One way to photo and show strangers is to pick an angle that omits their faces, or have things in front of their faces. Another is to do it from a sufficient distance to have no visible faces:
That crowd photoed by me on December 18th, on top of Primrose Hill.
Click on that to see why I so much prefer trees in the winter, rather than when they are smothered in leaves.
Yes, panic over. The situation seemed very bad, but instead is as described above.
Consider this photo, of the roof of the long snakey shed that looks like it’s for growing tomatoes, where the Euro-trains used to arrive and depart from:
I was viewing that in Windows Photo Viewer, but then I found myself simultaneously viewing that same photo in in my photo-editing software, thus:
Do you see? Of course you do. Windows Photo Viewer, on the left, has introduced, from nowhere, a cream background, and shoved it behind and into the photo. On the right, Photoshop(clone) has ignored this cream under(over)lay, and has restored the pure blue of that Waterloo Station roof and has taken the ominous yellow tinge out of the dark grey sky. The white bits of the roof are back to being white. Put the photo in some different software for viewing my archives, and it is similarly cleansed of yellowness. All was well with the original photo, as it emerged from my camera. Windows Photo Viewer is the problem and the only problem.
So, no panic about my camera. Just a question about Windows Photo Viewer. How do I get that to behave itself? I have worked out how to change the brown at the top and bottom of the photo to any other colour you or I would like. But can I get it to stop with the cream? Can I random-punctuation-marks-in-an-angry-little-line. Suggestions anyone?
One of the problems of getting old is that it becomes gradually harder to do more than one thing in a day. This being why my daily postings here are often rather perfunctory.
This morning, for instance, I had a most enjoyable meeting with a friend, and then, the weather being so good, I went wandering about in Soho. That’s two things there, right away. Now, all I am capable of is rather incoherent rambling about nothing very much.
I did, while meandering about in the south of Oxford Street area, finally manage to track down the latest issue of the BBC Music (by which is meant classical music) magazine, which is getting harder to come by with every year that passes. Another symptom of advancing years being that it gets harder to buy the things that you particularly like, as others who also like that thing die off.
But, good news: the BBC’s preferred best performance of the Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata was a rather obscure recording by the rather obscure pianist, Peter Serkin, who is the less famous son of the famous pianist Rudolf Serkin. I have so many CDs that I often can’t be sure whether I own some particular CD or not, and so it was with this one. But after some rootling around, I discovered that I do possess this CD. I love it when that happens.
And yes, since you ask, I am influenced by critics. If someone who knows the piece in question very well thinks that this or that performance is very, very good, then I know that I will at least want to hear this performance, even if I don’t end up sharing the critic’s high opinion, which often I do. This recommendation means I will now listen to this CD again.
The other thing I did was take a close look at a camera that I have been tempted by, but will probably not be buying, although it was interesting. This was in a shop called Park Cameras in Rathbone Place.
Inside Park Cameras Rathbone Place I also took this photo, with the camera that I already possess:
Good to encounter a new bridge of interest, even if it is only a miniature Lego version of an old bridge. I have no idea why such a bridge was in Park Cameras Rathbone Place, but I wasn’t complaining.
I get the distinct impression that a golden age of bridge building arrived about thirty or forty years ago, but has now departed. I just picture googled new bridge, and I mostly got bridges I have known about for quite a while.
I digress.
Jan 6 is the last day for being Christmassy, right? Twelfth Night? After today, all things Christmas forbidden?
So, having taken these early this evening, through the front window of the Oxfam shop in Strutton Ground, they have to go up now, or just join the queue to be Christmassy next Christmas, which means never.
So, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, 50% off, to all my readers:
Also a turkey, a squirrel, a robin, two rabbits, a reindeer, and some crackers. And that really is Christmas and the New Year totally done. Happy middle of January to all.
It seems that the consensus is that Twelfth Night is actually Jan 5:
People believed that tree spirits lived in festive decorations and while you look after them over Christmas, if you don’t release them afterwards this could have consequences for the rest of the year. They also believed that vegetation would not grow and there would be agricultural problems and food shortages.
I instinctively feel that the same thing applies to displaying Christmas cards in your shop window. Gives a whole new meaning to the word Oxfam.
Today, in Lower Marsh, I met up with a friend for some friendly tech support, and this being Friday, both before and after that, I was on the look out for Cats and/or Other Creatures related photo-opportunities.
I also like antique vehicles.
So, I was delighted to encounter this:
The Cat’s Back presents:
Pig Out Rolling Gourmet Kitchen.
But, is it fair to describe the human propensity to over-eat as “pigging out”?
Humans definitely describe their uniquely relentless fascination with sex, all the year round, as “animal”, but most animals only get sexually excited during their – usually pretty short – mating seasons. Humans are surely among the very few creatures whose mating season is: always. So that isn’t fair. This makes me suspect that we blaim pigs for overeating when actually they don’t. But, what do I know?
Google google.
