Many thanks.

My adventure has unfortunately come to an end and so normal blogging services resume. To say that the last week has been incredible, crazy and eye-opening would be a huge understatement.

The adventure began last Sunday morning and every second since has been filled with the most amazing situations, I’ve met amazing people and done countless photo-shoots; from standing in moonlit abbeys shooting fire dancers, to naked “green people” in the woods, from working with body-paint to tattoo shoots. There was endless tea drinking, brilliant conversations, tarot readings, neck piercing and complete madness, all the while in the company of some of the coolest people I’ve ever met. And so I have a list of thank yous to dish out;

Firstly, thanks to KenMc for lending me his 50mm lens. Without it I would have been completely screwed to start with and I can’t wait for people to see the results of our photo-shoots over the next few weeks. Thanks to Tanya “ModBot” O’Callaghan for turning into a walking canvas. Thanks to Ani for the endless hard work, the creative genuis, the chats and of course “stabbing me” in the neck (You’re a legend!).

Thanks to Ani and her amazing family for welcoming me into their home, the brilliant conversations and the pure creativity. Thanks to Helen for shaving your head and letting me completely re-arrange your sitting room into a studio (I want your cat!). To Simon and Mark for making me laugh so much. Thanks to all the fire dancers.

Thanks to Ani, Helen and Sean Boon for your amazing designs, and Tanya for endlessly standing still or being told how to stand. To all of the people who stripped down to reveal their awesome tattoos (or just stripped down). Thanks to Mary and Sandi for collecting me and the two day adventure that followed. To Sla for finally bringing me home and to Daw who has had to listen to me talking about my adventure since I got back.

The list of people to thank and reasons to thank them is really impossible to get through, so I can only hope that everyone knows how grateful I am and that you like all of the photos that will follow.

So first up is my second attempt shooting fire and I’m much happier with the results this time around; namely because of a better location for shooting it (in this case a moonlit abbey) and shooting both Poi and Staff which provide very different trails and flames when shot under slow-shutter speeds.

It was a pretty amazing thing to climb up the abbey ruins and look down on several fire dancers in the dark night. And the awesome sounds of all that fire spinning is impossible for me to describe. Because of the pure dark night I was able to use some very slow-shutter speeds for this shoot, resulting in bigger, more complicated trails, all of which you can see here.

Once again thanks to everyone for absolutely everything, I hope you like the first batch of photos, and I can’t wait to get to work on the rest, but first I really need to sleep.