Put Him a Good Slap in the Balls

Chertsey Town FC vs Bookham FC
Originally uploaded by Photo Plod

The title of this post reflects Google translate's rather poor attempt at converting a simple French comment on this very image over on my Flickr stream. I'm not sure that the poster really meant to say this!

I'm all for the power of the internet to reach a global audience, but why has nobody invented a simple translation program that actually works? Surely, if a search engine can be designed that can process billions of queries, predict entries and rate webpages according to relevance, someone somewhere should have invented some language software that does the job.

Twitterati

Everywhere I go, everything I read, the world seems to have gone Twitter mad. So far, I've resisted any urge to join them. How many people could really be interested in @Photoplod? Do people really want to know what I'm up to every minute of every day? I don't think so.

However, this morning, I actually saw Twitter being of some use. I travelled in to work during the middle of a general Tube strike - which, as anyone familiar with London knows, causes chaos everywhere. The BBC ran a very helpful "Live Strike News" feed, with people Twittering all manner of live travel updates, mainly coming from people on the ground with their phones.

I can imagine if I had an iPhone, it could be quite fun to post up random images of my daily life (nothing secret and work related, of course) - but with Facebook and Blogs, is Twitter just another virtual obsession pandering to a self-created need?

Bizarre Visitors

Yesterday, I uploaded around 136 images from last weekend's Chertsey Town vs Dorking football match. As is often the case, I received a spike in the number of visitors to my photo stream, but I also received dozens of "Favourite" notifications. Had I been discovered by some photo agency, earmarking my images for future attention?

No. Bizarrely, I'd been invaded by a Sock Fetishist. I had a look at his collection of "favourites" on Flickr - expecting to find sports & football images - but instead found numerous pictures of men...in socks.

Weird.

On Photography

I thumbed through a copy of Susan Sontag's "On Photography" today while on my rounds. Although this is considered a seminal work by many photographers - so much so that it is now printed in the Penguin Classics range - I have to say that the few pages I read seemed impenetrable and pretentious.

For someone who "writes" a photography-based blog, I don't much like reading about photography. I don't consider myself an "artist" and I'm not much interested in postulating about this theory or that one. I'm quite a simple creature in my tastes. I approach every photograph with one simple question: "Do I like it?" If I do, then I wonder why - and I try to appreciate the photographer's skill and composition.

Photography is about two things for me: Entertainment or Information. If a photograph is neither of these, then I move on. I'm entertained by skilful landscapes, action-packed sports shots, clever compositions and a myriad other things. What I am categorically *not* entertained by is 400-odd pages of pretentious artistic waffle.

Fighter squadron in formation

Fighter squadron in formation
Originally uploaded by The National Archives UK

This is a classic image of a Spitfire squadron in formation, straight from the National Archives. I can only imagine at the preparation going into this image - even down to the weather, this shot wouldn't have worked without a cloudy background.

The image comes from one of my favourite sections of Flickr, known as "The Commons" - a place where famous institutions from all over the world upload collections of photographs, in the spirit of sharing and bringing them to a wider audience.

Cardiff After Dark

Wee and Curry - Cardiff Wales UK
Originally uploaded by Maciej Dakowicz

Following on from my last post, I noticed a great set of photos on Flickr, posted by Polish photographer Maciej Dakowicz, entitled "Cardiff After Dark". It is a striking set of around 200 images, shot over the past couple of years by Maciej around the city.

The set shows everything I find familiar about a night duty - drunks urinating in the street, people fighting, passed out on the pavement - in effect, turning urban areas into gigantic, uninhibited human sewers after around 10pm. Maciej's photos are like a tragic slice of urban theatre. His photos have gained recognition recently in Amateur Photographer.

If you want to understand some of what is so wrong with Britain today, you could do a lot worse than look through his collection.

Night Shift

I see all manner of things in the course of my job. This week, I've been doing a stint on night duty CID - we only have to do it a few times a year, and it's one of my favourite duties because we have to cover all manner of incidents. The image on the left is the remnants of a typical Saturday night - that broken bottle you see on the floor was smashed into someone's face after a typical drunken brawl. The blood sprayed over the ground nearby was the result of some very deep lacerations that will leave the victim scarred for life. On top of that, over the 7 nights, I've attended a double stabbing, numerous other assaults and a drug-related car crash where the driver had tried to run over and kill some associates.

I've often toyed with the idea of asking for formal permission from the borough commander to do a "photo essay" of various parts of my OCU, just to show people some of the things we police officers face on a daily basis. Until I became a copper, I thought I was pretty streetwise and that there wasn't much I hadn't seen. How wrong I was. I just wish I could share so much more of it with the public. I don't think any images would shock - Hollywood has pretty much taken care of that for us, and nothing really replicates the feeling of "being there". Still, I don't know of any other police officers doing anything similar, and I think it would make a change from all the "Cops on Camera"-type police shows, which, although are fly-on-the-wall in nature, have still passed through the hands of TV editors and producers.