Over at my other blog I’ve been writing about touching up women, and summarising what I learned about photographing weddings from watching Armageddon. The latter has proved to be popular with outsiders so I am linking it from here for those who aren’t regulars at The Wedding Photography Blog.

I don’t mention it there and didn’t even think about it at the time, but the closing credits of that movie are intercut with scenes from the staged nuptials of Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler, shot on Super 8 with director Michael Bay’s permission by Affleck himself.

While I’m on the subject of big, dumb movies, here’s a piece of pompous nonsense from Terry Teachout called Why Hollywood Cannot Make Art. When you start getting bored with the article you can amuse yourself by counting the padding phrases and recycled critic’s boilerplate he’s inserted between the bits of received opinion. I wonder if he can see the irony of packing such an essay with so many clichés.

I have also linked for some time from the WedPhotBlog to the spectacular cake creations of Jintrinsique. I would love to go out to her part of the World and photograph them; I’m not sure if I could bring myself to do the vandalism necessary to eat them. They are beauties that even the Blessed Nigella would kneel down before. (Hmm, there’s a thought.)

Their creator had a lousy Christmas and wrote about it in a raw post [EXTREME SHOUTINESS and bad language alert] on her other blog. A friend of mine who saw both emailed me to suggest that this might be proof “that great art comes out of personal suffering” and that if her family were nicer to her she might “never have progressed beyond jam tarts”.

And I’ve been writing about cake too.