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Reassuringly Expensive

My Photo 366 project has had a really nice reception since its launch, and even inspired a few of my friends to do the same.

Shot With POPA BadgeI’m delighted to say that my friend Brendan Dawes has offered me a POPA to use for my Photo 366 shots. POPA is the big red button for your iPhone that Brendan’s company Beep Industries designed, and started to produce last year.

I’ve been using the POPA app for a while, and was planning on buying a POPA soon, so I’m obviously very keen to get my hands on my own POPA. I highly recommend the app; it makes iPhone photography fast and fun again, and has some beautiful design touches and moments of UI delight.

I’m hoping my POPA will arrive today. As soon as I’ve had a chance to play with it I’ll share a review here.

I’ve seen a number of photo sets on Flickr where people have taken a photograph a day, every day, for a year; I thought it would be a fun challenge to do the same. Being a competitive sort of chap I thought I’d go one better, and take a photograph every day for a year and a day: 365 + 1 = 366 and so Photo 366 was born.

Only after I’d setup a Tumblr site I’d intended to use to collect these photos did it dawn on me that 2012 is a leap year, and therefore has 366 days. So I will after all be taking a photograph a day, every day, for a year. Duh.

With my iPhone I always have a surprisingly good camera in my pocket, and I often share photos through Instagram, Twitter and Flickr. So I thought it would be good to have a focus for this photography, if you’ll excuse the pun. Having to take a photograph I’l be happy to put my name to will I hope make me look harder for better photographs.

I think my Photo 366 project will be a challenge to keep fresh with interesting photographs. I commute to London at least four days a week, well I say London but my employers recently moved to Angel; a Northern suburb of London, and possibly the most uninteresting, and un-photogenic area of London I’ve visited. So finding subjects worthy of photographing and not resorting to repeated pictures of the London skyline will be a challenge.

In addition to my iPhone I have a nice Nikon point and shoot which I might start carrying with me to allow for more control than the iPhone allows. I’m also hoping to buy another ‘real’ camera this year which will add another element to my challenge.

But to start a journey you must take a single step, and here is my first step – today’s photograph:

Weather Station

You can see my Photo 366 photographs on their own site 366.davidhughes.org or collected in my Flickr set.

Indian newspaper on an Indian bus
I was talking to my friend Christian about my post The Story Behind The Picture when he reminded of his favourite photo from our trip to India.

We were staying in McLeod Ganj in Himanchal Pradesh, and decided to have a look around the nearby town of Dharamsala. We thought a bus might be more interesting than a taxi so headed to the bus stand. This was my first ride on an Indian bus, and I was looking forward to the amazing views on the road down the valley.

Chris bought a paper near the bus stand, and started to read it as we waited to leave, and this page caught my eye – I think it was the use of the word ‘charred‘ that was particularly diverting.

Of course our bus journey was quite uneventful, and we had a very pleasant morning looking around Dharamsala followed by lunch at The Dhauladhar hotel overlooking the Kangra Valley.

typewriters
I love this image that I just came across on The Well Appointed Desk; it combines my love of old technology with some of my favourite authors.

There is one striking omission for me; that of my favourite author William Gibson who wrote the cyberpunk classic Neuromancer on an manual typer writer of 1930s vintage. Of this typewriter William Gibson said:

Neuromancer was written on a “clockwork typewriter,” the very one you may recall glimpsing in Julie Deane’s office in Chiba City.

This machine, a Hermes 2000 manual portable, dates from somewhere in the 1930′s. It’s a very tough and elegant piece of work. Cased, it weighs slightly less than the Macintosh SE/30 I now write on, and is finished in a curious green- and-black “crackle” paint-job, perhaps meant to suggest the covers of an accountant’s ledger.

Its keys are green as well, of celluloid, and the letters and symbols on them are canary yellow. (I once happened to brush the shift-key with the tip of a lit cigarette, dramatically confirming the extreme flammability of this early plastic.)

It amuses me that such a prescient story was written on a typewriter so old it could not be repaired when it broke a short time after Neuromancer was published.

It amuses me even more that I wrote this post using an app that in essence recreates a typewriter on shiny new technology.

I’ve owned stupidly expensive fountain pens, I’ve tried all kinds of roller gel ball pen things, I’ve used pens that can write upside down and underwater, but none come close to the simple perfection of a wood case pencil.

I didn’t realise quite so much went into making them however.