Lomography: Shooting from the Really Hip

Confessions Of An Editor - Nights Out from Lomography on Vimeo.

Imagine the surprise of the LOMO Russian Arms and Optical Factory when it invented the LOMO Kompact camera with such superior optics that the heartbreakingly clear shots of dams, train stations, and missile silos caused agents to find each other in gloomy naves, sunny parks, and busy cafes, dropping small packets into baby carriages, sliding them under their Figaro's, and dropping them into raincoat pockets of the man facing west on the Dneiper Bridge murmuring code like, "Lo-fi grain," "Beautiful light leak," and "Contrast and saturation, comrade, contrast and saturation."

Some say it was the warmth of this little camera that melted the Cold War, that put shooting from the hip in a better light.

Use your power for good at Lomography http://www.lomography.com/about/lomographs.

Head in the Sink:We are What We Sweep

2847

A kitchen midden that hasn't been flung out the door. Appalling and charming the detritus and sloughings of our lives we scuff through duning up. Ours is mostly hair, I'm afraid, most of it mine, I'm really afraid, and the cat's - all we have of her, but I'm sure I didn't get it all, if that's a comfort, Gravelly bits - although we take off our shoes on the porch - the nibs of tulip poplar seeds that ballast them to spear into loam, And color: pink confetti of onion skin, orange rind, sunny yellow Yogi De-tox tea bag labels, a Mediterranean theme on my floor: cilantro, parsley, pine needs, honey.

Base2Stay: A Little Swank in London

Base2Stay is a series of hotels: London, Liverpool. We stayed a Saturday night at one, I've forgotten why, on a sketchy edge of Kensington - the potted palms were chained to the pretty marble porch. Sketchy, maybe, but Base2Stay knows what swank is: gorgeous bedding, gleaming bath, equally gleaming European desk attendants, but it's neearly affordable (95 pounds a night - double it to translate to dollars; 65 pounds in Liverpool) because it knows exactly how much swank it is going to dollop on you. Exactly. How much.

As a result, the room was the size of the bed, and climbing over, the view was of the bins and the road, although the road was Kensington-quiet: a fruit shop and the chemist's on the corner, a Mini whizzing by or a Bentley prowling.

In the morning, galumphing in hiking boots and glasses past the impeccable, freshly spritzed, multi-lingual desk attendants. We went for good Italian coffee around the corner in Earl's Court. On the way, there was half a young man lying on the sidewalk, half through someone's garden gate, the bottom edge of his jacket, a plaid shirt, his legs, and pretty good shoes in the path. They were strange to approach. He was lying on his hip - the way you do - so his legs looked like they were walking toward us in a world on a perpendicular plane.

Brian hopped them, which was both delightful and appalling. Delightful, really.

It had been raining lightly, but the sidewalk under him was dry. He was gone when we walked back, but the legs walking were still there.