I have just received the periodic email from Somerset House, which lists the things they have on each month and they are featuring an exhibition of photos of London taken by one Richard Bryant, a noted photographer.

Apart from the exhibition though, there is also a competition for the best photos of London taken by amateurs.

The fluff about the exhibition reads thus:

Richard Bryant is one of Britain’s leading architectural photographers, and in this new exhibition he presents his personal account of London. Picking out views, spaces and architectural detail, the combination of world-famous buildings and little known secrets forces the viewer to reassess what they know about the city.

The competition though – that is being run via the ubiquitous Flickr website.

Richard Bryant will judge the entries himself and he’ll take the winners on a personal guided tour of his exhibition, offering advice on how to take great urban photographs. His favourite photos will also be featured in a winners gallery on the Somerset House website.

The prize is fame and glory!

Yesterday was one of the periodic opening at the Acton Depot, which holds tons of kit that can’t be fitted into the Transport Museum’s Covent Garden venue.  This weekend was themed around miniatures, so the place was also manned by lots of model railway groups.

As part of the fun, the museum also organised one of their periodic Scavenger Hunts – where teams are given a sheet of clues and have to rush around taking photos of the answers. Prizes awarded to the first team back and the one with the most correct answers.

My team (routemaster) did quite well I think – getting 17 out of 20 correct. We thought we had 19 – but two turned out to be wrong answers. Opps!

Part of the competition is to upload photos to Flickr who are part of the event – so you can have a look at my attempts here.

Much fun, and good to have a wander round the depot again – and thanks to Annie Mole for blogging about it so I could attend, along with the team at the Museum for organising the event.

Also, a write up of my first visit to the depot last March.

Just a tip – if heading over to the periodic open weekend at the Acton Depot this weekend, you would be strongly advised to try and get tickets from the Covent Garden museum before heading over to Acton as the queues there can at times get rather lengthy.

I’ll be there on the Saturday afternoon for the Scavenger Hunt fun.

Enjoy if you are heading over – some photos from a previous visit.

Earlier today, a quite remarkable milestone was passed as the 100,000th person looked at my Flickr collection of photos of an “Abandoned London” taken on Christmas morning – which is quite staggering.

When I got up on Christmas morning, I really had no idea if the photo session would work – it was just an idea to cycle into town and see what was possible. For all I knew, the West End would be as busy as a normal morning and the trip would be a waste, and to be honest I was really tempted to skip the project as, like half of London, I had a bad cold. Indeed, I was so grotty that I on the way into town, I had decided to stop at Tower Bridge, take some photos and go back home. Fortunately, I took a wrong turn and ended up at Bank for the first photos of the morning. Even though I knew the City would be abandoned, getting there heartened me to carry on to the West End.

That wrong turn probably saved the morning!

However, the one thing I never expected was the reaction to the photos once I put them up here on the blog and on my Flickr account. I hoped the photos would be interesting – and I am delighted that so many people seem to have liked the end results.

However, it has been truly quite staggering how people have reacted to the photos I took, especially as I am but an amateur with the camera and can’t consider the photos to more than just tourist snaps.

They were also featured on the Daily Telegraph’s website, which was rather awesome and loads of other blogs and websites commented on the images.

One thing which cannot come across in the photos is the silence of the city though – and the experience of cycling around an empty city really is something which I cannot recommend highly enough to anyone willing to try it one Christmas morning. The photos are one thing, but to be there yourself – that is quite something else.

I get the impression from comments going around the place that a fair number of cities will have photographers out in force this coming Christmas – which should be quite exciting to see.

Stats Porn:

The Flickr Set > 100,000 views & 48 comments.

The individual photos > 317,000 views, 299 favourites & 123 comments.

Chatting on another website about the clunky brand name given to the “International Day Against Homophobia”, which does not trip off the tongue that easily – and its hideous abbreviation, IDAHO. Anyhow, I was reminded of the George Orwell novel (if it was a novel) 1984 and the principles explained at the end about how choosing short abbreviations for political names enables people to say them quickly and without lingering over the meaning.

While Idaho is indeed a word that slips off the tongue almost unnoticed when compared to the International Day Against Homophobia, it lacks any instantly obvious meaning to the bystander. It is therefore a poor brand identity.

In the novel, much is made of the conversion from the Ministry of Truth – a term which you will subconsciously linger over for a moment – to Minitrue which is so brief that you wont even notice that you said it.

I did have a bit of a shudder as I was thinking about this though – as the trend in Web 2.0 branding is to drop letters and make brand identities as easy to say as possible, while still retaining an element of the original.

The Flickr website is an excellent example of how a company has adopted the Newspeak language form to define its identity.

I wonder if the website founders are fans of George Orwell?

The relevant text from the 1984 novel is below:

The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation.

In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called Recdep, the Fiction Department was called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes Department was called Teledep, and so on.

This was not done solely with the object of saving time.

Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations.

Examples were such words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Inprecorr, Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose.

It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.

The words Communist International, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily.

In the same way, the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth.