As some of you may know I have been carrying a yellow plastic duck with me recently and taking pictures of it. At first this might seem the actions of a mad man, but I can explain.
In 2008 I attended BathCamp, a BarCamp unconference in Bath. There was a bath at BathCamp that contained ice, cans of beer, and lots and lots of plastic ducks. At then end of the event we were given the ducks and asked to take pictures of them in cool places. There is a competition, but I don’t know if there is a prize, or if it is still happening.
Now to 2009. As you may know I like to take the odd picture with a digital camera and many friends who are in to photography. I was persuaded to give Project 365 a go. This is when you take a picture every day and upload it to the Internet.
As I often had the duck with me just in case of a cool photo opportunity I decided it would be fun to do an additional Project 365 for the duck. I called this Duck 365.
Now with that almost making sense I should perhaps stop explaining, but I will instead continue. When you upload a Project 365 photo you tend to write a bit of text about the shot. With the duck photos I decided to do the write-up from the duck’s perspective, and inadvertently gave the duck a personality.
The duck has slowly been gathering a back story. He just kind of came in to existence so sees what is happening but does not understand it all. In many ways he has the brain of an adult with the understanding of a toddler. He is aware that he is a plastic/rubber duck, but he also thinks he is a real duck, and at times a human. He is also rather cantankerous at times and blames me for most things that do not go the way he expects.
Originally I was pointing out that the duck did not really exist, but people seemed to get rather upset by this, so I will go along with him being real for now. People now call him Mr Duck, bring there ducks to meet him, and even given him his own conference badges.
You can follow Mr Duck on his page here, through his flickr set, on his Facebook page, or his Twitter stream. Quite a few people seems to do so and I hope it is because of the humour I try an inject.
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Hi, Alistair. We share a mutual obsession with ducks, but probably for very diferent reasons. Please take a look at the facebook group silly Duckers. I can see that I am a novice at this compared with yourself, but what I do know is that Doug and Doris make my life far more interesting. My aim is to encourage support for Chernobyl 2000, as you will see on the info tab. If you would like to contribute images, it would be really appreciated. =B¬)