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Archived posts: Photography

The Ride Journal Issue 3

The third issue of The Ride Journal has just come out, and as with the previous two issues, it's a sumptuous mix of insightful and deeply personal writing, stunning photography, and fantastic illustrations.

Alistair's feeling dead chuffed, as they've included a piece he wrote about the all-night bike ride called the Dunwich Dynamo, featuring some stunning photos by Joe McGorty.

Pick up a copy online.

8 November 2009 | 2 Comments

116 to Sea

Back in July Alistair took part in the Dunwich Dynamo, the fantastic annual 116 mile all-night bike ride from London to the Suffolk coast, starting at London Fields around 8pm, and ending on the beach at Dunwich in the early hours of the following morning.

Alistair has written up his experience of the trip for the third issue of gorgeous cycling magazine The Ride Journal, to accompany a beautiful series of images by photographer Joe McGorty.

Here's an excerpt from the piece:

"Almost imperceptibly though, the group began to stir. Helmets were tightened. Route sheets pocketed. Watches checked. Clusters of riders rose to pick up their bikes, transforming into a loose pack with a single fixed purpose: to ride right through the night.

As the pinks and reds of a setting sun gave way to the deeper hues of night, we gently paced our way out of the tight bright urban sprawl into the space and calm of the countryside. Up ahead, the column of cyclists formed a shifting string of blinking red lights, stretched out along the road, twisting lithely like a living organism next to the stationary lights of the queuing traffic. It was a fantastic sight."

To celebrate the launch of the third issue of the magazine, Joe and The Ride Journal, in collaboration with Exhibit X, are hosting 116 to Sea, an exhibition of the photographs at the Pebbledash Gallery in Stoke Newington, running from 7 – 13 November, with a private view on Friday 6 November.

(For more pics of the ride, check out Alistair's pics on his Dunwich Flickr set.)

29 September 2009 | Tags: alistair hall, dunwich dynamo, joe mcgorty, the ride journal | No Comments

Thomas Allen

These have been doing the rounds for a while, but heck, they're just great, so we're happy to join the gang and give them even more air time. They're cut-out dioramas by Thomas Allen – he takes pulp novels and gets busy with a scalpel to create dynamic new interpretations of the covers. And they're lush. They also put us in mind of Lars bon Trier's Dogville, which is no bad thing.

via Very Short List

8 May 2009 | 2 Comments

Monumental

This is a tasty little number. It's a screengrab of a daily timelapse, shot from the top of London's recently re-opened Monument.

The Monument View is an "ambient responsive outdoor installation" by Chris Meigh-Andrews, which shoots a continuous timelapse birds-eye view of the city. You can use the Explore button on the top right to search through a back-catalogue of the sequences.

Brilliant.

7 April 2009 | No Comments

iPhone camera app goodness

So, for most designers, the iPhone is the mobile of choice. But for most of those designers, the phone's camera is, well, rubbish: just 2 megapixels, and a cruddy lens to boot.

But, help has arrived in the form of a couple of deeply tasty downloadable apps that let you process your shots on the phone. We've secured the services of two 'resting' members of top pop combo Gorillaz (2D and Murdoc) to demonstrate those apps.

First up is 2D and the delicious QuadCamera from Art&Mobile. This application lets you fire off a salvo of shots, just like you might with a Lomo Super Sampler toy camera. Utterly brilliant. You can adjust how fast they shoot; which layout they come in (a rectangle of four, four in a row, a rectangle of eight, or eight in a row); and whether they're colour or greyscale.

We've pushed the colour/contrast on the shots above (using Photoshop), but even without doing that, they look great.

Fantastically, once you've got them on your computer, you can download the free QuadAnimator application to create gif animations of your shots. Eat your heart out Michel Gondry. Can't wait to see the first promo shot like this…

Next up is Nevercenter's CameraBag app, which lets you apply some groovy filters to your shots, re-creating a whole variety of retro styles like Holga, Fisheye, and Lomo. (We're guessing there's some kind of copyright reason for them renaming Holga to Helga and Lomo to Lolo). It's still a bit buggy, but generally does great stuff. Here's a selection of shots of Murdoc using some of our favourites.

First up, the original shot:

Now, the Instant (Polaroid) version:

And the 1962 version:

And the Lolo version:

And finally, the Helga:

Lush eh? Check out the full size shots over at Alistair's iPhone Flickr set.

Thanks to 2D and Murdoc.

Clothing: Models' own

Styling, hair and makeup: Jamie Hewlett

29 January 2009 | 1 Comment

Big in Japan

We're loving this home movie sent to us by Eric Testroete from Vancouver, who works as a 3D artist on video games.

The film documents his trip to Japan last October, and features most of the 3340 photographs (that's a whopping 46 gigs) he took while there, on his Pentax K20D*.

It made us think a few things:

Digital photography is ace

As a non-professional film maker, there's no way you could afford to do this on 35mm neg. With digital, the only costs are memory cards and time.

Sharing is ace

Once, you might have toiled over a project like this for months, but only been able to show it to a small audience of friends and relatives. Thanks to the web, and particularly its facility for sharing, you can reach a huge audience in no time.

Computers

They can be ace too.

