Higher, faster, yes. More meritocratic? No | Matthew Syed - Times Online
'Even some of our more intelligent commentators have convinced themselves that Sir Steve Redgrave is the greatest living Olympian for winning five successive golds in rowing, not seeming to realise that the sport is so elitist that it is virtually nonexistent across much of [...]
Posts tagged with ‘photography’
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16 August 2008 – 11:00 pm
The Muybridge Problem
11 June 2008 – 1:22 pm
I was wondering this morning why it is that narrative paintings always seem to fall so flat for a modern viewer (i.e. me). Not just those cheesy C19th paintings with titles like A Soldier Returns; even paintings by artists I find more sympathetic — Rembrandt, Goya, Velazquez — seem very obviously unconvincing when they try to [...]
Prokudin-Gorskii photographs
7 May 2008 – 3:18 pm
I’ve actually linked to these before, but a post over at i heart photograph reminded me about them and I was browsing through them again. Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a Russian photographer taking colour pictures in the years before the Great War. He took three black and white negatives of each subject using different coloured filters, then reassembled them [...]
Boy jumping
27 February 2008 – 11:43 am
A crop out of the centre of a photo I shot on the South Bank the other day when I went to see the Rodchenko at the Hayward.
See also Phillippe Halsman and Jacques-Henri Lartigue. And of course Flickr.
‘Alexander Rodchenko’ & ‘Laughing in a Foreign Language’ at the Hayward
18 February 2008 – 10:01 pm
I went to the Hayward today to see an exhibition of the photography of Alexander Rodchenko; the price of the ticket included entry to a show called ‘Laughing in a Foreign Language’, a exhibition which “investigates the whole spectrum of humour, from jokes, gags and slapstick to irony, wit and satire.”
It was a pleasure to [...]
Redwings
20 December 2007 – 3:26 pm
There’s a berry-covered tree over the road from the house—some kind of cotoneaster?—and at the moment there’s an almost constant stream of redwings going back and forth from it.
The redwing is a smallish thrush with a marked white eyebrow stripe and a brick-red underwing. I’m always pleased to see them, not least because they’re one [...]
Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition
1 December 2007 – 11:23 am
I went to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum yesterday, which is always worth a look.
Apart from the fact that there are loads of great photos, there’s the fun of deciding whether the judges have made the right decisions. I’m always a bit disappointed when they choose a portrait [...]
Just a quick plug…
6 October 2007 – 8:13 am
The sixth picture is up at my new photoblog Clouded Drab.
I’m just sayin’.
In non-Internet Explorer related news…
25 September 2007 – 8:25 pm
The release of WordPress 2.3 is my cue to release my photoblog onto the world.
Since this blog, which is comparatively simple in terms of layout, still isn’t working properly in Internet Explorer, I shudder to think what Clouded Drab will look like. But hey-ho, let’s press on regardless. There’s only one photo at the [...]
Site Redesign
4 September 2007 – 1:10 pm
I’m itching to do yet another site redesign—I have a pretty good idea of what I want and a working test version of it, allowing for a bit of tweaking—but I think it makes sense to wait until the release of WordPress 2.3 so I don’t have to worry about any compatibility issues. I’m considering [...]
New camera, same old clichés
29 August 2007 – 10:33 am
I’ve got a new camera, so I thought I’d celebrate it in the approved internet fashion: catblogging. You can click through to Flickr to see larger versions.
This is Boris:
And this is Posy, who is a difficult cat to photograph, because she’s so black and shiny:
Fun with lenses
20 August 2007 – 3:55 pm
A couple of weeks ago when it was, briefly, sunny, I was messing around in the garden taking pictures through the magnifying glass that came with the Oxford Ludicrously Small Print Dictionary.
Apart from the optical effects of the lens, I quite like the picture within a picture thing.
Anyway. Just a bit of silliness. If you [...]
Digiscoping parakeets
25 July 2007 – 1:43 pm
The parakeets only reached this part of London about three years ago, but now we have flocks of them every day; there are often seven or eight on the feeders and more in the surrounding trees. They’re attractive and full of character, but as ever with foreign species you worry about their impact on the [...]
Digiscoping woodpeckers
24 July 2007 – 4:09 pm
I was having a go at photographing the juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker that comes to the birdfeeder, but it’s kind of tricky. My success rate when digiscoping is never that high at the best of times; and as you can see, it’s not temperamentally inclined to stay still:
Still, the motion blur can be a fun [...]
Video digiscoping experiment
15 June 2007 – 5:05 pm
It just occurred to me a couple of days ago that since my digital camera has a video mode, I could try digiscoping some video. I thought it came out fairly well, considering. I just hold the camera up to the telescope, so it’s a bit wobbly, and the audio is dominated by aeroplane noise, [...]
Blogger Bio-blitz #1: Ayia Lake
1 May 2007 – 4:04 pm
On April 21st, I went birding to a reservoir near the village of Αγια, written as either Agia or Ayia in Roman characters. Ayia is about 9 km SW of Chania, the capital of the westernmost province of Crete, and the reservoir is a good spot for migrating waterbirds. The reservoir is surrounded by reedbeds [...]
A cunning plan
15 April 2007 – 1:59 pm
I just realised that my camera can screw directly on to my telescope tripod. Expect me to come back from Crete with lots of attempted panoramas.
Can you tell I’m procrastinating because I don’t want to pack?
My toy camera: the Cardcam
28 February 2007 – 5:16 pm
My post a few days ago about ‘toy cameras’ made me dig out my own toy camera. It’s not a film camera, though, like a Lomo or a Holga; instead, it’s a crappy digital camera from a few years ago. It’s somewhat in that spirit, though, as it’s a primitive point-and-shoot camera with no controls [...]
New improved photo page
27 February 2007 – 3:44 pm
With the help of a neat little application called PictoBrowser, I’ve tarted up the page with my Flickr photos. PictoBrowser should work even if you prefer reading the site with one of the old themes, but to get the full effect of my redecorating, you need to be using the ‘scallop‘ theme.
Digiscoping and Lomography
22 February 2007 – 11:17 pm
I was looking back at some of my old digiscoped pictures yesterday.
‘Digiscoping’ is the trick of using your birding telescope as very high-powered telephoto lens. At the simplest level, you just hold the camera up to the eyepiece and shoot through the scope; to get the best results you need more sophisticated equipment. You could [...]