I love this:

Here via here.

The point being that however fast the biker is moving, his shadow doesn’t move at all, relative to him.

I remember snapping a skateboarder and his shadow on the South Bank, by following him with my camera.  I went looking for that, but instead found these, of which the one in the middle of the bottom three is also a skateboarder, approximately in focus while all around is blurry.  I had no idea I was capable of such brilliance.

Earlier in the week I heard a similar expression of arrogant humility, from E. J. Moeran, on the subject of his cello sonata, which was played on the radio. 

Here we are:

“I have just spent all day yesterday on cello sonata proofs. You know I don’t usually boast, but coming back to it, going through it note by note, and looking at it impartially, I honestly think it is a masterpiece. I can’t think how I ever managed to write it.”

Ain’t the internet grand?

Although, any dumbo can still take the odd great photo, provided only that he knows its greatness when he sees it.  The real artists when it comes to photography are the geniuses who make the cameras.  Once I have one of these cameras, I don’t have to put my photos together “note by note”.  Cello sonatas, that is to say, are not something you can just get lucky with.

Indeed:

Here.

Excuse me sir, might I ask why you are taking those pictures?  I’m doing it because I like it.  You like it?  What kind of a reason is that?  Might I enquire what your name and address is?  Ah well now that’s where it gets a bit complicated.  I could tell you, but then I’d be missing out on a story for my blog about you PCSOs harassing innocent photographers who are not terrorists but who are a bit weird and who know their rights because they’ve read about them on the internet.  I’m not harassing you sir, just asking for your name and address.  Although, if you don’t give it, I’ll get one of the proper policemen to arrest you for being weird.  Yes you make a strong point.  Tell you what, have a read of this (which I am actually thinking of getting printed out and taking with me in triplicate on my photographic expeditions).  Etcetera, etcetera.

I feel like I’m part of an era in British social history that may soon vanish.  It can’t be long before only foreigners and the government will be allowed to take snaps in Britain.  So, while I still can:

That was last Saturday, I think, at Picadilly Circus, definitely.  I took lots of this particular little drama.  I figure, if they put on a great big show like that, I’m entitled to snap it too.  I did, anyway.  And if you take lots of pictures of a real photographer in action, in bad light, sooner or later your opinion about the best time to take the snap coincides exactly with his and you get what I got.

Actually, snapping other photographers in London, who are mostly foreign (although I’m guessing not this one), is easy now and is likely to stay easy for quite a while, because I look like one of them.  You seldom see PCSOs asking Billion Monkey foreign tourists why they are taking photos, because if they did, it might cause an international incident and threaten the tourist trade.  A few months back, I seem to recall a policeman harassing a tourist Billion Monkey, and it did cause an international incident and it did threaten the tourist trade.

Plus: Mr Clown says I’m - you have to scroll to the end - a genius.  I ought not to care about such things, but I do.

Today, in London, it was the first first day of spring.  What I mean is, it felt like the first day of spring, but wasn’t.  The sky was cloudless, the temperature temperate.  Tomorrow, it will almost certainly go back to being winter.  Then in a fortnight’s time, there will be another first day of spring, followed by more winter.  Eventually there will be a first day of spring that really is the beginning of spring.

I, of course, went out snapping.  But because of the cloudlessness of the sky the photo that I took that I found the most striking, when I looked through them back home, was this one:

Ignore the Big London Thing on the right.  I like it, but that’s not my point here.

Two other snaps also startled me, for a related reason.  I was photo-ing Billion Monkeys, and the Big London Things they were photo-ing, preferably both at once.  But what happens if you are photo-ing Billion Monkeys on the other side of the road, and a certain sort of rather boringly decorated lorry or bus drives past you just as you are snapping?  This:

Modern Art!  Masterly in their monumental restraint.  Exhuberant, yet calm.  Big and yet somehow small.  Loud, and yet, almost perversely, soft.  And a strong yet also oddly reticent comment on the decadence of late capitalism in era of mass consumerism.  Click on them to get them bigger.  If you need to.

Actually, I think the green one is someone dressed in green walking right in front of me, literally about a foot away from my camera, just as I was snapping.  The thing is, if people don’t know you’re taking pictures, which is the situation when I am snapping Billion Monkeys, they don’t know to keep out of your way.  Fair enough.

Paxman has just referred to this on Newsnight.  “If a million monkeys were given typewriters, blah blah, Shakespeare, blah blah, but now a bunch of scientists at Edinburgh University actually have given a camera to some chimpanzees!” How could I ignore that?

Google google.  Here‘s the story:

The team constructed a sturdy orange coloured box which had a monitor on the side acting as a viewfinder so the chimps could see what they were shooting.

John added: “I’m pretty sure they understood what they were filming.”

“We were dealing with an average group of chimps but they worked with us very well and gave it their best.”

Sadly, they were given just the one movie camera, not each given Billion Monkey cameras, which is what I would like to see.

Yesterday, the need for sheets took me to Primark, Oxford Street.  Having obtained my sheets I walked along Oxford Street towards Bond Street, to inspect the HMV shop there, where the depressing news is that the space formerly occupied by classical now houses both classical and jazz, and lots of other wrinkly pop stuff like Frank Sinatra etc.  Classical CD recording hurtles onwards, with ever more iterations of the standard repertoire and ever more obscure discoveries.  But I guess for most, the internet is replacing the shops.

Classical CD shops are not the only businesses with problems.  Take property development.  Before I got to HMV Bond Street, I passed this huge building site, right next to Oxford Street:

I know.  Not much like a building site, is it?  What’s happened is they’ve stopped, and they are trying to sooth a bit of the pain by hiring the place out to advertisers.  Hence the giant Fiat.

Another big building site I’ve recently been keeping an eye and a digital camera on is this one:

This is where they are still saying they will be putting the Shard of Glass.  Michael J keeps telling me: no way.  MJ may well be right, but judging by the number and power of the cranes and diggers I’ve seen there every time I’ve visited, it’s going to be a very expensive patch of empty ground, if that’s all it proves to be for the next decade.

So, will it be Giant Promotional Things for the next ten years, or this?:

I live in hope.

As regulars here will know, I like to take snaps of London’s big new landmarks, but from unobvious places, with unobvious stuff in the foreground.

So today, I was standing on platform 5 at Vauxhall station, and took a snap of the faraway Docklands Towers, straight in line with the track my train was due on.  On the left, the snap I was going for:

And on the right, taken seconds earlier, a version of the snap that went wrong, for some (at the time) inexplicable reason.  On my silly little Billion Monkey screen, it made no sense.  Had I allowed something bizarre to fall in front of the lens?  But what?

Only when I got home did I see what had happened.

Like I always say, Real Photographers decide what they want and get it.  We Billion Monkeys just snap away, and then pick from what we get.

Indeed:

Snapped outside the Channel 4 headquarters near where I live, earlier today.  Obviously you can’t too careful, but I don’t think they have any plans to blow it up.  No need to panic.

Indeed:

Here.  Via the Flickr blog

Here is one of these New York composites, linked to last Friday by David Thompson:

And here is my most interesting recent Billion Monkey snap:

The interesting bit is that while I was taking it a taxi got in the way.  I was angry, until I looked at my little camera screen and saw what had happened.

Because somebody recently commented on this posting I recently relistened to the recorded conversation I did with my friend Bruce the Real Photographer, and as I said to Bruce the Real Photographer during that, Real Photographers think of the shot they will most like and then systematically contrive that shot, while we Billion Monkeys just snap away pretty much at random and then pick the shots we most like.

UPDATE: Billion Monkey Monk!

I have a busy day today, but have realised that if you say something like I’ve got some Guido pictures which I will stick up at my blog Real Soon Now, then stick your Guido pictures up at your blog Real Soon Now is what you had jolly well better do, before the Sunday Mirror writes an article saying that Guido has hacked into your hard disc and scrubbed everything, or that you pushed the wrong button and scrubbed them yourself.

I probably have others, but the only Guido snaps I have found so far were taken at the launch party for the Globaliz(s?)ation Institute on July 19th 2005.  All were taken in the space of the same minute, and all turned out okay.  They are consecutively numbered, so there were no others that I scrubbed in between the first and the last.  All of which speaks well of the Canon PowerShot S1 IS on which they were taken.  Click on all of the below to make them bigger.

The Globalis(z?)ation Institute was started but later stopped by Alex Singleton, who now writes/blogs for the (now much denounced by Guido-worshippers) Telegraph, although on the blogging front he’s been a bit quiet lately.  Maybe he is concentrating on leader writing.  Maybe he is in a basement somewhere, tied up, where they’ve put him for knowing too much about Guido, and for having liked him.  You can see Alex in the right foreground of the snap where Guido is himself snapping.

I already used the Guido snapping snap in this very early posting here, although without blowing Guido’s cover.  All I said was that he was the bloke who was running some other Global Something or Other Thing, as indeed he was at that time.

Bloggers: copy and reproduce at will, should you wish to, with or without attribution, it’s up to you.  If any of these snaps do take on a life of their own, my bet would bet on the final one, in which Guido stares straight at my Canon S1 IS, as if saying “I own you - you are nothing to me - an object”, in the way John Travolta made Danny de Vito do in Get Shorty.  If anyone wants a snap to illustrate how You Don’t Want Guido As An Enemy (and you really don’t, do you?), this would surely do very nicely.  Although probably what Guido was really thinking was something more like: I wonder where I can get another drink.

The interesting thing about this particular clutch of snaps is how many clever looking young men and women are to be seen in them, whom I had never met before and whom I have never met since.  My guess is that older, fatter and more haggard versions of these then Bright Young Things will be popping up on the news in the years to come, revealing themselves to be People of Significance.

Cool people don’t take snaps at cool parties.  Only uncool twats do.  But as the years go by, if you were such an uncool twat at such an event, you can feel your temperature going steadily down, until eventually you’re the only cool one who was there.  Apart from Guido, obviously.  He is now in the vicinity of Absolute Zero, and looks like remaining there for some while yet.  (Who will play Guido in the movie?)

Here are snaps of some of the Bright Young Ladies that I exhibited at the time.  (The actual baby is one of Guido’s, by the way.)

Photos, to put it another way, are like wine.  You take them, and then just leave most of them in your hard disc stroke wine cellar.  Years later, provided you have not cocked up the labeling, some of them become quite significant, and more and more of them as the years go by.

. . . because the clock on my blog software is the same as the clock clock.  During the months over Christmas, if the clock clock says 11:53PM today, as it does right now, my blog sofware clock would say 0:53AM tomorrow, which is very confusing, and makes me think my deadline was due an hour earlier than it was.  I could probably find out how to keep these two clocks in permanent alignment, but can’t be bothered.

British Summer Time is also better because there is an hour more each day to take photos.  Low light is doom for us Billion Monkeys.

I’ve only just noticed last Sunday’s London Daily Photo, and it’s a cracker.  Here’s a horizontal slice of the bits that matter:

Billion Monkey.  Skyscrapers.  The Dome.  Cranes.  BrianMicklethwaitDotCom heaven.

That’s like a vantage point I will soon be visiting myself.  It’s great that Ham of LDPh always gives you a spot on a map for such photos.

Today Professor Dowd took me to see the Monsal Valley in the Peak District, A wonderful trip.

Here is the sign on top of the Monsal Valley railway viaduct, or rather two croppings from it.  The first is what John Ruskin said about it around the time (1967) when it was built:

And here is what he was moaning about:

And here’s how it looks now:

More about and more photos of this viaduct here.  The railway it carried is now a scenic footpath, and we made our way down into the valley and walked over it and back.  We had the best of the day’s sunshine for our little expedition.  Lovely.

Billion Monkeys never forget to photo the explanatory signs!

Somebody called Pete left this comment, rather irrelevantly (but never mind), on this posting:

Hi

Just wondered what you thought of this attack on a billion monkeys…
Section 76 Of The Counter-Terrorism Act 2008

From tomorrow section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 comes into force.

Under the law anybody taking a photograph of a current or former member of the police, armed service or security services can be prosecuted and/or fined. The act allows for police officers to remove the cameras of people taking photographs of them.

When I was at school, not too many years ago we were taught that cameras were forbidden in the Soviet Union and in East Germany. This, our liberal teacher told us was because cameras can be used to document offences of the state against civilians; as such, they were considered a tool that can bring about civil unrest and encourage protest against the Communist Governments. This particular teacher, sneered at this particular law and the system in which it helped preserve.

We take a big step further into Labour’s totalitarian state tomorrow, as professional photographers can be arrested and detained for doing their jobs. Tourists taking pictures of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace are liable for prosecution. Taking photos in the street, at sporting events, at weddings and during state proceedings could all lead to the possibility of prosecution.
(From Daniel1979’s blog)

I.e. this posting.

What makes the process built into laws like this one so hard to get a handle around is that they give powers to policemen, but don’t actually oblige policemen to do anything.  But, there the law is.  They have it, for when this country ever does become a fully functioning police state with the gloves off.  Meawhile, if a policeman does take exception to being photoed when – I don’t know – kicking the wrong door down at 5 am, then he has the law in his hands to behave like a bastard.

So here’s what I think I might do about this, and what I suspect a lot of other bloggers will also be doing.  I will add policemen to the list of Things that I photo as I wander around London, alongside Billion Monkeys, roof clutter, pavement clutter, and Evening Standard headline signs.  After all, if they aren’t doing anything wrong, they’ve got no reason to be angry, have they?  (Another meme doing the rounds.) And from time to time I’ll stick the picture(s) up here, and see if anything happens.  If I do get into any trouble, well, I can write about it and turn this blog into a Significant Blog, and get linked to by Iain Dale.  But, I promise nothing.

But actually, will policemen object?  I’m hoping they will, but will curse not us Billion Monkeys, but the damn law itself.  Here, have you noticed all these fat weirdos photoing us all of a sudden?  What the fuck’s that about?  Oh, they’re all mad about some fucking law.  Apparently the law says we can take their fucking cameras away, but the Chief Super says we mustn’t.  And then when all the fuss has died down and we’ve got bored taking their photos, the Chief Super will be replaced by another Chief Super who says, yeah take their cameras if you want to.  If we say it’s an offence, it is, and that’s good for our clear-up rates.  Fuck ‘em.

Meanwhile, here’s yesterday’s London Daily Photo:

BBC report here, all about how the law will only be used in the most extreme circumstances.  Yes, like: only when they want to use it.  Seriously, this thing where they make it illegal to say “Three” in public, but simultaneously say that if you say “Three” in an innocent kind of way, when all you’re doing is counting your change, you have nothing to fear, it’s only when terrorists say “here are three bombs” to each other that it will actually be illegal to say three ... blah blah ... what I’m saying is: this is not how law should be.  The law is supposed to specify something absolutely wrong, and if anyone gets caught doing it, they get done.  That’s what law is.  Not “giving the police all the powers they need” to go after Really Bad People, by making everything illegal and then arresting Really Bad People, confident that they will have said three during the last twelve hours.  The idea is that the law itself says who the Really Bad People are.  Now, they just decide that as they go along.  That, at any rate, is the direction things are headed, and that’s why I may (or may not) be about to post lots of pictures of policemen on this blog.  That’s what I’ll be flagging up.

Memo to self, do that Long Essay for Samizdata about the Meaning of the Rule of Law.

That Guy Fawkes costume is a visual meme that is really starting to work.  Every time they pass a law banning something innocuous, so they can arrest people they think are terrorists for doing it in the course of their terrorism, the Guy Fawkeses go out in their Guy Fawkes faces and do it, and tell the newspapers, and have themselves a ball.  But, the law stays there.

It’s Guido who has got this Guy Fawkes face mask meme out there, of course.  What a brilliant guy that Guy is!  I can remember when lefties were the ones who had the monopoly of agitprop expertise.  Now, that’s starting seriously to change.