Unreliable information since 1972
The first of two shots of the same subject, both of which I’m really quite happy with.
LFW was on in the grounds of the museum when I was there, and I wanted at least one shot that played with of the sorts of tricks that can get used in fashion portaiture to make people/products look striking. So here’s an “arty” high contrast black and white, applied to my own size zero model. Check out that attractive toothy grin…
Cheery little subject, this.
In case you have trouble reading it (this one more than most lives and dies by the viewer’s monitor settings, so I imagine a few of you will have trouble (it turns out I certainly did)) the text reads “Nothing lives forever, neither the body nor solid rock. RIP Restless in Perpetuity”
And this is, once again, from the Natural History Museum. In fact just assume that my photos will continue to be from there, until I say otherwise. :)
These are Ammonite clocks. The time they are showing is 65 million years past extinction.
I wish the detail on the top layer there was a little sharper, but I was shooting at highish ISO in low light, and every attempt I’ve made to sharpen it a bit has resulted in the noise level getting correspondingly cranked up.
Very short reviews this week.
Book : Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works
A book on typography. Not really easy to review, but if, like me, you want a basic primer on type, you could do a lot worse. Short, clear and to the point.
Music: O2
Mutant blues and beatboxing. It worked for Tom Waits, and it works here for Son of Dave. Really enjoying this one. It’s not Waits – it’s much closer to traditinoal blues, and lacks Wait’s voice and songwriting, but I’d still suggest that if you liked Real Gone, you give this a listen. (Available via Emusic, for those with accounts.)
A dress made out of recycled cans in the V&A (Edit: or as Ade rather more correctly points out, the Science Museum).
The lighting effect (as is probably obvious) is a fake – it’s not spotlit from beneath, that’s my camera’s flash at work, with my fingers across it to produce the big blocks of darkness. Sadly, the little screen on my camera made it quiet hard to make out the fact that I’d still lit a bit on the left of the dress. Serves me right for not using a bit of cardboard. (Not that I had any on me, or I would have.)
The first of a few photos from a Scavenger hunt round The Natural History Museum the other week. I’m posting this one, because a) Doug looks funny in the mirror, and b) I’m really happy with the composition on a techincal level – I think I got quite a nice balance of elements, and they’re all laid out in a manner that feels pleasing and natural.
Sorry, I think I wrenched my arm patting myself on the back there.
This week’s book: Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone
One I nicked of Dave when the AOL mothership took him to parts strange and alien. I loved this, bleak and depressing though it was. By the end of the first section of the book, I was ready to quit my job, and go off and do something worthwhile to improve people’s live in some godforsaken part of the world.
By the end of it, I just couldn’t imagine being able to go through the kind of stuff that the book’s three authors did. There’s still the nagging sebnse that I ought to try anyway, but my sense of enthusiasm for it is completely gone. It’s a stinging crtique of US foreign policy in the final years of (and post) Clinton’s presidency – an account of a moment where it looked like the world’s only superpower was going to step up to it’s responsibilities, only to turn tail and run from an armed streetgang that got lucky. It’s an indictment of UN beauacracy and incompetence.
It’s well worth the time it takes to read it.
This week’s music: Some Loud Thunder
I seem to be doing a one-week-hit, one-week-miss with these reviews. I quite liked this one, but I don’t seem myself listening to it a lot. Lots of bits of tracks I liked quite a lot, but as whole it didn’t really make that much impact on me. Dunno. Maybe it’ll grow on me, it kind of has that “maybe I haven’t approached it in the right frame of mind” feeling to it. Doesn’t help that I find the singer’s voice a bit annoying, though.
