Nick Knight is near the top of my imaginary ‘photographers I’d love to commission one day’ list. I’ve been an admirer of his work ever since I laid my eyes on his series of fabulous, color-drenched images created for Yohji Yamamoto in the early nineties. Nick Knight is now the uncrowned king of the digital fashion photography with his striking, beautifully composed, digitally manipulated images that often challenge the conventions of fashion photography.

Despite being a perennial favourite with the great and the good of the fashion world he hasn’t shied away from tackling controversial issues as racism, disability and ageism within mainstream media. My favourite example being his stunning photography for a Levi’s Jeans campaign featuring the original wearers of Levi’s Jeans, some of whom were over 70 years old.

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I stumbled upon a book recently which I simply had to buy for the sheer inventiveness of the images inside it. Mixing sharp humour with a delicious edge of melancholy, ‘Little people in the city’ brings together the collected photographs of Slinkachu, a street artist who for several years has been leaving little people in the bustling city to fend for themselves, waiting to be discovered.

Flicking through the pages of this book is like discovering a whole new miniature world around us… think Land Of The Giants meets the Borrowers in the modern world. As you see page after page of these miniature statues going about their daily lives, whitewashing graffiti and moving into new homes… you really do get the sense that there could actually be miniature people living amongst us.

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Imagine walking down any street and holding up your iPhone… what you see on the screen is a view of the street yet there are lots of Zombies running towards you that you then have to shoot. Or imagine walking up to a wall and touching it… just for the wall to then display the view that is on the other side of it…. This is the world of Augmented Reality and it’s a world that looks like it’s going to be very big indeed.

Put simply, Augmented Reality blurs the line between what’s real and what’s computer-generated by enhancing what we see, hear, feel and smell. It adds graphics, sounds, and smell to our world… and through a normal pair of glasses or display screen, informative graphics appear in your field of view, and audio coincides with whatever you see. These enhancements are then refreshed continually to reflect the movements of your head and the world around you.

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Gray & Osbourn, a leading niche clothing brand in the UK premium home shopping market, have appointed Red C to expand the role of online marketing and broaden the brands appeal to attract new, younger online customers. The business was founded as a division of Selfridges in 1989 and is now owned by the N Brown Group. Red C won the business in a 5 way pitch that included the incumbent and came down to a final 2-way shoot-out.

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Spurs 5 - Arsenal 1. Get in!

My school years are long behind me now, but I still have one or two memories of those days that I recall with fondness, now and again.  Bunking off double geography with Sarah Kirsopp when I was 16 is one. The other is a conversation I had with the 6^th Form’s Career Officer, Mr Kennedy.

The conversation started with a question we’ve all probably been asked.

“What do you want to do when you leave school?”

My enthusiastic response wasn’t greeted with the warmth or indeed excitement that I anticipated.

“Don’t be ridiculous White!  How on earth do you expect to be centre forward for Tottenham Hotspur?”

I left that meeting thinking to myself, “I’ll prove Mr Kennedy wrong, I’ll show you.  Mark my words”.

To be fair, whilst I haven’t completely given up on the dream, I have to admit it looks like Mr Kennedy was right.  But it’s not all doom and gloom.  Today I have actually found something I genuinely like doing.

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Choosing a director is a tricky business. You are putting a lot of trust in someone to bring your concept to life and this time we needed it to be extra special.

Working on the concepts for the Marisota spring summer 2009 DRTV advert we had to go back to basics, introducing the girls and focusing on the research and size messages. So to bring all this to life means taking care of the little details.

Once the storyboards were signed off the real work started. Firstly finding a Director who can understand the concept and add something special was needed. I was introduced to Andy Saunders through Sharon Gunnel and her production team at Velvet. The first pre-production meeting went really well, Andy brought lots of ideas to the table to bring the ad to life… and I was sold on him straight away.

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I like words. They happify me. In fact, they make me tripudiate with joy. I’m one of those people who take far more pleasure in hearing about a crepuscular splodge than actually seeing one; and would much rather read about a spelunking scrimshanker than go and cheer him on. I get a kick out of the English language and, at the risk of being philodoxical, I think everybody should. Language may be fundamentally a means of communication, in the way that food is fundamentally a means of nutrition, but both offer pleasure far beyond their function. Words should be savoured like a sumptuous steak.

Of course, when I try to convince my chums about the myriad delights of mellifluous language, they call me a ponce. Well, until a few weeks back. All of a sudden, they’re casually dropping obscure words into every conversation. It’s frippet this and proprioception that. And while I love to think it’s down to my strategic nagging, I’m afraid it isn’t. They still think I’m a ponce. But they’ve become huge fans of this website called Wordle. Read more…

Have you ever read Nineteen Eighty-Four? It’s about an everyman living under an oppressive totalitarian regime. The ‘proles’ are kept in a controlled state of poverty, living under almost constant surveillance and being ‘educated’ on a daily basis to believe in the inherent good of their government and the inherent evil of others. All in all, it’s a terrifying fiction. Well, if you can call it that. In fact, the regime in the novel closely resembles many real-life regimes of the twentieth century. And, much like the citizens of George Orwell’s dystopian world, the billions of human beings living under these govenments were mostly genuine and wholehearted believers. Their corrupt leaders successfully brainwashed  them into thinking they were living the good life, even while terrible things (war, poverty, oppression) happened all around them. There’s no denying it’s an impressive feat. Yet you can’t help but wonder: how on earth did they do it?

Consider Adolf Hitler for a second. Just how did a small man with a silly moustache convince a nation of perfectly ordinary people to revere his Nationalsozialist Party, to give erstwhile chums up to concentration camps and to greet the promise of aggressive war with arms wide open?

Through manipulative, powerful advertising campaigns – that’s how. He may have been a cold-hearted, hate-filled Nazi git, but Hitler was an undisputed master of propaganda.

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Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ was the book that changed the way I looked at photography and i’m envious of anyone picking it up for the first time. The beautifully sequenced, haunting photographs in ‘The Americans’  break all technical rules of photography in favour of a spontaneous, coarsely poetic beauty that I never seem to tire of. Not bad for a book that’s over 50 years old.

‘The Americans’ was created during a Guggenheim funded road trip across America in 1956 and 1957 in which the Swiss born Frank (sometimes accompanied by his young family) set out to to document “how Americans live, have fun, eat, drive cars, work and dream”. Frank shot from the hip and worked intuitively often snatching shots surreptitiously with his hand-held 35mm Leica, using his unique outsider perspective to expose themes of power, racism, inequality, and alienation. By the end of his 10,000 mile journey (in which he himself experienced prejudice after being arrested under suspicion of being a communist spy) he had made more than 27,000 photographs and had ‘sucked a sad poem out of America onto film’ as Jack Kerouac writes in the breathless introduction that accompanies the book.

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I love shopping online. I can do it from the comfort of my home, not having to rush from shop to shop and then back to the first shop again, deal with fitting room queues or worry about buying something before closing time. If I have something in particular in mind then it’s also great being able to search for it with the whole internet at my fingertips and specify what price, colour or brand I want. And I’m not the only one! According to Nielsen over 875 million of us have shopped online, with that number increasing 40% from two years ago. And despite falls in sales on the high-street, online shopping has seen a 13% rise on 2008 with the most popular purchases being Books, Clothing & Accessories, DVDs & Games, Tickets and Electronic Equipment.

But shopping online can sometimes be a bit solitary. It doesn’t replace going shopping on the high street with your friends and picking out clothes together and it doesn’t replace the buzz you get from having loads of shopping bags full of new things that you can’t wait to try on again at home. So that’s why online shopping had to evolve into something more visually and socially appealing. And with the boom in social networking sites and niche communities social shopping was born.  OSOYOU was one of the first online shopping communities and was launched in 2007. It acts as an aggregator of fashion and beauty products with 49 of the top retailers on there. But shoppers can also create their own profile, chat with each other in forums and drag products into their own “style file” to show off their most wanted items.

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