Whimsical Musings of a Loon

 On Friday I attended a Lego event for part of the We Love Architecture festival from the British institute of Architecture. Senior design manager at Lego Simon Kent gave a talk on how lego sets end up on the shelf - giving some insight to the concept, design, architecture and testing that products go through before the consumer gets their eager hands on the bricks. As much as I love how much architectural design goes into the set concept build, I found the process of testing and idea creating even more interesting. A set has a long cycle from birth to shelf; much care and attention goes through each stage. It feels loved, it feels agile, it feels a rather beautiful process. Lego is a long time love of mine, having spent most of my childhood immersed in the wonderful creative bubble of building and constructing your own world from miniature plastic bricks. Encouraging the creative, encouraging the logic, encouraging inquisitive minds as they grow, Lego has to be one of the m...

Last weekend I went to the Brecon Beacons, and payed a visit to one of the most unique sites I have ever been to. Over the past 12 years or so, since I started photographing and becoming interested in exploring and visiting new places to, essentially, see what they looked like photographed, I have been to quite a few unusual places, buildings and spooky surroundings. My interest in the decay of life once lived, my love of the mechanical intertwining with the natural has grown and grown, and of course I have become fascinating in Urban Exploration, and the synonymous melancholy of photography and the past. I've walked along derelict corridors of closed asylums; discovered cages and huts from a former wildlife park amidst thick woods; explored derelict residential areas full of decay and ghostly artifacts of normal every day life. But this site on the barren mountains of Brecon was even more different again. In 1944, on a dark November night, a Wellington Bomber carrying six R...

Untitled , a photo by sian_quincy on Flickr. Climbed an aircraft, skin shade pale, Amongst elderly fields of Daily Mail; Time is dead, time to kill, Travelling, yet feel so still. Leaving grey, mist relief, Into colour; flame Tenerife. Gigantic mountainous, against so weak, They speak, they tower, the mighty peak. Amidst snaking roads fear do give, Astonishment! In this they live. Such beauty makes a Spine-a-curled, I'm here. Not there. In my other world.

Hundred years ago this month, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and four other members of his British Antarctic Expedition 1910, reached the South Pole. What should have been triumphed as a great achievement of effort, bravery, knowledge and exploration, was diminished when it was realised that Scott's expedition had been 'beaten' to the Pole first by the Norwegian expedition lead by Amundsen. What followed after Scott reached the Pole was a decreasing circle of fate. Upon reaching the South Pole and the crushing reality that they had been beaten to the race, Scott and his small team began the even more exhausting 800 mile return to their base in constantly deteriorating weather and ill health. By March 1912, Scott and his team had lost their lives; perishing in the horrifyingly frozen temperatures. They had been hungry, frost bitten and fatigued for weeks. Captain Scott, Captain Oates, Lieutenant Bowers, Edward Wilson, and Petty Officer Evans had all passed away in their fin...

It's that time of the year again - Lazuary; no, not some annual homage to the former Bond star (whom was vastly underrated in my opinion); but the month of lazy journalism and blogs as we review the year just departed with endless lists and reminders of what happened as if we can't remember just a few months ago (to be fair, I often can't). It's as if we can't be bothered to think of any new blog topics of originality so just wheel out geeky lists of things we like as if to define ourselves as having a purpose of existing because of the elements in life that we favour. Which is exactly what I am going to do. It would be against my geeky religion not to. And besides, it's jolly satisfying. So here is my top 10 of favourite albums from 2011. Real Estate: Days Real Estate have been a favourite band of mine for a while. They produce simple pop of understated goodness. White Denim: D Lushness. A touch of the  psychedelic groove.  Cerys Matthews - Explorer...

Photography is one of my passions, and today whilst on a long walk with the dog up Caerphilly Mountain, I stopped at a style that overlooked Cardiff and wished I could master capturing the view. For years I have tried, and I have never quite achieved to replicate the oddly part-picturesque-part-M4-induced-city-scape exactly how I wanted. I will continue to try every time I trample past, but it did make me ponder over what was my actual favourite image of all time. Growing up, it was press images of sporting moments that captured beautifully split-second action, that got me fascinated photography. The images, perhaps, of Wales scoring a try in a rare victory - they were such exciting photographs -  the excitement in the players' eyes, the mud, the emotion, the faces of the crowds; you could sit and pour over the image and live it for much longer than you could watching the replay endlessly on TV. As I studied photography more, I saw the power this medium had for lettin...

I love running. No, I LOVE running. When people hear this or see how enthusiastic I get about running long distances, clocking up the miles early morning, or struggling up a Caerphilly mountain training run, some respond in sheer recoiled horror. I may as well have admitted I enjoy eating puppies for dinner before washing them down with a mug of vinegar once owned by Hitler. But I genuinely love it. And I wasn't always sure why; until I read Murakami's 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running' short book; his philosophy on his love of the pursuit. What he writes is essentially this: running is part of what he is. Like an artist's art, or musician's music. Just because it is an exercise (a sport!) makes it no less valuable or trivial to study and philosophise about. I had always liked sport as a kid. I spent the first 10 years of my life kicking a football against the garage door, winning Wimbledon against the side of the house, and using my mum's h...