Good Morning Good Night and General Chat.

[S-Westerly]

53 minutes ago, Six30 said:

just watched Liverpool demolish Palace .... what a performance , 7 outstanding goals with no reply 

It does make up for that unfortunate outing against Villa and best of all has shut up my Spurs supporting colleague.

Edited December 19, 2020 by S-Westerly
Bloody auto text again!!!

[Trooper74]

Taking the wheels off the Suzuki TS50 today ... guy bought it off me on EBAY .... £292 ... result.

He's collecting it in the morning in an Astra !

Front wheel is off but i cant get the rear off .. the axle is moving in the hub but is seized in the swinging arm ??? So nut off axle, hit with hammer , axle moves ... but it's really only spreading the swinging arm ... which is weird .... what is keeping the axle in the swinging arm on the non nut side ?? 

Anywayup ... I've taken the forks off as well so it should fit, laid down in the Astra with the rest of the bits piled on top ....

[Six30]

2 hours ago, S-Westerly said:

It does make up for that unfortunate outing against Villa and best of all has shut up my Spurs supporting colleague.

 nieces other half is a spurs fan , didn't shut him up the deluded twat, still thinks they are going to win the league, i did give him some shite after our win against em 

[Guest Swagman]

Good morning.

[Bender]

41 minutes ago, Swagman said:

Good morning.

Technically, but only people who work nights or have issues would class this as morning, as I've not gone to bed yet I bid you a goodnight in anticipation of eventually running out of beer and going there.

[learningtofly]

Oooh - apparently it's going to be sunny today, so I'm going to be out on the bike prior to watching Spurs reconfirm their title credentials this afternoon ( @Six30  )

[dynax]

Good morning

[Six30]

1 hour ago, learningtofly said:

Oooh - apparently it's going to be sunny today, so I'm going to be out on the bike prior to watching Spurs reconfirm their title credentials this afternoon ( @Six30  )

start of Spurs the slide ...

[learningtofly]

13 minutes ago, Six30 said:

start of Spurs the slide ...

I may or may not respond, depending on today's result!

[rennie]

Good Morning  Shhhh! don't make a noise! I'm feeling slightly fragile

I've just counted the empties waiting to be recycled! 10 cans of cheap Aldi cider and 2 bottles of 8.2% Westons!  I think I may be having a siesta later

[James in Brum]

@rennie you are a behemoth sorry, RENNIE YOU ARE A BEHEMOTH IN THE WORLD OF BOOZING AND I SALUTE YOU! 

[Guest Swagman]

Yeah but take a look at his liver.

[Guest Swagman]

Good morning.

[MarkW]

On 19/12/2020 at 08:54, Slowlycatchymonkey said:

...and @MarkW our resident photographic librarian, which photography books would you recommend, got a top 5?

Hmm… Picking my top five photography books won’t be easy, and most of the ones in the shortlist are very unlikely to have much mass appeal!

In the mid-1980s I bought a photography book as a Christmas present for my father, and one of the images in it just grabbed and held my attention the moment I saw it. It was pretty much the first time I had properly understood the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words, and at that moment I decided I was going to be a war photographer. I wanted to take pictures that had that sort of impact, and that had something genuinely profound to say about the truly appalling ways humans treat each other. Consequently my book collection is rather heavily weighted towards conflict photography, which by its very nature is disturbing and unsettling - these are definitely not coffee table books!

That first hard-hitting photograph eventually came to symbolise something else entirely for me when I researched the background a bit more, and of course started to look at it with the eyes of an adult rather than those of a child. And ultimately I managed to avoid the temptations of heroism, and have spent most of my life in the comparative safety of the lab, fiddling around with anthrax and other such delights.  

Anyway – neither here nor there. Let’s peruse the less gruesome offerings and see what we can come up with, starting with my most recent acquisition:

 

Gregory Heisler: 50 Portraits

I’ve really enjoyed this book. There are some fabulous images here, with his portraits of O.J. Simpson and Yasser Arafat standing as two of the most intriguing to me. Each portrait is accompanied by a description of the session itself and how he approached his subject, together with notes on the techniques he used to get the finished picture. I have been a medium format guy for years but this book has really given me the inspiration to have a go at large format for portraits, so the New Year is almost certain to see our house becoming even more cluttered with camera shit. My wife is thrilled.

 

Saul Leiter: Early Colour

The companion book ‘Early Black and White’ is also very good, as is the short documentary film ‘In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter’ which is well worth a watch. He was a very modest man with an incredible eye for composition.  

 

Fred Herzog: Modern Colour

I have a real soft spot for 1950s and 60s Kodachrome - it’s got a quality that I love. Unfortunately it went the way of many emulsions, falling victim to the leg-jiggling generation’s need for talent-free instant gratification, and as K-14 processing simply can’t compete with the mobile phone when it comes to uploading their latest happy-slapping atrocity to social media it was finally discontinued about ten years ago.

This book has some lovely images; not conventionally beautiful perhaps, but they really appeal to my eye.

 

Philip Davies: Panoramas of Lost London (Work, Wealth, Poverty and Change 1870-1945)

You always have to be careful with books of very old photographs. One of the few things the pompous self-loathing lesbian pseudo-intellectual Susan Sontag had to say on photography that was even remotely worth reading was that the passage of time eventually makes every photograph interesting: even the most boring and amateurish snapshot taken today will be an interesting artefact in 2120 merely because it shows what life was like 100 years ago. There’s always a danger with such books that the actual images themselves are interesting only for this fact. But this is an exception. It’s a large book of large prints, and many of them are so detailed and capture so much activity that you can spend hours with a magnifying glass, endlessly discovering new things.

 

Horst Faas & Tim Page: Requiem

OK, so this is a book on war photography, but it’s an important one in my humble opinion. It is a compilation of photographs from the war in Vietnam and Indochina, taken by the photographers who didn’t make it back. Many of the greats are in there - Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Dickey Chapelle, Gilles Caron, and of course Robert Capa – all in the thick of the action at the front line, and armed with nothing more than a Nikon F and a few rolls of Tri-X.

Many of these photographers worked together fairly closely, and their various fates were often intertwined. There’s a shot of Dickey Chapelle receiving the last rites, taken by Henri Huet just after the guy in front of her tripped a boobytrap. Huet was killed a few years later along with Larry Burrows when their helicopter was shot down over Laos. It’s not a book for the faint hearted, but it’s a fascinating one.

 

So that’s my top five (as of today, at any rate: ask me again next week and I’ll probably have changed my mind). Anyone else got any recommendations? I’m always looking for new stuff to add to the collection!

Edited December 20, 2020 by MarkW

[Six30]

7 hours ago, learningtofly said:

I may or may not respond, depending on today's result!

couldn't  resist , sorry, just make out it says Leicester instead of Liverpool

 

Edited December 20, 2020 by Six30

[Mickly]

7 hours ago, rennie said:

Good Morning  Shhhh! don't make a noise! I'm feeling slightly fragile

I've just counted the empties waiting to be recycled! 10 cans of cheap Aldi cider and 2 bottles of 8.2% Westons!  I think I may be having a siesta later

Westons Vintage Cider is delicious but at that ABV it has to be treated with respect, it’s caused me many a missed morning

[Slowlycatchymonkey]

2 hours ago, MarkW said:

Hmm… Picking my top five photography books won’t be easy, and most of the ones in the shortlist are very unlikely to have much mass appeal!

In the mid-1980s I bought a photography book as a Christmas present for my father, and one of the images in it just grabbed and held my attention the moment I saw it. It was pretty much the first time I had properly understood the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words, and at that moment I decided I was going to be a war photographer. I wanted to take pictures that had that sort of impact, and that had something genuinely profound to say about the truly appalling ways humans treat each other. Consequently my book collection is rather heavily weighted towards conflict photography, which by its very nature is disturbing and unsettling - these are definitely not coffee table books!

That first hard-hitting photograph eventually came to symbolise something else entirely for me when I researched the background a bit more, and of course started to look at it with the eyes of an adult rather than those of a child. And ultimately I managed to avoid the temptations of heroism, and have spent most of my life in the comparative safety of the lab, fiddling around with anthrax and other such delights.  

Anyway – neither here nor there. Let’s peruse the less gruesome offerings and see what we can come up with, starting with my most recent acquisition:

 

Gregory Heisler: 50 Portraits

I’ve really enjoyed this book. There are some fabulous images here, with his portraits of O.J. Simpson and Yasser Arafat standing as two of the most intriguing to me. Each portrait is accompanied by a description of the session itself and how he approached his subject, together with notes on the techniques he used to get the finished picture. I have been a medium format guy for years but this book has really given me the inspiration to have a go at large format for portraits, so the New Year is almost certain to see our house becoming even more cluttered with camera shit. My wife is thrilled.

 

Saul Leiter: Early Colour

The companion book ‘Early Black and White’ is also very good, as is the short documentary film ‘In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter’ which is well worth a watch. He was a very modest man with an incredible eye for composition.  

 

Fred Herzog: Modern Colour

I have a real soft spot for 1950s and 60s Kodachrome - it’s got a quality that I love. Unfortunately it went the way of many emulsions, falling victim to the leg-jiggling generation’s need for talent-free instant gratification, and as K-14 processing simply can’t compete with the mobile phone when it comes to uploading their latest happy-slapping atrocity to social media it was finally discontinued about ten years ago.

This book has some lovely images; not conventionally beautiful perhaps, but they really appeal to my eye.

 

Philip Davies: Panoramas of Lost London (Work, Wealth, Poverty and Change 1870-1945)

You always have to be careful with books of very old photographs. One of the few things the pompous self-loathing lesbian pseudo-intellectual Susan Sontag had to say on photography that was even remotely worth reading was that the passage of time eventually makes every photograph interesting: even the most boring and amateurish snapshot taken today will be an interesting artefact in 2120 merely because it shows what life was like 100 years ago. There’s always a danger with such books that the actual images themselves are interesting only for this fact. But this is an exception. It’s a large book of large prints, and many of them are so detailed and capture so much activity that you can spend hours with a magnifying glass, endlessly discovering new things.

 

Horst Faas & Tim Page: Requiem

OK, so this is a book on war photography, but it’s an important one in my humble opinion. It is a compilation of photographs from the war in Vietnam and Indochina, taken by the photographers who didn’t make it back. Many of the greats are in there - Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Dickey Chapelle, Gilles Caron, and of course Robert Capa – all in the thick of the action at the front line, and armed with nothing more than a Nikon F and a few rolls of Tri-X.

Many of these photographers worked together fairly closely, and their various fates were often intertwined. There’s a shot of Dickey Chapelle receiving the last rites, taken by Henri Huet just after the guy in front of her tripped a boobytrap. Huet was killed a few years later along with Larry Burrows when their helicopter was shot down over Laos. It’s not a book for the faint hearted, but it’s a fascinating one.

 

So that’s my top five (as of today, at any rate: ask me again next week and I’ll probably have changed my mind). Anyone else got any recommendations? I’m always looking for new stuff to add to the collection!

Blimey that’s more than I could have hoped for, thanks. 
I looked at the first book and thought hmm yes I’d definitely like to look at that one but I’ll have a quick look at the next one.. oh no I’ll get this one.. hmm but I also want the first one and on it went until I’d looked at all five and with the same result. In the end I decided to order Requiem but I suspect the others will be following soon because that’s an excellent book list.

I like art, all sorts even the much maligned abstract n modern stuff but I struggle with the pretentiousness that often accompanies it. Photography has a potency to it that hits multiple points much harder than a painting and avoids a lot of the obnoxious arty turn off trigger words like juxtaposition, quintessential, deconstructs and organic... blurgh. 
A painting of a conflict is never gonna do anything to you like a photograph can. 
I’m left wanting to know what the photograph was that set you off in the 80’s. 
Sorry I have nothing to offer in return, what can I say I’m an oik!

Too many thankyou’s make everyone feel nauseous and from what I can glean you wouldn’t accept them anyway but this is a great list, I’m very happy to have it, glad you avoided the heroics and survived to supply it! Thankyou. 
 

[Mississippi Bullfrog]

Oh dear, I seem to upset our local FB motorcycle group. There was a post merrily planning a ride through N Wales and I suggested that since Wales Covid rules suggested avoiding unnecessary travel this might not be the best of ideas.

 

So apparently the BBC and Welsh government websites are fake news outlets so the whole thing is about as credible as the flat earth theory. There are absolutely no travel restrictions anywhere in the UK. It’s all just a conspiracy.

 

Which I questioned, and it seems the proponent was one of the mods so I got booted out for doubting their amazing intellect.

 

I am devastated.

 

 

[Bender]

@Mississippi Bullfrog

Never mind your welcome here with your mad ideas

[MarkW]

4 hours ago, Slowlycatchymonkey said:

I’m left wanting to know what the photograph was that set you off in the 80’s. 

The photograph in question is called ‘Aid from the Padre’ and was taken by Hector Rondon during the El Porteñazo uprising in Venezuela in 1962.

