I do notice little things, perhaps that’s what draws me to photography, but I know I can take my local environment for granted. I want to be less conveyor-belty and pause more often, even when it feels uncomfortable. Appreciating the small things is an infinite well of pleasure.

Something that really moved me, yesterday, are the Hitchcock mosaics in Leytonstone tube station’s underpass.

They were designed and put together by a team of artists: Steve Lobb, Nathan Lobb, Carol Kenna, Claire Notley and Julie Norburn at the Greenwich Mural Workshop. They were a Waltham Forest Council public art project to celebrate Hitchcock’s 1899 - 1999 birth centenary and were officially finished on 3 May 2001.

Most are scenes from well-known Hitchcock films but I love that they’re not freeze-frames. They capture the essence but there’s a surrealist element which gives them a beautiful, unsettling quality.

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Hitchcock was born at 517 High Road, Leytonstone (now a petrol station)

Leytonstone is the area in East London where Hitchcock grew up. Sadly his old house is now a grim-looking petrol station but you can see little clues and nods to him everywhere.

There’s a big hotel named after him, The Alfred Hitchcock Hotel, paintings on buildings that reference his films and until recently even a pub called ‘The Birds’. For people who’ve lived here a long time there is a real pride that he is one of theirs.

In the 10 or so years I’ve lived nearby and walked up and down these streets, I’ve always been fascinated by these curious mosaics. There is something about the colours and expressions that give them a fever dream quality.

But they are placed in an odd, slightly awkward location in an underpass that takes you from street level to the entrance of the Leytonstone tube station.

I say awkward is because this underpass is the kind of place you want to get in and out of as quickly as possible.

It always smells faintly of piss. It’s dimly lit. It’s grubby and there’s usually litter strewn everywhere. The walkway is ridiculously narrow, which means you can’t really stop and look if anyone is nearby you because you’ll block the path.

The station is not a particularly happy corner of Leytonstone and typically there will be 2 or 3 people sleeping or seeking respite here, and lots of drugs.

This combination means that most of the pedestrians walking past are hurried and harried. They’re usually going to or from home or work and just want to get where they’re going. NO TIME FOR ALL THIS ART NONSENSE.

But it is worth a pause. Today when I went for a walk to clear my head it was unusually quiet and there were just a trickle of commuters.

I thought I would try to stop, take my time and appreciate these murals because I personally think they exquisite.

There is something ghoulish and haunting but at the same time intricate and Art Deco about them. Like snapshots from a pixelated Great Gatsby horror movie.

The lighting in this underpass is terrible. Just enough light to see where you’re going but not dark enough to hide the chicken shop wrappers and fag butts.

But… today I noticed the light accentuates the mosaics. The light doesn’t bounce off them as awkwardly as it might do in full sun, which gives them a more filmic quality.

Initially I took just one photograph as a little keepsake but as I was walking off I thought I’d do my best to capture all 17 and share them here for anyone who is interested.

I’ll give you the address of the mosaics below (spoiler: it’s Leytonstone Tube Station underpass) so that if they pique your interest, and you’re in London, you can visit them for yourself.

If not, and if you’re in a faraway land, hopefully these images gives you a flavour.

I haven’t captured the entirety of each mosaic in these frames. I realise this is a bit like sharing an image of the Mona Lisa’s earlobe but because I wanted to keep the images as clean as possible.

The little light that does exist in this dim underpass comes from the kind of strobe bulbs you get in municipal buildings and reflects awkwardly off some of the mosaics.

So I’ve filled the frame with what I could without getting too much nasty glare, or in some cases angled down.

There are also mosaics which wrap around corners or columns and so in these cases I have angled a little to the side to try and fill the frame.

I’m telling you this out of respect for the artists but also so that you have even more reason to visit them in person and see them in their full glory.

I’ve been smacked with an unexpected wave of nostalgia recently. I’ve found myself walking slowly through old haunts, as if returning, wistfully, after 30 years stranded at sea.

We’re preparing to leave London, for a life in the countryside. It’s our last stretch after 10 years in this area (and for me a lifetime in London), so I’ve found I’m looking at everything again with new eyes.

Probably these mosaics would have been better installed in a beautiful park or public space where they could be lingered over and appreciated and talked about.

But that’s one of the magical things about London. You can spend several lifetimes here and still discover - or truly appreciate for the first time - a wonderful thing that had been lurking in a dim underpass.

So this is my token of appreciation for these artworks.

They probably have one of the highest footfalls in Western Europe for an art display.

People funnel through here in their thousands every day. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone stop and look them.

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If you’re interested in where they are, and how to get to them, I’ve shared a few details below.

Where to Find the Mosaics

If you want to see them in person your best bet is to take the tube at head to:

Leytonstone Tube Station.

Leytonstone tube is on the Central line which goes from West to East London and right through the centre. You can change onto the Central line easily from the Elizabeth line too at Stratford, which is only a couple of stops away.

(I’ve bolded Leytonstone Tube Station because there are a few Leyton/Leytonstones, including some rail stations, and to confuse things further, Leyton Tube Station).

As you get off the train you will find the mosaics in the underpass as you walk out of the exit. Be sure to walk out of both exits as they cover both sides.

Leytonstone tube station, like a lot of tube stations around the world, has its challenges. When I took this photo below, it was dead quiet, and for a few seconds no-one walked by.

This is unusual though, more often that not all of London is rushing past. Unless you’ve got a bit of time to linger, it’s probably a place to explore as part of a wider visit to the area. This is the view of the underpass from inside the tube station and a more typical scene.

Leytonstone often gets the dubious ‘up and coming’ label but it has real charm and history. There are good Indian and Thai restaurants here, good charity (thrift) shops, some decent boozers and wonderful green spaces if you fancy a walk.

The Red Lion is an excellent (and huge) pub nearby with beautiful Victorian features. Hollow Pond and Leyton Flats are easy to get to on foot and you could also stop by the Alfred Hitchcock hotel while you’re there.

If you’re interested, the mosaics show the following…

There are 3 personal life mosaics: A young Hitchcock outside his father’s shop, Hitchcock ‘the director’ and Hitchcock with Marlene Dietrich.

Then the following are from this films: Suspicion, Psycho, The Skin Game, North by Northwest, The Pleasure Garden, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, Saboteur, The Birds, To Catch a Thief, Rebecca, The Wrong Man and Rear Window.

I’d be interested to see if you can spot which are which!

I hope you enjoyed this little journey to the Hitchcock mosaics. They are one of London’s hidden treasures and I hope to share more London’s oddities in the future.

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By the way, thank you for the lovely, thoughtful comments on my Philosophy of Flat Photography piece. I enjoyed digging into an idea and interacting with interesting people on the nature of the frame and the aesthetic. I’m keen to explore elements of this further in future articles.

Ok, on with Lost & Found. Enjoy this edition and please share anything you’ve come across recently that you found interesting in the comments.

Here is my latest selection:

Martin Parr Documenting ‘People At Large’

Two selections from Flashbak today, for no other reason than I love their content and they seem to have neurally hijacked me. This first pick is a selection of wonderfully funny, saturated, Pop Art-like photographs by Martin Parr of people doing the things that people do and the glorious, beautiful strangeness of it all. I love the image of the two ladies with shopping trolleys leaning up against a pebbledash wall.

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Markus Brunetti’s Beautiful Dead Flat Photographs of ‘Holy Houses’

This caught my eye because Markus Brunetti’s photographs have a deliciously flat, perpendicular aesthetic that gently dusts valium onto my optic nerve. His images are so clean, level and neatly aligned that the cathedrals, monasteries and other ‘holy houses’ featured almost look like beautiful illustrations.

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The Curious Tale of Vegetable Lamb of Tartary

Public Domain Review have published an investigative article on the pervasive medieval rumour that lambs grew out of vegetables on the subcontinent. “The floral body differs across manuscripts but often branches symmetrically, with two or four pods sprouting miniature, happy lambs.” Sumptuously illustrated (and written) article that pieces the curious story together.

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‘Photographs on Fabrics’ in a 1947 Edition of LIFE Magazine By Nina Leen

Joyful pictures by Nina Leen of people wearing fabrics with photographic prints on them in 1947. I think this passage from the original article in LIFE magazine sums it up nicely: “Until now anyone claiming to have seen a dinner dress decorated with life-size photographs of the wearer would have been met with breath-sniffing suspicion or clinical alarm”.

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Syd Shelton’s Street Photography in West Belfast During The Troubles

Photographs taken by Syd Shelton during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. They were shot in 1979 in West Belfast among the Catholic community and have a stark, contrasty, bleak, beautiful, grainy, abandoned feel. These images are poignant, sensitively observed and moving. Syd allows light and humour into his frame.

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To finish off, an image from my photography archive.

A town in the Great Karoo called Merweville where we stopped, one beautiful day, to stretch our legs.

‘It’s a Beautiful Day’

That’s it for now.

If you missed the last edition, you can find that here.

Please share any thoughts and discoveries below.

‘Flat Edgware’

This is an image I took earlier this year.

The scene was bleak and messy outside of the frame. I was leaning against a sharp railing, on a busy thin pavement next to a raging dual carriageway. Cars screamed past constantly and everything was grey and polluted. My fellow pedestrians looked busy and annoyed. I was a scrawny annoyance. To get this shot ‘flat on’ I had to angle myself awkwardly against the railings.

I was overly aware of my camera and my sixth sense was scanning the periphery for anyone wearing a balaclava or riding an electric bike while I tried not to block the path. Yet for a moment I zoomed in on a small window of symmetrical calm.

I framed the shot to leave out the mess, noise and ugliness. There is much more to the building, outside of what I framed here. The relentless pollution had created slimy, dirty streaks. Above the building the sky was an ugly grey dusk. Below were thick grey rails to stop cars crashing into each other. Under this was a lattice of grey roads.

It was an ugly, noisy uncalm environment. It doesn’t matter how interesting a subject matter is. If it’s set against a mucky or jaunty background my brain fusses over it.

By the philosophy of flat photography I think I mean, more broadly, the flattening of chaos. The softening of noise and of honing in on calm.

All hail the planimetric

There’s a word that in part describes this aesthetic…

Planimetric.

The film theorist David Bordwell describes the planimetric aesthetic in film and photography as having “the camera lined up perpendicular to a back wall or lines in the setting”.

The goal is to produce images or scenes that look intentionally “flat”.

In the mid nineties Wes Anderson’s films burst onto the scene like a great origami firework. I was both thrilled and annoyed. Thrilled that entire films were being made with this aesthetic. Annoyed that it would look like all of my images were trying to rip off Wes Anderson.

It also made me realise that there were others like me. Whole photography movements started to form around Wes Anderson’s style.

(There’s even a book and franchise called Accidentally Wes Anderson. People collect, share and curate images that look like they could be a frame from one of his films).

His films have only strengthened my resolve for the 2D aesthetic. They celebrate imagery that hugs parallel lines and perpendicular framing.

What is this attraction that Wes, myself and thousands of others have to the flat aesthetic? To this mathematical, cosy neatness?

‘Flat Golf’

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The philosophy of flat photography

I think about what the draw is with flat photography.

Is it something that appeals to certain brains? Is it a tonic for those of us with swirling, haphazard minds?

My own feeling is that the flat, neat framing provides a sense of calm and order.

This can only ever be speculation because I cannot ever know what it is like to be in another person’s mind.

Maybe all minds are like mine, maybe all minds are the opposite. Maybe, like with most things, we sit on a spectrum. Shifting variables that expand and contract throughout our lives.

Based on conversations I’ve had with others, I get the sense that my mind darts and ruminates a little more than, say, the average. If this is the case it’s neither a good nor bad thing (it’s both). It’s also the only reality I have.

I have little practices that I’ve developed, over the years, to calm my brain when it buzzes and whirrs. They typically involve the usual:

Walking in nature, getting lost in a good book, looking out over the horizon, sauna, spending time around kind people, hiding electronic devices from myself.

They probably sound a bit podcast hacky but they work. I’ve also developed practices within my creative work, including my photography.

Part of this is the slow, mindful process of editing and curating photos but it’s also how I photograph a scene and what I enjoy when I look back.

This is where the flat, level, dead straight photograph comes in.

‘Flat Flats’

Unlike the first image I shared in this piece the elements sitting outside of the frame in this shot (the green block of flats) weren’t ugly. The sky was blue and the foreground grass and trees. But they were still distractions.

It was a comfortable shooting experience this time. I wasn’t contorting my spine against a railing or dodging pedestrians. I was sat on the grass, calmly, unhurriedly changing lenses and framing the scene in my own time.

Two different images and shooting experiences but both, I think, striving for the same thing. Calm and simplicity.

For me when an image has some internal order to it and some of the chaos intentionally left out of the frame, it takes on a calm, zen-like quality.

The overwhelming schema of three dimensions… and all the goings on in the moment, are blunted and soothed in a bed of tidy, ordered comfort. It brings relief.

Happily drowning in the aesthetic

I’m going to go off on a tangent now, but bear with me.

I think this is the kind of relief that Schopenhauer talked about when he discussed, in his way, the human condition and the nature of existence.

Specifically what he called ‘will’ or what could be understood as ‘striving’ (I’ll use the word striving) that drives our behaviour... and that drives nature’s behaviour.

Portrait of Schopenhauer by Karl Bauer

What does he mean by striving?

The drivel on most Social Media platforms would have us believe that striving is a chest pumping Wolf of Wall Street -esque drive to ‘succeed’.

That might describe a soiled, end game manifestation but that’s not it.

It is the unconscious striving of all things.

It’s worms drawn to moisture under the ground. It’s cells dividing and tectonic plates shifting. It’s the need to go to the toilet or scratch your chin. It’s the microbes in your gut multiplying. The swipe right on Tinder. The deciding, after trillions of imperceptible mind-shifts, to leave your home city.

It’s everything. The incessant movement towards. The buzzing, vibration of atoms. The constant inertia. Everywhere always in flux.

If this all sounds tiring and stressful that’s because it is. Existence is extraordinary and relentless.

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Momentary release from the chaos

But there is respite. One release from the relentless surging, Schopenhauer believes, is in the rare moments where we truly experience, and get lost in, the aesthetic.

The word aesthetic is often banded around clumsily, usually by ad agencies. By aesthetic, we’re not talking about looks or branding. It’s about beauty - intrinsic, emergent beauty - in art forms like music, painting and theatre.

It’s being totally and utterly enmeshed in a piece of music so that you are the music and music is you. Everything energy, no differentiation.

For that brief moment you experience - and become part of - life’s wave forms. You become part of the ‘noumena’, the thing behind the thing. Free from your tangled, fleshy cage. Free from the inertia and part of the whole.

Any great work of art - natural or otherwise - Schopenhauer believed, can have this effect. Being utterly absorbed in a painting allows you, for a few moments, to transcend humanness, to transcend aches and pains and ruminations. The pathos of theatre, the hypnotic beauty of a butterfly wing on a dandelion in a field in late September.

Maybe, for me and others like me, one of the trillions of pathways that can connect with the aesthetic is the calm and order that flat photography provides.

I don’t live in a particularly ordered way. My photography is not neat or planned and yet there is control, maybe that’s the word, control.

When I see something that I want to photograph I feel compelled to neaten it. To put it in a box and protect it.

‘Flat Lorry’

“Always be knolling”

My friend Jono taught me a word called knolling. He noticed me doing it one day at a table and shrieked “You’re a knoller!” He then showed me this video on YouTube: Always Be Knolling.

Knolling is the act of neatly aligning things in front of you. Arranging objects in parallel lines or at right angles. I don’t always knoll but I often knoll. Usually absent-mindedly. Some people chew pen lids, I arrange salt and pepper pots.

It’s a curious trait. I would understand it more intuitively if I was someone who needed to keep things obsessively tidy, but I don’t. For most of my teenage years my bedroom looked like an explosion. Until I met my partner so did my flat, then our house and… actually I’m still messy.

I think all humans, even those of us who are leave-socks-on-the-floor type people, need respite from chaos. We need to have some feeling of control.

Brains like mine - and perhaps yours (if this resonates) - find respite by making sense of what’s in front of us.

‘Flat Canal’

We try to create localised order. I think this manifests in different ways for different people in different environments.

For me it’s the intentional framing of a photograph. It’s also absentmindedly framing the small area of the table in front of me with my hands, as I knoll pencils and condiments in parallel lines.

For someone else it’s the neat, millimetre perfect cross-stitch, the careful construction of a bird box, or the subconscious artistry of applying eyeliner.

Windows within windows

It occurs to me that when I knoll, or when my aunt cross stitches, or my niece applies eyeliner we are working within windows we’ve constructed.

There’s the embroidery window where the cross stitching takes place. There’s the eye-shaped window which becomes the canvas. There’s a window in front of me, on the table, as I unconsciously align the knife and fork at perpendicular angles.

Any mess to the left and right of these windows is cropped out because we choose not to focus our attention on it.

‘Flat Window’

In the photograph above (some window shutters I gawped over in Bordeaux) there were messy elements just outside of the frame. Tufts of grass below, vines to the side, the awkward edges of the building and an ugly plastic white vent.

I didn’t want any of this. I wanted to feel as if this beautiful, imperfect French wall might go on forever.

Maybe that’s what I’m doing when I photograph. I’m arranging the world within the window of my viewfinder or screen. A little world I can control and make sense of. I’m trying to collect beautiful fragments.

We have gone deep into the rabbit hole now so I’ll try to return to the premise.

The philosophy of flat photography, is for me, about seeking calm and control. It’s finding little windows of sense within the chaos.

I’m interested to hear from you and other artists, writers, photographers and creatives.

Have you noticed any patterns like this?

It doesn’t have to be straight lines or curved lines. It could be an attraction to certain sounds or colours. It could be how you edit and rewrite your words. It could be the materials you work with.

Have you thought about what it might represent, what it might be drawing you to, or helping you escape or find?

I enjoy thinking about this sort of thing. Flat photography, declutter and the joy of knolling feature in my photography and I’m happier for it.

There are other rhythms, moods and stylistic dances I’m drawn to but this always struck me as a curious one.

Maybe we are all wired, from birth, such that our tastes and predilections are predetermined. Maybe we are in part shaped by our traumas and environment.

Maybe life just ‘is’. We are the bees constructing hexagonal hives for no other reason than it is what is done and what we must do.

In personal project news, I finished the last in my Spring Fever series, here, my photo-journal on the colour in the Cotswolds. I’m also working on a few other projects: a celebration of two cows named Salty and Caramel, an essay on the trolley problem and ten thousand other half-finished things.

I highly recommend checking out Danziger’s shots (the British documentary photographer) at the end of this Lost & Found, they’re incredibly moving.

Enjoy and please share anything you’ve come across recently that you found interesting in the comments.

Here are my latest finds:

Beautiful Photographs of the Repeating Micro, Macro and Mega Patterns in Nature

A selection of images from Australian photographer, Jon McCormack’s new book, Patterns: Art of the Natural World. As the title suggests he’s trying to draw attention to the repeating patterns in nature. To do this he’s used a mix of aerial photography, macro photography, microscope photography and more traditional shots. There are mineral streaks left behind after volcanic eruptions, crystal like formations in caffeine, waterfall rainbows and more. Wonderful concept, beautifully realised.

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A Gentle Appreciation of Crisp Culture in Madrid

I love slow journalism on a subject you know nothing about but is covered so passionately and delicately that it draws you in. Abbas Asaria does a deep dive into the Spanish love of crisps (potato chips for US readers). “There’s a wonderful old-school kitschiness to these places too, with their glass and chrome counters, colourful shop signs with old-school fonts and neon lights.”

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A Forgotten Institution: A Sunken Fisherman’s Inn in West Berlin

Abandoned Berlin put out incredible work and I keep finding gems on their site. This time they’re exploring an abandoned (100-year-old) fisherman’s inn in West Berlin. As they put it, the Fischerpinte was an “old West Berlin institution, and the best place in the whole city in summer for a relaxing beer, cake, sweets, ice cream or sausage served with a cigarette-smile in the age-old hut, itself a capsule from times gone.” Some evocative words and imagery. I love the image of the little table covered in stacked ashtrays, dried flowers and a little sign that says ‘Privat’.

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Some of The Best Images From a Pool of 430,000 Photography Submissions

If you can’t get to London for the Sony World photography awards, Wallpaper have posted a selection of some of the most arresting images. There are some beautifully observed shots here curated from “430,000 submissions from more than 200 countries and territories.” I’ve been to the exhibition a few times and it’s a visual feast. It’s typically held in Somerset House, an experience in itself.

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The British Doing British Things Between 1994 - 1999

I love Nick Danziger’s street / reportage photography. He’s just released another set of black and white images from his archive for Cafe Royal (Cafe Royal are photo publishers who do incredible work). I grew up in this era and the first image, here, leaps off the page. An infinity of ladies marking cards in a bingo hall… perms, polystyrene cups and crinkled crisps. It’s a funny, happy, sad, absurd series of very British shots. In his words: “I believe the role of a documentary photographer is to shine a light on places and stories that would otherwise go unnoticed.”

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To finish off, an image from my photography archive.

A moment when the universe of hot poultry experienced, if only for a brief time, a glitch in the Matrix.

‘There Are No Hot Chickens’

That’s it for today.

If you missed last week’s edition, you can find that here.

Please do share your own thoughts and discoveries below.

It felt like a good punchline to a series of recent mishaps. We got four parking tickets in four days because I confused a ‘1’ for an ‘I’ in the parking app. Last week the bathroom window came away in my hands while I was painting it. Earlier today the lawnmower started screeching, smoking, then died.

So anything that slows me getting into the house before I break any more things is probably for the best.

These are all silly modern life stresses but that doesn’t stop lizard brain whirring disapprovingly.

Yet, whenever I look out of the window or go for a walk, any stress melts away.

‘Butterfly Leaf’

Even rotting leaves, given the right amount of time in the sun, create beautiful tapestries. Like stories on a butterfly’s wing.

It is so beautiful here it almost feels scripted. Like Julie Andrews might appear, at any moment, from behind a rose bush and burst into song.

There are delicate little moments everywhere.

‘Soft Pink’

I’ve been getting more and more into macro recently.

Macro photography is a great way to dance with beautiful, alien worlds.

It’s my first Spring here in the countryside, rubbing shoulders with nature instead of pavement and there’s so much to discover.

In London I didn’t always feel I had the space to stop and appreciate these details. I felt as if I needed to hurry along.

‘Buttercup Sanctuary’

Buttercups are my new favourite thing. Tiny, little suns bursting out of the ground.

I believe it might be impossible to feel sad around them.

‘Pink Mountains’

If I look out of the window early in the morning I can see the sun rising over the valley. Sometimes the clouds dye pink.

At night we watch the two cows in the field out front nuzzling into each other’s necks.

‘Dreaming of Trumpets’

When I took the shot above I was balancing with one hand on a thick branch while I tried to shoot the stamens with the other.

I kept laughing because every time I got it in focus a gust of wind picked up, blew it and I had to start again. When I left, a bee, who had been waiting patiently, took his turn.

‘Pink and Green’

I’m trying to notice the little moments beyond the classic spring headliners like tulips, buttercups (I’m going to say buttercups a lot) and daisies.

Some of the fallen leaves and petals at this time of year have such a delicate feel to them against the forest floor.

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‘Gold Dust’

This guy was drawn to the buttercup nectar and I was drawn to the flecks of pollen on his head, shimmering like gold dust.

I realise I have gone full buttercup in this photoset but I’m fully drunk on them.

‘Door to the Other Side’

Most days I walk past this door. It’s not part of any structure or building. Beyond is a sheer drop down a thick green mass of grass and heather. If a drunk burglar tried to break in they would be extremely disappointed.

It has a secret garden quality and I always day dream when I see it. A Narnia-like portal in the forest.

‘Blue and Red’

There’s a grandiose old building nearby with a red post box outside. It’s old, covered in mossy scabs and looks picture postcard.

I noticed some bright red tulips growing next to it so I spent a few minutes trying to get the red on red juxtaposition. The end result was ok but felt a bit stock photo-ey, so I lost the post box and tried a more stark, ant’s eye view of the tulips against the sky instead.

‘Sun Daisies’

On my way home I spotted these daisies in a beautiful part of the valley, 30 or 40 yards above the stream. They were growing in a little opening in a forested stretch.

When the sun shone through the trees, it felt like there were a thousand of them, swaying gently in the breeze. I stayed and was hypnotised for a while until a dog joined me and made me feel self conscious.

‘Beautiful Alien Eyeballs’

It’s an amazing time of year to witness strange, normally invisible worlds through a macro lens. Metamorphosis everywhere. New life emerging.

Trying to capture that moment between hibernation and bloom is a lifetime’s study in itself.

I noticed these tiny white buds in the photo above in their just-about-to-burst moment. I think they look like alien eyeballs, or the mouth of something ghoulish that you might find stalking the deep ocean. Repeating themes in nature in the most unlikely places.

‘Butter Fields’

Speaking of repetition, it feels appropriate to end on buttercups.

The healing salve for butter fingers or a flagging mood.

All hail nature’s tiny suns.

More from my Spring Fever series: Part 1: Tiny Worlds of Colour | Part 2: Perspective Shifts

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But I’ve missed the old projects I was working on. The strangeness of my old city. The contradictions and absurdities and little stories that unfold when I go for a walk.

I moan about London but I also love and am obsessed by it.

So today I plugged in one of my old hard drives (at random), fired up my old catalogue file and it brought up the last photos I imported from an SD card in May last year. A small selection of a few days worth of photos.

‘Can We Still Fall in Love This Summer?”

‘Hovercraft’

‘Don’t Park Tickets’

‘New Home’

‘Final Destination’

‘Gut Health’

‘Forest Side’

‘There Are Posts’

‘No’

‘Flat Green’

‘Need Paint’

‘Appealing Wall’

‘Back Entrance’

‘Butts’

‘Ugly’

‘So Ugly’

‘Not Good’

It’s fun diving into an old archive and not quite knowing what’s there and seeing if there’s a thread.

I remember the moments when I took these. I knew I was gearing up to leave the city but still hunted, 2 - 3 hours every day, for street ephemera.

A lot of my London shots, when I squint and try to pretend I’m someone else looking at my own photos, might look dark and miserable or like they’re shunning London. There are lots of pictures of scribbles and waste and mess. That’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m looking for little stories and a record of how strange and curious the human animal is.

These are pieces that caught my eye in the mad froth of the internet.

Enjoy and please do share anything you’ve come across recently that you found interesting in the comments.

Here are my latest finds:

Dwile Flonking: 500 Year Old English Dodgeball With Pints and Rags

This is the most English English tradition I’d never heard of. Dwile flonking involves two teams. The flonker tries to fling a beer-soaked rag (dwile) at a team dancing round a bucket. Hit someone and they have to down a pint. Miss twice and you have to down a pint. There is no permutation, that I can see, where you don’t have to down a pint. There’s a lovely video here and an article below.

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An Eerie Dry Cleaner’s, Abandoned Mid-Service

Lost Oddities | Exploration | Photography

I’m obsessed with these photos. Beautiful, haunting shots of an abandoned dry cleaner’s in the UK (the exact location is left a mystery by the author). All the clothes are still on their racks and there’s an old fashioned till and hand-painted signs. It’s as if the owners spontaneously combusted, mid-service. The images are so quiet and intricate and full of unanswered questions.

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An Italian Tourist’s Photographs of America in 1966

Lost Oddities | Exploration | Photography

Mario Carnicelli won a photography competition in 1966. His prize was two cameras and a trip to America to take photographs of Chicago, Detroit, Dallas and New York. Incredibly these pictures weren’t published until 2010. As an Italian, he “imagined all this enormous wealth, but walking around there was also a lot of poverty”. Some beautiful observations.

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The Breathtakingly Beautiful World of Slime Moulds

Lost Curiosities | Lost History | Read

Slime moulds are amoeba-like organisms that can combine into huge ‘super-cells’ to create extraordinary, extraterrestrial-looking patterns and colours. They thrive in dark, damp, rotting environments and, though intelligent, operate entirely without a brain. Like me after a spot of dwile flonking. These incredible macro shots from Barry Webb, capture their strange, other worldly beauty. Psychedelic eyeballs on sticks.

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To finish off, an image from the photography archive. Shot on a bridge in Whitechapel, London:

‘I Overthink, Therefore I Over Am’

That’s it for now.

If you missed last week’s edition, you can find that here.

Please do share your own thoughts and discoveries below.

And the glow. The landscape feels like it’s actually glowing.

‘Spring Bursts’

I’ve noticed my perspective is changing.

It’s blossom season here and if you scan the horizon there’s a burst of colour on every hill. Tiny floral fireworks.

In London I built an entire world around photographing street ephemera. Anything unusual or off kilter. I pieced together stories from the rubbish people left behind. Beautiful shadows on concrete, mysterious scribblings, any ‘accidental art’ within a ten mile radius of my home.

It was a long-standing creative project but also a comfort blanket. Making sense of the chaos by constructing narratives.

This was the mainstay of my photography for years and I mostly shot with a wide angle lens. Wide angle, in non-technical terms, means zoomed out. It captures more of the scene and has that quality where it feels like you are ‘there’.

I’m long-sighted and I love being able to shoot from a distance but everything in a big city felt so close and vast.

My world is now hills, moors, commons and forests.

I’m naming cows, noting down where mushrooms grow and discussing dry stone walling as if I definitely understand dry stone walling.

This is my tribute to spring and the ladybirds who announced it.

This morning when I left the house they were everywhere. On nettles, on wild garlic and later on my face.

I remember a day last year, also in spring, when the ladybirds were shocked out of hibernation. It was uncharacteristically warm and triggered a great awakening.

We took our lunch outside that day but retreated after thousands of them dive-bombed us. All drunk, woozy and confused.

‘Lady Garlic’

‘Wall of Nature’

‘To the Pub’

‘Claude’s Reflection’

‘Violets and Silhouettes’

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‘Jurassic Spring’

‘Blue is Endemic’

‘Red and Green’

Here’s to the ladybirds who sang to me today and to their tiny world of colour.

More from my Spring Fever series:

Part 1: Tiny Worlds of Colour | Part 3: Butter Fields and Alien Worlds

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Friends and colleagues checking: “when is it the clocks change again?”

There was colour, even in darkest February, but mostly the greens, greys and browns that had been bedded in for months.

Then suddenly, overnight, tiny exploding worlds of colour.

‘Butterfly Beard’

I went out for a walk, the clouds cleared for a wonderful 45 minutes, and there was a carpet of dandelions. Tiny purple and pink flowers emerged from the cracks in the walls. Buttercups were getting ready to sing Hoppípolla.

Spring in the West Country, it seems, doesn’t gently announce itself, it spontaneously combusts.

I say that. There was one very important advance party. Daffodils. Bloody daffodils. They arrived, on cue, in March, in isolated clumps like awkward house party guests.

The yellow cuts through the murk. But (and I realise this is heretical) they feel a bit like false prophets to me, arriving in fanfare, declaring spring is here without bringing the entourage.

Still, all is forgiven lemon trumpets. Out on my walk, letting my attention drift, I was hypnotised by tiny colourful flowers bursting into the landscape that weren’t there yesterday.

I had my macro lens on me so I entered their lost world and this is what I enjoyed:

‘Dark Yellow’

‘Violet Confusion’

‘Micro Worlds’

‘Pink Planets’

‘Ridges of Interminable Bokeh’

‘Cotswolds Japan’

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‘There is Fluff’

‘Blue and Yellow"‘

‘Pink Abstraction’

More from my Spring Fever series:

Part 2: Tiny Worlds of Colour | Part 3: Butter Fields and Alien Worlds

I’m sharing them here in case they are of interest to any like-minded souls. Anyone who is attracted to the esoteric, the beautiful and the absurd.

Glass people, rotting cars, psychedelic burger chefs…

Broad subject matters - exploration, the creative arts, oddities - but all curiosities.

Enjoy and please do share anything you’ve come across recently that you found interesting. Here are this week’s finds:

The Citroën Graveyard of Middle England

A delicious Angkor Wat of rusted cars hidden somewhere in the Midlands. I’d love to take a trip here someday, if I can figure out the secret location. In the meantime, while I scour Google Maps in Satellite view, Janine has taken some wonderful shots for us to enjoy.

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The People Who Believed they Were Made of Glass and Might Shatter

“The men came from the Netherlands, from France, from Spain - documented in medical literature across four centuries, each arriving with a precise and terrible self-diagnosis.” This is a wonderful long read by Tamara Sanderson, Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis.

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Saving the Psychedelic McDonald’s Mural

Such a wonderfully eerie, unintentionally dystopian image. Ronald McDonald milking a cow while being gazed at, lovingly, by what looks like a pirate, the Cookie Monster, a huge cow pat and a selection of walking hair pieces. Cabel’s story follows the imminent demise of a strange artwork in a Centralia and his mission to save it. Fantastic photographs by Aaron Lee too.

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Maxim-Zetkin-Pflegeheim: The Abandoned Home for the ‘Mentally Afflicted’

Pflegeheim Saalow was a home for the elderly, infirm and the mentally afflicted but has now been abandoned and left to ruin. “It had its own graveyard, and a pulley under the now-abandoned church so the corpses could be lowered underneath.” There are haunting descriptions and very moving pictures in this piece.

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To round us off an image from the photography archive. Some street tiling I admired:

‘The Mosaic’

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That’s it for now.

I hope you found these as interesting and illuminating as I did.

Please do share your own thoughts and discoveries in the comments.

‘Shadow Tree’

Right now I’m stood by a wall a tiny bit nervous about having my phone out.

I’ve seen lots go on here. It’s an area where people often smoke crack, steal bikes and get into scrapes, but it’s morning and it’s quiet.

Not even the howling cat lady from the Brutalist building across the street is awake.

This caught my eye as I walked past.

‘Flag Red’

I take out my camera and frame the shot. I don’t want any unnecessary clutter and I’m trying to get the 2D flatness I like in my images.

As I’m framing I notice a waft of sweet, almost caramelised, piss.

It’s the brightest day we’ve had this year and the sun’s gently heating up thousands of historical urinations levelled against this wall.

It comes in waves and reminds me of sauna and the heat that ebbs and flows, only it’s piss.

(Incidentally, this a Storybook from a day’s shooting in London. It’s an article that first appeared on my website, Lost in the Trip, here , but I’ve reinvigorated it for Substack).

Inventing Meaning From Meaningless Mess on a Wall

I like the simplicity and the brash, clean colour palette of ‘Flag Red’. I like the accidental canvas from the peeling wall.

The writing itself feels meaningful.

I have no idea what it means but it probably means something important to someone.

It reminds me of being a teenager in history class sitting next to my mate Ian. I’m looking at paragraph in a textbook that talks about the Red Scare in the US in the 50s. I don’t know why the memory is lodged in my head but the words ‘Flag Red’ trigger it.

It’s not likely a reference to that passage in my old textbook but who knows, it might be. It’s probably an instruction of where to drill something for a maintenance person… or maybe a tag from a graffiti artist.

A wall and a daubing of unknowns.

In world that insists on labelling and categorising and defining meaning, this moment of uncluttered abstraction and of not knowing, is welcome.

Knowing When Not to Bother Taking a Shot (And Being Cool With It)

There’s a group of three workmen, just around the corner. I am in their blind spot and they can’t see me. I luxuriate in the time and space I have to get my tatty ‘Flag Red’ wall shot.

When I stop shooting I take another look at the workmen.

All of them are smoking, wearing grey tracksuit trouser bottoms and yellow Hi Vis vests. Fogged up sartorial triplets.

Would they make a good photo? They should.

I think about crossing the road to get a picture, but I don’t.

Years ago I would have wrestled with this.

Get the shot at all costs, think later. But there’s that slight back of mind, sometimes front of mind, hassley element to street photography.

Maybe hassley is not the right word. It’s fear of intruding into someone else’s world.

Some photographers are naturally great at navigating this. Others have to cross the mythical 10,000 hour threshold of doing a thing repeatedly until it loses it’s fear factor.

A key realisation for any photographer, or creative (or human for that matter) is the realisation that if your intention is good and you do something confidently, it puts everyone else at ease.

Nervously stealing photos with a camera held at strange angles while your eyes dart back and forth and your body language is stiff and sneaky makes you stand out.

It’s a creep klaxon. At best you look like a spy, at worst a pervert. Trying to game invisibility doesn’t work.

‘Pee Pee’

If you calmly, confidently and slowly frame your shot with intention in your body and a smile on your face you become part of the scene.

You are unthreatening, you’re not acting nervously. You are meant to be there.

I understand this - and I am better at this now than I was 20 years ago - but I still have a love hate relationship shooting street photos.

From a purely aesthetic standpoint I’m not a fan of subjects looking shocked or surprised in my photos. The ‘Bruce Gilden’ approach isn’t my cup of tea.

With that said I’m obsessed with street photography as an art form. Well done, it’s a blend of wit, surprise, superhuman framing and pure, beautiful happenstance. I just don’t always love doing it.

I say that now, still stood by this pissy wall. But I know I’ll want another street photography hit at some point.

The difference in my photography now, to say several years ago, is that I’m more comfortable assessing whether or not to take the shot.

I still take street photos – especially if I think there’s a potential banger – but I take more time to assess if the background is interesting enough or if there is enough going on in the photo.

That’s what I faced today with my triplet gentlemen. It was a scene that should have the ingredients of an interesting story, photographically.

They had interesting faces. Pockmarked and full of stories. There was also some interest from the plumes of smoke.

But the background was too cluttered. A busy road on one side, an ugly hoarding the other.

They were sat and stood around a stone bench (sounds interesting, it wasn’t), phones out. They weren’t angled in an interesting way.

Not Everything Works Better as a Photograph

I knew it wouldn’t make an interesting photo.

It was one of those instances where my eyes saw and then reimagined, something more interesting than I could have captured with my camera.

That’s ok.

Sometimes it’s good to take advice from some of life’s great philosophers.

As Joey from Friends once said: “Take a Mental Picture”.

‘Wistful’

Know when your eyes and head will do a better job.

I can picture their frowns. Frown lines that said hard living. Frown lines like canyons.

I can still enjoy that they were dressed in matchy outfits in my mind’s eye.

Swarthy men dressing the same is something I’d normally associate with teenage girls going to a K Pop concert.

To have captured all that with the camera I would have had to have taken multiple shots. Close ups of their faces with a portrait lens. A wide angle shot of them together doing something interesting – which might have taken half an hour or more.

This isn’t something any of us would have enjoyed. I’d probably end up peeling bits of camera off the pavement and my face.

So I try not to be too hard on myself and if you’ve struggled with this, you should too.

Not every scene will make a great photo, even if you want it to, even if you feel like it should. Enjoy the moment for what it is. There will be thousands more that will work beautifully behind a lens.

In pursuit of ‘The Quiet Photograph’

The quiet photo, as I pretentiously call it, is want I’ve been drawn to more recently, for the last 5 or 6 years.

It can be a photo of any genre – landscape, urban, abstract, even street – that has an opaque calm to it.

It’s a shape, it’s a sleepy angle, it’s a very still, geometrical tower block. It’s a happy juxtaposition that doesn’t assault the senses.

‘Mondrian and Rothko’s Child’

This was taken outside a corner shop this morning, near where I used to live, which I’m obsessed by.

There’s always something odd going on with this wall.

Usually it’s rubbish or discarded stock left outside, precariously balanced against the wall. It’s like this because they don’t have access to a big enough bins or storage everything sits outside.

Painted crates and other items scrape against the wall and so you get accidental minimalist expressionist pieces emerging.

It’s a contrast to a new development in Hackney Wick which is covered in swanky new apartments now.

But still the occasional jolt of humour.

‘That’s a Nice Contrast’

This graffiti artist, who I’ve only ever seen tag a tiny area in Hackney, just writes the word ‘THATS’.

No context, no apostrophe.

Extreme close-ups, surreal lighting, deep shadow. Taking a shifting, infinite sunset and distilling it into a handful of shapes and colours.

A blood orange sun looking like a retro arcade graphic as it sinks behind a hill.

‘Abstract Sun’

Now that I’m seriously focusing on this idea, which I just thought of in the shower which came to me as I contemplated the mystery of all things, I’m frustrated.

I have lots of photos that would fit the brief but don’t have easy access to all my old hard drives since moving out of the city.

Someone (I’m looking accusingly at myself here) hasn’t unpacked all the boxes.

So I’ll focus here on some images from the last few weeks.

There’s a pleasing discipline in that and I’m learning to love these sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental (usually arbitrary) restrictions on the curating and editing process.

The idea is to make familiar subjects less familiar while still trying to capture an aesthetic.

Fine tuning perception

Photography, as a medium, gives us the ability to hone in on a thing. Sometimes a thing within a thing.

We can exclude from the frame what we don’t want the viewer to see. Anything that might complicate, distract or evoke a different emotion.

I think we can - and should - use this to fine tune perception.

To try to capture a specific mood or meaning. Sometimes a meaning that might not have seemed present at the time. The faintest whiff of a signal.

A feeling of total silence and mercurial calm you noticed. One element. Flaking paint on an abandoned window, framed by an ancient-looking vine.

Even if a security guard was screaming “get out”. Even if the wind was howling that day… that calm you perceived was still present, you captured it. The thing that would have otherwise gone unnoticed, lost in the noise and fog, preserved.

‘Corrugated Vine’

Stand back from the photograph above and you would see six or seven ugly cars and behind them a huge complex of precariously balanced corrugated iron panels.

I’ve shot this carpark before, from a distance, because it’s an odd scene.

But when I looked this time I noticed the ghost of the creeper. The gentle, weaving line work nature has done on the otherwise uniform panels.

Photography is as much about what you choose to leave out of the frame as what you include in it

That’s why the old photography adage ‘get closer’ is so enduring.

Another way of putting it might be to remove clutter from the frame, remove edges.

Remove any external influences vying to get attention or confuse things.

So many potentially great photographs that capture something incredible have no impact because there’s too much going on.

When we look at a photograph we see a much smaller representation of the world.

Sit in the front row of the theatre and the characters are almost life size. Look at an image on an A3 print, Polaroid, or (gasp), a phone and the characters are ant like.

It’s useful to understand and play with that.

Watch the sunset in the most naked way possible, with our actual eyes, we focus our attention. We are drawn to the elemental.

Everything around the sun is still there but we are engaged and hypnotised by its last dance.

A photograph can convey drama, simplicity, harmony, fear, sadness, joy or beauty. Any given moment can contain any one or some or all of those things.

We see whatever the photographer decided to keep within that particular frame.

Ugly cluttered backgrounds or elements that don’t create symphony or rhythm can be jarring.

They can make otherwise beautiful moments messy and uncomfortable.

Beyond the obvious

There are ways around the photos-aren’t-life size issue. We can print big, or insist that only tiny people view our work.

Or… we can use zoom lenses to make smaller elements of a scene larger…

Macro photography to visualise tiny worlds that were otherwise invisible.

‘Glassy Geometry’

A few months ago I was shooting discarded rubbish and clambering into underpasses in London. Now I’m noticing strange reflections in the water.

When we start out with photography often the instinct is to whip out the camera and click vaguely in the direction of things. Spray and pray.

We get excited. We forget or don’t realise that the camera doesn’t capture life size. It doesn’t capture those moments before and after the frame. It doesn’t do smell or touch or fear or ecstasy.

It doesn’t have the brain’s ability to harness attention and to focus on that one beautiful or surprising thing.

The photographer has to do all that, while understanding that they are using a medium that only captures light for a millisecond in a single tiny, sliver of a space.

The image that has energy and longevity is the one that captures a magic that whispered, almost noticed.

Sometimes you get that tiny thrill. You look at the back of your screen. You nod smugly and inwardly to yourself and think, ‘got it’.

Then you get it off your SD card afterwards and it is ugly. The parts of the photo you remember your mind’s eye focusing on are overshadowed by some ugly thing you hadn’t noticed in the background. An overhead cable or a red car jars.

The periphery becomes the subject.

That’s why we have to ensure that the subject dances alone or in symphony with other elements that complement or exaggerate it.

So this mini story book is a celebration of that. Of using light and framing to such an extreme that the image itself almost becomes an abstraction.

‘Sun Face’

I like this one.

I like it particularly because my partner and I went for a sunset walk that evening.

We walked to a spot that I’d been wanting to show her. It’s a place I sometimes sit and watch the sun go down.

It was a really overcast day so I wasn’t expecting much. A yappy dog kept sprinting over and scratching my trousers.

But, for a few minutes, the sky turned perfectly pink in one small area. It was also dead straight and at a strange angle. Like a hexagonal ruler emerging from the left.

If I had been 50 metres higher and further forward and had a 70 foot lens I think I could have got an interesting shot of it dissecting the sky. Instead I took some boring images I’ll never look at again.

But we sat on the bench and watched it for a little while longer until my partner announced that this was a ‘mediocre’ sunset.

So we decided to leave before it got too dark. But I kept on jerking my head back, as we walked, to see what the sun was doing.

You never know with sunsets, they can shape shift unexpectedly.

One of my best tips is to linger for that last 10 minutes - even if it’s looking hopeless. Strange things can happen as the sun ducks under the horizon.

And that’s exactly what happened.

The clouds, as if rushing for last orders, arranged themselves in a way that the sun became a dimmed orange light bulb.

It squashed into a flaming, luminescent yolk. Awe turned to laughter as a couple of cloud eyes formed above. Beautiful and ridiculous.

I spent a couple of minutes unpacking my stuff again and caught the shot above.

I was interested in the abstraction. In the majesty of nature and of the sun, giver of life, reduced to a child’s drawing of a face.

So this is the story of sunface. A sunface that followed us home.

‘Tree Orb’

This one involves a dimmed, gentle version of the sun.

It was overcast but I was walking at a much lower altitude by the water when I noticed the trees had created an inky reflection.

The sun was almost in frame so I walked around a little until I liked the positioning. I then tried to frame it so that there is no muck outside. No broken reeds or crisp packets.

With all these images I want the impact to be the thing that impacted me.

‘Not Black and White’

The shot above looks black and white.

It was taken at that dusky, mercurial time of day when the shadows are black and the water has just enough light to reflect, but nothing more. Nature’s charcoal sketch.

There is always time for Orwell

It’s just occurred to me all the pictures for this edit so far involve either the sun, the water and/or trees. I am a creature of the country now.

It’s time to invoke Orwell.

‘Small Brother is Clouding You’

This was taken on a happy day. A day with a couple of old friends in London walking along the Thames, trading stories.

They were draped over the waterside railings chatting while I spent a few minutes trying to isolate the CCTV camera against the ragey sky.

Talking about Orwell and 1984 feels like cliché territory but I ashamedly love his work and witchy foresight. So this shot is an ode to him. A storm in plain sight.

When the viewer is not physically with us at a scene we have to do the work for them to help them notice ‘the thing’. We have to show (or signpost) what attracted our attention.

In this case, for me, it was that oasis of blue in an oppressive, enclosing storm cloud. The dystopian state monitoring system standing sentry, coldly, implacably.

There were things below the camera, which I quite liked (some interesting angles) but I wanted to leave out everything that didn’t sing to the theme I was focussing on.

Using depth, light, colour or shape to accentuate a story

‘White Tower’

A little further along our walk I was weighing up whether I could respectfully sneak into a heavily fortified building site (I didn’t).

As I turned this oddly 3D, honeyed cloud emerged, like smoke from this tower. There was some white hoarding close to me (but far from the tower) so I used it to keep the colour palette simple.

If we are not framing, we are not really ‘seeing’. We’re doing something different. We’re excited by the moment and the scene before us. That’s a wonderful thing. That’s a happy moment and I try to put the camera down and enjoy these moments.

‘Orbiting Abstractions’

It feels appropriate to go full circle. A man-made sunset.

I’ve taken so many pictures of the Orbit over the years. It’s a London landmark which has been relatively close to places I’ve lived in East London since the 2012 Olympics.

I’m not sure about it. It has a rollercoaster vibe. I also think it looks a bit like a collection of industrial veins.

I’ve learnt to love it over the years, mainly because it peeps over things. I have hundreds of photos spanning what must now be over 15 years where the orbit is popping its head over something else.

In this photoset of abstractions I think it finds a place because it’s unclear what’s going on. The scale is unclear. Even what we're looking at, unless you are a Londoner, is unclear.

When we take elements out, the effect this has on the viewer is that it allows for some imagination.

It’s like the horror movie that instead of relying on gory, explicit scenes, suggests a tension and an unknown that leaves you with a sense of dread.

The viewer can mentally fill in what is going on around a scene.

Maybe it is a more beautiful, more infinite forest than shown in the confines of the image.

Maybe it is a perfectly cylindrical puddle.

There are infinite maybes and unknowns.

The lovely shared part to keep in any art form is to allow the viewer licence to add to the story.

This is no great shame. It’s all ridiculous. But the giant jumble of unsorted photos feels like a painful, looping stutter.

I want to get more storybooks out, and over the years I've developed different ways of curating and editing my work.

I'm always looking for new ways to curate the jungle and today I developed a new one I’m calling The Whisky Edit.

Step 1. Settle into an armchair with the laptop
Step 2. Chuck on a decent playlist
Step 3. Pour a generous glass of whisky

For this, the first in the series, I went for a Lagavulin 11, Charred Oak Cask. It hasn’t had much action recently but it’s a decent dram. Burnt, thick and slightly oily. Some bonfire and molasses.

‘There Are Sorry Princesses’

This is a photo I took near a scrapyard in Canning Town. The light was like a curtain reveal and this chap whizzed past on his bike as I was framing.

I like having him in it. He’s reading the message. The light feels warm and intimate.

The practice of curating photos with your mouth on fire

The whisky is warming my throat now.

I’m curating photos by speed scrolling through my Lightroom photos until something compels me to stop.

I’m not thinking about the why. I’m just picking photos out that feel like they fit the mood.

I’m then doing a 30 second edit on whichever photo I stop on and putting it in a folder labelled ‘Whisky Edit’.

‘There Are Buildings’

The image above is from a couple of weeks ago. I was lost (as usual) trying to get back and spotted the symmetry and new / old juxtaposition.

The selection process for picking out shots for this series isn’t constrained by themes or dates. It’s more of a loose, playful state of curation.

That’s it, the whole workflow and process for this.

A gentle whisky buzz, a look at some new and old photos with no particular agenda.

I’m enjoying it because it still has a narrative. Little stories and sub-stories emerge.

‘There Are Blossoms’

There’s a tree on the road where we used to live that bursts into bloom for just two weeks of the year. It’s blink or you’ll miss it.

We were packing our things to leave for this last blossom. It’s a very urban London road. Rows of Victorian two up and downs terraced houses, brown, brutalist estates, bins everywhere.

I’ve taken shots of these blossoms before but noticed something different today.

I was in the loft grabbing some bits when I noticed that if I poked my head far enough above the window, and used a long enough lens, I could frame the naked silhouette of the tree with the blossoms.

I could leave the grey road, discarded nappies, PVC windows and patchwork of cars out of the frame. For a fleeting moment a Japanese paradise in London.

‘There Are Rain Clouds’

I nearly didn’t include this one. It feels - as I’m posting - a bit less congruous alongside the rest of the photos, less urban, less abstract.

However, the whisky insisted at the time. Whisky does that. Respect the whisky edit.

I took the photo today, about 2 hours ago. Some friends had left. A guy I hadn’t seen in 25 years and his partner. We had a few beers and it felt like only 5 minutes we’d been apart. Lovely humans.

The weather welcomed the reunion. It had been grey skies all week but the moment we left the house for a walk it was bright blue skies. When they left I noticed a black cloud swooping in from the east.

I kept checking in on its progress and that’s the shot I got.

‘There Are Flags’

Lots of Tetris buildings in London.

‘There Are Blues’

This beautiful blue is from a trailer that’s always parked on a road where we used to live. It belongs to a hoarder.

I’ve shot it a few times because I’m obsessed with the blue. I love the little markings and tatty bits.

I sometimes wonder if I'm on anyone's Ring doorbell footage photographing this stuff.

‘There Are Rectangles’

More Tetris. A timber merchant’s roof provides ship-like ballast for the two towers.

‘There Are Oranges’

I’ve taken to shooting wayward cones. This one looked like he’d had a rough night and then I spotted a guy walking past wearing a matching outfit.

‘There Are Black Lines’

Another image I shot today, I am really obsessed with inky blacks and distortion at the moment.

‘There Are Yellow and Beige Lines’

This might form part of a project I’m doing on yellow lines. I’ve taken thousands of shots of yellow lines over the years and want to stick them in a collection.

There’s a pattern of lines emerging in this edit.

‘There Are Rich Foods’

‘Eat the Rich’ is a pretty ubiquitous tag in London these days.

It’s just occurred to me that it’s an inversion of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal, where he suggests, satirically, that the rich eat the poor.

I don’t usually go in for shooting graffiti tags or overly popular slogans but sometimes they can come in handy as parts of series. Like, for example, if I was able to pair it with another foodstuff.

‘There Are Baguettes’

And here is that foodstuff. The abandoned baguette.

The process of taking this picture was, like many of my odd street photos, quite fun.

Normally when I get my camera out and take a picture in London someone will slow down and think about whether they should take one too, even if they’ve no idea what I’m shooting.

Humans are naturally curious and fearful of FOMO. What if I’m missing THAT moment?

I enjoy their baffled eyes quizzing the back of my head when they realise I’m just taking a picture of a baguette stuck next to a piece of metal surrounded by piss.

I feel like the octogenarian (some of my best friends are octogenarians) fruitlessly jabbing my finger at the TV remote.

So far I’ve…

1. Pointlessly written TWO ‘About Me’ posts, one here and one here. It took me a week to realise there’s a dedicated ‘About Me’ section on Substack.

2. Miserably populated my first posts with a symphony of grey images. First impressions set the stall. My stall is smog, pavement and cigarette ash.

Anyway, I want to change all that.

This is a Storybook from a day’s shooting in London (it’s an article that first appeared on my website, Lost in the Trip, here) but I’ve reinvigorated it for Substack.

It’s called the ‘Yellow Fever Edit’.

My dad and my friend Justin are birthday twins. They’ve met once - by chance - because we were all getting Yellow Fever jabs at a clinic in London.

So this is in their honour. The shots span two consecutive days (including their birthday) in February.

‘Concrete Mondrian’

‘Bubblegum Street’

‘Street Pathogens’

‘Rage Solves Nothing’

‘Stealing Norway’

‘Have You Seen It’

‘Shoescraper’

‘Screaming Sellout’

‘Target Eye’

‘Trolley Humps’

‘Abstract Prophet of Paddington’

‘Rob Banks Make Art’

‘Sorry I Love Your’

I nearly didn’t include this last one but there’s something happily ridiculous about messages that are crossed out, half written and mid-thought.

I’ll leave it there, on a half finished sen…

It felt like the weather was trying to mirror my mood today and it won. Everything was pigeon grey. Constant rain, very few glimpses of light.

There was, however, a thick, end-of-times mist in the morning. There was beauty in the strange shadows and shapes it created.

These shots are in chronological order and take you from sunrise to dusk.

‘Mesolithic Mast’

I secretly worship this mast. It stands sentry during some pretty biblical weather and always maintains this stately, jurassic pose.

A structure that will outlive the cockroaches, emerging proudly from the British jungle. Thank you, mast.

I’m hoping one day, if I’m lucky, to get a shot of the sun balancing on its tip, like a steampunk seal doing tricks at Seaworld.

‘Mist Birds’

I got a bit lucky here. I was trying to frame the triple cloud colour palette and waiting for them to neatly align, when these birds sauntered past.

‘Doom Sky Farm’

‘Moss Wood’

‘Bleak Berries’

I was flagging at this point and beginning to wonder if the world had turned a green and grey. This burst of colour from the rain-drenched berries gave me a lift.

‘Path of the Dead Leaves’

The ‘finding colour in the murk’ theme continued. I’ve walked past these bright, rusty leaves a few times now. They have a glow to them at certain times of day which I’ve tried to capture by papping them at a wide aperture.

‘Lady of the Wood’

A bump of euphoria at the end of the day.

I LOVE finding strange, accidental etchings in nature.

Lady-shaped moss in a sea of decomposing leaves.

‘Cortical Branches’

Trees and roots, when taken from a certain angle, look like neurons and dendrites.

Beautiful, witchy, highly-charged networks above and below ground.

I hope you enjoyed this Storybook.

Even on the bleakest (seeming) days there’s beauty to be found. I felt very grumbly this morning. Even more grumbly traipsing around in the damp and murk, slipping around like a muddy salmon.

But the moss and the berries and the leaves (AND OUTRAGEOUSLY GOOD LOOKING MOBILE PHONE MASTS) don’t look like this on a bright, sunny day.

That glorious gloom and ethereal lighting can make it worthwhile.

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Photography, Philosophy, Travel and Some Less Pretentious Sounding Things

I love writing, rambling and taking photos.

I have thousands of half-baked musings and half-written articles. Thousands of half-edited, half-curated photographs.

They have silly names like ‘Lysergic Hour’ and ‘Rooftop’.

It’s my teenage self’s bedroom. An awkward mess of ideas and clutter scattered in different apps and notebooks.

Hand me down t-shirts that don’t fit, some bogeys under the bed frame, but hopefully the odd shiny coin.

I write and shoot all the time but, like almost everyone I know, I find the finishing and publishing part overwhelming. That’s why I set up Lost in the Trip.

This is me - with my terrible sense of direction, my stream of consciousness thoughts - getting lost at home… abroad… in my head and putting it here.

There isn’t really a theme, but if there was one it would be novelty, quiet spaces, curiosity, celebrating opposing ideas, mundane beauty, the divine silliness of humans and our creations.

A Gentle Tribute to the Substack Gods

I already have a website (with the same name, Lost in the Trip), which has been live for several years now.

My posting is so irregular and interactions so sparse on there that it’s really just me wittering in an empty room once or twice a year.

So this is a new approach to complement the old one.

Substack feels like a place to indulge in delicious long-form content and creativity. It doesn’t feel like the inside of an angry casino.

If you want to join my little corner of this ecosystem then you are very welcome.

Take off your wet socks and dry them by the fire. Maybe sip on a whisky.

In Search of the Aesthetically Wheezing

A big part of this project is photography.

I’m a self-taught photographer (god, I hate that term, it’s worse than ‘moist’) and have been shooting for nearly 20 years.

It started as a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, when I bought a decent camera, to get snaps of the mountain gorillas and volcanoes.

Over the years it has evolved into trying to capture happy accidents where I find them.

Peeling paint, miraculously aligned rubbish, silly signs. I’ve done this mostly on the streets of London but have now moved further afield.

We lived in the desert for a while, now we’re in the English countryside nestled in mist and hills. Two of our closest neighbours are llamas.

The places change but the general idea is to work hard at getting lost.

To abandon Big Ben and red telephone boxes and take unmarked roads instead.

To meet interesting strangers and photograph things that might raise a smile. To see hot chickens in their natural environment.

Welcome, Enjoy and Please Say Hello (In Whichever Order You Fancy)

I’m excited to meet other members of the Substackeratti.

For a couple of years I’ve avoided leaving comments but recently I’ve come across, and subscribed to, so many cool, quirky and thought-provoking creators on here that the urge to publish won over.

Thank you for reading.