Here we have Norfolk’s ambassador to Camden presenting his wares at Camden farmer’s market. Ever since I’ve been in Camden I’ve wondered, and asked, often why Camden doesn’t have a farmer’s market. If I get the urge, I tend to wander up to Parliament Hill Fields on a Saturday morning.

Well, now it does on a Friday, albeit twice-weekly. There are tasty wares on offer, from artisan bread (Hoxton on the first week was sublime) to the obligatory Bath cheeses who turn up everywhere. I got some Tottenham Wildes cheese which being young was a bit bland. Give me some lovely Comté from the Dark Knights of Cholesterol any day!

I do fear for the market though. Footfall on a Friday during the day seems poor. Maybe some marketing among the local offices, leafleting local homes and perhaps cheekily doorstepping outside Morrisons or Sainsburys would help a lot. I will enjoy it while it lasts and looking forward to this coming Friday!

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Good gig. Nice to hook up with some of the Bristol/Bath posse and also some cousins I’d never met!

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For about four years, I’d been living in perl 5.8.8. land at the BBC, and some unicode issues aside, not really been fussed about recent perls. I’d had a nagging feeling that I’d been missing out on shiny new features that would make my life so much easier. Also being constantly being berated on the #london.pm IRC channel about being a laggard didn’t help. So, having had the links to the release notes thrown at me, here is an incomplete list of what’s new.

As an aside, and on the back of work I did for Photobox and some BBC projects, here is a piece of advice: do NOT use the system perl. That way lies much pain. Treat your perl as part of the *application* stack. There is no reason not to. These days, with perlbrew and cpanm, and a well-maintained Makefile.PL you have total control of the software that runs your software. Pity those poor folks with other languages.

So here is a list of the new stuff:

• “say” appends a newline to a print.
• Persistent private variables:

use feature 'state' ;

sub thingy { state $x ; return ++$x }

• Smart matching:

$a ~~ /foo/;

$a ~~ @list;

• Switch:

use feature switch;
given ($foo) {
    when (/abc/) { $abc =1; }
    when (/def/) { $def = 1; }
    default { $default = 1}
}

• Defined-or operator:

$a // $b ;
defined $a ? $a : $b ;

$c //= $d;
$c = $d unless defined $c ;

• A fun operator. I’ll let you work this one out.

...

Aside from these, most of the work has been going on under the hood: a huge number of bug fixes, performance enhancements and a massive chunk of work getting Unicode “right”. I wouldn’t have dreamed that there are over 250 Unicode characters that match \d for example. But it doesn’t matter, now it’ll JFW.

So, on the surface, it doesn’t seem much has changed but even if you can’t see it, it has and I would encourage anyone using an old perl to at least start developing on a new perl, move to building and shipping your own perl (maybe even built with gentoo-safe flags for your hardware for extra jiggyness) and joining the new decade!

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On strong urging, we went to see the Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain.

And therein lies a story. With joint visitation being in the region of £35, and an annual membership around £90 it seemed crazy not to cough up for membership. Plus we get lounge access! So I coughed up. And we got to see the Turner prize exhibition for free as well.

What is there to say about this that doesn’t sound overcooked? GO SEE IT. I’d been aware of the low-hanging fruit like Rosetti and Millais, as well as the crossover with William Morris, but to see the development of the school over decades and many affiliated and even unrelated artists was great. A room of Morris-related craft added to the ambience. The audio guide was worth it too according to my in-house artist, apparently. Will definitely go back before it closes!

The Turner Prize was a mixed bag. Too much un-grabbing video work for me. Paul Noble was robbed.

We then hit up William Klein and Daido Moriyama at Tate Modern. We’d seen the Moriyama video loop outside already which whetted my appetite. Sadly, despite the comprehensiveness of the shows, and all the contrasty black and white street photos, it left me cold. Nothing really captured. Might give it another try if we’re down that way again (likely). Also the member’s room was a zoo.

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So that was a weekend. AngelHack is designed to throw a couple of hundred people of various disciplines together to see what wacky and zany ideas they can come up with in 24 hours. There are sponsors present, Microsoft pimping BizSpark and CouchDB amongst others, rewarding you with loot for sitting through their pitches.

First a comment about the hosts Bloomberg. Nice shiny building in the outer heart of the City of London. Sadly, their operation doesn’t scale. Queues for registration on Saturday were far too long and the single queue for catering ensured the pizza was cold and nasty. Sad. Monkigras was orders of magnitude better.

I fell in with a friend of a guy I know from the startup circuit with an idea for a marketplace for people in the music business. I know this area well and went off and coded something, leveling up slightly in Catalyst. I suspect I was the only person coding perl in a sea of Rails and Objective C. In the event, we barely touched on the code, talking through graphical mockups, but I was happy to have learned what I did. I know who to talk to to progress this idea further. I also destroyed a nice stylesheet in the process. Might try to find a different one.

I’d like to see more of the perl community turning out to events like this, it would certainly raise the profile of the language.

I also nipped out to Silicon Milkroundabout which suffered from similar buzzword-itis. There was some Java and Perl lurking in the background but it was mostly all shiny new children.

Ho hum.

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When I teach photography, one of the things I tell my students is “don’t be afraid of the modes”. Tell this to someone who fancies themselves as a “proper” photographer and I’m likely to be met with the sucking of air over teeth. This is the reaction of a clueless bigot. All modes are are quick presets for certain situations: “sports mode” sets shutter speed priority, “beach” mode sets a nice sunlight white balance and “snow mode” fixes the exposure and white balance.

My old Canon S90 had a favourite: “sunset mode”. It took a fairly ordinary evening sky and turned it into something nice. It disappeared on the Canon S95, but with the power of fiddling, and for your benefit, I’ve worked out how to emulate it manually! Here’s the recipe: underexpose by one stop and ramp up the white balance. And here’s the result with several kittens: silhouette, reflection, sunset and a musician having his photo taken!

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We’ve done most of the 50 emergency tourist things in London and still keep finding new stuff, like the Wallace Collection, the fabulous William Morris Gallery and the Geffrye Museum.

Today, after an article in Vice, we upped and went to the badlands of Hackney Wick to see “In My Country” by Daniel Stier at the Stour Space. On the VERY odd chance you happen to be in the area, then it’s worth a view. Very nice work.

Also, the café on the canal is nice. And that’s the important thing about any gallery/museum, right?

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After having my arm strongly twisted, I ran a studio lighting photography session this weekend. Packing down ten weeks of Central St Martins course into six hours on Saturday (with time out for a nice lunch!), was quite tiring but ultimately I hope, successful.

I gave a handwaving introduction contrasting natural light with studio light: natural light means we have little or no control; in the studio with powerful lights we have ultimate control.

Then we ran through a few basic setups:

• Full, model-style three light setup. No contrast. Boring but it’s what they like.
• Turned off two lights, moved the big softbox off to one side, got nice contrast on the face.
• Snooted one of the lights and pointed it at the model’s hair. It’s a bit cheesy when it’s overdone but can be nice.
• Then we added a fan for that wild, blowy look. As our model had lovely golden tresses, this worked really well. Getting the fan too close can be a problem though!
• After lunch, we acquired our male model and moved to a more masculine-friendly contrasty setup. One big softbox off to the side and a couple of black scrims to fully subtract any stray bouncing light.

With that, it was time for the pub and to discuss “what is art?” and “how can you tell if art is good?”. In the last ten years I’ve had two artist girlfriends and on art historian so even though I’m a techie at heart, I feel like I’m beginning to get a feel for it all so I’m happy to call a Rothko blob of colour good art!

I’ve got a few people on hold for another session, so if you’re interested, let me know and we’ll fix a date!

Thanks to Ania for the pic, I was too busy to take more than a couple of photos the whole day. One of my pictures on Flickr is here. Look at that yummy catchlight. I was even caught in a few pictures. Update: New session for October!

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I managed to pin Doris of Chthonic down when she was over and got her to sign 3 (just 3!) giclée prints on Kodak archival paper on an acid-free 11″x14″ mount.

This shot was taken at Bloodstock Open Air 2012 up at Catton Hall, which was a fine show.

The cost is £150 plus £5 postage UK, £10 rest of the world (Royal Mail signed for and all that goodness). First three people to email me at daveh@hodgkinson.org and arrange payment via PayPal will secure this one-of-a-kind item which will look incredibly stylish on anyone’s wall.

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Having never availed myself of that stretch of line while it was still the tube, and having made it that far recently on an epic trek into Epping Forest, with a long weekend in prospect we decided to do that train thing.

First was a nice bouncy, shaky vintage Routemaster from Epping to North Weald, although the line is due to be extended much nearer Epping in the future. This took me back 20 years.

We took a first class compartment behind a nice big steam engine from North Weald back towards Epping forest then onwards to Ongar. This took me back at least 25 years.

We pubbed at the Royal Oak in Ongar (out of the station approach and turn right) which despite feeling like a throwback to the 70′s served up really decent food, sourced as locally as they could: farm eggs and great bacon! Recommended should you find yourself there.

Stopping off in Stratford on the way back for a really indifferent coffee gave me the perfect excuse to take the HS1 (or Javelin as it appears to be known currently) back to St. Pancras. Re-living the Olympic experience.

Sadly, for various reasons, most of my pictures were shocking, but I’ll take this one.

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