The sky this afternoon.
Category Archives: Photography
Moonlight on the Cam
The BBC Radio 4 PM programme had an interesting idea. They asked anyone with a camera to take a picture of where they were at exactly 5pm today and post it to them. At that moment, I was crossing the river Cam at Grantchester (right opposite the house where Bertrand Russell lodged when he was writing Principia Mathematica with Whitehead), so I stopped and took this. Quality is poor — I only had a point-and-shoot camera on me. But still…
LATER… I went back to the image and tried a different crop, which seems to me to be much more satisfactory:
Eastern light
Shot on a cold, wintry East Anglian day.
Picasso’s guitar
Courtesy of the PhotoBooth software that comes with the new Macs.
Flickr: camera stats
Flickr has released released some interesting statistics about the most popular cameras used by uploaders. This graph shows the most popular ‘serious’ cameras. The graph below shows the most popular point-and-shoot cameras.
If these stats are accurate, Canon seems to have the business sewn up.
Flickr comments:
These graphs show the number of Flickr members who have uploaded at least one photo with a particular camera on a given day over the last year.
The graphs are “normalized”, which is a fancy way of saying that they automatically correct for the fact that more people join Flickr each day: the graph moving up or down indicates a change in the camera’s popularity relative to all other cameras used by Flickr members.
The graphs are only accurate to the extent that we can automatically detect the camera used to take the photo (about 2/3rds of the time). That is not usually possible with cameraphone photos and cameraphones are therefore under-represented.
Wacky panorama
I was in Oxford today for a meeting at Queen’s and afterwards I walked briskly along Broad Street. The city was entrancing in the afternoon sunshine. It’s got so much lovely honey-coloured stone. I tried to take a panoramic sequence of Balliol as I sped along, rushing to catch a bus. The moral — as you can see from the result — is: never do panoramas in a hurry!
I love Balliol. It’s such an architectural jumble. I’m reminded of the story of Benjamin Jowett, the celebrated Master, coming out of the front gate and being confronted by some market stalls. He queried the price of some goods. The aggrieved stallholder protested to him that it was “impossible for an honest man to make a living, these days”. “Well, my good man”, said Jowett, “cheat as little as you can”.
I’d love to have known Jowett (though I am pretty sure the feeling would not have been reciprocated). He was a great reformer of Oxford traditions whose motto was “Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.” According to Wikipedia, a Balliol undergraduate described him in doggerel thus:
First come I. My name is Jowett.
There’s no knowledge but I know it.
I am the Master of this College,
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.
Balliol used to be famous for producing graduates who ran the country (including a raft of British prime ministers, though not Tony Blair). Geoffrey Madam said that “at the top of every tree there is an arboreal slum of Balliol men”. In the 1930s it had a reputation as a haven for liberals. Evelyn Waugh and his reactionary friends once provoked a riot in an Oxford cinema by shouting “Well rowed, Balliol!” when a film showed a group of South American natives paddling briskly along in a dug-out canoe.
Joined-up photography
I gave a seminar today on “Blogging and the new media ecosystem” at the new Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford. Afterwards, Paddy Coulter, Director of the Reuters Fellowship, entertained us to tea and gossip. As usual, I tried to capture the moment using David Hockney’s ‘joiner’ approach. As usual, I failed. Sigh. Joiners are much more difficult to do than you’d think — or than Hockney makes them appear.
Brillo Pad rides again!
Andrew Neil (aka Brillo Pad) gave the Keynote Address to the Society of Editors conference. This picture was taken just as the TV director was switching from a questioner (standing) back to BP.
His Address was an entertaining farrago of insights, half-truths and thinly-veiled attacks on his enemies. It went like this:
New media bring challenges… time for a new mindset…an opportunity not a threat…all technological change brings upheaval…much to be positive about… bad news only for red top tabloids… the Guardian has used the web astutely to reinvent the Guardian brand… Sunday Times is selling more copies today than it did under his editorship…the Economist is doing brilliantly… the FT is thriving again, showing what can be done when a newspaper comes to terms with the Net…journalists who are so good at lecturing others about the need to adapt to disruptive change are not very good at learning to live with it themselves…the days of spending the day working on a piece, filing it just before five and heading off to the pub are over…all media organisations must become 24×7 operations…’reach’ is the key to getting a true measure of our proposition… 38% of people’s leisure time now spent online (more than watching TV) but 38% of advertising spend hasn’t followed it — yet: but that will change as advertisers follow the eyeballs…Google now has more ad revenue than ITV… but Google is growing fat on the backs of poor unpaid journalists and their employers … time for a conversation with Google about this matter …need for a new breed of journalist … journalists will become brands in their own right… broadband has transformed the Net into a multimedia channel… there’s a premium on moving-picture ads…. newspapers must get into that… there’s never been a better time to be a journalist… these new journalist-brands “will write blogs because you wouldn’t give them a column, and then they’ll sell the Blog back to you for an inflated price”…
He finished off with some incomprehensible score-settling about the Scottish Media Group, the Scotsman, the Herald and the unalloyed stupidity of the Scottish political class.
In questioning, he revealed that he had bought Handbag.com for £300,000 and sold it a short time later for £22 million.
Update… Roy Greenslade is also at the conference. Here’s his Blog’s take on Brillo Pad.
In a bowl, brightly
One of my favourite places to eat in London is the brasserie in the Groucho Club. You can guess where the name came from. If not, try here. I’ve been a member since 1989. Among its attractions is pervasive Wi-Fi, so I find it a great place to work when in London.
Unfinished business
I spent most of last Sunday afternoon laboriously trimming the big beech hedge that is one of the glories of our garden. Then I made some coffee and lit a cigar and sat down to admire my handiwork — and immediately noticed that I had missed not just those straggly bits on the top edge, but also the TV aerial that appears to have grown out of the hedge when I wasn’t looking.
Which just goes to show that it all depends on your point of view.