I like these sculptures. But I didn’t encounter them in a park, the way they are at the other end of that link. I encountered them on the ground floor of the Cheesegrater.
And, of course, photoed them:
The ground floor of the Cheesegrater was only pretending to be a park.
Yesterday, before Gurrelieder, I had twenty minutes to fill, and ran up to the top of the RFH and took photos.
This was one of my favourites, of a favourite London building, and a favourite other place to photo London buildings.
That’s Richard Seiffert’s One Kemble Street, with its seldom noted other than by me hairdo of roof clutter. And lined up right in front of it, the ME Hotel Radio Bar, from which, a while back, I photoed those seven London bridges:
There is also some older-school roof clutter to be seen there, in the form of a chimney array. You see those a lot. If you want to, that is.
The funny thing is, I didn’t need to be attending a concert in order to make this short climb. I could just go to the RFH, go in, go up to that viewing spot, photo my photos, go down again, and leave. Memo to self: do this, soon, and quite often.
On that day recently when England ruthlessly crushed Tunisia, 2-1, with a late goal in extra time, I was checking out the Big Things of the City.
In particular, I wanted to see how the Scalpel was looking, close up. Here are a selection of the photos I took of it:
I especially relish those window-shaped gaps in the soon-to-be-pristine surface.
Whenever, in London, I bump into Chinese couples doing a wedding photo session, I join in and photo away myself, taking care to include the official photoers in my photos.
That clutch of photos was photoed in September 2014 on Westminster Bridge, and is one of the nicer Chinese wedding photo sessions I recall joining in on, largely because of the splendour of that red dress. (And yes, she herself looks pretty good too.) Usually, the bride wears white.
Just like the official photoers, I lined up a landmark behind the happy couple in one of my photos. And note how another of my photos is just her, without him. That seems to happen quite a lot.
Until now, it never occurred to me to research this delightful Chinese custom, but today, I did. And I quickly found my way to this BBC report, published in October 2014, which explains that actually, these photos don’t get taken just after the wedding, but before it:
It’s a Chinese custom for couples to have their wedding photos taken before they are married, rather than on the day of the nuptials. “We wanted to take some sweet moments to share with the guests,” says Yixuan. On the wedding day, the photos will be shown to the guests on cards, via big screens and perhaps on video.
In China, pre-wedding photography is a huge – and lucrative – industry. …
Usually I hesitate to feature the faces of strangers at this blog. But my rule is, if you are making a spectacle of yourself, you are fair game. And these photoers often make a huge performance out of getting the exact shots they want.
I think I have mentioned here before that I believe someone should do a ballet based on the contortions that digital photoers twist themselves into. It would make sense to include a Chinese wedding couple in such a ballet.
It is called, at any rate by the people who built it, The Peak. What it is called by others, in the event that they notice it at all, I don’t know. But it’s more likely to be something along the lines of “that peculiar and asymmetrical lump outside Victoria Station with the big curved metal roof on it, that looks like it was stuck on the top during a refurbishment of some ugly old block built in the sixties or seventies”.
Today, personal business took me to Victoria Station, but before descending from the main concourse of the station into the Underground, and encouraged by the spactacular not-a-cloud-in-the-sky weather, I took a look around outside.
And saw this:
That being the top of “The Peak”, and on top of that top, the rather splendid window cleaning crane that periodically emerges from that bizarre roof. I love these cranes, especially when they have odd hats on the way that one has, to make them merge right back into their roofs, when they resume their hibernation.
But today, that peculiar curvey metal bit that sticks out on the left, as we look, was also looking wonderful.
Although almost any building looks good on a day like today was, that particular combination of sights particularly appealed to me, and made me particularly pleased that I had interrupted my journey.
Yes. After photoing Cromwell, and much else besides, and having been lifted to the top of the Tate Modern Extension, I mostly then photoed my fellow photoers.
But I also photoed this:
Yes, a fire. There were absolutely no clouds in the sky of any sort, except for that cloud, and it had to be a fire on the ground.
Another photo taken seconds later told me more about where this fire was:
Whenever I photo something interesting or out-of-the-ordinary, I try to remember to photo as much context as I can, so I can find out more about whatever it was when I get home. Signs and street names can help a lot, to pin down what and where it is, if I’m right next to it. You think you’ll remember, but what if you are only investigating years later, when all you have is the photos. With a story like this, several photos with varying zoom are a good idea, to make location easier to identify.
In the foreground there is the Blackfriars Station Bridge. That tells me what particular slice of London the fire was in. Even my googling skills were more than sufficient to tell me that the fire in question, given that I had the time of it as well as the approximate place, was one that broke out at the top of the Somers Town Coffee House.
It would seem that everyone in there got out, and there were no fatalities or even serious injuries. I say this because the only news about this fire happened while it was raging and for about half a day after. No fatalities or serious injuries were reported in those early reports. After that early news: no news, or none that I could find. No news, with news of this sort, is surely the best sort of news.
Yesterday I walked, in bright sunshine, along Victoria Street to Parliament Square, and then across along the river, ending up at the top of the Tate Modern Extension. In total, I took one thousand four hundred and seventy two photos, most of them at the top of the Tate Modern Extension, and most of those of my fellow digital photoers.
But here is just one of the photos I took yesterday, not of another photoer, and not anywhere near to Tate Modern:
That’s the statue of Oliver Cromwell, outside the Houses of Parliament. Read more about it here.
Usually, the background behind this photo is complicated Parliamentary architecture. But just now, work is being done on this architecture, so Cromwell’s background is unusually plain and unfussy, like Cromwell himself, I believe.
I like temporary stuff. And a nice variation on temporariness is when the temporariness is in the background behind something permanent, like a statue outside Parliament.
On the day that England ruthlessly crushed Tunisia at football, with a very late goal, I was checking out the most recent Big Things of the City of London. But there are other things in the City of London besides Big Things, and this is, you sense, deliberate. They’re trying to make the City more than a place of work which becomes deserted when everyone buggers off to the suburbs early on Friday evening. They’re trying to make it stay alive at evenings and weekends. They’re trying to make it the sort of place that people might like to visit, as opposed merely to a place that lots of people find it profitable to work in.
One of the things that signals this effort is sculpture.
On the right is a photo I took of the first sculpture I encountered during my walkabout. Frankly, I wasn’t impressed. The colours are quite nice, but the sculpture itself is too much like a miniature and pretend Big Thing. And why would you want that when you have real Big Things all around you? Standing as it does next to the Lloyds Building, this pile of coloured rectangles just looked feeble and sad.
I much preferred this carthorse:
And this goat:
Here is a link to information about the goat.
Strangely, I could find absolutely nothing on the www about the carthorse. This may be because, rather than being Art, it is merely a 3D advert for alcohol. Those big giant courgettes it is dragging along in its cart are for making booze of some sort, or such is my guess. Or, the silence of the internet may be because this carthorse has only very recently arrived at the spot where I encountered it. Or, the internet is full of stuff about this carthorse and I merely failed to find it, which is the most likely explanation for this not-link.
Whatever. The thing I liked about both the horse and the goat is that they are simulated biological entities, rather than man-made structures like that pile of coloured rectangles. They do not compete with the Big Things, because they are different from them. Instead, they make a welcome contrast to the Big Things.
Big Things on their own are very dull, I think, and little Big Things don’t change that. Sculpted creatures do change this, I also think.
More and more, I have come to think of the reflections to be seen in windows as interesting things to photo, alongside the things you see through the windows.
Thus:
That’s Battersea Power Station and its crane cluster, photoed from a train, about to cross the river into Victoria, earlier in the month.
I know, it has the lights inside the train reflected in the window, and that is considered bad. But why is this a problem? I think it makes a rather interesting combination of sights.
I also like very much how the above photo also includes a small mention of the Shard, towards the bottom on the right:
My camera sees more than I do.
What the above sentence really means is that when I looked at the actual scene, when photoing it, I saw one thing, but when I look at the photo that I took, I see different things.
I now get to see more of that one scene. At the time I saw the scene, complete with its reflected lights, but then the train carried on moving and immediately showed me another scene, and another, and … . No wonder I didn’t see as much of the original scene.
On Saturday June 9th, I journeyed to Blackheath’s All Saints’ Church to hear GodDaughter 2 and three of her Royal College of Music comrades in song take it in turns each to sing a few of the songs they had already done or were about to do in their graduation recitals. It was a fine event for all present, but for me it was particularly special, because, simply, I thought that GD2 sang so very well. There was a security, strength and beauty to her voice that I’d never heard before, and she sold her songs, every nuance of which she clearly understood perfectly, with just the right amount of facial and bodily gesture, enough to really help, but never to distract from her now amazing voice.
GD2’s graduation recital was still to come, and in the next few days I asked myself if she really had been as good as I thought she had, and whether, if she had been, she’d reproduce this recently achieved level of excellence when there was so much more at stake.
It was this graduation recital that got me, last Thursday afternoon, photoing the statue of Prince Albert outside the Albert Hall (sadly it is easier to scroll down than follow that link). In that posting, I mentioned, in passing, that I thought GD2’s recital had been very good. Perhaps you thought that this was mere routine politeness on my part. No. It really was very good, indeed.
The recital happened in a rather large hall, way too large for the number of friends and family present. In the middle, at the back, right in GD2’s eyeline, four RCM judges sat at desks in a silent row, giving her marks out of a hundred and writing comments that would decide her future. At first, GD2 seemed understandably rather nervous. But once she got into it, it was like Blackheath all over again, and if anything even better. This was a far bigger venue to fill than that church, but she did this in a way that suggested she’d do the same in a place three or four times bigger.
Most of GD2’s recent performances that I’ve seen and heard have been in opera scenes, where she was mostly just singing along with others. Which was fine, but it was hard to judge what personal progress she had been making.
It’s no good asking any of GD2’s fellow students what they think of her singing. They’re great kids, but all part of what is so great about them is that they never share any doubts they may have about each other’s performing progress or prowess with a mere civilian such as I. Which means that if they now think that GD2 is as good as I do, they have no way of telling me so that is fully convincing. My only way of knowing if GD2 is as good as she has suddenly started sounding and looking to me is simply to listen very carefully, e.g. while shutting my eyes, and then to go with what I think I heard. And what I think I heard, and saw, especially last Thursday, was the sort of singing that would have sounded absolutely fine if I and five hundred and fifty others had paid to listen to it in a packed Wigmore Hall.
I have always liked and admired GD2. And ever since she got into the RCM I have admired her even more. Clearly there were classical singing experts who thought highly of her prospects, and that was hugely impressive. But it was only at that Blackheath church, and then again last Thursday, that I was able to hear it and see it, fully, for myself.
Here are a couple of photos I took of GD2 last Thursday, in the RCM foyer, after her recital:
As you can see, I wasn’t the only one photoing her.
There’s still a long way to go before GD2’s name is in lights and on the covers of CDs, and any number of knowns or unknowns could still stop all that. What she is doing is like running in a marathon. It’s still quite early in the race and the leading bunch in this marathon is still pretty big. But, the point is: GD2 is still in that leading bunch. She’s still a contender.
It helps that her voice, mezzo-soprano, is quite rare. Regular sopranos, along with bass-baritones, are fairly common. Mezzos and tenors, not so much, not good ones.