Here:
Lovely. Thank you Twitter.
It’s London, but the colour is Turkish delight. The sky being the chocolate and the sun being the filling.
Category: Roof clutter
Here are some I took earlier
Today was a perfect day for a day out on a big photo-expedition, but for some reason to do with getting older, I didn’t feel up to it. It’s too early to be sure, but I sense that a phase of my life, a phase that consisted of, among other things, exploring and photoing London, may just have come to an end.
So, instead of showing you photos I took today, here are some from an ancient I Just Like Them! Directory:
Taken in 2008 in Trafalgar Sqaure (1.1), in 2012 underneath that rather pointless ski lift thing out east (1.2), in 2014 while those swanky student accommodations were under construction at the far end of Westminster Bridge from Parliament (2.1), and at the top end of Horseferry Road looking at the top of a random building at the top end of Rochester Row (2.2) also in 2014, when all the tree leaves had been shaken off.
Weird Piccadilly photos today
Fortnum & Mason are promoting their tea with their window displays just now, with giant teapots.
Here is a giant teapot made of bits of broken mirror, promoting Royal Blend:
And behind the teapot is me, and Piccadilly, and a woman walking along Piccadilly, into a giant pile of liquid-but-solid tea. Reflections can be very strange.
And then, when I reached Green Park tube, I saw this, in the distance, maximum zoom:
It’s Nova, complete with its crane for cleaning its windows. Weird because the light is so weird. Cloudy, just getting dark, but not dark yet.
I love these window cleaner cranes. Roof clutter above and beyond the call of duty. Best of all are ones like these, which sometimes you see and sometimes not.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Another crowd scene
Yes, here’s another crowd scene, photoed later on the same expedition as I took that earlier crowd scene. (But don’t follow that link. Quicker just to scroll down.)
We are now at Tate Modern. I’m there to get to the top of the extension tower and to photo London. But I pause briefly, to photo this scene:
And later, I chance upon this forgotten photo, and stop, and look, impressed.
I could expand upon the idea that Tate Modern is amusing for lots of people to be in, regardless of the “art” which is the supposed purpose of the building. For many, me included, this “art” is of no consequence. The place is what matters.
Although. Presumably someone thinks that those bits of metal in the foreground of the photo are art.
But I think I am thinking of something else, with this photo, and with that earlier one. What do I like about crowd scenes? In interesting places? Interestingly lit? With colourful backgrounds? I don’t know.
I think it may be the agreeable sight of people who are all recognisably human, and all doing things that humans do, just as cows do what cows do or birds do what birds do. But, they each do these things in their own ways. They are not on parade. I like roof clutter for this sort of reason. A crowd is, you might say, a clutter of people. There are no rules about exactly how they must walk or stand or sit or sprawl. There are merely places where many people find it agreeable or necessary or convenient to be doing such things, but each in their own particular way and particular shape.
But, not sure yet.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
South Kensington roof clutter
Yes, some truly exceptional roof clutter, photoed by me today, just as it was starting to get dark. The buildings all so polite and proper looking, but then on the roof, they go mental:
There is even a bridge in there. That aerial with its big long arms is bizarre. Was with others so had no time to check out what all this stuff was on the roof of.
My thanks to the tree, at the front, for not having stupid leaves all over it, and thus not blocking out this wondrous view.
I find myself in the South Kensington are quite a lot these days, because that’s where I often go to see and hear GodDaughter2 and her RCM pals performing. This time it was two Bach Cantatas. Very good, especially the absurdly young and talented tenor soloist. A first year undergrad, apparently.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Creature photos
A frog outside a supermarket in Brixton – a lion outside some flats off Sloane Square – a swan family at Alton in Hampshire – a sign at Battersea Park station – another swan at Walthamstow Wetlands – an octopus in a shop window – Boudicca’s horse – a book about WW2 I must remember to get on Amazon – the horses on top of the Hippodrome next to Leicester Square tube:
This posting started out with just the top of the Hippodrome, and then I thought, I’ll add some other carbon-based-organism-angled photos, of which there were a few more that I thought I’d include. But getting up to a convenient nine photos took longer than I expected. It turns out I don’t photo creatures as often I thought I did, and as interestingly as I thought I did.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Up on the roof
The view from on top of my block of flats is jot quite high enough to be really great, like, say, the view from the top of the Tate Modern Extension. Plus, there is the great lump that is Hide Tower, right outside my front window, which blocks off a huge chunk of London.
But if the light is playing games, things can get entertaining. While grubbing back in the archives looking for a shot, from my roof, of the now deceased New Scotland Yard building just off Victoria Street, I came across this shot, taken just under two years ago, looking from my roof along Chapter Street, towards Battersea Power Station:
Cranes, roof clutter, vapour trails. Lovely.
I find that I can best photo a sunset, not by photoing the sunset itself, but by photoing it with and behind buildings, and showing what it can do to buildings. In the right light, the most commonplace of buildings can be transformed into something far less commonplace.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
The light and the lights of Victoria Station
Well, I’m making some progress on the WordPress front, and there will be a new BMblog, but meanwhile, the last of the photos I want to show you that I took on Jan 5. I took the tube back home, but chose to get out at Victoria rather than Pimlico, probably to try to buy the Gramophone, which I can now, near to me, only buy there. And because I did that, I was able to feast my eyes on this:
That is the late afternoon sun crashing through where the trains go in an out, and bouncing off various reflective surfaces.
I like how this kind of scene permits bright colours, like those little union jacks, but turns fainter colours monochrome, like when that little girl in a red coat appears in Schindler’s List.
I particularly like this little part of the scene:
What I love about sights like that is the way the sun turns those lights on. No electricity is involved. It’s pure sunlight.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
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
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.