Interesting Facts

11th November 1918 - On the 11th hour of the 11th Day in the 11th month the Armistice that officially ended the First World War was declared. https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/first-world-war https://flic.kr/g/fnA5wu 2005 - Lord Lichfield, the Royal photographer died at the age of 66 after suffering a major stroke. (Apart from being an excellent photographer he endeared himself to me by using a whistle to keep the Royal Family in order when taking the photographs at Charles and Diana's wedding - I am sure that he and Diana will have a few interesting words to say to each other.)

According to research carried out by Time Magazine, Makati City in the Philippines is the selfie capital of the world, with 258 selfie-takers per 100,000 people. (TIME built up the database by searching more than 400,000 Instagram photos with  geographic coordinates tagged “selfie”. The top 10 were:- Makati City, The Philippines (258) Manhattan in the USA (202) Miami, USA (155) Anaheim and Santa Ana, the USA (147) Petaling Jaya, Malaysia (141) Tel Aviv, Israel (139) Manchester, England (114) Milan, Italy (108) Cebu City, The Philippines (99) George Town, Malaysia (95) I've never taken one.)

According to research from mobile network O2, smartphones are hardly ever used to make a phone call. (Most people use their smartphone for surfing the web, checking social networks or playing games. The research found that the average smartphone owner spends more than two hours each day using the device. Here's a breakdown of what they use it for. Browsing the internet - 25 minutes  Social networking - 17 minutes Playing games - 13 minutes  Listening to music - 16 minutes Making phone calls - 11 minutes Text messaging - 10 minutes Taking photographs - 3 minutes Even though people only spend three minutes a day taking photographs, photography was the most popular thing to use a smartphone for, 74 per cent said that they had taken photos with their handset. For me all the above is true apart from playing games and texting. I have never played a game on my Motorola Droid, and I send about 10 texts a year. In fact my smartphone gets about 30 minutes use a day, I prefer...

Louis Daguerre was the inventor of the first commercially successful form of photography. (After years of experimentation, he perfected Daguerreotype in 1839, the process involved exposing silver-coated copper plates to iodine, obtaining silver iodide. This was then exposed to light for a few minutes and coated with mercury vapour and fixed with salt water. The French government 'acquired' Daguerre’s patent and, in August of that year, announced that the invention was a gift “free to the world”, but don't worry, Daguerre didn’t need to make money from his invention as he was pensioned by the French government in exchange for sharing the details of the process.) PS - He has been honoured today with a Google Doodle to mark his 224th birthday.

The first photograph was taken in 1814 by by French scientist and inventor Nicephore Niepce (pronounced Nee-ps). (He used a Camera Obscura, but it needed eight hours of light exposure and even then the resulting photograph was not permanent, it faded to black in daylight. Maybe that's what Metallica were singing about.)

Associated Press has a zero-tolerance policy of adding or subtracting content from an image. (They recently suspended the use of US Department of Defense photos after it emerged that a photo of a general was found to have been digitally altered. Ann Dunwoody was shown in front of the US flag but it later emerged that this background had been added. I think AP are right, it's so easy to alter photos, a news agency must draw the line. Now let's just hope model agencies follow suit.)

7,000 people to took their clothes off in an avenue in Barcelona today. (American photographer Spencer Tunick persuaded them to take their clothes off, before photographing them from the top of a crane. How weird is the world?)