Yes, a truly wonderful The Wires! sculpture gets long overdue recognition from Dezeen, on account of a lump of religious concrete being put next to it, by an architect.
The photographer clearly loves The Wires!:
But Dezeen’s writers are under strict orders.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful and intricate The Wires! are:
The rule is set in concrete.
Don’t mention The Wires!
I like cricket. And I like drones. But which is best?
There’s only one way to find out. Fight.
Actually, all the drone did there was hover, waiting to be clobbered, which, a minute and a half in, it duly was, by Chris Gayle.
What I want to see is a game where drones fight against each other. Or a war. Either would do.
Or, perhaps a demo.
Here is a piece I did here about how Modernism got associated with whiteness. And for most would-be Modernists, Modernism still is white. But, here is another piece I did about coloured Modernism, in the form of Renzo Piano’s very colourful buildings near Centre Point. (Renzo Piano also designed the Shard.)
Here is another photo I took of these, I think, delightful edifices:
And here is a faked-up picture I came across not long ago, which suggests that Piano’s colourfulness may have struck a chord with other architects:
That picture adorns a report about the footbridge that you can see on the right of the picture, the very same one that I saw being installed last August. But I think you will agree that the towers on the Island there are a definite echo of that Pianistic colour.
The great thing about coloured architecture is that you can build the most severely functional lumps, and only worry about brightening them up afterwards. Form can colour function, and then colour can cover up the form and make it fun.
But it need not stop at just having one plain colour. Soon the artists will join in, and there will be giant murals.
If I had to place a bet about how different London will look from now in thirty year’s time, this would be the change I would bet on. Both new buildings and dull old ones will be much more brightly coloured.
I’m guessing that outdoor paint is a technology that has had a lot of work done on it in recent years, and that such work continues.
I will be interested to see if those Piano office blocks become faded, or if the colour stays bright for a decent time.
Interestingly Le Corbusier was a great one for colour being slapped on Modern buildings, but the notion never really caught on. Or rather, it is only now catching on.
As is illustrated in this posting at Material Girls. Where the point is also made that another huge influence on the monochrome association with Modernism was early and black-and-white photography. Even colourfully painted buildings didn’t look coloured in the photos. (One might add that newspapers and magazines only burst into colour after WW2, in the case of newspapers only in the 1960s. Until then, all newspaper and magazine photos were printed in black and white. So even if Modernism was done in colour, its influence spread in black and white.)
Now, colourful buildings tend to look colourful, both for real, and in the photos.
First, the BMdotcom headline of the day:
Ukrainian Army Using 3D Printed Drones To Battle Pro-Russian Separatists As Cease-fire Nears
These drones are being used to “monitor”, not for bombing or shooting. Nevertheless, interesting.
In other drone photography news, have a look at the new Apple Headquarters, as it takes shape. This particular movie seems to be friendly, so to speak. Apple would appear to have agreed to it. But what of drone photos and drone movies that are not so friendly?
I first realised that drones would be a big deal when I saw one (with a camera attached) in a London shop window.
In October, I posted this, provoked by seeing a drone in a London shop window. I said stuff like this:
Something tells me that this gadget is going to generate some contentious news stories about nightmare neighbours, privacy violations, and who knows what other fights and furores.
What might the paps do with such toys? And how soon before two of these things crash into each other?
I should also then have read and linked to this piece, published by Wired in February. Oh well. I’m linking to it now.
Quote:
Sooner or later there will inevitably be a case when the privacy of a celebrity is invaded, a drone crashes and kills someone, or a householder takes the law into their own hands and shoots a drone down.
Quite aside from privacy issues, what sort of noise do these things make? That alone could be really annoying. (Although that link is also very good as a discussion of privacy issues. Noise is only the start of their discussion.)
My guess? These things will catch on, but at first only for niche markets, like photoing sports events, or, in general, photoing inside large privately owned places where the owner can make his own rules and others then just have to take them or leave them. Pop concerts. If they’re not too noisy, they might be good for that.
This is always how new technology first arrives. Ever since personal computers the assumption has tended to be that the latest gizmo will immediately go personal, so to speak. (Consider 3D printing.) But actually, personal use is, at any rate to begin with, rather a problem. At first, the new gizmo finds little niche markets. Only later, if at all, do things get personal.
Which is why, I think, the first two sightings I have made of photo drones have each been in shop windows, the first in the window of Maplins in the Strand (see the link above), and the most recent, shown below, in the window of Maplins in Tottenham Court Road:
And a creepy Christmas to you. I guess this is the gadget of choice of “Secret Santa”.
Which reminds me. Now is the time I start taking photos of signs saying “Merry Christmas” to stick up here instead of sending out Christmas cards. Will I find a weirder “Merry Christmas” than that? Quite possibly not.
I am looking forward to photoing one of these things out in the wild.
