I just bought a new camera, the Panasonic Lumix FZ150, and it is great. Here are some snaps I took with it, on Monday, of a few of my fellow digital photographers:
The light was fading quite fast while I was taking these, and trust me, these are much better snaps than I could have taken with my previous donkey-driven camera.
So today (yesterday by the clock but this is only the small hours and not really tomorrow yet) I was in Piccadilly Circus, London, and I spotted and snapped a celebrity:
Yes it was Dame Edna:
I know, the sunlight all behind her. But what could I do? Move the sun round to behind me? Run round to the other side of the car? Not strong enough or clever enough, and no time. But at least the traffic forced her to stop right next to where I was. Had this happened during the early days of the Congestion Charge, she’d have been there and gone in a blur.
Could this personal appearance in full war paint be something to do with this? She was evidently being filmed as she travelled on her stately way. I’m pretty sure that that definitely-not-Billion-Monkey-type camera was attached to her car, although you can’t be sure just from my shot of the arrangement.
I was only passing through Piccadilly, having other business to attend to. But when that was done, I came back for more, hope that lightning might strike twice. And it did, in the form of these peculiar circumstances:
Those bottoms are advertising the Borat DVD, in which Borat himself dressed like this. Or I presume he did. Maybe that was only for the promotional stuff. The Borats were cavorting and yelling in Boratese outside what used to be Tower Records in Piccadilly, and is now (I think) another Virgin mega-emporium. I of course photoed the photo-ers as well as the bottoms, that snap being the best of a (by then) rather dimly lit lot.
These pictures, taken about ten days ago, began life as a simple Billion Monkeys shot, of a guy using his mobile phone to take pictures of the wheel. But what he never saw, and what I didn’t see at first, was that the real story was behind him.
Usually I hate the Shell Building, which has now barged its way into undeserved picture postcard prominence through its proximity to the wondrous Wheel. But the evening sun does cast a lovely shadow on it, does it not?
I couldn’t decide which of these snaps showed the effect better, so here are both of them.
At first, these little pictures were going to be clickable on, to get them bigger. But I now think that the effect is clearer in a small picture than in a big one (rather in the way that blurry photos can look quite sharp on the small screens of Billion Monkey cameras), so small is all I show. And I now think, because the shadow is smaller, than the one on the left shows the effect better, but mucking about with this now would be further effort, and I want to go to bed.