photography

Dead planes

Friday, March 12. 2010







Some astounding images of a dead Russian sea plane. (Spotted on a @eleventhvolume tweet).

Defined tags for this entry: , ,

Robin Friend

Tuesday, March 2. 2010


Belly of the Whale. Image by Robin Friend


Greenhouse. Image by Robin Friend


West Country. Image by Robin Friend

"The landscape is in danger of losing its capacity to keep secrets from us."

We've not had much in the way of photography on here recently, but I came across Robin Friend today (courtesy of youyouidiot) and wanted to share. His photographs have got a damp melancholy to them, and feel both secretive and oddly voyeuristic, as if Friend were trying to restore some of the secret nature he sees as being leached away from our relationship to landscape. You can more of his work at robinfriend.co.uk and youyou has an article on Friend in this month's Hotshoe magazine.

Defined tags for this entry: , ,

The long gap

Wednesday, February 17. 2010



Excuse the long hiatus, I've been sweating it out beneath the roaring sun in The Gambia and Senegal. I stepped outside work today, into the first pool of sun I've seen since being back and could scarce believe that just five days ago I was facing the same bright disc and barely able to stand it. The shot above was taken about 100km inland from the coast in Senegal at the a ford of a river. The area was rich with cultivation - onions, tomatoes, lettuce - and people tended neat gardens, pulling at weeds, taking water straight from the river with battered metal watering cans. We sat at the ford for a time and watched the comings and goings, which was mainly people passing between villages, some with things to sell, others on social visits or simply on their way to school. What I love best about the photo is the little feet. All three women had children in these back slings (though two are obscured), and each of the children looked as if they could sleep all day long. Amen to that.

The Big Picture

Thursday, December 17. 2009


Fishermen row a boat in the algae-filled Chaohu Lake in Hefei, Anhui province, China. Image from REUTERS/Jianan Yu


Chinese military singers take part in a chorus performance of patriotic songs. Image from AP Photo


A Hindu woman devotee offers prayers after taking a holy dip in the waters of river Ganga in the northern Indian city of Allahabad. REUTERS/Jitendra Prakash

Dazzling, humbling 3 part suite of photos from 2009 over the Big Picture blog. There isn't much to say except go and take a look.

Defined tags for this entry:

Francis Wolff and the Empire of Cool

Monday, October 19. 2009

A couple of dazzling galleries of images from the lens of Francis Wolff - from the peerless If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger blog. Woolf was an executive at Blue Note, a company set up by his childhood friend and co-German emigre Alfred Lion, and Woolff used his access to the rehearsal sessions to full effect. Awesome. Genuinely.


Elvin Jones


Eric Dolphy


John Coltrane


Defined tags for this entry: ,

Red Dust

Wednesday, September 23. 2009


The harbour bridge, obscure

As a city that is so concerned with itself as a spectacle, the current dustcloak that is choking Sydney must be doubly disorienting. There have been some amazing shots of the dust storms - the above is probably my favourite (taken, I assume from the Rocks end of the bridge) - but there are some other jaw-dropping efforts contained in these two Flickr galleries.

Edit: A fantastic piece on this from Dan Hill of City of Sound. (Cheers to John Coulthart for the tip on this).

Defined tags for this entry: , , ,

A taste for the epic...

Wednesday, August 12. 2009


Eclipse - 6m 42s


Nebula NGC 6559

I routinely rediscover the NASA APOD every six months or so and promise myself I'm going to check it every day, follow the links, make myself humble. But I invariably creep away. Current events though have made me think of our place among the infinities and coming across it again today is no great surprise.

There's also a suitably epic track to download - Belong's mighty 'The Door Opens the Other Way'. Turn it up: it will fill the room.

Download: Belong - The Door Opens the Other Way

Defined tags for this entry: , , ,