David and Maxine at their exhibition

John W., of the micro photography fame (at least to my mind), came round today for morning coffee and a chance to chat about a new project. This would include writing, photography and possibly video to illustrate a rather wide-ranging but fascinating subject, before a more focused approach is realised. As always I enjoyed talking with him as we discussed the potential for such a project and the technologies that might be involved. More of that to come, I am sure.

Tim M. also popped by soon after we'd eaten some delicious scrambled eggs on toast, as he needed to borrow an Apple system install disk for his Macbook Pro to try to repair a misbehaving hard drive. Sadly the disk didn't help, so he must return to an Apple Store for a fix. After they had left I headed to town as I wanted to try to take some archive pictures of the two curving staircases at Lansdown Hall. I am involved as a town councillor with a series of works to repair and improve the building as the town's village hall. The pictures might help in an information booklet to illustrate the project to potential funding bodies.

The ground floor space, beneath the Hall available to hire as a gallery space for any one in the local community. Woodpeckers had reminded me that Maxine, who we had met at her exhibition a few weeks ago in another gallery in town, would be presenting a special exhibit as part of a small exhibition at Lansdown Gallery today and tomorrow. I did my archive project before going to talk to Maxine in the gallery and I also met David Friese-Greene who had organised the short exhibition as a way to show some local work and to meet whoever came to visit. He moved to Stroud quite recently and is keen to meet people. I certainly enjoyed meeting him.

In the end I didn't manage to see much of the exhibition because we were too busy chatting, so I hope to go back tomorrow to see Maxine's 'special suitcase'. Maxine had remembered our mentioning Blipfoto and she will now be able to see my blip of her sketch book. David was also intrigued by the nature of Blipfoto and I think he might become involved too, as he is a keen photographer, as well as having had a background at one time in documentary production as I once did.

The was a regular stream of visitors to the gallery who were greeted by David and Maxine. During a lull, David started to use his crayons to draw and they said they didn't mind me taking pictures. I chose this image as I wanted to portray them today, but I was tempted to blip an exhibit by another friend of David's, Lilla Duigan, who with some collaborators had mounted their own photo diary of 2012, The Heartsing project, a picture a day that made the heart sing. I have put it on my Blipfolio. It seemed fitting to have been talking about blipfoto when there was a 365 photo project on show, and David will tell Lilla about Blipfoto.