Category: Maps

Lady photoers in 2013

Once again, I am catching up with showing you photos, this time photos photoed on a sunny day in September 2013, all of lady photoers. We are in my most regular photoing-photoers places, outside Westminster Abbey, outside Parliament, on Westminster Bridge and beyond, beside or above the River:

Ignore, click through at speed, linger if any seem worth lingering at, whatever you want.

What I see in these photos is a moment of maximum camera variety. There are big cameras with interchangeable lenses for maximum photo quality. There are bridge cameras, like the ones I use. There are little snappy-snappy but still dedicated cameras. There is even a great big tablet. And, of course, we observe the rise and rise of mobile phone photoing. As usual, I demanded facial anonymity, sometimes photoshop(clone)-cropping out recognisable bystanders. But typically, I cropped with the camera, because by then I had become pretty good at this. (Photo 4, for instance, is exactly as originally photoed.) And then I selected for artistic effect, not to make any point about cameras. Which means that the point about camera variety is made. I wasn’t going for this. It just happened.

Since then, all the major effort seems to have gone into making mobile phone cameras as good as they can be.

Walking north to the Dome

So there I was at YOU ARE HERE …:

…, and following a bit of shipspotting, I made my way north along the wiggly pink line beside the River.

And so now here is another of those click-click-click in-your-own-time fast-or-slow-or-as-you-wish galleries, of the sort I never used to do on such a scale at the old blog, because they were so much harder to do and so much harder for you to click-click-click your way through:

Looking back, at such things as the quadruple chimneys of the Greenwich Power Station. Looking left across the River to the towers of Docklands and towers further away. Looking at the strange shore, between the River and the land I was walking on, and at the strange things people do to such shores. Looking to the right, at the new machines for living in that are being constructed next to this shore. And looking to the right further away, to catch occasional glimpses of the Optic Cloak, which I admire more and more every time I see it.

There is no theme this time, other than the theme of this being where I was and this being what I saw from where I was. Fences, scaffolding, cranes, towers, and lots of signs, and, in general, a place that will be very different in a few years time. Also, quite a lot of plant life of various sorts, which I always enjoy in moderate doses, in among all the urbanity.

The walk involved quite a bit of digressing inland, as walks alongside the Thames tend to. This being because they are constantly altering what is next to the Thames, and don’t want you getting in the way while they’re doing that.

The final photo in this gallery features a huge fence, for stopping balls escaping from a mini-golf range. I did not see that place coming.

A little shipspotting

A little bit of spotting I mean. The ship itself was rather big.

Remember this map, showing where I went walking from Maze Hill station to YOU ARE HERE, and then went north to the Dome:

The original idea of that posting was to say where I was, and then tell you about something rather interesting I saw from that spot. But by the time I had finished rambling on about the sign of which the above map was a part, I already had an entire posting, about the sign.

But yes, there I was at YOU ARE HERE, and rather than concentrating all my attention on the view of where I was about to go, I also looked west. Here’s what I saw:

That’s right, one of those huge and impossibly top-heavy-looking cruise ships.

I tried to think when I had ever seen such a vessel in London before. I have a very vague recollection of having once such a thing, maybe, but nothing for sure. Well, well.

I then turned right and north, and in among all the photos I took on my way north, I occasionally looked back at this ship:

Those being the same photo, one of the last I took, with, on the right, the bit of the photo on the left which shows the actual ship slightly more clearly.

And this was the very last photo I took of her, maximum zoom:

With that, I took a turn inland, dictated by the path I was following, and I saw no more of her.

When I got home, I became curious about this ship. Name? I look a closer look at one of my photos above, and found this:

The Viking Jupiter. So, basically, that would be: Wotan. Just kidding. Viking’s the line, Jupiter’s the name. Fair enough. Just because an ancient (in both senses) historian might get angry about saddling a bunch of Norsemen with a Roman god, that doesn’t mean anyone else has to fret about this.

Then, in an inspired move, I wondered what Google Maps would have to say about the spot where I saw this ship. Here’s what came up:

And in particular, closer-up, this:

So, not just a pier of some sort, an actual ship. This would appear to be a regular London thing, with a regular pier for the ship to attach itself to in a regular spot.

Google google. Here is a map of the cruise that the Viking Jupiter was about to embark upon:

I had always thought that ships like this confined themselves to places like the West Indies or the Mediterranean. London? Liverpool? Apparently so.

Yet again, what I observed, and photoed with much pleasure, was something I would not dream of purchasing myself. Cruising on a big and over-decorated cruise ship like this is absolutely not my kind of thing. If they paid me £6,340 to do a cruise like this, I might even turn that down. (Probably not, but maybe.) But, I rejoice that London is part of this business.

I was there on the afternoon of July 29th, and “departure” was supposedly the 28th. But I think that may have meant the day when you had to leave your home in the UK, get to London and check in on the ship.

Photo and learn. Blog and learn.

New category, long overdue: maps.

I now rather regret that I didn’t scrap my original plan and turn left, and take a much closer look at this ship. Maybe next year.

Google Earth and Mr and Mrs Goose

Google Earth is a source of endless fun. Here, for instance, is a famously spectacular image, suitably flattened to fit in here:

That’s a slice of the first of these, which I found via here.

I have been making ever more use of Google Earth in my explorations of London. It can’t tell you much about where you can go, but it is great at telling you where you went.

So, for example, I recently managed to get into this huge expanse of almost complete nothingness, surrounded by photo-ops on all sides, which is to the south of the Royal Victoria Docks:

I’m talking about the big grey slab there, and the more vegetated area between the grey slab and the river, where the ground rises, to keep the river in check presumably. If you want to find that for yourself on Google Earth, type in “west silvertown tube station”, which is to the top right of that vast expanse.

At the extreme westerly point of the ground I covered, I found a nesting goose, and took a photo of her. Mrs Goose is on the left:

At which point Mr Goose showed up, and drove me away. He looks happy enough there, on the right, but that’s because by then I had retreated. A real photographer would have advanced again, made him angry again, and got a shot of him being angry, while very slightly risking death, again. I only wished I had done that when I got home.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Photo!

So. Let me see whether I can contrive to upload a photo.

It seems to have worked.

And I surely cannot be accused of misusing this lady’s likeness, stealing her soul, or suchlike.

However, more work is needed making it smaller, so the box doesn’t get bigger than it should.

Which has now been done. If anything the picture is now too narrow. But too narrow is better than too wide.

Slumps back in chair exhausted.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog