Category: London

The light and the lights on Blackfriars Bridge

This is the last of my postings about my walkabouts beyond Lower Marsh on Jan 5th and on Jan 18th, the three photos below having been taken on Jan 18th.

Just as on Jan 5th, the light was extraordinary. On Jan 5th, it was, for me, at its most extraordinary on Blackfriars Road, and then at Victoria Station (see the posting immediate below this one). On Jan 18th, at the same time of the day, it was at its most extraordinary when I was on Blackfriars road bridge, which is what Blackfriars Road turns into when it crosses the river. Blackfriars Bridge being the one next to the Blackfriars railway station bridge, as you can very clearly see here:

What we see there is the now nearly horizontal sunlight bashing in under the clouds overhead and picking out the bridge. Very dramatic. And just as on Jan 5th, the light was particularly good at picking out something painted red. On Jan 5th, it was a crane, the very same crane that we see in the above photo, in the distance, in front of 240 Blackfriars. On Jan 18th, it was Blackfriars road bridge itself.

The above photo captured the drama that I saw at the time. The next photo, taken moments before the one above, isn’t so dramatic. It felt very dramatic, but my photo captures little of the drama that I saw. The light that illluminated that scaffolding in the middle looked amazing. But I now have to point it out to you:

So, why this photo? Well, for my purposes, it does have one great merit, which is that it shows that the street lights, on the right of the road bridge as we look along it, were not switched on. Yet moments later, these lights were “switched on”, by the sun, just as similarly un-electrified lights in Victoria Station had been lit up by the sun on Jan 5th:

Behind these lights are the lower floors of One Blackfriars, now nearing completion.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The light and the lights of Victoria Station

Well, I’m making some progress on the WordPress front, and there will be a new BMblog, but meanwhile, the last of the photos I want to show you that I took on Jan 5. I took the tube back home, but chose to get out at Victoria rather than Pimlico, probably to try to buy the Gramophone, which I can now, near to me, only buy there. And because I did that, I was able to feast my eyes on this:

That is the late afternoon sun crashing through where the trains go in an out, and bouncing off various reflective surfaces.

I like how this kind of scene permits bright colours, like those little union jacks, but turns fainter colours monochrome, like when that little girl in a red coat appears in Schindler’s List.

I particularly like this little part of the scene:

What I love about sights like that is the way the sun turns those lights on. No electricity is involved. It’s pure sunlight.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The delivery scooter – first improvised now designed

Do you remember when those things started appearing on top of the cabs of articulated lorries, like the bonnets of Volkswagens, for pushing the air upwards, over the rest of the lorry. Something to do with the price of petrol having got so high that it made sense to buy a big lump of metal to stick on the lorry, just for the sake of lowering the air resistance and thereby saving a small amount of petrol?

And do you further remember how, in due course, lorry cabs started appearing where the lump on the roof of the cab had been incorporated into the design of the cab?

Course you do.

Well, now, something similar has happened with those scooters that delivery guys ride about on, delivering stuff. They used to be regular scooters, but with a big cube of a box attached to the scooter at the back. Regular scooter, big box attached.

But now, take a look at this:

That was photoed by me this afternoon, in Warwick Way, when I was out shopping earlier this evening.

And that’s right. The box is now seamlessly incorporated into the design of the scooter.

I did not see this coming. I should have. But I didn’t.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

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

Photoer in silhouette

I haven’t taken many photos of people in silhouette, but I should do it more, because it is a really good way to photo people. Maybe the problem is that a person has to be in the dark with lots of light behind him or her, and if you are like me and you just photo people out in the open, and you let the lighting be an act of God, so to speak, God only very rarely obliges with a silhouette.

But God did so oblige, on Jan 5th, which was the day I also took the first four of yesterday’s photos. This photoer was under Blackfriars Bridge and hence in darkness, and behind him, we observe the Millennium Bridge, artistically out-of-focus:

See also this photo, taken indoors, of Christopher Snowdon.

