This is a picture I did not take of a woman with a baby in her arms and a burping towel on her shoulder, walking up to the side of a vacant, foreclosed home in the middle of a neighborhood hit hard by mortgage fraud, looking up and down the street before turning-on the outdoor spigot at the corner of the house to take a drink with a cupped hand, and then, after wetting the towel, she began to carefully wash her newborn’s feet.
cleversimon.com
He looked like a man who would write vers libre, as indeed he did.
Unphotographable: Vacant Home Newborn's Feet →
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Oh, right. That happened.
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GPOYW, travelin’ hat edition.
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Heading home.
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And that’s what I call a gin and tonic.
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Now this is what I call a pub.
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, eat your heart out.
Yes, you can spend too much time dicking around with your phone. Yes, I probably do it. But humans have always spent “too much” time on something, be it books or music or TV or video games or the Internet. “Too much” is how passion gets by.
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There’s no way to say this without sounding like a shill for Apple, but fuck it: the iPhone 4’s camera has got me excited about photography again.
I’ve taken nearly 300 pictures this week. That’s more than I’ve taken all year. It occasionally frustrates me with its limitations, but more often than not my iPhone manages to be in my hand at exactly the right moment and be at least adequate—frequently equal, sometimes exceptional—to taking excellent pictures. And that excites the hell out of me.
Hurf durf all you want about white balance and megapixels and focal length—you know I know; you just get off on the sound of your own joyless pedantry—but the fact is that I’ve been having a shitload of fun taking pictures that make me happy to look at, and it’s been years since I’ve felt this way, and it’s all thanks to an overhyped piece of luxury consumer electronics.
So suck on that, haters.
Original content © 2007–2010 Simon Crowley.
Rights & cetera reserved in perpetuam.
Masthead painting by Stanley Donwood.
Background photo by Mila Zinkova.
