Fish & Fish

For eighteen years of my life the only fish I would happily devour was that from the local fish & chip shop. I mean I have always loved fish & chips and it's still my favourite takeaway to this day, possibly one of my favourite meals.. So unless we were drenching dinner with salt and vinegar and wrapping it up in that day's misprinted papers, I wasn't interested. According to my parents I happily spent my youth referring to the dish as 'fish & fish', so I must have liked it deep down inside just not when it came to dinnertime.

So it comes as no surprise that I can remember quite vividly the first fish dish that stopped me in my tracks, and made me sit up and take note. I was at my Uncles in California (that would be you John - thanks again) enjoying the delights of the surf, the beach, my first surfboard and getting driven around in a lowered F150 truck (such a child!).. John suggested some fresh fish from this killer place on County Line that serves up the freshest fish, caught daily from the pacific opposite the restaurant. What with me being very British I felt it was a bit rude to say that I didn't really like fish so I shut my trap. What followed was a culinary delight though, Sea Bass sprinkled with flaked almonds, a generous pinch of salt and pepper and a hunk of butter. All wrapped up in foil and cooked to perfection on the barbecue of course. And perfection it was. Now I like fish, I said to myself.

I'm not the only person who now likes to eat fish. Statistics say that in 2009 the world ate over 120 million tonnes of fish. It's a staggering statistic and that rate increases by 6% year on year. So maybe we should be worried about running out of oil but we should also be aware of the rate at which the world eats fish. Some of the practices that directly affect fish heading for the UK markets were highlighted last year by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on a Channel 4 series called Hugh's Fish Fight. It was heart wrenching, educational and made me want to act. It also seems to have made another 770,617...and counting people want to act, which is great.

I'm glad to be heading out to Bangladesh at the end of this week with duckrabbit to work on series of photofilms for a Fishing & Aquaculture research institute there. It's made me think about how important fish are to this world, for sustenance, to provide livelihoods and in the environment as a species.

It's also made me think about just how hard it is to get a nice piece of fresh fish nowadays. Thankfully my brother is a chef so I had the nicest piece of trout I have ever eaten on Christmas morning this year.

And if you don't know my brother then perhaps it's easier to just go fishing. Like James Brown here..

#phonar

I've just got back from giving a lecture and working with the #phonar class at Coventry University this week where I talked photofilms, transformative storytelling and transmedia. Interesting stuff and thanks to Jonathan Worth's approach to sharing and creative commons (it's his class), you can take part and hear the class too as #phonar is free to join and take part in online. Visit www.phonar.org for more details.

Matt Johnston who run's the course with Jonathan will be uploading the talk to the phonar class soon for you to hear but in the meantime he recorded my five top tips for photofilms..

Getting there

I'm well on my way to Novo Mesto in the heart of Slovenia to take my seat at the 11th annual Fotopub photography festival. After a brief stop in Brixton to check up on the latest batch of gentrification and a trouble free but solo flight from Gatwick I arrived in Ljubljana with only a few hours to wait for Rebecca to join me. It's a long story but I booked the last seat on a flight out of Gatwick so we travelled at the same time from different airports to the same destination. I won't be booking any separate tickets ever again!

Rebecca and I have prepared a great schedule for the participants of the multimedia workshop at Fotopub and I'm looking forward to meeting our students and getting to work. It's going to be a busy week in Slovenia as the students have five and a half days to learn about photofilms, get out in the field and collect their material and build their finished pieces. The work will then be shown in Novo Mesto next Saturday as part of the Festival.

I've brought quite a bit of kit with me, the usual cameras, lenses and more cameras along with a laptop and additional speakers and a healthy dose of cables and headphones, so I ditched my current book for the trip. I was therefore left with the inflight reading material which is usually enough to drive anyone crazy. Not so as the Adria Airways magazine was pretty goo and even featured a piece on the Fotopub festival, which was nice.

Multimedia at Fotopub

As the weather repeats it's ever changing rain and sun game in the run up to the Glastonbury festival and you continue on regardless, although getting more use out of your waterproof trousers than you thought necessary in June. Maybe you should be thinking about what to do this summer? A trip abroad.. perhaps Europe.. hmmm been to France sooo many times, maybe further east. How about Slovenia, it's next door to italy, on the adriatic, you could swim in the beautiful lake Bled, visit the stunning Julian Alps, take in the capital Ljubljana, visit Maribor for the world downhill mountain bike racing or perhaps visit the small town of Novo Mesto for this years Fotopub festival.

If you hadn't guessed already I am excited about the Fotopub photo festival happening in Slovenia, 25th-30th July 2011. Not just because it's the 11th year this wonderful events been happening, and because I have heard and seen so many great things about it but also because this year I finally get to go. This years Fotopub has a great lineup of mentors and events with talent such as Ed Ou, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Epsen Rasmussen and more attending and I have been looking at the site with some excitement. So I guess being asked to be a mentor and to teach the multimedia workshop has only one downside - I won't have time to go and the see all these other great talents speak. I'm sure we will be able to catch up over a beer..

It's been a long week what with us not having a kitchen (long story), a photofilm commission on the go, another in the pipeline and with Fotopub asking Rebecca and I to come and teach. It all came about through our wonderful Hinterlands workshop in Devon that we (Rebecca and I that is) ran in collaboration with duckrabbit in May of this year. It went great, so great that duckrabbit felt happy to recommend us to the Fotopub team, and I am really happy they did.

So.. If your twiddling your thumbs at home and are wondering what to do in July - head to Fotopub. And if your interested in multimedia, slideshows, photofilms or whatever you call them then come and signup for the multimedia workshop. It's going to be a great place to produce a short multimedia piece and to have a stunning week all at the same time.

MSF in Kibera

I worked with Médecins Sans Frontières the other day to produce the audio for three photofilms all about people living with HIV in Kenya's Kibera slums. The BBC world news had the piece on their front page today which I am really happy about. The pieces go back to visit three people from the Kibera slums with HIV who's lives have been changed as a result of taking ARV's over the last six years. If your interested in seeing the other pieces they can be found on the MSF site.

It was a challenging and very long day including not much sleep, too much driving, a lack of headlamps in the car and a super long edit so I'm really happy that the BBC decided to use the piece.