Photoed by me last night, at Blackwall DLR station:
It’s not really that of course. It’s just that I have learned that one of the best ways to photo a sunset is to photo railway tracks that are disappearing into it.
Category: My photographs
Another leaning crane
This phenomenon continues to trouble me. Intellectually, I know that the people supervising these circumstances have them all under control. If ever there was a trade in Britain that knows what it is doing, it is the big city building trade. Things get done on time, all according to plan, and the results work as intended. And cranes do not fall over. (The financing can go all over the shop, which means that plans can change dramatically, but that’s a different story.)
But it still feels to me as if this crane might fall over. It still feels to me that, at any moment, something near the ground, on the left as we look, just might … SNAP!!!!:
So, another for the collection. Photoed by me the day before yesterday, from the Rooftop of John Lewis.
I don’t generally do Photoshop(clone)ing, but some rotation was necessary with this one. In my original, the crane was completely vertical. And everything else: not.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Two faces of Bruce the Real Photographer
Last week Bruce the Real Photographer (regular name: Bruce Nicoll) dropped by and we went out for a coffee. While we coffeed, we got onto the subject of how faces look different depending on how far away the camera is. By which I mean: Bruce the Real Photographer told me about this. (He mentioned this famous photo, on the right here, to illustrate what he was talking about.)
Inspired by this portraiture lesson, I at once took a very close up photo of Bruce the Real Photographer, which looked like this …:
…, and then I walked away and took this next photo, with lots of zoom, so that his face occupied most of the photo in the same way as it did in the above close-up:
The contrast is remarkable. His face is a whole different shape, depending. And look what happens to the background.
I sort of knew all this. But sort of knowing something and knowing it for sure are two distinct things. Knowing it and really seeing it are also two distinct things.
I photo a lot of buildings, close-up, and from a distance with lots of zoom. But these tend not to be the exact same buildings from one moment to the next, and the above contrast very seldom jumps out at me.
Mostly, what I see is another equally clear contrast but what looks like a very different one. I see extreme angle differences, like when verticals converge, or not, depending on how far away you are. I mentioned in passing, yesterday, how buildings do less of this when you are further away. When you are far away, you can get exact horizontals and exact verticals, the way you don’t when you are close-up. See the first photo below, which was done with lots of zoom from far away.
It all makes perfect sense. When you work it out, it becomes obvious. It is obvious that, if you are far away from someone who is wearing glasses and he is looking straight at you, you are more likely to see his face through those glasses and less likely to see the background beyond his face through his glasses. It’s all a question of angles.
It is obvious that if you are close up, you see only the front of his face. Further away, and you also see the sides of his face.
And it’s obvious that if you are far away from a rectangle that is at a slightly higher level than you are, it looks more exactly rectangular the further away from the rectangle you get. Again, the angle changes.
But that’s what knowledge is. When it becomes “obvious”, that means that you know it.
Here is another photo of Bruce the Real Photographer, which I took immediately after taking the second of two above, but this time with no zoom:
This shows that I was never actually that far away from Bruce the Real Photographer. It’s merely the difference between very close and not so close, two places which are only a second apart from each other. With buildings, you need to get a lot further away to make much difference.
To show you just how Real a Photographer Bruce the Real Photographer is, go to this long ago posting here (LINK TO THE OLD BLOG), which has a whole clutch of some of his best looking stuff, but small enough to fit on this blog and not to be worth anyone serious about copying to copy.
The first photo there is a particularly good one of the actor Dudley Sutton, who nrecently died, causing much lamentation in the antiques trade.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Art and information
Maybe “art” is putting it a bit strongly, but nevertheless, I do really like this photo …:
… which I took in the summer of 2015, somewhere in the City of London. The directory I found this in is called “Looking4BroadgateTower”, so that tells you roughly where I was.
BMdotcom-wise, this photo has so many boxes ticked.
– First things first: cranes. In this case, crane towers. BMmmmmm.
– Reinforcing rods, sticking out the top of the lump like vegetation. Reinforcement: insufficiently sung heroism of modernity.
– A crane tower shadow, on …
– … that material they shove over …
– … scaffolding.
– That monochrome thing that happens during sunsets. And – who can say? – maybe even during sunrises.
– The way that sunlight hits crane towers and just lights them up, which I so often try to get and so seldom manage to get.
– Lots of horizontals and verticals, made possible not by Photoshop(clone)ing but by the excellent zoom lens on my nearly-but-actually-not-SLR camera, with its one brilliant super-zoomy lens.
So, lots to like there. But what and where was this? This is the kind of thing I like to know.
