Opening my email the other day was a pleasure, there amongst the usual dross was a glowing little reply from Eric at photomedia, one of my images had been accepted to this years Open Juried show. A smile crossed my face when I read which image it was. It has been a good year for this pinhole picture, I am beginning to loose track of the places this has been featured or accepted into, sometimes an image really captures the emotions that everyone can relate to. Anyway here it is for you.

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Since last january I have been working with a group of 'Home Educated' (never at home) children and their parents doing what started as a Solargrphy project at our local nature reserve. It was planned that it would last for a year and then we would bring all the images together and the documentation and make a Blurb book. This is of course still ongoing and we are also now dabbling in other forms of image making which are accessible to the children and also possible with the limitations of the site. The results of the solargraphs are great so far with only a couple of fails and some vandalism! Anyway our little project has been featured on the council blog, which is great news for all as the site is important to many in the community and anything we do to give it a boost is important.

The group also has its work on flickr: Flickr: h e projects at drnr's Photostream

i shall no doubt feature some of the work in the future as we have done lumen prints as well and plan to do photosynthesis prints and cyanotypes and of course make more pinholes!

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It seems fitting that this is my first entry, I have been waiting for the chance to write and funnily enough I have been waiting for an allotment for  what seems like an eternity.So I am doing both, today I finally got one and I went over to visit for the first time with a gaggle of children(not necessarily volunteers) with spades, hoes and pitchforks in hand we wandered through the local park to the site. After negotiating the lock and securing it behind us we turned to view our new domain, it spread before us a wonder bursting with photo opportunities, I couldn't believe my luck and I almost couldn't contain myself. Once all the hard work was done I would be able to sit back and enjoy and I was certainly going to relish making images here, as well as veg.

The plot was overgrown but not too bad, we worked at clearing for some time, I actually lost track of time as it was so quiet there, it wasn't particularly backbreaking as the soil had been really looked after and it was sad to find evidence of the previous owner and his tastes, though I'm not sure it would ever be safe to consume that many Jerusalem Artichokes!

The children wandered off home early and I carried on in solitude but felt great in the knowledge that this place would grow and sustain us, it would become somewhere to escape to, to contemplate, to create and to socialise, much like the new Toycam site which is equally inspiring!

I have no image of the allotment yet, you shall have to wait until the film is dev'd.

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Yesterday I decided to take a break from working on TC and LL. Summer is winding down and the boy heads off the school soon. One of the things I do, because I'm a web geek is purchase the domain names of my kid's names before they are born. So for almost 7 years, jonahbarnes.com has been parked. Yesterday, me and the boy decided to set him up with a host and give him an online presence.

Do 6 year olds really need a web site that he can blog from anywhere in the world? Maybe not, but a little music player, mario graphics, colouring pages and a page dedicated to his dog are all things that seem pretty cool to him.
Being a web geek has it's advantages sometimes, and the boy is pretty happy. My newest client, and will not doubt be the most demanding.

If you have that 6-8 year old boy demographic in your family, check out www.jonahbarnes.com, I'll update his colouring pages when I do more over time (he's at the age where his favourite things change on a minute by minute basis...).

Today's job will be to get his likeness in a dancing animated gif in his music player :-)

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Hello to all, it's my first day on the revamped Toycamera.com site and I'm liking it a lot already, the new features seem easier to navigate than the old site so hopefully I shall get more from it. Nice work mike!

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Rachel and I had to have some tough conversations this past spring and summer about Light Leaks. On the one hand we have a magazine that continues to grow, with both subscriptions and retailers. On the other hand we have this accumulated debt that eats away at us because of the road it took to get to this point.

We went over every possible way to cut costs while not decreasing the quality of the magazine. We've switched to brown kraft mailers, we're choosing a more economical paper stock - and we pushed the printer to cut our costs substantially. Another measure we will be doing is doing a full signature (8 pages) in black and white -this will start in issue 18. We aren't leaving any stone unturned - but still, we can only control our end, the final answer is the consumer - will they continue to support the magazine. From the last subscription drive, we could tell many of you are still as passionate about it as we are - and we thank you for continuing to subscribe.

Holgapalooza is another BIG piece of the puzzle that needs to pull through for us to continue printing. We are forecasting a slightly less draw than last year simply because we reduced categories - but we would love to have everyone who submitted last year submit again. A successful Holgapalooza will for sure pull us through to next year - and I personally believe from there we will continue to print Light Leaks.

www.toycamera.com will hopefully also help drive subscriptions and keep people on top of all things toy and low-fi related. Including some of the old articles from past issues is something many people have asked for. Have you seen them yet? They look pretty sweet in this new template and the funky image enlarger I have added - very professional if I be so bold :-)

Anyhow, I'm the kind of guy where it's 'balls to the wall' (Rachel hates it when I say that), or "go big or go home". This is it folks - these next few months are crucial for us with our business, so please accept my advanced apologies for the barrage of "Enter Holgapalooza" you'll be getting over the next two weeks!

Balls to the wall baby, balls to the wall.

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One of the many cool features of the new site is the ability to create events. An event can be a special day, like World Toy Camera Day; an exhibit that you may be involved in; a contest or competition; or an open call for submissions to a gallery.

The events application allows you to accept RSVP's, as well as invite other members. You can define how many seats are available, and you can even put in an address to the event so people can find it on a map.

Check out this tutorial on how to create an event of your own (feature available to Light Leaks and Premium subscribers only)

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found someone who had taken two nifty panorama shots from this weekend

http://www.bendayanfoto.se/planket-2010/

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Today was supposed to be my day to get as many Light Leaks articles up as possible... didn't happen, not one. Putting out the fires and trying to stay on top of emails is what transpired. The subscription system is... not perfect. Some people seem to be subscribing via the Light Leaks subscription who don't actually have Light Leaks subscriptions... some of their responses when I send out emails asking for verifications can difficult to respond to productively.

Some emails and paperwork for a new advertising campaign took a couple of hours today too, but it is nice to find new advertisers - it keeps the wheels turning.

Oops... my dinner guests are here early... that's my day!

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Back when I was first proposed to take over www.toycamera.com, Jackie Lund was one of the active members in the community. Her images and web site were very inspiring to me. Jackie is one of the few toy camera photographers to weild the Agfa Clack, and as you can see from her gallery, she does a pretty damn good job.

Hopefully we'll all get to see some more from Jackie's other toycams soon!

Welcome back to toycamera.com Jackie!

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