Indeed:
Taken by me in, I’m pretty sure, Earlham Street, which is one of the spokes that converges on Seven Dials.
The mirror is presumably there for people to see how potential purchases look on them. But my first thought when I saw the mirror was: Is that for encouraging people to take selfies? And I was happy to oblige.
Yes, in Piccadilly Circus, photoed at the same time as those hair-patting ladies. And this time, you know, just photoers, just photoing photos.
What strikes me is what a good camera I now have. The light was not good. I was there to meet up with someone, not to make the best of some sunny weather, because there was no sunny weather to be made the best of. In the bad old days, when their were two zeroes in the years, most of these photos would have been an unsightly blur. But now, the only thing I worry about is if there are recognisable faces on show:
Once again, I made the selection of what to show here entirely by me liking the photo and you not seeing recognisable faces. No thought was given to what sort of cameras were being used. Which means that what cameras were actually being used becomes interesting and informative, like a small scientific experiment.
Once again, we observe the rise and rise of the smartphone as the preferred way for regular people to photo. There are some Real Photographer cameras to be seen here. And I think there always will be, because there will always be photoers for whom the best possible photos are the thing they want, and the best that a big old clunky machine can do will always be better that what a smartphone can do.
But, thinking about that some more, is that right? Will there actually soon come a time when all photoing is done by little things the size of a biscuit?
And will there then be a Great Grumble from all the Real Photographers – a category which is maybe starting to include me – similar to the one when digital cameras first got going?
Following on from that earlier very vertical dragon photo, here’s some horizontality:
Original photo, with explanation, here.
My thoughts and feelings towards these ladies can be summed up with the phrase unconditional positive regard.
Indeed:
Photoed by me in the West End yesterday afternoon, prior to attending Lohengrin.
Other creatures don’t get any more other than that.
This afternoon, I will journey to the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, to see and hear the first night, no less, of Lohengrin. It will be deep into the darkness of the evening before I journey back home. It will take, I believe, the best part of four hours.
According to this Summary and Comment:
It is difficult to find a role which is more handsome than Lohengrin. This is the reason why “Lohengrin” gained popularity among opera fans. The entrance scene on stage by a magic swan boat, and the dialogue scene with Elsa are outstanding.
In addition, the music of the scene of Elsa and Lohengrin’s wedding is known as the Wedding March. You can hear this March at many weddings these days.
That’s the conclusion of the comment bit about Lohengrin.
At the beginning of the summary bit, we learn that Lohengrin is set in “the first half of the tenth century”.
But if this ROH graphic (see here) is anything to go by, it will look, this evening, like this:
But, he’s holding a sword. And notice that shadow. With luck, this will be effective rather than clunky, mindful rather than mindless updating of the setting. I shall see.
And hear. What I hear will not be updated and made more relevant. That I can already be sure of.
I did a Samizdata posting today about the architect Patrik Schumacher, and his opinion that cities ought to be more created by market choices, and less by planning, than is customary today.
So, London. Is it planned, or did it just happen?:
That looks like a fairly happening sort of place, to my eye.
I love those little splashes of colour, in the middle. Thank you Renzo Piano. Here’s a photo, of (someone else’s photo of) Renzo Piano, which I took way back in 2007:
I wouldn’t trust just any architect, merely because any architect is an architect. But I would trust Renzo Piano. The above colourful offices. The Shard.
Shame they didn’t allow this. A case of planning meaning preventing. Which is mostly what it does mean, I suspect.
Yes, one of the more endearing things that lady photoers and their companions do just before photoing themselves is pat their hair:
Next time you see a lady taking selfies, watch out for this. Chances are she’ll oblige. It never makes any difference, but they almost always do it.
I took those two photos at Piccadilly Circus yesterday afternoon. I like the scaffolding. Not good enough to be worth photoing in its own right, but a nice background to those hair-patters.
I find signs to be an endless source of fun and revelation, and I frequently photo them. So I was much entertained by this New York Times story, about a sign that went wandering. Across the Atlantic Ocean.
Hurricane Sandy grabbed this sign from the town of Brielle, on the eastern coast of the USA, in October 2012. But, on or around May 14th 2018:
A man walking along the Plage du Pin Sec, near Bordeaux, spotted it. The faded sign was missing a chunk, but he could still read the legend “Diane Turton Realtors 732-292-1400.”
“It was curious,” the man, Hannes Frank, 64, a semiretired software consultant who lives in Brussels, said by phone on Thursday. “I looked at it and found it quaint.”
And he got in touch with the enterprise advertised on the sign. By their nature, signs can be very informative.
The NYT says that its preferred expert on flotsametrics reckons that, given how long this sign took to make its way to France, it may well have crossed the Atlantic not once, but three times.
Flotsametrics is the study of things that float. Now that the Lefties – like the Lefties who own, run and write for the NYT – are giving up on the claim that capitalism is ruining the planet by ruining the weather, they are back to bitching about how capitalism squirts out lots of rubbish, and they have become particular obsessed with rubbish that hangs about in the sea, especially if it floats. So this story is actually part of The Narrative, even though it is presumably also a genuine and a genuinely good story.
Once the capitalists work out how to transform all the world’s rubbish into – oh, I don’t know – something like gunk for 3D printers to turn into replacement body parts, the lefties will have to think of some other insult to throw at capitalism. But for now, this rubbish thing is getting back to being their biggest complaint. Again.
But just clearing the rubbish up is no good. Oh no. The rubbish must be stopped at source by stamping out capitalism, starting with plastic drinking straws. The actual source of this oceanic rubbish is mostly rivers in poor countries. But that’s a mere fact. The Narrative is what matters.
This has been a spontaneous rant, which is why I am keeping it here, rather than switching it to there.
One of my favourite public sculptures in London goes by the official name of Assembly. This, or perhaps it should be “these”, stand outside of the Woolwich Arsenal, on the south side of the river, downstream of the centre of London.
I photoed these militaristic characters a while back. Here is how they look, in their local context:
I did a posting (LINK TO THE OLD BLOG) here about them.
Here is one of the photos I showed in that posting:
That’s actually the inside of the head of one of these men, but your eye is telling you that this is a regular head, rather than any sort of concaveness. Yet concaveness is what it is. Your brain insists on telling you it’s a regular head, and you can’t successfully tell it any different.
Here’s another of these head-shaped holes, and this time it is a lot easier to see what is really going on, because there is a bit of context. Also present is a spider’s web, visibly flat, which couldn’t be if the head was sticking out like a regular head.
And now here is another photo which makes everything clear, by turning the head entirely black:
No chance, therefore, for the brain to misinterpret what’s going on.
The reason I was reminded of these sorts of optically illusional images is that I am currently reading this book, which is about how the brain in particular sees things, and in general makes sense of things. This was recommended by Alastair James, commenting on this earlier posting.
The point being that it isn’t just the brain that “makes” all this sense. The process of “making” sense takes place at all levels within the brain/nervous system. Your retina, for instance, is already prejudiced, so to speak, in how it looks at things.
Put it this way. The phrase that has kept on rattling around in my head while I’ve been reading this book is the title of another book, by Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations. We don’t just passively soak up information, and then only a bit later “make” sense of it. Our sense organs are all the time imposing intelligent guesses upon what we are experiencing.
That summary probably isn’t that good. But I’ve only on page 40 and I’ve been finding it pretty hard going.
The last photo above reminds me of the picture in this Samizdata posting that I did a year ago.
Indeed:
Usual story. Started to write a piece for here. Realised it would go better there. Carried on writing it anyway. So, here? That.