The previous posting concerned August 4th 2017. Here are two photos I took on August 4th 2018, of scaffolding:
Another posting in what might in due course become a series, although I promise nothing.
Shame the weather on August 4th 2018 wasn’t as good as it had been exactly one year earlier.
Two years ago to the day, GodDaughter2 arranged for the two of us to visit the top of the Shard. I paid. She organised.
Sadly, she couldn’t organise a bright cloudless day for us. It was muggy and dim, instead of bright.
I got quite a few good photos, but the photo I remember most clearly from that expedition was this nearly great near miss:
That’s the original, no cropping or photoshop(clone)ing. That was it.
And, it badly needs an extra slice of land at the horizon, so I could rotate it into perfect horizontality, and crop it to have just a small slice of land. As it is, there’s no saving it.
What I still like about that photo, and what I would have loved had it been the masterpiece that actually got away, is the way that one of the biggest problems of photoing from the Shard, the shininess of the windows, has become a feature instead of a bug. Oh well.
But now look at this. I only (re)discovered this one today, while searching out stuff that was exactly x years ago to the day where x can vary. This one was also photoed on that very same expedition and from the top of that same Shard, and it also features a reflection:
Once again, no editing, no messing. That is it, straight from the camera. And how about that?!?!
We are looking out across the River, in a north easterly direction to the Tower of London (bottom left) and beyond. But, wondrously reflected, unmistakably, bang in the middle (so I must have been doing this on purpose): the Walkie Talkie. Click. Forget. On to the next one. And I only just rediscovered it. Had no memory of this at all.
The rule with photoing, or at any rate a rule I follow, is that there can be as much confusion as you like, the more the merrier, so long as at least something is clear. And the Walkie Talkie is clear, because it is such a distinct shape. Other photos I photoed by photoing straight at the Walkie Talkie tell me that this is a genuine reflection of the thing itself, rather than – I don’t know – just picture of it or something.
And I know that you could probably do this very easily with your photoshop(clone). But, I couldn’t. And I didn’t.
On the 29th of last month I journeyed to Maze Hill railway station, walked north towards the river, just as I had planned, and in due course got to this spot:
I’m looking at signs. And I’m looking past the signs in the direction I intend to go. I love these signs that London has everywhere. And presumably also every great city in the rich world.
Let’s take a close look at the sign on the right in the above photo:
As you can perhaps see, this sign contains chunks of written information about places nearby. Chunks of the sort that I do not like to spend time reading direct from their signs, but which I do like to photo and then read later. Chunks like this:
So, the Isle of Dogs got its name from Henry III’s dogs, did it? Well, maybe. This is a fun maybe-fact, I think. Henry III was the one who had to escape the clutches of, and then execute, Roger Mortimer, Mortimer being the one who toppled Henry III’s Dad, Henry II. Henry II did badly. Henry III, at any rate by the standards that his subjects cared about, did very well, at least at first. What this means is that Henry II fought against his own nobles, in England. Henry III fought against the French, in France. Given how much pillaging and plundering and sheer destruction was involved in medieval warfare, in order to deny supplies to the enemy, Henry III’s wars were greatly preferred by the English.
(MUCH LATER: The above paragraph is mostly bollocks. Henry III was indeed the one with the dogs. But, I was muddling Henry III and Henry II with Edward III and Edward II. It was Edward III who fought against the French and whose Dad Edward II was deposed by Mortimer. Sorry. Now, back to the original posting, which still makes some sense, even though it is nothing to do with what it says on the sign:)
I know what you’re thinking. Why not just not have any wars, anywhere? Ridiculous. What century are you living in? This one? There you go. No wonder you just don’t get it.
However the sign is now out of date on the subject of the tallest tower in Britain. That was indeed, once upon a time, One Canada Square. But the Shard has since, metaphorically speaking, toppled it. See here for details of that story. The soon-to-be-completed 22 Bishopsgate is already also a lot taller than One Canada Square.
However, I am puzzled about whether we are at Anchor Iron Wharf, as claimed by the sign on the left in the first photo in this posting, or on Ballast Quay. Many the former ends on the left with sign on the left, and the latter begins on the right with the sign on the right.
The right sign also contains a map, which is rather faded (what with it being a rather ancient sign), but this had the effect of throwing my intended journey into sharper relief:
This map even helpfully shows, with a thin dotted pink line, the very first part of my walk from Maze Hill station to the River. Having thus arrived at where it says YOU ARE HERE, my plan was to follow the thicker squiggly pink line north, beside the River, all the way around the north of the Dome, and then either go across the River on the Dangleway, or else just go home on the tube from North Greenwich.
And that’s what I did.
Quota gallery time:
This photos were all photoed in a regular stamping ground of mine at that time, outside Westminster Abbey and then on into Parliament Square and the across Westminster Bridge.
This being a quota gallery, just to have something up here today, my thoughts on these photos will be brief. I have two.
First, no mobile phones. Mobile phones for photography had already arrived, but they had yet to drive out all those little old digital cameras, of the sort we still see in many of these photos.
Second, my own camera was pretty rubbish. Rubbish, given how I used it, and certainly compared to the ones I have enjoyed since, which I used in exactly the same way but with better results. The photos are okay from the composition point of view. I only cropped a couple of them, and that was only to avoid displaying recognisable faces. But too often, the focusing is just too, well, unfocused.
As you can tell from the umbrellas in the very first photo, it wasn’t that bright a day. I love brightness. Photography is light. Well, it is for me.
On July 23rd, Darren and I went to the Oval to watch Surrey lose to Middlesex. I photoed signs, and I photoed a drone, and that was about the half of it, if by that you mean about 0.5% of it.
As earlier noted, we got there with lots of time to spare and to spend taking in all the incidental sights and sounds of the Oval before the actual game got going. Which meant that when we reached our seats, the entire place (not just the place we were in) was nearly empty.
Darren had purchased seats for us in something called Bedser Upper, in honour of this Surrey legend. And the first thing we noticed when we reached our seats was how very cool it was, compared to how hot it might have been. We could see everything perfectly, yet we would be sheltered from the sun:
Remember, this was was the hottest day ever in London since the dawn of creation. 38 degrees centigrade, and a sure sign of Gaia’s Wrath To Come, to punish Sinful Man for burning too much petrol, gas, oil, etc., and for being too happy and comfortable and well off. Humanity used to be a bunch of slave labourers. Now it is a much vaster throng of, pretty much, sports fans with, compared to olden times, part-time jobs. And the sort of people who disapprove of that disapprove of it by talking about such things as how very hot it was, in London, on that day. And it was indeed very, very hot.
But, not quite so hot in Bedser Upper. Darren had chosen very well.
Later we realised that we were also sitting inside a giant loudspeaker, into which dementedly deafening pop music would be inserted for the duration of the game. Such is modern (very) limited overs cricket. But, we agreed that this was a price well worth paying, for the lack of extreme hotness.
I love the architecture of the Oval. (By which of course I mean the Kia Oval.) So much more interesting that some dreary built-all-at-once football stadium. The big sweep of that big new stand, with its big curved roof, on the left. The classical nobility of the ancient gasometer. The magnificently tall pavilion, on the right. And in the distance, occasional glimpses of the Big Things of central London. What a place.
And, just as divertingly, for me, before the game got started there were lots of interesting rituals being played out by a total of getting on for a hundred people. WIth other sports, a lot of this stuff is hidden away behind the scenes. But with cricket, if you get there early enough, you see it all. More about all that in further postings here about this wonderful night out, Real Soon Now.
Yesterday I went on the expedition I told myself yesterday I’d go on, which was good. Although, I didn’t do the Dangleway bit at the end, because I was too knackered.
Sadly, though, the weather forecast did something it never does usually. It was a bit wrong. It promised cloudless sky at the end of the expedition, but in reality, the cloudless sky came only at the start:
Cloudless sky turns almost any situation into a photo op, for me anyway, and those are four very early photos I photoed.
First, an orthodox photo with lots of blue sky, taken of the new apartments in Victoria Street that are taking shape, which I go past on my way to St James’s tube. When finished they’ll look approximately like this. That was their guess in 2016, so by now the guess will be different, but so what.
Second, the box of covered scaffolding on the right of the first photo was behaving in a particularly fun way. It is usually quite fun, but this was funner than usual.
Third, the sort of photo I quite often take when in a train. Nothing remarkable about it. Reflections in the window? Why is that a problem?
But fourth, it gets interesting. The train was travelling very slowly, because of overheating track or some such thing. And this last photo was taken when the train was stuck, immobile, between stations, next to a wall. What we see there are not shadows, they are the reflections (see above) of what is to be seen through the train window opposite. What I like is how very recognisable that building is, the one with three holes in it. To me, anyway. And that’s clearly a crane tower in the foreground of the reflected scene. Which is good.
Photography is light.
Yesterday’s weather, as prophesied at midday yesterday:
And today’s weather, as prophesied later on yesterday:
Which means that today, there’ll be a photo expedition. Another trip to the Dome and nearby parts, I think. There’s some sort of copy of New York’s High Line going on over there.
The plan is to go to Maze Hill station, head north to the River, and then walk all around the Greenwich Peninsula until I get to the High Line thingy, checking out the Optic Cloak and the Quantum Cloud as I go. (Too busy being about to go out to insert links. Look them up.) Then, depending on my mood, I might take the Emirates Dangleway over the river and see in particular how the stuff on the bank on the north side of the River is now looking, from above. Then, with or without the Dangleway journey, home.
The further plan is that by putting this plan here, I make it more likely that I will actually do it.
I took this photo at the Oval (sorry the Kia Oval), on July 23rd 2012, when I and Michael Jennings were watching England lose by an innings to South Africa:
All very regrettable. England lost all twenty wickets, but South Africa only lost two wickets. Hashim Amla got a treble century. Boo hoo.
But, take a close look at the rather odd stick-like thing sticking up over that big stand in the distance. Not the big flyswatter, which is for floodlights. No, I mean the rather insect-leg-like thing to its left, as we look.
This:
That’s a simple crop-and-expand of the first photo above.
Then as now, I was interested not just in cricket, as in: Is my team winning? (It was not (see above)). I also was already interested in the means by which cricket is televised or video-internetted. I know this, because at about the same time I was photoing the above photo, I also photoed this photo:
Imagine spending your entire day, which on that particular day was a pretty hot day, doing that.
Okay. Now, fast forward to the Oval exactly seven years to-the-day later, July 23rd 2019, when Darren and I visited the Oval, to watch Surrey get beaten by Middlesex in a T20 game.
Once again, that my team was losing was very regrettable, but once again, I consoled myself by photoing other things besides the actual cricket, as already recounted in this earlier posting.
And the most interesting thing, by far, that I photoed that evening, was this:
I owe the spotting of this contraption, which hovered throughout the entire game over the same part of the ground as the 2012 crane-photoer did, to Darren’s sharper-than-my eyes, and to the fact that he reads this blog and knew that I would be interested. I would be amazed if I discovered that it was actually not videoing the game that Darren and I were watching, even if it was only panoramic views, for now.
It is surely only a matter of time before drones start being used to video games like the one I saw at Beckenham, where I also photoed video cameras.
And scaffolding. Drones don’t need scaffolding.
I’m guessing that the drone problem just now is keeping them absolutely still, or alternatively, moving them in exactly the required manner, the way crane-photoer has long been doing. But if humming birds can solve this problem, I presume that drones can, and that actually, somewhere, they already have.
Googling for drones-cricket etc. tells me that this is a technology that is bowling ahead, so to speak. For instance, it says here, in connection with the recently concluded Cricket World Cup, that:
The drone camera provided by Batcam will also provide stunning visuals of all venues across England and Wales.
“Batcam” link added.
So, as Darren suggested, it is quite probable that the TV picture in this posting was done by a drone, rather than by a bloke at the top of a crane.
Which means that the Big Alignment described in that posting (the Shard and the BT Tower) may have been no accident. Maybe the drone lined them up right next to each other on purpose.
One of the many things I like about watching cricket on the television, along with things like that I can see properly what is going on, is that in between overs, those high-up cameras often look beyond the cricket, to the surroundings beyond, a process which is especially appealing if the game is being played in London.
As last weekend’s Cricket World Cup Final was, at Lord’s:
That’s a photo I just snapped off of the TV, with a camera.
Let’s see if I can do better, by putting one of the three DVDs I made of the Final with my TV recording machine, into my computer, and then do a screen scan. It helps a lot having the score, because that way I can quickly find the same shot.
Here we go:
A bit better, I think. Not a lot, but a bit.
In the foreground there is Regent’s Park. but the particular thing I like is the way the BT Tower aligns with the Shard. The BT Tower even manages to place itself between the Shard and Guy’s Hospital.
Here’s another Lord’s photo, that I photoed myself on a more sedate Lord’s occasion. Rugby v Marlborough, on August 12th 2017:
I took that from the top of the big new stand which has a roof on it like a big tent. You can see the same alignment, of the Strata (the one with three holes in the top) and the Wheel, in the TV shot above. What this tells me is that the TV shot was taken from a lot higher up, and off to the left as we look. So, on a crane, standing at the Media Centre end.
Here is a photo of some Real Photographers …:
… whom I photoed that same day, minutes after that earlier photo. Lord’s was not exactly buzzing that day, was it? Anyway, I’d like one of those Real Photographers to be sent up to the top of the crane where the TV people took their shot from, and take some extra good stills of the same BT Tower/Shard alignment.
Alas, they probably wouldn’t be that interested. Plus, nowadays you can probably do everything you want along such lines with drones.
That earlier game, described here, had one thing very much in common with the recent World Cup Final game, which was this:
Neither side deserved to lose and cricket was very much the winner …
It was indeed a terrific contest, even if only a tiny few people watched it, compared to the crowd last Sunday, at the ground and on TV.
Yes, following on from yesterday’s cricket dramas, the mundane matter of how photos look, here, on this blog.
You will recall that last week, GodDaughter2’s Sister and I were wandering about in London. After we had passed through Trafalgar Square, we carried on, across the River, and then along to the Oxo Tower, up which I had never been and up which GD2S now guided me. Here is how the top of that Tower looks from just underneath that top:
Now for the housekeeping. The photo I just uploaded to my blogging software is 1000 pixels across. The blog software cleverly shrinks that photo on your screen, to make it fit the full width of the posting.
However, here is another photo I took from that same spot, of the two Blackfriars bridges, road in the foreground and the railway station bridge behind it, with a little clutch of those Ghost Columns (also featured in photo 4.3 of this recent photo-collection here) in between. (Top right, you can just make out the Millennium Footbridge.) This photo is, as of now, 1500 pixels across, and if all now behaves as it has been behaving, this photo will now look, on your screen, rather less wide:
The effect is not always visible. You have to widen out the blog posting before you spot the difference. But when you do, you see that the Tower Top is wider across than the Bridges.
Which is strange. What I would like would be for the blogging software to shrink the photo that is 1500 pixels across down to the exact width of the posting, but no narrower, just as it did with the 1000 pixel photo above, of the Tower Top, no matter what the size of the screen you see all this on.
Don’t worry. I’m not asking you to sort this out for me, unless you are Michael Jennings, the man who got this blog going, and who has more recently promised to give this matter his attention.
If you are not Michael Jennings, the purpose of this posting is, however, more than just a matter of showing you a couple of (hope you agree) nice photos. I am also interested in illustrating how an aspect of modern life consists of people like me (who don’t know how all this stuff works) asking people like Michael Jennings (who does know how a lot of this stuff works or failing that knows how to find out how it works) to make stuff we put on the internet look more nearly as we would like it to.
An ongoing agenda for this blog is the texture, so to speak, of modern life. And this particular sort of techno-relationship, between a circle of tech-ignorant people and … That Guy, to whom they all go for answers to conundra of this kind, is very much part of how we all live now. Why be ashamed of any of this? Why not turn it into a blog posting? It’s interesting.
If, despite not being Michael Jennings, you feel that you nevertheless have something to contribute in this matter, feel entirely free to comment. I like comments, and am grateful for all the ones I get.
By the way, if you never have to ask That Guy for help, of the approximate sort that I have just described, then you, for your particular circle of acquaintances, are probably That Guy yourself.