Photoer in silhouette

I haven’t taken many photos of people in silhouette, but I should do it more, because it is a really good way to photo people. Maybe the problem is that a person has to be in the dark with lots of light behind him or her, and if you are like me and you just photo people out in the open, and you let the lighting be an act of God, so to speak, God only very rarely obliges with a silhouette.

But God did so oblige, on Jan 5th, which was the day I also took the first four of yesterday’s photos. This photoer was under Blackfriars Bridge and hence in darkness, and behind him, we observe the Millennium Bridge, artistically out-of-focus:

See also this photo, taken indoors, of Christopher Snowdon.

Does face recognition software work with silhouettes? I just shoved that question into google, but answer came there none.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Winter sunlight and new buildings beyond Lower Marsh

On the fifth and eighteenth days of this month I was in Lower Marsh, which is just south of Waterloo Station, as I often am. On each of these days, there was bright sunshine, and cloud.

On each day, after I had done my business in Lower Marsh and continued on to Blackfriars Road, and to its two newly constructed edifices: One Blackfriars (the curvey one) and 240 Blackfriars (the “crystaline” one).

The first of these photos, !.1, shows One, and One reflected in 240:

I love a good crane, and 1.2 is rather remarkable, because it shows (a) two construction cranes, (b) these cranes reflected in 240 Blackfriars, and (c) on the surface of that same building and above the reflections of the cranes, the shadows of those same cranes. If you click on nothing else, click on that.

Photo 1.3 tells us where we are, and shows One of that road scraping the sky,

In 2.1, 2.3 and 3.3, we see another joy of winter, trees without leaves.

The final photo of this little set, 3.3, shows the tower of a crane with some of those trees, and is included because the colours are what you would expect with regular lighting.

Ah, but what if the lighting is irregular? What if there is bright sunlight hitting a crane tower, but with dark cloud instead of blue sky behind it? 3.2 is what then happens. Worth another click, I’d say.

And 3.1 shows clouds of a very different sort, again reflected in 240 Blackriars. Also pretty dramatic.

1.1 to 2.1 taken on the fifth. 2.3 to 3.3 on the eighteenth.

What, no photos of photoers? Was I the only one photoing? Could nobody else see the epic dramas of light and dark, construction and reflection, scaffolding and skeletal trees, that I was seeing? Apparently not.

On the fifth, soon after I had taken the first four of the above photos, my fellow photoers had been all over the man with the flaming tuba.

Photography is light. But I guess for most photoers, mere light, bouncing off of dreary things like modern buildings, cranes, trees, scaffolding and the like, is not enough.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Piccadilly in the wet

Today I went to see a movie. I and the person I went with fixed to meet beforehand at the statue in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. I got there early, and took a ton of photos, of which only the photos of the rain-affected pavement were not terrible. Here is one of these:

Photography is light.

I tried photoing lots of umbrellas, and I succeeded, if by that is meant that I took a lot of photos of umbrellas. But, they were all terrible.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Yes I know – BMdotcom is a mess

By which I mean that the content is what it is, but that the loading up is either very slow or, from time to time, non-existent.

If you had been trying to view this blog today, this is what you would have seen:

I cranked up BMdotcom on my mobile, just to make sure it wasn’t my computer that was in some mysterious way causing this. It wasn’t.

And yes, I cheated with the timing of this posting. I actually stuck this up in the small hours of Monday morning, and backdated the date. If this bothers you, have your lawyers call my lawyers.

Conversations are now ongoing about not only how to get fewer such collapses, but also about how to speed up the loading, to the point where a decent number of people might consider reading it, again, or even for the first time. What I am thinking I will do is set up a new WordPress blog, and leave this as Classic Brian, or some such thing.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A Mickey Mouse posting

Indeed:

At the time I took that photo, in Lower Marsh, I was with someone else, and just grabbed the shot before moving on at once. But I reckon it came out really well.

Wikipedia tells us of Mickey Mouse’s compiucated origin. He was a replacement for a rabbit, and before a mouse was arrived at, it seems that many other animals were considered:

Mickey Mouse was created as a replacement for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, an earlier cartoon character created by the Disney studio for Charles Mintz, a film producer who distributed product through Universal Studios. In the spring of 1928, with the series going strong, Disney asked Mintz for an increase in the budget. But Mintz instead demanded that Walt take a 20 percent budget cut, and as leverage, he reminded Disney that Universal owned the character, and revealed that he had already signed most of Disney’s current employees to his new contract. Angrily, Disney refused the deal and returned to produce the final Oswald cartoons he contractually owed Mintz. Disney was dismayed at the betrayal by his staff but determined to restart from scratch. The new Disney Studio initially consisted of animator Ub Iwerks and a loyal apprentice artist, Les Clark, who together with Wilfred Jackson were among the few who remained loyal to Walt. One lesson Disney learned from the experience was to thereafter always make sure that he owned all rights to the characters produced by his company.

