Small is beautiful

London fast and slow

Great little film (which took a lot of work I imagine) by Chris Searson.

Rush Hour London from Chris Searson on Vimeo.

Evening Standard Headline Boards

Cory has a post on BoingBoing about the completely absurd headline boards that go up around London each evening to try and make you buy the papers — especially the terrible Evening Standard. Check out his Flickr set here.

I always see them as I head to the tube from our office in Bethnal Green. The one that made me laugh out loud last year was this one. It was a nervous laugh, you understand.

World Press Photo 07

I popped along to see the winning entries of World Press Photo 07 yesterday in London’s Royal Festival Hall. In a world where I feel surrounded by grainy long lens shots of celebs getting in and out of cars, it reminds you of the power of real news photography. Some of the images in the exhibition completely blew my mind. Well worth a visit if you’re in town.

Photography from the deep past

The most recent Long Now Seminar in San Francisco sounds like it was brilliant. Frans Lanting set out to take photographs of places where the conditions resemble those from key moments in the distant past of the evolution of planet Earth.

From Stewart’s email summary:

On a live volcano in Hawaii he found the naked planet of 4.3 billion years ago — — molten rock flowing, zero life. “Your boots melt. You smell early Earth.” On the western coast of Australia he shot a rare surviving living reef of stromatolites, made of the cyanobacteria who three billion years ago transformed the Earth by filling the atmosphere with oxygen. Lanting took pains to photograph without blue sky in the background, because the sky was not blue until the cyanobacteria had generated a planet’s worth of oxygen.

The photos are absolutely stunning. You can find them here.

Shoot Shoreditch

Last Sunday I took part in Shoot Shoreditch with a couple of friends and a few hundred other Londoners. It’s basically a photographic treasure hunt. You get a bunch of clues and have to match them up with places on a map. The twist is that the winner isn’t the team that finishes first but the one that takes the best set of photos of the places that fit with the day’s theme. In this case ‘crime’.

We didn’t win (one of our better shots is above), it’s the taking part that counts of course, but it was great fun and I reckon I’m up for the next one which will be around Tate Modern in June.