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I’m entering the TNT Magazine travel writing and photography awards, and need your help. Which of the photos below, or from my trip last year overall, should I submit?
Lots of my best piccies from last year all together… mmm… happy bunny.
Just about a year ago now I was stood looking at this. Mind-bogglingly beautiful outside, and if I’m honest, a bit bland inside, as if Emperor Shah Jahan had run out of ideas by the time it got to decorating indoors.
On the day, I had taken a six hour bus journey from Jaipur to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, and was hot, sweaty, dirty and pissed off. Getting in the front entrance was a rugby scrum with fifty Indians who didn’t understand queueing, touts and hawkers hung around outside and drove me mad, and I got taken to a marble shop to buy expensive gifts by a rickshaw driver who looked like an Indian version of Bobby Ball.
It’s all OK though, because I realise now that I would have kicked myself incredibly hard had I not see the Taj Mahal.
I’ve just discovered this new toy, which I love so much I feel the need to spread the word. It’s a Firefox extension called Greased Lightbox, that makes photos (from Flickr, Google image search, anywhere on the web) look beautiful. What happens is quiet simply that when you click on a thumbnail image which is linked to a larger photo, the larger photo is loaded onto your page on its own, and the background is blanked out. It allows you to see the photo without having to load a new page, and see it presented in a way that does it real justice.
To install this extension takes three steps…
One year ago I was here, in Hampi, Karnataka State, India. It’s inland from Goa, well and truly on the tourist trail, but nevertheless stunning, enchanting, and relaxed. Huge rocks are scattered around the landscape (after supposedly having been flung down by the gods in a show of strength), wrinkled old Sadhus crouch in the hills, cows lounge about the place, and stunning temples are to be seen wherever you look. India was a truly unforgettable place that I will never forget. I’d love to go back one day, but the question is – is anything ever as good the second time around?
This face transforming tool from St Andrew’s University gave me a bit of a surprise. Upload an image to the web site, tell it where your eyes and mouth are, and it transforms your face – older, younger, Asian, even half chimp – but the ageing made the biggest impression on me. My picture as an older man reminded me of an artists’ impression of the Beatles as older men in a lyrics book of theirs from the seventies. The formula to age someone is obviously constant if you can do it with software – your skin droops, shows signs of ageing from the sun, your hair greys.
Seeing yourself as an older person is trying to look into the future, but physiognomy isn’t enough. You’re much more than the image of your face – your experiences and relationships are arguably more important, and make up the biggest part of you. Seeing an older version of yourself is like seeing a shell of a person – I don’t know this bloke.
I’ll be signing up to do some experiments on the Face Research web site – lots of interesting sounding stuff including facial attractiveness experiments.
Yet another Flickr toy allows you to spell out anything you like using photographs of letters. Possibilities include:
Quite Random is the blog of Nathan Nelson, a human male who lives in the UK and is not entirely sure what he's going to do when he grows up but is interested in international development, photography, secularism, technology, music and movies and other things anyone of his age would be.
