That mobile phones have cameras means that even regular people now always have a camera with them.  Already, mobile phone cameras are quite good.  Soon, they will be as good as all but the best cameras, to the point where ever more people will be satisfied with their mobile phone cameras, and accordingly won’t want to be bothering with dedicated cameras at all.  This transition is already under way, a fact which I regularly track whenever I roam about London snapping (among other delights) my fellow snappers and their snapping machines. 

This photographer, for instance, looks like he’s using a “phone”, the inverted commas there being because these things are so much more than phones, to the point where the phoning is almost an afterthought.  As Michael Jennings said last night, it really is something of an accident that we just happen to call these things “phones”.

Here is a photo I took with my Google Nexus 4, very soon after I got it, of Randy Barnett (already featured here in this earlier posting - bottom right of the first lot of pictures there), speaking at Freedom Forum 2013:

As you can see, the quality is okay, but only okay.  Compare with the zoomed photo (at the link above) of Barnett, and you can easily see the difference that a better camera makes.  If the Google Nexus 4 camera has a zoom feature, I have yet to discover it.

As the picture above shows, I (of course) had my regular camera with me at FF2013.  But last night I was out and about for a short while, without that camera, only the Google Nexus 4.  I was dining at Chateau Samizdata, and collecting Amazon stuff that I have delivered there rather than at my own front door, because at my own front door there have been robberies.  So anyway, a recent arrive at CS was a keyboard, for use with the GN4, but although pre-warned that this keyboard would require two AAA batteries to make it go, I had forgotten to bring these with me.  So, I nipped out to buy some.  Without my regular camera.

Sod’s Law decrees that whenever you are out and about without your camera, interesting things will immediately present themselves to you.  And one such interesting thing did, in the form of a sign making use of the double meaning of the word Pole.  But, Sod’s Law was held at bay by my GN4, which I did have with me, in my jacket pocket, because keeping the GN4 in my jacket pocket at all times except when I am using it is The Rule.  Snap snap, which fortunately I had more or less learned how to do:

The GN4 may not be much good for distance Big Things, and the like, but it is fine for a sign.

And since the sign was the point, even though I do like scaffolding, here is the bit of the picture with the sign:

No computerised trickery there, apart from the cropping.  More than somewhat blurry, but entirely legible, the whole point of letters being that they hack their way through exactly such communicational barriers.

The speakers at the Liberty League Freedom Forum were an impressive lot.  I intend, Real Soon Now, to be writing at greater length (at Samizdata) about what some of the speakers said.  In this posting here, I will concentrate on shoving up photos.

Here are some snaps of just a few of the speakers in action:

Top left: Douglas Carswell; top middle: Terence Kealey; top right: Mark Littlewood.

Bottom left: Sam Bowman; bottom middle: J. P. Floru; bottom right: Randy Barnett.

I did not attend anything like all the sessions, not least because many of them were simultaneous.  But we all crowded into the big hall to have lunch on Saturday and Sunday, and there were a couple of speeches there also, from Mark Littlewood on the Saturday, and from J. P. Floru on the Sunday, both of whom are shown above, doing their lunchtime talks.

Impressive though the line-up of speakers was, and hard as it often was to choose which speaker to listen to, the real star of the occasion, for me, was the audience that the Liberty League people had managed to assemble for this event.  It would have been quite something for me to have listened to a succession of very good talks.  It was something else again to be part of a 200-strong audience listening attentively to those same talks, most of them of less than half my age.

So, here are some crowd shots:

The more I study the world and its ways, the more importance I attach to the influence of gatherings like this one. Getting a couple of hundred of Britain’s most committed libertarians and free marketeers together over a weekend, and permanently connecting them with each other, will have network effects beyond calculation, especially when you consider how much easier it now is to do networking electronically.

So who put this event together?  Well, I did some asking around, and three people kept getting mentioned:

Left: Anton Howes; centre: Christiana Hambro; right: Stephen Davies.

The latter two are both briefly biographised at the IEA website, and Anton Howes is likewise described on this list of Liberty Leaguers.  Hannah Besford, Will Hamilton and James Lawson, also on that Liberty Leaguers list, also got several mentions, not least in the conference progamme (i.e. on page 2 of this), as having contributed importantly.  Notoriously, when credit is to be shared among humans for their cooperative achievements, there are frequent mismatches between who gets given the credit and who did the actual work, so my best guess could be seriously off.  Nevertheless, my best guess is that the three people pictured above were the prime movers (certainly among the prime movers), all three of them having decided independently that what the British free market/libertarian movement needs is a succession of gatherings like this one, wherever in the UK it makes sense to stage them.  So, that is what they have been doing, this latest London event being merely the biggest of such events so far.  There have been several others during the last few years, and it looks like there will be many more.  I certainly hope so.

So here are three more digital photographers digitally photographed by me on March 5th, to add to the ones in this photo-collection:

I chose those for all my usual kinds of reasons, to do with focusing and composition and suchlike, which is not major my purpose now.

What I have done is reduced the size of the little photos above, that you click on to get the real photos, from 166 pixels wide to 165 pixels wide, and shoved a small space in between.  I’m hoping that 165 x 3 + 2 spaces won’t go beyond the 500 pixel limit, but only posting it will tell.

Which means that this posting is liable to be posted, and then reposted a few times, while I work out what works. I can’t tell from within my blogging software whether these new spaces and pictures sizes are a good fit, or if I’ll have (e.g.) to make the pictures a bit smaller.

It goes with saying (surely a more rational way of saying “it goes without saying”, if you immediately then say it) that I am a bit apologetic about this disruption.  But in truth, not very apologetic.

The reason I am doing this is that I have now got my Google Nexus 4 supersmart mobile phone, and have been looking at how this blog looks on it.

Point one: obviously all the regular stuff on the left that you don’t read should be on the right.  That may one day happen, and may not.

But the other thing is that when I do these little clutches of lots of little clickable photos, then on the GN4, just as on my computer, I get a small white space between each horizontal row of pictures and the next row down, but not between each picture, sideways.  If you get my drift.  And a much better arrangement would be to have spaces between each picture, if only to make the pictures easy to see as separate pictures, especially on something like the Google Nexus 4.

So now you know.

A BIT LATER:  Too wide.  The blurry digital photographer behind the focused leaves, who was supposed to be on the right, has moved himself to a new row below of his own creation.  So now I will make the small pictures 164 pixels wide rather than 165.  Isn’t this exciting?  Well, probably not.

A BIT LATER STILL: Done.

I’m still on about last Tuesday, and about what a fine day it was to be taking photographs, and about what sort of photographs I took.

First there were those brightly coloured buildings, then the Tottenham Court Road grubbings, and now … the rest.

I confirmed that the weather was going to be just as fabulous as the weather forecasters had been saying for the best part of a week that it would be, from the moment I stepped out of my front door.  Because, what I then felt was that very particular early spring experience, namely: feeling warmer than I did indoors.  It comes from the bricks in my home being a heat store, or in the case of winter a cold store.  To be more exact, the sun outside is hot and it warms up the air outside a treat, but it will take way longer for it to warm up those bricks, still busy sucking the heat out of my indoors.

So, I was in a fine mood from the start, and duly ticked off my official objective (plus second semi-official objective close by), so that the other half of the fun might begin.  For me, the point is to get out there, preferably to places I have not visited lately, on a fine day, and to make sure I set forth with appropriate resolve and soon enough for it still to be light, I need an official objective.  Those coloured buildings served that purpose very well.  But then, there followed the unofficial pleasure, so to speak, of just meandering about and noticing things.

If you only click on one photo of those below, click on the first one, top left.  That scene was actually quite a long way away, but thanks to the brightness of the sunshine and the power of my zoom lens, it looks like I’m right next to it.

