Category: London

Ashes lost – CDs soaked – cranes in the sunset

A mixed day. In the morning, Australia won the Ashes back. And in the evening, when I got back from a photo-expedition, I found water trickling down the wall of my kitchen, the wall in question being the one behind me in the picture at the top of this blog, a wall filled with CDs, a quite large number of which had their documentation soaked. It could have been a hell of a lot worse, but it wasn’t at all good. I have just spent most of the evening trying to sort that out, but probably not accomplishing much. Many pages of musical info will be stuck together irrevocably. Bugger.

But in between those two disasters, the photo-expedition was pretty good. I will surely show more of its results here Real Soon Now. For the moment, following an evening spent fretting about those CDs, here is just one such result:

I tend not to like sunsets, by which I mean that I tend not to like the photos I take of sunsets. But if there are cranes involved, that’s a different story. Also, for the cricket, a sunset is all too appropriate.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Camera not conked out – I just pressed the wrong knob by mistake

My camera is pretty good, but it isn’t ideal for me. I only use a bit of it at all regularly, the automatic bit. So if, on a rainy day, I push, by mistake, some stupid knob on it that tells it to stop being automatic, it stops being automatic. And, the automatic focussing refuses to work the way it should. That’s what happened when I thought it had conked out. It’s fine. It was simply obeying orders.

I tried photoing the relevant knobs, first with mirrors and then with my mobile, but the results of all that were a blurry mess. Have you ever tried getting a camera to photo its own arse? And photoing with my mobile is something I need daylight to do half decently.

I got a much better picture of the back of my camera by going to this.

In particular, I draw your attention to this bit:

The knob with AF/AE LOCK on it needs to be pointing at AFS/AFF, and absolutely not at MF. MF means, I presume, Manual Focus. AF means automatic focus. S and the other F mean whatever they mean.

The problem arose when, in the rain and needing to possess three hands, one to hold my bag and two to operate my camera properly, I try to look at the photo I just took. That involves pressing the button with the green arrow on it. To get back to photoing, press DISP. But, what with all the rain and the confusion and only having one hand to both hold the camera and press the knobs on it, I accidentally pushed the AF/AE LOCK knob, and got it pointing at MF. By mistake. I’m guessing this would be why the AF/AE LOCK button includes the word “LOCK”. And this works a treat. I know this now.

Anyway, the upshot (metaphorically speaking) of all this is that my camera went from photos like this, just before I met up with GD2 the day before yesterday …:

… to this, not long after that, after the knob disaster had occurred …:

… and then back to this:

… when I met up with a friend yesterday, in: Hither Green.

So, panic over.

It’s an odd feeling, partially the feeling of massive relief that I won’t have to spend Christmas trying to turn whatever guarantee came with my camera into another camera, and partially the feeling that I am an idiot and that I should pay more attention to the knobs on my camera. Delight and embarrassment all mixed up together.

This is what Americans would call a “learning experience”, and although often all that this means is “total cock-up”, in this particular case they would be right.

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

Queen and Bean

Today I was in central London. It wasn’t good photoing weather. Grim and grey and wet. But I did take this photo:

At the time, I thought I was photoing an army of Santas. For some reason I find the photoing of large numbers of similar or identical objects, in a big clump or clutch, to be rather satisfying.

But it turned out I was photoing two British Personal Brands With Huge Global Reach, namely The Queen, as performed by Elizabeth Windsor, and Mr Bean, as performed by Rowan Atkinson.

A lot of their appeal is that these are both characters who do a lot of physical stuff, rather than characters who talk a lot. Neither Elizabeth Windsor nor Rowan Atkinson are stupid or inarticulate people. On the contrary both are notable wordsmiths, blessed with famously subtle senses of humour. Nevertheless, the Queen’s daily repertoire of stuff is adopting Royal poses and walking or being driven about Royally and making Royal gestures and doing Royal things like shaking hands with a line of lesser celebrities. And Mr Bean mostly makes faces and does pratfalls. These are things that anyone on earth can see – see – the point of with great ease. You don’t have to know a word of English to get what The Queen or Mr Bean are all about. And if only a tiny percentage of the world’s populace like what they see of these two characters, that is still a lot of people.

You see Queen and Bean together, in effigy, in tourist crap shops, a lot. That I photoed the two of them accidentally is no, as it were, accident.

Despite googling it, I still don’t understand what this is about.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Antique Austins near the Regency Cafe

There are two places in London where I regularly encounter antique cars, in other words the sort of cars that were new at the time when I was a new human being. One of these places is Lower Marsh, where there are regular convocations of such cars, which I have regularly bumped into when shopping at Gramex for second hand CDs, which was until very recently in Lower Marsh.

And the other place where antique cars can often been seen is outside the Regency Cafe, which is about two minutes walk away from where I live. Antique cars congregate there in order to contribute to television shows or films set in olden times, the self-consciously dated Regency Cafe being a regular location for such dramas.

I recall being rather surprised to encounter these two ancient Austins, even nearer to where I live than the Regency Cafe, in the summer of 2013. What are they do? Answer: they had been or were about to be performing outside the Regency Cafe. Enjoy:

I am meeting someone tomorrow morning at the Regency Cafe. I haven’t actually used this place very often, other than to photo old cars and showbiz activity outside it, but I think I will eat in it rather more in the future.

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

A big panda (with stars in its eyes) at Victoria Station

Seeing a how this is Friday, and Friday is my day here for cats and other creatures, I don’t want to just leave it at train seats. I have an Other Creature to show to you, that I photoed earlier this evening. This was at Victoria Station, so this is also train related.

The Other Creature was, I am almost certain, a panda:

A few moments after the moment captured above, I actually asked this guy if he’d object to me photoing his panda. I said “bear”, but it didn’t matter. Not him, I said, just the bear. He was fine with this, so I took another photo, of the panda. But the above photo was better, if only because in it, the railway connection is better communicated.

And yes, the panda has stars in its eyes. How about that?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Adriana Lukas tells Libertarian Home about the experience of communism

Earlier this evening at the Two Chairmen, Westminster, Adriana Lukas, who grew up in the old Czechoslovakia as was, gave a most eloquent talk about this experience. She didn’t bang on at length about the usual horrors – prison camps, executions, purges, and so on – although of course these were mentioned. Rather did she focus on the minutiae of life for the rather less unlucky victims of communism, the ones who got to stay alive. People adjusted, basically. Or if, like Adriana’s family, they were dissidents, they learned to be extremely distrustful of almost everyone but their closest and most trusted loved ones. Being a dissident wasn’t about overthrowing the regime; it was merely about staying sane.

Here are four photos, that I picked out from the dozen or more that I took, and that I just sent to meetings organiser Simon Gibbs, who is to be seen in the first one, introducing Adriana. The photos I sent to Simon were rectangles, but I actually prefer these square cropped versions.

As you can see, this excellent talk was videoed. Videos are far harder to edit than merely to … video. So you may have to wait a bit before seeing this one. But, for those who did not attend this talk and for many who did, it will be worth the wait.

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