First rule of the internet has to be “Don’t scroll past the end of the article to the comments”, especially if it’s an article that involves Apple in any way, shape or form.
This superb clip makes a wonderful mockery of the utter bollocks that gets written online, in this case YouTube.
Fascinating seeing these images from such diverse parts of the world over at Wired. Would be great to compare to more organically developed cities. It also reminds me of a book I once had where all the great public spaces were drawn at the same scale in a figure ground style diagram. Must remember which book it’s in. The example of Washington DC shown below was my favourite, although I was surprised Barcelona’s Cerda grid didn’t make an appearance.
…or video as some people might call it.
A conversation yesterday with Jim reminded me of this video by Tim Crocker which still completely blows me away with it’s quality, composition and the new ideas that are shown in it – it’s two years old and still seems fresh.
A lot of video of Architecture seems to be fairly poorly produced with utlra wide shots, lots of third point of perspective and wonky buildings, too many pans, dolly shots, focus pulls etc – all of which distract from the narrative surrounding the Architecture in my opinion. Essentially there seems to be a lack of subtlety which most successful Architectural photography creates. In this video a series of frames are created which would be powerful architectural shots alone, but then the frames come alive with movement from the people and the play of light on the buildings and trees in the frame. The Architecture then seems to form the backdrop to the life contained within, having created a pleasant public space for this activity to take place.
It appears that Pedro Kok is also fairly handy with Architectural video – tip of the hat to Dave Morris for the link.
I found Ben’s work after following him on Twitter for the last few years. I really enjoy his work, which at first glance appears to be medium format due to the tonal qualities and square format along with architectural ‘verticals, vertical’ style which is very much reminiscent of the work of Sander Meisner. As with Meisner a lot of his photos appear in my favourites page on Flickr. Intriguingly though he is using a compact digital camera and making corrections after in Photoshop. This by no means diminishes the quality of his images though.
Ben could be accused of being obsessed with dark, gloomy or dull spaces. For me the images are more about finding beauty in the every day or the mundane that surrounds us. The consistency of his work is incredible, something I’ve completely failed at with my Flickr. I’ve added a few of my recent favourite images below but you should definitely spend some time going through his photo stream.
Hard to believe that iTunes is getting on for 12 years old. I remember first using it whilst finishing up my degree on my old PowerMac G4 400mhz albeit with a very limited selection of MP3 files. Ars Technica have an interesting run down of its development.
For me the most interesting thing is the evolution of the GUI. iTunes has always been a bit of a testing ground for UI developments that then sometimes made it into the main design of OS X, some with more success than others.
I can almost see Emma rolling her eyes now – ‘Another blog Andy, reaaaaaallllly?’. Yes well I have made another little blog for all my Scaffold of the day pictures, which my sister recently described as ‘…a bit weird’. You can find it at scaffoldlove.com and maybe I’ll buy a domain for it later. Why Tumblr? Well I don’t ever really want to clutter up my Flickr with Instagram photos. It seems like it’s just not the place for them.
The best thing is that I don’t need to ever update it, I just used the wonderful IFTTT website – which stands for If This Then That. So each time a photo on Instagram is tagged with #scaffoldlove it magically finds its way over onto this Tumblr page. All my Instagram shots also go to a massive album on Facebook, which probably annoys the hell out of everyone, using the same service.
Clever stuff when you think about it really. It’s amazing that you can fire up a new Tumblr blog in a matter of minutes and start posting content as well as automatically pipe stuff to it. This used to be so painfully hard but the internet does seem to be getting to the stage of “It just works” – very Steve Jobs – with all these clever services.
