pictures. Maybe it's a flaw in myself and maybe I'll never find perfection in my own work. That's quite possible actually. Ah well. I can still strive for it. I can still wonder at beauty in the work of those around me.

The American Dream, for me, is something quite different than it is to most. The American Dream, for me, is long, yellowy summer evenings where sundust dances in the light and the world is orange. It is in this dream that perfection can be found and I don't think I can find it in grey England. Australia would work too. I read somewhere that a photographer can never take brilliant photographs in his home country. He needs to emigrate overseas and to remove himself from what he finds normal to see the things that he misses in his home land. I've seen amazing photos taken in this country but I don't think I can take them. Maybe this is an excuse for what I find to lack in my work and maybe I'll find myself forever chasing the foreign dream, forever striving for something I'll never be able to capture. Maybe.

I found another one of mine that's almost perfect but not quite. Maybe.
That's it for today I think. I might add some more later.