I took the above picture from my balcony whilst on Honeymoon. Its's taken with an iphone app called Hipstamatic, which replicates electronically what analogue cameras like the Lomo do, namely creates a sort of instant nostalgic feel to a picture. The press of a button gives you an automated, no talent required, dreamy snapshot, and gives otherwise mundane images a soupcon of artistic gravitas. Found an interesting article today that attempts to unravel the popularity of this sort of thing - namely that

"The faux-vintage photo is merely an illustrative example of a larger trend whereby social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past."

A chance comment from a man in a pub (a Mahlerman in a pub) made me feel sufficiently guilty enough to galvanise me into kicking this thing back into life!

To begin: Abandoned Wrecks - photos of coastal delapidation (I note that the images are very cheap to purchase too!)

A collection of beautiful photographs of

empty swimming pools

Crumbling into the western desert. A simple refutation of the American Dream

I really like this photo - it's spooky and I just immediately think ' This would have made a great Hitchcock film poster'
the above image is a photochrome of an ice cave in the alps - we've all seen them, those ghostly edwardian postcards of stained brown days, the strange granular clarity of the images; their sinister childlike colours that bleed and warp.

Photochromes seem similar in their 'hyper-reality' to the current trend for tilt-shifting, which has been all over the web for ages now and which is just beginning to seep into the mainstream of TV and press ads. I've read the description of how they do it a few times now, and I'm still not really sure I understand totally!




I like this photo because it looks like the ultimate dream Subbuteo kit I never had.

They've got an exhibition on at MoMA -
"Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West" , and here's a slideshow and some interesting words over at Slate

I love images of the western desert, the threadbare houses wilting in the sun, the mysterious lines that bisect the salt flats on google earth, the weirdos, the outlaws, the myths

Lovely pictures from an american chap called Eric Rolph

Iain Chatburn is a young photographer from Loughborough who takes lovely photographs of our countryside, including a fine collection of tree trunks, which in general are things that I can stare at, touch, lean on, climb and sit by for ages

This is pretty amazing! The above photo is of an air gun pellet fired directly at a razor blade and being split in two! More incredible freeze-frame photography HERE

Lots of lovely abandoned ruins

Vindicated!

For a few years now I have been telling various non-believers that the amount of megapixels a camera has is of fairly little relevance to the quality of the pictures that it takes. The lens is where the magic happens. Here, at last, is the boss of Olympus cameras saying that they are no longer interested in the 'megapixel war', and will instead concentrate on producing better lenses and sensors for their SLR cameras, as they reckon that 12 megapixels is probably enough for nearly everybody, including most professionals

THE WAR IS OVER

Venice from Above

Funny how so many people of my age and younger have a nostalgia for the postwar years, when we were yet to be born until another 30 long years later!

This brief window of time after WW2 as the sun set over Albion was captured in beautiful fashion by the photojournalist John Gay, a German. Born Hans Gohler in 1909, he fled the country in 1933 for a new life in Britain, horrified by the treatment of his Jewish friends at the hands of the Nazi regime, and served in the Pioneer Corps during the Second World War. His favourite subjects were the English countryside, London street scenes and the architecture of the railways, the latter leading to a book collaboration with Sir John Betjeman.

"...His photographs capture people going about their everyday lives and they are special because he was looking at Britain through foreign eyes..."

John Gay - England Observed runs from January 29 - March 29 at Kenwood House, Hampstead. Admission is free

Collection of Photographs

OBITUARY: JOHN GAY