Category: My photographs

WHAM!

While searching the photo-archives for something else completely, I came across THIS!:

I photoed the above in the summer of 2016, in the Tate Modern gift shop.

Art galleries fascinate me, even though I often don’t like the Art that’s on show in them. And I am in particular fascinated by the gift shops that are now always attached to Art galleries. These places are often more crowded than where the Art is being shown. The above is only one of many, many photos, of Art stuff, that I have photoed in Art gallery gift shops.

In the case of this Roy Lichtenstein stuff, you can make a pretty good case for saying that those cushions, for instance, are as “authentic” Roy Lichtensteins as the “original” painting that the cushions were copied from. After all, the “original” painting was itself a copy, of something a lot like the cushions. And the original comic that Lichtenstein copied his painting from was mass produced, just like the cushions. Only the fetishism of the authentic unique object, by an officially recognised Artist, is holding back the dam of absurdity here.

I’m guessing that the business that Art galleries do in their gift shops, and in their equally vital coffee shops, is the difference between economic famine and something more like feast.

I also think that Art galleries are popular places to spend time in, again not because of the Art, but because of the quiet. Art galleries do not, on the whole, play annoying music, and talking in loud voices is considered boorish. The result is something a lot like a church.

Quota scaffolding shadows

I’m back from my photo-walk and it was every bit as physically knackering as I feared. But, what with me having done more than one posting here each day for the last few weeks now, here is another quota photo.

Despite the effort, it was a fine expedition nevertheless. My better photo-walks often begin with fun photos as soon as I step out the door, and today’s was like that:

That scaffolding has been there for ages, what with The Plague. There being at the mini-roundabout where Great Peter Street meets the top end of Horseferry Road and the southern end of Strutton ground. They’re doing something to the fire station there. But what? I’m waiting to see.

Maybe not as nice as this, but nice.

Quota photo of the BT Tower advertising Follicular Lymphoma

Haven’t had many quota photos here lately, have I? But I am now about to go on what could be a long photo-walk, and don’t want to be worrying about not yet having stuck anything up here.

So:

Photoed from the top of my block of flats, last November. Ah, those were the days, when people worried about lots of diseases instead of just the one.

What is Follicular Lymphoma?

Follicular lymphoma (FL) is a slow-growing type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It develops when B-cells (also called B-lymphocytes) become abnormal. B-cells are white blood cells that fight infection.

The abnormal B-cells (lymphoma cells) usually build up in lymph nodes, but they can affect other parts of the body.

Have a nice day. I intend to.

Pigeon scaring spikes just beyond Tower Bridge

In the summer of 2012, I was on the far side of Tower Bridge, about to cross it and walk back home along the South Bank, and my photo-archive tells me exactly what I was seeing, and thinking about it.

I started noticing how the sun was catching the pigeon scaring spikes:

And then came the kill shot, the artistic climax, the one where it was all effect and no context. Don’t bother clicking on any of the other photos in this posting if you’re not inclined, but at least feast your eyes for a few seconds on this:

It’s not regular sculpture, but it is sculpture, I think. I also photoed the nearby girl and dolphin, which is regular sculpture. I prefer the anti-pigeon spikes.

Because I knew that this could actually use a bit of context, here are three more of the photos I photoed, after that best in show shot above:

I also photoed a couple of pigeons, that had apparently not been scared, but you all know what pigeons look like. It’s those spikes that were so photoable.

These spikes are now a feature of London life. They’ve put spikes on top of my block of flats.

Zooming in on Millais

In January 2018, I see that I did a blog posting, in which I expressed interest in this camera, the Nikon Coolpix B700, including that link in that earlier posting. Late last year, I bought one of these cameras. This was partly for its x60 optical zoom, but also because the camera is red, and a red camera that looks like it should be black is, I think, cool. Also, it is easy to tell at a glance which of the two cameras I now use is which. It helped that it was going cheap, on Amazon, as I recall.

It proved ever so slightly disappointing, impressive though the zoom proved to be, sometimes. Here are three photos I photoed with it soon after getting it, that show just how powerful that zoom is:

These photos were taken last November, from the top of the steps outside Tate Ancient.

On the left, note the dark building made of three bits, of varying heights, looking a bit like a rude gesture made with the middle finger. In the middle photo, we observe the top of the middle and tallest bit of this building. And on the right, with the zoom going full blast, we see the cleaning crane at the top of the tower.

Technically, I was impressed. But, did I really need to be taking long distance photos of things which I could surely photo just as well by just getting a bit nearer. After all, much of the point of my photoing is to get me out of my home and taking some exercise. x25 would mean rather more exercise, so, the new x60 camera was that most unwelcome of phenomena, the solution to circumstances that were not a problem.

Until a few days ago, when I went out with my x25 black camera and my x60 red camera, and I photoed this photo, with the latter:

That was taken of John Everett Millais, at maximum x60 zoom, from quite a long way away.

With the result that I was not photoing the underneath of his chin, but photoing him something more like from his level. I was still below him, but the angle I was coming up at him was much smaller. Basically, I wasn’t photoing his adam’s apple.

Compare that with this, which, with apologies for the repetition, I had earlier photoed (and earlier shown here) of JEM with the x24 black camera:

I actually think that the black x25 photo is pretty good also, but given the choice for photoing the faces of statues, I now prefer the notion of using the red x60 camera, or at the very least having that option. There could be statues when its better angle will make quite a difference.

I like human faces, but there are problems with just photoing interesting faces and then shoving them up on a blog. Privacy, etc. I respect that.

I could show lots of photos of my own face, but I fear looking like a narcissist. (I also fear that one of the symptoms of narcissism is the fear of being thought a narcissist, but I’ll set that aside.) But there are no issues with photoing statues, and you can go in as close as you like on their faces. Also, most statues are of very interesting people. So, I like to photo them.

And now, I have photoing equipment that is that little bit better for doing that.

Out near London Gateway

A little clutch of photos of a decaying jetty, photoed just beyond Tilbury on the north side of the Estuary, in September 2013:

From this spot I could also see, in the far distance, the first few cranes of London Gateway. I made several trips to inspect these, around then:

There is nothing else as big as these cranes to be seen anywhere near them, and in their visual impact on their surroundings they remind me of nothing so much as one of those medieval cathedrals, in a town than never got much bigger. (Like Ely.)

According to Wikipedia, there are now twelve cranes up and running. There’ll eventually be twenty four.

One more such expedition to those parts probably wouldn’t kill me. Or then again it might. In London, everything is close together, and there are buses and trains everywhere. Not out there.

Cover his face

The previous posting being about photoing facial features in a way that’s clear, this posting is about how sometimes, what with the Plague we’re having, that can’t be done:

Those photos were photoed on March 31st, with MI6 and related edifices to be seen on the opposite side of the River there, across Vauxhall Bridge. A lot of their jobs just got harder.

So, this Lockdown thing has actually been going on for quite a while now, around two months. And it’s been time to unlock it for quite a while now. Trouble is, most people are so thoroughly scared now, if not of the Plague itself then of being thought indifferent to it. And, keeping Lockdown actually seems to feel good to many. It’s a chance to show one cares by just doing nothing. It won’t feel so good when, for those not already fretting about such things, all the bills come due.

Get back to work, world. And please world, keep the public spending splurges to the minimum. It was the New Deal which put the Great in the Great Depression.

Millais statue close up

Yesterday, I had another go, since I was passing that way, at photoing the Millais statue behind Tate Ancient, following an earlier effort last week (number 2 of these).

The light was the same as then, unhelpfully perfect. But this time I knew to try photoing the great man in close up, as well as from a distance with the whole statue visible. The distance ones were pretty much silhouettes, but one of the close-ups was quite good:

I tried to find a picture (for instance by googling Millais self portrait, or for that matter a photo, of Sir John, to put next to the photo above, to see how much they agreed. But nobody does regular pictures from the angle I photoed that statue photo from, so there didn’t seem any point.

I intend to go back there when the weather’s less good. The great thing about statues, from the photographic point of view, is that, like buildings, they don’t change from one day to the next and they stay where they are.

Electric scooter with vegetables

ISIBAISIA: The Next Big Thing in Transport, certainly in London Transport, is not robot cars; it is human-driven electric scooters.

Today, outside a local Afghan shop (the same one as at the other end of the second link above), photoed by me, with permission:

The photos were a bit better this time, and the vegetables came out much better.

In this podcast-with-Patrick I expressed scepticism about robot cars coming to your city any time very soon, but omitted to mention electric scooters, which are already here. Missed a trick there.

See also this robot-car-sceptic piece that says Self-Driving Cars Are Taking Longer to Build Than Everyone Thought. Which is not quite right. Self-driving cars are taking longer to build than everyone except me thought.

Even when they do arrive, robot cars will start out as just a robotised version of the same bad idea, which is people, who are not that big, meandering about in metal boxes which are very big indeed. Electric scooters take up a fraction of the space of these metal boxes and are easily stored at work, and equally easily carried on trains or buses, unlike the big metal boxes which are a nightmare to store and impossible to carry around with you. Electric scooters are, in particular, also much better than bikes. In a decade they will be everywhere, in giant flocks. Just you wait and see.

For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that the brand of scooter this guy was kind enough to demonstrate to me was the Inokim QUICK 3 super +. I’m going by comparing my photos with the imagery at the website, and going by what the he said it would do, and what he paid for it.

It looked really solid.

This taxi-with-advert couldn’t be cropped down to 1000×500

1000×500 is usually the size I crop taxis-with-adverts down to, for display here. Or to put it another way, first I chop them down into a big 2×1-shaped horizontal rectangle, and then reduce that down from whatever it was to 1000×500.

But I couldn’t do that to this taxi-with-advert, now could I?:

I may do so eventually, if and when this taxi-with-advert takes its place with another big gallery of taxis-with-adverts. But in the meantime …

This photo was photoed in January of 2014, hence the absence of 22 Bishopsgate, the Biggest Thing in the City of London Big Thing Cluster, yet despite that, so boring that it is still seems to be known, if known at all, as “22 Bishopsgate”.

The far less boring Scalpel was also yet to be built.