The Circle of Confusion

A New Topography of the Durham Coalfield by Adam J Brown | Make Your Own Book

It’s a tricky one.  Which one gets the bullet?  Mr Charisma Bypass or Mr Face I’d Never Tire of Slapping?  Of course I’ve only shown two choices and, much though I hate to admit it, it looks like Rock vs Hard-Place is the way our electoral system is going to stay.  The LibDems recent poll surges give some hope that the old system might get demolished but I’m not holding my breath.  I can remember the election of 1983 when the SDP-Liberal Alliance polled 25% of the national vote yet gained only 3% of the seats in parliament.  Talk about disenfranchised.

The stunningly ill-conceived piece of legislation known as the Digital Economy Bill is due to go to the report stage in the House of Lords next week.  It seems increasingly likely that the bill will be forced through before the the General Election in an attempt to bribe Murdoch & Co. to support Labour’s election campaign in the press.

Clause 43 is the most disturbing for photographers (and other creatives)  as it essentially legalises the theft of orphaned works (i.e. those whose authorship cannot be identified by a cursory search).  More in-depth critique of this bill can be found over at Copyright Action, the AOP, and the BJP.  You can find a template letter to send to your MP here.

I wonder how long it would take the Met to pomme purée my brain-matter if I wear this around town?

with apologies to IAPNAT

Clementine, AJB, 2010

Come join us, play, dance, eat, win things… but most importantly of all

BE KIND !!!!

Random Acts of Kindness presents a fundraising night of great eclectic music, raffles, cakes with a mystery golden ticket, snap happy photographers and much, much more…. all for the Westminster BAPA (Photographic Arts) course.

BeatTree Live www.myspace.com/beattree the collective of interesting and talented musicians make there way to North London bringing with them a mix of nujazz and rock.
Dott Reed et la Belle Epoque www.dottreed.com …that singer girl. Take a bouncy piano and violin, add a soaring voice dripping with innocence and mix in cheeky, childlike lyrics.
Ragamuffins www.myspace.com/ragamuffinsmusic are a quirky pop-electro-indie quartet blending energetic guitars, shimmery synths and jaunty keyboards with infectious hooks and melodies
Mescal Circus www.myspace.com/mescalcircus combine melodic funky sounds with actual on stage art creation.
After, DJ Jack Beer plays a body popping mix of indie and electro.

Doors 7.30pm, £4 entry.  The Good Ship – Kilburn

I’ve just spotted an article in the local rag about an exhibition of John Bulmer’s images of the North from the 1960s.  He’s not a photographer whose work I’m familiar with but it certainly looks worth seeing.  I only wish I’d known about it before submitting my dissertation on this very topic.  Meh!

© John Bulmer

It didn’t occur to anyone to take the north of England in colour – that was considered a black and white subject

The exhibition is called Northern Soul: John Bulmer’s images of life and Times in the 1960s and runs until 25th April 2010 at the National Coal Mining Museum.

From New Scientist (6th Feb. 2010):

Software doctors bad photos to make them look like a pro’s

It may seem crude to reduce aesthetics to number crunching but software can now manipulate an amateur’s photographs to make them more pleasing to the eye.

Algorithms score a photo’s aesthetics using simple composition rules widely used to guide budding photographers.  The image is then automatically cropped, or parts of it moved and resized, to boost its score.

The science bit is here.

This is just great.  No one need give a moments thought to the composition of their photographs.  The machines will take care of it.  They’ll spot who is smiling and refuse to shoot until all are grinning inanely, make the chubby ones look a bit slimmer, give everyone a perma-tan, and then rearrange the scene to make it look pretty.  Soon the technology will have progressed so far that you need not even attend your child’s birthday party, family holiday, or big night out with the lads.  Just send along your camera (with the GPS linked Thrust-O-Matic levitation device) and it will capture picture perfect moments of the event.  It will then upload them to Flickr to join the ranks with billions of other normalised images from the herd/cloud. Oh for fucks sake….

What The Duck #135

The camera in my mobile phone has a rather abstract concept of reality.  Colours are seldom as they were, every highlight is blown and every shadow crushed, and the noise is truly epic.  Why any idiot would cram a 5MP sensor behind a lens the size of a gnat’s chuff and pair it with an asthmatic image processing engine is beyond me.   Anyhoo….every now again the combination of poor design, inadequate hardware, and blind bloody luck makes something rather pretty:

River Wear, AJB, 2010

Entanglement, AJB, 2010