Yesterday, encouraged by the weather forecast (which predicted a window of weather excellence in the midst of the otherwise dark and dreary weather that had been prevailing until yesterday and that has resumed today), I went out photo-walking. The mission was to check out that viewing platform at the top of Tower Bridge. How does that look from below? I will tell you all about that later, maybe. (I promise nothing.)
Within seconds of stepping outside my front door, I knew that this was going to be a very good day for photoing, because of the light. Photography is light. I like lots of it, but I don’t like it to be too bright, and I don’t like it all going in the same direction. Yesterday was such a day.
If you are a Real Photographer, and if the sort of light that is readily available is not what you would like it to be, then you contrive what you do like, or you fake it – with clever filters, Photoshop, blah blah – processes that you know all about. I am not a Real Photographer.
On the right there is one of the very first shots I took, a shadow selfie, which included a lady walking past me in the opposite direction. It’s not really proper to stick photos of strangers up on your blog – photos of strangers complete with their faces, photos of the strangers complete with their faces who are doing nothing to draw attention to themselves – no matter how obscure your blog may be. But, photoing their shadows and sticking that up is definitely okay.
And here are two more pictures I took early on in my perambulations, just after I had emerged from Tower Hill tube station. I start with them simply because they are vertical rather than my usual horizontal, and hence it makes sense to display them next to each other:
Here is a report from when that statue was unveiled, in 2006. It is not the war memorial that it resembles, more like a peace memorial, for people killed while doing building work. Good. This is the least that such unlucky persons deserve.
As for the Shard, it was looking particularly beautiful yesterday, like a ghost of its regular self. It was all to do with that light.
The Thing in front of the Shard is the highest of the four towers of The Tower of London. The Tower of London is an odd way to describe it, what with their being so many towers plural involved. I’m guessing they built one big Thing, called it the Tower of London, and by the time they added all those little towers, the name had stuck.
However, after reading this, which says things like this, …:
It is not clear exactly when work started on the Conqueror’s White Tower or precisely when it was finished but the first phase of building work was certainly underway in the 1070s.
Nothing quite like it had ever been seen in England before. The building was immense, at 36m x 32.5m (118 x 106ft) across, and on the south side where the ground is lowest, 27.5m (90ft) tall. The Tower dominated the skyline for miles around.
… I would like to revise my guess. It would seem that the four little towers on the top were there from the start, and that to start with it wasn’t the Tower of London at all. So, what I want to guess instead is that now that the Tower of London is surrounded by London as we now know it, what we tend mostly to see of it is the four towers at the top. But, for many centuries, the Tower of London was indeed seen by all those within sight of it as the one Big Thing (which merely happened to have a few spikes on the top), London’s first Big Thing, and for many decades, its only Big Thing.
It’s one thing to see a photo-drone reviewed in DPReview, and costing the best part of a thousand quid. It’s quite another to see one in the flesh, in a London shop window, on sale for less than four hundred:
Photoed by me through the window of Maplin’s in the Strand, late this afternoon.
Here are the details of this gizmo, at the Maplin’s website.
Okay, that must be a very cheap camera, but even so, this feels to me like a breakthrough moment for this technology, if not exactly now, then Real Soon Now. Note that you can store the output in real time, on your mobile phone. Something tells me that this gadget is going to generate some contentious news stories about nightmare neighbours, privacy violations, and who knows what other fights and furores.
What might the paps do with such toys? And how soon before two of these things crash into each other?
Here is another way I might get those high up views of London that I am always searching for:
DPReview review here:
In my own experiences, aerial shoots have proven difficult to pull off. The window of shooting time was limited, the cabin was cramped, and the first time I ever stuck my camera out the window, the lens flew off and I miraculously caught it in mid-air. It was also roughly $250 for an hour.
But within the past couple of years, aerial photographers have been introduced to a burgeoning market rife with little flying machines that don’t require passengers, don’t need fuel to operate, and can fit inside a cubic foot. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the era of user-operated photography drones is upon us, and it’s already kicking into warp speed.
I’m guessing that the technology of it would be beyond me, and the legality of it a minefield.
I loved them when I photoed them last January. Now the chimney pots and rooftops of Paris get serious Real Photographer attention, from Michael Wolf:
One of David Thompson’s latest clutch of ephemera.
If you’ve not been there before, I recommend visiting Handpicked London. I’ve just been browsing through it, and found my way from it to Photographs of Tower Bridge being constructed are found in a skip, from December 2011, which I do not remember noticing at the time. (The first two of those are Facebook links, and maybe they don’t last. You have to register, is what the second one just said.)
These photographs of Tower Bridge being constructed have been unveiled after a stash of hundred-year-old photos were found in a skip. The 50 sepia pictures, the most recent of which date back to 1892, reveal in incredible detail the ingenuity behind one of the capital’s most popular tourist destinations.
Hybrid modernism. Modern in its manner of creation. Ancient in appearance. An architectural style with a lot of mileage in it.
LATER: More stuff from me about towers here.