Otherwise, there are my usual preoccupations.  There is scaffolding, the other scaffolding being on Blackfriars Bridge, middle middle, where they are still finishing the new station on the bridge, with its oddly fluctuating roof.  There are cranes, the same cranes each time, I suspect, on the top of a new erection arising somewhere on the other side of the river, between Waterloo and Tate Modern.  And there is a particularly choice reflection effect, this time (I am almost certain) Tower 42 (the NatWest Tower that was) torched by the evening sun and reflected in the glass at the top of Tate Modern.  There are bridges, no less then three in the picture bottom left, and five different bridges if you also count the ghostly columns of the Blackfriars Bridge that never was, next to Actual Blackfriars Bridge.  And seven if you could the three views of the Millenium Footbridge as three different bridges.  There is the Wheel, twice.  And photographers of course, thrice.

I sought out the river because, as the light began to fade, by the river there would still be a huge (completely cloudless) sky full of the stuff to sustain me, in contrast to the streets north of the river where the light struggles to reach ground level.

My destination yesterday was The Shard, and I’d have gone straight there, from Pimlico Tube, had I not wanted to buy some sticky tape for my winter insulation system.  But the sticky tape shop was the opposite way from Pimlico, near Victoria Street.  And once in Victoria Street, as already recounded, I reckoned there was time before it got dark for me to walk down past Westminster Abbey and photo some digital photographers, which I haven’t done for a while.

With results I am very pleased with.

Two anoraks:

Two ladies each holding two cameras:

And two bag ladies:

I love that cross-legged pose.  She’s photoing Big Ben, as you can see on the screen of her camera.

Excellent gloves throughout, I think.  Apart from the guy in blue, who makes up for that with an excellent bright red camera and a prominently displayed website.

Once again, I’ve shown people in ways that will make them harder to recognise, like with these earlier ones.  I am now looking for shots like this even as I take them.

In this recent Samizdata piece, about using iPad’s to take photos, I said this, concerning a picture of a bloke photoing Westminister Abbey with an iPad:

He’s not the first iPad (or Tablet or whatever) photoer I have spotted in recent months, just the first who obliged with a good clear pose for me to photo, ...

But now see this:

I took that photo on June 1st of this year.

The thing is, I photo an interesting thing, and then, through a combination of failing short-term memory and the desire to concentrate on the next photo rather than the last one, I forget about it.

Besides which, these things don’t present themselves to me in one revelation.  They creep up on me.  I find myself noticing a thing, now promoted to a Thing, several times, rather than just the once.  Just the once wouldn’t be a Thing, would it?

I just did yet another techno-ramble on Samizdata.

More pictures taken yesterday.  Will I ever tire of snapping my fellow snappers?  The weather was a bit cold, but not too cold, so there was lots of photography going on with gloves on, but sometimes just the one. 

Click an enjoy:

I am hoping that one of the benefits of switching to Wordpress, if I do, will be that both the posting and the viewing of such clutches of photos will become easier.  I will be able to fling them up more quickly, and you will be able to click through them more quickly.

And yes, I know that I could contrive this by using one or other of the dedicated photography “platforms”, but I personally particularly relish the thought of using only one platform for all of my bloggage.  I want to use Wordpress for Samizdata and for here, and I want to use Wordpress to display whatever photos I want to display.  I will only ponder alternatives if I find out that Wordpress doesn’t allow this sort of thing, far better than I am doing this now.  But judging by what Alec Muffet (the man who is contriving the Samizdata switch-over) told me in a recent conversation at Chateau Samizdata, Wordpess will offer much better photo-display options.  I definitely hope so.

I’m talking about the photo on the right here, taken the same evening I took the ones in the previous posting.  I only show the photo on the left, taken moments before, which in itself is rubbish, because it clarifies what’s going on in the photo on the right.

And in the photo on the right, what we see is a flash going off exactly when I took my photo, even though the photographer and her flash are hidden from view.  All we see is the shadows cast by the flash.

We can see it’s flash, rather than just some random street light, from the fact that there is no corresponding light in the photo on the left.  And on the left, we can see the lady (in a red top) whose flash went off in the right hand photo.

An unusual addition to my collection of snaps like this one (one of my all time favourite snaps) and this one (another favourite).

Last Wednesday, for reasons that had nothing to do with any attempt to take the photos that follow, I found myself at Piccadilly Circus.  This is always a fun spot to photo photographers, but on this particular night they were out in force, because also present were Halloween revellers, typically themselves armed with cameras.  Here are some of the better snaps I snapped, of all the Halloween fun and games:

I hope (although I promise nothing) to be doing a Samizdata posting, Real Soon Now, along the lines of: Is Halloween Replacing Bonfire Night in Britain?  I shall be keeping an ear open next Monday (November 5th) to hear if there is any abatement on the explosion front.

Nice for me that one of them was a cat, what with it now being Friday and all.

Yes, Patrick Crozier (to whom deep thanks) has just improved the state of this blog, by making it that if you go via a monthly archive, you can easily access the comments on a selected posting here, even though the chances are you almost certainly won’t be allowed to add any more comments.

If you follow one of my links back to an earlier post here, however, you still may find yourself at a posting which has comments, but which makes no mention of them.  In a recent posting, for instance, I did a link, back to an earlier posting about a Muslim man photoing four Muslim ladies in black letter-box costumes.  But, as linked to by me, this posting has no mention of any comments.  If you want to look at the comments (a bit interesting in this case), then click on the title of the posting, and you will arrive at this, which is the exact same posting, but with all the comments there.

If you feel compelled to add something more, try emailing me.

The logic of why it is good to be able to access ancient comments is explained here, and well illustrated here.

A recent Patrick Crozier piece at Samizdata illustrates further the value of being able to access ancient comments.  Often a blog posting is a question, and a pretty blatant - often shamelessly explicit - attempt to solicit comments that answer that question.  I also do this a lot, and I do mean a lot.  There is little point in being able to read such questions, but not being able to read the answers.

I am still hoping that someone will tell me who this guy is.  He looks a bit like a young Rio Ferdinand.  Anyone?

I haven’t lost interest in digital photographers, even if I don’t call them Billion Monkeys any more, because sometimes I had to explain that that didn’t mean Muslims, and any meme that has to be explained is a failed meme.

But here are some more digital photographers, photoed on the same day I took these and this:

Click on them to get the bigger pictures.

This time I was able to have the sun behind me, instead of behind what I was photoing.

When I go out photographing, the process goes: that looks interesting, snap, forget about it and immediately on to the next one.  Which means that I get all those nice surprises later, when browsing, that I keep going on about.

What do you make of this, for instance:

I can just about remember thinking at the time that a very large number of snappers were taking a mysterious interest in what looked like a very unremarkable young man, including one snapper with very thin legs.  And the young man was most definitely cooperating.

But now I ask again, as I asked myself when taking this snap, who is this young man?

My policy with any celebs I myself recognise is that if they are just wandering about making no effort to attract attenntion and probably hoping very much not to, then I will photo them, but will not shove them up on the internet, until a minimum of a few years later.  If, on the other hand, they are out and about being photographed, they are totally fair game, and can be internetted within the hour.

Not that I did this to this guy.  The photo was taken on March 30th of this year, on Westminster Bridge, and no sooner had I taken it than I forgot about it.

So anyway, who is this guy?  Here’s a close-up that makes him a bit more recognisable, if you recognise him.

Are there already clever face-recognition procedures that would enable me to find out who he is, if he is anyone?  If you are the kind of person who knows about such things, then please do this yourself, and tell me.

I met up with a friend in Kensal Green last night, and after we’d dined upstairs (here), we went back downstairs to watch those Jamaicans do their 1-2-3 in the 200 metres.

I have been trying to ignore the Olympics, and I actually did (I now realise) pretty much completely ignore the Beijing Olympics.  But if you live in London and the Olympics are in London, remaining indifferent to the Olympics is hard, especially in a place containing lots of Jamaicans, or at any rate Jamaicans for the night.

I took some photos of the screen, featuring Usain Bolt taking some photos of his own.

My photos were wonky and taken from way off to the side, like this:

But, stretched out and rotated a bit, that one looks quite good:

Here is a more photographically professional treatment of the same story, and they have some of the photos that Bolt himself took.

My favourite Bolt snap is this one:

How many photographers do you see there?

The man in the red circle is the owner of the camera Bolt borrowed.  He was obviously not in any doubt that his camera would be returned to him by Bolt (rather than it going walkies in all the excitement), and he was a very happy man.

And here, taken about one minute before the picture of cranes in the posting below, is what the top of the Shard looked like, as of last Sunday:

Commenting here, I said this:

Dave Walker

Agreed about the top of the Shard looking a bit odd. This is the main departure of the real thing from the visualisations, i.e. fake photos. I think what they didn’t see coming was that, what with there being no internal partitions up there, the light comes straight through, and the floors are emphasised, the way they aren’t anywhere else below.

I suspect there may be further changes to come up there, when it gets filled in, so to speak. I have many pictures of it looking as it does now, and will be looking carefully to see what, if anything, happens up there next.

Or then again, maybe what we now see is what we will continue to get. And pictures will soon start appearing, here and elsewhere, of tiny people in silhouette, inside. Some taking photographs no doubt, which is one of my particular photographic enthusiasms.

Stay tuned.

Last week I used one of the photos I took at the new Bomber Command Memorial at Hyde Park Corner as a Samizdata Quote of the Day.

Here are some other snaps I took of the Memorial:

For some reason, I often find the little cards and photos of loved ones that people put on these memorials to be more evocative than the Big Thing itself.  And given that others will of course also be photoing the big picture, I often find myself concentrating on these small things when I photo these things.  And on others taking photos of course, that being a constant preoccupation of mine.

You don’t have to agree with everything Bomber Command was commanded to do during WW2 to salute the bravery of those who did it.

I for one find that prominent Pericles reference to defending freedom (the one I made into an SQotD, and which you can see in the final picture above) slightly odd.  Bomber Command was an offensive weapon, as is made clear in the Churchill quote about how only the bombers could offer victory (see photo in line 3, far left).  And its purpose was not just to win the war (which despite Bomber Harris’s promises it only helped to do), but to punish the damned losers of it for having started it.  This was a punitive war, and everyone at the time knew it.  Oh sure, the story at the time in the newspapers was that it was all precision bombing of military targets, blah blah, but if any bombs just happened to land on civilians, the attitude of civilians on our side was: serve the bastards right.

You have to realise how most British people felt about the Germans during WW2, including most of the bomber airmen.  The Germans were the people who, having experienced World War 1 in all its horror, concluded from it that they needed to have a re-run of it, but this time win.  Starting WW1 was forgiveable, albeit a horrible blunder, and we still quarrel about who exactly did start it.  Starting WW2, on purpose, was unforgiveable.

Okay, maybe a lot of Germans were not in favour of all this.  But they went along with it, very happily.  Until it all started to go wrong.

WW1 ended with a negotiated German surrender.  This time around, our Anglo ancestors were determined that every last German left alive would not only lose, but know that Germany had lost.  Each German must taste defeat, and if they died while tasting it, that was just fine.  This time, the surrender would be unconditional.  No “stab in the back” crap.  Stabbed from the front, with overwhelming force, by an enraged world.

Never again.  You must never, never, do this again.  That was what Bomber Command was saying.

In a way, the bombing offensive was a continuation by other means of the silly pamphlet dropping over Germany which was what the bombers first did.  Sending a message, but this time in a form that would register.

You may not like any of this, but that is how it was.