Archives filed under "Photography"

How I love this site.

In their haste to eschew the Gerber culture, they’d unwittingly created a culinary monster, one who demanded an amuse-bouche from the chef at the start of every meal.

Really, it’s beautiful. Don’t just look at the headline!

I had no idea

A picture from a few weeks ago:

Higger Tor Panorama. Click for larger version.

This was an interesting experiment. Readers many know that I’ve made a lot of virtual reality panoramas over the years. Given the rise of portable devices such as the iPhone & iPad, however, is requiring a re-think of how we present them: browsers on portable devices don’t support any plugins. The examples in the above link require Quicktime, which is just as forbidden as Flash. It looks like the only option is Javascript-based interactivity, which will require some serious testing.

So why is the above picture an experiment? Well, because instead of using all my VR photographic kit, I used an iPhone & Debacle Software’s Pano, which does a really nice job for casual picture creation. You can’t, so far as I can tell, make a complete 360-degree panorama. Perhaps that’s coming, though.

A brilliant idea: take the wonderful photographs found on The Big Picture & add teh funneh. As The Big Caption’s mission statement says, it’s

A complement to The Big Picture wherein Jokes and Statements are made using Typography.

They’ve not been publishing much recently: I hope the Copyright Police haven’t shut them down. Here are two of my favourites:

Fuck you, flowers—how does it feel to get kicked right in the face?

And, equally strong:

Hipsters, Start Your Photocopiers

Heh—it’s funny ’cause it’s true!

Culled from my Facebook posts:

I was born in the depressed industrial town of Waterbury, Connecticut. For about the first half of my life, I lived within 30 miles of it & so knew the town pretty well. As a child, it seemed like a big city to me. It’s not.

In any event, looming over Waterbury, on a hill, was a huge, glowing cross. This was the site for a kitschy Catholic attraction called the “Holy Land”, a 1/4 scale representation of Christ’s life. My understanding is that the cross has been replaced, but I vividly remember flying back to the UK from Newark & passing over Waterbury: you always knew you were there because of the huge looming cross. The attraction is not maintained: there are some wonderful pictures of this decaying place.

“Jerusalem” in Waterbury’s Holy Land (photo by Shaun O’Boyle)

My mother brought me there as a small child & inadvertently added to my confusion about religion. My father always brought me to a tiny church in a village called Bethlehem: I clearly remember thinking, “If this stuff is so important, wouldn’t it be a bigger deal?”. Now, however, as we walked through a depressing plywood Jerusalem, with statuary about waist height, I thought “Well, people were supposed to be smaller then”.