Seven London bridges from the ME Hotel Radio Bar

I returned to the Radio Bar at the top of the Hotel ME on Saturday 7th of this month, when the weather was brighter and breezier. I was in a hurry to be back for an appointment at home, and did not have time to really look at what I was photographing, and anyway, my eyesight is poor and I can’t see a lot of it if I want to.

So, for instance, when I took this picture, …:

… I thought I was photographing just the one big, obvious bridge, the one with the towers. But it turned out that I was photographing seven bridges. Newcastle eat your heart out. Sorry about that big white circumcised cock in the foreground, getting in the way. It looks like it’s doing radar, but I doubt that.

Moving on quickly from that, let me itemise the bridges, from nearest to furthest away.

Here is a google map which shows how this picture was possible. Where it says “ME” (photo manipulation is not my strong suit but I did manage to add that), at the far left, is where I was standing, so ME means both me and the hotel of that name. Click on this map to get it bigger:

So, first, nearest to me, on the right of the big white cock, we can see pedestrians crossing the river on Blackfriars Bridge, the road version.

We cannot then see the isolated, do-nothing columns of the Blackfriars Railway Bridge that isn’t, so that doesn’t count. But just beyond those columns, we do clearly see, second, the Blackfriars Railway Station Bridge that is, with its long line of slanting roofs.

Third, we can see the upper parts of the Millenium Bridge (featured in the bottom three pictures here, where there is also another snap of those weird Blackfriars columns), the footbridge that famously wobbled when first opened, which does about half the job of taking pedestrians between Tate Modern to St Paul’s Cathedral.

Fourth, slightly green despite being in the shade, is Southwark Bridge.

Fifth, there is the severely functional railway bridge that takes the trains from the south east over the river to Cannon Street Station. You can just make out a clutch of signals at its left hand end as we look at it.

Sixth, we have “London Bridge”, and I can help adding sneer quotes. What a come-down that bridge is from how London Bridge used to be. No wonder so many people think that Tower Bridge is London Bridge. The actual London Bridge is so boring.

One of the reasons I especially like the new Blackfriars Railway Station Bridge is that it sets a precedent for putting buildings on a London bridge, and makes it more likely that London Bridge itself might one day be rebuilt in something like its former glory. Maybe not quite as tall as it once was, but with buildings on it, like Ponte Vecchio. What would be particularly cool is if, just as in former times, a new London Bridge could be built, strong enough to be a platform for buildings, but if it was then left to individual plot owners to decide exactly what to put on each plot.

And finally, seventh, there is Tower Bridge, at the far right hand end of the map.

London. It just keeps on getting better.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

ME Hotel Radio Rooftop Bar

Yes, it’s another posting about photographing London’s Big Things from a high up place.

On July 27th of last year, I found myself at the top of Kings College, London, and a week later I posted a few of the photos I managed to take from that vantage point.

Many of the photos I took looked like this:

In other words, general, semi-panoramic views, just hoovering up whatever was there to be seen, to be looked at in more detail later.

But after taking that photo, I realised that this view included what looked like another very promising vantage point:

When I got home, I did some googling, and found out that this place must be the Radio Bar at the top of the ME Hotel. The ME Hotel is at the westerly spike of the Aldwych semi-circle, so to speak.

Here is another good picture of this place, and of the kind of views that may be had from it.

So, I had a go at visiting this soon after finding this out, in August, but there was a queue, and I am not good with queues. Queues mean waiting in the queue, and also mean that when you finally get there, there will be lots of people in the way of my photographing, and worse, that they may be in a hurry to get rid of you (especially if you are a photographer), rather than glad to see you. So, I decided to try it again when the weather was nice, but colder.

And recently, on January 25th, I did this. Me being me, I took lots of views, and lots of views with fellow digital photographers taking shots of the views:

I also cranked up the zoom, and took lots of views like this:

This Radio Bar is one of the very best places I know of to look out over London.

With views that touch the clouds and include Tower Bridge, the Shard, London Bridge, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Tate Modern, Somerset House, Southbank, London Eye, Houses of Parliament, and the theatre district of Covent Garden, the rooftop bar at the ME London raises the bar on the enjoyment of social life whilst having a drink in the lounge.

Boastful but fair, although I think I marginally prefer, for the way it is laid out, One New Change. But the views from this new place are an order of magnitude better.

On January 25th, I purchased not just the one over-priced (actually a blazing bargain, given what I was really buying) drink, but, after I had finished taking snaps, another.

I returned to the ME Radio Bar just over a week ago, but … later.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Eiffel Tower with chimney pots – La Défense ditto

Much humour is to be had by modifying a cliché, and something similar applies to photography. The Eiffel Tower features in many photos. The chimney pots of Paris, not quite so much.

That was taken on February 2nd 2012, from the Pompidou Centre.

I an still stunned by how brilliant my new, cheap computer screen is. Pictures like this one become hugely better than I remember them first time around, and wandering around in my photo-archives is more enjoyable than ever before.

Here is another picture taken at the same time from the same place. Also lots of chimneys, though you have to look a bit more closely this time. But in the background there, La Défense, Paris’s Big New Things district.

What that big dome is in the foreground, I don’t know. I was staying with Antoine Clarke when I took these snaps, and in fact he was up there with me when I took these. Maybe he can tell us what that big curvey thing is. When you take pictures of some big thing, there is a presumption that you do care what it is, but personally, in this case, I don’t really care. There are more than enough mysterious buildings like this in London to keep me wondering, without me fretting about mystery buildings in Paris. But maybe you would like to know.

And yes, I am almost certain that is a crane.

One other thing. This new screen has me thinking that maybe the size of pictures I am putting up here may be a bit wrong. When you click on the above two, you’ll get them at 1200×900, which is bigger than I usually do, because now my own screen is bigger. Is this either too big, or too small? I’d welcome anyone’s opinion on that.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Alex Singleton at the ASI last night

I have plenty more to say about Alex’s PR Masterclass, and may even get around to saying it, Real Soon Now. Meanwhile, here is my favourite snap that I snapped at the launch of the book last night, at the office of the Adam Smith Institute:

If you hold a book launch for a book called “PR Masterclass”, that launch had better be packed out, or you look like a prune.

It was. He didn’t.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The text of my talk for Christian Michel last night on the impact of digital photography

As I said in the previous post, my talk about digital photography at Christian Michel’s last night went well, in the sense of me feeling it went well, and it seeming to be well received. I occasionally put my sheets of paper down and extemporised upon some point I was making, but mostly, this was it. No links, no photos, no extras. (They may come later, I hope, but I promise nothing.) Just the bare text that I read out, complete with all the errors of grammar and spelling, of fact and interpretation, that may or may not be present:

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

I have given several talks in this 6/20 series, but until now this has been because I have had both questions and answers to offer to the assembled throng. I have had theses to present, clutches of facts to pass on.

This time I don’t know the answers. I merely want to know the answers. What is the impact of digital photography? What is it doing to us? Since fixing this subject matter with Christian I have made, I think, some progress in arriving at answers, but only some. Tonight I expect to make further progress.

Luckily, for my purposes, we have all been alive throughout the period of digital photography’s mass use, and have observed it in action, even if we may not always have wanted to. Has anyone here not taken a digital photo? Just as I thought. (It actually says that here. And this.)

*****

I will start my remarks by quoting a remark made by an American whom I overheard about fifty years ago, on the Acropolis in Athens, the place where what is left of the Parthenon stands. I was there trying to do some sketching, a skill I never got any good at but spent a few years attempting. He was doing pictures with his seriously pre-digital camera. As soon as he had finished photoing, he wanted to leave, presumably to get to his next photoing place. But his family were enjoying the Acropolis in the morning sunshine. Said he to his family: “Come on, come on! We’ll look at it when we get home!”

This outburst captures a great deal about what people object to about digital photography, but it also reminds us that photography, by Everyman as opposed to by professionals, is nothing new. Digital photography is partly just the intensification of a process that has been in place in our culture for well over a century. But it is more than that.

Continue reading The text of my talk for Christian Michel last night on the impact of digital photography

Ballerina with crane

Photoed by me today:

The golden dancing lady is the one on top of the Victoria Palace Theatre.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A Strutton Ground shop and a Strutton Ground pub

Photos mature with age. The most commonplace snaps can turn into something a bit more interesting, with the passing of time.

Consider this one, one of the very first that I took with my Panasonic Lumix FZ150:

I know. It’s a shop.

But the thing is, it’s now boarded up. That photo was taken in January 2012. In January 2013, this happened:

The administrators to Jessops face a battle to rescue any of the company’s 192 shops after leading camera makers tightened the terms on which they sell products to the company following a downturn in the market.

Rob Hunt, joint administrator for PricewaterhouseCoopers, said: “Without the support of certain people, we are looking at complete closure.”

Jessops has since made a partial return to life, but so far, that Jessops, which is in Strutton Ground, near where I live, has remained shut.

In the years just before it closed it had an unbearably “helpful” shop assistant, who behaved like he’d been on some mad American training course in how to relate to customers. He wouldn’t leave you alone, and instead would engulf you in loud, totally fake bonhomie. I used to browse around in there from time to time, occasionally buying things like batteries and SD cards, and pondering my next camera. But because of this person, I stopped going there. Was I the only one, I wonder?

Talking of Strutton Ground, did you know that the Goon Show first saw the light of day in Strutton Ground? Yes, on the top floor of the pub at the far end of it from me. I saw this in a TV show about Spike Milligan.

I guess that’s probably more interesting than a Jessops closing. I’ll see if I can dig out more photos of things that have changed, that are rather better than that one, taken longer ago.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A vanished building and a bendy bus

Last night, in the post immediately below this one, I said that photos get better with time because the things in them change. The illustration, a shop that is a shop no longer, was pretty feeble. But after posting that, I went looking for better pictorial proof, and I think I found it:

This picture is of a big London building, in the middle of the big roundabout across the river from Parliament. This building no longer exists. I then went looking for one of the numerous photos I have taken since of the swanky new hotel that has replaced this old, brutal, Brutalist monstrosity, but of course I could not find one. Follow that link to see what the new Thing looks like.

And my picture also features a bendy bus. These are likewise no longer with us.

The photo was taken on March 10th 2004, with my now antique Canon A70. I also, while on my travels through the archives, found other particularly choice old digital cameras in action. Some of them soon, probably, possibly, I promise nothing.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Cranes seen through Cardinal Place

Yes more cranes, which I spotted yesterday afternoon, at the top end of Victoria Street. So again, very near to Victoria Station.

I’m afraid that, yet again, I had to do some twisting to get that vertical and horizontal. I am cursed with the desire to photograph verticals and horizontals, but not to be able to get them looking right straight out of the camera.

Cardinal Place has a pointy end, which is basically just two huge windows, so you can see right through that. Below this paragraph, on the right, a photo from the exact same spot in the exact same direction, but with the zoom not operating, so you can see better what this is of.

Perhaps there are some readers wondering what the hell is so fascinating about cranes. Well for one thing, they’re cranes, with all that this entails, in terms of structural magnificence, aesthetic beauty, functional just-so-ness. Also, cranes mean new Things, coming soon. Not necessarily good Things, but … Things. Cranes are a vote of confidence in whatever place they are operating in. Cranes in London say: hurrah for London.

Also, cranes are, unless something has gone badly wrong, temporary. It will be great fun to stand, in two years time, in the exact same spot, and see how different things then look.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Smaller is more legible – big is more fun

Sometimes mistakes caused by not holding the camera still can be interesting.

Today I took several photos (at Victoria Station, like the previous photo featured here) of the station electronic notice board saying where my train was about to go. Basically, I was taking notes to remind myself later of where I had been. But one of these photos went wrong. On the twiddly little screen on my camera it looked, on account of me having moved my camera vertically at the critical moment, approximately like as you see it, top right.

That one won’t last a second when I go through all these at home, I thought. If I was in the habit of deleting snaps on the fly, which I am not, I would have deleted that one straight away.

But now look at how it looked on my big screen, back home on my desk, this evening:

That’s the middle of the picture, to get how big it is when spread out sideways all over my big screen. Click on that bigger picture to get an even bigger version of the original.

I don’t think it’s just me. The smaller picture is much more legible. But the bigger picture is a lot more fun, on account of being less legible. It stops being annoyingly blurry writing, and instead becomes Art.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog