Photography Inspirations: The World is the Human's Project

This is just a quick headsup to say that this book is currently on sale at the Book Warehouse on Southampton Row and I have also seen it in the new store on Camden High Street. I picked up my copy for £19 and its list price is £69.95. Whether you think its a bargain or not depends on your taste in photography. I would recommend that you head down to your nearest Discount Bookstore and see if they have a copy so you can decide for yourself. If you have weak arms take a friend, because this book weighs a ton. Its three inches thick, a foot square and has nearly 700 pages of photos.

There is a huge variety of images from a number of different photographers and yet the book manages to pull the whole lot together into a unified style. The majority of which are in a square format. There's relatively little text and a huge index at the back with the title and copyright holder. The only name I spotted that I recognised was Drew Gardener and a prolific photographer called Royalty Free. Of course there will be many from the book that I would like to get to know.

My five year old daughter, Christina, loves it. I haven't managed to get all the way through it yet, because she takes over. It really is a great book to immerse yourself in. But totally pants if you want to read it on the bus. I recommend putting it on the floor to read it as you won't cut off the circulation in your legs.

Photographic Half-Mile

So the new lunchtime project is to photograph every street within a half-mile radius of my office. How much progress have I made so far? Not a great deal. The thing about doing something like this is that you need to prepare. I have done a little walking and I have been thinking about what to photograph but not taking many photographs yet. I have been procrastinating a little using the fact that I hadn't worked out the boundaries of the area as my excuse. But Now I don't have that excuse because I have updated my map with a half-mile boundary.

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This is the same map that I used for my previous lunchtime walk project. The outer circle is a mile in radius and the red square is the boundary of my initial goal which I completed within 4 months of starting. As you can see, the half-mile marker fits well within the red square so it shouldn't be too challenging to get out there and take photos.

The real challenge will be deciding what to shoot. Bear in mind that I am doing this at lunchtime, so I'm not going to have the best lighting and quite frankly some of these streets are not very exciting. So I'm going to take some inspiration from one of my favourite photobooks, Barbershops by Tally Abecassis and Claudine Sauvé. In their book they took detail shots and straight record shots organising then into typologies. I suspect that this took some planning on their part, perhaps a checklist of things to shoot, so I will work on a plan myself. The lovely thing about typologies is that quite often the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, which means that even the most unpromising street will be able to contribute something to the project even if its just a doornob and the street sign.

• Streetnames
• Blue Plaques
• Door Numbers
• Stone Faces
• Railings
• Bollards
• Boobies
• Swastikas

The last two items might seem a little odd, but there are many topless buildings and statues in the area. And there are buildings that incorporate the swastika as part of their decoration. I'll also be looking for details of things that can be isolated and viewed as an beautiful image unsupported by others of its kind. I'll take them as I find them.

Of course if I were to just photograph details, you would get no sense of place, so I will also be photographing a wide shot of the street. If I try and use the same angle and focal length for each shot I should be able to connect all the street photos in some way. Again I'm not sure how good I'll be able to make these wide shots. It will definitely be a challenge.

Perhaps more promising will be the middling shots, these will show an area or activity on the street and provide a link between the detail and the wide shots. The sort of thing I might shoot would be traders at leather lane, or an individual building. There should be a lot more scope for variation, and many of the buildings are beautiful but tend to get lost in the crowded landscape

So thats the plan. No more excuses now I have to go out and shoot that half-mile

Improving Your Flickr Experience

If you use a Firefox it is possible to install scripts that make little improvements to the Flickr user interface. All you need to do is install a plugin called Greasemonkey which allows you to install scripts and even write your own. Once you have installed greasmonkey, you can head over to userscripts.org and search for handy scripts to use with flickr or any other web site that you fancy.

Here are some of my favourite flickr greasemonkey scripts

Flickr Embed

This script is useful if you are blogging photos, because it creates a textbox on image pages that contains the html for embedding it in posts.

Flickr Exif Info

This one is pretty straightforward. It displays some key information from the exif data directly on the image page, so that I don't have to go click on the more info link to see the key settings of a photograph.

Flickr Show all images by this user in this pool

On the face of it this script sounds like its not much use. I installed it to help me keep to the posting limit in a group pool. The group only allowed 20 images from each use in the pool. With this script I could click on one image of mine in the pool and then follow a new link under my name on the image page, which would allow me to see all the images I had put in the pool. Where it comes in handy is if you see an image you like in a large pool like the strobist pool, you can then find all the images that user has posted there. This is better than just looking at their stream because the images from the pool are more targeted to what you want to look at.

Flickr Auto Page

I have mixed feelings about this script. Sometimes it is very useful other times it's annoying. Fortunately its very easy to enable and disable scripts though the greasemonkey menu. The flickr Auto Page script is designed to stop you from ever having to hit the "next" button. When you scroll to the bottom of a page, the script automatically fetches the next page and displays it on the current page. Very handy for looking through photostreams and group pools.

Flickr Quoter

This script makes it easy for you to quote people. It adds a quote link at the bottom of forum posts and comments. If you click on the quote link it puts the quote in the message box and formats it nicely for you.

There are loads of scripts to choose from and rolling your own isn't difficult if you know a little javascript. If you use another browser, then its not quite as easy. Google Chrome has some limited support for user scripts but you need to use the developers version and some of the more sophisticated scripts are unlikely to work. I believe that Safari users can also get Greasemonkey working using software called GreaseKit, but you'll have to find out how yourself.

What scripts do you use? Drop me a comment.

Here is a screen shot showing embed and exif info for Paul Mason