roads
There's some fantastic photography here at The Most Dangerous Roads In The World. Some proper adventure for all you adventure tourists. (via Heresy)
quite pleased with these
I left a few of my failed polaroids in my bike basket for a week, just to see what happened if they got rained on, bashed about and mashed up with other pictures. Most of them are clearly rubbish but these two are on that awkward cusp between rubbish and art. Though I like them. And I think that if i declare that they're art, then they are. Not necessarily good art. But art.
meeting in a pinhole
I've been feeling overly digital recently so I bought this pinhole polaroid camera. It's very physical - it's plastic, photons, paper and chemistry. And I've resolutely refused to look up how to use it on the web. So I've been experimenting with it and taking loads of really bad pictures. Over-exposed, totally black, unappealingly blurry. But then yesterday I stumbled on a use I quite like. Lots of my work life at the moment is in chunks of about an hour, in cafes; mostly meetings with people. Or not meetings, chats. And inside, in the moody lighting you get in most cafes, getting a decently exposed picture takes about an hour. So I've been pulling out the thing that exposes the film, plonking the camera down on the table and letting it sit there during the whole duration of the visit. And I wouldn't say I've ended up with good pictures yet, but I get the sense that something interesting might happen soon.
This is the first one, about a 30 minute exposure, at Suburb in Covent Garden, chatting with James yesterday. (What a nice and interesting man.)
This is at The Breakfast Club this morning. about an hour chatting with Chris and about an hour typing on m'computer. You can it's ghostly echo and my ghostly hands. I think what I like about these things is they capture something of what a meeting's like. We arrive. We talk. We blah blah blah. And we're all a blur. All that's left when our clever ideas have moved on are the tables and the lights.
This is an hour's meeting with Alex West in Suburb, (elevenses) followed by some computer tapping. This reminded me that when you play with the non-digital you have to have some reverence for the stuff. I'd been writing on the back of the pictures and then just chucking them in my bag. And obviously some of the pen leaks through from one on to the other. Which spoils this one...
...and this one. This was another hour of typing and free wifi at Suburb. The blurriness comes from the bloke sitting next to me asking to look at the camera and waving it about a bit and me putting it back in a slightly different place to where it was originally.
This is me writing a presentation in Starbucks this afternoon. Writing a presentation. As Dan's pointed out, you can almost see the data coming out of the USB and firewire ports.
And this is me doing that presentation, about an hour later. Or rather it's the room I was doing the presentation too. One of those hotel, conference room places.
They're quite interesting aren't they? Not sure why, but I like them. No idea why the first one's blueish and the other's are greeny-yellow. Hopefully I'll get better at this.
moody view from our window
Kirsty's had one of those perfect little ideas which makes for a great blog - The View From Your Window - asking people to send in pictures of just that. These are my contributions. Above is the regular view.
And this is the view if you lean out a little. Always gives me a little thrill to see it standing there.
it is obvious
Went to see the H.A. Rothholz posters at the Margaret Howell shop. City Of Sound's already written about it better than I could but I was especially struck by the obviousness of the messages the posters were trying to convey - 'Fence All Openings' 'Buy Stamps In Books' 'Drivers Be Alert'.
Sorry about the bad picture, but this is a haunting reminder to tie your shoe-laces.
I very much like the stuff in Margaret Howell but they do seem to match the austerity of the product with a certain 50s chilliness in the quality of the service.
actually insightful
Phillip Toledano has done fantastic pictures of people playing videogames (via wonderland). Superb.