On the sunniest day of the year so far, I went, as earlier noted, east, to Docklands.
I photoed the blue sky, the leafless trees, and the many towers of Docklands:
Nice. Lots of pollarding.
Almost anything looks nice in weather like that.
I felt the cold so you don’t have to.
Today, as I promised myself on Tuesday, I went east. The weather was even better than was forecasted, and among the very first photos I photoed was this, before I even got to the tube station:
But the good weather came at a price, paid in degrees of temperature. No clouds and there’s nothing to keep the warmth in. It was cold. And all the walking I did has taken it out of me. Also, I met up with occasional commenter here and good friend Alastair, and that meant me getting up and out earlier than usual. So, I am knackered, and I can’t now even summon up the energy to explain what exactly is going on in the above photo, let alone show you any more photos. It doesn’t now help (although it will) that I have nearly six hundred photos to look at and pick from and ruminate about.
Now: early to bed.
The reason I’m showing so many ancient photos here just now is because the weather in London is so very dreary, and I’m not going out much. Instead, I am doing lots of tidying up and chucking out, provoked by those sofas. And, I’m back to doing more at Samizdata than of late.
Here’s another relic from another era. This is Southwark Towers, photoed by me on May 31st 2006:
Relic because this really quite Big Thing was demolished in 2008, to make way for London’s ultimate Big Thing, The Shard.
At the time I took this photo, I had no idea that what I was photoing was about to disappear.
If in doubt, photo the photo.
It’s been a while since I visited the Isle of Dogs. Here are some photos I photoed of a building site there, next to the river, in January 2014:
I wonder how all this looks now. I’m pretty sure I know where this is. Google Maps is good enough for that. But not for the up-to-date story.
In decades to come, if will presumably be possible to go pretty much anywhere that’s public, virtually, without leaving your dwelling pod.. But for now, the only way to be sure about a place like this is to go there and see.
I was in the West End earlier this evening. Not having done any blogging here today, and today being Friday, I kept my eyes open for something creaturely.
I spotted this, in the window of one of those very Old School shops, in Cecil Court:
Ah, cigarette cards. Never had them here before. And I don’t think poultry have been featured here before either.
Click to get them a bit bigger.
Indeed:
It’s the roof of this, looking upstream into the sunset, last August.
I continue to photo taxi adverts, whenever I get the chance. Last Sunday, I photoed this one:
There wasn’t space for to get the whole taxi, and there wasn’t time for me to go the other side of the road and get the whole taxi, because I was in a hurry to be somewhere else. But I hope you agree that that photo suffices.
This being the century of the internet, I have since found this, and this, and this.
I bet Jimbo Phillips never thought he’d be selling mortgages.
Recently, I bought a book on Amazon, about English as a Global Language. I’ve not read it right through yet, but it seems really good.
As regulars here will know, one of the things I like to do is reproduce short excerpts from books. This I do by scanning. But, unfortunately, my copy of English as a Global Language came to me full of underlinings of what the previous owner consider to be significant sentences and phrases. For what it’s worth, I often agreed with his choices. But such underlinings play havoc with scanning, so I wanted them gone.
Luckily they were not in ink, only in pencil. So, an eraser of some kind ought to do the trick. So, where could I buy an eraser locally? I actually wasn’t sure. It would certainly be a palaver. So, maybe I already owned an eraser. I had a rootle through a couple of small transparent crates, which I use to keep such things as pens, pencils, felt tip markers, and so forth and so on.
I found several erasers, all hard as rock. They hadn’t been used for a decade and they might as well have been plastic cutlery for all the use they were for removing pencil marks. But then, I came across this:
Just like everything else in the crate, this thing had not been touched for a decade. This too would prove useless, surely.
But no. It worked perfectly. The rubber was as soft and useable as it was the day, lost in the mists of time of the previous decade or even longer, when I first acquired it. Amazing. And the print of the book was utterly untouched, so soft was the rubber of this wondrous item.
One of the things you seldom see on the internet is any reportage of how well something works a decade later. Usually the reviews are instant. Does it work now? If it does, five stars, or four if you have some minor quibble about it.
So now, I am delighted to report that the STAEDTLER Mars plastic, or whatever it’s called, has real staying power, as a remover of pencil marks. Buy a STAEDTLER Mars plastic now, and if you still have it a decade hence, it will still work.
The thing is, it was such a trivial task. To have to have spent an afternoon wandering around London SW1 looking for a new eraser would have been so annoying. To be able to get erasing right away was just so satisfying, compared to all that nonsense. That the actual erasing took hardly any time at all only emphasises the contrast between how well things went and how annoyingly they would have gone, in the absence of my STAEDTLER Mars plastic.
I may never do any actual scanning of this book, but that’s not the point. The point is, now I can, with no bother.
I basically picked last night’s quota photo for alliterative reasons. QUota. QUantum. As we bloggers say: heh. No long essay was required to present that little joke, if joke it even was.
In the course of my search late last night for a suitable QP, I came across other photos which seemed suitable for showing here, but which demanded little essays to explain what it was that made them suitable. And I was too knackered for that, having spent yesterday working on this talk for Christian Michel’s 6/20 soiree, and then in the evening giving the talk.
In particular, late last night, I encountered in my photo-archives this remarkable (I think) photo, which I took in Regent’s Park in March of 2012, as it was getting dark, when on my way back from taking photos on and from Primrose Hill:
What I find remarkable about that photo is the contrast between how very red the reflection in the water of the lights on the BT Tower is, compared with how very un-red the actual lights themselves are, as photoed through the mere air.
You often get this with reflections. In photos, I mean. Your actual eyes make adjustments as they scan the scene. What I would have seen, with my eyes, when photoing the above photo, is quite bright red lights on the tower, and a similarly bright reflection.
But my camera, on automatic, doesn’t think like this. All my camera is concerned about is the overall balance. It has to pick just one balance and apply it to everything. And because a reflection is involved, it often ends up picking a balance where the actual view is very light and bright, but the reflection contains all the action. I often do this-and-this-same-thing-relected photos with a glass window doing the reflecting. And often what you get with that is a completely blank white sky, but then in the reflection you get all the distinctions between quite light and not so light, quite blue and not so blue, that you don’t get in the bit of the photo that is directly of the sky.
And that’s what surely happened with the above photo. The redness got lost when we were just looking at the lights themselves. But the water darkened and strengthened that same redness, and made it really red.
On the day, I was more interested in the birds swimming around on the water. The next eight photos in that directory are of ducks and geese, and the final three are of a swan. After that I called it a day, what with daylight having ended. I only really noticed this reflected redness thing last night.
Most Real Photographers have to have the skill of knowing at once when they’ve photoed a good photo, and why. We unreal photoers can take our time.
