The Circle of Confusion

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

Ausgang/Eingang, AJB, 2009

Girl on a ’spacehopper’ at the bottom of Janet Street backlane, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, 1971

Photo Op, kennardphillipps (2005)

Seems appropriate today.

The exhibition runs until the 20th December 2009 at P3.  Come along and see some great images (including one of mine) inspired by the theme ‘Sustainability’.

Polar Ice Cap

Go to www.ratm.co.uk follow the links and download your copy of “Killing In The Name Of”.

Give the gift of choice this Christmas.