Lightning reactions

An epic thunderstorm the other day meant I spent many minutes repeatedly attempting to capture lightning as it lashed across the sky. Most shots were a failure but the one below was a shot I was pretty pleased with, especially given it was shot on an iPhone 5C.

Lightning quick reactions. #London #weather pic.twitter.com/rfgCKmgnsj

— danworthV3 (@danworthV3) July 3, 2015

Chairs in a field

Always liked this picture.

Morning blues

I love endless skies of blue, so blue they seem to shine. This morning was one such example, with East Putney's ancient red-brick facade a brilliant and stark contrast to the backdrop.

In fact it was so good I actually stopped to take a picture, aware people walking past would be casting quick glances my way. They should have joined in.

Resolution

Hey, hey, two blogs in under a week – what is this, some kind of record? (No, obviously not).

However, perhaps I will reconnect with the blog, as I miss updating it and enjoy having it as a location of digital whiteness for brain thoughts and book opinions and whatnot. I've experimented with other platforms – Posterous, Tumblr, Wordpress, and all that – but I do like Blogger – plus I've been using it since 2006 so it has all my posts and stuff on it.

I helped a friend move house yesterday – he still has his CDs – and it was sort of fun. I don't know why I find helping people move house oddly enjoyable. I think, perhaps, it just comes from the sense of easy completion – move this, to there, by this time, done. Easily quantifiable success.

It was a lovely sunset yesterday too, followed by hazy summer rain and glorious rainbows. Got some great pictures, as you can see below.

 

Putney Bridge at sunset

Through the hoop in Fulham

Wimbledon skies

I moved to Wimbledon at the start of October from Putney. It's a very nice area (although no The Thames running through it, shame) and it has some ridiclously massive houses which all have four cars in their gated-off driveways: one 4x4, one sports car, on estate and one "runaround", which is mostly a very new Mini.

I quite enjoy wandering around the streets, just to nosy around the area and discover any shortcuts and while doing so snapping some pictures.

This leads me to the chance to post this picture up that I took which I was quite pleased with for capturing the multitude of colour Autumn always presents.

Disposing of old fashioned photography

I was at a Turkish wedding reception on Friday night – it was a lot of fun – but something interesting happened while we where there that I thought was just a nice snapshot of how technologies we (my generation and above) know never used to exist are already engrained in the minds of youngsters who can imagine nothing else.

My girlfriend took a photo of her sister and a little girl, maybe aged seven, with a disposable camera and immediately after the flash went off the little girl grabbed it (nicely) and peered at the back, clearly expecting their to be a digital image of the photo. Her face when she saw there was nothing to look at was one of complete bewilderment.

"Yes, in the old days you took photos, had no idea what they would look like, then took them to a shop where a stranger developed them, sometimes as quickly as an hour, but often longer - several days maybe - before giving them back to you, and it cost you about a fiver, and you could only get about 24 or 26 photos on each camera. And each camera cost about a tenner, and they were pretty shit. It wasn't good no, digital is so much better. How did we cope? I've no idea. Right kids, on your hoverboards, we're off to the moon !"

Accidental bird watching

On Saturday while out enjoying the nice weather I got caught up in a bit of bird watching, by mistake. While I was waiting for my girlfriend and her friends to turn up I noticed a comorant standing guide over the river, and so decided to take a quick snap...which soon turned in to several more as said comorant did all he good to provide some good photo opportunities, including drafting in a friend of his to help. The results of this are below. He's called Albert, as it was right next to Albert Bridge. It was strangely fun. Click on images below to enlarge.

Shhhhh!

I went to the British Library yesterday. It was enjoyable. I had a look around the 'Points of View' exhibition, - no, not the best of Terry Wogan sardonically replying to a letter sent into the BBC - but a look at the first days of photography and how it impacted on society.

Then I went around the rest of the building, looked at the historical first page of Tess of the D'Ubervilles, and Jane Eyre, listened to poetry on some headphones read by Ezra Pound (sounding strangely Scottish), made a failed attempt to decipher the handwriting of the Magna Carta (why couldn't people write neatly in those days?) and then had a sit in the 'Digital Space' section and listened to some famous speeches from history.

It's a great building, and seems to be (unless perhaps it's just me) somewhat overlooked among the things-to-see-and-do-in -London-list, as it houses some fascinating pieces of history and is all free too.

Photo round-up

Went to the Thames Festival on both Saturday and Sunday this weekend. It was absolutely brilliant, with great food, music, fire and fireworks, and a great example of the never-ending cycle of London events that fill every weekend in the capital. A bunch of pictures to illustrate this.

Rowers / mad escapologist / carnival man / flaming orb / southwark bridge transformed x 3

Photo diary

I thought pictures would sum up the sort of things I got up to over the bank holiday weekend. Enjoy!

Blog looked for a place to sit

Hello again. Yesterday I promised you some thoughts on magazine captions. Here they are:

In many magazines aimed at men, either self-professed lads' mags, or magazines for men that have a veneer, or even facade, of being upmarket, there is golden rule they all follow blindly. Hilarious captions. Every picture must have a side-splittingly funny caption. This is because, you see, men like humour. Of course we do. We like drinking lager, staring at women, and laughing. Ideally at the expense of our mates when they do Something Stupid.

As such, magazine chiefs believe that by giving every picture a witty, offbeat, irreverent caption, they are appealing to LADS! enjoyment. But they're wrong. It's just bloody annoying. I don't need every picture to have a caption, and I certainly don't need them all to be jokes. In fact, the effect is cheapened by having every caption trying to be your friend because if there is one or two genuinely wry observations on an amusing quirk in an image they are buried beneath the avalanche of mediocre ones on every page.

Worst, and Shortlist does this a lot, the writers often give an inanimate object a personality, or an essence of being 'alive', by capitalising the word. So, for example, a ladder becomes "Ladder" and the caption could read. "Ladder wished he'd gone to Spain on holiday" or something equally banal. There was even a job advertised for Shortlist in which you had to submit your own "Shortlist style caption" for a picture of Tim Lovejoy.

Here's mine: Tim wondered why there was a game of PacMan on his t-shirt.

Picture perfect

The quality of mobile phone cameras continues to astound me. These were two images taken from my phone while at home, and the sheer level of detail, and size of the images, is just incredible. And my camera is hardly top of the range. The days of needing both a digital camera and a phone are surely coming to and end?


























Aside from that, isn't Cornwall spectacular?

Finishing touches

I've just noticed how image light the top of my blog is; it looks a touch drab. I don't want to go OTT but something for the banner on which the text could rest would be good. Any suggestions?

An Icelandic horse

For work I regularly have to make use of copy right free images - perhaps from dedicated sites like Morgue File (a staple of university days) - or be perusing the various terms on Wikipedia and Flickr images to see if they are free to use. Being a small company it's important to be judicious with funds you see.


What I like about this is three things:

One - that people are willing to be so open with their images. They take them and uploaded them purely because they will of interest, benefit and use to millions of people around the world. Often in ways they couldn't imagine.

Two - how many talented people there are out there. Some of the photos you come across are truly fantastic, and yet they are in all probability taken by a keen amateur photographer who is happy enough to see the image online.

Three - the best reason though is just the fact you can come across some fantastic, striking and beautiful images completely at random. Earlier today I was looking for an image of Iceland. I found this one, which is a beautiful shot and will be the one we use, but I also came across this (the image above), which is also a wonderful shot and finding it through such a roundabout way makes it all the more enjoyable.

Photos

There's lots of Photography of 2008 sections on news sites at the moment, but these from The Boston Globe, are some of the best I've seen. Some really stunning stuff.

The sky at night

Can you imagine what someone in the 11th Century or in the Roman era would have thought if they'd have seen this in the night sky?

Photo by Felicia Sutantyo in Melbourne, Australia taken from BBC photo set here.

I Told You So

As I mentioned a few posts previous I recently took part in Someone Once Told Me, and now my image has been updated. You can click here to see it on the site, or just look a few millimeters to the right. There's even a little audio description of what my 'SOTM' is about.

The owner of the site is always happy for people to take their own and send it to him so why not? What inspirational (or comedic) words would you choose?

Words of wisdom

The internet is great for many reasons. Chief among these is the way it brings people together through the most random of routes and for such interesting reasons.

On Saturday I took part in photo-wisdom website 'Someone Once Told Me' because the owner of the site had used his Google Analytics to track the link I had given him on this blog. He asked if I would like to take part and so I accepted and myself, and my housemate, went along to meet him.

We wrote our words and had our photos taken, chatted about the site, his future plans for it, why it's such an enjoyable site to peruse and so on, and it was all very pleasant. And really we had the internet to thank for bringing us all together on a cold and rainy day in North London when otherwise we would have probably just sat around doing nowt.

If you want to take part in the project you can contact Mario (for it is he) at the bottom of this page. Alternatively he says he is more than happy for people to send in their photos for submission.

I'll upload my picture once it's live.

Around Every Corner

I thought this picture was a rather extreme example of some of the terrifying sights the service personal encounter in Iraq on a daily basis.