Category: My photographs

A better photo of One Kemble Street

Recently I went out looking for another good shot of Richard Seifert’s One Kemble Street, of which I am very fond, having already posted some fun photos of it as seen from the ROH Bar and two more rather so-so photos of it, along with a photo of another circular Seifert edifice, also with an anarchic hairdo.

But here is a better photo of One Kemble Street, that I took over a year ago, from the top of the Tate Modern Extension:

The thing is, when I’m out on one of my photo-wanders, the pattern is: Photo, forget. Photo, forget. Photo, forget. I hardly think at all about what I have just photoed. Almost all my thinking concerns the next photo.

When, usually about one day later, I look back at what I got, even then I don’t pay attention to anything like everything I got. Just some of it. Which means that when I look back at some directory or other a longish time later, I notice more photos, basically for the first time since just before I took them.

It’s tempting to assume that this is the result of me getting old. But I suspect that if I had had a digital camera when I was thirty, I would probably have forgotten most of the photos I took then, much as I do now. But, I do think that age probably reinforces this effect.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Hippos

One of the depressing things about the Internet is that excellent places, because not quite excellent enough, or because for a few months they don’t feel quite excellent enough, fall off your radar. Well, maybe not yours, but mine.

So it has been, for me, from a time way back when to about the day before yesterday, with the excellent and constantly updated site which relentlessly explains that This Is Why I’m Broke, this being a succession of things. Rather expensive and somewhat esoteric things, of the sort which someone, maybe you, is going to like a lot.

Things like this:

I have recently acquired a new Cleaning Lady, and her partner happens to like hippos a lot. This is just the kind of thing that he would love. And for a mere £82, 555 it could be his.

It wouldn’t suit me. Quite aside from the thermo-nuclear expense, when I purchase seating I need it to seat the maximum number of people in comfort that it can, in the space that it occupies. This is for my meetings, of which there was another this evening. This hippo sofa is altogether too much hippo and not nearly enough sofa, for my purposes.

And I’m guessing that even Cleaning Lady’s Partner would hesitate at the price, and be told by Cleaning Lady that it would occupy too much space. They being a couple who think that emptiness is a desirable quality in living space. (I like emptiness, but like even more having somewhere to put all my books and CDs and home-recorded DVDs.)

I must have been quite a blow for Cleaning Lady’s Partner when (a) he first set eyes on the above hippo sofa (he will definitely have set eyes on it, because his hippo radar is state-of-the-art) but then (b) having, reluctantly, to decide that, hugely appealing though it obviously is, he could not, in all conscience, purchase it.

But the good news is that I recently encountered, in a local charity shop, and immediately did purchase, the hippo shown below:

You couldn’t sit on this hippo, and frankly, it looks considerably less like a hippo than the hippo sofa does, despite its sofa. But it is a lot smaller and it was a lot less expensive than the hippo sofa.

Following the meeting, Cleaning Lady seems to have departed with the hippo, or I hope she did because I cannot now find it. Hope Partner likes it.

I love digital photoing. For many reasons, only one of which is that when you give someone an amusing present, you can photo it before handing it over, and carry on enjoying it in a convenient, digital form. I took many more photos of the hippo than just that one, but I am now in a hurry to finish this, so one photo will have to do.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Photoers last Sunday

Last Sunday, in among photoing leaning tower cranes and Twentytwo.

I also photoed photoers. I could probably do blog postings for the next fortnight based on nothing but the photos I took that day. Don’t worry, I won’t. But I probably could.

Maybe I am not as keen on photoing photoers as I was a decade ago. Or maybe it is just that there are now lots of other things that I am also keen on photoing, and so my fellow photoers loom smaller in my thoughts when I am now out and about. But they still loom. I still like to photo photoers, whenever the opportunity presents itself:

It was such a lovely day (3.3), and all the better for being a bit misty (3.1 (a lot of zoom in that one, I think)). There was lots of interesting hair (1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 3.1, and best of all 3.2). There was even a very old-school small dedicated digital camera (1.2), of the kind that has been totally replaced by the mobile phone (unless, like this old guy, you have your old-school digital camera and you like to keep using it – this makes a lot of sense to old guy me.)

My keenness to photo architecture just grows and grows. I notice, and like, a new building, and from then on want to photo it from all angles and distances, basically from wherever I can see it, and aligned with whatever else I can find that is aligned with it.

I also delight in photoing architecture which is on the screens of my fellow photoers. The guy in 1.2, in addition to having interesting hair, is photoing the Boomerang.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Twentytwo

Last Sunday, I photoed those wonky looking cranes. I also took this photo:

That’s not at all what I think, but lots of people do think that those City of London Big Things are indeed follies. Follies being a show that the National Theatre, that concrete thing on the right, was advertising when I walked past it.

I find the Big Things of the City hard to keep track of, given that I do try. Let’s have a closer look at those vertical concrete lumps, that look they will turn into something very big:

There you go. Once you have a name like that, the gates of the Internet open.

So, what’s the City of London about to look like next? The most useful answer I got was this:

That being the picture at the top of a Londonist posting from last July.

Quote:

Based on the visuals, these projects are a mixed bag of ho-hum and coo-wow. Taken together, they make for a crowded cluster that’ll almost entirely obscure the much-loved Gherkin building, once so dominant on the skyline.

A particularly coo-wow part of the story being the Scalpel. See above.

The rather ungainly 22 Bishopsgate, which is going up where the Helter Skelter would have gone until the financing for it collapsed, is going to be the tallest Big Thing in London, for a short while, just until that big boxy tower (“1 Undershaft”) with the diagonals on it goes even higher.

22 Bishopsgate will have a free viewing platform, according to this report from two years ago:

At the top of the building will be a double-height public viewing gallery, which will have dedicated lifts, be free to the public and sit alongside a two-storey public restaurant and bar.

I can’t wait, as people say when they’re just going to have to wait and are actually quite capable of waiting, in a state of impeccable mental equanimity.

This is the kind of building of which it will be said: The view from 22 Bishopsgate is magnificent. From 22 Bishopsgate, you will not see 22 Bishopsgate. They used to say this about the National Theatre.

I sseem to recall taking some closer-up photos of all this activity a few months back. I must take another look at those. And … I just did. June 3rd, earlier this year.

I particularly like this one:

Very stylish.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The leaning tower cranes of London

I love cranes, especially those big tower cranes they use to build Big Things. So tall. But so thin. But they do trouble me. How do they stay up? Why don’t they ever fall over? Well, they do, sometimes. But mostly they don’t.

And, as I couldn’t help noticing when I was out and about last Sunday, these tower cranes often lean over, in a way that looks like it is asking for headline-making trouble.

Consider one of these cranes, the one on the right, that’s leaning over, about four degrees off of the vertical. How does that not fall over? (Thank you vertical lamp post for telling us what vertical is.)

Well, I’m guessing these people know what they’re doing. No, scrub that, I’d be amazed if they didn’t know what they’re doing. This kind of thing just has to be business as usual, no matter how crazy it may look to mere passers-by. As I discovered when I went looking for other leaning cranes in my photo-archives, and I found one that I had photoed just an hour earlier, on the same walkabout:

I think we may assume that the BT Tower is the very definition of vertical.

In each case, the crane is bent backwards by the big concrete blocks that compensate them for the lifting job they do with the other end of their tops. But when no lifting is happening, the compensating weight has no weight to compensate … it. And the result can look very scary.

No London cranes have been reported collapsing during the last few days. So, like I say, no problem.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Pont-Aven et ses environs

I got bogged down semi-working on a succession of postings that never got finished. So here is a quota photo, picked out the archives pretty much at random:

There I was, trawling through a huge clutch of photos taken somewhere in Brittany, in June 2011, but not knowing where they were of. Then that photo presented itself, and all was clarified.

Memo to self: always photo signs, maps, signposts, in fact anything that will later tell me what I was photoing and where. I know, I know, cameras will give you map references, if you ask them nicely. But I’m a twentieth century boy. I like actual maps

Preferably with little signs on them that say: you are here. Or in this particular case, vous êtes ici, which I don’t think the above maps do have. Quel dommage.

I recently started a new directory called “You are here”, for all such map photos.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Pavlova is back

I had a nice surprise today. As time passes, the number of places I can buy the Gramophone and the BBC Music Mag keeps on diminishing, one of the few that remains being W.H.Smith in Victoria Station. It was once again a beautifully lit late afternoon, and when I stepped outside the station concourse, I encountered this beautiful sight:

Yes, the wraps have come off Pavlova. And far sooner than I had been expecting.

Several of the above photos feature the new Nova building. This fine edifice was awarded this year’s Carbuncle Cup. The dreary grumblers who award this award think that it’s a badge of shame, but I generally find it, and its accompanying runner-up collections, to be a great source of information about interesting and often excellent new buildings. Nova is wonderful, I think. I intend (although I promise nothing), to say more about this enjoyably showy yet elegant addition to Victoria’s mostly rather lumpish architecture.

In 3.2, I got lucky with an airplane.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A good day

Today was mostly a dull day, unsuited to photoing, by me at any rate. But late in the afternoon, I realised I needed to get out there to purchase a new SD card reader, what with the existing one having become too undependable. I could usually get it working, eventually, but who needs that? I needed a card reader that didn’t need any juggling and wiggling and mucking about with, but just worked first time. And now I have it. I also took a detour to Sloane Square to meet up with a friend, before journeying to Curry’sPCWorldCarphoneWarehouse in Tottenham Court Road.

Equally good, the late in the afternoon today turned out to be very photogenic. The light was beautiful. Always it’s the light. The sky was in that cold clear state where every vapour trail hangs about, and it looked like someone had been scribbling on it with a big box of white chalks of different sizes.

I took photos, of course, and here are a few of the ones I liked best. The first three were on the way to Sloane Square. The last one, the sunset, was taken outside Warren Street tube.

Not much happens in the sky in 1.2, but I like it anyway. There’s something about those little ladders that you see on roofs. I see that, in the case of this particular ladder, there are birds that agree with me about this.

AndI love that fake building in 2.1, on the outside of the real building that I think they’re refurbishing or rebuilding or cleaning something, just off Sloane Square.

What makes the sunset worthy of inclusion is the low cloud that joins in, making it look like something’s on fire. Plus, there are cranes.

All the photos I took transferred themselves to my mainframe, first time, clean as a whistle. No juggling or wiggling. Just plug in the reader. Shove in the card. Done.

And earlier in the day I got some other stuff done too. A good day.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Bounty Bars for Alfie Saggs

Yesterday GodDaughter One invited me to join her for one of her Moves, from Stonebridge Lock, up the River Lee Navigation, to Enfield. The boaters of London have to keep moving. They aren’t allowed to stay in the one spot for ever, which I bet thins down the numbers. Plus, it makes sure that the canals have lots of canal boats chugging about on them for the likes of me to photo. It’s quite a subtle rule, I think.

I took many photos. Here are some that commemorate the life and work of Alfie Saggs, the lock keeper of Pickett’s Lock, which was renamed “Alfie’s Lock” in 2015:

Alfie Saggs is well known to London’s canal boaters, but the story was all new to me. Read about Alfie Saggs here. Apparently Alfie liked Bounty Bars, and so Bounty Bars were how the boaters expressed their appreciation of his work:

It’s good that this celebration of his life’s work was something that Alfie Saggs himself was able to enjoy, and that it didn’t happen only when he died, just three weeks ago:

I photoed a lot of signs yesterday. Signs are very evocative and very informative. When I browse through directories of past wanderings, I am always glad of signs. They tell me exactly where I was, the way that mere landscape and waterways cannot with nearly so much certainty.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Self storage is a strange expression

Yes. I ran it by Adriana plus her Plus One (Perry de H), at that feast I reported on yesterday, and it turns out that I’m not the only one who finds the phrase “self storage” …

… to be rather odd. (That’s this.)

I know what self storage is. It’s the name given to the process of ridding your self of some of the crap by which your self is currently surrounded and impeded, without actually chucking it away irrevocably. In particular, when your self is in between locations, or when your self has moved from a big place to a smaller place, your stuff, or your excess stuff, needs to be stored somewhere.

But self storage, taken literally, sounds like you are parking your self in a warehouse and for the duration, your life will consist only of all the extraneous crap.

You become like a zombie or something. I can understand people wanting to put their mere selves to one side while earning a living. That might make a rather profitable business. But while actually, you know, … trying to live … ?

Odd.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog