I mis-titled this above as DogFrisby. Not that this matters, but it’s bee not by.
The photo that the above was sliced out of is even better. Real photography at its most real.
Category: Other creatures
Parrot as toothpick
Here. Nine seconds of video.
An Other creatures posting, not just because it’s a parrot picking human teeth, but because the human teeth are those of a Fox.
If ever a sign needed a vocative comma …
That’s what Newcastle language teacher Mike Metcalf tweeted about the sign in this photo:
Quite right. Are we Satan’s Brainwashed Cattle? And must we wake up? Or are we supposed to wake up a flock herd of Satan’s Brainwashed Cattle, in the event that we encounter such a thing? Either way, I would have thought that it would surely be better for Satan’s Brainwashed Cattle to remain slumbering.
I don’t know where this photo was photoed.
Bird and bird shadow
Charlie Waite hits the photographic spot for me hits the photographic spot for me:
(Again.)
Verticals. Horizontals. Excellent shadow. Symmetry. Beautiful blue and grey and white colours.
A commenter comments:
Any thoughts on cropping out the bird in flight altogether.
Question mark. Well, there’s nothing to stop you doing that if you’d like to. I tried it. Yes, quite nice.
I did a Charlie Waite twitter search. Reommended. Not the same as his mere twitter home.
Churchill War Rooms gallery
One of the nice things about people coming to stay is that you often find yourself visiting touristy but interesting things that you’d never quite get around to seeing on your own. Later, maybe, but not today. It’ll always be there won’t it?
Touristy things like: the Churchill War Rooms. In February of last year, nearly two years ago now, GodDaughter2’s Dad was in town, and that’s one of the places we went.
And I took the odd photo or two. Well, more like 350, of which here are 84:
A big spread of photos like that would have been an impossibly tedious operation to stick up at Brian Micklethwait’s Previous Blog, and an equally tedious business for you to be scrutinising. But now, here they all are, and you can do the usual, clicking through as quickly or as slowly as you like. Enjoy. Especially if you rarely or never visit London, and have no plans to see this place for real.
There’s a million things I could say about it. One of the more striking of the photos above is photo 33, which shows how thick the concrete was protecting everything, from all but the most direct of direct hits, that passage that you see having been drilled through afterwards, when they were turning these working spaces into a place people could visit and circulate around.
Other talking points? Well, lots of signs and souvenirs, often signs made into souvenirs, for sale in the inevitable gift shop. And also: signs that are not Original but Modern. Signs with lots of words. Which is appropriate, given how important Churchill knew words (see photo 80) to be.
Most of the human figures that you see are not real; they’re sculpted. And “Other creatures” is in the category list because, inevitably, there are bulldogs.
I did all the hard work for this posting before I got ill, and I’m still not fully recovered. So, please continue to wish me well.
Quota creature
The Smoke-Breathing Godzilla Christmas Tree
Here. One of these. (“You want one and you know it.” (Also: “Context is for weaklings.”))
Flying horses
Found at the blog of Chuck Pergiel, who has occasionally commented here:
Read the whole posting here.
Boundary Dragon – Boundary Dragon shadow
I love the City of London Boundary Dragons, and I am pretty sure that the photo below is my favourite City of London Boundary Dragon photo that I have ever photoed:
That is one of the two Dragons on the south end of London Bridge. I photoed this photo on August 12th 2008.
When a strong shadow and weirdness are involved, the Thing itself is usually clear, but the shadow is weird. But in the above photo, the Thing is weird. And the shadow makes everything clear again. Which is an effect that I especially like. And I think we can tell from the framing that I noticed this at the time. This was not a fluke, except in the sense that this effect was there to be noticed and I had the luck to notice it. What I mean is: I did notice it at the time. It didn’t just happen to show up in a photo that I photoed for other reasons, or for no reason.
And what of that building reflected in the window? I rather think that may now have been obliterated, to make way for The Boomerang. Memo to self: go back and do the same photo again, preferably at the same time of day. On August 12th 2020 perhaps? But even without the shadow, a different (or maybe the same) reflection would be worth a go.
I really like this bus filled with architecture
As quite often noted here, I am fond of photoing tourist crap. So it was that, earlier this month, I photoed a whole clutch of photos like this:
Well, I like them. But in among them was a photo that I now think to have a bit more to it. This photo:
What I like about this is that cameras these days don’t just have better eyesight than I do; they have better eyesight than almost everyone. And by zooming in on this bus filled with Big Things, well, it’s a bit like looking through a rather weak microscope. But still one strong enough to show you something you don’t regularly see. You know what it is, but you don’t ever look closely at such a thing.
With things like flowers and insects, we all get to see lots of close-up zoom photos, because they are considered worthy of the close-up zoom treatment. There are competitions if you photo photos like that.
But tourist crap, close-up? You don’t see that very often, do you?
So, I don’t just like this photo, I really like it.
Also, note how Portcullis House made it into the bus, entirely because it is across the road from Big Ben.