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

Bounty Bars for Alfie Saggs

Yesterday GodDaughter One invited me to join her for one of her Moves, from Stonebridge Lock, up the River Lee Navigation, to Enfield. The boaters of London have to keep moving. They aren’t allowed to stay in the one spot for ever, which I bet thins down the numbers. Plus, it makes sure that the canals have lots of canal boats chugging about on them for the likes of me to photo. It’s quite a subtle rule, I think.

I took many photos. Here are some that commemorate the life and work of Alfie Saggs, the lock keeper of Pickett’s Lock, which was renamed “Alfie’s Lock” in 2015:

Alfie Saggs is well known to London’s canal boaters, but the story was all new to me. Read about Alfie Saggs here. Apparently Alfie liked Bounty Bars, and so Bounty Bars were how the boaters expressed their appreciation of his work:

It’s good that this celebration of his life’s work was something that Alfie Saggs himself was able to enjoy, and that it didn’t happen only when he died, just three weeks ago:

I photoed a lot of signs yesterday. Signs are very evocative and very informative. When I browse through directories of past wanderings, I am always glad of signs. They tell me exactly where I was, the way that mere landscape and waterways cannot with nearly so much certainty.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Self storage is a strange expression

Yes. I ran it by Adriana plus her Plus One (Perry de H), at that feast I reported on yesterday, and it turns out that I’m not the only one who finds the phrase “self storage” …

… to be rather odd. (That’s this.)

I know what self storage is. It’s the name given to the process of ridding your self of some of the crap by which your self is currently surrounded and impeded, without actually chucking it away irrevocably. In particular, when your self is in between locations, or when your self has moved from a big place to a smaller place, your stuff, or your excess stuff, needs to be stored somewhere.

But self storage, taken literally, sounds like you are parking your self in a warehouse and for the duration, your life will consist only of all the extraneous crap.

You become like a zombie or something. I can understand people wanting to put their mere selves to one side while earning a living. That might make a rather profitable business. But while actually, you know, … trying to live … ?

Odd.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Frollicking outside the Abbey (a decade ago)

This blog having been in business for well over a decade, an obvious blog post genre is ten-years-ago-today. This one’s actually more like ten-years-ago-plus-about-a-fortnight, but who, apart from me, is counting?:

What I think this clutch of photos captures rather well is the sheer fun that digital photography unleashed, around that time. I was a photoer-having-fun and so were all the other photoers.

Digital photography wasn’t completely new at that moment. It had already been around for several years. But what my photo-archives tell me is that this is about when it started getting seriously good. This was when the rubbish-to-okay success rate (simply from the point of view of things like blurriness) of the average mostly-automatic-setting photoer like me, or of the photoer in the above photos, started climbing from something like ten percent to more like fifty percent. We weren’t yet at the fifty percent and still climbing rate. Or, we only were if the light was very strong and there was no moving. (That came around five years later.) But these kids frollicking about outside Westminster Abbey were keeping still for their camera and therefore also for mine, and as you can see, there was plenty of bright sunlight sloshing about that day. So their pictures were probably okay, just as mine of them were.

Also, ten years ago was well before the face recognition problem kicked in. Then, I had no problem about posting recognisable photos of people. I also have no problem with the recognisable faces above, because these kids were making a rather undignified spectacle of themselves outside a major place of worship. Which is fine. God loves fun, or why would He have created so much of it? But: the above recognisable faces, all those years ago, are fair game for my blog, I say.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Quota Roller

Indeed:

From the I Just Like It collection. Photoed somewhere in the Piccadilly Circus Leicester Square region, in December 2013.

One of those photos where I moved my camera to keep it on the object of my attention as it rolled by, thereby keeping the object in approximate focus and the background not.

Nice.

I love luxurious cars driven by the ostentatious nouveau riche. (Is there another kind of nouveau riche? Probably, yes.) I would hate to have to actually look after such a vehicle throughout its life, but I love being able to photo such things, on my wanderings in London, where there are just enough of such vehicles to be amusing, but not so many that you stop noticing and stop enjoying.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Quota dragon

By which I mean an urban dragon, like this one …:

… which I photoed this afternoon, stuffing a few of the remains of the old New Scotland Yard, now deceased, into a skip, for a lorry to take away.

There is something very primitive and savage about machines like this one, destroying reinforced concrete, i.e. destroying just the sort of concrete that is designed to be indestructible.

I had a busy day today, by which I do not mean that I accomplished anything. Merely that I did a lot of pleasurable things, out there in Real World.

And then, BMdotcom was misbehaving, when I first tried to post this. But it seems now to be back working again, albeit – alas – with its customary lethargy.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

More light on water

Photography is light, and light loves water:

Photoed under another bridge, five years before I photoed that X. Which was different, but similar. Both have a slice of light shaped by two bridges right next to each other, over water.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A busy day that never happened

Today I had a taste of what my life would be if I had the Sky TV cricket channel. (It would be over.) I watched Surrey play Somerset on the live feed from the Oval which comes complete with the BBC’s sound commentary. I had all sorts of plans for today, but managed to get very little else of consequence done.

Surrey spent their day trying to ensure that they avoided all possibility of being relegated from Division One of the County Championship. When they finally managed to defeat Somerset, they found themselves lying second in Division One. Division One contains eight teams, two of which will be relegated, and it’s all rather close, apart from Essex, who have already won, and Warks, who have already been relegated. So, a very strange day, but ultimately a very good one.

So, quota photo time:

Yes, it’s a still life, with condiments instead of old school food in old school containers. Little Big Things, you might say. Photoed five years ago, in a cafe only a very short walk away from the Oval.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Thumbnails

Click on the thumbnail on the right to see why I’m presenting this photo to you, as a thumbnail.

Photo taken outside (as you can probably work out) Westminster Abbey in December 2015.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Photo by me of seventeen London bridges

I am very proud of the photo of London bridges that I took from the top of the Hotel ME, which featured seven bridges.

But today, while trawling through my photo archives on another errand entirely, I encountered a London bridges photo that I took, back in 2015 which clearly shows no less than fifteen London bridges:

And not so clearly, it shows, I reckon, two more bridges, in the very far distance, beyond the second pointy one, which I reckon must be Albert Bridge.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog