Posts Tagged ‘Liverpool’

I went to see the Painted Photographs exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool today of photographs that have been retouched for use on TV and in the Press.

Due to my own stupidity and incompetence I never made it to the Open Eye Gallery before its new venue so I can’t compare it to the old space.  Its new home is almost on the waterfront in a small but perfectly formed gallery with three rooms and a small shop.

There is an impressive elegance to the design.  It’s a simple uncluttered space with simple wall geometry and sight lines used to incorporate the entrance, reception, retail and first gallery area into one room without the other elements impinging on the gallery space.  Cleverly though the reception desk can see the retail area, entrance and first exhibition area while also acting as the payment point for the shop area without resorting to an exit through the shop design.  It’s the sort of architectural design I can’t help admiring.

I read about the Painted Photographs exhibition of pictures collected by Martin Parr on the BBC website last week.  Some of the commenters on the site get tangled up in the idea that this is a modern art exhibition.  It’s nothing of the sort.  It’s a curious insight into the way things were done before Photoshop became the ubiquitous tool of photo retouching.  Its old school and fascinating for it.

There is a photograph of Mohammed Ali arriving in London with crop marks to just use his face, another of James Dean with legs painted in and one of John Lennon with just enough of Yoko painted out to make a square frame of his face.  The brush work is hurried and surprisingly basic.  These are pieces of work produced to illustrate a news story not pieces of art intended to be hung in a gallery.

If you’re interested in how things were done before digital stormed the world this exhibition is worth a visit.   It’s a perfect for a bite sized visit for lunch if you work in the city centre or an excellent aperitif for its larger neighbours if you’re coming from further afield.

In a smaller gallery next to the Art in Revolution: Liverpool 1911 is an exhibition of black and white photographs by Paul Trevor of inner city Liverpool taken in 1975.  The exhibition features a sequence of stunning images that reflect both the poverty and material decay that afflicted inner city life in the 1970s.  Most of the pictures feature children and amongst the battered landscape they add a sense of joy, hope, happiness and freedom.

Like you’ve Never Been Away is free and is at the Walker until 25th September and is well worth a visit if you’re passing.  An excellent way to spend a lunch hour if you work in Liverpool City Centre.

I think this is the first time DarkDwarf and I have independantly taken photographs of the same thing for our blogs. Here is a shot of the Port of Liverpool Building reflected in Mann Island Development I took a couple of weeks ago but fell through the cracks of being busy doing other things.  Scarily we had almost the same title.

When I took this picture of buildings all jostling for space with each other on a Liverpool street I was going to just post it as a throw away picture post. However this was one of the views, with its variety of buildings from different eras, that inspired my render Accretion City. So I thought I might expand a little on the idea that pictures (especially 3D renders) need to be careful of avoiding mono culture scenery. I really like CityEngine (I think my reviews of CityEngine Indie and CityEngine Vue made that pretty obvious).

A lot of 3D scenes reveal their artificial nature because they use the same elements over and over again. I can’t remember which film it was but I do remember one of the 3D cartoons with insects films a few years ago where all the background insects looked the same. Every time I saw a group of ants in the background I knew I was watching a CG movie and it pulled me out of the story.  Vue users have become so used to EcoSystems they almost forget the power the variety gives in making scenes more believable through variation.

The sample scenes are great but they tend to create models of settlements that are very mono culture in nature. Even when they feature different types of area they tend to be of one era. CityEngines way of creating models of a city is great but they aren’t settlements that grow over time – and trying to making them do that is a task that would scare me and probably wouldn’t have huge benefits. So the trick will be to include a variety of building types to make it seem a model has grown over time. That will include creating models that fuse multiple styles so the old can be extended sometimes in a way that would have Prince Charles talking about carbuncles if these were real buildings.

Anyway somewhere along the lines before I’d finished writing what should have been a complete post I was struck by how I don’t just think this way for 3D stuff but also when I’m world building for stories or games. In fact I went as far as writing up a formalised way of doing that when I put together STEEPVM. Thats quite a formal method and I know that most of the time the ideas for a setting layer themselves by accretion until, hopefully, I have something believable.

Thankfully I don’t have to create some sort of procedural set of instructions for this to work. However I do have to be careful of the trap that lies in wait – a curate’s egg setting.

It is far too easy to be lured by lots of shinny, shinny ideas and to throw them all into a setting and be left with a mess. I hate to pick on one particular target but the RPG Waste World seemed to me to suffer baddly from this.  On the flip side I was really pleased when Nightfall Games posted on their new(ish) forums that they won’t be updating SLA’s technology because at the moment, for me, its achieved a level of accretion without tipping over into being a mess.

I was starting to write something about that when I remembered I’d written Leave out the (Steampunk) Kitchen Sink last year so I’ll not go back over that old ground again…

Dark Dwarf posted quite a few pictures of HMS Liverpool on her last visit to the city on his blog:

• The Leaving of HMS Liverpool
• HMS Liverpool

I just thought I’d post one of the ones I took last Sunday morning too.

On the opposite side of North John Street from the Royal Insurance Building is one of the ventilation shafts for the Mersey Road Tunnel. It’s not as grand an affair as the Georges Dock Ventilation Tower and Central Station with its statues and other decoration but it does merit Grade II listing. It’s quite a hard structure to get a photograph of because its wide but also very tall – at 60m its the 17th equal tallest structure in Liverpool. Hidden away high above the street, along the top of the bulk of the building, below the shaft itself is a thin, art deco decoration with a horse’s head at each end.  Yet another example of the treasures hidden in Liverpool’s architecture if you look up from the street sometimes.

I don’t usually photograph the Beatles attractions around the city but the Lennon European Peace Monument was catching the sun as I was looking for a vantage point in Chavasse Park to photograph the Royal Insurance Building’s golden dome from last week.

The golden dome on the Royal Insurance Building in Dale Street stands out on Liverpool’s skyline. 34m (110ft) above Street level is the highest point on the Grade II* listed building started in 1897 and finished in 1903. Sadly J Francis Doyle’s Edwardian Baroque building has been derelict for most of my time in Liverpool.

Today was the first day this year I’ve taken my camera for a wander round Liverpool at lunch time.  I’d originally taken it in because there was some really atmospheric mist when I got up in the morning and I was hoping it would still be around later.  By lunch it had all burnt off.  So I went for a wander in glorious sunshine instead and took this shot of the Bluecoat.

The Bluecoat is the oldest building in Liverpool city centre.  A former school it now houses a gallery, a variety of art and craft shops, a café, a bistro and various bits not open to the public where creative organisations.

With the cold weather here’s another photograph from earlier in the year… a different view of Liverpool Resurgent over the entrance to the former Lewis’s Department Store.