 

 

Rondon had been pinned down by sniper fire for almost an hour when he saw Navy chaplain Luis Manuel Padilla roaming the streets, giving the last rites to dead and dying soldiers. This image is of him supporting a wounded government soldier as he tries to get to his feet, and a few moments after it was taken the chaplain was driven back by gun fire, and the soldier was killed.

 

As a young teenager what struck me about this photograph was the obvious and chilling fact that it captures someone’s last desperate moments, and that despite the effort with which the solider is clinging to the chaplain – and to life – a few seconds later it was all over; the noise which has drawn the chaplain’s attention is the sound of his imminent and violent death.

 

The photograph won the World Press Photo of the Year award in 1962 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. Padilla was hailed as a hero – something he rejected with all the false modesty of those who believe they are on intimate terms with the creator of the universe. He later said that as a chaplain he knew that the Catholic ‘enemy’ soldiers would neither have shot him nor obeyed any order to do so, and that at no point did he fear for his life.

 

That made me start to look at the photograph rather differently. I wondered why, if he felt so secure, the chaplain had done nothing to try to stop the murder of this man. Nobody ever knows how they will behave under such circumstances of course, but I hoped that if I had been in his position I would have interposed myself to try to stop it, to explain to the advancing enemy that his war was over, and there was nothing more to be gained by killing him. Whatever I may have done, I know myself well enough to know that there is no way I could abandon a fellow human being who was clinging to me like that in his most desperate moments. But Padilla dropped him like a brick the moment he heard the gunfire, scuttled back and left him to be cut to pieces by the bullets. To me the photograph became a metaphor for the false consolation of religion, and the immorality of anyone who could believe that when someone needs genuine help and you are in a position to provide it, that meaningless magic incantations provide any sort of substitute for the most basic aspects of our humanity.

[S-Westerly]

Bit harsh on the padre as if I remember the 60's saw quite a lot of religious being slaughtered by various factions left and right in South America. I'm not  religious at all (humanist if anything) but some of the few people who give the slightest toss about distressed seamen are the various seaman's missions. Governments and commercial interests frequently  leave men to rot on deathtrap ships with no wages, food or chance of repatriation. And yes it happens in the UK. 

[MarkW]

1 hour ago, S-Westerly said:

Bit harsh on the padre as if I remember the 60's saw quite a lot of religious being slaughtered by various factions left and right in South America. I'm not  religious at all (humanist if anything) but some of the few people who give the slightest toss about distressed seamen are the various seaman's missions. Governments and commercial interests frequently  leave men to rot on deathtrap ships with no wages, food or chance of repatriation. And yes it happens in the UK. 

I guess it would perhaps have been a harsh judgement of the padre were it not for the fact that he said he felt perfectly safe to wander the streets giving last rites. If he felt that the Catholicism he shared with the approaching soldiers made him immune from attack, then whether he was under a misapprehension or not the question has to be asked: why did he abandon this man to his fate so readily? He could have done - or at the very least tried to do - something genuinely useful for this man, but he didn't.

 

I often wondered what was going through that soldiers mind when he was in the padre's arms. If he was resigned to his fate and just wanted someone on hand to say the appropriate words when the time came then that is one thing: it's still not useful in any meaningful sense, but at least it would have been better than thinking he had come to save you and discovering that he hadn't as he dumped you on the ground and retreated at the first crack of gunfire.   

 

Anyway, these were meant to be photography-related posts rather than ones that stray off on a religious tangent (my fault - sorry). Someone always brings up charity though when you make any criticism of religious organisations, as though it in any way compensates for the harm they do. Hamas and Hezbollah aren't behind the door when it comes to pointing out all their charitable work either...  

Edited December 21, 2020 by MarkW

[Gerontious]

Last night of the week finished and just waiting for day staff to arrive, back on Wednesday. Working over Christmas and new year this time. Just waiting now for the calendar in the office to be changed so I can book my holiday for September.257 days to go.

[rennie]

Good Morning  I have to brave the shops today 

[S-Westerly]

45 minutes ago, Gerontious said:

Last night of the week finished and just waiting for day staff to arrive, back on Wednesday. Working over Christmas and new year this time. Just waiting now for the calendar in the office to be changed so I can book my holiday for September.257 days to go.

At least you weren't hoping to go anywhere in January.  Hope for you that September is a go.