Zerofee. Good Thinking:

Carters’ Steam Fair — a trav­el­ing typo­graphic museum

Well, the fair really, not cir­cus. And not town, but post­code, since we’re in Lon­don, UK and there’s no town for it to leave.

Carters’ Steam Fair is effec­tively a trav­el­ing col­lec­tion of machines and visual mate­r­ial from a bygone era – vin­tage dive bombers, carousels, dodgems, candy floss and arcade machines all of which are restored and lovingly-maintained so they can con­tinue to be appre­ci­ated as they roam Lon­don and the South East for seven months of the year, chanc­ing the change­able British weather. It’s been the turn of Stoke New­ing­ton, N16 this week­end. One cen­time­ter diam­e­ter hail­stones pounded the site in the late after­noon, fol­low­ing a decep­tively sunny and warm start.

The arrival of the fair presents us with a vis­it­ing typo­graphic museum, the high­light of which is the vin­tage arcade – old penny oper­ated machines (pachinko style, one-armed ban­dits and other attrac­tions, all oper­ated now by penny-style tokens) which are gen­uinely antique unlike, we sus­pect, some of the fair­ground ride sig­nage – mod­ern, under­stand­ably – but vin­tage in style.

We took a stroll around to cap­ture some of the typo­graphic high­lights, want­ing to test a few things in the process… With the excep­tion of the lead image above, all the shots are untouched – straight out of iPhone cam­eras and into Flickr via email, so no sharp­en­ing, level-tweaking or other improvements:

The typo­graphic sur­vey was the main draw, but it was an inter­est­ing test of:

• iPhone 3GS cam­era performance
• Geo­t­ag­ging
• Upload­ing images directly to Flickr, com­plete with geo­t­ags, while ‘on the road’
• Automat­ing the process of bring­ing that con­tent to this blog in the form of images dis­trib­uted across a spe­cific map area, with addi­tional thumb­nails for direct access to full-size images

Some obser­va­tions; the cam­era in the 3GS is gen­er­ally improved, with nice macro and adjustable focus (also affect­ing light meter read­ing) – over­all faster oper­a­tion allow­ing more rapid access to and around the cam­era and photo func­tions. The inte­rior shots taken in the vin­tage amuse­ment arcade were impres­sive given the avail­able light, and we only had to dis­card a few. The GPS geo­t­ag­ging is vari­able in its accu­racy – the images indi­cated by the mark­ers north of the major­ity in the map above were not taken there, oth­ers are all pretty accu­rate. Using an XML Google Maps plu­gin and geoRSS to place the Flickr images onto a Google Map is pretty straight­for­ward and the result inter­est­ing, but not very effec­tive for images that are closely located to one another – the mark­ers with the darker drop­shad­ows in the map above are actu­ally mul­ti­ple images, stacked on top of one another, with only the most recent being acces­si­ble. We added a Flickr thumb­nail gallery below the map to make sure all the pho­tos could be viewed.