Here.
Category: Bridges
South Kensington roof clutter
Yes, some truly exceptional roof clutter, photoed by me today, just as it was starting to get dark. The buildings all so polite and proper looking, but then on the roof, they go mental:
There is even a bridge in there. That aerial with its big long arms is bizarre. Was with others so had no time to check out what all this stuff was on the roof of.
My thanks to the tree, at the front, for not having stupid leaves all over it, and thus not blocking out this wondrous view.
I find myself in the South Kensington are quite a lot these days, because that’s where I often go to see and hear GodDaughter2 and her RCM pals performing. This time it was two Bach Cantatas. Very good, especially the absurdly young and talented tenor soloist. A first year undergrad, apparently.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
The light and the lights on Blackfriars Bridge
This is the last of my postings about my walkabouts beyond Lower Marsh on Jan 5th and on Jan 18th, the three photos below having been taken on Jan 18th.
Just as on Jan 5th, the light was extraordinary. On Jan 5th, it was, for me, at its most extraordinary on Blackfriars Road, and then at Victoria Station (see the posting immediate below this one). On Jan 18th, at the same time of the day, it was at its most extraordinary when I was on Blackfriars road bridge, which is what Blackfriars Road turns into when it crosses the river. Blackfriars Bridge being the one next to the Blackfriars railway station bridge, as you can very clearly see here:
What we see there is the now nearly horizontal sunlight bashing in under the clouds overhead and picking out the bridge. Very dramatic. And just as on Jan 5th, the light was particularly good at picking out something painted red. On Jan 5th, it was a crane, the very same crane that we see in the above photo, in the distance, in front of 240 Blackfriars. On Jan 18th, it was Blackfriars road bridge itself.
The above photo captured the drama that I saw at the time. The next photo, taken moments before the one above, isn’t so dramatic. It felt very dramatic, but my photo captures little of the drama that I saw. The light that illluminated that scaffolding in the middle looked amazing. But I now have to point it out to you:
So, why this photo? Well, for my purposes, it does have one great merit, which is that it shows that the street lights, on the right of the road bridge as we look along it, were not switched on. Yet moments later, these lights were “switched on”, by the sun, just as similarly un-electrified lights in Victoria Station had been lit up by the sun on Jan 5th:
Behind these lights are the lower floors of One Blackfriars, now nearing completion.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Photoer in silhouette
I haven’t taken many photos of people in silhouette, but I should do it more, because it is a really good way to photo people. Maybe the problem is that a person has to be in the dark with lots of light behind him or her, and if you are like me and you just photo people out in the open, and you let the lighting be an act of God, so to speak, God only very rarely obliges with a silhouette.
But God did so oblige, on Jan 5th, which was the day I also took the first four of yesterday’s photos. This photoer was under Blackfriars Bridge and hence in darkness, and behind him, we observe the Millennium Bridge, artistically out-of-focus:
See also this photo, taken indoors, of Christopher Snowdon.
Does face recognition software work with silhouettes? I just shoved that question into google, but answer came there none.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Getting old – BBC Music – Lego Tower Bridge – etc.
One of the problems of getting old is that it becomes gradually harder to do more than one thing in a day. This being why my daily postings here are often rather perfunctory.
This morning, for instance, I had a most enjoyable meeting with a friend, and then, the weather being so good, I went wandering about in Soho. That’s two things there, right away. Now, all I am capable of is rather incoherent rambling about nothing very much.
I did, while meandering about in the south of Oxford Street area, finally manage to track down the latest issue of the BBC Music (by which is meant classical music) magazine, which is getting harder to come by with every year that passes. Another symptom of advancing years being that it gets harder to buy the things that you particularly like, as others who also like that thing die off.
But, good news: the BBC’s preferred best performance of the Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata was a rather obscure recording by the rather obscure pianist, Peter Serkin, who is the less famous son of the famous pianist Rudolf Serkin. I have so many CDs that I often can’t be sure whether I own some particular CD or not, and so it was with this one. But after some rootling around, I discovered that I do possess this CD. I love it when that happens.
And yes, since you ask, I am influenced by critics. If someone who knows the piece in question very well thinks that this or that performance is very, very good, then I know that I will at least want to hear this performance, even if I don’t end up sharing the critic’s high opinion, which often I do. This recommendation means I will now listen to this CD again.
The other thing I did was take a close look at a camera that I have been tempted by, but will probably not be buying, although it was interesting. This was in a shop called Park Cameras in Rathbone Place.
Inside Park Cameras Rathbone Place I also took this photo, with the camera that I already possess:
Good to encounter a new bridge of interest, even if it is only a miniature Lego version of an old bridge. I have no idea why such a bridge was in Park Cameras Rathbone Place, but I wasn’t complaining.
I get the distinct impression that a golden age of bridge building arrived about thirty or forty years ago, but has now departed. I just picture googled new bridge, and I mostly got bridges I have known about for quite a while.
I digress.
The sky pool is coming
I’ve not yet finished what was going to be today’s posting, so here, to be going on with, is a link to this Londonist list of eleven things to look forward to in London in 2018. From their list, my bronze, silver and gold medalists are:
Bronze: Crossrail.
Silver: The new Spurs stadium.
Gold: The swimming pool in the sky.
Here is what that Gold medalist will, we must all hope, look like:
Says Londonist:
It’s been over two years since it was announced that London was getting a swimming pool in the sky, right next to the new U.S. Embassy, and it’s finally diving onto the London skyline in 2018. The bad news: it’s not for you – unless you are one of the lucky few who could afford to splash out on an apartment in Nine Elms’ Embassy Gardens development (starting price £602,000). The rest of us will have to make do with our local leisure centre.
But I don’t want to live there. What I want to know is: Will I be able to photo other people swimming in the sky pool? I’m guessing it’ll be out of public sight.
Maybe you are thinking: Yes, but that’s a bit pervey. If you are thinking that, I agree. It is. But the best photos often are.
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
More light on water
Photography is light, and light loves water:
Photoed under another bridge, five years before I photoed that X. Which was different, but similar. Both have a slice of light shaped by two bridges right next to each other, over water.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Photo by me of seventeen London bridges
I am very proud of the photo of London bridges that I took from the top of the Hotel ME, which featured seven bridges.
But today, while trawling through my photo archives on another errand entirely, I encountered a London bridges photo that I took, back in 2015 which clearly shows no less than fifteen London bridges:
And not so clearly, it shows, I reckon, two more bridges, in the very far distance, beyond the second pointy one, which I reckon must be Albert Bridge.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Bromley-by-Bow tube to the Twelvetrees Crescent bridge
Some of the best walks in London that I have done in recent months have been alongside the River Lea. Typically, I would start at Bromley-by-Bow tube station, go south along the A12 and then turn left along Twelvetrees Crescent until I get to the Twelvetrees Crescent bridge. Then I’d go either north or south.
On one of these meanders, the weather was particularly bright and sunny, and before I even got to the river, while I was just walking south along the A12, photo-ops abounded. Or maybe they didn’t but it felt as if they did. Everything, even the most mundane of objects or lighting effects, seemed dusted by a spraycan of joy, and I can’t look at the photos I took that day without that joy colouring my feeling about the photos I took at that moment.
Photos like these:
I can’t be objective about whether anyone else might like the above photos. I was and remain too happy about them to be objective. Just looking at them when I was preparing them for this posting, I became too happy to even care about being objective.
Share my joy, or not, as you please. 1.1 just tells us where we start. 1.2 is another view from the station, but not of it. 1.3 is one of those gloriously complicated drain-unblocking lorries. 2.3 I like because the colours on the car are so like the colours sported by the building, and because the sunniness of it all is emphasised by my silhouette. In 3.2 you can just see the top of the Big Olympic Thing, an effect I always enjoy. And 3.3 features a photo of, I do believe, the Taj Mahal. Lovely.
Not long after photoing all that, I photoed these shopping trolleys.
When I returned a day or two later to retrace my joyful steps, I photoed the excellent footbridge from the Twelvetrees Crescent bridge (one of my favourite footbridges in all of London (although maybe it’s just how good it looked that day from that spot)). I photoed the Shard. And I photoed a map that shows the locality where all these delights are to be found.