Category: Reflections

Michael Jennings London photos

I have done a lot less photo-wandering of late than I would have liked, so I have kept meaning to post a Michael Jennings London photo here, to fill that gap here. But, I’ve never quite got around to doing this. Time to correct that, with a gallery of some of his recent photos, as already shown by Michael, one at a time, on Facebook:

The same circumstances that have had me staying at home more than usual have caused Michael to be staying in London more than usual.

All of the above were photoed, I believe, with a mobile phone, during the late afternoon or evening, that being an interesting time of day for light, especially when natural light and artificial light are about even in strength. (Is that why it’s called “evening”? Could be.) This also accounts for the predominantly sepia colouring that one normally associates with nostalgia-prompting photos of times long gone.

Will there be nostalgia for Lockdown, if and when it ever ends? Probably yes, on the same principle that some people, for accidental reasons, remember WW2 with some fondness, in among all the grief and stress. Many will remember liking the peace and quiet, even as they realise that it could not be allowed to last. Michael himself has spoken to me of the cleanness of the air. Not least because it allows photoing to be better.

Big Jim’s Trims behind its windows

This afternoon in Wilton Road:

It was the Walken faces that got my attention, as was surely the idea. Big Jim, or maybe just one of his hirelings, was behind the glass, doing a trim, and I was with someone. So this was all done in haste. But despite all the reflections and the confusions, I like them, and partly because of all the reflections and the confusions. What with windows being such a big deal in architecture these days. They create a lot of the particular look and feel of our times, the look being reflections, and the feel being the resulting confusions.

It’s late. All I’m really doing is showing you some half decent photos that I did today, rather than photos from my previous life.

Here’s the Big Jim’s Trims website. It’s a franchise. So, that won’t be Big Jim himself, just a guy with tattoos on his arms.

And here’s what that Barbicide sign is about. I can make no sense of it myself, but if you want to try, click on that, and I wish you luck. “Barbicide” ought to mean killing barbers, or maybe killing barbie dolls. Is that a clue?

A triple selfie

I thought about calling this posting “Beauty”, but decided to go with actual accuracy rather than attempted comedy:

A photo done on a very bright and hence very reflective day, in August 2008. No idea exactly where, but somewhere by the River, upstream from me, out west in Putney or some such spot. See also this earlier posting, about an American lady photoer of the last century who also enjoyed this kind of thing, with another selfie by me.

I can now proceed with the rest of my day, in the knowledge that I have already put something here.

Window pane sucker

Today I did the longest walk I’ve done in a month. I could show you a photo from that, but honestly, it would be quite the effort, after all my earlier efforts.

So this, when I got home, was a very nice surprise. GD2S, whom regulars here may recognise from that acronym and who for the benefit of irregulars is a lady friend of mine, sent me this photo that she had photoed, of men at work, with a window pane sucker and a crane:

Manhandling big sheets of glass into place on the outside of buildings is central to what the latest architecture now is, as anyone who pays attention to these things will already know. Typically, these days, the outside of a building is covered in sheets of glass so big that getting them up inside the building would, as likely as not, be impossible. So, the skills you see being applied in the above photo are doubtless finely honed. Especially when you consider how expensive, in cash and confusion, a mistake would be.

Come to think of it, here is a photo I photoed late this very afternoon, illustrating the exact trend I’m talking about:

There, in one photo, is that trend. In the foreground, we see Architectural Modernism from the Concrete Monstrosity era, with its windows all of a manageable size and uniformity and frankly not looking that expensive. Lose one of those window panes and getting another wouldn’t have been much of a bother. But in the background, rising up in the new new iconic style, is One Blackfriars, entirely covered in sheets of no doubt fabulously expensive glass, each sheet a different size and shape, capable of resisting all that the weather can throw at it. I presume that a fabulously more elaborate version of what is to be seen in the first of these photos is how all that glass got itself into place.

But, as of now, I am too knackered to pursue the matter, and if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Whatever the real story, I still very much like that first photo there. I don’t know where it was photoed Somewhere in London, with an iPhone, is all I can tell you.

I really like all the reflections in that photo, in the regular windows, and in the new window that’s just arriving.

Urban picturesque with Shard

Same formula as the previous post. Ooh that’s nice:

But puzzle. What is it? We see the Shard there, but where are we? What direction are we looking at the Shard from?

Context:

We are at the Dome end of the Dangleway, looking across the Greenwich Peninsular towards the towers of Docklands, with central London beyond. The City cluster is not visible, but the Shard is.

I still don’t know what that blob in the middle of the sky is. Mercifully, it isn’t to be seen on any of the other photos I photoed at this time.

The tall pole with sticking out bits in the original photos is for hanging banners, saying things like: “London Olympics 2012”, 2012 being when all these photos were photoed. Now, there are Machines-For-Living-In Things in the foreground, next to and just south of the Dome, and a great many more bigger Things in the Docklands Tower Cluster.

The photo on the right, featuriing the Dome, was photoed as I began a Dangleway journey across the River to Victoria Dock.

I love that part of London. An essential part of that being because it keeps on changing.

More London

Back in March 2019, on the same day and just before I photoed these photos, I photoed this photo:

What I like about that is what I also find weird about it, which is the way that this metal circle of 3D map information kind of hovers weightlessly over the pavement.

Luckily I soon found another photo which explained this weird effect with logic:

But now, there was another mystery. What is “morelondon”? Turns out it’s More London, which was the place where I was.

Here are some more photos I photoed at the same time as the two above:

The reason I made them look so small in this posting is in the hope that you will be deceived about what is going on, in photos 1 and 4 there, 1 especially, 4 in a general way, but 1 in a very particular way. Click and you’ll surely see what I mean.

The strange coloured-in statues are, I now learn, by Stephan Balkenhol. More about him here. At the time I recall wondering if they were Art, or just advertising of some kind. Art, it would seem.

Today I had my hair cut

Indeed. My Lockdown locks, to coin a phrase that I bet others have coined too (yes), were today lopped off.

Here is a pair of selfies, taken before and after the haircut I had this afternoon:

In haircut shops they often, as in my local one, have mirrors that enable you to see the back of your hair as well as the front. So, clickety click. I don’t think this was vanity. I just wanted a souvenir of this weird little moment in this weirdest of weird years. I am one of many men, men especially, with a weird hair story to tell now-abouts.

For the last few weeks, my hair had never been as long since my teens or twenties, and this time around, it turned washing into a dreary ordeal of slight but never ceasing hair loss, handful after handful. I say hand full; what I really mean is: never quite empty. If I were a stand-up comic I’d turn this into a gag about how, as I have got older, my hands have become stronger. And I suppose you could say that I am, among other things, a sit-down comedian and I just did this gag. If I did, it was little consolation for the hair-related annoyances of the last few weeks. The only cure for my condition was today’s shearing.

I left a bigger tip than usual. Cutting long hair is no harder and takes no longer than cutting shorter hair, and I just wanted most of my hair gone. Nothing fancy. Just get rid of it please, as per usual. But from where I was sitting I was paying by the yard and I got many more yards than usual of value.

Pavlova reflected … twice … and now here

One of the things I have learned from my stats page, which has been operating since the end of April of this year, is that quite a few of the people who come here like to rootle around in the archives. This makes sense. Much of goes up here doesn’t date. A pretty photo is a pretty photo, no matter when it was taken.

So, every so often I do a burst of transferring stuff to here from the old blog, making you liable to bump into it here. (At the old blog, you’re liable to be bombarded with “not secure” propaganda.) And yesterday, I was mostly been concentrating on Pavlova. Some of the postings at the other end of that link have been here quite a while, but several went up here yesterday for the first time.

And my favourite Pavlova photo that I copied across was, this one:

Which originally appeared on the old blog in July 2015.

I liked that photo in July 2015, I like it now, and I believe I’ll like it in 2025. And I hope something similar applies to you, if not with this photo, then maybe with some other photo, or some other bit of verbals, from way back.

Mirror and white

As I said, I didn’t do much photoing when I met up recently with GodDaughter2. But I did do some. Of this dazzling object, for instance, in a shop window:

This is why I love digital photography. I would hate to live with that Thing on a permanent basis. But photoing it was great fun, not least because I had no idea how it would turn out, what with all those reflections.

I called the photos “Silver+White”. But … silver? Is “mirror” a colour? It is, see above, now.

I made me think of Jeff Koons, whose work is of this same sort of tastefulness and restraint, is it not? Has Koons ever done a car like this? I googled “jeff koons silver car”, and got the answer. No, he has never done a car like this. But, he has done a car like this. A BMW as it happens. Again, glad someone photoed it, even if not me. But, definitely wouldn’t want to own it.

A model of London Bridge that is hard to photo

One of the more frustrating of the photo-expeditions I have done in the last few years was one to the Church of St Magnus the Martyr.

I was there, around a year ago. to photo a model of Old London Bridge, which I had found out about in some way that I now forget. And the model was there. That wasn’t the frustration. What was the frustration was that photographically, this model pretty much defeated me. Although clearly visible and clearly identifiable for what it was, it was protected by the photographic equivalent of armour plating, in the form of a very shiny glass box.

I still took lots of photos, and from the selection of those that I now show you, you do get some idea of what sort of model this is and how it looks in its ecclesiastical surroundings:

The less these photos are about the details of the model and the more they are about the model as a whole and its surroundings, the better they are, and I biased my choice of what to post here I had in that direction. So they are worth a click through, if London’s eccentricities and oddities are of interest to you.

I image-googled this model, and the results were not as disappointing as my own efforts but still rather disappointing. This model has been there since 1987, but at no time, then or since, has anyone taken any really classy photos of it, or not any that the internet seems to be have been told about. (If commenters can prove me wrong, I’d be be very happy.)

There are some photos of this model, which are definitely better ones than mine from the point of view of showing the details of the Thing, here. But even that photoer struggled, I think. As did this guy.

It would be nice if this church were to pick itself a Real Photographer, and let him have a go at this Thing, with Real Photographer type lighting, with the glass temporarily removed, and maybe with some specially supplied backgrounds to screen out the church clutter, and also all the uneven light that crashes into the church through its church windows. Maybe let the RP take the whole Thing to a studio of some sort.

That would be nice for the likes of me. But maybe the people running this church already rather resent the number of godless tourists of my sort who already come tramping into their House of God to gawp at and and to photo this bridge model, and who then tramp out again, ever to be seen again unless they want more photos of the model. And the last thing they want is to encourage a whole new flood of such people. If my guess is right, I can’t say I blame them, but it is just a guess and I could be quite wrong.

I could find no reference to this London Bridge model at the church’s own website, but again, that could merely be because I am terrible at searching websites.

There is another picture of this church in an earlier posting I did here about the Monument, showing how near that edifice is to this church.