Most holiday advertising is not at all ace

This made us want to pick up our passports and jump on a jet plane more than just about any advert we care to remember. It's not glossy and perfect. It just feels real.

LCD Soundsystem are very ace

Great track!

All in all, not a bad thing to find in your inbox on a Monday. Cheers Eric.

*He then used Lightroom to process all the images, Métamorphose to rename all the exported files, Sony Vegas to import the sequence and cut it up, then Virtual Dub to scale it down and compress it.

6 January 2009 | 1 Comment

Happy Moog Year

Tick tock goes the clock, and it's another year down. It's been a bit nuts hasn't it? Here's hoping 2009 brings some good stuff. The words HOPE and CHANGE floated around a lot towards the end of the year, mainly thanks to Obama's campaign; and the fact that he's the man in charge stateside certainly suggests some kind of cautious optimism is allowed. Fingers crossed – we reckon it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

Meantime, we'd like to introduce you to our friend Lee, also known as Moog. He's been doing the Flickr 365 project for the past year (you take a picture a day for a whole year – technically it was 366 this year, what with the whole leap year thing) – and we're quietly blown away by his stuff.

Every day he's been putting together incredibly complicated self-portraits, getting busy with some mad photoshop skills. Particularly impressive when you find out that this isn't his day job (yet!). The four above are just a tiny glimpse of what he's been up to. Check out the full Moog 366 Flickr set.

And if that tickles your fancy, why not join the 2009 365 group?

Have a fantastic New Year's Eve, and we'll see you next year.

31 December 2008 | 1 Comment

Street or Studio: Flickr remix

We made our way over to the Tate Britain on Friday evening to catch the launch of the Street or Studio Flickr Book.

The book was created from submissions from Flickr users, who posted their photos to a Flickr group set up to tie in with the Tate Modern's recent Street or Studio show. The group pulled in over two and a half thousand photos, which were whittled down to just one hundred for the book by the judges (photographer Juergen Teller; the show's curator Ute Eskildsen; and Flickr team member Heather Champ). The winning entries were also shown on a slideshow at the Tate, which means the winning photographers can now say they've been exhibited there. Which is kinda cool.

The book was / is produced using Blurb, a print-on-demand site that lets users create their own limited edition books via some downloadable software. Blurb's been around for a while, but it's great seeing it, and Flickr, being used in such a high profile way.

We loved the selection of shots in the book (including Betty, top, by Flickr user Scarycrow; and Sunday, above, by Flickr user Docksidepress); and actually found it much more engaging than the Tate's original show.

Get your copy of the book here.

10 November 2008 | No Comments

JR’s ’28 Millimetres: Women’ at Lazarides

If you use ffffound.com, you'll recognise the shot above, which is the work of paste-up supremo JR; and if you live in London, you will probably have seen more of his stuff adorning walls across town last June, including a huge shot of actor / film-maker Ladj Ly on the outside of the Tate Modern.

JR is back in town thanks to the fantastic Lazarides Gallery, with a brilliant new show exhibiting work from his ongoing 28 Millimetres: Women project. The exhibition comes in three parts: a video installation at the Charing Cross Road gallery, a series of artworks at the Greek Street gallery, and a series of full size paste-ups along Manette Street, which runs between the galleries.

The work all comes from his time spent in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, particularly in the favela Morro da Providencia, which "has a recent history of murders of innocent people by the war between local corrupted army and drug dealers". JR filmed and photographed the women of the favela "for whom crime, violent loss of loved ones and arbitrary repression are part of everyday life"; he then pasted their faces, particularly their eyes, onto the walls of the favela. The effect is strikingly beautiful, but also politically powerful. These are no longer a silent, faceless community. They are here, and they are watching.

The 16 minute video installation at Charing Cross Road is a beautiful document of the project, a timelapse gallivant through the favela, showing the paste-ups being installed, and featuring all the women involved. It's incredibly beautiful; and it's a testament to JR that his work is never patronising or sentimental, but instead is engaging and uplifting.

The paste-ups on Manette Street feature some of the shots from Providencia, and each one has a phone number attached to it that you can call to hear their individual story. The Greek Street gallery features a selection of smaller, more intimate works using the images from the project. They're all wonderful.

The show runs until 14 November, and there should be a book coming out to go with it any day now.

Check out some more images from the show on Alistair's Flickr set, and see more of JR's films on his Dailymotion page.

6 October 2008 | No Comments

Cold War Modern at the V&A

As we mentioned in the previous post, Cold War Modern is the new show at the V&A.

And it's a corker.

The show looks at the decades after the Second World War, when the two super powers were locked in a constant battle of one-upmanship. Not content with just having bigger and better missiles, they tried to outdo each other in every area – leading to an explosion of fantastic art and design. As the blurb from the show points out "Modern life after 1945 seemed to promise both utopia and catastrophe".

The major strength of the exhibition is its sheer breadth. It pulls in Dieter Rams's beautiful designs for Braun (which still exert a powerful influence on the some modern day classics); paintings by Gerhard Richter, Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Hamilton; Archigram's Walking Cities; Otl Aicher's lecture posters; as well as bits from Eames, Corbusier, and Buckminster Fuller. Deeply brilliant.

The show runs until 11 January, but heck, why wait?

26 September 2008 | No Comments

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