Ambrotypy

The work of  Serg Shushyn a modern day ambrotypist. He works with the 19th Century wet collodion process - as did Lewis Carroll among others. An ambrotype is photographed onto a glass plate which has been coated with black varnish, so that the negative is the positive because the under exposed areas reveal the varnish. Development and fixing are done in the same way as the paper method which pre-dated glass plates and continued long after them. Unlike paper, a glass substrate has no grain, which allows a better capture of fine detail. How the images are digitalized I have no idea.

Pleased to meet you, Mr Cannibal

"Pleased to meet you Mr Cannibal, but if you'll excuse me. I won't stay for dinner."

Maddie's Last Day
Ou en Francais La Fin de Madeline

from Mothering Sunday

And I thought of a woman so benign,

she lifted all wickedness from me,

a weight I did not know was mine

until her light fell on me.

Light indeed I felt at last,

ready to stand at my own height

before a smile which travelled fast

across the windless night.

Granny Takes A Trip

The site of the pyschedelic boutique Granny Takes A Trip on Chelsea's King's Road. When it was opened in 1966 by tailor John Pease and artist Nigel Waymouth this was at the unfashionable or Fulham end of the King's Road. The immediate neighbourhood remained pretty scuzzy for some while. When I used to walk past daily in 1980 the premises had become a fruit and vegetable shop. It still had its Granny Takes A Trip awning, which came down on rainy days.
More on psychedelic London in my book Jimi Hendrix: London (MusicPlace)

Pareidolia

When we were children we all used to find pictures in things. The name for this phenomenon is pareidolia. It is the principle which causes people to discover the face of Jesus or Elvis within damp stains or on pieces of toast, and for us to be able to recognise them too, when they are pointed out to us. It is the principle through which I found the above face in a marble tile on my kitchen floor this morning.
I believe during the Renaissance finding pictures through pareidolia was part of an artist's training. As far as I know, no school of art uses the practice these days. Perhaps it has been forgotten. Or perhaps there is the deeper reason that our entire education system is founded on materialist principles, and Materialism finds Consciousness an embarrassment it cannot account for, so the method may have been as much discouraged as dropped.

The Enchanted Conversation

My story The White Marriage is a guest post on the marvellous Enchanted Conversation

To hear the mermaids sing...

Pretty video clip borrowed from Maggie's Farm