3x2 Photocast - Episode 19

And now there's a plane flying over. It's gonna be on the recording now.

Oh, okay, well then I'll see if I can keep that in. Hi everybody, you've just joined the, uh, the Aviation Enthusiasts Podcast.

Yep.

Although your audio hijacks probably filtered it out. We'll see. People will be like, what the hell are they talking about?

From the sky today.

Oh yeah, that's right, from the, uh, the flight attendant's, uh, like food pantry. Yeah, that little vestibule or whatever it is with all the weird drawers.

Tucked in the little caddy. Yeah.

We're actually here for 3x2 Photocast, which is everyone's favorite audio commentary of photos that we don't show.

Yep, that's what I've heard. That's the, that's the word on the internet.

And, uh, yeah, I'm gonna share 3 photos that have stood out to me Recently, you're gonna share 3. Is it actually my turn first?

I think so. I think it's your turn first. And I've also— I've picked 3 photos that are related in some way.

Okay.

That I didn't tell you about. I did a theme without telling you. So it'll be up to you to figure out what that theme is.

Cool. And I chose photos with no theme. But you, Jason, and everyone listening can decide to make one up if you want. We'll find one. Let us know.

I feel like we find themes often between the things we pick, which is weird.

We do. It just kind of happens. Yeah. We think the same way or we look for certain things. But anyway, okay, so here's the thing, Jason. I will try to work out what your deliberate theme was. Okay. And then you can make up a theme for mine.

I will. Yep, I got it. I'm on it.

Okay. So beginning my made-up theme that I didn't choose, uh, my first photo is called Nearly Extinct. ...or ellipsis. And you know that I love a good ellipsis, Jason.

Oh God, do I.

Nearly extinct. And it's posted on Glass by Michael Badalamenti. I apologize if I've mispronounced that, Michael. But it's a photo of what appears to be an American phone booth. Well, it's not really a booth, it's just a freestanding phone. It says phone and you've got the wired handle. And what is actually that thing underneath? Is that like a power unit thing? It doesn't look like our ones in Australia.

Oh, it's It's precious. It's a phone book. Oh,

it's a phone book! Yeah. Right, okay, okay. But it's in like a little carry bag that's—

It will rotate 90 degrees, flip up so you can then open the plastic protective casing.

Brilliant.

And thumb through the phone book that most of the pages have probably been ripped out.

Yes, because that— I've seen that in American movies. I've seen the American like phone books in the phone booths but not presented this way.

Yeah, like in Terminator where he's going down the list. So Same thing.

Yeah, and the tearing. I remember seeing tearing in the movies because apparently that's the thing you do. American movies, you tear—

You can't use a phone book if you don't rip a page out.

You tear a page out of a shared public resource and you go to American diners to order coffee that you don't actually drink. Correct. Or food that you don't eat. I have to go now. It's like, why did you order that?

That's absolutely, absolutely correct.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, back to the photo. I just thought this was really endearing. And the fact that it's between 2 shrubs or hedges, kind of like that whole between 2 ferns that Zach Galifianakis used to

do. Do you mean ferns? Yeah, it's against this wall.

wall with like, uh, it's like white on the top and kind of like a coral color. It's almost like faded.

I'm gonna say it's terracotta.

Terracotta. It does look faded, right? And I just thought this was really kind of nice and quaint. And it was also in my mind, given that, you know, listeners of Hemispheric Views would have heard my wife Natasha on recently to talk about payphone tag. And I thought, oh, look at this, we've been discussing Australian phone systems like wired landlines and Here's this Northern Hemisphere example. Great. So I just thought this was really nice. And yeah, a few people in the comments I can see here, like Daniel, who I think was part of the Glass team, he wrote, adore this. So obviously there's a bit of nostalgia for people who grew up seeing this on the streets.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting because it feels almost out of place. It feels like, yeah, why is there just a random phone here with these 2 bushes around it? Like, what's going on here? 'Cause it's just a walkway. There's nothing seem— I mean, maybe there's vast amounts of things right outside the frame, but it feels like there was just a phone that randomly popped up here, and they're like, ah, the phone is just so alone. We should probably put shrubbery next to it for some reason. I don't know.

Yeah, but then also funny that although I've said that the phone's between them, it's actually set in front of them on the path where those two—

Right.

freestanding, like they're not the same plant. They've got their own kind of trunks or stumps, right? But they've deliberately— whoever's there maintaining this has deliberately cut them and maintained and trimmed them to maintain that gap. They haven't let them kind of merge or form a wall. So they've really respected the phone booth.

And one of them is nicely vertical with the phone booth, and one of them is very much not, which is— could be— I can see being jarring to some people to see like, ah, I really wish that other one was straight up and down because you've got the vertical lines— or I'm sorry, the horizontal lines of the, the sidewalk, the phone booth itself, the wall painting. Then you have the vertical lines of the phone booth and that one bush, and then the other one's like, nope, I'm gonna just do what I want to do. And then on kind of the opposite side of that, the, the symmetry is— I like how the symmetry is totally thrown off because the one bush is straight, one's not.

Yeah.

The, the right side of the frame, bright white wall, nothing. Left side, big other tree coming into frame.

Yeah.

And the phone book, like we just talked about, is also not centered, just out of the way it works. It can't be. And then I just— I appreciate that the cord is also then tangled, just to add a little more like— Oh,

it has to be.

Unruliness to the situation.

Are they ever not tangled? Yeah. It's like, you know, any kind of cord or cable. Yeah, it's gonna happen.

Yeah, but it, it's very cool. It feels What is the— what's the, um, liminal? No, what's the—

Yeah, you mean like a liminal space?

It feels like that, but it also doesn't in a way, because I think the phone is meant to— like, there should be someone at the phone, but there's not. And it feels like the phone is supposed to be a tree of some kind, but it's very much not. It's, it's just, it's a cool juxtaposition of the, the bushes in the phone booth. I like it. It's cool.

Exactly. And given that it's called Nearly Extinct, you know, the title for the photo— Makes sense. As of the date that we're recording now, this was uploaded on Glass 5 years ago. So it may be extinct.

It may be gone. It probably is gone, yeah.

But immortalized in this image for our discussion.

And let's be honest, it probably didn't work when this was taken. It probably was out of, out of service.

Well, someone took that half-ripped phone book home and is enjoying it now.

Okay, so my first one. here is called Flower Meadow. Hmm. From Switzerland, apparently. One of my favorite photos from last spring, April. This was in 20— oh, 2026. Okay, so very recent. And it is— it's trippy. I'll say that first of all. It is a trippy image. It reminds me of a painting because it is very green with blue and purple flowers. But they are seeming to melt, but not melt down, rather melt up where they're like dripping upwards like it was a longer exposure with sort of a drag across the scene as you're taking the photo.

Yep.

Well, let's see. It was, it was 1/5 of a second. So yeah, just kind of a nice little like, er, while you're taking the photo. So it gives this stretching of all the flowers which makes it look like like paint on a canvas. But it's, it's extra jarring to me because you expect things to drip down where this is dripping up. So it's very just this kind of surreal, otherworldly kind of thing.

But also, yeah, it's like rain is falling upwards.

Yeah.

It's lifting. It's weird. But then do you feel like maybe the orientation of the photo is not what it originally should be? Because I feel like the way that the flowers are actually growing before you even regard the motion, like the, uh, the— was it 1/5? 1/5, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Second exposure. It's like they're drooping the wrong way. Like you almost have to rotate it, like have it standing up towards us.

Oh, like you think it's 180 maybe?

Rotate it anti-clockwise. Yeah, it's, it's like it should be vertical, but they've tilted it clockwise or rotated it clockwise. Everything looks kind of wrong. Like not bad wrong, but it's hurting my brain wrong before you even get to the motion.

I could see that. I also feel like somehow you were up higher than just standing to take this photo.

Yes.

Somehow you were above it. I don't know.

Such a simple thing, such a simple scene, but they've obviously thought, you know what, I'm gonna muck around with this. I'm gonna complicate it a bit just to really—

Yeah.

Challenge the viewer.

I— the thing that really just was the colors, the blues and the purples of those flowers, against that like harsh green. Absolutely gorgeous. Love it.

Well, this is a good choice and taken with a photo camera that you love.

There you go.

Hustle blood.

Also interesting that the corners are very much not dragged.

Yeah,

which I'm assuming is just a byproduct of this camera, probably.

Well, is it possible you own this camera or is it doing something? Because I know, for example, like with Olympus and now OM System cameras, if you do things like live composite mode, which is one of their computational modes, mode options. It will fill in or do a kind of longer exposure for things that it detects that are lighter or changing in the scene. Is it picking up stuff that's lighter and not darker?

I don't think so. Do you have similar— No, it's pretty much, uh, what you see is what you get. It really doesn't do anything to the image. It's, it's, it's dumb in that sense where it doesn't— it does stabilization, and that's That's about it. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. So the— yeah, this is just a trippy photo.

Yeah.

Well done, Dietmar.

All right.

All right. So my second option is on Flickr by Anna M. Sky, and it's a photo simply titled Bologna, like the Italian city. We're not talking about bolognese or anything. We're talking about the city. And it's a very vivid scene. We're looking down a kind of paved or— yeah, it's not cobblestone. It's like a paved slope. in the very, very bottom kind of slightly blurred foreground of the image leading down into an alleyway with like just— I don't know if it's from rainfall or things leaking out of pipes or buildings, but it's this vivid orange alleyway of these older kind of rendered buildings with quite a bright blown-out sky. And there's no one in the image. You can just see these, like a small balcony in the distance and just these windows. It's totally deserted. And the reason this stood out to me, not just because I loved the orange, as I assume you do, Jason. It was the fact that this scene in any other city would look like shit.

Oh yeah.

Like, if you saw this in Sydney, like, okay, maybe if you're— if you haven't been to Sydney and you've got your tourist glasses on, I suppose you'd be like, oh yeah, that's cool. But this is just so beautifully vivid and kind of interesting, although it's, you know, abandoned or no one's there, that you kind of forget that it's just kind of like a dirty alleyway. But you go to these places in Europe or any kind of older city, and I don't even know, these buildings might not even be that old, but it's so vivid and kind of beautiful in the way that it's presented. It made even the most ordinary, unattractive, undesirable place to visit look like somewhere that you would want to take a photo. And Anna's composed it beautifully, and I love the shadows and the colours, and I just thought it was a good photo to share.

It does seem like it could be an unremarkable thing you just walk past and not even

Yeah.

Care. I like that. So the orange, obviously great, 10 out of 10, can't beat it. But I also pick up yellow, and I don't know if that's just the lighting up on the top left there of the kind of underhang of the, of the roof. So there's kind of reds, oranges, yellows, and then you have at the very foreground— I also like that it's very much in focus all the way through.

Yes.

Instead of it being, you know, very blurry in the front slash in the back. So it's just a very nice even exposure or even throughout the frame, but you have the bricks in the very, very foreground.

Yep.

Which you would tend to think are more of the kind of bright red and orange color of a brick, but they're so just like beaten down from time where they're just sort of just dark and kind of dingy, looking up at almost kind of longingly at the bright orange building that maybe they used to be closer to in color. And it's kind of an interesting— I don't know, it's— and it's kind of a lower photo. It feels like they, they kind of drop down a little bit to be in line with whatever this step is, unless maybe that's like a hill that goes up and over. I don't know, but I like that the angle of being more in line with where the, the bricks are versus being— maybe standing up taller and catching more of the top of the building.

Yeah, it's like a pretty ordinary place made interesting with cool colors. So

yeah,

yeah, I, you know, this feels like, you know, people say street photography and they mean like the, the people and the scenes and the action of the street. This is literal street photography.

Yeah, it's a, it's a picture of a street. Yeah, which is great.

Really good. It's much—

that's my personal preference. When I think of street, I actually generally more of taking pictures of the street and the things on the street than, than like jumping in front of people's faces and going, ah, and taking their photo in a weird face.

Yeah, people wait for 4 hours for one cyclist to ride through that beam of light before, you know, like, I've been waiting for this thing. It's just like, no, excuse me, can you just get out of the way? I want to photograph that alleyway. So that's that one. That's my second one.

Let's see, my second one here from Magnus is— well, it doesn't have a title. I guess it's just part of a series called Waterscapes. It's both incredibly simple and incredibly complicated at the same time. It's what it says on the, on the, on the title, Waterscapes. It is a lovely light blue. It's, I'm assuming, pretty decently long exposure. Oh, f/19 at a quarter second. And it is a very soft bit of moving water with a harsh I'm assuming it's a wave, maybe in the ocean, coming kind of from left to right, maybe curling over where it's just a harsh white line, not quite, uh, 45 degrees, but going across the entire frame. And you have the nice light streaking on the top and then the darker kind of under, under part of that wave coming over. And it's, again, it's super simple. And also very complicated and also looks a little bit kind of like a painting in a way. It's got the brushstroke feel in there and it's just, it's just a beautiful picture of water.

Yeah, I can imagine like you'd, you know, you'd ask Magnus on Glass, you know, where is this? What spectacular body of water is this? And he's just like, well, actually it was just an experiment in my bath.

Yeah, it totally could be. You have no idea, which makes it that much more magical.

Yeah, but I can imagine Apple or Microsoft or whatever paying someone decent money to use this as a desktop operating system wallpaper. You know, like the this is the look of yeah new System X. You know,

it's real good.

Very good. Very nice.

It's really good.

Beautiful lines. It's very satisfying. Thanks for popping that one in. And my final one is called well, I don't know. Yeah, it doesn't actually have a title, but there is a caption that I will read so that people can appreciate what it's all about. It's part of a series called Changpa Nomads from Highland. of Ladakh, if I've pronounced that correctly. Sorry if I didn't. And it's this beautiful portrait of this little kid with this puffy vest, a beanie with the letters on the front that just say G-O, like go. And he's holding this tiny little blue camera up to his right eye, but then also very, very cute, like looking out cheekily with his left eye at the photographer. So, he's taking a photo of the photographer that's taking the photo of him. And that's Manish Lakhani who's taking the photo. And the caption reads, a tiny photographer with a tiny camera in, in Changthang, Ladakh. At this time of year, the nomadic camps are usually short on young children. Most of them are away at school. But this little fellow, barely a year and a half or 2, and newly confident on his feet, was making the most of his assignment. As I began photographing him, he made a quick retreat to the rebo. I assumed he was camera shy. A moment later, he emerged grinning, armed with his own tiny camera, and promptly turned the lens on me and looked into the viewfinder. Apparently, in that moment, I wasn't the photographer after all. I thought this was super cute. I'm not obsessed with, like, you know, full-on creamify, blow out the background bokeh, because I often like to see a bit of the impression of the place. But I think Manish has used it beautifully in this sense to just totally lock attention onto this really cute kid who's pointing the camera back at him and highlighting that moment of connection. Because in the series, you can see, like, he's put a lot of effort into capturing this place. Like, you can, you can see the landscapes, you can see this stuff, but the story in this photo is 100% about this kid and the connection between them through the camera, or looking at each other cheekily. So I just thought this was a wonderful portrait and a great way to finish on my end.

Yeah, you mentioned— so you mentioned the blurriness of that background is wild.

Yes.

I was just looking at the— what the, the specs was: 200mm f/2.8, And it's just— there is no background. It is gone. But the subject is super sharp, but it also doesn't do that weird thing where it feels like they're cut out.

No.

You know, sometimes you do— you see those photos where you're like, it just looks unnaturally cut out.

Yes, which is kind of what turns me off at some times.

Yeah, it just feels too, too much, like when something's over-sharpened. And you're just like, ugh. But anyway, back to the photo. Freaking adorable. I love the concept of like 2 people taking a photo of each other, and all I want to see is the photo that the little, the little kid took. I want to see like both sides of it almost like next to each other because that would probably be really, really adorable. Yeah, cool. And I just like zoomed in and noticed that it's a, it's, it's kind of one of those little not a throwaway camera, but it's like a little— it's a cinnamon roll camera. So it's from like Sanrio or whatever. So it's super funny. But I love that he like ran away to get this to then come back is super, super cute. Yeah. And because they are, you know, obviously they're a child and they're probably anxious and excited about what's going on. It's looking through the viewfinder is not enough. Like they want both eyes to be like fully looking at what's going on. And you can see the, just like the little smiles tail peeking through, which is so funny. And

that's the way that you'll see, like, camera brands actually market their cameras sometimes. So, you know, the OM System Pen, like, which has, you know, been announced semi-recently.

Yeah.

Those photos, given that it's a rangefinder design, in order to be engaging in those marketing materials when they're pointing the camera towards you as the viewer of the advertisement, they have their other eye open.

Oh.

Now, some people might actually take their photos that way, but generally you close your eyes, whether it's an SLR style or a rangefinder style. You normally close the other eye, right? Yeah. In order to focus see properly, but they know that if you have someone pointing a camera at you and you can't see their eye, it kind of looks strange. But then practically, it's strange to take a photo with your eye open.

True. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that.

And here's the evidence. It's endearing because you can see his eye. You can see the emotion coming through. You can't see someone's eye? Kind of weird. Kind of creepy.

If their eye was closed, it would be a very different thing because you'd really just sort of— they would be almost like a Yeah, it would be odd.

It wouldn't work because you wouldn't be able to actually see into their soul in a way, right? Or what they're feeling.

And then the Go is just— I don't know what that means, what that is or whatever. It's just like, just adds a little bit more fun to it.

Yeah, and that's what this is. It's fun. And I love, like you said, 200mm, right? It's not the longest telephoto length, but Manish is not close to this kit.

No.

And this kid's looked around and gone, I see you. I know what you're up to.

Yeah, and you have to imagine the kid's photo is gonna be super wide with whatever that little camera is. So I, yeah, I would just love to see—

Covered in cinnamon.

Yeah, I would love to see what they captured.

And that's that.

All right, my final one from Jake here is— so how do I even— okay, so we are looking over a body of water and We have, again, speaking of things being in focus or out of focus, we have like a viewing scope like you would see at like a marina or something where you could go and like look at whatever your boats out in the harbor or whatever. And then there is the, the nice, nice sky. We've got clouds, we've got a nice horizon there, but then we have this big bird flying across. I don't know if it's a seagull or what it is. But I just, I like the fact that we have this apparatus in the frame that is purpose-built to view something like this bird going by, but we sort of just blur it out in the foreground and don't use it and use our camera instead. Which is just kind of a— it's a fun thing there of just having this viewing device that we are ignoring, and we have the bird right there to look at, and it's pointed You know, seemingly with the way that the, the shot is set up directly at the bird. So you could easily just look right through and potentially see this bird. And I just thought that was a fun, a fun way to incorporate this because you could have easily moved to the left or to the right of that. And, you know, had it still had the nice sky and the horizon and the bird, but having this, this in there with it just adds a little something extra.

Now, sorry, I was listening to what you were saying, but I was also like peering at all these parts of the photo while you're speaking to see all the detail. Did you mention the people, like, it's like that little things, like the little people in the boat just peeking over the top of that telescope or whatever it is?

I didn't, no. But yeah, also, yeah, again, like pointed directly at something and we're just choosing to, to not use it.

Yes, that's it. Okay, yeah, because I was like, yeah, what's this? Is that what he's talking about there? Yeah, it's just, there's just so much to see in this photo. And also like The aspect ratio. I probably mentioned this too much on the show, but I love like the orientation that's chosen because landscapes, you think landscape.

It's almost like it's in the name.

Yeah, exactly. But this one, no, it's not. It's a waterscape. Not like the waterscapes one that you mentioned before, but it's a landscape, but it's portrait. It— yeah, it's just more interesting for kind of breaking the rules, I suppose you can say. It's nice when people break the rules. Those mountains are gorgeous too.

Yeah. Very, very nice. I

imagine they're like five times taller than what we call mountains here.

Probably, yeah.

People come here and they're like, "Where are the mountains? You have lied to us.

You have hills." Yeah, awesome shot.

It's just so much to look at here: the bird, the telescope, the yeah. I'm have you visited Zurich before? I was fortunate to go once. It's a cool place.

I have not. No.

Yeah, it's this. Yeah, this is my image of it. Just this picturesque, like. picture-perfect places that you see kind of advertised on, you know, like river cruises. And you go, who are these people going on those European river cruise things? It's like, this is the life that you want.

Absolutely.

But you can't have it.

Nope.

Well, clearly Jake is. Well done, Jake.

Thank you, Jake. And thank you, everyone else, for your lovely photos.

Alrighty. So it's my job now to choose the theme. Yes. Or identify the theme.

Correct.

All right. So first of all, I was thinking, oh, You've chosen 2 photos that happen to be in Switzerland. Is the other one? Oh, no, no, I think he's Norwegian. So it wasn't that. And I was like, oh, is it something about water? Because you've got 2 that have water, but they're not necessarily the same 2 photographs. And I was like, no, one of them's flowers. And then I went, aha, they're all taken with Hasselblad.

It's, it's the same lens for all of them.

There we go. It's the same lens. Yes. Okay. So the same Hasselblad lens. There you go. Slightly different cameras, but there you go. So I got it there. I got there eventually.

Yes, you did. Congratulations on guessing that. Thank you. I was gonna have your theme as either lacking people, but that didn't work out on the third one.

Sure.

Or blue, but then that doesn't work for the middle one.

Yeah.

So I'm not sure. I'm not sure what the theme is here now.

Well, I'm gonna make one up.

Okay.

Uh, twist! The person who actually photographed those first 2 images was the kid.

With the cinnamon roll camera. Perfect. There you go.

So not so much a theme, but a weird photographic twist.

That thing takes some incredible photos.

This is the stuff that people listen for. No, no, no, I don't want to take away people's, uh, credit for people's photos. Well done, Michael. And Anna, I know you're not the, the kid. You took those photos.

Well, there you have it. That is another 3 times 2 equals 6 photos.

Excellent.

Thank you, Martin. Thank you everyone for taking photos. And if you're listening to this, thanks for listening.

Thank you very much.

And also go take some photos and let us know about them because we always like to see new ones.

Do it now because we'll be checking.

It will be. Clock is ticking.

Thanks, Jason.

Thanks, Martin. Goodbye. Bye.