Blue Swirl

I've always been rather attracted by abstract forms in my photography - using quirky camera angles and extreme close-ups to capture unexpected detail, fortuitous combinations of light and shadow, shape and texture.

One of the few things I like about digital cameras (I was born a film man, I'll die a film man!) is that the 'mini-TV' display screens on the back of them do make it incredibly easy to go hunting for such serendipitous delights. Of course, the infuriating thing about digital photography (even with my SLR, which I am still struggling to learn the ins-and-outs of 2 years after I bought it; ten times more so with the 'happy snapper' that I use most of the time when I am out and about at bars and parties) is the lack of control: even with the SLR it is ridiculously fiddly to balance settings for shutter, aperture, and flash, and the auto-focus is slow and cranky and unreliable, especially in bad light; on the 'happy snapper', the flash is appalling, making everything in the foreground flat and and overlit, while the auto-focus takes so bloody long that it removes all linkage between when you press the 'shutter button' and when the photograph is actually taken. It drives me bonkers!!

Nevertheless, I will often spend a happy half-hour or so - in a spliffily obsessive kind of way - trying to take pictures of the woodgrain on a tabletop, or the sole of a shoe, or the inside of a trouser leg, or (a great favourite, this one) the interior of a beer bottle - as in 'Centre of the Universe' at the top of the sidebar here.

A month or so back, I was out having a beer and a pizza with my buddy The Choirboy, and he was playing around with this rather striking blue 'laser' pen-torch he'd just picked up from somewhere (on a key fob or a cigarette lighter or somesuch)..... and I was rather taken with this shot I took through the bottom of a pint sleeve glass.