Category: Cranes

Another January 5th photo – trees and cranes and 240 Blackfriars

All this stressing about having to have a new blog is, well, stressful. So, thank goodness for all the lovely photos I took that day. They have been a great comfort. I have nearly finished bragging about them, but not quite.

This is one is one of my particular favourites from that day:

Remember I said that Windows Photo Viewer is turning everything a bit yellow? Well yes, it is, although a more accurate description would be: cream. And the odd thing is that the above photo actually looks prettier to me in its creamy manifestation than it does here, as taken. But, I still like it a lot. I suppose I could squirt some cream into it with my photoshopclone, but I don’t hold with that sort of thing, which has created another barrier, which is that I don’t know how to do that.

Once more, we see: trees without leaves, and behind them cranes, and behind them, the top of 240 Blackfriars. We are looking along Lower Marsh in a north-easterly direction, towards 240 Blackfriars, and behind that, the City of London and its bigger Big Things.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Winter sunlight and new buildings beyond Lower Marsh

On the fifth and eighteenth days of this month I was in Lower Marsh, which is just south of Waterloo Station, as I often am. On each of these days, there was bright sunshine, and cloud.

On each day, after I had done my business in Lower Marsh and continued on to Blackfriars Road, and to its two newly constructed edifices: One Blackfriars (the curvey one) and 240 Blackfriars (the “crystaline” one).

The first of these photos, !.1, shows One, and One reflected in 240:

I love a good crane, and 1.2 is rather remarkable, because it shows (a) two construction cranes, (b) these cranes reflected in 240 Blackfriars, and (c) on the surface of that same building and above the reflections of the cranes, the shadows of those same cranes. If you click on nothing else, click on that.

Photo 1.3 tells us where we are, and shows One of that road scraping the sky,

In 2.1, 2.3 and 3.3, we see another joy of winter, trees without leaves.

The final photo of this little set, 3.3, shows the tower of a crane with some of those trees, and is included because the colours are what you would expect with regular lighting.

Ah, but what if the lighting is irregular? What if there is bright sunlight hitting a crane tower, but with dark cloud instead of blue sky behind it? 3.2 is what then happens. Worth another click, I’d say.

And 3.1 shows clouds of a very different sort, again reflected in 240 Blackriars. Also pretty dramatic.

1.1 to 2.1 taken on the fifth. 2.3 to 3.3 on the eighteenth.

What, no photos of photoers? Was I the only one photoing? Could nobody else see the epic dramas of light and dark, construction and reflection, scaffolding and skeletal trees, that I was seeing? Apparently not.

On the fifth, soon after I had taken the first four of the above photos, my fellow photoers had been all over the man with the flaming tuba.

Photography is light. But I guess for most photoers, mere light, bouncing off of dreary things like modern buildings, cranes, trees, scaffolding and the like, is not enough.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Ashes lost – CDs soaked – cranes in the sunset

A mixed day. In the morning, Australia won the Ashes back. And in the evening, when I got back from a photo-expedition, I found water trickling down the wall of my kitchen, the wall in question being the one behind me in the picture at the top of this blog, a wall filled with CDs, a quite large number of which had their documentation soaked. It could have been a hell of a lot worse, but it wasn’t at all good. I have just spent most of the evening trying to sort that out, but probably not accomplishing much. Many pages of musical info will be stuck together irrevocably. Bugger.

But in between those two disasters, the photo-expedition was pretty good. I will surely show more of its results here Real Soon Now. For the moment, following an evening spent fretting about those CDs, here is just one such result:

I tend not to like sunsets, by which I mean that I tend not to like the photos I take of sunsets. But if there are cranes involved, that’s a different story. Also, for the cricket, a sunset is all too appropriate.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Two more leaning tower cranes

I knew this would happen. Ever since I noticed those leaning tower cranes of London, which looked like they might be about to collapse through the unbalanced weight at the top of them, I knew that as I wandered through my photo-archives I’d find more such pairs of leaning tower cranes, leaning in opposite directions to each other, and looking like they should have collapsed and caused a flurry of shocked news reports, but which never actually did that.

And I just did:

Taken from the top of the Monument, on the same day as the photo below of the Walkie-Talkie.

At the time, all I thought I was photoing was a nice sunset and some nice cranes, posing nicely in front of The Wheel. But those two cranes on the right there seem to be in that same state of strong disagreement about what exactly vertical is, and for the same reason.

Yet, if either of those cranes had collapsed, late on in the year 2012, I am sure that we would have heard about it, and that I would have remembered it. Clearly, they did not collapse. They were just leaning over a bit.

All those cranes that we see were working on, among other buildings, two rather striking buildings that are now finished. I’m talking about the two stumps now blocking the view of the Shell Building. There is, on the right, in between the two leaning cranes discussed above, 240 Blackfriars. And to the left of 240 Blackfriars, as we look, the innards of the Tate Modern Extension, from which further lovely views out over lovely London were to materialise.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Monument dwarfed by Walkie-Talkie

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.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Cranes and horses

Indeed:

Tilbury, September 2013. That’s what a BMdotcom wildlife photo should be. Creatures, yes, but also cranes.

At around that time, I made a series of trips out to London Gateway, London’s new container port, which is just downstream from Tilbury. Here‘s a recent report of how London Gateway is doing, which also has further news about animals in the area:

The £1.5bn construction saw a staggering 350,000 animals moved off site into new habitats. At one stage DP World’s office building on the site homed tanks of great crested newts before they were moved into newly created ponds.

However, the horses in the above photo were not disturbed, because they were just outside Tilbury. London Gateway is further down river. It was only several hours later that day that I set eyes on those cranes, from a great distance. Despite the gloomy weather, it was a great day. The photos bring it all back.

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

Twentytwo

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.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The leaning tower cranes of London

I love cranes, especially those big tower cranes they use to build Big Things. So tall. But so thin. But they do trouble me. How do they stay up? Why don’t they ever fall over? Well, they do, sometimes. But mostly they don’t.

And, as I couldn’t help noticing when I was out and about last Sunday, these tower cranes often lean over, in a way that looks like it is asking for headline-making trouble.

Consider one of these cranes, the one on the right, that’s leaning over, about four degrees off of the vertical. How does that not fall over? (Thank you vertical lamp post for telling us what vertical is.)

Well, I’m guessing these people know what they’re doing. No, scrub that, I’d be amazed if they didn’t know what they’re doing. This kind of thing just has to be business as usual, no matter how crazy it may look to mere passers-by. As I discovered when I went looking for other leaning cranes in my photo-archives, and I found one that I had photoed just an hour earlier, on the same walkabout:

I think we may assume that the BT Tower is the very definition of vertical.

In each case, the crane is bent backwards by the big concrete blocks that compensate them for the lifting job they do with the other end of their tops. But when no lifting is happening, the compensating weight has no weight to compensate … it. And the result can look very scary.

No London cranes have been reported collapsing during the last few days. So, like I say, no problem.

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.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog