Photoed by me earlier this evening on my way to a superb evening at Chateau Perry and Adriana, at the 55 Broadway Shopping Mall, aka St James’s Park tube station:
And from BMdot com.
I failed to photo the last thing they wished us, so I say: choose whatever else you would most like.
My camera is pretty good, but it isn’t ideal for me. I only use a bit of it at all regularly, the automatic bit. So if, on a rainy day, I push, by mistake, some stupid knob on it that tells it to stop being automatic, it stops being automatic. And, the automatic focussing refuses to work the way it should. That’s what happened when I thought it had conked out. It’s fine. It was simply obeying orders.
I tried photoing the relevant knobs, first with mirrors and then with my mobile, but the results of all that were a blurry mess. Have you ever tried getting a camera to photo its own arse? And photoing with my mobile is something I need daylight to do half decently.
I got a much better picture of the back of my camera by going to this.
In particular, I draw your attention to this bit:
The knob with AF/AE LOCK on it needs to be pointing at AFS/AFF, and absolutely not at MF. MF means, I presume, Manual Focus. AF means automatic focus. S and the other F mean whatever they mean.
The problem arose when, in the rain and needing to possess three hands, one to hold my bag and two to operate my camera properly, I try to look at the photo I just took. That involves pressing the button with the green arrow on it. To get back to photoing, press DISP. But, what with all the rain and the confusion and only having one hand to both hold the camera and press the knobs on it, I accidentally pushed the AF/AE LOCK knob, and got it pointing at MF. By mistake. I’m guessing this would be why the AF/AE LOCK button includes the word “LOCK”. And this works a treat. I know this now.
Anyway, the upshot (metaphorically speaking) of all this is that my camera went from photos like this, just before I met up with GD2 the day before yesterday …:
… to this, not long after that, after the knob disaster had occurred …:
… and then back to this:
… when I met up with a friend yesterday, in: Hither Green.
So, panic over.
It’s an odd feeling, partially the feeling of massive relief that I won’t have to spend Christmas trying to turn whatever guarantee came with my camera into another camera, and partially the feeling that I am an idiot and that I should pay more attention to the knobs on my camera. Delight and embarrassment all mixed up together.
This is what Americans would call a “learning experience”, and although often all that this means is “total cock-up”, in this particular case they would be right.
Seeing a how this is Friday, and Friday is my day here for cats and other creatures, I don’t want to just leave it at train seats. I have an Other Creature to show to you, that I photoed earlier this evening. This was at Victoria Station, so this is also train related.
The Other Creature was, I am almost certain, a panda:
A few moments after the moment captured above, I actually asked this guy if he’d object to me photoing his panda. I said “bear”, but it didn’t matter. Not him, I said, just the bear. He was fine with this, so I took another photo, of the panda. But the above photo was better, if only because in it, the railway connection is better communicated.
And yes, the panda has stars in its eyes. How about that?
Indeed. I was going through the I Just Like It file, and came across two, independently selected, which make a nice pair.
First, taken in November 2012, the Walkie-Talkie while still under construction, viewed from the top of the Monument:
And second, taken in January 2016, the Monument now just about visible in the scrimmage of smaller London
The Walkie-Talkie looks very big from the top of the Monument.
The Monument looks very small from the top of the Walkie-Talkie.
And while we’re about it, here is another photo that links these two buildings. Taken on that same day in November 2012, back on the ground, with a little sign on the right there, saying “Pudding Lane”.
The Monument remembers those who died in the Great Fire of London of 1666. Pudding Lane, or so I was always told, was where that fire started.
Also, three days after taking that photo of the Monument from above, above, I took this photo of the Monument from below, along with another sign, this time a temporary sign telling me how to get to the Monument:
The way to get to the Monument was not, it would seem, the obvious way to get to the Monument.
Yesterday I showed a photo that I actually took yesterday, rather than last year or last decade. And today I’m doing the same. I’m showing you another photo that I took yesterday:
That’s the inside of the domed roof in the middle of Leadenhall Market in the City of London. This is another of those photos which is a lot easier to take if you have a twiddly screen, such as I always now have.
Here is the next photo I took, to show you which place I mean:
To me, one of the odder things about Leadenhall Market is that all the enterprises plying their trade in it would seem to be obliged by the house rules to proclaim their names in the exact same style and size of lettering. This is not what you get in most shopping centres, which is what this place basically is. But, fair enough: their gaff, their rules. And although in one sense this is uniformity gone a bit mad, in another sense it is variety, because this is not something you see very often.
It is clearly a recent thing, and Wikipedia confirms this:
Between 1990 and 1991 the market received a dramatic redecoration which transformed its appearance, enhancing its architectural character and detail. The redecoration scheme received a special mention in the Civic Trust Awards in 1994.
Ah yes. Commercial, you understand, but not too commercial. The subtle business of not being too businesslike.
I passed through this place on my way to Monument tube, having been wandering towards the City and its Big Things from the Bethnal Green area, enjoying the last daylight of a very fine yesterday. Of which maybe more here later, and of which maybe not more here later. (This blog is also not very businesslike.)
It’s been a while since there’s been any horizontality here. (That isn’t the most recent piece of horizontality here, just one that I happen especially to like.) So, allow me now to correct this, thus:
Click to get the bigger original.
It’s a shop just off Lea Bridge Road, opposite the station. Photoed by me almost exactly one year ago.
The previous posting, with its references to Gaspard de la nuit, had a tenuous Halloween vibe to it. But do I have any recent photos to show you, with a ghostly or spooky angle to them?
I’m afraid the best I can do is a photo of a sign on the side of a boat that I photoed on the day I also took these photos.
Here is the boat:
And here is the sign on the side of it:
I know. Not very scary.
Nevertheless, this points to a real problem of living in a canal boat. Security. As these boats multiply, and as it becomes more chic to live this way, in a manner often practised by people who are away at work for long periods, so too will the number of thieves who have a go at preying on them.
But on reflection, if I was a thief, I think the above sign might put me off. It suggests a concern about resisting thievery, and also a certain willingness to think unconventionally. What if some unsupernatural ghosts have been artificially contrived, to aid in the boat’s defence? Yes, I think I’d try another boat.
Every little helps.
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.
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.
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.