Month: October 2020

A gallery of mostly mundane things – unmundanely lit

As I spend less time accummulating photos and more time contemplating the ones I have, I more and more see that. for me, light is everything. Photography is, I find myself telling myself more and more often, light. For me, bad light equals bad photography, the sort of photography that involves lots of pressing of things like the “sharpen” button in my not-Photoshop programme. Good light presses that button for me.

October 21st 2018 was a good light day. In the days after it I did several postings based on photos I photoed that day. I did my favourite ever photo of Centre Point that day. I photoed how very blue the blue sky was that day. I photoed Bartok. I photoed Chinese lanterns. I photoed Compton.

I spent some of October 21st 2018 in the area around and to the north of Centre Point:

One of those photos, number 22 (of 25), requires a bit of an explanation. I like to photo the BT Tower. And I like to photo the reflection of the BT Tower in the big building at the top end of Tottenham Court Road. That photo is one of the few times I managed to photo both these things at the same time.

I think my favourite of the above photos may be number 2. Scaffolding, lit in a way that makes it, I think, downright magical. I also particularly like number 3, where you see both a reflection and a shadow, of the same pointy building.

If your are inclined towards enjoying such things, then enjoy. Click click click. It needn’t take you long.

Is “unmundanely” a word? It is now.

Taxi with Dettol advert

I like taxi with advert photos. And I like photoing photos that pin down peculiar times, when I look back at them years from now.

So, I like this, which I photoed this afternoon, outside Victoria Station:

The Dettol people must surely be hoping, however, that Londoners remain abnormally keen on cleaning their hands, more so than before all the Covid nonsense. Meanwhile, there’s nothing normal about being made to use gunk like this, in a restaurant, before they accept your order. Unless that becomes the new normal.

Monster pumpkins

I love it when Halloween comes around and the supermarkets are suddenly full of weird stuff:

Sainsbury’s this afternoon.

Promising looking e-scooter from TAUR

This looks rather promising. It’s a new design for an e-scooter which, by the look of it, is still portable, but which answers some of the doubts that are now being expressed about e-scooter safety.

Carson Brown, the designer and public face of TAUR argues that a basic cause of e-scooter danger is the ungainly body posture demanded by the current and less bulky versions of the e-scooter:

One thing that sets TAUR apart is the foot platforms, which provide a dedicated place for the rider to stand. Instead of placing your feet behind one another with your hips twisted awkwardly, you stand fully facing forward with your feet side by side. The platforms are 2.5 times wider than the deck of a typical scooter and help the rider with stability. The benefit of facing head-on with your body aligned is that you are able to twist 180 degrees in either direction — giving the rider maximum ride awareness.

There are other tweaks added to achieve much greater safety, like much bigger and tougher wheels, and lights to signal your presence. In general, the TAUR, Carson says, is an e-scooter designed to travel on roads, rather than merely on super-flat surfaces like shopping centre pedestrian areas.

Having been watching the e-scooter story unfold, I note that a big problem now is that to achieve maximum portability, safety seems to have been sacrificed. That’s a deal breaker for many and probably most people. I’d sum up the TAUR by saying that the “traditional” e-scooter, the one we now see trundling about in London from time to time, is the smallest and cheapest and most portable e-scooter you can have that still goes reasonably well. The TAUR, on the other hand, is the safest e-scooter you can still carry by hand when you’re not travelling on it. It’s not as light as it can be, so you can lift it easily. It’s as heavy and bulky as it can be, while still remaining liftable.

This reminds me somewhat of the definition of, I think it was, the General Motors Cadillac. A car like the Ford Model-T was the cheapest car you could have, and that of course was mass produced, to make it as cheap as possible. And of course GM had their version of that also, at the bottom end of their range. But, the top-of-the-range Cadillac was the most luxurious car GM could still sell in sufficient numbers for it to be mass-produceable. This notion of satisfying a basic requirement while maximising another very desirable variable is a powerful way to think about the design of manufactured things, I think. The trick being to choose exactly the right variables, to be satisfied, and to be maximised.

Kappa Alpha Theta supplies an unbecoming BMNB QotD

Quoted in this report, the following unbecoming opinion from Candace Owens:

Black Lives Matter is an organization of white men, using the faces of dead Black people to raise millions of dollars toward electing White Democrats into positions of power.

It is the most flagrantly racist organization in America.

Streisand strikes again, assisted by Glenn Reynolds.

Katherine Lauer should find herself a different sorority.

Greenwich Peninsular – 2005 – 2019

We’re on the far side of the Peninsular, from central London, looking north.

2005:

2019:

I can’t swear I was standing in the exact same spot. I rather think that 2019 may a bit further downstream, further away from the Dome.

But, the point stands. It’s quite a contrast, making it clear how much has been going on around there, just south of the Dome, in the Greenwich Peninsular. And it’s not just new buildings. In 2005, no Dangleway.

As time passes and as I get ever less mobile and exploratory, I expect, although I promise nothing, to be doing more of such before after photo-pairings.

LATER: None of which pairings will be anything like as impressive as these ones. In the two (2005/2020) of thos included in this posting here, you can see the changes I refer to above, beyond the Dome and to the left, as we look.

Canaletto – and now

Came across this picture of St Paul’s by Canaletto, with boats, done in the 1740s:

I tried to find a bigger version. I failed, but did encounter this, from the Daily Express of June 4th 2012:

WITH its spectacular pomp and ceremony, yesterday’s river pageant evoked the alluring images in Canaletto’s painting The Thames on Lord Mayor’s Day which depicted a royal flotilla against a backdrop of the City and St Paul’s Cathedral more than 250 years ago.

That “backdrop” is not what it was. St Paul’s is still St Paul’s, but what’s in front of it has taken rather a turn for the worse.

I’ve surely photoed photos of that scene, although not with that many boats. I recall getting interested in the Faraday Building, the one with the green roof in the photo above, which was the first big architectural violation of that St Paul’s view.

In the Canaletto, notice all the spires there, of other places of worship, most of them also designed by Wren.

A bird stands on its own reflection

Yes, I found this in the photos I did on an expedition along the New River, back in 2015:

You don’t see that, if you are merely looking at the actual thing. It takes a camera to see it, and then show it to you. And even then, it took me quite a while to see this particular thing.

I think it helps create this illusion that there is coloured stuff in the water, which makes the reflection look less like a reflection and more like a solid and separate thing.

London buses in times past

Incoming from one of the Robs:

Hello Brian,

Hello, one of the Robs.

Hope you are well.

Mustn’t grumble, as people say when inclined to.

YouTube’s mysterious algorithm just recommended this video to me and I thought it was your cup of tea.

It is.

Maybe the past was more colourful than we tend to imagine.

Rob

The past in this case being the 1920s. I think most of us get that life has always been in colour, albeit not necessarily all that colourful, long before photography learned to register this fact.

To be more grateful and more serious, what struck me was those curved staircases at the back of the buses. The Boris Bus clearly harks back to that shape. I had not realised this.

YouTube, having established that I wanted to watch this, then showed me some film from before WW1, back in the age of horse-drawn buses. Apologies, I lost the link to this, but basically we’re talking about a world dominated by these things. Was one of the driving force behind the motorisation of buses the fact that so many of those horses were sent away to fight in the above mentioned World War? Well, no, the timing is all wrong. Dragged out of retirement, more like. By the time that war had started motorised buses had already arrived in a big way.

And as soon as they did, lots of adverts.

Is this duck the same weight as Amey Coney Barrett?

This duck has been in the news recently:

The Babylon Bee did a piece just over a week ago about how Senator Hirono, also to be seen in the fake-photo above, brought a duck with her to the Congressional Hearing concerning whether Amey Coney Barrett should be allowed to become a Supreme Court judge. If the duck weighs the same as ACB, then she’s a witch!

Facebook disapproved of this mockery of their preferred political team, saying it incited violence, taking it down and taking various economic measures against the Bee, while telling the Bee to say nothing about having been thus admonished. But the Bee’s Seth Dillon took public exception. Twitter also got in on this attempted censorship.

The Babylon Bee is wise not to base its business model on never publicly disagreeing with Facebook and Twitter and the rest of the Woke Social Media Platforms. By not depending on them and by never begging them for permission to do its business, but rather by mocking these social media all they like whenever these platforms try to screw with them, the Babylon Bee has turned the wokist workforce of these social media entities into a Streisand effect salesforce for the Bee and its various jokes and fancies.

Quack.