In the spring of 1928, Disney asked Ub Iwerks to start drawing up new character ideas. Iwerks tried sketches of various animals, such as dogs and cats, but none of these appealed to Disney. A female cow and male horse were also rejected. They would later turn up as Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar. A male frog was also rejected. It would later show up in Iwerks’ own Flip the Frog series. Walt Disney got the inspiration for Mickey Mouse from a tame mouse at his desk at Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1925, Hugh Harman drew some sketches of mice around a photograph of Walt Disney. These inspired Ub Iwerks to create a new mouse character for Disney. “Mortimer Mouse” had been Disney’s original name for the character before his wife, Lillian, convinced him to change it, and ultimately Mickey Mouse came to be.

Those two paragraphs are, at Wikipedia, crammed with links. Follow the link above and scroll down to where it says “Origin”, if you want to follow any of these links.

I will, however, honour the amazingly named Ub Iwerks with a link from here. I wonder how he was pronounced. His dad was from Germany, and I think I know how they’d have said the name there. But, Ub (!?!) was born in Kansas. When it came to Amercans pronouncing foreign names, all bets were off. My guess is there were lots of Germans where the Iwerks family grew up, and thus it was not felt necessary to do any name changing.

Blog and learn.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A pub which shows the Six Nations

It’s around this time of year that I start to anticipate the Six Nations. But instead of looking it up and finding out, I merely begin to wonder about when it will start, and contenting myself with thinking: oh goodee, The Six Nations, soon. As often as not, I only get the date of when it kicks off fixed in my brain when I walk past a pub in The Cut (which is the continuation of Lower Marsh (which I frequently frequent)), where they show these games on their TVs and where they are in the habit of having signs outside saying when the Six Nations will be starting (and continuing and ending).

So it was today, when I found myself in The Cut:

The pub is called the Windmill.

I do not know what is going to happen in the Six Nations, whether England or Wales or Ireland or Scotland or France will win it. This is because nobody knows. It is the most wonderfully unpredictable competition. I do know that Italy will not win it. Everybody knows that.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The London skyline ten years ago

Ten years ago yesterday, to be exact about it:

Memo to self: go back to the same spot and take the same photo again, some time soon.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A brightly lit building in front of a dark sky

Remember a while back, when I showed you this photo:

I took that photo back on January 5th. As soon as I started working on it, I got sidetracked into realising that my camera was not misbehaving after all, i.e. not turning everything yellow. Phew.

But the reason I started work on that photo was that it is an illustration of that special sort of weather that happens when there are both dark clouds, and holes in those clouds, through which light comes ripping through, sometimes lighting up buildings that stand in front of dark clouds. The above blue roof was not the first of such brightly-lit-thing-against-a-dark-background that I saw and photoed that day, and I felt sure that it would not be the last.

And boy was I not wrong? As in: I definitely was not wrong. Because, soon after photoing yesterday’s flaming tuba player, under Blackheath Bridge and its railway station, I climbed up into Blackheath Bridge and its railway station, and through the windows on the downstream side, I found myself staring in amazement at this:

I seldom photo St Paul’s Cathedral. I understand why people admire Ancient Architecture, but I find Modern Architecture more intriguing to think about. But I couldn’t resist that. That is not your usual St Paul’s Cathedral photo. To me it looks not so much like a photo as like a collage, where I have stuck a cut-out of St Paul’s Cathedral onto a dark background, but chose paper that was too light for the Cathedral, to make sure it showed up clearly.

I knew that this effect would not last, and sure enough, it did not:

That being a photo I took of St Paul’s Cathedral less than a minute later.

Here is a cropped version of the special effects photo above, to make the contrast even clearer:

I know, lots of reflections in the glass windows of Blackfriars Station, through which the photos were taken. Guess what. I don’t care. So, the photos were taken through windows? So what. And actually, I think the glass may have increased the contrast, by darkening the sky somewhat bit, but not being able to darken the Cathedral, because it was just too brightly lit by the sun.

Photography is light.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Photoing the man playing a flaming tuba

So today I was up to my neck doing other things. Well no not really, I just forgot about doing this, until it was bed time. So, here are some photos of people photoing a man playing a tuba with flames coming out of it:

Photoed by me, under Blackfriars Bridge (the one with a railway station on it), earlier this month.

I do not know why the man in the red and white hat was holding a bit of silver paper. Something to do with food he had been eating?

This man is regularly seen playing his flaming tuba, all over London. I myself saw him playing outside Embankment tube, not so long ago. Also being worshipped by photoers.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Primrose Hill photoers

Yesterday’s photo, taken at Primrose Hill before Christmas, was very pretty. That lovely light you get when the sun is low, which it always is, which is nice because it’s nice, and nice because it means you can see what’s on people’s screens. Trees uncluttered by leaves. Distant Big Things. Wonderful. Which is why there were so many other photoers in action:

No computer-recognisable faces, but lots of winter clothing, including woolly hats and woolly gloves.

18 photos there, and just two of them (2.1 and 5.1) do not feature smartphones. I chose the photos entirely for artistic impression. It merely turned out that way.

See also 1.3. It looks like she’s holding a giant cock of the unmentionable sort. But, it’s a glove. So (see 4.2): No Bad Vibes.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog