I have a warm furry rug...

I never did work out what the extraordinary and unique method of selling tiles might be. I might need a new tag for crimes against grammar.

column of prisms off Regent Street

This one is an in-joke for those associated with technology journalism and publishing in the UK. We spotted some gaily decorated deckchairs in Green Park recently and I photographed every one that didn't have someone sat in it (start here on flickr). And then I saw this poem on one of them...

And I walked round the back to see who wrote it...

And I thought of several good Felden stories...

After Bryce and Zion and dinner in Springdale at Oscar's Cafe and sunset in the desert with starlight and the neon jangle of Vegas and the utter idiocy that is the rental car center with no taxi rank so you have to go queue with the airport multitudes, I'm too tired for a real post, but I think the photo says it all.

Agua Canyon, Bryce Canyon; our shadows along the fence against the light...

I know icons need to be very obvious, but warning icons often make me giggle when I take them literally. In this case I'm sure the icon says 'don't dance on the edge of the canyon'...

It's a Mac running Windows Vista. And a PC running Mac OS 10. Now that's what I call MIXing it up...

The motel we stopped at in Mojave had a signed photo of the round-the-world plane in reception; and the same design is carved into the mirror frames, cupboard doors and bedsteads in all the rooms. Well, the runway is just behind the motel...

Aaarrrrr! This be the way to prepare for the next Speak Like a Pirate Day! This be the spell checker in Word 2007 and it be sure confused by me run-on clauses, me hearty.

No disrepect to Microsoft; language processing is hard and in most sentences 'be turned on' would be correct - just not here.

Flickr is aggregating the EXIF information from uploads to say what are the most popular cameras among Flickr users (or most used, which isn't necessarily quite the same); Canon, Nikon, Canon, Canon, Canon... for cameraphones it's only the ones that ID themselves. EXIF and photohosting as free advertising for the manufacturers and free review information for users.

On the Banks Peninsula the pukekos go in one direction, single file...

I started a flickr group called Airport Art quite a while ago, because I love taking photos of the wonderful art, sculpture, mosaics and exhibitions I see in airports. I haven't added many of my photos there recently, but quite a few other people have and it's really nice to see the selection growing. There are things I haven't seen in airports I know well, airports I've never seen and quite a few better shots of art I've tried to capture.

There's some of my heart in San Francisco by now, though this heart has gone - it was part of a CowParade style show around the city. I love the design so much I have a userpic of it. I'm blogging the image again to advertise http://mosaicartsource.blogspot.com/ which has blogged the image on flickr; there are some stunning mosaics including a very detailed one inspired by Chagall, which makes me want to go back to Chicago.

http://mosaik.wordpress.com/ has also linked to another mosaic photo of mine; this is a beautifully categorised blog that seems to cover entirely different ground from MosaicArtSource. Nice to have such good resources...

My review of the Canon EOS 5D doesn't seem to be live yet, but you can read what I think of the Power Shot S2, sorry the updated PowerShot S3 that's very similar to the S2, over at ThinkCamera...

Heading from our second to third meeting today we passed this rather delightful sign at London Bridge. Are most exits not way out? And it's right next to No Entry...


Shot with the BlackBerry Pearl; it takes rather better images in daylight.

I rather like this; you can set it to recent, recent interesting or random interesting, vertical or horizontal, individual or group - and it works (at least in the LiveJournal preview)!

sbisson and I wrote the first batch of reviews for ThinkCamera a while back but now that the site is live I can atually link to it.

Review Pentax Optio S6
Review Kodak EasyShare P850
Review Ricoh Caplio GX8
Review Fujifilm FinePix S5600
Review Fujifilm FinePix S9500

Hmm; some of those should really have Simon's name on ;-)

You can get mugs, jigsaws, T shirts, albums - and now sofa cushions. Cloth UK is quite pricey - £60 for a cushion, £495 for a chair - but they print your photos onto a range of fabrics and make up the furniture too. They can also print onto tiles - £10 or £15 per tile depending on the size of tile. What a great way to get a mosaic, or to add a line of holiday photos to the edge of the bath. Can't find the tile design you want? Create it in Photoshop or Painter. The only pricing for fabric is the £180 wall hangings, but I'm wondering what an A4 size photo to stitch onto a shirt or a bag would cost. A Mount Rainier T shirt with our own Mount Rainier photos on... I like the personal side of technology; let's hope the price drops.

Driving the dragons spine
Where the postman doesn't go
Skimming the edge of clouds
And gazing down below.
Moss and lichen green
Cloud shrouded ribbon road
Breakneck tumbling slopes

driving the Santa Cruz mountains at cloud level.

I spotted this almost life-size ad in the corner of a session about the digital home at the Intel Developer Forum last week and I thought I'd post it to allow general fangirl squee-ing to go on. If that's what you get with the latest laptops, there should be some interesting plane journeys coming up this year...

From the very front seat of a tiny plane flying from San Francisco to Boise last November, I craned round and held my camera out behind me to get a shot of the light of the setting sun through the window as it went from golden


to red


to dusk, with the sun a glowing ember

The half-life of a Putney restaurant is about the same as the rest of London - say 18 months. Recently several of the smaller chains - The Real Souvlaki, Wagamamas - have arrived on the High St. Today I spotted that Frankie's is going to be round the corner along Putney Bridge Road and it's almost finished; we get an Itallian grill and pizzeria with many mirrors (based on the pictures at http://frankiesitalianbarandgrill.com as well as what I saw through the window!)

It's not going to have the late-afternoon laid-back-Mafia ambience of Original Joe's in San Jose, or the fabulous spinach and bacon, but the menu looks a little more adventurous than most - tongue with mostardo fruits, for example.

Putney has a lot of independant restaurants and I hope we'll keep places like Enoca Turi, which I'm a huge fan of for the food (even though the service for the family meal the night before the wedding was pretty poor). A mix of big names and good locals is far better than looking like any other London food court.

I got a press release about it and I like the sound of Unibind's new DIY photo album that turns a bunch of printed pages into a bound book, so I went off to http://www.unibind.com/Basic/home.html to see if I could see a picture that would make the description a little clearer. viz: "My Books makes instant hard-cover 8 ½” x 11” personalized photo albums without the need of expensive binding equipment, glue or mess.  To use, a consumer simply inserts their stack of pages with the provided front and back cover sheets.  Then he or she staples the stack of pages; places the pages in the spine of the album; pulls the yellow strips off the front and back of the album and closes the cover, which seals the albums to the pages.  Then he or she simply tears off the extra paper on the inside cover sheets at the perforation for a final beautiful customized photo album keepsake."

The site has four competing navigation tools: the buttons across the middle, the buttons up the side, the buttons across the top of the page and the scrolling images of products above them. Except that when you click an item in the scrolling images, while that item does change from wireframe to photo and a pointing finger cursor does appear, you can't actually click to make anything happen. It's Flash to make things pretty, not Flash to make pretty things an interface. And I still don't know what the yellow strips look like.

Every now and again we get to help Bryan Talbot with source images (yesterday, I was the hand model for an image of Beryl Formby on the telephone he's creating for Alice in Sunderland), so I keep an eye out for interesting image sources. I also love seeing how things have changed since vintage photos were taken. I recently worked on some tutorials for Corel, including one for Digit magazine where I took one of our photos of Mount Rainier and used the PowerTRACE tool to make it look more like the images produced by the Work Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project for the US National Park Service in the 1930s (you can see restored versions at http://www.dougleen.com/new/posters.html).

So I really like the look of the Great Postcard Hunt: recreate as closely as possible the photograph from a vintage postcard. There are some great images already, including aerial views redone from Google Earth.

Walking through the quad of the Arts & crafts centre in Christchurch - if it's a weekend there's a market - you look up and there is a doorway and a staircase in the sky. Look behind you and there's a doorway and stairs up to the great hall (the Canterbury society semms to have done their best to recreate an Oxbridge college in the sun); the doorway in the sky is a pared-down version of the style.




Walk a little further and turn round and you're inside the doorway looking out. It's all perspective!

(I'm finally uploading the images from my trip to New Zealand in 2004, spurred on my illustrating my diary to give to my mum; you'll find them at http://www.flickr.com/photos/marypcb/ - it will take a while to get them all uploaded though!).

We've been tinkering with image editing software today (for fun and and profit respectively) and sbisson has spent ages carefuly cutting out this lovely icon of a chilli heart from Pike Place Market (when I saw them hanging up I wanted a photo to make an icon from!). Here's the original:



This is another heart, from the decorated heart exhibition they had in San Francisco a year or so back. Tony Bennett's heart is still in Union Square, but this mosaic heart was in Yerba Buena gardens. I love the colours and patterns on it; I want to do something inspired by it as a mosaic on a box or a mirror frame or a wall...
Here's the original:


And this is a mosaic boss from the wonderful Parc Guell in Barcelona (Gaudi of course). We visited it with rowanf one very hot July day...
Here's the original: and the ceiling it adorns:

In his imaginary city of Newford, Charles de Lint has The Tombs - an abandoned area of the city; it sounds a little exciting and a lot dangerous, a little like a refuge and a lot like a dead end. San Francisco has the Albany Landfill - a spit of land jutting out a mile into San Francisco Bay from the east shore, between Berkeley and Richmond. Like the abandoned military barracks that became Freetown Christiana (which the Danish government would rather turn into another modern development), people took it over as a resource. Dog walkers liked not having to put their dogs on a leash, artists painted there, squatters moved in. According to photographer Jill Posener it's being cleaned up as a park; the squatters are gone, the dogs are on leashes and the artists have been told it's a family park.

There's a dark side to free places; there's distrust of travellers and people outside the system. No-one wants somewhere dirty, dangerous and squalid instead of a park. But we need the borderlands and the breakthrough spaces where people can be different as well as the safe clean spaces that can be too plastic and antiseptic sometimes. Liminal places where you can step over the threshold to something new. Art thrives in wilderness, and the art here looks pretty inspiring to me.

See the rest here

Would protecting the art as a sculpture park make it sterile? Where will the gypsies move on and be inspired next?

via a link from Susie Bright

If you're rushing to beat the December 1 price rise on passport renewals, http://www.epassportphoto.com lets you upload and crop a digital photo and get a strip of images ready to print. Of course you have to look neutral, be against a white background, not have your mouth open or your hair over your face, wear a hat or have reflections from your glasses, so you may not be able to use any photo ever taken of you.

We spent a fair part of the week playing with different digital cameras and one of the things I was looking at was how the noise in photos varies with ISO settings; shooting the same scene at different ISOs is a crude way to look at it but it's been interesting seeing the effects. One camera I looked at has been criticised in several places for noise but one of the critiques turned into a discussion of noise as the fingerprint of the digittal technique and whether that could be art in the same way that manipulating Polaroid images can be art. I came across this column which calls noise the brushtrokes of digital photography. Artefact or art? Reproduction or representation? Freezing the world into a still is as artifical as freezing the fluidity of life into a narrative...

London is full of strange things! As I came out of 1 Parliament St the other day I saw this man placing the gnome carefully on the box and setting up his shot. Afterwards he and the boy picked up the gnome and headed off to the next setting.

Today Rick drove us over to the wire country in his open-top Mini - from fog to 96F sunshine, wine and chocolate raspberry macaroons...

Inspired by peteyoung I've made a flickr group for Airport Art at http://flickr.com/groups/airport_art/. I've invited everyone I know on flickr which is rather less of you than there are here ;-) So - enjoy!

well, I'm not quite sure what the right word is. After fjm's discussion about LJ and search and pricvacy, I thought I'd use Google Images to search for my name. The results:
- the photo from www.sandm.co.uk/mary which is also www.marybranscombe.com
- Me as the Village People in the video at www.rantsandraves.co.uk
- a house in Richmond California photographed in 1923 by Mary Thompson for her school history project: the home of Mr Branscombe
- an illustrated invitation to a charity event chaired by a Mary Beth Branscombe
- an East Devon estate agent (Branscombe is a village)
- two photos of my engagement ring from an RSS feed of my LJ run by http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/;at the University of Bath: A centre of expertise in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information, education and cultural heritage communities.
- me braiding hair for charity at Eastercon 2003
- a picture that comes directly from my LJ but it's actually a PC and Pixel cartoon I blogged
- a box shot of Adobe Creative Suite Premium from the Graphics Unleashed site that copies reviews from Amazon; probably because I've reviewed graphics software for Amazon, though the site doesn't use my name anywhere.
- me looking sleepy on a panel at Helicon 2 because I'm so much shorter than Harry Turtledove that it looks like I've got my head on the desk
- the estate agent again
- the video cover for America's Natural Wonders - Yellowstone / Grand Canyon / Yosemite.

Not quite what I was expecting!

Y'all could pick this up as a meme if you like ;-)

Simon and I are both big fans of Tablet PCs because the combination of being able to write things down, record things and carry years worth of notes around with us make work so much easier. I know dress designers who use them and pilots, and teachers who rave about them. This week Microsoft did a publicity stunt in Leicester Square, getting one of the caricaturists who sketch people to use a Tablet PC instead of pen and paper.

( We went down to get caricatured )

Just in case it was going to rain all week we headed for the coast on Monday. Whistable was windy but the long groynes that run through the shingle down to the beach shelter the individual slices of beach so you just get nice hot sun and pretty shells and flints to pick over. Later we saw one two three count'em six kiteboarders leaping and splashing, soaring up from the waves and landing with a considerable splash, weaving around in an erratic loop like dark dandelion seeds.

More Whistable beach photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marypcb/sets/624366/

Books, boxes of glasses, rucksacks, herbs, cats...

Bentham usually finds somewhere comfortable and sunny to lounge around.

One evening in Amsterdam, dinner was a tram ride away in this lovely restaurant that alternated dining rooms with greenhouse rooms full of most of what we had for dinner.

Melon basil soup
beef rolled around asparagus with broad beans
salad with pansies
fish and artichoke fond pot pies
beef
lavender cream, poached peaches, strawberry pistachio ice cream

yum!

More pictures from Amsterdam here

Last May we were in California, for work and fun. In San Francisco we stayed in a hotel very close to the Moscone Centre and walked to the conference through Yerba Buena gardens every morning. I remember one beautiful morning walking along, trying to get out of a grump and being stopped in my tracks by music from the stage they'd been setting up the previous afternoon. They were testing the speakers with Fanfare for the Common Man and it was glorious. Later in the day we took some time to walk through the gardens and take photos of the waterfalls and the willows.

See more of my Yerba Buena, San Francisco and California photos here: