Ducks this week

This week's picture set is about ducks. No special reason, even if (tangentially) the news is currently all about turkeys. Unfortunately I haven't got a decent selection of pictures of them, although there is one further down this page that shows a nice healthy bird on a farm in Sussex. At least ducks, so far, have not been as comprehensively fucked up by the food industry as turkeys and chickens. A quack, nowadays, is a lot safer than a gobble.

Last week's pictures looked at shop decoration

Other recent pictures of the week

There's been a lot of comment recently about the amazing growth of coffee shops. If you stand in London's Regent Street, apparently, you now have 166 branches of Starbucks within a five-mile radius. That chain only opened its first outlet here in 1998, but has been so successful it is annually adding 50 new prime locations where you can drink its over-priced and insipid lattes. People must like these places, though the demographics suggest they are not visited by either the poor or the old. The trouble is that the rise of Starbucks (and the other corporate coffee chains) means the closure of old-fashioned cafes that have for years served their local communities less glamorously but much cheaper. The picture set a fortnight ago focused on the disappearing world of caffs and cafes. They are about life not lifestyle and I suppose, sadly, that's why they are doomed.

The picture set three weeks ago took a look at horses. Wikipedia describes them as "odd-toed ungulates of the order Perissodactyla, a relatively ancient group of browsing and grazing animals that first arose less than 10 million years after the dinosaurs became extinct". So they'd been around a long time before we learnt to domesticate and use them for everything from ploughing fields to the 3.30 at Kempton Park. An English writer called Naomi Royde Smith, now otherwise entirely forgotten, wrote the couplet that went "I know two things about the horse, and one of them is rather coarse". She never said what it was, which is rather a shame.

The subject four weeks ago was cows. They had been in the news - and none too favourably. First off, the Daily Mail ran a bovine scoop about the arrival in Britain of Dundee Paradise, a calf said to have been cloned from the ear of a champion Holstein in Wisconsin. The advantage of this, as might be expected, is entirely commercial. Cloning can create huge cows producing 70 pints of milk a day (30-40% above the norm). Then, if such monstrous and unnatural gushers were not enough, there's the alarming contribution of the world's cows to global warming and the end of civilisation as we (and the Daily Mail) know it. Because of their four-chambered stomachs, they can fart up to 600 litres of methane daily. That's enough, apparently, to fill 40 party balloons. What with all that milk and fart gas, it's going to be quite a party. A mad world, and we're not talking just about the cows.

About this site and picture library

There are now over 48000 images in the library and they can all be keyword searched from the picture search page. New or updated subjects include ducks, shop decoration, cafes, horses, cows, shop names and post boxes. The site has several ways to help make relevant and fruitful searches, including index pages for both subjects and events & places.  There is also a useful search guide and information page.

A good showcase of the type and range of photography available can be explored in the pictures of the week series. Published on the site since December 2001, this now totals more than 2400 images. Every week there is a set of ten pictures about a particular place, event or theme. Almost all the library's pictures are available for personal or commercial reproduction. Digital files can be delivered by email or CD, prices start from as little as £8 and there is further information on the prices and terms & conditions pages. You can also contact David Gray for quotations and availability for new photography commissions.