December 5th - December 11th 2005
Sunday Young Toby
Saturday Aldgate
Friday Cheating
Thursday Harwooded
Wednesday Surrey Water
Tuesday And anozzer thing
Monday Grotto
Sunday 11th December 2005
Toby Young is a problem.
That he is an Arsehole goes without saying. But is he an unmitigated Arsehole, going about his Arseholing on automatic pilot - Born as it were, to Arsehole - or is there a deeper game-plan at work?
He's no stranger to irony, certainly: you can't publish something called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People without some sense of irony (unless, of course, your publisher imposes the title).
Reading that thin slice of autobiography, and more or less anything else he writes, you find yourself constantly torn between admiring his punkish disregard for conventional politesse and deprecating his simultaneous lame attempts to big himself up in the process.
But it's pretty easy to make a living these days ignoring conventional politesse - cf Toby's erstwhile inamorata Julie Burchell.
The difficult thing is to make your writing about something other than yourself (a trick that Burchell pulls off with considerably more style than Young Toby).
He begins what may well be his valedictory theatre review in this week's Spectator by admitting that when he first began work as a theatre critic he 'didn't have much time for theatre' - and a part, a small part, of you can't help but admire his gall.
But a much larger part of you wonders what on earth made him think he was qualified for the job in the first place.
Especially when he then declares: "Four years later, I've had such a complete change of heart that I felt like one of the luckiest men alive as I sat in an abandoned factory in Southwark watching Sunday in the Park With George, a Stephen Sondheim musical that even Sondheim aficionados regard as difficult."
Honest Toby. Clever Toby. Artful Toby. Sitting in an 'abandoned factory' appreciating 'difficult' Sondheim. One of the luckiest men alive.
But then he continues: "I loved every second of it and I've spent the past week hunting down the original Broadway cast recording. Who knows, by this time next year I may even have turned into a fully fledged homosexual."
Perhaps he's not an Arsehole at all.Perhaps he's just a Silly Little Cunt.
Saturday 10th December 2005
Aldgate, Autumn 2005
Friday 9th December 2005
Regular readers of Blogadoon, if there are any, will have noticed a distinct turn towards the picturesque in recent months.
I started posting more graphic content at the beginning of this year when my acquisition of a spiffy new computer made me re-evaluate my understanding of 'average' download speeds; I apologise to any modem-based readers who have found themselves disadvantaged thereby.
Six months later, I finally dived back into photography proper when I got round to investing in my first digital camera; I hope that you think it's proved worthwhile.
Whatever image I publish tomorrow will be the fiftieth photograph I've posted on Blogadoon: a fitting moment to unveil the addition of a Photo Index page, as freshly seen at left.
In the unikely event of your finding time to peruse said list, you might want to consider a potentially pointed issue: how honest are these pictures?
Most photographers have always felt free to manipulate the basic information captured in their cameras by tinkering with exposure or cropping the image. For a small minority, however, such manipulation struck at the very foundations of what they saw as photography's unique ability to communicate the truth about the way the world looks.
Photoshop has exploded the traditional relationship between photography and reality. Some artists (David Hockney, for example) have gone on record as regretting the fracture that results; other photographers welcomed it with glee.
(When I had lunch with Lichfield several years ago he surprised me with his enthusiasm for what was then a new technology: "Do you know a program called Photoshop? Marvellous. Take a model's picture and you can put her anywhere you want, in the desert, on an ice-cap, anywhere. Saves a fortune...")
In re-committing myself to the New Photography, I was vaguely conscious of the demands it would entail. It was, after all, never as easy as simply seeing something nice and snapping it: you bracket your shots, you try out different angles, and then you edit, edit, edit.
Add Photoshop to the mix and the potential for a life wasted on optimising an image that few, if any, people will bother to look at grows exponentially.
In the event, I've arrived at an instinctive set of rules about how much license I allow myself.
Given the limitations of the relatively inexpensive camera that I chose (an Olympus µ) being free to rotate the original image in Photoshop is mandatory.
Cropping is not just permitted, but essential - it strikes me as almost as vital a part of the creative process as the initial selection of the shot. (As and when I move up to a proper SLR, I may reconsider.)
And with three or four early exceptions, every image has been cropped to a 3:2 ratio - simply to minimise an otherwise paralysing range of possibilities.
Adjusting the contrast strikes me as regrettable but necessary, given the wide range of monitor conditions out there. (And I'm still not convinced I've got it right: does the magnificent luminance of my 20" iMac flatscreen makes me over-estimate some images' impact on duller screens?)
Diddling with Saturation strikes me as fair game, given that the results are fairly akin to bracketing the original exposure; Photoshop's new Shadow/Highlight tool has a near-miraculous ability to rescue foreground detail that's been drowned out by strong backlighting, but it introduces a lot of noise as it does so, so I only use it with caution:
I approach playing with Hue even more cautiously, but don't always resist the temptation to punch up a blue sky or a red poppy (but only a little; most of the point of the sunset picture above was that the sky actually was that way, and it would be silly to spend time creating elaborate lies about that.) Canary Wharf can really look like that, and here's the original (left) of a dawn shot to prove it:
Beyond that, what you see is pretty much what you'd have got.
Pretty much: I have occasionally, very occasionally, allowed myself to touch out a highlight that I found distracting: note the disappearing lamp, top centre, in the sunset shot.
And I admit that there have been times when I've been so entranced by an image I've half-captured that I've felt no option but to go the extra mile and, quite frankly, fake it.
The iconic image of the couple at Brighton Pride is one fairly harmless example: after I cropped it, I blurred and darkened the rest of the image to emphasise the protagonists.
When I snatched a picture of a crowded Soho Square from the top floor of The Edge, I had my finger over the top right corner of the lens: I later spent an hour or so laboriously copying and pasting fake foliage to cover it up.
I don't feel too bad about that, and I don't have a problem with the picture of the concourse at Liverpool Street which, I think, most anybody who cares enough to think about will realise is the result of some laborious compositing (the blur, though, is 'real'). Similarly, tampering with the firework shot strikes me as fair play.
The early picture of trains at Hamburg railway station was a composite and I confessed to that at the time.
The one instance of tampering with the truth that I do feel slightly bad about is the misty image of Shadwell Basin:
Most of it came from one photograph, but not all:
Six fakes out of fifty: mea culpa. But I'm comforted by a slightly pretentious quote I found from David Hockney:
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist
Now that I've got all that off my chest, I know just what picture I shall post tomorrow - it's rather dull but, cropping and re-sizing apart, and despite the bizarre colouration, it's as honest as it gets.
Thursday 8th December 2005
Always nice to bump into a familiar face at Duckie, especially when it's someone I originally knew from another hostelry way to the east.
You'll be wondering about the cabaret that night, but all I recall is a charming woman, totally shaven, totally naked, and covered in large gold sequins. (Or were they spangles?)
Nice to be handed an invite to an upcoming private view. Even nicer to discover that Stephen now has a blog. (And very readable it is too.)
But you won't see it listed to the left because that is territory reserved for people who link to me. (Do you? Why not?)
Ooh, flashback: the final part of the health-education themed evening was a contest to see who could best fit a condom onto Amy Lamé's strap-on. Using only their mouth. (I can't tell you much more than that because I had my hands over my eyes for most of the time.)
Wednesday 7th December 2005
Surrey Water, Autumn 2005
Tuesday 6th December 2005
Sports news: Imraan Ladak, the chairman of Kettering Town football club, has sacked Paul Gascoigne, blaming 37 alcohol-related incidents in just 39 days.
Gascoigne, for his part, accused Ladak of "meddling in team affairs, failing to produce promised funds, and not dressing smartly enough."
Monday 5th December 2005
......previous week
