Category: My photographs

Now thrive the scaffolders: Amélie-les-Bains

Giving old buildings a facelift and a refurbishment is huge business these days. But long gone are the days when workers getting killed on a job was, although regrettable, not that bad for business. Having workers fall off buildings while working on them is now a habit that will bankrupt you.

Result: scaffolding. A lot of scaffolding. Big stepladders, just shoved up against the side of the building are just not safe enough, any more. It’s like you need another whole building, from which to work on the original building:

That is some scaffolding that I encountered in the south of France last April, in a place (see above) called Amélie-les-Bains.

The better the light, the more fun you get with the shadows that scaffolding causes. And the light in that part of the world is, when it shines the way it shone that day in that place, world class.

Black and white Mini (with a black and white Union Jack)

I say “Mini”. One of the signs of getting old is that you find yourself putting sneer quotes around things that younger people think are real but which you think are fake:

That’s not a Mini. The Minis in this are Minis.

But the above Mini has something going for it, I think. Not only is the entire car black and white when you’d be expecting colours. So too is the wing mirror with the Union Jack on it. That is also black and white. The effect is to turn the entire car into looking like it’s all coloured – red, white and blue, as likely as not – but then Photoshopped to look like a black and white photo of itself.

Photoed by me earlier today. No editorial messing about. Those are exactly the photos that came out of my camera just now.

Fast food – slow food

On the left, fast food, and on the right slower food:

The Speed Burger bikes on the left were photoed by me in Quimper, Brittany, in April 2018. The taxi advertising Just Eat food was photoed by me earlier this evening, as I walked home from a meeting.

I photoed this taxi with the permission of its driver and (presumably) owner. I told him I liked to photo taxis with interesting adverts, like his taxi, because such adverts are a relatively new thing in London, and because particular adverts will soon be gone. He told me that his advert was especially interesting because it had to be changed. The original Just Eat advert had been for fast food. But then the Mayor of London banned fast food adverts wherever Transport for London is in charge, which includes on taxis, and a different advert was stuck on the taxi, advertising Just Eat food that is slower.

Battersea gallery

Yesterday evening I walked over to Battersea, to see how things are going with surrounding the old Power Station with apartment blocks, with sorting out the western end of London’s Big New Sewer, and constructing a new tube station.

In the photos that follow, I concentrate on the new blocks of flats, not least because it is easier to see that, what with it having reached the stage of mostly now being above ground. Tube line and sewer construction remains largely hidden throughout, and in general they tend to be more secretive about such things.

So how are things going with all those flats? How things are going is that there is a lot of building going on, but also, already, a lot of living.

The earliest photos in this gallery show the part where they say: come on it. This is already a place, with people, and food, and a road through to other parts beyond. Then, you walk along one of the oddest bridges in London, over and through what is still a giant building site, right next to the old Power Station, and then you arrive at the bit that is finished and already containing people.

None of the photos that follow are individually that fascinating. But click, click, click your way through them at speed, and you’ll get an idea of how this passing moment in the history of London is now looking:

The photos that concentrate on life being lived, rather than merely dwellings being constructed, concern the London Seafood Festival (that being the only link I now have the time to contrive), which I had definitely not been expecting. But many others had, and were gathered in large numbers to partake.

Then I made my way to Battersea Park railway station, with the last two photos having been photoed from the train that took me to Victoria Station on the other side of the river.

My larger point is this: that the newest and most noticeable London architecture has now done a switch, from the erection of individually crafted and highly visible and recognisable Big Things, to the mass production of generic Machines For Living In and Machines For Working In. So many office blocks and blocks of flats of a certain height, all jammed together in a formerly not so very desirable location, each higher than low but each lower than really high. So much concrete and steel being hoisted into the air by so many cranes. And so many people all being crammed into these new dwellings and new workplaces, as they beaver away at their desk jobs nearby or in The City, and relax by the river in their numerous new eateries and drinkeries down on the ground floors. Yes, this kind of thing has been going on in London for many decades, but just lately, it has shifted up a gear.

That all these new Batterseans will be within walking and face-to-face talking distance of one another is bound to have creative consequences. All sorts of new urban possibilities will become possible.

A lot more of this stuff has been happening out East, in Docklands and beyond. There too (see especially: North Greenwich) things have shifted up a gear. Battersea feels a bit more upmarket than those places down East.

Welcome to the latest version of London.

Wheel lit – Wheel not so lit

Indeed:

March 2012, from Primrose Hill.

I love things that are the same, but not the same. E.g., the exact same size but a different colour. The exact same sort of taxis but each with a different advert. Or, as here, the same exact thing, but differently lit.

I’ve always liked these.

A big painting in a small puddle

I have a busy day ahead of me, or at least I want to. So I am doing today’s quota photo now, to get it out of the way.

And of all my recent photos I find that the one I want to put here is this:

What I think I enjoy there is the contrast between the smallness and shallowness of the puddle and the extremity of the visual effects it is creating. One silly little bit of water, surrounded only by grubby road and pavement detail, creates all that light and depth, to say nothing of the Photoshop effect it does on the building, turning a mere photo into an impressionist painting.

It helps that the building tells me that I am very near to my home, about twenty seconds from my front door. Nearly there. That always lightens the mood.

If you are not impressed …? As I have definitely said before, the good thing about quota photos you don’t care for is that they waste very little of your time.

GD2 does a selfie session with a fan

Yesterday a big gang of friends and family, me among them, heard G(od)D(aughter)2 do her end-of-year recital, way up at the top of the Royal College of Music just near the Albert Hall. It was terrific. If they picked her up out of the rather small room she sang in and dumped her down in that same Albert Hall, and replaced the pianist and his piano with a huge symphony orchestra going full blast, GD2 would have sounded great and entirely at home and in command, and they’d have cheered like crazy. That’s how good she seemed to me.

Immediately afterwards I of course photoed photos of GD2, but these photos weren’t that good. Closer-up, she was still in performance mode, but looking tired, understandably. Worse, I wasn’t able to get a proper view of her, together with the lady who was also photoing her.

Later, when we all went to the nearby Italian restaurant, GD2 was able to relax and enjoy, and this time, my view of her was perfect. She did a selfie session with the same lady who had photoed her immediately after the recital, and whom I had sat next to for the performance. “What a voice!” said this lady, when GD2 had finished. In the restaurant, she and GD2 sat right across the table from me, and more photoing occurred. I photoed this photoing:

It’s not that I object to the face of the lady on the left, who turned out to be a friend of GD2’s mother from way back. It’s just that I don’t shove faces up here without prior approval. GD2 has already said she has no objection to her face appearing here. Lady on the left has not said this, so her face gets hidden, same as when I photo any other photoers, without their permission.

Lady on the left has, it turned out, a blog, which I have already looked through, partly to see if she has photos on it of herself, in which case I could presumably put a photo of her here without causing offence. No photos of her there, that I could see.

At her blog, she follows a completely opposite rule to the rule here. Here, I say something every day, whether I have anything sensible to say or not. She, on the other hand, seems to follow the strange rule of only saying something when she has something she considers worth saying. I know, very strange. If everyone followed that rule, hardly anything would get said at all.

But I digress. My main point here, today, is well worth saying, which is that GD2 is doing very well.

Note the electric plug sockets in all the above photos. These sockets were all over the place in the restaurant, 4×2 of them at our table alone. I assume that these sockets are for recharging mobile phones, like the one being deployed in the above photos.

Photoing God Save The Queens

In the basement of a club in Soho, soon after I’d photoed that dirty Landrover.

The problem was that I was getting the verbals, but not the image in the middle of the verbals.

The trick, as a friend demonstrated, was: zero in on the image. Cut the verbals out of it:

And if you want both, show both the photos, of the verbals and of the image. And a couple of images of the lesson. Lesson learned.

If you’d been there in person, you would of course have been able to see it all in one go. (But a camera often can’t do that.)

Some easily satisfied birds

The way that we humans feel about other creatures and the way that other creatures either do or do not feel about us continues to fascinate me. Which means that I seem to be continuing here with my creaturely postings on Fridays. Here is another such Friday posting, featuring some birds whom I encountered in East London not long ago.

This is the spot where I found them, at the west end of the Victoria Docks, right next to and right underneath the northern end of the Emirates Air Line or the Dangleway, or whatever you want to call it:

I then switched my attention to the foreground:

That floating platform being where the birds, and their “nests”, were to be seen.

On the right, was this bird:

And on the left, this couple:

A coot, or a moorhen? Ducks, of some exotic sort? But what do I know? Any offers?

What interests me about the not-so-wild wildlife of London, apart from how cute it often is, is how it continues to evolve. As we humans get more sentimental about our fellow creatures, more inclined to feed and photo them, less inclined to eat them or just shoo them away, they adapt to our changing sentiments, and start betting on our benevolence. In this case, they are merely betting that they’ll be left alone, now that it’s been made clear that this is where they live and will be having their kids.

Quota sunset photo

The rule of something here every day however inconsequential is important to me. You know how they say, during films set on American battleships: “Now, hear this.” Well, now see this:

October 2004.

Rule followed.