Does face recognition software work with silhouettes? I just shoved that question into google, but answer came there none.

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

Piccadilly in the wet

Today I went to see a movie. I and the person I went with fixed to meet beforehand at the statue in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. I got there early, and took a ton of photos, of which only the photos of the rain-affected pavement were not terrible. Here is one of these:

Photography is light.

I tried photoing lots of umbrellas, and I succeeded, if by that is meant that I took a lot of photos of umbrellas. But, they were all terrible.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A Mickey Mouse posting

Indeed:

At the time I took that photo, in Lower Marsh, I was with someone else, and just grabbed the shot before moving on at once. But I reckon it came out really well.

Wikipedia tells us of Mickey Mouse’s compiucated origin. He was a replacement for a rabbit, and before a mouse was arrived at, it seems that many other animals were considered:

Mickey Mouse was created as a replacement for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, an earlier cartoon character created by the Disney studio for Charles Mintz, a film producer who distributed product through Universal Studios. In the spring of 1928, with the series going strong, Disney asked Mintz for an increase in the budget. But Mintz instead demanded that Walt take a 20 percent budget cut, and as leverage, he reminded Disney that Universal owned the character, and revealed that he had already signed most of Disney’s current employees to his new contract. Angrily, Disney refused the deal and returned to produce the final Oswald cartoons he contractually owed Mintz. Disney was dismayed at the betrayal by his staff but determined to restart from scratch. The new Disney Studio initially consisted of animator Ub Iwerks and a loyal apprentice artist, Les Clark, who together with Wilfred Jackson were among the few who remained loyal to Walt. One lesson Disney learned from the experience was to thereafter always make sure that he owned all rights to the characters produced by his company.

In the spring of 1928, Disney asked Ub Iwerks to start drawing up new character ideas. Iwerks tried sketches of various animals, such as dogs and cats, but none of these appealed to Disney. A female cow and male horse were also rejected. They would later turn up as Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar. A male frog was also rejected. It would later show up in Iwerks’ own Flip the Frog series. Walt Disney got the inspiration for Mickey Mouse from a tame mouse at his desk at Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1925, Hugh Harman drew some sketches of mice around a photograph of Walt Disney. These inspired Ub Iwerks to create a new mouse character for Disney. “Mortimer Mouse” had been Disney’s original name for the character before his wife, Lillian, convinced him to change it, and ultimately Mickey Mouse came to be.

Those two paragraphs are, at Wikipedia, crammed with links. Follow the link above and scroll down to where it says “Origin”, if you want to follow any of these links.

I will, however, honour the amazingly named Ub Iwerks with a link from here. I wonder how he was pronounced. His dad was from Germany, and I think I know how they’d have said the name there. But, Ub (!?!) was born in Kansas. When it came to Amercans pronouncing foreign names, all bets were off. My guess is there were lots of Germans where the Iwerks family grew up, and thus it was not felt necessary to do any name changing.

Blog and learn.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A pub which shows the Six Nations

It’s around this time of year that I start to anticipate the Six Nations. But instead of looking it up and finding out, I merely begin to wonder about when it will start, and contenting myself with thinking: oh goodee, The Six Nations, soon. As often as not, I only get the date of when it kicks off fixed in my brain when I walk past a pub in The Cut (which is the continuation of Lower Marsh (which I frequently frequent)), where they show these games on their TVs and where they are in the habit of having signs outside saying when the Six Nations will be starting (and continuing and ending).

So it was today, when I found myself in The Cut:

The pub is called the Windmill.

I do not know what is going to happen in the Six Nations, whether England or Wales or Ireland or Scotland or France will win it. This is because nobody knows. It is the most wonderfully unpredictable competition. I do know that Italy will not win it. Everybody knows that.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The London skyline ten years ago

Ten years ago yesterday, to be exact about it:

Memo to self: go back to the same spot and take the same photo again, some time soon.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog