My best photos of 2012

Having wound down enough to look back on 2012, it has been an amazing year in all sorts of ways.

So here are 50 of my favourite photographs I’ve taken this year. I’ve chosen my favourite shots rather than going for reportage, but it includes weddings, births, national spectacles and Brightonian pagentry…

In terms of my photography, it’s a year of two halves  - the first half is dominated by photos taken with the iPhone, edited and posted on Instagram, which was a bit of an obsession. Then in the middle of the year I got a new DSLR – a Nikon D5100 – and the best shots are mostly with that, and one or two Nokia Lumia 920 shots – the phone I got at the end of the year.

Anyway – I hope you enjoy them. Let me know what you think…

Geeks you can see from space (well, Google Maps)

Maybe I should reserve judgement until the project is concluded, but I think that Moblog impresario Alfie Dennen may have surpassed himself with the Britglyph project.

The plan seems to be use a combination of GPS and digital photography to map out a geoglyph, a large drawing on the ground, using geeks around the UK to make up the points in a kind of join-the-dots exercise on a massive scale. 

The image that people will create, basically by dropping stones on the ground and pins in a Google Map with images attached, is of John Harrison‘s Chronometer H5, the 18th century technological marvel that gave us an accurate way to measure Longitude.

 

An excerpt from the lost graphic novel: Chronometer to Crack Up: The Fall of John Harrison

The project seems to be in part to promote Shozu, a mobile software application which, as Lloyd Davies pointed out in a comment yesterday, can be set to automatically attach a geotag (location reference) to photos that you upload to Flickr, and possibly elsewhere. 

I grew up partly in the Vale of the White Horse, the white horse being one of the oldest geoglyphs in the UK. I recall that people said it used to be a serpent until King Alfred‘s soldiers carved legs on it to celebrate a major battle – but I can’t find any trace of that story on Wikipedia or other websites.