Time for some more horizontality:
Click on that to get the 1000×750 original bigger picture, which I found here.
Notice the title of the posting. Hartley really is fascinated by colour, whether present, as here (in the sky), or absent, as is the case for the black and white birds here.
Interesting that stripping out the context, which makes it that bit clearer that these are birds, makes these birds that little bit harder to see clearly, as birds.
This is not an advert for a book. Well, it is, but that’s not my purpose in showing it here. My angle is my niece, the crime fiction writer Roz Watkins, who is quoted here, enthusing about the book:
The point being that, with what seems to me like remarkable speed, Roz has turned herself into someone whose opinion about other people’s writing is considered worth quoting.
I found the above graphic at her Twitter feed, along with her thanks for having been described as “the great Roz Watkins” by a grateful publisher. Everything about Roz’s public and social media presence says to me, and I am sure to everyone else who is following her, that she is very serious about her writing career. Deadly serious, you might say.
This matters, because readers of crime fiction need to know that, if they invest their time and curiosity and shelf space, to say nothing of their cash, in a leading character, this investment will pay off. The energetic and upbeat way that Roz presents herself says that there will be plenty more books about her lead detective. There is already a second Meg Dalton tale coming out next April, and if several more Meg Daltons do not follow, at a speed no faster than (but no slower than) is consistent with the maintenance of quality, I for one will be very surprised.
I follow the actor James Dreyfus on Twitter, because I liked him in Gimme Gimme Gimme and The Thin Blue Line, and because his opinions seem to be refreshingly un- and often anti-PC.
Dreyfus recently tweeted about a device that the owner of a blind dog had made for the dog, to stop the dog bumping his nose into things, and instead bumping the device into things before his nose got there. It looks like a sort of horizontal halo, with a curve curving out in front of the dog’s nose. As a result, the blind dog became willing to wander around, whereas previously he’d been too scared of bumping his nose on things. There’s video, showing how this device works and what a difference it is making.
James Dreyfus is in favour of kindness to animals, as am I, and he complimented the owner for his kindness and inventiveness, as do I.
When I went a-googling on the subject of blind dogs, I discovered that you can actually buy a device like this, as one of Dreyfus’s commenters points out. It’s called a halo guide, although it doesn’t do much in the way of guiding. It just takes the hurt out of bumping into things. But, it is sort of guiding, because presumably the dog gets to learn his way around.
But, these halo guides are quite expensive, and anyway, how would you know beforehand what are they called, or even that such a thing already exists? How do you go looking? I got lucky. (Before I realised that a commenter had said this.)
However, what I was trying to find out was if any blind dogs are assisted by guide dogs. But if you google that, Google just sees “blind” “guide” “dogs” and assumes the dogs are for blind humans, as they mostly are of course. Try telling Google that you want to know about a guide dog and a blind dog. Can’t be done. I couldn’t do it, anyway.
Remember those performing horses of Warwick Castle, galloping up and down on a thin rectangular arena, telling the story of the Wars of the Roses. Course you do. I showed you a spread of photos of them, but wasn’t that impressed with how those photos came out.
Well, after the show, all of us friends and family of one of the performers went backstage, so to speak, to shake hands with the guys in their armour and to say hello also to the horses.
And the photos I took of the horses seemed to me rather better:
It helped that the horses were standing still. It also helped that the background was much easier to choose and mostly looked quite different from the horses heads.
I also prefer the way horses look when they aren’t wearing complicated costumes. There’s nothing like quite like a horse, unclothed, in sunshine.
That hoods that a couple of the horses are wearing are not cruel. They’re to keep the flies off their eyes.
The actual war horses that fought the Wars of the Roses would have been a lot stockier and heavier than these horses. These ones are retired race horses. Which is okay, because they are actors.
More and more of my photo-time is spent collating the photos I have already taken. Last night, for instance, I went looking for (more) photos of London taxis with adverts on them. There is something especially appealing, to me anyway, about a large number of objects all exactly the same shape, but each decorated differently. (Some time, I must go searching for my photos of elephants.)
Equally appealing, to me, were those Gormley Men (LINK TO THE OLD BLOG). In that case, each Man was the same, and undecorated in the more usual and rather bland sculpture way. But, each one was in a different place and a different sort of setting. My Gormley Men photos did not need collating, because Gormley had already collated them, by putting all his Men in the same part of London at the same time. Therefore my photos of the Gormley Men mostly collated themselves.
Not so the elephants, or taxis. When looking for taxis, I am looking for taxis photoed in the course of all manner of different photo-expeditions each with their own directories.
But my point is that in the course of all this taxi-collating, I was clicking through literally thousands of non-taxi photos, and I kept coming across non-taxi photos that I particularly liked. Like (like as in “such as” – this is not a command) this one, for instance, taken last June:
I like doing modified cliches in writing, and I also like them photographically. A view, for instance, of some London Thing that has been photoed to death, but put beside or in front of or behind something that is not so usual. Most photoers would regard the above scaffolding as a problem rather than any sort of solution, to the Eros-has-been-photoed-to-death problem.
The scaffolding’s wrapping has the effect of clearing away all the usual clutter from Piccadilly Circus and replacing it with something a lot like sky on a dull day. It puts Eros in an empty field in the countryside, you might say. And yes I know, I like clutter. But not always.
Here is another modified cliché photo:
The Wheel has been photoed to death, and that’s a view I regularly see – and regularly photo – of it, from the point where Strutton Ground meets Victoria Street, looking down Victoria Street towards Parliament Square and beyond. But that sky behind The Wheel made The Wheel look amazing, on that particular day in January of this year.
Finally, one of many photos I took this year of Battersea Power Station:
The Power Station and (if you are a craniac like me) its crane cluster are the clichés. And if you want to take the sting out of a cliché, one way is to reflect it in something. At that point its extreme recognisability becomes more a virtue and less of a bore. Its very clichéness becomes helpful to the photo.
This photo was taken from the upstream side of the Power Station, where there is already a big chunk of new flats up and running, with accompanying tasteless sculpture, coffee serving places and the like. All sparked, I believe, by the new USA Embassy.
This photo of mine turns Battersea Power Station upside down. I’ve always thought that an upside down Battersea Power Station would make a rather good table. But, until now I never thought to go looking for such a table on the www. Here we go. That took about three seconds, so I bet there are plenty more that are cheaper. This guy had the same idea, but those two links were all I could quickly find concerning this notion.
Here is another modified cliché photo of Battersea Power Station, the modification this time being smoke.
Come to think of it, all those London taxi photos I’ve been digging up are also modified cliché photos, aren’t they? London taxi = cliché, adverts = modification.
Over the summer, a friend of mine was performing in a show at Warwick Castle about the Wars of the Roses. And early last August a gang of her friends and family went there to see this, me among them. It was a great show, albeit wall-to-wall Tudor propaganda, and a great day out.
Warwick Castle is quite a place, being one of Britain’s busiest visitor attractions. It’s No 9 on this list.
I of course took a ton of photos, and in particular I photoed the horses in this show, the crucial supporting actors, you might say. The stage was out of doors, of course, and long and thin, the audience on each side being invited to support each side in the wars. Long and thin meant that the horses had room to do lots of galloping.
None of the photos I took were ideal, but quite a few were okay, if okay means you get an idea of what this show was like:
The basic problem, I now realise, is that the horse heads were at the same level as the audience on the opposite side to my side. As Bruce the Real Photographer is fond of saying, when photoing people, you start by getting the background right. And I guess he’d say the same of horses. Well, this time, for these horses, I’m afraid I didn’t.
So it was a case of nice legs, shame about the faces. (That link is to a pop song from my youth, the chorus of which glued itself to my brain for ever. I particularly like the bit where they sing: “Shame about the boat race”.)
I recommend the show’s own Real Photographer, for better photos, potted biogs of the leading historic characters, and a little bit about the enterprise that did this show.
Somewhat over a year ago I wrote about When what I think it is determines how ugly or beautiful I feel it to be, in connection with this building:
This is described, at any rate by its owners and its various occupants, as The Peak.
And that photo of mine above, taken from the top of the Westminster Cathedral Tower, is my Peak photo which best illustrates the oddly deceptive appearance of this decidedly odd-looking building. It looks like a 60s rectangular lump, to which 90s or 00s curvatures, on the right as we look, and on the top, have been added. But, as I discovered when concocting that previous posting, the whole thing was built all at once. It looks like a two-off building rather than a one-off building, but looks deceive, or deceived me, for a while. Two-off good, one-off bad, was how I had been thinking. It was two-off, so (aesthetically) good. Organic, additive, blah blah. But, what was I supposed to think, on discovering that it was really an inorganic and un-additive one-off?
Now, buried in my photo-archives, I find this photo, taken on October 28th 2008, which confirms that The Peak is indeed a one-off, because here it is (here it was), all being built in one go. There really is no doubt about it:
When I took this photo, I was a lot more interested in the anti-pigeon spikes on top of those street lamps, and on top of the railway sign, than I was in the building work in the background.
How I now feel about The Peak, aesthetically, is that I still rather like it, if only because I have paid so much attention to it over the years, and feel sort of proprietorial towards it, as you would towards a somewhat clumsy child that you have adopted. (That feeling applies, for me, to a great many London buildings.)
Also, whatever else you think of it, when you see it, you at once know where you are. It is very recognisable, recognisability being a quality in buildings which I appreciate more and more. “Iconic” is the rather silly word that estate agents and suchlike use to allude to this quality. But they have a point, even if they use a silly word to point to their point. That “you could be anywhere” feeling is not a good one, in a city or anywhere else.
“Other creatures” (see below) because of the pigeon scaring.
When I google “crane”, what I want to see is tall pointy things made of metal for shifting stuff around on building sites, not birds posing en masse in a lake. You can’t always get what you want.
A further illustration of that same principle came when, this morning, I had reason to google “canada goose”, because this time I actually wanted to learn about a bird. I photoed some lines of birds a while back, in Rye, and blog pal 6k commented today that they were probably Canada geese. And because 6k backed this up with some migration info that seemed quite informed, this sounded right, despite the fact that Rye is nowhere near to Canada.
So I googled “canada goose”.
But what I got was lots of expensive jackets with furry hoods. Even after two pages of links to stuff about the jackets, there was literally no mention of any bird.
You can’t sell a bird for a thousand quid, I guess. Or, not a bird like a Canada goose. I am not the customer of Google. I am Google’s product. Overpriced jacket sellers are Google’s customer.
However, if you google canada geese, sanity is restored. And I think Canada geese migrating is even better. It would appear from the images you get if you look there that Canada geese do often form great big mobs, fish shoal style. It can take them a while to get organised into lines.
If I had a pound for every time someone’s told me that they like to photo The Wheel from Tottenham Court Road, I wouldn’t have any more pounds than I already have, because it’s just me that likes to do this. But, I really like it.
I’m talking about photos like this one:
Great light there, don’t you think? It could be an oil painting. Exactly as it came out of the camera, no Photoshop(clone)ing. That dates from April of 2015. As you can see, that weird entrance to Tottenham Court Road Tube station was still under construction.
Here’s a couple more, taken in 2016 …:
… and in 2017:
That crane there should have told me that something ominous was in the works, but actually I was taken by surprise.
Take a look at what the same scene looked like today:
That’s right. The Wheel is about to be blotted out of this particular picture.
I moved nearer, which moved the top of the Wheel down to the bottom gap in the structure:
I took a final close up:
And that may well be the last time that I ever photo The Wheel from Tottenham Court Road.
Busy day doing other things besides this, but here are a couple of Other Creatures snaps, the Other Creatures in this case being birds.
Last Saturday evening, I and some friends were in the southern coastal town (one of the so-called Cinque Ports) of Rye. As it was getting dark, a big line of birds flew over us. I snatched this shot, which you can get all of by clicking on this rotated and horizontalised slice:
Then another squadron of birds flew over, this time in a V shape, which means that this next horizontalisation is a bit less thin:
So, two lines, joined at the front, all following the one top dog bird.
Again, click to get the original.
Rye is a “port” that isn’t much of a port anymore, because a thousand years of river mud has pushed the sea away from it. The houses in my two photos are recent, where there used to be sea, a bit away from the centre. The centre, i.e. the whole of the old town, is on a hill, which used to be an island.
I think the birds are geese, but I really do not know. For the benefit of birdophiles, this full-size crop from out of another photo I took, of the first line of birds above, should narrow it down:
Those look far too big to be – I don’t know – starlings. And, I surmise, rather too well organised. Starlings just swirl about in a big mob, like fishes, right? Come to think of it, do any fishes line up like these big birds? I ought to be asking the internet this, but I’m off to bed.
