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

The electricity meter man photos my electricity consumption with his mobile

Indeed. And, I got him to hold the pose while I photoed it:

Okay, mine’s a rubbish picture, but: you get the picture, and in any case the fact that you can’t read the numbers is a feature rather than a bug. I’m sure he got his picture. He has already typed into his other little machine a note of my address and electricity score. So it will be entirely clear to him which number he is confirming, or conceivably correcting, with his photo.

Just another example of what mobiles contribute to the economy, not just by doing newsworthy stuff like transmit big gobs of money or send portentous messages to and from people on the move, but simply by helping workers to do little bits of work. Often, mobiles and their cameras are used to record the progress of work. This is using mobiles and their cameras actually to do the work, because this particular work is recording.

I know: smart meter. Well, someone recently tried to install one, but for some reason it couldn’t be done, or not yet.

To really appreciate this, you have to have experienced what happens to your electricity bill when your electricity consumption is recorded wrongly.

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

Un autre quota photo

This evening I started contriving what I hope will be the first of quite a few excerpts from The Judgement of Paris, the book referred to in the previous posting. But it all took far longer than I had thought it would. Those Frenchies and their accents! Also, lots of numbers referring to endnotes had/have to be removed. It has a lot of endnotes.

So, meanwhile, another photo taken by me in Paris, in the frigid February of 2012:

That’s one of the modernistical buildings of La Défense, reflected in another of the modernistical buildings of La Défense. (Even organising those accents was a bit of a bother.)

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

An interruption ends

Today I finally got to the end of The Judgement of Paris. I have now started making a list of some short bits of it that I hope to reproducing here.

Meanwhile, by way of a small celebration, here is a Parisian photo I took, in Paris, way back in February 2012:

It’s the Tour Eiffel, of course, photoed from under it. Tour Eiffel is pronounced “Tour F L”, rather that “Tour I Fell”. Which reassures me that I know how to pronounce the leading historical character, Ernest Meissonier, in the above book. “May sonni eh” rather than “My sonni eh”.

Anyway, a big and very interesting interruption has stopped interrupting me and my life, and I’m very glad about that.

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