Tag Archives: photography

Chaplinesque lamp post
Chaplinesque lamp post 2
Walking railings
Flaky rooftops
Balloon tree
Squeezy house
1000-fin swimming tree
Dreamt bridge
Shortbread bridge
Water spirit haunted house
House about to move house
Water with muscle fibres
Water brush strokes
Half-remembered castle

Looking at the water

22 September 2015

Point your camera at a reflection in a canal or a river, flip the image around and see what a liquid world looks like. Trees try to float up into the sky, lamp-posts become Chaplinesque, railings grope around corners, fish pass by windows and houses breathe in and out.

Around and up and also down

14 November 2012

Some time ago I posted an article on my liking for random walks, in which I outlined an insanely complicated method to get to places you weren’t planning to see. Recently I found another way to go to randomly explore the world, without getting up from my chair.

A few days ago, as I was preparing to leave for Prague, I tried to find some information on the city’s railway station. I can’t remember why, I have been to so many places (at least virtually) since then. I happened on a page with a 360 degree spherical picture of Fantova kavárna or Fanta’s Café, originally the main hall of the station as it was built in 1871 by the architect Josef Fanta. The picture was on a website called 360cities.net which, I have discovered, is a wonderful tool for random travelling.

I soon ended up in other places in Prague, my favourites I think being the Bethlehem Chapel, a medieval crane and the wonderful Strahov library, where the picture is so detailed that I am quite confident that I will one day spot a bookworm about to take a bite out of one of the ancient volumes.  Read more…

Africa, slowly, from the sky

4 May 2010

The April 19 issue of the New Yorker had an interesting article by Lauren Collins on the American photographer George Steinmetz. His speciality is taking pictures from a motorised paraglider which  he flies low and slow (27 mph is the one speed it has). With it he can get the angles which he wants, whereas “trying to get a pilot to put a plane exactly where you want it is like trying to get someone else to scratch an itch”.

The picture above is of a salt-making site at the village of Teguidda-n-Tessoumt in northern Niger. Read more…