Category: Computer graphics

I don’t know whether it’s the weather or my camera

I have a new camera, and I am not as happy as I would like to be about the photos I am photoing with it. They often seem vague and blurry, as if seen through a mist.

But then again, the humidity levels during the last week or two have been very high. Maybe the views have all looked as if seen through a mist because they were seen through a mist.

Here, for instance, is a photo of a favourite building of mine, the big decorated box that is the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, as seen from Westminjster Bridge, which is quite a way away:

But I got to work with my Photoshop clone, and beefed up the contrast, and darkened things a bit.

Thus:

Which looks a bit better. I’ve chased away some of the mist. The trees look greener. The details of the ROH’s exterior decoration are clearer.

I have a vague recollection of trying to reset my camera, so that it did things more darkly and more contrastingly. Maybe at that point, I contrived to do the opposite of what I thought I was doing.

But then again, not long after taking that photo, I took this one, of the giant 4 outside the Channel 4 headquarters building at the top end of Horseferry Road, a short walk away from where I live. I often go past it on my way home after an afternoon of wandering, and so it was that day, nearly a week ago now:

That looks bright enough and clear enough, doesn’t it? That’s without any zoom, i.e. space filled with blurriness. And without this weather making its presence felt, the picture doesn’t look like it needs any artificial editing attention. So maybe the camera is fine, and it has been the weather. And I just made the weather better.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

When what I think it is determines how ugly or beautiful I feel it to be

I am intrigued by how political opinions influence aesthetic feelings. Can you think that something is beautiful merely because it is the way that you think, in a political sort of way, that it ought to be? I say: yes.

I have been experiencing an illustration of this tendency recently. And the effect was thrown into sharp relief by the fact that I changed my idea of what the thing was, and that changed how I felt about it aesthetically. Although the thing itself hadn’t changed at all, I immediately found myself liking the look of it better. I had felt it to be ugly. Now, although I wouldn’t call this thing very beautiful, I don’t see it as ugly any more.

This is the thing that I had been regarding as ugly, It is to be seen across the road from Victoria Station:

The ugliness of it is in its non-symmetry, and in the utterly irrational and incoherent contrast between the rectangular block in the middle of it and the curvey bits on the top and at one end. Why would you make a thing looking like that?

The best way to see how ugly this thing is (or was), is to look at it from above. Here is the google satellite version:

But then what should have been obvious to me all along became obvious. The rectangular block wasn’t designed into the building we are looking at. It had been there all along. The curvey bits had merely been added to the rectangular block, at one end and on the top. This building wasn’t all one design. It was a doubling up of designs:

There you see a photo, which I took in 2009, of this thing while they were doing it. It doesn’t prove that it was done in two entirely distinct stages, of which this is merely the second stage, but it seems to suggest that. The new building activity seems to concern the curvey bits on the top. The scaffolding next to the rectangular bits looks much more like the kind of scaffolding you put up when you are merely revamping an already existing building. And that, I am almost sure, is what is happening there, to the rectangular bits.

What I now see when I look at this ungainly thing is that rather than it being a very ugly piece of one-off design, I now see it as a charmingly quaint urban agglomerative confluence of constrasting styles, such as London contains a hundred examples of, and hurrah for London. London itself, as a whole, is just such a multiple design confluence. Old meets new, and both live to tell the tale. Or in this case new meets newer. This weird-looking building is a two-off design, you might say. It is a two-off design, and it looks exactly the sort of way a two-off design ought to look.

If I am wrong about it being a two-off design and I learn that actually it was all designed at once, I’ll probably go back to thinking it ugly.

Here are some more pictures of it that I have taken since then, from various angles:

That picture, to my eye, makes it look downright beautiful. As does this next one, taken looking into the evening sun from the top of Westminster Cathedral, even more so:

But now, the plot thickens, or maybe that should be: the plot gets thinner, back to its original state.

My internet searching skills are very primitive. I have just had yet another go at finding out what this odd building is called, at any rate by those who own it or who are in the business of renting it out. And I have finally managed to learn that they call it “The Peak”. Heaven knows why. It doesn’t look like much of a peak.

Anyway, knowing this, I eventually found my way to this description of The Peak. And what do you know? (More precisely: What the hell do I know?) It would appear that this ungainly thing was what I had originally assumed it to be: a one-off design. The whole thing was built all in one go. So what had seemed obvious to me was not even true, let alone obvious.

The Sheppard Robson designed building adjoins the Apollo Theatre and replaces two existing structures. The Vauxhall Bridge Road and Wilton Road elevations incorporate robust Portland stone-clad columns and spandrels with intricately designed glass solar shading louvres between.

The louvres provide a dynamic visual effect to the building both during the day and at night. The prow of the building facing Victoria Street is curved, following the site boundary, and an arcade has been provided at street level to substantially increase the pavement width along one of the busiest pedestrian thoroughfares in central London.

So, what will I now feel about this building? Will I go back to feeling that it is ugly?

This will not be a decision. It will simply be a fact, which I will discover by introspection. How do I now feel? As of now: not sure. My mind may decide that, because it had, for a while, been deceived by this building, and dislike it more than ever before. But, I am starting to suspect that, having found beauty in this object, even though this finding was based on an error, my mind will be reluctant to surrender this happy feeling.

Incidentally, I have already posted here a photo of the roof of this building, and in particular of the crane that sprouts out of that roof to clean the windows. I’m talking about the last of the three photos in this posting.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Lea River footbridge

I like this footbridge, and I like this photo of this footbridge:

I took this photo on the same day I took this gasometer with towers photo, and these cat photos (LINK TO THE OLD BLOG).

We are looking down from the road bridge that takes Twelvetrees Crescent over the River Lea and Bow Creek. It’s a delightful spot, to be found at the top right end of the Limehouse Cut. On the right, we see the Limehouse Cut about to make its bee-line for the Limehouse Basin. And on the left, the River Lea is about to wend its very winding way down to the River. Where the Lea empties itself into the Thames is right near where I took these fish photos.

The reason I cross-reference all these photo-postings of mine is because the idea of these expeditions is not just to see amusing things in isolation, but in addition to that to build up the bigger picture in my mind of what that part of London, and in particular its waterways, is like. All these walks need to join up with each other, in reality and in my head. The latter I achieve by trawling back through my photo archives, by repeatedly meandering about in google maps, and by connecting up this blog posting with that one. And by going on more expeditions.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The Limehouse Cut is boring to walk along …

Today I had what I suspect may prove to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I say that because it was so boring that I may never do it again. I walked the length of the Limehouse Cut:

The thing about the Limehouse Cut is that it is dead straight, as purely man-made things so often are. So, when you are walking along next to it, you find yourself staring forwards at an infinitely receding, dead straight, unchanging canal-side path. The Limehouse Cut is dead straight, and hence dead boring.

Click on that dreary little map of the Limehouse Cut, above, and you will get the context, which shows also how most waterways in London look. Not straight. And that makes them much more amusing to walk next to. Usually, when walking beside a London waterway, there are constant twists and turns. New things regularly come into view. The whole atmosphere of the journey keeps changing. But when things straighten out, like they did today, it can get very repetitious.

Here are some pictures that make that point:

I have long noticed something similar when it comes to walking along roads. Long straight boulevards are an ordeal. Twisty and turny walks, with lots of visual variety and with obstacles in the way so you can’t see miles ahead, are, I find, much more appealing.

The point is variety. Anything that just keeps repeating itself is dull. Even if it is something you might think picturesque, like a waterway with lots of boats on it. But that gets dull also.

I was actually not surprised by this. I was expecting it. But, I was hoping against hope that there might be a good view in the distance, like the Shard maybe. Or that it wouldn’t be boring. Well, it wasn’t entirely boring. There were things to see that were surprising. Plus there was a park that I was able to visit. But basically, it was boring.

But the thing was, what if the Limehouse Cut was really exciting? I had to make quite sure that this was not so. So, there was a meaningful mission today, and it was accomplished. And it didn’t take that long.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

My comment on the Six Nations so far

I am hopeless at drawing, as you can see.

But having been watching the Six Nations rugby tournament for the last few weeks, and having in particular been listening to the various television commentators, I feel the need to offer you all this attempt at a cartoon.

Anyone who wants to copy this, or indeed copy it and improve the graphics, is most welcome. I am surely not the first to have thought of this particular observation.

(There was a bit of fiddling about with the presentation of this, on account of my software not actually showing me exactly how a posting like this will look. Sorry about that.)

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Recent taxis with adverts photos

Yes, I’ve been continuing to photo taxis with adverts. Here are half a dozen of the most recent such snaps.

First up, further proof, if you need it, that the internet has not abolished television. People still like to be passively entertained, surprise surprise. But the internet is in the process of swallowing television, so that they end up being the same thing:

Next, become an accountant! Note how they include the word “taxi” in the advertised website, presumably to see whether advertising on taxis is worth it. Note to LSBF: I have no plans to become an accountant.

Note also the Big Things picture of London, something I always like to show pictures of here, and note also how out of date this picture is. No Cheesegrater, for a start:

Next up, a taxi advertising a book. I do not remember seeing this before, although I’m sure it has happened before:

Next, Discover America. I thought it already had been:

Visit a beach. I didn’t crop this photo at all, because I like how I tracked the taxi and its advert, and got the background all blurry, and I want you to see all that blurriness. Nice contrast between that and the bright colours of the advert. A little bit of summer in the grey old February of London:

Finally, a snap I took last night, in the Earls Court area. And now we’re back in the exciting world of accountancy, this time in the form of its Beautiful accounting software:

As you can see, it was pitch dark by the time I took this. But give my Lumix FZ200 even a sliver of artificial light and something solid to focus on, and it does okay, I think. A decade ago, that photo would have been an unusable mess.

I am finding that taxi advertising changes very fast these days. All of the above photos, apart from the one with the beaches, was of an advert I had not noticed before.

Which means that in future years, these taxi photos will have period value, because the adverts will have changed over and over again with the passing of only a handful of years.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Blue Big Things by Shard Baby

Built, and being built:

Here.

The most interesting one that I hadn’t properly clocked until now is the Scalpel, now under construction. Faked-up photos of that here.

Interesting that they got a convincing name organised for it good and early.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The Shard was looking very special today

This afternoon I went walkabout, with quite another object in mind than the Shard. But, the Shard was looking peculiarly beautiful this evening, at any rate from where I was standing, on the Millennium Bridge.

At present I am not seeing this picture nearly as clearly as you probably are, because my proper computer (Godot) is ill and my laptop (Dawkins Judas) only has a very small and inadequate screen.

What I hope you are seeing is the sky looking very earthly, but the Shard looking almost heavenly. The sky looks rough and the Shard looks smooth. The sky looks matt and the Shard looks gloss. Sky behind the Shard is dark, the Sky reflected off the Shard is light. London is dim, but the Shard is bright.

Renzo Piano, who designed this wondrous Thing, saw all this coming. He knew that the Shard would reflect in a quite different way to a merely vertical Thing, and today this effect was to be seen at its very best. I can only hope that my photo gives at least a clue of what was going on.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

London is getting more colourful

Here is a piece I did here about how Modernism got associated with whiteness. And for most would-be Modernists, Modernism still is white. But, here is another piece I did about coloured Modernism, in the form of Renzo Piano’s very colourful buildings near Centre Point. (Renzo Piano also designed the Shard.)

Here is another photo I took of these, I think, delightful edifices:

And here is a faked-up picture I came across not long ago, which suggests that Piano’s colourfulness may have struck a chord with other architects:

That picture adorns a report about the footbridge that you can see on the right of the picture, the very same one that I saw being installed last August. But I think you will agree that the towers on the Island there are a definite echo of that Pianistic colour.

The great thing about coloured architecture is that you can build the most severely functional lumps, and only worry about brightening them up afterwards. Form can colour function, and then colour can cover up the form and make it fun.

But it need not stop at just having one plain colour. Soon the artists will join in, and there will be giant murals.

If I had to place a bet about how different London will look from now in thirty year’s time, this would be the change I would bet on. Both new buildings and dull old ones will be much more brightly coloured.

I’m guessing that outdoor paint is a technology that has had a lot of work done on it in recent years, and that such work continues.

I will be interested to see if those Piano office blocks become faded, or if the colour stays bright for a decent time.

Interestingly Le Corbusier was a great one for colour being slapped on Modern buildings, but the notion never really caught on. Or rather, it is only now catching on.

As is illustrated in this posting at Material Girls. Where the point is also made that another huge influence on the monochrome association with Modernism was early and black-and-white photography. Even colourfully painted buildings didn’t look coloured in the photos. (One might add that newspapers and magazines only burst into colour after WW2, in the case of newspapers only in the 1960s. Until then, all newspaper and magazine photos were printed in black and white. So even if Modernism was done in colour, its influence spread in black and white.)

Now, colourful buildings tend to look colourful, both for real, and in the photos.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Some photographers last November

At the end of November 2014 (on the day that I also took these photos) I made a small pilgrimage to Tower Bridge, the excuse being that I might be able to photo up someone’s skirt through the observation floor that they had recently installed at the top of that bridge, and the reason being that I simply like to go on random pilgrimages in central London, for the sake of what I might see on the way there, there, and on the way back.

As often happens with these small pilgrimages of mine, I got there not at midday, but towards the end of the day. By which I mean just before and during the ending of daylight. And the ending of daylight is a very good time for taking photos, especially with a digital camera that is good in low light conditions, and especially if you are someone who likes taking pictures of other photographers in ways that don’t show their faces but do show the screens of their cameras. At dusk, those screens tend to show up particularly well, as a number of these photographer photos illustrate:

The more I photo, the more I find myself liking to take categories of photos, photos in sets. At first, my photos of photographers were just photos of photographers. But soon I was subdividing that huge category, into photographers taking selfies, photographers looking at the photos they’d taken. Recently I have found myself making further subdivisions, often of photos I have been taking for some while but which I had not been putting into a separate category in my head, if you get my meaning. So, above, in addition to all the photos of photographer’s camera screens, we see contributions to the photographers taking selfies category (subdivision: couples taking selfies), to the photographers looking at the photos they have just taken category, but also a good addition to the bald blokes taking photos category, and two for the photographers with interesting hats category.

And of course, there is that vast category that has hove into view in the last few years, of people taking photos with their mobile phones. No less than seven of the above twelve snaps are of people doing this. This was not a decision on my part, merely a consequence of me picking out nice photos of people taking photos.

My favourite photo of these is the last one of all, bottom right. The light is nearly gone, but that means that the view of the shot he is taking (with his mobile phone) shines forth splendidly, as strongly as what he is photoing. And I love that I got what he was photoing as well as his screen picture of what he was photoing.

It was the essentialness of posting that one photo, very late but not never, that made me, while I was about it, also stick up the others, all twelve having already been subdivided into a separate little directory.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog