Marcey the Trampette

University is where you meet the people you tend to be friends with for life. You get put in a hall and suddenly, with everyone in the same boat, you forge these supernaturally strong bonds that take an awful lot to break (and believe me I know how much it takes to break them).

So this shared experience that gives way to an incredibly strong friendship is unique to every university hall and group of people within it. Now my university hall wasn't really a hall at all. It was a little housing estate made up of budget (almost flat-pack) 6-bed houses. My bond with my housemates was stronger than most because instead of spreading myself liberally over about 200 people, there were four other girls I spent most of my time with - principally two.

Maybe it's chance who gets allocated what house, maybe there's a bit of 'let's try and match these people' - I don't know, but whether by accident or the university's design, I got placed with a girl who happened to have the same birthday as me.

This meant we always made a big deal of our birthdays. In our second year (because we all decided to stay together in our wee house) we'd have a big event in September for one clutch of birthdays and in March for our brithdays. We'd see it as a challenge to come up with creative and interesting presents so much so that for  our 20th birthday, after my housemate signed up to a kind of army-training programme, I decided that she could save on gym membership if she had her own store of keep-fit items. That and our other housemate could practice for Total Wipeout with them.

So one Saturday morning I took delivery of a trampette and added them to my collection of a gym ball, a twisty thing, a hula hoop and probably something else that 'seemed like a good idea at the time'. Anyway, the day came and we presented our housemate with her gifts and took the trampette outside for a test run.

Once we had set it up we realised that it had a picture of a formidably muscly woman named Marcey stamped across the middle and so we set about bouncing so that we too could look slightly peculiar and overly muscly like the picture suggested.

Therefore, I can now show you the next picture in the series:

On Marcey

My 20th birthday, March 2009

Motion Picture

So jumping, as we have already established, is an art. It is as much an art as the taking of the photo itself. There are, however, numerous techniques to employ to make your jumping photo stand out from someone else's.

1. Crouch down
It makes the jumper seem like they're jumping higher.
2. Use a 'speed-burst' setting
That way you won't miss it even if your timing is a little iffy.
3. Jump high
Jumping off a bench or a wall will mean the jumper is in the air for longer so there is a greater chance of getting a fantastic mid-air shot.

It's basic common sense. But one evening after a Christmas party at university, my friend and I started to experiment with another type of technique.

The Long Exposure

University Kitchen, December 2007

I am fascinated by movement. I love taking pictures of things that you can't take pictures of because they're never static long enough. I love trying to capture a literal 'motion picture'.

This is a picture I took at the 2011 Belgian Grand Prix of a Red Bull blasting out of Eau Rouge. There is no denying that a Formula 1 car is powerful and this picture really shows that - even complete with a rooster tail of spray!

I know my jumping picture doesn't quite encapsulate that same idea of movement, but it's dynamic nonetheless. The idea of suspended animation is itself suspended to show, in its place, a real motion picture.

Diving

It was nearly a year later that the my urge to jump came back. I want to explain for those who haven't really understood the point of this blog; I'm not writing a diary about suicidal tendencies - far from it. I am blogging in homage to the art of the jumping photo - capturing something that even the human eye can't really appreciate fully. It's like I've got hold of Bernard's watch and I'm freezing time so that I can look at things in suspended animation.

Anyway enough of that - we're bordering on science fiction and I haven't even shown you the next picture.

Just Call Me Tom Daly...

Andalucia, 2006

This photo was taken on a Spanish holiday where it was far too hot to do anything during the day. The only activity that proved to be enjoyable was taking a dip in the pool. Not content with doing lengths, I tried to do a Tom Daly. By that I mean teach myself how to dive not be an irritating adolescent.

So it doesn't take much to jump. Some people are, undoubtedly, better than others at pulling weird shapes and getting a lot of height, but most people can bend their legs, catch some air, and land again.

Diving, as I soon found out, is not that easy. There is an art to it, and there is a very fine line between diving perfection and a belly-flop. It took me a while to fall (pardon the pun) on the right side of that line. The art in this picture is not in taking the photo as much as it is in the jump itself.

Legs a-go-go and wild hair are usually trademarks of my jumping pictures, but with a dive you have to achieve a certain level of elegance - something that is very hard for me to do. So when you next see a jumping picture, think not of the photographer, though there role is important, but spare a thought for the jumper who might be trying harder than normal to make it all look easy.

Where it all began...

There is a bloke on Youtube that dances with people. He doesn't bore his friends with hundreds of albums of him doing tourist-y things, he takes a short video showing him dancing with a wide variety of people and then he puts it on the internet and nobody's Facebook page is ever assaulted by 200+ photos than no-one really wants to see.

Taking photos and videos can be and indeed is art; I love taking artistic pictures or making mini-movies. It would appear that most people don't think like I do. I want to see outside-the-box thinking when I am subjected to other people's holiday photos and so in a stand to remove the bone-crunching boredom that my friends will endure when looking through my photos on Facebook I began to collate a series of pictures.

Taking a picture of someone jumping involves skill. Gone are the days of 'point and press'. I therefore decided that I would give my friends on Facebook a highlights package of the places I have visited, putting one picture from each place in an album. The name of that album... Where have you jumped?

I have so far jumped in 9 countries, on my own, with a whole host of friends, up high, down low, inside and out, in winter, spring, summer or, ahem, fall, on three birthdays, and off endless shin-high objects.

But there was one place it had to start - one picture that had to set the ball rolling.

The Beginning

Tuscany, 2005

It was on holiday with many and varied members of my family that we began to experiment with the jumping photo as an art. It became a compulsion to get a better picture each time - higher, crazier poses, better views. I don't know if you'll agree, but as the one that set the ball rolling, it's not a bad effort.