Most of a pig’s day is spent foraging and eating. The end of their snout has as many tactile receptors as the human hand, and is a highly specialised and sensitive tool. This, along with their exceptional sense of smell, enables pigs to locate and uncover tasty treats such as seeds, roots, and truffles. Unlike dogs or humans, pigs never dangerously overeat – even when given access to unlimited food.
Blog and learn, assuming that is right. Not: pig out. Dog out, maybe? But dogging already means a form of human sex (see above), so dogging out wouldn’t do at all. (Mind you, I have to admit that dogs seem to have a permanent mating season also.)
Many decades ago, there was a TV show called Juke Box Jury. I liked it best when someone said: “I like the backin’.” Subsequently, upon maturer reflection, I felt that I was quite right to zero in on that dictum, and I still do. So often, with pop music, it is the musical backing, rather than the mere singing, which turns pop inadequacy into something distinctive and entertaining.
Something similar can be said for photography. When a Real Photographer (LINK TO THE OLD BLOG) friend of mine was once upon a time telling me about how to do photoing, he too said: get the background right.
All of which is the preamble to this photo, which I took this afternoon, and the backin’ of which I like a lot:
That is a statue (so far so obvious) of (not so obvious) Prince Albert. When you image google for “Prince Albert statue London”, you get a lot of photos of him in golden splendour, seated inside his Memorial in Hyde Park, but not so many photos of this one. Judging by the other photos I did find of it, here, here (he calls it “the politest statue in London”) and here, this statue has recently been cleaned.
I am surprised at how much I have come to like statues, and public sculpture in general. Three of the photos in this posting of mine, which I linked to from here yesterday evening, are of public sculptures, two of them statues, of Beau Brummell and of Anna Pavlova. I didn’t plan this. It just turned out that way.
Happy New Year, by the way. I’ve had a good 2018, so far.
And something quite substantial, by which I mean quite long, there. But nothing, other that that link, here. Have a very good evening, celebrating the rest of this year and the beginning of the next, if you are doing that.
This evening I had a party at my home. All the people I invite to my Last Friday of the Month meetings were invited, and almost exactly the same number of people showed up as tend to show up for the meetings. How do they do this?
I am now completely knackered, but it wasn’t the party alone that knackered me; it was … alas, I find that I am too knackered to explain. Maybe, although I promise nothing, later.
So instead, a quota photo, of Southwark Cathedral not being dwarfed by modernity:
Taken out of the train window, on my way to Hither Green.
Spot the Gherkin.
Last night, egged on by some Southern Comfort and Coke, I sneaked a posting onto Samizdata, at a very quiet time of the year, and after a long break from doing anything there. I wonder how often, in human history, far more portentous events than that have been set in motion by the power of alcohol to turn “maybe later” into “what the hell I’ll do it now”.
The posting started with a photo of five hands holding five plastic glasses of something alcoholic. Here is another photo of the same scene, at the top of Primrose Hill, this time with one of the participants also doing a photo:
And then I showed a photo of Perry de Havilland, taken on Christmas Eve at his home. Here is another such photo, rather less exuberant:
And I ended with a quote garnered from Deidre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues. Page 61 of my paperback edition features five such quotes. I put one of these, from Benjamin Constant (and added that link to that piece about him) in the Samizdata posting. Here is another, from Voltaire, dated 1733:
I don’t know which is the more useful to the state, a well-powdered lord who knows precisely when the king gets up in the morning … or a great merchant who enriches his country, sends orders from his office to Surat or to Cairo, and contributes to the well-being of the world.
Neither do I know “which is more useful to the state”. But I know which one isn’t contributing to the well-being of the world and which one is. I think Voltaire rather gives his game away there.
After that trip to Primrose Hill with GodDaughter2, when my camera stopped cooperating, and I later got it working again, I went back there, on my own. I couldn’t be content until I had taken as many photos there as I would like to have taken on the previous visit.
One of the better photos I took on that second trip, of photoers photoing, was this:
Is that guy photoing his photoer lady-friend, as she photos the view? Judging by the red blob on his screen, which has got to be her bright red rucksack, I would say: yes he is. What a peculiar man, wanting to take a photo like that.
Joking aside, there is something else about my camera that troubles me, besides having spent a day thinking it was completely bust. Do you remember that day earlier this year when the sky turned yellow, because of some North African dust storm, or some such thing. Well, when my camera is set on automatic – and when I use it it is always set on automatic – it does this all the time. Everything comes out yellower than it should. Blues are diminished into white. The merest suggesting of actual yellow is intensified. Not good.
The above photo, effective though I think it is, illustrates this only too clearly. Notice how even my photo of the guy’s screen has his sky bluer than my version of the sky. Which means that his screen must have been very blue.
I tried reading the camera manual, but unfortunately this is written in a Serbo-Croation dialect of Sanskrit. Not one word of it makes any sense to me at all. And I tried fiddling around with the camera itself, without any success. I couldn’t even find anywhere on the www where I might be able to ask my question, and more to the point, maybe get some worthwhile answers. Help. I realise that Boxing day is not a good day to be saying such a thing, but I say it anyway. By the time anyone gets around to reading this, the problem is unlikely to have gone away.