Happy Birthday Charles Dickens, 200 years old today.

Featuring in the 200th anniversary celebrations around the city today, Ian Dickens, great-great-grandson of Portsmouth’s own famous son, spoke outside the Dickens’ Birthplace Museum this morning, along with Simon Callow, the Lord Mayor and Susan Healey, chair of Portsmouth Dickens Fellowship.

They were joined by the Pickwick Bicycle Club on their penny farthings, school children from the Charles Dickens Junior and Primary schools, Friends of the Museum and members of the community.

Ian Dickens, great great grandson of Charles, today in Portsmouth

Light play - Homs , Syria

Idyllic street scene taken from the tower restaurant central Homs in Syria - before the unrest, during a recent holiday... so sad to see what's happening there now

Katy Sexton, Former World 200m Backstroke Champion

Amazing photoshoot with Katy Sexton, training for the Olympics, had the opurtnity to photograph Katy in the studio and at work in the pool, thank you to HMS Temeraire Portsmouth.

Borneo 2011 photographic trip

Perhaps once in a lifetime, or if you are really lucky twice, does an opportunity to visit Borneo come up. And so it was for us – this last Christmas – a 3-week trip to the island. Prior to this, I wasn’t even sure where or what Borneo was. Now I do: it is an island, the third largest, in the South China Sea, north of Java, Indonesia that is about 73% Indonesian,1% Brunei, with the remainder taken up by Malaysian states, Sabah & Sarawak. It is home to, and largely covered by, one of the oldest rainforests in the world. It is also, in short, a slice of paradise.

Kuala Lumpar, exciting enough itself, was our hopping over point, and the short flight to Sarawak went over some of the greenest seas, lushest landscapes and deserted sandy beaches. The capital of Sarawak is a city called Kuching, meaning cat, not ‘hitting the jackpot’; albeit we felt we had. It is a relatively new city, formerly a British Colony that is spread along the Sarawak River. It’s people are a mix of Chinese, Malays, Ibans & other ethnic groups and it’s cuisine likewise.

Food, as well as wild-life was one of the great delights of the trip; trying everything from bar-b-que seafood extravagances, to colourful, stripy local cake to blue fruit! We ate mainly at the street food markets, which were colourful, fresh and really good value.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/131design/

Happy New Year!

Some great new projects are underway for the New Year: 160 page brief history to Fratton Locomotive Depot is in production; 2 six-week creative workshops with young people from “Mix-Up” in Gosport are coming to a successful conclusion, culminating in their own New Year Calendars. Pitching for a short promo film for Hampshire County Council; 3 books are at the printers, 2 more on the way and at the last count, Waterstone’s held 7 of our books. We're staging an “Urban Theatre” event at Southsea’s skatepark for the city’s ‘Lost Hour’, maintaining a high profile creatively in Portsmouth, as well as looking forward to 5 more years of growth and productivity - and really big print bills!