On CD, by Haydn and by Bruckner, and this despite my CD shelves already being crammed to overflowing:
Oh no my mistake, that’s not my CD shelves, it’s a building, at the top end of Victoria Street.
On a more serious note: Note the colours. Architectural modernity is getting slowly but surely more colourful.
June 2013, Parliament Square:
Cropped. So you can’t recognise the wearer.
But if you ever saw it again, you’d recognise the tiger!
Simon Evans, whom I follow, did a tweet asking what is the greatest photo ever. Many excellent photos followed.
The Chosen One joined in the discussion:
May I humbly suggest @StuartHumphryes for your delectation? An amazing collection of superb photos
It certainly is. Cue more excellent photos, and excellent photographic restorations and history lessons. This is Twitter being brilliant. Twitter can be horrible. So, ignore the horrible and go with the brilliant.
Simon Evans was already a fan of Humphryes, who calls his Twitter feed “BabelColour” (see above). But I’d never encountered the discoveries and recreations of Humphryes until now.
Following.
Recent taxi with advert sighting:
I think it refers to this enterprise, but in my photo I see no N at the start. Also, I see no graphics at that site that resemble what I see on the taxi. I hope that all will become clearer, in due course.
Now, The Internet is going to bombard me with adverts for women’s clothes, and oh dear I just made it worse.
This morning I did a long-winded posting about something or other, and I ended with a reference to my rule that blog postings should keep it simple and short. I think you get my point.
When I photoed this photo on Westminster Bridge, way back in 2007, well, you know what I was interested in:
But now, it’s the bag that gets my attention.
Oh, I was interested in a general way in the phenomenon of photoers photoing while carrying shopping bags, often in way that hid their faces, which I was already watching out for. But particular bags were of less concern.
But look at the list of addresses on this bag, of Book Warehouse branches in London:
Now, only one remains.
I loved those places. There was one that was only a walk away from me, the one in Strutton Ground. There’s nothing like a remainder bookshop to find unexpectedly interesting titles, old and new, at prices that make them worth it the way full price never would be. Best of all, if you like the look of a book, you can have a leaf through it, and can soon find if you’d really like it, the way you can’t on the internet without relying on other people’s opinions. In Book Warehouse you could suck it, so to speak, and see.
When Gramex was in its final address in Lower Marsh before closing, that was in a basement right underneath the Waterloo version of Book Warehouse, which itself had had to move. But as Lower Marsh went up market (they should now start calling it Upper Marsh), it went beyond the reach of such places.
Memo to self: When all this Coronavirus nonsense is over, make a pilgrimage to Golders Green to check out the last resting place of Book Warehouse. If it is even still there. According to Google Maps it is, but that can often be out of date.
More and more, I now suspect, my prodigious archive of photoer photos will be of use at least as much for what else is in the photos, besides photoers.
At the time I photoed these twelve photos, I picked them out and put them in a special directory, but then it went no further. Here they are:
Not bad, but you’ve seen it all before. Photoers photoing, with their faces unrecognisable, a BMNB staple.
But consider that last photo, of the lady whose face would appear to have been covered by her scarf blowing over it, or maybe being placed over it. I included that photo for future display, but for some reason I didn’t consider any of these four photos as interesting:
At least I thought them interesting enough to actually photo them. Maybe the idea was to do a special posting about mask photos. If so, here is that posting. Which must also include one or all of these photos, of her friend, doing the same thing:
History doesn’t just make you experience the present differently. It also makes you look back at the past with new eyes.
My designated official mission, to photo the supermoon, failed, but when up there, I photoed other photos, including this one:
Now, and as Instapundit would say, I’m not saying that it’s aliens.
But …:
… it’s aliens.
That second one would make a good book cover.
Yes, another retro-photo-meander, on May 11th 2015
Photo 1: This doesn’t exactly nail down the date, does it? This could be a headline from any day during the last two decades. False, every time. The only time we got tough on the EU was when the mere voters voted to leave.
But Photo 2 is suitably fixed in time, the time when they were just finishing those rather lavish looking student apartments, on the far side of Westminster Bridge. In my day, we lived in digs. These were holes in the road. Just kidding.
Photo 3: Just as photos of people wearing face masks take on a new meaning now, so now do crowd scenes. Who are those people wearing blue caps? No idea. Memo to self: gather up more crowd scenes. I haven’t done many of these. In future, I’m guessing now I’ll do more.
Photo 4: The Big Purple Cow is – was? – a comedy venue.
Photos 5 to 9 explain themselves. Above the streaks on concrete is a sign saying where we are.
Photo 10: On the right, that’s the ME Hotel Radio Rooftop Bar.
I can never remember what the roof clutter i Photo 12 is on the roof of, but I always like to photo it.
The vapour trail in Photo 15 was also this vapour trail. If vapour trails always looked this black and horrible, there would now be no planes flying.
Before I forget, I need to report on my photoing of last Thursday’s supermoon. Alerted by the media, I made my way to the roof of my block of flats and scanned the horizon at the appointed hour. I pointed my camera in what I believe was the correct direction, with the result you now see:
That’s the appropriately named Hide Tower.
Mind you, according to these photos in the media that I came upon afterwards, I didn’t miss much, although it was apparently quite impressive in Lancashire.
Remember that Hong Kong demo I photoed in January and belatedly mentioned here at the end of last month? Well, to remind you about that, and about what a nasty government they were demonstrating against, here are some more photos I took of that demo:
In Hong Kong, there was widespread use of face masks long before the Wuhan Flu, to resist another sort of threat, namely government surveillance.
I am pessimistic about Hong Kong, in any run but the longest. But it is possible to hope that the huge burst of negative feeling about China’s government may draw more attention to all the other nasty things they are doing, in China and in Hong Kong, and that this may get in the way of them swallowing up Hong Kong. I hope so.
I have long been noticing face masks, on those rare occasions when I saw one in use in London. Assuming I manage to deploy my camera quickly enough, they allow me to photo people, and show the photos on the Internet in a way that keeps faces unrecognisable. This demo was a target rich environment for such photoing, my wishes concerning unrecognisability being in line with the wishes of those I was photoing.
Sadly, face recognition is starting to see past face masks.