Category: Photography

A sound file with sound advice about photography

Testing testing:

Wow, that worked! First time. A long line with progress on display, just like the real internetters do. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting anything that good. Go WordPress.

The sound file is of me picking the brain of my friend Bruce the Real Photographer. His advice about photoing is very clear and down to earth. I did a posting on BtRP way back in 2006, which included this interview. Now I’m trying to transfer that posting across from the old blog to this blog. It’ll be a while yet before you see that, because the photo-presentation angle of that is complicated. But meanwhile, ff you fancy the idea, have a listen.

Colossal baby tripod fish – flamingos feeding – house exploding

Baby? Well, it says “larval”. That sounds very young to me:

I came upon this at Colossal. But I’ve not checked out Colossal lately, and it took a Steven Pinker tweet to draw my attention to these photos, of which the above is one.

I scrolled down at Colossal, having not, as I say, been there recently, and I then also came upon this video of flamingos feeding, which David Thompson also noticed, them being his penultimate item of ephemera today, his final item being about an old man who attacked a fly with his electric fly swatter and blew up his house.

Ah, the Internet. Where would we be without it?

Camden Highline coming

Glad to see that this project is making progress:

The Camden Highline project, planned to open in phases from 2024, will create a new central London park and linear walking route – inspired by Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s New York High Line – featuring seating areas, cafés, arts and cultural interventions and spaces for charitable activities.

Cultural “interventions”? Does that mean sculpture and stuff? People wearing daft costumes? I guess I’ll have to wait until 2024.

I had already noticed this Camden Highline notion back in August 2017. I even included a map.

A model of London Bridge that is hard to photo

One of the more frustrating of the photo-expeditions I have done in the last few years was one to the Church of St Magnus the Martyr.

I was there, around a year ago. to photo a model of Old London Bridge, which I had found out about in some way that I now forget. And the model was there. That wasn’t the frustration. What was the frustration was that photographically, this model pretty much defeated me. Although clearly visible and clearly identifiable for what it was, it was protected by the photographic equivalent of armour plating, in the form of a very shiny glass box.

I still took lots of photos, and from the selection of those that I now show you, you do get some idea of what sort of model this is and how it looks in its ecclesiastical surroundings:

The less these photos are about the details of the model and the more they are about the model as a whole and its surroundings, the better they are, and I biased my choice of what to post here I had in that direction. So they are worth a click through, if London’s eccentricities and oddities are of interest to you.

I image-googled this model, and the results were not as disappointing as my own efforts but still rather disappointing. This model has been there since 1987, but at no time, then or since, has anyone taken any really classy photos of it, or not any that the internet seems to be have been told about. (If commenters can prove me wrong, I’d be be very happy.)

There are some photos of this model, which are definitely better ones than mine from the point of view of showing the details of the Thing, here. But even that photoer struggled, I think. As did this guy.

It would be nice if this church were to pick itself a Real Photographer, and let him have a go at this Thing, with Real Photographer type lighting, with the glass temporarily removed, and maybe with some specially supplied backgrounds to screen out the church clutter, and also all the uneven light that crashes into the church through its church windows. Maybe let the RP take the whole Thing to a studio of some sort.

That would be nice for the likes of me. But maybe the people running this church already rather resent the number of godless tourists of my sort who already come tramping into their House of God to gawp at and and to photo this bridge model, and who then tramp out again, ever to be seen again unless they want more photos of the model. And the last thing they want is to encourage a whole new flood of such people. If my guess is right, I can’t say I blame them, but it is just a guess and I could be quite wrong.

I could find no reference to this London Bridge model at the church’s own website, but again, that could merely be because I am terrible at searching websites.

There is another picture of this church in an earlier posting I did here about the Monument, showing how near that edifice is to this church.

Goats in Llandudno

When the humans stay indoors, the goats are emboldened:

My favourite (photo 15 (and their favourite because they also put it at the top)) of these lockdown photos.

See also, a raccoon in Central Park (photo 2), with Big New York Things in the background.

And: fallow deer in East London (photo 7). I hope they aren’t playing a ball game.

Drone photos in the outer suburbs

And by outer suburbs, I mean the outer suburbs of London. Just the other side of the green belt:

I came across these on the Facebook page of a friend (Facebook friend and friend for real). I didn’t think I knew anyone possessing a drone, with a camera, which he has been using to take aerial photos of the non-countryside, near London, but it turns out I do. I really like these photos, especially the one of the midget reservoir.

I am blogger-friends with 6k, who displays the occasional drone photo. But that’s in Africa. Africa is like another continent.

If I tell you that it’s the River Thames in those photos, that narrows it down quite a lot, but not too much, I trust. That approximate location aside, I am of course being deliberately vague about telling you anything more about my near-London friend than that he’s my friend, and that I thank him for permission (just in case you were wondering) to reproduce some of his recent set of drone-photos here. The vagueness is because who knows what sort of trouble I might get him into, maybe with some non-friendly neighbour, if I was not so vague? I agree, it’s most unlikely that anyone will give a damn about me “publishing” these photos, but what if they do?

I wouldn’t dream of attempting anything like this inside the green belt. But if my friend wants to drop by and give it a go …

I would absolutely love to accompany him and his drone on a photo-expedition, just to see for myself exactly how obtrusive and obvious it all is, or not as the case may be. Just for starters, how noisy are these things? Does everyone in the vicinity of a drone which is doing its thing know it’s there? Can they then look for it, and see it? Or are drones like my friend’s one too small to see from any distance?

Someone sent me an email plugging this drone guide, a while back. I’ve not read it. Maybe I should.

Some more creature tweets

A scary tweet:

The other thing I found out was that the female monarch butterfly has an array of chitinous teeth inside her ‘vagina’ …

Chitinous? Excuse me while I google that. Here we go.

A nitrogen-containing polysaccharide that is a tough, protective, semitransparent substance and is the principal component of arthropod exoskeletons and the cell walls of certain fungi.

A tweet about how They solved a life-threatening problem for this glorious pelican.

A scornful tweet, about how the brother of a lion was also a lion. Or so CNN claimed.

A tweet about a beautiful, very long but only two-door, charger. Which is a creature.

A tweet about Mama monkey making funny faces at baby.

A tweet about what someone joining in the tweeting called a beautiful bird, which means I can include it in this list. What it really is is a huge nuclear bomber airplane called the Convair B-36, which had both propellers and jets to drive it along. It reminds me of those big old sailing ships that also had coal-powered engines:

Anyone know where that photo was taken? It should be recognisable, if you recognise it I mean.

Are you bored with all these creatures tweets? Well then, here, especially for you, is a tweet about a snake yawning.

Tower Bridge at night

Lots of postings yesterday, but today, after one, other things to do. So, to make it two today, here’s a quota photo that I like:

This is another of Michael J’s, photoed, presumaably, on one of his nocturnal walks in the clear air of London (See his comment there). I copied it from his Facebook site a while back, but now cannot find it there. He has other photos up of a similar sort, including that earlier Shard photo, and including another similar view of Tower Bridge which includes the Shard, here.

I particularly like the way the surface of the water looks, like a rectangular grid of reflected light.

Two fearless cats

First, a cat I met during Lockdown in June, enjoying the almost empty road, and strolling across it like he owned it:

If Lockdown ever ends, the urban animal tendency is going to be mysteriously baffled as to why things became so mysteriously nice, before going back to being regular old nasty.

And second, Oscar, the cat of GodDaughter2’s family, as photoed perching on some railings by GD2’s Dad, earlier this month, in the south of France:

I bet it’s hot down there just now.

Actually, Oscar is being quite careful, and is perched in such a way that if anything did go wrong, he’d fall onto the balcony, not to the ground outside.

Nice pics there GD2D, but I think this photo, also illustrating Oscar’s fearlessness of heights, is even better.