BADCOCK GOES APE

This is what I did to one of John Badcock's paintings. John Badcock is a NZ painter whose paintings pull in surprisingly high prices. Here is one of a naked man beating a woman with a stick.

I took a photo of one of his paintings in a gallery and carefully added some Toyota HiAce van reflection to give my photo of his painting some added social context.

And then I let rip with a few filters which seemed to bring out the beating aspect a little more. There is nothing like a good beating!

The things you see in the street…

Are we being traumatised by these images? Well I guess that depends how sensitive we are.

I didn’t make any of this up – really I didn’t – Here is a photo of John Badcock:

 

A FULL PLATE

 The 2025 Tour de France has just kicked off this weekend. I've been following the Tour since the 80's and remember buying this book when I was at school, 40 years ago!

Apart from watching this year's Tour highlights I seem to have about a million other things to do  this month, and this post is just a random collection of images that caught my eye.

This month was also part of an experiment - back in May I had a month off doing any blog posts, and surprisingly my hits actually increased, so I became interested in checking out what effect not posting has on my hit count. I'll fill this month in later, but in the meantime, apart from this post, I will monitor a second month off and see if a pattern emerges. 

 

RANDOMS 2025 #27

ONE OF MY FETISHES

 

For some reason I have a fetish for taking photos of strangers.

I lurk about with my camera waiting to get a snap of them. And then I post their pics online and hopefully my unwitting victims never know! Here are some lucky strangers that caught my eye.

(I like my strangers in a Polaroid style)

OVER US$12k FOR A BLOG POST

 

GET RICH BY BLOGGING!

Back in 2016, in the early days of the blogging platform Steemit – when it still looked like an awesome new blogging platform rather than a massive Ponzi scheme – certain key accounts were flinging money about in an apparent effort to bring in new users.

One of my first posts got a $400 payout. Although the whole thing looked a bit suspect, I didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth – I just went “choice mate, thanks a lot” – https://steemit.com/photography/@sift666/my-obsessive-polaroid-photo-fetish

Next I started learning about crypto currencies, and by early 2017 was hanging out to get started. So I cashed out some of my Steemit earnings and bought Bitcoin. They were only US$1000 back then so US$400 bought 40% of a Bitcoin.

Cryptos went nuts that year, and by the time Bitcoin went up over US$15,000 I was getting sweaty and nervous. I managed to cope with the stress until they hit US$17,000, then I sold the lot and breathed a sigh of relief. They actually peaked for a short time at US $19,000 but $17k was an awesome point to ditch them.

So 40% of a Bitcoin went up from US$400 to US$6800. Convert that into NZ$ and it became NZ$10,300. Next I used that money to buy gold bullion, back when it was $NZ1700 an ounce, so that $10,300 soon went up plenty more.

Later when Bitcoin dropped back from US$19 to US$5, I bought some more Bitcoin  at US$5000, and that worked out well too. I just waited for that nervous sweaty feeling to come back, and then headed back to the the bullion shop – https://www.mygold.co.nz