If anyone is curious about what I think of today’s news, what better way than this?

Maybe one day I’ll name a computer after Moyes or Mourinho? Somehow, I don’t think so.

Taken in late March in the Langstrath Valley, like all sheep they would usually have scattered at the first sight of a human being, but these guys had found some shelter from the wind and the snow and were going to stand their ground. Most of all I love how the only black one seems to be their leader.

From Carolyn Drake’s Two Rivers series

This morning a friend and I took almost the last chance to see the Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour show before it closes over the weekend.

I’m not so sure it really did live up to its claim to “illustrate how [14]  photographers working in Europe and North America adopted and adapted the master’s ethos famously known as the ‘decisive moment’ to their work in colour.”

Some pictures did seem to fit into that agenda, but there was a series by one photographer shot from his car window that might have been a whole lot more interesting had that moment been devoted to getting out of the car and using his legs.

My favourites all seemed to be by two photographers, Saul Leiter who has obviously been around for a long time but was a completely-new name to me, and the much younger Carolyn Drake (right) whose web site has more excellent work.

Banhegyesy Antal

I’ve not been quite so assiduous in buying Black and White Photography magazine this year. It only seems to be at the bigger WH Smiths in railway stations, and for some reason I’ve not passed through casually or nipped into town to pick up a copy. Or maybe it’s that when I do catch a train home , my iPad means I already have plenty to read and just want to sit down and resume my Nordic noir or that Steve Jobs biog? Anyway, I do still love my b&w and yesterday after enjoying a grown up pint with my nephew (at a great discovery called The Speaker in Westminster) I wandered over to Waterloo station and was glad to see the magazine’s not gone under.

In fact, it was particularly full of great b&w thanks to their BWPOTY (do such acronyms need to be written in full) and my favourite was a series of studio nudes by Banhegyesy Antal. It turns out he’s Hungarian and I very much enjoyed his site – even if there’s only a thumbnail of the picture that really caught my eye (legs in the air, her knickers strung between). Well worth a visit, well worth getting buying Black and White Photography magazine again.

My initial response to the now-disqualified winner of the 2012 Landscape Photographer of the Year was that I liked the image very much. A black and white had come top of the pile too, and it wasn’t really a cute dog picture, unlike one previous winner,  or belong to another genre which happened to please the sponsor Network Rail. This year I was glad to see the judges had chosen a picture that was unequivocally a landscape.

Maybe their decision would have passed unquestioned had the photographer’s web site not mentioned he’d been trying to copy a friend’s photo of the same scene – and had succeeded in doing so. Alex Nail and then Tim Parkin deserve credit for digging further and demonstrating that clouds and other landscape elements had been added in Photoshop, breaching the rules for that section of the competition, and as a result the winning picture and two others by the same photographer were disqualified. The objection wasn’t to the photographer, and you could readily accept that he hadn’t read the rules if you saw his grasp of spelling and grammar in online forums where he defended himself. The real beef was with how the organisers had not succeeded in enforcing their own rules.

For me, Peter Laurence’s shot of redwoods in Scotland was the outstanding picture in the Landscape Photographer of the Year exhibition at the National Theatre

In fact earlier this year I’d met the organisers of another of the major UK photo competitions and advised on methods for validating shortlisted images. So I’d been thinking of where I would personally draw the line. For myself, I’ve always thought in terms of “darkroom rules” and feel less-satisfied if I know my Photoshopping has extended too far beyond what one could achieve in the darkroom. Yet you don’t need to know much about the history of photography to know how much latitude that might give the unscrupulous. So how does this definition work – if you could perform the manipulation in Lightroom / Aperture / C1, a picture rightly belongs in a photography competition. If that’s not the case, and the image is the result of compositing layers, surely the picture would feel much more at home in a Photoshop contest?

Anyway, I wasn’t so keen on the eventual winner. The photo had initially caught my eye, and I liked the choice of subject and its foreshortened treatment. But I keep thinking it’s let down by the messy trees in the lower quarter, and the photographer Simon Butterworth has certainly done far better work. Seeing it this week in the exhibition at the National Theatre, my view didn’t change. No, my winner was this Peter Laurence shot of redwoods in Scotland which was printed at a metre tall and looked magnificent. Black and white too. There’s a surprise.

Also see Rob Hudson’s thoughts on the artistic implications of LOPTY 2012.

Late notice, I know, but if you’re anywhere around South Essex over the next week, see if you can nip into the Royal Opera House’s production centre (the place where they create the sets) at Thurrock just off the M25. For this week only there’s a retrospective exhibition of  photos by my great friend Clive Barda who has been the leading photographer of opera and classical music since the 1960s. It’s already been round some of the major opera houses in China as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad and may be in New York next year.

Just as they say you can remove the boy from the ghetto but can’t take the ghetto out of the boy, it’s hard to shed the effect of a couple of decades in accounting. It creeps out every so often, most recently explaining Sarbanes Oxley to a non-accountant who believes the glib explanations of why some software upgrade simply can’t be released mid-cycle, and today it was reading Adobe’s quarterly results. But if reading the results yourself doesn’t fill you with equal delight, here are a few highlights :

• Sales are up 6%
  • Software sales (“revenue” to Americans) are static compared with the same period last year
  • Remember that Creative Suite sales are spread over a couple of years so there’s no spike caused by CS6′s release
  • Sales growth comes, not surprisingly, from subscriptions and service/support
  • Subscription sales are about 15% of total software revenue
• On the costs side
  • R&D costs are static
  • Sales and marketing costs up 10%

There are also some interesting comments explaining the subscription revenue growth. “Adobe Creative Cloud paid subscriptions grew to approximately 200,000 in the third quarter.  Adobe added approximately 8,000 Creative Cloud subscriptions per week during the quarter, exceeding the addition of 5,000 subscriptions per week that was assumed in its third quarter financial targets.” So it looks as if it’s got off to a strong start:

“We’re on a path to drive millions of subscribers to our Creative Cloud offering….”

That’s from the top numbers guy and was probably just a rather unfortunate turn of phrase (makes accounting sound dynamic), but it does come in the week when Mitt Romney’s leaked comments showed candour isn’t always the best policy.

Mark Elson is an LA-based photographer who was doing a series on American Civil War re-enactors and decided to use the contemporary wet plate collodion photography:

I learned the process, had equipment built, and found period lenses. I fell in love with this demanding and beautiful process, with its rich tones, great detail and timeless look.

Fascinating results and in a book Battlefields of Honor which appears to be available in the US and UK.

Even though it’s here in London, I’m not too interested in the Olympics (it’s the poor man’s World Cup, isn’t it?) and I am supposed to be out of town for most of the event. I will make an effort to watch the awe-inspiring and rather cool Usain Bolt, but that’s about it for me! But still, I don’t want to be too down on it and I knew the Olympic torch was passing nearby this morning (this isn’t me!), so I thought I could get into the spirit (and get some exercise) by walking down to Coldharbour Lane  in Camberwell to take some snaps. These guys summed up my feeling – the games are here, right now, so you’ve got to be pretty miserable not to take some pleasure in it and get involved in some little way. The best bit though was that across the road was a mainly-Jamaican steel band pumping out a great version of London Calling. London was at its best, a completely-ridiculous mix of cultures with the odd spiky edge. As it must have been 30C and a 3 mile round trip, I just had to go for a pint to break the walk home – Fuller’s London Pride of course. Even if I’m resolutely not a Londoner.

Terry White’s Creative Suite Podcast is one of the many RSS feeds that I track. I generally look forward to watching each new one, at least once the horrid intro music finishes. They’re short and there’s a decent variety of coverage from some topics where my reactions may be as lukewarm as “so that’s what Illustrator does” to others that spark ideas.

I don’t feel it’s too embarrassing to say that this morning, being in no hurry to get up, I was reading various things on the iPad (had I been reading something while on the toilet….). So I lay there watching How To Use Photoshop Files in Your Adobe Muse Website where Terry “shows how to incorporate Adobe Photoshop (.PSD) files in your Muse Website and how to create buttons with hyperlinks.”

Interesting enough, if you’re convinced by Muse, but I don’t really buy the “create a website without writing code” line (they always say that!) and this example rather sums up why I feel it’s the poor man’s Dreamweaver and a diversion of Adobe resources and attention (how thick do you have to be to find Dreamweaver too difficult?). As I saw Terry showing how you could place a Photoshop PSD file in a web page design and how Muse would output it as a JPEG/PNG, I just kept thinking I’m sure I can do exactly the same thing in Dreamweaver – and I’m sure it’s just as easy. So before the podcast was half way through I was on my way downstairs looking for the laptop (I’m glad to say it stays out of the bedroom!) to prove my case.

Why don’t Adobe tell anyone about this? Well they did – as long ago as the days of CS4 – and there’s a video Working with Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

If you’ve a bit of time, you may enjoy the recordings of Adobe UK Creative Week. It’s a mix of studio discussions and pre-recorded demos about the creative industries served by Adobe’s products, and Thursday’s web/mobile session and Friday’s photography interested me most. Nicely done, and with a great backdrop of Tower Bridge and the Olympic rings – I just wonder if Julianne Kost might have run through her Photoshop and Lightroom presentation even faster….

Shard I – a most pretentious wayto title your images

I find it hard to understand why everyone isn’t a fan of the Shard, London’s big new office building.

OK, it will be filled with office drudgery, grossly-overpriced hotels and astonishingly-expensive apartments that even the rich won’t even be able to afford. And it’ll probably take a long time to fill with tenants and would bankrupt its owners – if they weren’t feudal rulers who need a way to launder their country’s wealth.

But apart from the Gherkin it’s probably the only one of the City and Canary Wharf skyscrapers with any sense of style, and I do like how it seems to echo the spires of the Wren-era churches that you see jutting out in images of pre 20th century  London. Rather like I could put aside my dislike of hereditary monarchy and appreciate how the TV pictures of all those boats in the Jubilee flotilla echoed the Canaletto painting, for all its scale the Shard’s shape does seem to connect London to its historic appearance.

If nothing else, if you do genuinely dislike its appearance, you’ve got to admit that its construction led to the destruction of the dowdy 25 floor accountant-infested Southwark Towers. Once you think of that, what’s not to like?

I can’t wait to see the view.

If you’re in any doubt how to celebrate the Jubilee in style, what about a “Limited Edition” can of Heinz Baked Beans in a 1952 label? It’s 2012 prices though – but go on, push the boat out!

The moment I heard about this poster of our hereditary head of state’s family, I knew I needed to get a snap. I’d tried on Sunday but abandoned it after getting so snarled up in the traffic rerouted for a 10K run (yes it’s going to be chaos for the rest of us when the Olympics hit town) but this morning I had time to stop off at Blackfriars before going to the opening the London Festival of Photography (which has some excellent work).

Hideous, isn’t it? I bet Kim Jong Un would approve though, even if he might not quite understand why Mark Phillips has not been Photoshopped out of the picture, or replaced with Lady Di?

Speakers Corner - first time I've been there for ages, OK 6 months

This man seems to believe that it’s right that

• we are Her Majesty’s subjects and not citizens
• the head of state should be determined by heredity and not by the ballot box
• legislation passed by his elected representatives doesn’t become law until it has the Queen’s signature
• marrying a Catholic, but not a Muslim or atheist, should disqualify  members of the family from the line of succession
• modernisation is allowing female children equal precedence
• foreign tourists wouldn’t come here if we got rid of the Monarchy, unlike in France
• the family name is the very-English Windsor and not something Greek or German
• Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia still have kings

He probably has a lot of other equally silly beliefs too. But no doubt he’s right that this ludicrous institution will long outlive us.

Also see:

• Will Self’s point of view
• Prince Philip’s words of wisdom
• Pizza Hut UK’s Jubilee pizza

See Derrick Story Webinar: A Fresh Look with Familiar Subjects in Black and White a bit of  B&W, a bit of Nik Silver Efex Pro.

I did say I certainly reacted to the Photoshop box cover, but I didn’t mention how I’d been wowed by the splash screen – you can see a relationship  between the two. So I enjoyed this article on how Adobe developed the CS6  branding:

We know that every release requires change and that the change will make some people unhappy. Like many of you, we are life-long users and fans of the tools, and we do our best to create something that we can be proud of, knowing full well that some people will not agree with our choices. Then again, if no one reacts negatively, it’s probably not very interesting.

Trivial, perhaps, and nowhere near as useful as being able to filter my layer palette down to  the pixel layers. But I still like to open Photoshop and find a carefully-designed welcome mat.

On BBC4 tonight Roundhead or Cavalier: Which One Are You?

In this programme, celebrities and historians reveal that modern Britain is still defined by the battle between the two tribes. The Cavaliers represent a Britain of panache, pleasure and individuality. They are confronted by the Roundheads, who stand for modesty, discipline, equality and state intervention.

The ideas which emerged 350 years ago shaped our democracy, civil liberties and constitution. They also create a cultural divide that influences how we live, what we wear and even what we eat and drink. Individuals usually identify with one tribe or the other, but sometimes they need some elements of the enemy’s identity – David Cameron seeks a dash of the down-to-earth Roundhead, while Ed Miliband looks for some Cavalier charisma.

Dare you miss it? Hopefully you won’t see me in it as I was trying to get my own pics while the SK stuff was filmed. Which am I? Definitely a Roundhead!

There’s a fascinating article about publishing to the iPad by Jason Pontin, the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review. In Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps  he argues “The future of media on mobile devices isn’t with applications but with the Web.”:

Here, the recent history of the Financial Times is instructive. Last June, the company pulled its iPad and iPhone app from iTunes and launched a new version of its website written in HTML5, which can optimize the site for the device a reader is using and provide many features and functions that are applike. For a few months, the FT continued to support the app, but on May 1 the paper chose to kill it altogether.

And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.

In InDesign CS6 there are tools to maintain alternative landscape and portrait versions, but even if designers are smart enough to use them (which I rather doubt) maybe the problem is indeed more fundamental?

Here’s the interesting story behind the striking and rather gruesome picture used on the Photoshop CS6 box. Interesting for me because I didn’t expect it was a Russian rather than an American artist, and because I hadn’t the faintest idea how the effect had been achieved. The artist Oleg Dou says “I am looking for something bordering between the beautiful and the repulsive, living and dead. I want to attain the feeling of presence one can get when walking by a plastic manikin…” It’s clearly a very fine line….