Category Archives: UK

Brighton Shock

Lightly Worn

Beachy Head[click image to enlarge it] I was eating breakfast in an hotel in Cambridge the Saturday morning after I shot that college ball. A tall, intense-looking man with a beard sat down at a table nearby. He pulled a hardback book out of his briefcase and began underlining paragraphs heavily with a soft pencil. […]

Off The Grid

the middle of nowhere[click image to enlarge it] [A dirt track in Wales exactly seventy-five miles from the nearest Starbucks. POOTERGEEK is laden with three cameras, several lens bags, and a tripod. He is trying to open the gate to a field full of sheep by pressing a London Transport Oyster card against the hinge […]

The Pathetic Bookshop

It is an important day for Britain. Since the abrupt collapse of our manufacturing base, our economy depends heavily upon fictional characters. Together, Lara Croft, James Bond, The Teletubbies, Simon Cowell, and Harry Potter now account for 43 percent of GDP. From time to time, J K Rowling dials 141, calls Buckingham Palace, and mutters quietly: “I […]

Ball Lighting

A couple of weeks back I attended one of the two “reasonably smart” evening occasions that PooterGeekers kindly invited me to in response to my appeal so that I could test out some wacky lighting techniques. This was photographing various Latin American performers at a Cambridge college ball. I’m sure you’ll agree such a setting […]

I Only Pass These Things On

The front page of today’s Argus features this headline: Today’s Argus street placard features this headline:

Philosophers: 2 — Scientists: 0

Last Friday I found myself stuck in a room in a Cambridge college waiting to do a photo job so I took Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations down from a shelf and, as an intellectual dwarf perched on Hindsight the Giant, sneered at it. Certain things he said appear absurd in the light of certain experimental […]

Bismillah!

Did anyone else hear that BBC news soundbite from a representative of the emergency services reviewing the effects of the sub-tropical storms that hit parts of the UK this week? Amongst other things, he described them as “very, very frightening”. If so, did you manage to resist singing, “Thunderbolt and lightning / Galileo! / Galileo!”? (And why […]

The PooterGeek Argus Headline Collection: Hove Special

I admit that I have, in the past, given my readers the impression that the more genteel half of Brighton & Hove is a sleepy, geriatric, upper-middle-class, conservative place. Indeed, one resident commented here: After all the effort I’ve put into making Hove sound like the hipper and more cosmopolitan sista of Brighton, you’re making us sound […]

Singular Sensation

Foolishly allowing himself to be provoked by the skeptical taunts of Professor Cho the experimentalist, Professor Hawking chooses the annual NASA barbecue as the occasion to collect on one of his bets.

Unrelated

There’s a movie called The Ring about a video so frightening that anyone who watches it dies. Here’s a link to a post at Drink-Soaked Trots.

Scooped!

Dang. That Skuds beat me to this classic Argus headline: RESTAURANT BOSS SHOCKED AT SIZE OF MARKER PENS PACKAGING

Scissored Sisters

The official name for the place where I live is “Brighton & Hove”. A friend of mine was recently asked at interview to characterize the difference between Brighton and her non-identical Siamese twin town and came up with something along the lines of Hove being a respectable older aunt and Brighton a wayward younger sister. The […]

Oxfam Report Supports UK Humanitarian Intervention

This is a surprise: The UK must not shy away from trying to resolve international crises despite the “terrible misadventure” in Iraq, a report from charity Oxfam argues.

Citizen Ghale

My dad has long been associated, as a member and officer, with the largest UK teaching union, the NAS/UWT. Indeed, in classic working-class northerner style, he first had a heart attack as he arrived at a union conference. Equally typically, after it was initially misdiagnosed by a junior doctor as a digestive problem, he just […]

In The Developing Lab This Morning

SUCCESSFUL LOCAL FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHER [looking down her nose at trade mag]: It’s amazing they still do ads like that in this day and age: women in bikinis standing in the darkroom doorway. POOTERGEEK: It’s post-feminist, innit? Those are ironic tits. SUCCESSFUL LOCAL FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHER: Just for once I’d like to see a man in a gold lamé G-string. […]

New Broom

Chasing Frisbees

Later, on the Wedding Photography Blog, I’ll be explaining how you can obtain a photo like this yourself, using an old camera, a wind machine, and a stuffed Westie on a stick.

Memo To Self: Always Engage Stealth Mode—Even At Night

It’s All In The Hanging

Jogging from the bank yesterday evening to catch Richard Brincklow’s in-store performance at Passenger’s launch of their new single [buy it now!*], I stopped to photograph this: Regulars will know that I am not an admirer of Banksy’s work, but circumstances and the shrewd planning of the staff at artrepublic temporarily turned the 2006 effort of […]

Say It Loud: I’m Chippy And Proud

Chippy!” is the cry of a winner in the lottery of birth losing an argument. There’s a scene near the beginning of Casino Royale in which Vesper Lynd practises some amateur psychology on 007 as they sit opposite each other on the Eurostar. She says something like: You’re Oxford, but not from money, hence that huge chip […]

Reach For The Pie

I’m sitting here eating a microwaved vegetable biryani in front of my computer, having returned from a Ginsters-fuelled morning shoot of a band at Shoreham Airport, a cute, art deco building surrounded by dodgy Italian mopeds of the sky—not just propellor aircraft that look like they are powered by elastic bands, but helicopters that were […]

Poot Toots

Richard Brincklow leads a jazz trio called Sesame Forum. They have a Sunday afternoon residency at The Brunswick in Brighton. The weekend after next, The Brunswick is hosting a jazz festival, featuring people who you might have heard of, like Liane Carroll, who won Best Vocalist Award at the 2006 British Jazz Awards and is […]

See How They Run

Sorry it’s been quiet here. I’ve been busy and ill (again). There’s always The Brighton Argus to cheer me up though. And its front cover story today is about a “masked raider” being identified by his distinctive smell.

Never Mind The Barmy Army…

…what about the shocking behaviour of Australian cricket fans?

RIP

Yesterday, over the phone, my dad and I held our own Ashes inquest. It was brief.

Sex-u-a-lity

Given that I spent New Year’s Eve alone at my computer keyboard tidying up my remote UNIX home directory, this is going to read like a middle-class white guy wibbling on about how “vibrant” the local “community” is as he moves into a flat in one of London’s tiny ethnic war-zones instead of the Georgian […]

Fighting Sexism

It appears that there is a serial killer murdering prostitutes in Suffolk. Jeremy Vine has just been interviewing Frances Curran, Scottish Socialist Party Member of the Scottish Parliament for the West of Scotland on BBC Radio 2. She argued that the victims should not be referred to in the media as “prostitutes” because this “invites a judgment” […]

Straydar*

I’ve just returned from another boozy early evening exhibition party. One of the exhibitors is a painter who does portraits from photographs so it was business as well as pleasure. When things finally started winding down, the last people standing were three gay guys, the hostess, one other woman, and me. At that point the […]

Overheard In New York

Someone at Harry’s Place comments that Until now, I thought Gwyneth Paltrow was Welsh.” which reminds me of being in a video rental store in NYC in the late 90s with a local. An old Tom Jones song starts playing. “Well, I never,” says I to my native companion in my conspicuously British way, “This is […]