Heroes with photoers

Ten years ago, to the very day, I took these photos. Two are of regular heroes, Indiana Jones and Lara Croft; and two are heroes of the Super variety, Batman, and Superman:

The above heroes were, of course, not real. They were plasticated sculptures, standing outside the old London County Council building, to advertise movies, presumably.

It’s interesting – is it not? – that no such statues are erected to honour real people. Or none that I know of. Those are still done in monochromatic metal.

I’ve just seen how the photos have worked out. Indy is trying to whip Superman. And Lara Croft is shooting Superman. Both of which seem rather unwise.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Super selfie taken on a sky slope

I reckon that, if there were some kind of competition for selfie photography, this selfie would, if entered, be a definite contender for a medal spot:

I am fond of arguing that you should judge a new technology or communicational device or software application, not by its merely average, everyday uses, but by its most significant uses. So long as the average uses do no great harm, then if the highly significant uses are very good, that’s proof of the extreme goodness of the thing. Don’t judge telephones only by all the silly but harmless chitchat they transmit, judge them by those life-saving 999 calls. Don’t judge Skype by people just gibbering at random even though there’s no big problem with that, judge it in particular by how it connects people with relatives who are dying on the other side of the world. Judge it when doctors use it to do long-distance and life-saving diagnoses, or when an absent father, working abroad, is able to keep in touch with his kids back home.

The same applies to selfies. Most of them don’t do any harm, even if they aren’t great works of art. But some are terrific. See above.

As you can see very clearly, this one was taken with a mobile phone. Look closely, and you’ll see that there is a perfect shadow of the photoer, just to the right of the mobile phone.

Found it here.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A wedding photo session in March 2008

Ten years ago, plus another eleven days, there was a wedding photo session in Parliament Square, and I joined in, as I always do whenever I see this kind of thing happening:

I like how, top left and top right, they tied her train (?) to the railings, to get a better picture. That gives you just a small hint of how much trouble all concerned go to, to get good photos. Two Real Photographers, going at it for about half an hour.

And so totally absorbed in what they’re doing that they hardly notice me. Or if they do, they don’t care. Besides which, given what a spectacle, in a good way, they are making of themselves, they probably agreed with me that they were fair photographic game.

I wonder what sort of life they are living now. A good life, I hope.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

My new FZ150

No, I’ve not bought yet another camera. I refer to the new Panasonic Lumix FZ150 that I bought myself, as a late Christmas present, in January 2012. When I look back through my photo-archives it becomes clearer and clearer that this was the moment when my photos really started looking pretty.

On February 1st 2012, I posted nine of the photos I had taken on January 30th, of my fellow digital photographers. Here are nine more photos of photoers, that I took on that same expedition:

In these photos, we observe some dedicated photographers, with their SLRs, some hobbyists with what are still only cheap cameras, and, inexorably on the rise, smartphones.

One more for luck, an example of a genre I grow ever more fond of, the perhaps rather (in this case very) blurry bird, in flight:

I cropped the original, to hide the photoer’s face.

Yes, I picked nine good ones to show you, back in February 2012. Now I can easily show nine more just as good, and then another that I only now noticed.

That was the change that new camera brought with it. Before it, I took the occasional good photo, and many bad ones. When the FZ150 arrived, I took quite a lot of good photos, and as many bad ones as ever.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Ladies in Quimper Cathedral

Yes, still ill, so still quota-photo-posting:

July 2009.

I like the hands.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Photoer in silhouette

I haven’t taken many photos of people in silhouette, but I should do it more, because it is a really good way to photo people. Maybe the problem is that a person has to be in the dark with lots of light behind him or her, and if you are like me and you just photo people out in the open, and you let the lighting be an act of God, so to speak, God only very rarely obliges with a silhouette.

But God did so oblige, on Jan 5th, which was the day I also took the first four of yesterday’s photos. This photoer was under Blackfriars Bridge and hence in darkness, and behind him, we observe the Millennium Bridge, artistically out-of-focus:

See also this photo, taken indoors, of Christopher Snowdon.

