Sunday13thMay07

Today (despite the fact I didn't get to bed till the wee hours) I got up early and ploughed through a tonne of work. As of tomorrow I should be completely up to date with the blog and maybe even finished the half way point of my photos being marked by the assessments for back home this week.

I did take a break for a jog this evening (would have taken more but my stomach has been waging war against food all week so I'm on a green and energy drink diet) and didn't do too badly but my head wasn't in it, I couldn't clear.

Syphoning through photo files is fairly dry work so I decided to investigate some old music files and rediscovered Sage Francis (the guy may be a lyrical genius) and some old Atmosphere albums to keep me going. So it got me thinking about sages. What is the best advice I've ever been given?

The one that sticks with me always was from a good friend who said 'it doesn't matter how far you fall, it's how quickly you get backup again that counts.' Strange as it may be, that line has stopped me from doing a lot of stupid things. But that's not the one that's been stuck in my head all day.

A few years ago I was at a big festival. Some friends were doing the sound for the bands and one friend was in charge of one of the live feed cameras. She came up to me one afternoon and asked if I could take over that night, I obviously said yes and asked her to show me round the camera to which she said, 'no, I'm leaving now, just do it.' I think my heart may have stopped at that point. I was bricking it (for lack of a better phrase) I had never done anything like that before. So after grilling the film guys for help (they were very kind given that I'm sure they were a little shocked) I still had no idea how I was gona pull this off without some serious camera shake. But about five minutes before the gig started my mum came up to and said something perfect, (pretty paraphrased) 'you know you can do this. If you're scared, you'll do an average job and that's okay, but if you take a risk and just go for it you could do somethin pretty creative.' She was right. I took the risk and tuned out it paid off. I totally calmed, pushed the nervousness out of the way, and just went for it. Turned out the guy at the back liked what I did and my camera was one of the main feeds the whole night, and the next morning I was asked to do it again till my friend got back.

It's not easy to do though. It's like going white water rafting, you need to switch off the part of your brain that tells you to run in the opposite direction. I have been outputting average for too long now, I think it's about time some risks were taken. I just need to figure out how.