sonny photos

Chicken Brain Internet

This is the ridiculous situation I am in , I pay 90 bucks a month to use my mobile as a modem for the lap top so I can go on the net
and the phone needs to be in , what's called a 3G network area, which, is pretty much all of a Sydney, all of the northern beaches, all of Avalon, but , not Jacqui's place, literally , as soon as you cross into her property, 3G drops out. Now I been on the phone with Vodafone about this for 5 months, and one lady has been really helpfull in trying to get to the bottom of this as to why this is happening, as this has only started in since about Feb this year, and for 2 years before I had no problem. The way Vodafone works is you speak to a customer service representative and they tried to help you , if they can't they make a customer problem description ( or something aling those lines ) and feed it onto the tech department, but they can't keep track of the technical department to see what progress they are having or what the problem is in the first instance. All they could tel me was that thye are working on it, and se-ing that they been working on it now for 5 months, it begs the question as to when it will be completed, but , customer service can't tell me as they do not have any form of communication with their technical department ( and this for a communications company---bizarre)
So here I am , sitting at the neighbours fence to get 3G coverage, but I must prop up the umbrella, ladder and big bits of cardboard so I can not have a glare factor on the screen. Got my coffee and notice the slingshot, that's to keep these pesky minor birds from swooping down on the cat and the chickens

Aahh...where you been Sonny ?

Yeah well, I got a few emails from you out there,concerned that there were no posts going up for , oh my gawd, more than 2 weeks, crazy huh.
Well, that's all because I'm back in Australia , and for some frustratingly annoying reason, up at Jacqui's place there is no 3G reception on my mobile phone. I use the 3G coverage in Australia with my mobile phone to connect to the internet, and it works fine...till I get to Jacqui's place...I mean, I'll stand in the neighbours yard, 3G, the driveway, 3G, in the middle of the street 3G, but the house or garage..nothing. Jacqui has been struggling with this for a long time as well, simple you say, use the phone line, well she did, but could only get dial-up ( can you imagine ) so Jac was on dial up for a while, but yeah, forget even trying msn chat on that speed, just was not going to happen. So upgrade to ADSL , and/or get Wi-Fi, I mean the neighbours have it, so ..why not at Jacqui's house.well...turns out Jacqui's phone lines were upgraded a while ago, only one in the street, so she has the " new "phone line that can't get the current internet connections, not with any of the different phone companies, oh , but yes, ofcourse you can get the old lines put back in , at a cost of ..ermm.. 30 thousand dollars ( pass ) So after much searching, Jacqui now has a satellite dish on the garage roof( was not possible to put on the roof roof, as trees would have blocked a clear signal ) But the data packages aren't cheap, and best to use it after 11pm, still , she has at least upgraded from dial up. But back to my 3G, strange thing is, that I have been using 3G to connect to the net for over 3 years now, and I never had a problem before, I even got myself a little office desk and set up a little office in the garage so I can labour away on the 'puter and net in the garage away form the kids, and has been fine, but now, since last 2 times I been in Oz, it literally drops as soon as I walk onto her property, and we are talking about a standard sized block in the suburbs, and the option of sitting in the middle of the street with an extension cord is not on, last time I was here, back in August, I discovered that I could get a clearer signal if I was on the roof

That's me on the garage roof

bleedin' ridiculous, or , dedication

no ladder , no 3G
but that only worked best on slightly overcast day, as the sun's glare is too much, and yeah, well, rain is not an option ofcourse, and as soon as the sun went down, I'd be freezing.
So anyway, not much connection, so very slow on updating my blog then, so I'll try to give you a quick fast forward since Paris Fashion week. After Paris I drove back to Belgium , where I had a very over grown autumn garden to deal with, but still managed to post some pictures from the Dior, Cher, Cacharel, Bruno Pieters shows ( and a few more, but not going to name them all here, you just have to scroll down and click next ) I was only in Belgium for what seemed like 5 days, and in that 5 day period my laptop died, something about ram and memory ( too many late nights ? ) So it was in the computer shop for 3 days , getting upgraded and cleaned out, it's better now, but still not optimum. That time without my computer was weird, made me realize how much time I spend on the bloody thing, as I would be thinking to myself, ok, can't upload the pictures from Paris, so what should I do, oh, I can finish of those pictures I been meaning to process and clean up, oh, no, can't don't have my laptop, ok, well, I need to do my tax paperwork, so let's do that, oh, no, can't, as I now do it all in excell..on my computer, well, I should this person or that person, oh pooh bum, their numbers are on my computer. So instead I cut some more trees down across the road with Sabine, the trees had to get cut down as they were growing in to the electric cables and became a fire risk. Just before I left I met up with Bruno P, Glen M. and Pholoso for a small night on the town, we went and had some drinks at the Hopper ( cafe in Antwerp ) I proposed to Bruno that I shoot his amazing collection in Australia, Pholoso can come and do the styling, he can do the art directing and Glen can be ..Glen can be Glen, good idea, but it would cost a lot to get all the clothes sent to Australia, as it is not a case of just packing them in a suitcase, they all are individually packed in boxes, so if we were to shoot 12 outfits, it would mean transporting 12 boxes, hmmmm, again, that word..budget. Working on it, Bruno informs me that he will be showing the Hugo Boss collection for the first time in Paris next year, starting in January with the men's collection, good news, as going to Berlin for just one show was a big ask.

So then after my few days in Belgium, I hopped on a plane back to Sydney ( will post some images later ) and got a great view , finally, of Uluwatu in Bali, perfect peeling lefts , looked like a good 6-12 foot swell , taken from 10 km high up, back in Sydney not quite summer yet, but already a lot nicer than north Europe, but no waves, has been flat for weeks apparently, ( and will be for another 10 days )
so I spend my time cursing the lack of 3G ( been on the phone to vodafone several times, trying to get some sort of understanding as to why, but they can't seem to find out themselves) and tell you the truth, the last 2 weeks in Sydney have just flown past, I been spending a lot of time with Jacqui and the kids, on one day all of us walked around the barrenjoey headland ( some people told Jacqui it could not be done, but I knew my dad had done it a while ago , so it was possible) it took us a while, around 4 hours, but was a great walk ( will post photos later )  Spend a day at the offices of Oyster to go through all the fashion show photos, and last week end went to the sculptures by the sea at Bondi. Not updating my blog has given me the time instead to up date the vegie garden at Jacqui's , planted lots of tomatoes and Basil plus I brought back from Belgium some beans that will grow pretty tall, so I chopped down some of the bamboo to use as poles for the beans to grow up , getting the herb garden set up as well, and in the process of starting a patch of sweet corn, so lots of dirt under my nails at the moment, but now it really is time to get the blog updated, so I will try to upload some more highlight form the paris shows, but I won't have much time, as I been asked to contribute to a book they are producing on the all the past fashion weeks form Sydney ( must be close to 15 years of them ) and I have literally a mountain of photos to go through. Sitting down with Lorraine Lock tomorrow to try and go through all the pics. Also, in the past 2 weeks I have 2 small articles published about my work, one on Trendland, an article called "The other side of the runway " and one on an Australian site called Pedestrian TV, the call me the backstage homie.
Anyway, that's my little update for now, now I'll try to upload some pic for all you image hungry people out there

 

:-)

Scaryness

Was chatting with Iek last night, we were using skype to chat, then we connected our webcams to do a video call, but my face, on a computer on the other side of the world, came out a bit different. I'm like a robot man. So Iek took a picture of her screen to show me what I looked like, good thing we turned the webcam off after that.

Fre

I'm at Frederick's place, haven't seen him in a few months now, he's pretty busy working on job for Wouter, so doesn't have much time. I brought him some walnuts from the garden which Fre is crazy about, we chat and exchange some DVD's. But tell me which photo do you prefer, the top one with phonecam and phone flash,or the botom one with the phonecam flash turned off

Stina Daag

After a bit of running around in Paris I meet up with Stina, we haven't seen each other for a while, missed each other in Sydney by a day or so . So we had a lot of catching up to , and I had quite a few beers.Stina is an Art Director hailing from Sweden and has worked for nearly all the major Australian glossies, now she works at an advertsing agency in Paris, after working for over a year at one of the fashion mags in Paris

at the local internet shop

And I got an e-mail form someone who has added me as their “friend” to view photos on her flickr site, when I clicked the link, this message popped up, censorship on the internet, never experienced that before. So you can imagine how much would be blocked in someof those communist countries , and you can see Bush frothing at the mouth , wishing he could implement it on some of those news sites that don’t toe his line