Category: My photographs

Big Things built – Big Things still to come

At the time, in August 2009, all I think I thought I was doing was photoing a pretty sunset:

But now, that photo captures a single moment in the relatively early stages of the recent eruption of London’s Big Thing collection. We see: Guy’s Hospital, the NatWest Tower, and of course the Gherkin. We do not see: the Shard, the Walkie Talkie, the Cheesegrater, the Scalpel, and the biggest one of all that replaced the Helter Skelter which is so boring it’s only called 22 something. All of the Big Things that you do not see above sprang up during the last decade.

Which just goes to show that if you have as big a photo-archive as I do, your archive is mostly duds, but there’s also a subcategory of non-duds that is like a fine wine collection, getting better with age.

John Wesley statue outside St Paul’s

I do love statue-photoing but I admit that it has been very hit-and-miss. This, however, by my modest standards, I rate as a hit:

That’s John Wesley. He was, or so it says on the base of the statue, the “father of Methodism”. And, it is right outside St Paul’s Cathedral. How come? Well, it only arrived there as recently as 1988 and is a bronze redo of another statue of Wesley that is in Central Methodist Hall. Or there’s another copy of the original there, or something.

I learned this here. And if you follow that link you get to an even closer head shot of this Wesley statue, which, to my eye, makes him look rather like the actor Christopher Plummer.

Crowd scenes

I’ve never been that interested in crowd scenes, until Sod’s Law swung into action and banned them.

So I went trawling through the archives, and to see if I could find any. I found … a few:

Tate Modern 2004, Hampstead Heath 2005, Farnborough 2012;
Trafalgar Square NFL gathering 2011, Blackheath Concert 2018, View from Tower Bridge 2019;
The Dome 2019, Bryan Caplan Lecture London 2019, South of France classical concert 2020.

That’s the trick of photoing. You need to know what is, at any particular time, temporary. In a few years time, I sincerely hope, crowd scenes will seem the most natural thing in the world. Again.

Wooden sheep out east

So there I was, out east, exploring what was happening to the canals in the Bow, Hackney Wick part of London, photoing photos like this, …:

When, rather suddenly, I came upon this:

All that grubbing around the canal being to create the sort of place where Desirable Apartments can be constructed, and Desirable Apartments need Desirable Sheep Sculptures.

Have you noticed how upmarket sculpture, and also upmarket toys, made of wood, make it very clear that they are made of wood? The woodenness is emphasised. Downmarket sculpture, and downmarket toys, are as realistic as they can be made to be, with the how of it left entirely behind. I veer into toys, because this sheep looks a lot like a toy, I think.

I see a connection between this emphasising of the particular material that the Thing is made of, in sculpture and toys, with Impressionism. Posh paintings, like Impressionist Paintings, make it clear that they are indeed paintings, made of paint, as well as paintings of something. I mean, take a close-up look. Paint! Paintings for peasants just look as much like what they are trying to be of as possible.

Signs reflected in cars (and other things (like water))

One of the unconsidered visual trifles of urban life is the reflections you can, if you want to, see in the bodies of cars.

Reflections like this:

It’s one of these.

Here are some reflections-in-cars photos that I posted here in 2019. I never managed much in the way of reflected signs, though. Memo to self …

If robot cars ever abolish cars as we now know them, as they well might, the explosion of nostalgia for these shiny old cars, cars that are now largely ignored from the aesthetic point of view by all but a few petrol heads, will be something to see.

You hate the look of whatever threatens to engulf you. You switch to liking it when it retreats and threatens to disappear. Neon signs are now in retreat, it would seem, so this Real Photographer guy in Boston now likes them. The cars are just one of his ways to notice the signs.

More photoers at the top of the Tate Modern Extension

Time for some more photos photoed in and from the top of the Tate Modern Extension, photoed August 30th 2016:

The one in the middle, no 5, shows that I wasn’t the only one interested in reflections.

I’ll know that my life is back on track, if it ever does get back on track, when I can again go to this superb place.

Meanwhile, I continue to tell myself this, which I photoed more recently in the same superb place.

Harley in Earls Court

This afternoon, I was in the Earls Court area, getting tested for all my aches and pains and coughs. On my way back to the tube, I encountered a Harley Davidson, parked outside a barber’s shop:

The light was already fading, and the background is very distracting, despite being quite entertaining in its own right. But, whatever. Maybe it would have been better if I’d used my mobile. Memo to self: Do a session, in bad light, using only the mobile.

It’s the contrast between the lack of size of the front wheel and the size of the back wheel that I like about this beast. I love to photo these monsters, but I’d hate to own one.

I went searching on the www, to find an exact same beast nicely photoed. No success, although this is a bit like what I saw.

Another courtyard photo

This photo, from 2004, is another one I enjoyed encountering again. See also these photos.

I appreciate that, for you, it is nothing special. To you it is just some people doing some fairly insignificant and undisruptive work, in a courtyard:

But, this is my courtyard, and the contrast between how my courtyard usually looks and how my courtyard looks in the above photo is, to me, pretty dramatic.

Also, the improvements that these good people were contriving were of direct benefit to me, making the process of putting out my rubbish significantly less depressing and actually even rather enjoyable, because my courtyard ceased from being depressing and became a nice place to visit. This was, and is, no small thing.

I miss those Wicked Campervans

I do ever more trawling through my photo-archives, and every time I do this, I seem to come across more Wicked Campervans, Wicked Campervans that I have not shown on a blog before, like (I’m pretty sure) these two, which I photoed in the summer of 2014:

I don’t really understand either of these WCVs, but the one on the right has definitely non-human creatures on it, so it’s suitable for a Friday here.

I miss these vans a lot. They used to live not far from Lower Marsh, where I used to go to buy second-hand CDs. And there was a brief time when they used to congregate in Lower Marsh itself, in a piece of dead land now built upon to a much more lucrative purpose.

That arrangement was never going to last, and they’ve now moved up north.

Falcons flying

I photoed this photo way back in 2004, at Twickenham railway station:

And ever since, although as sporting photos go it’s nothing special, I’ve always been rather fond of it. It conjures up a world of fandom and fellowship, because if any other Falcons fan sees this guy, for instance on a train from Twickenham to Newcastle, he’s going to know he’s met a soulmate, and they’re going to have plenty to talk about. Nothing transforms public transport quite like sports fans embarking on it en masse, because sports fans, unlike regular travellers, all communicate with each other. This can be annoying, but it is certainly different.

I did some digging concerning the recent form of the Newcastle Falcons, and it turns out it’s been rather good. They got relegated from the Premiership at the end of the season before last, but bounced back in style. It was decided that they should be promoted by a committee, but since the Falcons had won fifteen out of fifteen games down there in Nearly The Premier Division and were heading for victory before Covid abolished the last few games of the season, they surely deserved their instant reinstatement.

Confirmation that they deserved to be back to the Prem came in the form of the Falcons winning all their three games so far. So they’re now eighteen for eighteen. Only the mighty Exeter Chiefs are now above them, with three stonking wins compared to the three close wins that the Falcons have got.

All this falconry is because it’s Friday and that’s my day for non-human creatures of every sort. Humans have a habit of calling their sports teams after animals and insects and fishes and whatnot. In the Premier League, the members of whom you can see at the other end of the above link, there’s the Newcastle Falcons, the Bristol Bears, Sale Sharks, Leicester Tigers, and of course there’s Wasps. Gloucester just call themselves Gloucester but there’s a big old red lion on the shield they promote themselves with.

Such creaturely ruminations aside, the one big fact that all rugby civilians should be aware of is who the most famous Newcastle Falcon has so far been. It’s this guy.