Year: 2015

Click the image for a larger version.

This is a view of the Tuscan countryside from the gardens of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. I took it using the iPhone camera with the panorama setting.

The original image out of the phone is 8798 x 3150px with a 9.3MB file size. The EXIF data also tells me that the exposure time was 1/1,014 second.

Plainly, that cannot relate to the whole period I was scanning the scene with the phone so it must relate to the frame rate. That would mean, of course, that each slice of the shot is taken in less than 1/1,000 second.

Pretty neat – and the way it stitches the panorama so flawlessly is nothing short of amazing.

When I was writing the word ‘Tuscan’ just now, I had a moment of hesitation wondering about the origin of the name ‘Tucson’, the city in Arizona in the USA.

Of course the ‘s’ and the ‘c’ are the other way around, so there is not reason the two names should be connected, and in fact they are not related.

Google and its resources (Wikipedia etc.) tells the story:

The name of the city in Arizona derives from the Spanish words meaning ‘at the base of the black hill’.

Tuscany in Italy gets its name from the Etruscans, who date from before the Roman period.

They inhabited Etruria, an ancient land around the Arno and Tiber rivers, corresponding to modern day Tuscany, Lazio, and Umbria – in other words, covering most of central and northern Italy.

Florence is on the River Arno, and if my sense of direction can think back correctly to when I took this shot, the Arno and central Florence is off to the left, out of the frame.

My wife Tamara is very quick to spot photographic opportunities, and we were just getting off the bus on our way to the Met Museum when she spotted these dog walkers.

The scene was unfolding fast, as you can imagine on a Manhattan street with people walking along, so I had to grab the moment when the street was clear. I took more photos when we were in front of the walkers but this shot gives the best overall impression of the numbers – twelve dogs I think, but you can count them.

If you are going to be hired to walk a dog, I can see how it is better to walk with several of them at the same time and to go around with a co-worker who is also walking dogs.

I wonder what the dogs think of it?

Living in Edinburgh, I see the name Playfair from time to time.

The Playfair Steps are on the footpath leading from Princes Street to Market Street at the top of the Mound. They are named in honour of the architect William Henry Playfair (1789 -1857).

Then there is the Playfair Building (often called Surgeons’s Hall) on Nicholson Street, up from North Bridge, that is part of Edinburgh University and the home of The Royal College of Surgeons.

And there are other places names.

Meanwhile…

I use Playfair Display typeface and I happened to be reading about the Scottish scientist and mathematician, John Playfair.

And that got me wondering.

The typeface was designed by Claus Eggars Sørensen, who describes it on his website ForTheHearts as follows:

An Open Source typeface family for display and titling use: Play­fair is a trans­itional design. From the time of enlight­en­ment in the late 18th cen­tury, the broad nib quills were replaced by poin­ted steel pens. This influenced typographical letterforms to become increas­ingly detached from the writ­ten ones. Devel­op­ments in print­ing tech­no­logy, ink and paper mak­ing, made it pos­sible to print let­ter­forms of high con­trast and del­ic­ate hairlines.

I wondered how the typeface got its name, so I wrote to Mr Sørensen who designed the font, and asked him.

He replied.

Dear David
The naming of the Playfair typeface was indeed inspired by the Playfair brothers of Scotland. I was looking for a name from the era in which the transitional style of typefaces (to which Playfair Display belongs) was developed, and preferably from the with a Scottish connection since Playfair Display is inspired from the so called Scotch Roman style developed by printers in Scotland. With this in mind Playfair was both topical, evocative of the era, and free to use (important for an OpenSource product).

With kind regards,
Claus

About The Brothers Playfair

Both John Playfair (1748-1819) and his brother James Playfair (1755-1794) are buried in Calton Old Cemetery, which is in the centre of Edinburgh on the street leading from Princes Street to Calton Hill. In gilt lettering on the wooden plaque at the entrance, John is mentioned as one of the notables buried there.

Here is a link to the font on GitHub along with a photo of the designer, Claus Eggars Sorensen.