I love to write about digital photography, and have been tracking the selfie phenomenon since long before the mere word was invented, way back in the days when I referred to digital photographers as Billion Monkeys (which I don’t anymore (because some people thought I meant Muslims)).  (But also way back in the days when I didn’t worry about showing the faces of strangers, the way I worry now.) And I also enjoy often public sculpture, especially of the more recent and less abstract sort.

So, I love this:

There have been complaints, of course, such as from all the commenters there at the Daily Mail.  God forbid that vulgar people should find this vulgar statue so much fun.  Sculpture is Art, and Art isn’t supposed to be amusing.

One of the Daily Mail’s other photos is of bloke photoing himself with his own mobile, in front of the selfie statue.  But I prefer the more subtle response that consists of simply being photoed joining in, thus:

For once, the statueness, so to speak, of the statue, the fact that it is made of monochrome metal rather than realistically painted to look like real people, works really well, because it contrasts so nicely with the real people.  It helps that it seems to be exactly life size.

One of the idiot grumpy commenters at the Daily Mail said that Sugar Land is a stupid name and they were obviously desperate for some attention, which they have never had until now.  But wasn’t there a Goldie Hawn movie called The Sugarland Express, or some such thing?  Yes there was.  Early Spielberg.  But, is Sugar Land the same as Sugarland?

According to a later Daily Mail report, it isn’t only their grumpy commentariat that objects to this statue.  Could this be because a lot of people heard about this story partly through the Daily Mail, and those people being the sort that hears about things via the Daily Mail, immediately started objecting, because they object to everything.  Whereas, the ones who liked it hadn’t heard about it so much.

I first found about the statue via Amusing Planet, so of course I was already self-identified as the sort who would be amused.  It was just that the Daily Mail had better pictures.

I just bought a new camera, the Panasonic Lumix FZ150, and it is great.  Here are some snaps I took with it, on Monday, of a few of my fellow digital photographers:

The light was fading quite fast while I was taking these, and trust me, these are much better snaps than I could have taken with my previous donkey-driven camera.

On Saturday I went to St Paul’s Cathedral, front of, to hear Kevin Dowd and Gordon Kerr address the Occupy St Paul’s people.  In the event I head very little of what they said, Kerr having been and gone before I even got there.  But I was very impressed that they did it.

If my time at Occupy St Paul’s was anything to go by, it has all been thoroughly domesticated.  Somebody is definitely in charge of this thing, and with a combination of threats and negotiation, a stand-off agreeable to all has been achieved.  There is no sense of impending violence.  Nobody yelled at me when I wondered about in among the tents, taking photos.  Nobody yelled at Kevin or Gordon for spouting Austrian Economics.

Click at will for the big pictures.

My usual preoccupations are in evidence.  There are many signs.  There are, of course, digital photographers, because I was not the only one taking photos.  Many were just photo-ing St Paul’s.

The bloke in the cap taking photos is Nigel Meek, the Editorial and Membership Director of the Libertarian Alliance, who apparently showed up as a result of that Samizdata posting (already linked to above) that I did flagging this up.  Afterwards (he told me later) he went out drinking with Kevin and Gordon and had a great afternoon of it.

If this demo is anything to go by, the tent makers have done a good trade.

Than it was a short while ago.

But, you still still can’t tell exactly how high it will finally be.  Will the converging glass cladding insist on entirely joining up into a point at the top, like … a shard of glass?  Or will the various converging shards of glass be content to get quite near to each other, and then just have a little extra roof in there?

Note also the excellent fifth finger of the left hand of the digital photographer, on the right.  This reminds me somewhat of the Star Trek salute that Trekkies do, which was featured on an episode of The Big Bang Theory last night.  But it is of course more sensible, being rooted in the necessity for the fifth finger not to feature in any photographs.

Although, I suppose the Star Trek salute might also be rooted in something “sensible”.

Early last week, via the Londonist, I heard about a big occupation of Regent Street that was going to happen yesterday, not by idiot hippies with no agenda (thank god), but by cars – veteran cars, E-type Jags, Minis, boringly modern cars, and surely plenty of etc. type cars.

But, come yesterday morning, I really wasn’t in the mood to get out, and nor was the weather very getoutful.  But I am very glad that I forced myself to attend.  I have never seen so many interesting cars assembled in one spot.  Any one of them would have deserved a photographic effort.  All of them congregated together was stupendous.

The light was poor, the kind where you have to hold your camera still or it’s disaster.  But I held it just about still enough, and snapped away like a mad thing.

There were, as promised, lots of E-Type Jags:

Lots of E-Type Jags and Minis:

Yes, lots of Minis, and we’re not talking the fake German Minis of recent years, that aren’t even that Mini.  These were real Minis:

The reason for all that Mini Jag action being that both are this year celebrating their fiftieth birthdays.

Better yet, there were lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of vintage cars, of the sort constructed over a century ago, when they were still trying to work out what a car was:

There were other cars, some exciting, like the knee-high red rocket car, and some dreary, like all the cars that demonstrated different varieties of fuel, such as electricity.  The dreary thing about the modern cars on show is that they look exactly like ordinary cars, i.e. in the nature of this, dreary cars.  You can’t see all the bizarrely new mechanical stuff, or not most of the time, because it is hidden behind dreary metal, just like a regular car:

But despite the dreary modern cars, it all added up to digital photographer heaven.  Many of the above pictures contain photographers, whom I couldn’t have avoided snapping had I been trying to avoid snapping them, and of course I wasn’t.  Was I going to be the only digital photographer present?  Of course not.  Here are some more of my tribe in action:

But what exactly, besides cars, were we all photo-ing?  I believe I was not the only one who was particularly noticing all the details of the vintage cars.  Like I say, they hadn’t (around 1900 or so) fully worked out what a car was supposed to be, and you can see them experimenting and juggling around with this and that arrangement, these and those luxury appendages, these and those sorts of seats, these and those sorts of bonnet shapes, right there in front of you.  Things had to be somewhat different from horse-drawn carriages.  But how different?

Amazing.  That all took hardly more than an hour.  Throughout, it was threatening to rain, but it never did until I was ready to leave.  I love how, when you visit something with a camera, you can photo it, and then go home and look at it all at your leisure.

Including “Sport” in the category list is because today, many of these cars will have been racing down to Brighton.

To everyone except cricket fans, WWW means the “world wide web” (yawn), but to us true believers it spells hat trick, three consecutive wickets in three consecutive balls.  Which was what Stuart Broad got this afternoon against India, in among a couple of other Ws.

Antoine tW . . | . 1 . . 4 1 | . . W W W . | . Wittered that I must have been all excited, but actually I missed it.  I was out in the sunshine.  I only clocked it, on my laptop, when I stopped in at Marie’s Cafe in Lower Marsh for some of her delicious chicken and cashew nuts with rice, after visiting Gramex (also in Lower Marsh) to stock up on cheap classical CDs.

By then, England were already batting, and it was nearly the close.  There had already been another W (Cook – having a rotten series (12, 1, 2, 5 so far) – cricket eh? funny old game), but mercifully there were no more.

I said in this, a couple of days ago, that if India hit back hard after their Lord’s disappointment, this has the makings of the best series here since 2005, and behold, India have hit back.  England will have to bat very well tomorrow.

While in Lower Marsh, I took this artistic snap.  Well, I like it:

And what with all the sunshine and all the great cricket (Surrey also won in a very close finish - earlier on in that game, Ramprakash was given out for “obstructing the field”, which happens in proper cricket about once a decade if that, and which I heard on the internet radio commentary just before I left home) and the great CDs I’d bought, I was in a really good mood.  So instead of just getting the bus home, I strolled across Westminster Bridge like it was 2005 and took photos of people taking photos.  Here are my favourites of those snaps:

When I got home and got to see the test match highlights on the telly, I discovered that the middle W of Stuart Broad’s hat trick should never have been given.  Harbhajan Singh clearly hit it before it struck his pad, yet the umpire gave him out LBW.  Still, the Indians would insist on not having techno-reviews, so they kind of deserve it.  Hard on Harbhajan though.

Talking of techno-reviews, everyone is trashing Hot Spot, which is the one that shows if the ball has struck the edge of the bat, sometimes.  What the players are saying is that sometimes, the ball does strike the edge of the bat, but doesn’t show up on Hot Spot, especially now that the batsmen all put Vaseline on their bats, in order to confuse Hot Spot.

However, correct me if I am wrong, fellow cricket fans, but this merely means that Hot Spot shouldn’t over-rule an umpire’s on-the-pitch opinion that the batsman did snick it.  If Hot Spot says he did snick it, but the umpire says not, then Hot Spot is still right.  Right?  So, Hot Spot is still some use, and should not be totally got rid of. The rule should be: If the umpire says you’re out and Hot Spot says not out, you’re out.  If the umpire says not out and Hot Spot says out, you’re out.  Only if they are unanimous that you are not out, are you not out.  You say that that is hard on the batsmen?  I say it would serve the bastards right for putting Vaseline on their bats.

Today, late in the afternoon, I took a walk towards Westminster Abbey, looking for things to photo in the aftermath of the public upheaval that was the royal wedding.

I know why people grumble about this wedding.  It’s not that they are forced to pay attention to it.  They are not.  Their problem is that they don’t like how much others seem to be attending to it, without being forced to any more than they are.  They don’t like the way this rather mediocre family occupies a place in British society, and in British affections, that they think ought to be occupied by a person who is - or persons who are - more politically qualified, by which is meant more political.  I used to think like this, but now believe that any more “rational” arrangement of this sort would merely strengthen the power of politicians by giving them yet another hold over us, which would be bad.  I still feel no reverence towards the family, but no longer favour any alternative arrangement.  It’s been quite a while since I would have lifted a finger to support any change in our Head of State arrangements.  Now, I might lift several fingers to keep them as they are, were the need for that ever to arise.

I don’t think the family can be expected to do anything beyond keeping the politicians away from the Head of State job, like preserving British sovereignty, or some such chimera.  If the politicians are determined to destroy that, destroy it they will, and the family will tag along.

Not being a reverent sort of royalist, I had no difficulty ignoring this wedding.  In order to notice it, I had to take active steps, which today took the form of wandering about London after it had finished, with my camera, to see whatever I saw.

Here is one of the photos I took, of a shop window:

And here is another shop window:

And of course, today as always, my fellow digital photographers were out in force:

Those ones were photographing the front door of Westminster Abbey.  This looked to me much as it always does.  But I suppose if you find the family exciting, there is something extra about photo-ing the front door of the building where one of their weddings was, only hours after it happened.

These blue Men reminded me that I have been meaning, ever since I took them, to display here some of my photos of some other Men, the ones put by Antony Gormley all over the South Bank and related areas (like bits of the North Bank), in the Summer of 2007.

I wouldn’t recommend solemnly looking at all of these, but click on a few at random, until you get the picture (I think it was not knowing how to do squares that caused the delay.)

For some damn fool artistic type reason that need not concern us unless we want it to, Gormley called these Men “Event Horizon”.  (Artists who make nice things but talk bollocks about them are a characteristic type of our time, I think.  I don’t blame them.  If they didn’t talk bollocks they’d never get their careers cranked up.  Anyway, it makes a change from a generation ago, when the things they made were almost entirely bollocks also.) The Gormley Men are all based on Gormley himself.

Critic Howard Halle (see here) out-Gormleyed Gormley by saying this:

“Using distance and attendant shifts of scale within the very fabric of the city, [Event Horizon] creates a metaphor for urban life and all the contradictory associations – alienation, ambition, anonymity, fame – it entails.”

Whatever.  In other words, you see in these metal Men whatever you want to see, much as you see whatever you want to see when confronting actual men.

As for me, I liked how they humanised the mostly very unlovely buildings of the South Bank.  And I liked how children would run about among them pointing excitedly and saying: “There’s another!”.  And I liked how my fellow digital photographers photoed them, and how I was able to photo some of them photo-ing them.

They also reminded me of the angels in the Wim Wenders movie Angels of Desire, and even more of the angels in the Hollywood remake of that called City of Angels.

I really liked these Gormley Men, and have missed them ever since, whenever I have visited the South Bank.  Thank goodness for digital cameras, which can ensure that such passing moments in the history of a city are thoroughly recorded and celebrated.

And in an attempt to illustrate that proposition with a link, I have just discovered that the Gormley Men paid a visit to New York, in the year 2010, I think.

And to Rotterdam in 2008.

Well done them.

Blog and learn.

Oh and: spot the deliberate mistake.