Category: Architecture

Photoers on Primrose Hill and how my camera turns everything yellow

After that trip to Primrose Hill with GodDaughter2, when my camera stopped cooperating, and I later got it working again, I went back there, on my own. I couldn’t be content until I had taken as many photos there as I would like to have taken on the previous visit.

One of the better photos I took on that second trip, of photoers photoing, was this:

Is that guy photoing his photoer lady-friend, as she photos the view? Judging by the red blob on his screen, which has got to be her bright red rucksack, I would say: yes he is. What a peculiar man, wanting to take a photo like that.

Joking aside, there is something else about my camera that troubles me, besides having spent a day thinking it was completely bust. Do you remember that day earlier this year when the sky turned yellow, because of some North African dust storm, or some such thing. Well, when my camera is set on automatic – and when I use it it is always set on automatic – it does this all the time. Everything comes out yellower than it should. Blues are diminished into white. The merest suggesting of actual yellow is intensified. Not good.

The above photo, effective though I think it is, illustrates this only too clearly. Notice how even my photo of the guy’s screen has his sky bluer than my version of the sky. Which means that his screen must have been very blue.

I tried reading the camera manual, but unfortunately this is written in a Serbo-Croation dialect of Sanskrit. Not one word of it makes any sense to me at all. And I tried fiddling around with the camera itself, without any success. I couldn’t even find anywhere on the www where I might be able to ask my question, and more to the point, maybe get some worthwhile answers. Help. I realise that Boxing day is not a good day to be saying such a thing, but I say it anyway. By the time anyone gets around to reading this, the problem is unlikely to have gone away.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Two phone photos

My camera has conked out. The autofocussing is refusing to autofocus. Which is nasty. And even nastier given that I only found out about this when I was trying, with it, to take photos, this afternoon, like this one:

That’s from the top of Primrose Hill, as photoed by my mobile phone, which is a Google Nexus 4. That one wasn’t too bad, but most of the phone-photos I phone-photoed with this annoying gadget, truly good only for telling me where I am and how soon I will reach my tube destination and what the cricket scores are, were rubbish.

Here is one of the few other good ones, taken from one of the bridges over the Regent’s Canal:

That red boat is the Feng Shang Princess.

GodDaughter 2 was with me. Since I couldn’t take lots of photos, there was nothing for it, I had to make do with talking to her. And also listening to her. Which worked out quite well.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Quota plants

Yesterday’s panda posting had all the appearance of a quota panda posting. But it wasn’t because there’d already been a posting earlier. Who could forget those Thameslink Seats?

But this really is a quota posting. It features a photo of plants in summer (the summer of 2012 as it happens) that are pretending to be a trees in winter, by having branches but no leaves. That means you can see through them to the Big Things in the distance:

That wasn’t in the I Just Like It directory, but it could have been, because I do really like it. The view is looking back across Victoria Park, which is out east, the other side of those Big Things from me. The Big Things are way out of focus but still clearly recognisable, which is just what you want from Big Things. The rule is: a photo is fine if something in it is in focus, like these plants. If everything is out of focus, well, that’s a problem. But even that can sometimes be quite good.

In a few years from now, that view will look very different, with several more really big Big Things, two in particular, now at various points in the pipeline.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Two more leaning tower cranes

I knew this would happen. Ever since I noticed those leaning tower cranes of London, which looked like they might be about to collapse through the unbalanced weight at the top of them, I knew that as I wandered through my photo-archives I’d find more such pairs of leaning tower cranes, leaning in opposite directions to each other, and looking like they should have collapsed and caused a flurry of shocked news reports, but which never actually did that.

And I just did:

Taken from the top of the Monument, on the same day as the photo below of the Walkie-Talkie.

At the time, all I thought I was photoing was a nice sunset and some nice cranes, posing nicely in front of The Wheel. But those two cranes on the right there seem to be in that same state of strong disagreement about what exactly vertical is, and for the same reason.

Yet, if either of those cranes had collapsed, late on in the year 2012, I am sure that we would have heard about it, and that I would have remembered it. Clearly, they did not collapse. They were just leaning over a bit.

All those cranes that we see were working on, among other buildings, two rather striking buildings that are now finished. I’m talking about the two stumps now blocking the view of the Shell Building. There is, on the right, in between the two leaning cranes discussed above, 240 Blackfriars. And to the left of 240 Blackfriars, as we look, the innards of the Tate Modern Extension, from which further lovely views out over lovely London were to materialise.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Monument dwarfed by Walkie-Talkie

Indeed. I was going through the I Just Like It file, and came across two, independently selected, which make a nice pair.

First, taken in November 2012, the Walkie-Talkie while still under construction, viewed from the top of the Monument:

And second, taken in January 2016, the Monument now just about visible in the scrimmage of smaller London

The Walkie-Talkie looks very big from the top of the Monument.

The Monument looks very small from the top of the Walkie-Talkie.

And while we’re about it, here is another photo that links these two buildings. Taken on that same day in November 2012, back on the ground, with a little sign on the right there, saying “Pudding Lane”.

The Monument remembers those who died in the Great Fire of London of 1666. Pudding Lane, or so I was always told, was where that fire started.

Also, three days after taking that photo of the Monument from above, above, I took this photo of the Monument from below, along with another sign, this time a temporary sign telling me how to get to the Monument:

The way to get to the Monument was not, it would seem, the obvious way to get to the Monument.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Leadenhall Market

Yesterday I showed a photo that I actually took yesterday, rather than last year or last decade. And today I’m doing the same. I’m showing you another photo that I took yesterday:

That’s the inside of the domed roof in the middle of Leadenhall Market in the City of London. This is another of those photos which is a lot easier to take if you have a twiddly screen, such as I always now have.

Here is the next photo I took, to show you which place I mean:

To me, one of the odder things about Leadenhall Market is that all the enterprises plying their trade in it would seem to be obliged by the house rules to proclaim their names in the exact same style and size of lettering. This is not what you get in most shopping centres, which is what this place basically is. But, fair enough: their gaff, their rules. And although in one sense this is uniformity gone a bit mad, in another sense it is variety, because this is not something you see very often.

It is clearly a recent thing, and Wikipedia confirms this:

Between 1990 and 1991 the market received a dramatic redecoration which transformed its appearance, enhancing its architectural character and detail. The redecoration scheme received a special mention in the Civic Trust Awards in 1994.

Ah yes. Commercial, you understand, but not too commercial. The subtle business of not being too businesslike.

I passed through this place on my way to Monument tube, having been wandering towards the City and its Big Things from the Bethnal Green area, enjoying the last daylight of a very fine yesterday. Of which maybe more here later, and of which maybe not more here later. (This blog is also not very businesslike.)

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

EXCLUSIVE IT LIAN LOUNGE, DIN G & BEDROOM FUR ITURE

It’s been a while since there’s been any horizontality here. (That isn’t the most recent piece of horizontality here, just one that I happen especially to like.) So, allow me now to correct this, thus:

Click to get the bigger original.

It’s a shop just off Lea Bridge Road, opposite the station. Photoed by me almost exactly one year ago.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Fewer Big Things then

Busy day. Busy evening. So just a couple of quota photos, both taken a little under ten years ago, just before Christmas 2007.

First, Guys Hospital, looking as good as it ever could:

At first, all I was thinking was: artistic impression. But it also has interesting info in it. No Shard. Which got me noticing another, at the time very commonplace photo, of the Gherkin. Also interesting info in it. No nearby Big Things. There it stands, in splendid isolation.

I also photoed lots of photoers that day, and have so far showed you only some of them (LINK TO THE OLD BLOG). There are several more good photoer photos deserving of resuscitation, all with impeccably concealed faces, but these will have to wait.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The face of a seagull

I’m not much of a wildlife photoer, if only because others are so very enthusiastic about it. Nature beautiful. (Hu)Man-made world ugly. Those are the cliches, and bollocks to them. I prefer to celebrate, with my photoing, the human-made world, often by noticing how “natural” (that is non-centrally-dictated) that human-made world so often is, especially in a complicated place like London.

But I do keep trying to photo non-human creatures in case I get lucky, and about once every other blue moon, I do get a non-human photo that strikes me as worth showing here.

So, for instance, earlier this year I was photoing Big Things with a seagull in front of them, mostly to illustrate how recognisable these Big Things are, despite being out of focus. Recognisable to me anyway. Thus:

On the left, a seagull lined up with the Spraycan. On the right, the same seagull lined up with the Millbank Tower. But then, when I lined the seagull up in front of Big Ben, I got this, which strikes me as, you know, quite good:

Click on that to get my original photo, with blurry Big Ben behind being clearly recognisable. But here is a case where the photo I photoed of the actual creature seemed more interesting than the Big Thing. Because this seagull happened to be pointing its face straight at me, I got a view of a seagull face that I for one don’t regularly see. The beak, because pointing straight at me, is taken out of the picture, and the head that remains looks more like that of some kind of fluffy baby seal or some such thing. But with bird legs. Scroll up so that you only see the head, and it hardly looks seagullish at all.

I was going to add a photo of a squirrel to this posting. I even checked that I was spelling squirrel right. But this squirrel photo, which I took about two minutes before taking the above seagull photos, although quite nice, had no architecture in the background. It was just a squirrel, in a tree.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Two shiny windows

Once again today is nearly over, yet I have posted nothing here. I have several non-quota postings about half done, but nothing blog-ready. So, here is, instead, this:

From the I Just Like It Directory.

I just like it because of the contrast between the shiny windows with their out of focus, curved reflections, and the Concrete Monstrosity style concrete that surrounds the windows, the concrete being in focus, not shiny, not curvey. I like that contrast. That’s exactly as it came out of the camera. No cropping or photo-enhancing.

Taken in Victoria Street, opposite where New Scotland Yard used to be. Not that that matters.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog