On the sunniest day of the year so far, I went, as earlier noted, east, to Docklands.
I photoed the blue sky, the leafless trees, and the many towers of Docklands:
Nice. Lots of pollarding.
Almost anything looks nice in weather like that.
I felt the cold so you don’t have to.
I wonder what this extraordinary place …:
… will turn into.
Approximately halfway between Turkey’s largest city Istanbul and its capital Ankara, the Burj Al Babas development will contain 732 identical mini chateaux when, or if, it completes.
Begun in 2014, the hundreds of houses have been left in various states of completion since the dramatic collapse of the Turkish economy led to developer Sarot Group to file for bankruptcy in November.
Too bad people can’t buy them one by one, and put them in lots of other places around the world. Sadly, houses don’t work like that.
Having them all next to each other surely defeats one of the major purposes of a new house like this, which is to outdo your neighbours.
It looks miniature, doesn’t it? The houses look like things you have to careful not to tread on.
The reason I’m showing so many ancient photos here just now is because the weather in London is so very dreary, and I’m not going out much. Instead, I am doing lots of tidying up and chucking out, provoked by those sofas. And, I’m back to doing more at Samizdata than of late.
Here’s another relic from another era. This is Southwark Towers, photoed by me on May 31st 2006:
Relic because this really quite Big Thing was demolished in 2008, to make way for London’s ultimate Big Thing, The Shard.
At the time I took this photo, I had no idea that what I was photoing was about to disappear.
If in doubt, photo the photo.
It’s been a while since I visited the Isle of Dogs. Here are some photos I photoed of a building site there, next to the river, in January 2014:
I wonder how all this looks now. I’m pretty sure I know where this is. Google Maps is good enough for that. But not for the up-to-date story.
In decades to come, if will presumably be possible to go pretty much anywhere that’s public, virtually, without leaving your dwelling pod.. But for now, the only way to be sure about a place like this is to go there and see.
Indeed:
It’s the roof of this, looking upstream into the sunset, last August.
I basically picked last night’s quota photo for alliterative reasons. QUota. QUantum. As we bloggers say: heh. No long essay was required to present that little joke, if joke it even was.
In the course of my search late last night for a suitable QP, I came across other photos which seemed suitable for showing here, but which demanded little essays to explain what it was that made them suitable. And I was too knackered for that, having spent yesterday working on this talk for Christian Michel’s 6/20 soiree, and then in the evening giving the talk.
In particular, late last night, I encountered in my photo-archives this remarkable (I think) photo, which I took in Regent’s Park in March of 2012, as it was getting dark, when on my way back from taking photos on and from Primrose Hill:
What I find remarkable about that photo is the contrast between how very red the reflection in the water of the lights on the BT Tower is, compared with how very un-red the actual lights themselves are, as photoed through the mere air.
You often get this with reflections. In photos, I mean. Your actual eyes make adjustments as they scan the scene. What I would have seen, with my eyes, when photoing the above photo, is quite bright red lights on the tower, and a similarly bright reflection.
But my camera, on automatic, doesn’t think like this. All my camera is concerned about is the overall balance. It has to pick just one balance and apply it to everything. And because a reflection is involved, it often ends up picking a balance where the actual view is very light and bright, but the reflection contains all the action. I often do this-and-this-same-thing-relected photos with a glass window doing the reflecting. And often what you get with that is a completely blank white sky, but then in the reflection you get all the distinctions between quite light and not so light, quite blue and not so blue, that you don’t get in the bit of the photo that is directly of the sky.
And that’s what surely happened with the above photo. The redness got lost when we were just looking at the lights themselves. But the water darkened and strengthened that same redness, and made it really red.
On the day, I was more interested in the birds swimming around on the water. The next eight photos in that directory are of ducks and geese, and the final three are of a swan. After that I called it a day, what with daylight having ended. I only really noticed this reflected redness thing last night.
Most Real Photographers have to have the skill of knowing at once when they’ve photoed a good photo, and why. We unreal photoers can take our time.
At the end of April and the beginning of May of 2018, I visited the city of Quimper, almost certainly for the last time. The friends I have stayed there with several times are now living in the south of France, and their Quimper home is now someone else’s. So, farewell Quimper.
On May 4th, on my last full day in Quimper, my hostess drove me to see the superb lighthouse at Penmarc’h, which is on the south west tip of Brittany. And no, I don’t know how “Penmarc’h” is pronounced, and nor do I know what is really the correct name for this mighty edifice. It seems to have many names. But, it is a lighthouse, and it is in the town of Penmarc’h, so Penmarc’h Lightbouse it is.
Although she needed to get back in quite a hurry to prepare supper, she let me take the time to climb up the Lighthouse and savour the views of the town of Penmarc’h and of the Brittany coast. Which were spectacular, as was the weather that day:
The lighthouse I went up is the furthest from the sea of three structures, which would appear to have been doing, in succession, a similar job. As time went by, they got smaller, nearer to the sea, and more dependent upon electronic technology. Photo 3.1 shows the two smaller ones, as seen from the big one.
That same morning, I also checked out a huge and totally marvellous second hand shop in Quimper, and an equally huge and totally marvellous cheese factory, which was really more like a cheese refinery.
So, a really good day. One of my favourites of 2018. Except that the day after that day, in Paris, was probably even better.
In search of worthwhile photos to show here, I find myself digging further and further back in the archives. I looked for photos taken a decade ago, but found nothing that stirred any thoughts. However, these four, from over fourteen years ago, do now seem to be worth showing.
The first is of the ghostly pillars of the old Blackfriars Bridge. These are still there, looking now just as they looked then. But, then there was no Blackfriars railway station on the more recent Blackfriars Bridge. Blackfriars Station then only happened on the far side of the river, as we look north.
Second, a rather striking view of the City Big Thing Cluster, the striking thing being that most of the City Big Thing Cluster had not yet happened. The Gherkin stands in almost perfect isolation, visible from all directions. No Cheesegrater. No Walkie-Talkie. And definitely no 22 Bishopsgate, already the biggest of the lot of them so far.
The third of these photos I include simply because I like it, or at least I like what it shows and how the photo is composed. (Technically these photos are all very blurry and primitive. The Canon A70 is the cheapest camera I have ever owned and used, and it shows.) In particular I like how we see so clearly the truncated end of the Millennium Footbridge. (I should have a go at that view again, with my current and much better camera, on a much better day.)
And finally, the grey of the dying light suddenly looks blue, as grey did look with that Canon A70. Tate Modern was there, of course it was. It isn’t that modern. But, the Tate Modern Extension, which now stands behind Tate Modern itself, is still way in the future.
I show this photo because it very clearly says “Collection 2004” on Tate Modern. Windows Image viewer, cross-examined, also says 2004, January 17th, and I am a lot more inclined to believe that, given that I know that the 2004 bit is right. I’m guessing that Jan 17 is right also. Goodness knows, it’s gloomy enough to be January. So, nearly fifteen years ago.
I haven’t been out photoing a lot lately, so here are some Christmas-themed photos picked out from the archives, taken during about the last five years or more.
There’s two dozen in all that are ready to go. Here are the first dozen:
Another dozen tomorrow.
I hope your Christmas is going well, with some of the right people with you, and not too many of the wrong people.
Today, it is once again tomorrow, and almost the only thing I can think of to say here is that I once again managed a posting at Samizdata, concerning some graffiti.
But here, for today, is a rather fun photo I took in October, from a train, of St Paul’s Cathedral, with lots of rather bulbous South Bank modernity in the foreground, modernity which is blocking the view of most of the cathedral:
If you think that it would be better just to see St Paul’s, well, Google image should solve your problem. But if, on the other hand, you were wanting a photo more like the one above, how else would you come across it?