Luckily, I took informational photos, as well as arty photos like that above. Always, when out taking photos like the above, take lots of photos which are not for art, but for information about that art. I need to keep telling myself, because often I fail to do this.
I fail, that is to say, to take photos like this …:
… which scores about zero for artistic impression, but which tells me what all that art in the first photo above actually was.
In the above (information) photo we see the same crane towers and the same lump, but viewed side on. It’s definitely the same stuff.
There’s even a name and a website to be seen, if you crop it, and then expand it to be 500 pixels across, like this:
So, there we have it. It’s the earlier stages of this. Once you have the words to describe what you want to learn about, the internet suddenly starts to work.
This being this:
My best guess is that the lump of art in the first photo in this posting is somewhere in the middle of the more complicated computerised Thing on the right.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
The Great Pagoda of Kew Gardens – and its dragons
The high point, literally, of the expedition that GodDaughter2 and I made to Kew Gardens back in August was our exploration of the Great Pagoda.
From the top of the Great Pagoda, you can see the Big Things of Central London. But what the Great Pagoda itself looks like is also worth examining.
Here is an early view we had of it:
And here is how it looked when we got closer:
The Daily Mail describes the Great Pagoda as Britain’s First Skyscraper.
Now look how it looked when we got closer still:
So, what are those sticky-outy things on the corners of each sticky-outy roof?
That’s right, dragons. And we’re not talking merely inflated dragons. These are solid looking and scary. You couldn’t kill these dragons with a mere pin prick, and you wouldn’t dare to try.
Most of the Great Pagoda dragons look like this:
We discovered when we got there that the recent restoration of this Great Pagoda had, only a few weeks before our visit, been completed. We got very lucky with that.
Read more about these dragons, and about the Pagoda that they now guard, in this Guardian report.
This Great Pagoda, London’s very first Big Thing, was built by Sir William Chambers in 1762. The dragons were a feature of the original Pagoda, but in 1784 they were removed. Being made of wood, and following a burst of wet weather, they had started to rot.
Wikipedia says that Kew Gardens was adopted as a national botanical garden in 1840. Would that be when the Pagoda was opened to the general public? Whenever exactly that was, Kew Gardens and the Great Pagoda have been what we now call visitor attractions for quite a while now.
During World War 2, the Great Pagoda was used to test bombs. You can still see one of the holes they made in all the floors, to allow the bombs to fall. Keeping that for everyone to see now is a nice touch, I think.
Kew Gardens contains lots of greenery, and green stuff on sticks. What do they call those things? Trees. Kew Gardens has lots and lots of trees, of many different brands.
So, on the left here, the hole in the floor. On the right there, the seat made from many trees:
And in the middle, the seat, seen through the hole.
But back to those dragons. The old rotting dragons have now been almost entirely replaced by 3D printed dragons, which look solid but which are actually far lighter than the old-time originals.
On the lowest roof, right near the ground, there was a different sort of dragon, which looked like this:
I wonder what the story was of that one, for there did indeed seem to be only one such blue dragon. Had the original plan been to make all the dragons like that one? But did its structural weakness cause them to abandon that plan, and go with the other darker green dragon with its scary red tongue, and with its rather more solid wings? Don’t know, but whatever the story is, the winning dragon design is pretty good also.
Everything about how the Great Pagoda looks, inside as well as its exterior, says: class. This is a visitor attraction that I warmly recommend. There is no lift, not originally of course, and not now, but the steps, although quite numerous, are at a comfortably mild angle – rather than, say, like the ones in the Monument. Even better, each flight of steps you go up causes you to reach another actual floor, of the sort you can stand on, with windows looking outwards. So, oldies like me can go up two floors, say, and then have a comfortable breather, without blocking anyone else on the stairs. If we are on the right floor, we can even use that multi-treed seat (see above).
The weather on the day that GD2 and I visited Kew Gardens was not perfect. The dragons look rather dark and menacing in my photos. But that look works, I think. And as days out go, this day out was pretty much perfect.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
La Taupe
To me, nothing says Abroad quite like a poster, somewhere in Abroad, advertising an English speaking movie, whose English title I already know, with a foreign title that is different, but with all the same star names:
La Taupe means The Mole. I preferred the TV series, but I love this poster. Photoed by me in Paris in February 2012.
As was this, on the same expedition:
In the same directory, I encountered other photos of posters advertising the following movies: Drive (Ryan Gosling), Ghost Rider (Nicolas Cage), Underworld (Kate Beckinsale), and Star Wars Episode 1 (whoever). But in those posters, the titles stayed in their original English. Why?
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Pavlova in front of “Portland House”
Yesterday I was in Victoria Station, and as I emerged from it into … that mess of activity outside the front entrance, I noticed that the light seemed particularly appealing. At first what got my attention was the combined effect of the mess in the foreground, in the dark, and the assorted Medium Sized Things in the background, totally mismatched and just jambed down together in the London style, all illuminated. (See photos 1.1 and 1.2 below.)
But then, I found myself zeroing in, yet again, on Pavlova. What got me noticing her was that, finally, I seemed to have found the right moment to photo her with that big concrete lump that calls itself “Portland House” behind her. I have done this a lot, but it has never worked until now. This time, there was a shadow behind Pavlova, while Pavlova herself, and the dwarfed-by-modernity theatre on the top of which Pavlova dances, were both picked out by the light, a combination of circumstances I have never before encountered, or if I did I didn’t notice.
I took many photos of this effect. Partly because I can’t decide which one I like best, and partly because I think these photos look good when small, here are 3×3=9 of them:
Maybe the Wikipedia entry for Portland House does say who originally designed this unlovely edifice, but if it does, I couldn’t find that. Wikipedia does note, however, that Portland House is a miniature rip-off of the Pan Am Building in New York, now called something else.
Further googling got me to a piece by Mike Higginbottom entitled Pan-Am’s London sibling. He rather likes it. Plus, he name checks the now pretty much forgotten architect of said sibling: Howard Fairbairn & Partners. Modern Movement hulks by big name modernists sometimes have a certain in-your-face impact and memorability about them. But this hulk has always seemed to me to epitomise Modern Movementism at its dreariest. It’s not even “brutal”, just big, bland and boring. I greatly prefer Nova, the red diagonalised Medium Sized Thing nearby, which is also to be seen in photos 1.1 and 1.2 above.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
A lorry brings reinforcements
And no, I don’t mean reinforcements for an army. I mean the kind of reinforcements that end up buried in concrete.
Like these ones:
All six of these photos also feature one of the more impressive scaffolding arrays near me just now. The art of scaffolding and the art of creating reinforcements for structural concrete have much in common. Both involve putting together lots of bits of metal. Both need to result in a structure that stays put and does not collapse. Both look pretty to people like me.
But there are also big differences. Scaffolding is very visible, and it remains visible for the duration of its working existence. Scaffolding thus proclaims itself to the world, by its very existence. That we live in a golden age of scaffolding is obvious to all of us, whether we like this fact or hate it.
Also, scaffolding rather quickly punishes those who erect it, if they don’t do it right. While creating scaffolding, scaffolders make use of the scaffolding they have just been constructing, and they are their own first users. They thus have a literally inbuilt incentive to do their work well. And if they don’t, it is not that hard for others to spot this. Bad scaffolding wobbles. Such are my surmises about scaffolding.
Reinforcements for concrete are something else again. By the time they go to work, doing the job they were built for, everyone concerned had better be damn sure that they have done their work well. But, if they haven’t, the disastrous consequences of that bad work may take years to happen, and even then to be controversial. Who is to say exactly what caused a building to collapse? And if the building collapses rather catastrophically, it is liable to destroy a lot of the evidence of what exactly happened, and why. Investigating such catastrophes being a whole separate job in itself. So, getting these reinforcements right, with an inbuilt regime of testing and inspection and supervision, all managed by morally upright people whose declarations of confidence in what they have been inspecting can be relied upon, is a whole distinct industry.
But, this is an industry whose products, by their nature, end up being invisible. We all rely on such work being done correctly, not just “structurally” but also in a morally correct manner. Yet, we mostly never see this work, only its indirect results.
So, I hereby I celebrate the work, morally as well as merely technically good, that goes into the making of reinforcements for concrete. I salute the good men and true who make these (I think) beautiful objects, and who ensure that they perform faithfully. Their moral as well as technical excellence is all part of why I consider such reinforcements to be things of beauty.
I did some googling to try to determine exactly what reinforcements like those in my photos are used for. The lorry says R. SWAIN AND SONS on it. But they are hauliers, not makers of concrete reinforcements. The nearest I got to an answer was this photo, of objects just like those on my lorry, with this verbiage attached: “Prefabricated Piling Cages Made of Reinforced Bars On Site”. Prefabricated Piling cages. Piling sounds to me like foundations. (Yes.) The reinforcing has to be shoved down a hole in one go. It can’t be constructed bit by bit, in the hole. It either gets assembled beforehand on site, or, it gets assembled in a factory and taken to the site by lorry, as above.
The reinforcing that a structure needs when it is above ground, on the other hand, can be assembled on site, and I’m guessing that this is what usually happens.
Just guessing, you understand. My first guess actually was: for an above ground structure, until I came upon the photo I just linked to, and not foundations. But, what do I know?
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Another go at Bartok – and two competitions
I was summoned to Chateau Samizdata (which is in South Kensington these days) for lunch today, which meant that when I walked past that Bartok statue at lunchtime today, the light was behind me, rather than in front of me and behind Bartok.
So I was able to have another go at photoing him:
But with rather mixed results. The change in lighting made a lot less difference than I had been hoping.
I spent the late afternoon and the evening (a) doing stuff at home, and (b) keeping track of the climaxes of two competitions, this one, which was won by pianist Eric Lu, and this one, which was won by the Worcestershire cricket team. Which means Worcestershire have had a mixed season, having also been relegated from Division One of the County Championship. It was like them winning the FA cup but also getting relegated from the Premier League. However, getting relegated from Division One of the Country Championship makes far less financial difference than dropping out of the Premier League. So Worcester are probably now pretty happy. Counties doing well in one format but badly in another is quite frequent. They all say that, of course, they want to win everything. But in reality, they prioritise this and neglect that.
Tonight, Radio 3 played the last two Leeds Piano Competition concerto performances, the three others having been played last night. I will be checking out the performance of Beethoven 1 from last night, because, while they were waiting for them to pick the various prize winners, they played part of a chamber music performance by the guy who had played Beethoven 1, which sounded excellent. Also, this guy came second in the overall competition, so he’s pretty good.
Tonight’s Beethoven 4, from winner Lu, was excellent, albeit somewhat more subdued than I think Beethoven had in mind when he composed this piece. Lu’s was a very “private” performance of what was actually, I think, written as a rather public piece (about private feelings). But that’s very much a matter of (my) opinion. Given what Lu was doing, he did it very well. Besides which, who would want all concerto performances to sound the same? Beethoven might have been surprised by Lu’s delicate and subtle performance, but that doesn’t mean he’d have minded. On the contrary, he would probably be amazed and delighted that people were still playing the thing at all.
Tonight’s other concerto, the Schumann, was similar in artistic intention to Lu’s Beethoven 4, but to my ear it involved a few too many wrong notes. The Radio 3 commentators didn’t mention these wrong notes, but I don’t think I imagined them. I think they chose to ignore them.
Bartok wrote three Piano Concertos, each very fine in their contrasting ways. None of these were played in the final of the Leeds Piano Competition.
LATER: I’ve just been listening to another county game, just started on Sept 18th, and I realise that the piece I linked to about Worcester getting relegated was dated 2015. Theoretically, they could still avoid relegation this year. But they’re not going to. They’ve just been bowled out for 94 by Essex, and they are about thirty points shy of safety, with Yorks and Lancs both having to cock it up big time for them to escape. As it is, Worcs and Lancs both look doomed to the trop. But, in theory, Worcs are still in with a chance of avoiding this.
I am very sorry to have misled you, in the unlikely event that I did, and that you care.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
A noisy anteater
Last Sunday morning I was trying to have a good old lie-in, but instead I got woken up early by a giant anteater.
Yes. Having been woken up, I looked out my window towards where all the din seemed to be coming from, and this was the scene I beheld:
At first I thought the culprit might be that refuse lorry in the foreground, but it soon because clear that the noise had been coming from that red lorry with the crane-like thing attached to it.
Let’s move in closer:
By the time this photo had been photoed, the big red lorry had lifted its nozzle out of that hole in the pavement on the right there, which I subsequently learned had been dug in connection with electric cables. Evidently there was muck in the hole which needed to be got out, in a hurry. Sometimes technology really sucks.
I was intrigued, and at first greatly puzzled, by picture on the side of the red lorry, and it took me quite a while to work it out. It is a giant anteater. It looks like at least two creatures, pointing in opposite directions, but the “other creature” is, or so I believe, the giant anteater’s giant tail. That tail being a lot of what makes the anteater a giant.
Wikipedia tells us what an actual giant anteater looks like:
I can see why an anteater would have a very long nose. But why the enormous tail? Balance, perhaps? The answer offered here says balance, and also maybe to cover itself when sleeping. It seems to be mixed up with the anteater having a low body temperature, the tail being there partly to keep heat out. So, perhaps also some kind of fan? I couldn’t find a confident answer.
As for the gizmo deployed at the back of the lorry, note how this time, a bendy arm with a tube in it does make use of a bendy tube, unlike that machine for squirting concrete that I mentioned here earlier. Guess: not so much pressure this time, not least because the material itself being sucked up (this time) is not so heavy and bulky. Some pressure, but not so much.
That phone number of the side of the lorry got me to the enterprise that supplied this equipment. But follow that link and you’ll find no mention of any red lorries with anteaters on the side. By which I mean, I didn’t.