place, nature, landscape

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

Posted by poacher in photography at 09:39 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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.

Posted by poacher in photography at 12:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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.

Posted by poacher in photography at 17:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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.

Posted by poacher in photography at 21:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Paul is a friend who is working in Abu Dhabi and he shot this footage from his hotel balcony. It is a thing of complete simplicity and is no less than dazzling.

Arriving in Abu Dhabi my initial reaction, standing on the balcony of my hotel room on the 20th floor, was disorientation and near-vertigo. Laid out before me was a building site on a scale I had never seen before; a small island was under construction.

This was “a room with a view” of a very different kind. Not some picturesque vista illustrating historical achievement but a vast, stark scene of becoming; a display of the knowledge, effort and will required to alter the landscape and create a new world.

The Alva Noto track 'Xerrox Monophaser 2' that forms the soundtrack to this, fits so perfectly it feels built for the task. Uncanny. Xerrox Vol. 2 is out on Raster Norton and well worth getting.

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 09:41 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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

Posted by poacher in photography at 21:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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).

Posted by poacher in photography at 13:27 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)