Does face recognition software work with silhouettes? I just shoved that question into google, but answer came there none.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Winter sunlight and new buildings beyond Lower Marsh

On the fifth and eighteenth days of this month I was in Lower Marsh, which is just south of Waterloo Station, as I often am. On each of these days, there was bright sunshine, and cloud.

On each day, after I had done my business in Lower Marsh and continued on to Blackfriars Road, and to its two newly constructed edifices: One Blackfriars (the curvey one) and 240 Blackfriars (the “crystaline” one).

The first of these photos, !.1, shows One, and One reflected in 240:

I love a good crane, and 1.2 is rather remarkable, because it shows (a) two construction cranes, (b) these cranes reflected in 240 Blackfriars, and (c) on the surface of that same building and above the reflections of the cranes, the shadows of those same cranes. If you click on nothing else, click on that.

Photo 1.3 tells us where we are, and shows One of that road scraping the sky,

In 2.1, 2.3 and 3.3, we see another joy of winter, trees without leaves.

The final photo of this little set, 3.3, shows the tower of a crane with some of those trees, and is included because the colours are what you would expect with regular lighting.

Ah, but what if the lighting is irregular? What if there is bright sunlight hitting a crane tower, but with dark cloud instead of blue sky behind it? 3.2 is what then happens. Worth another click, I’d say.

And 3.1 shows clouds of a very different sort, again reflected in 240 Blackriars. Also pretty dramatic.

1.1 to 2.1 taken on the fifth. 2.3 to 3.3 on the eighteenth.

What, no photos of photoers? Was I the only one photoing? Could nobody else see the epic dramas of light and dark, construction and reflection, scaffolding and skeletal trees, that I was seeing? Apparently not.

On the fifth, soon after I had taken the first four of the above photos, my fellow photoers had been all over the man with the flaming tuba.

Photography is light. But I guess for most photoers, mere light, bouncing off of dreary things like modern buildings, cranes, trees, scaffolding and the like, is not enough.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Photoing the man playing a flaming tuba

So today I was up to my neck doing other things. Well no not really, I just forgot about doing this, until it was bed time. So, here are some photos of people photoing a man playing a tuba with flames coming out of it:

Photoed by me, under Blackfriars Bridge (the one with a railway station on it), earlier this month.

I do not know why the man in the red and white hat was holding a bit of silver paper. Something to do with food he had been eating?

This man is regularly seen playing his flaming tuba, all over London. I myself saw him playing outside Embankment tube, not so long ago. Also being worshipped by photoers.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Strange home decorating photo

This is a strange photo, which looks somewhat like Modern Art, but which actually isn’t (a pleasing phenomenon which I referred to in passing in this recent posting of mine). What it is is a photo of some home decorating:

Aren’t you supposed to put the glue on the wallpaper, rather than on the wall? Perhaps both? Personally, I chose my wallpaper by not caring what it was when I moved in and thus keeping it as was, so I have never done anything like this.

Also, what are those peculiar white marks on the right? They look like random smudges of white paint. But why are they there? Very strange. Presumably something else was being painted before the wallpaper went on.

All is explained here. It’s number nine of those thirteen photos, which I found out about here.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Primrose Hill photoers

Yesterday’s photo, taken at Primrose Hill before Christmas, was very pretty. That lovely light you get when the sun is low, which it always is, which is nice because it’s nice, and nice because it means you can see what’s on people’s screens. Trees uncluttered by leaves. Distant Big Things. Wonderful. Which is why there were so many other photoers in action:

No computer-recognisable faces, but lots of winter clothing, including woolly hats and woolly gloves.

18 photos there, and just two of them (2.1 and 5.1) do not feature smartphones. I chose the photos entirely for artistic impression. It merely turned out that way.

See also 1.3. It looks like she’s holding a giant cock of the unmentionable sort. But, it’s a glove. So (see 4.2): No Bad Vibes.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog