This picture is definitely rather funny.  This, on the other hand makes perfect sense:

Photoed yesterday afternoon.  She’s taking a picture of Big Ben.

Sadly, just the make sure, I probably need to explain again that the first category listed below refers to digital photographers.

Another excellent addition to the Billion Monkeys Flashing collection.  And she’s carrying a big bag.  And she’s holding another camera besides the one she’s using.  And she crouching down with the best of all those in the Billion Monkeys Crouching archive.  Tick tick tick tick.  Taken yesterday.  Click for the bigger picture.

And, I’ve just remembered, I want to do a collection of Billion Monkey pictures which do not violate anyone’s privacy, for exposure on such places as Flickr.  Tick tick tick tick tick.

Here‘s an interesting story:

Global news and photograph agencies will carry out their threat to boycott coverage of the Indian Premier League because of the restrictions on the distribution of photographs. Agencies are prohibited from providing photographs of the Twenty20 tournament to cricket-specific websites.

The News Media Coalition (NMC), the umbrella body that comprises global news and photograph agencies Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Getty Images, called the restrictions “discriminatory”.

“It is discriminatory for the accreditation terms to prohibit international news agencies from being able to serve a specific group of users, such as cricket websites,” the NMC said in a statement. “The interests of the IPL are protected by the fact that its accreditation terms limit news content generated by the news agencies to be used for editorial purposes only. The NMC calls upon the IPL to remove remaining obstacles in the way of full editorial coverage of the tournament.”

The Editors Guild of India also called for the withdrawal of “unacceptable conditions” while the Press Trust of India, India’s leading news agency, had said it would cover the event “under protest”.

What this shows is the overwhelming importance to cricket of the biggest fact in cricket now, which is the number of Indians who are fans of it.  Foreign fans of cricket in India just don’t matter, or not enough register seriously in anyone’s calculations.  The combined might of all those foreign press agencies counts as nothing besides those Indian fans.  Meanwhile the Editors Guild of India has “called for” this, that and the other, and the Press Trust of India, which would look idiotic, to all those Indian fans, if it ignored this new Indian cricket league, only agrees to cover it “under protest”, in other words: it agrees.  The bottom line is, if only Indians pay any attention to this new league, that will be more than sufficient.  This won’t stop it being mega-profitable, and in search of their shares of all those mega-profits, all the world’s best cricketers will still want to play in it.  Even if at the moment the only white people involved seem for the time being to be made of plastic:

Calling Michael J, my expert commenter on cricket, football, science, technology, travel, history, geography, television, etc. etc. etc..  Have I got that right?  Or will this news agency boycott actually count for something?  And will there eventually be pictures I can copy and paste to here of Pietersen, Flintoff, Mascarenas, Luke Wright, and other expert Anglo-sloggers giving their all to Bangalore Royal Challengers (or Birmingham City?), when they should (according to MCC old farts and the like) be playing boring old test and county cricket in front of very few people indeed in England?

Time for the Billion Monkeys of India to snap a million IPL snaps, methinks.  18X zoom lenses have arrived just at the right moment.  (But, will Billion Monkey cameras be banned from the grounds?  And if so, will that make a blind bit of difference?)

More informative IPL reportage here.

Michael J sends this picture:

And says of it, and of a second snap of people just drinking beer, this:

Two shots of Alan Little in a gigantic beer tent in Munich on Sunday.  The two of us concluded that the first is not a Billion Monkey photograph as he was using a Real Photographer’s camera. I am not sure if the fact that I was also using a Real Photographer’s camera disqualifies things further.

That’s Alan Little as in this.

Do we need a separate category for SLR users?  How many are there of them.  Two hundred million gorillas?  Four hundred million?  Trouble is that the categories merge into each other.  A few years ago they said you couldn’t have proper SLR cameras which showed you the picture beforehand on a little screen.  Can’t be done.  No more possible than ships made of metal floating or heavier than air airplanes taking to the air.  Which rather neglected the fact that so many people, people like me for instance, very much wanted this.  So, now, these combined SLR/Billion Monkey cameras now exist.  The best one is truly brilliant, with the screen not only showing pictures beforehand but also twiddling, just like on my Canon S5 IS.  It costs two arms and three legs now, but that will soon change, once the loony millionaires buy it anyway (thereby proving that non-millionaires would like it also), and the competitors move in.  My next camera will probably be like this.

Another recent Munich pic from MJ here.  The picture is called “nazi1.jpg” so I’m guessing the building has an unsavory history.

The trouble with showing themed sets of Billion Monkey snaps is that I collect these sets, but then it’s too much like hard work to stick them up.  Occasionally I manage it.  But often, not.  Often, they just fester away on my hard disc, not enlightening the world in any way about the ways of – or the soon to be obsolete cameras of - Billion Monkeys.

So, while looking for something else in my ever more gigantic photo archive, I encountered this, which I consider to be well worthy of posteritisation.  So here it is.  No collage of like-minded snaps.  No muss.  No fuss.  Just this one, now:

It’s not just the picture on the camera of one of London’s great modern landmarks.  It’s also the hand.  The ring is nice too.  A small ring, and a big ring.

Photoed in September of last year.

I haven’t actually done much snapping lately, but this evening I was rootling through my photo-archives for good snaps to show you, and came across a whole lot I took of the spectacular sunset that graced western Surrey last Christmas Day.  This was the day I took this photo.

Here are four more that I took on that same day.  In a way they look better small than big, because when big they are a bit blurry.  But, you decide.  The blond Billion Monkey lady in all of them is my niece, my eldest brother’s daugher.

I like the contrast of the blue on the camera screen with the lurid red of the sky, which really was that red

Yes:

On the left the best of a set of snaps I took of a troupe of Billion Monkeys, who were all snapping away at Big Ben.  And on the right the verdict of the Alpha Male of the troupe.  Hurrah!  We’re being photoed!  And it just got better!  Now you’re on the internet!

Do you suspect me of losing interest in Billion Monkeys?  Not so!

Billion Monkeys, for those uninitiated into the concept, are digital photographers.  An earlier generation of postulated monkeys used to sit at typewriters, failing to write anything good.  But our current generation of technologically enabled primates, armed this time around with digital cameras and snapping away like monkeys possessed, are real.  And they – we - are producing many works of art, many beautiful images, many wondrous memories, and witty and pertinent illustrations of what life now is like.  We Billion Monkeys are the real story of photography now, not the mere trivia of which Real Photographers are considered to be the most artistic by those who believe that they decide such things.

I am an enthusiastic Billion Monkey and I photo my fellow Billion Monkeys.  Without their consent.  But the result is a crowd scene, and in fifty years Posterity will govel in gratitude.

Recently I was wandering back through my ever-growing Billion Monkeys photo archive, and was struck by how certain days seemed to result in little inspiration, while other dates yielded fine snap after fine snap.

January 12th of this year proved to be a particularly satisfactory afternoon of Billion Monkey hunting.  Here are some of my favourites from that day:

It wasn’t very cold that day, but nor was it hot, and many of the the Billion Monkeys I encountered were doing a very characteristic Billion Monkey thing, namely wearing gloves while snapping.  Real Photographers don’t do that, although Real Photographers do sometimes wear mittens.  So there were lots of snaps in the category: Billions Monkeys wearing gloves!  But all the Billion Monkey bases seemed to get covered that day, with a particularly strong showing in the Billion Monkeys photo-ing themselves! category.  Above all, there were just lots of just very interesting looking Billion Monkeys wandering past my field of vision that day.

I particularly like the best of the snaps that were taken as the light was fading, causing buses and even by the end just anyone or anything moving at all to become a blur, in front of which the stationary Billion Monkey shows up especially well.

In the blurry background of 1.5 is the new statue of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square.  And the statue in 5.1 is of Queen Boudicca in her chariot, next to Westminster Bridge.

That big new architect-designed office building in the background of 2.1 is where all the MPs now have their office space.  I reckon the reason so many MPs are now, suddenly, getting into trouble for hiring members of their families is that these people finally have somewhere nice to work in, which before they didn’t because MPs had no room for them.  Nepotism expands to fill the space available for its accommodation.

By the way, regarding this posting’s title, this is one of my favourite pop tunes:

He just caught the Jamestown Ferry,
It’s not a hot day in January,
Like he said it’d be if he ever left me.

I always switch off when bloggers copy out entire pop lyrics, so I kept that copy-and-pasting short and to the point.

There are times when I worry about violating the privacy of my fellow Billion Monkeys, by putting pictures of them up on the internet, even if it’s only here.  I still do it, but I do worry.  But honestly, can there possibly be anything wrong with showing this to the world?  He’s making a living sculptural exhibition of himself, and his face is invisible.

Taken last Wednesday on the South Bank, between the Wheel and the Hungerford Bridges.  This is where strange people stand motionless in strange painted costumes, all silver, or all yellow, of invisible, or dressed as a pirate or a Chinese lady dancer or some such.  He’s photo-ing one of these, so that he gets the Wheel right behind them.

Should I report him?

I am too knackered to be doing anything much here today, beyond telling you that I’m too knackered to be doing anything much here today.

If you want recent bloggage of the sort I would be proud to have done, may I suggest you give Bishop Hill a visit.  He has been rather eloquent during the last couple of days.

Meanwhile, here is a snap that I took today on Westminster Bridge, just before it got dark, of a lady photo-ing herself holding a huge - and I mean huge - wheel.

Also on show here is the Billion Monkey way with bags.  Having one hanging from an arm that you want to be holding rock steading, either because it’s holding the camera or because it’s part of the shot, is not comfortable.  But worse, far worse, would be to leave the bag somewhere where a villainous local might grab it, while you’re busy snapping.  Billion Monkeys keep their personal possessions with them at all times!

Twice recently I have visited Tate Modern.  The stuff in it is mostly silly, but the building is splendid and I really like it, even as I ruminate upon the vast expense of having such a huge place, just for people to wander about in and chat and have coffee and buy books and postcards.

Recently there’s been a big piece of installation art there in the form of deliberately contrived and rather large cracks in the floor of the big main Turbine Hall.  I photographed this.  Me being me, I also photoed others photo-ing it:

Click to get both those two and the next two snaps bigger.

But then I found something else.  Here are two views of that something else.

That’s right folks, there’s a real crack right next to the fake cracks, and caused by them.

I guess two things about this real crack.  First, I guess that the artist and the Tate Modern bosses are decidedly irritated by it, and would really, really rather that this had not happened.  Had there been more cracks, they would, I think, have been even more angry, and it would have become a snigger story in the Daily Mail.  (As it is, the crack is only a small one, and not worthy of that much attention.) Second, I guess that they will shrug it off as equally thought-provoking and artistic, and just generally going to show how right the artist was about, I don’t know, the nature of the world and its precariousness etcetera, blah blah, gibber gibber.  Like nobody would have known otherwise that things crack.

I’m still trying to work out exactly why I find this real crack so smile-worthy.  All I now know is that I do.  Probably it is because it is making people look foolish who I want to look foolish.  I am sure they are unhappy about this crack, assuming that it has been drawn to their attention (as I am sure it has), but what is the precise nature of that unhappiness?

In that Times report that I linked to above, I have now discovered, it says this:

“What she wants is for people to think about what’s real and what’s not,” the spokeswoman said.

The spokeswoman said!  I love that, and again, I don’t know quite why.  It’s something to do with the fact that proper Modern Art, in the days when Modern Art cursed The Establishment rather than being The Establishment, shouted in your face that you were a bourgeois cunt.  It didn’t have a prim little “spokeswoman” doing its explaining for it.

Well, what I think is that the fake cracks are not real and that the real crack is real.  So, mission accomplished?  No, I don’t think so.  But why don’t I think so?

Went walking yesterday in the cold and perfect sunshine, but didn’t take many photos.  I’ve already looked at them once and they didn’t seem up to much.  So, not a particularly good day.  But, experiment, which was the best of a bad lot?  I will now pick one.

Well, here are six that are worth a second look.  Three are the inevitable Billion Monkeys ...

... but three are ... not:

Click to get them larger.

When I got home and first looked through these and all the other snaps, what I clocked was their average un-niceness, which was distinctly un-nice, and in particular the fact that several that I hoped would be very nice were not nice at all because blurry.  But the nicest were still quite good, I think.

The two peculiar shiny sticking up things in front of St Stephen’s (i.e. the spikey old Parliament) Tower are Art, outside the Queen Elizabeth Hall.  The skateboarder is perhaps a controversial choice, being mostly as blurry as all the disappointments.  Even much of the skateboarder is blurry.  Think of that also as Art.  If I were a Real Artist, I would print out all the blurry ones and put them up in an Art gallery with a caption complaining about late capitalism.

Well, I like it:

If you don’t, well, no very great harm done.  Taken last Thursday.  The BM is snatching a last snap of Parliament, Big Ben etc., as the bus speeds away across Westminster Bridge.

How could I have missed this?

Someone should have alerted me to this at the time.  They don’t look very like her, but who cares?  Billion Monkey gold, and better late than never.  I found this classic shot because there was a Sharapova interview in yesterday’s Sunday Times, with a picture of her snapping herself with a mobile phone, and I went looking for that.  (Apparently she’s just signed a huge deal with Sony-Ericsson.)

I didn’t find that one, but I did find some good Sharapova snaps, beyond the obvious ones of her wearing swimsuits and playing tennis.  There was this:

That’s her with a Canon Billion Monkey camera, on the side of a New York bus.

Best of all was this, which features La Sharapova holding the same camera (I presume) and a dog, and being photographed by a Real Photographer.  Most of my favourite Sharapova-being-photoed and Sharapova-holding-a-camera and Sharapova-lookalike snaps are the work of tammyloh, but all seem to be .gifs, and alas I don’t know how to make any use of them besides just linking to them.  Presumably that’s the whole idea.

All my instincts tell me that La Sharapova is not a real Billion Monkey, although I would love to be wrong about that.  There is none of the characteristic finger work, with the fifth finger sticking up in an exaggerated fashion, to avoid any possibility of it getting into the picture.  In all the pictures of her holding a camera that I’ve seen, that’s all she seems to be doing, holding it, and often as if she’s just been handed it and will very soon be handing it back.  Plus, in that bus picture she’s grinning at the person photographing here.  A real Billion Monkey lady would be engrossed in her camera and utterly oblivious of anyone photo-ing her.  Trust me.

But, look!  I tried again to find that self-photoing shot, and this time I found it.  It had only recently shown up on the Google.

Ending her three-year run with Canon, the highly profiled player today pledged her allegiance to Sony Ericsson. Besides undertaking a series of new consumer-brand campaigns off the court, Sharapova will also be working with the Japanese-Swedish company’s designers on “a range of products and accessories,” according to the press release.

Well, we suppose it’s bye bye Canon PowerShot and, hello, Sony Ericsson for the tennis star. And guess what phone she’s using now? The Sony Ericsson W350i.  What did you expect?

Well, actually I had no particular expectations about which brand of phone La Sharapova is using.  I only quoted that nonsense to stop what happened to the picture in the previous posting happening again at the bottom of this one.  But it does rather confirm that she’s not a proper Billion Monkey.

Michael Jennings asked me recently if it takes me a stupidly long time to do those photo mosaics that I like to do, and of course it does.  So this time, I’m just going to show you a mere three favourite snaps of all the Billion Monkey snaps that I took yesterday afternoon:

Yesterday in London was a classic sunny-intervals-scattered-showers day.  When I went out it was sunny, but soon it became rainy again, and darker, and soon it became officially dark.  But the rain did good things to the pavements.  And dim light has its uses for us Billion Monkeys, especially if we are a Billion Monkey who likes to photo other Billion Monkeys.

The first is an example of what you can do with fading light, because in dim light anything in motion becomes a blur and blur is good because anything in front of the blur in good focus shows up especially well.

The second, I think, is another consequence of rain on the pavement.  This man doesn’t want to mess his trousers by allowing either knee to touch the ground, hence his somewhat ungainly crouch.  For he has to get low enough to get Big Ben into the picture properly.

The third is my favourite of all that I took yesterday.  It shows a characteristic Billion Monkey moment, when the person you’ve just asked to take your photo with your camera gives it back to you afterwards.  The rainy pavement and the umbrella makes me think Jack Vettriano, although he never does out of focus.  That would be just too photographic.  Nor would he think of painting a raindrop on his lens by lightening and slightly blurring a bit of his picture, which is what happens towards the bottom left of my picture.  Which I don’t mind at all.