Yesterday evening I attended the talk organised by Libertarian Home, in the City, given by Steve Davies.  I sat right at the front, and took photos:

On the left, Simon Gibbs of Libertarian Home photographs, on the right, Steve Davies.  Here we see Davies taking time out from talking about the history of individualism in Britain, to describe the best way to play the opening chords of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.

Cranes, with a great sunset behind them.  What could possibly go wrong with a shot like that?

It’s just a bunch of birds, that’s what:

You want cranes?  These are cranes:

Birds picture via here.

Photographed by me this afternoon, outside the Savoy Hotel, Strand, London, where there are two of these, on either side of the entrance road:

I couldn’t tell, no matter how carefully I looked, whether this is made of real vegetation or just plastic fakery.  I asked how long the cats had been there, but got no satisfactory answer.  All I learned was that these cats are there for “good luck”.

When home, I googled, and learned of Kaspar.

I shall definitely be having a go on this, which will be up and ready for climbing in the Autumn:

The boundaries between Art, Advertising and Fun get ever blurrier.

This particular bit of artistically fun advertising being to advertise a new way to use “tulipwood”.

Blog and learn.

Here is one of my favourite recent snaps, taken in that garden just up river from the main Parliament building:

Click if you want the bigger original picture, which is not much different.

And yes that does look like a cassette, that he is using there to take snaps of his own (oblivious of me taking a snap of him of course).

So, a close look at the cassette:

I googled cassette iphone case and found lots of iPhone cases like this one, but not that exact one.  Maybe it’s not an iPhone, but an Android phone.

I also like the water bottle.

More thoughts from me on the impact of digital photography on our world, and an appeal for sofa help, here.

Yesterday I investigated another London Park, Victoria Park, out east.  Again, too many trees, Big Things only occasionally and distantly visible in among trees.

But at the end of my explorations I found myself at Hackney Wick Overground station.  Much better.  As railway stations often are, this is a fine spot to photograph surrounding stuff and distant Big Things.  And despite the already considerable elevation of the platforms, there was also a footbridge that was even higher than the platforms.  Here are some snaps taken from that footbridge:

The white spikes (1.2, 2.1) are the Olympic Stadium, and the big red thing is the Big Red Olympic Thing.

At first I thought that picture 3.2 featured some sort of new bridge, but now I think it’s some sort of big shed, in its early stages.

LATER: No.  The thing that looked like a shed being constructed is actually a shed being dismantled.  It used to be a big white Olympic sport shed of some sort, and now it is being removed.

Further googling reveals that this used to be the basketball arena.

Well, I’ve had another of those longish spells of silence, referred to in this earlier posting at the end of last month.

Quote:

When I have a longish spell of silence, such as the one that has just ended lasting ten days, my problem is that I keep thinking that another day won’t hurt, and that when I return, I must do so with a big bang, i.e. a brilliantly big or important posting.  Which causes the spell of silence to prolong itself even more.

So instead, what I eventually do is just shove up any old thing, ...

So, once again, here is any old thing:

That was taken in Southwark Park, on the first day of this month.  I like the shadows there.

However, Southwark Park was, for me, rather a disappointment.  The idea was that from a big open space such as it seemed to be on the map, …:

... I would be able to see some of London’s Big Things, a few of which are quite close.  But alas, the place was chock-a-block with trees, as you can tell from that map if you scrutinise it a bit.  Which meant that Big Things were hardly visible:

In the summer, when the trees will presumably be covered in leaves, this place will be a total nightmare.

A few days ago I visited Chateau Samizdata.  While there, I picked the brain of its Chatelaine on the subject of my Google Nexus 4, because she now has one of these also.

She showed me various useful tricks. In particular she showed me – and helped me to download – an Android app called BUS LONDON, which identifies the bus stops nearest to wherever you are, and tells you what buses are about to arrive at each stop, when, and where they are headed.

BUS LONDON, in other words, provides you with information like this:

That is a photo I took last night at a bus stop near me.  I have always, in my pre BUS LONDON life, found such signs to be immensely useful because so very reassuring.  A bus to where I want to go will almost certainly be coming, quite soon, is the message I get, and it is most welcome when you consider the alternative.  But only some bus stops have these excellent signs.  Hence the value of an app like BUS LONDON.

Irritatingly, however, when I was at Chateau Samizdata, BUS LONDON refused to tell me about the bus stop that I was about to use.  This is because this bus stop is a bit further away from CS than it might have been, but is worth the short extra walk because of the greater choice of buses that it offers me.  This is a stop that buses converge on, so to speak.  But once I got near enough to it, BUS LONDON obliged with all the relevant information.

However, when I arrived at the bus stop, which also has an electric sign like the one in the photograph above, this is what I saw:

I stared and stared at this to see if anything further would happen, but nothing did.  This is something I have never seen before.  Usually these signs either work, almost always, or occasionally do not work and are blank.  Never before have I seen a sign behaving like an 80s personal computer, by publicising its problems like this and getting stuck.

Quite a coincidence, I think you will agree.  Within about an hour of acquiring BUS LONDON, I encounter a bus stop sign that fails to tell me what is due, but no matter, because I now have BUS LONDON to tell me!

I could not shake the feeling that my Google Nexus 4 had sucked all the information out of the sign, into itself, leaving the sign utterly confused.

If you think the reflections of all this info are not strictly necessary, and that the reflections might have been cropped out, well, true, but I do like reflections.

Here is the reflection of the first sign, the one near me, rotated and reversed to make it easily legible:

Off topic, but I like it.  If you think this reflection to be an irrelevance, then I suggest you redo this posting on your blog, with the first two images cropped, the final image omitted, and these last two paragraphs also omitted.  What?  You can’t be bothered?  Suit yourself.

As do I.  Suiting myself being what this blog is for.

That mobile phones have cameras means that even regular people now always have a camera with them.  Already, mobile phone cameras are quite good.  Soon, they will be as good as all but the best cameras, to the point where ever more people will be satisfied with their mobile phone cameras, and accordingly won’t want to be bothering with dedicated cameras at all.  This transition is already under way, a fact which I regularly track whenever I roam about London snapping (among other delights) my fellow snappers and their snapping machines. 

This photographer, for instance, looks like he’s using a “phone”, the inverted commas there being because these things are so much more than phones, to the point where the phoning is almost an afterthought.  As Michael Jennings said last night, it really is something of an accident that we just happen to call these things “phones”.

Here is a photo I took with my Google Nexus 4, very soon after I got it, of Randy Barnett (already featured here in this earlier posting - bottom right of the first lot of pictures there), speaking at Freedom Forum 2013:

As you can see, the quality is okay, but only okay.  Compare with the zoomed photo (at the link above) of Barnett, and you can easily see the difference that a better camera makes.  If the Google Nexus 4 camera has a zoom feature, I have yet to discover it.

As the picture above shows, I (of course) had my regular camera with me at FF2013.  But last night I was out and about for a short while, without that camera, only the Google Nexus 4.  I was dining at Chateau Samizdata, and collecting Amazon stuff that I have delivered there rather than at my own front door, because at my own front door there have been robberies.  So anyway, a recent arrive at CS was a keyboard, for use with the GN4, but although pre-warned that this keyboard would require two AAA batteries to make it go, I had forgotten to bring these with me.  So, I nipped out to buy some.  Without my regular camera.

Sod’s Law decrees that whenever you are out and about without your camera, interesting things will immediately present themselves to you.  And one such interesting thing did, in the form of a sign making use of the double meaning of the word Pole.  But, Sod’s Law was held at bay by my GN4, which I did have with me, in my jacket pocket, because keeping the GN4 in my jacket pocket at all times except when I am using it is The Rule.  Snap snap, which fortunately I had more or less learned how to do:

The GN4 may not be much good for distance Big Things, and the like, but it is fine for a sign.

And since the sign was the point, even though I do like scaffolding, here is the bit of the picture with the sign:

No computerised trickery there, apart from the cropping.  More than somewhat blurry, but entirely legible, the whole point of letters being that they hack their way through exactly such communicational barriers.

Lunchtime O’Booze is the name given by Private Eye to a certain vintage of Fleet Street era (i.e. when they really all did work in or near to Fleet Street) journo.  One of these (now long retired) characters was staying with me earlier this week, kipping down on my sofa-bed to be precise.  Tony now lives in France, but he was over here for a few days, to participate in a lunch, with a dozen or more of his old Fleet Street cronies.

I met up with Tony on Sunday evening, and we dined out, very well.  Thanks to my twiddly screen, I was able to take photos of him like this, with the camera resting in the middle of the table, and me just looking down at it:

Tony looks rather like one of those South African type villains in The Saint, which I have been watching lately from time to time, waiting for the IPL to start on ITV4.

Next day, Tony departed for the lunch.  Ring me when it’s over, I said, maybe we can do something in the evening.  Nine hours later, Tony rings to say he’ll be back soon, and eleven hours later he is.  I feared drunken disruption.  Which I would have survived.  Tony has been very hospitable to me over the years.  But the evening ended very pleasantly.

To give you a further idea of what kind of lunch it was, here is a limerick, which Tony brought back from it:

An Argentine gaucho named Bruno
Said I’ll tell you something I do know
Girls are just fine
And boys are divine
But a llama is numero uno

And here is a photo, taken by someone else with Tony’s phone:

The big guy - a very big guy indeed - in the middle used to play prop forward for the Harlequins and is now a wine correspondent, the sort of bloke who has a special table in his home for drinking guests under.  The ultimate oh-stay-a-bit-longer-and-have-another-one bloke.  I think the guy on the right drives new cars for a living, in such places as the south of France, and then writes about them.  Certainly, someone of this kind was involved.

Do not ask men like this to drink and drive.  They just might do it.

When I have a longish spell of silence, such as the one that has just ended lasting ten days, my problem is that I keep thinking that another day won’t hurt, and that when I return, I must do so with a big bang, i.e. a brilliantly big or important posting.  Which causes the spell of silence to prolong itself even more.

So instead, what I eventually do is just shove up any old thing, such as this photo, this one photo (easily done), which I recently took near the Houses of Parliament:

What I like is that I am so very obviously in it, in the form of my shadow.

This sort of picture explains why it is so very useful for me not to be using a viewfinder, but instead a twiddly screen such as all cameras I ever buy always have.  They think I’m just looking at previous pictures, but I’m not.  I’m taking my next picture.  Of them.  And using only one hand, which adds to the impression of me not taking a photo.

You see people taking pictures with smart phones more and more these days.

I was at Wembley last Saturday, to see Wigan beat Millwall in the FA Cup semi.  I am doing a longer posting on the crowd violence that happened during the second half, but will also be referring also to the architecture of the place.  Hence me posting this picture here now:

The point being that the Arch, as seen from inside the stadium, is not that special.  It only gets interesting photographically if something else happens in front of it, or beyond it, like if a helicopter were to crash into it or if behind it there was an eclipse of the moon, or in this case if there are balloons in the frame.  The Arch’s purpose is to draw attention to the stadium from outside, and especially from afar, rather than to make much of a difference to the experience of actually being inside the place.

The Arch does make the process of approaching the stadium from Wembley Park tube more interesting than it would otherwise be.  Here is a shot I took after the game, looking back at the stadium, in the wet and gloom of the evening:

Talking of shots like that, does anyone know how to get rid of that upwards perspective effect, in the programme I use (ArchSoft PhotoStudio 5.5)?  I want to widen out the sky there, if you get my meaning.  I want to make the buildings, on the left especially, go upwards rather than inwards.  Any suggestions?

LATER: My favourite Wembley Arch picture.

The speakers at the Liberty League Freedom Forum were an impressive lot.  I intend, Real Soon Now, to be writing at greater length (at Samizdata) about what some of the speakers said.  In this posting here, I will concentrate on shoving up photos.

Here are some snaps of just a few of the speakers in action:

Top left: Douglas Carswell; top middle: Terence Kealey; top right: Mark Littlewood.

Bottom left: Sam Bowman; bottom middle: J. P. Floru; bottom right: Randy Barnett.

I did not attend anything like all the sessions, not least because many of them were simultaneous.  But we all crowded into the big hall to have lunch on Saturday and Sunday, and there were a couple of speeches there also, from Mark Littlewood on the Saturday, and from J. P. Floru on the Sunday, both of whom are shown above, doing their lunchtime talks.

Impressive though the line-up of speakers was, and hard as it often was to choose which speaker to listen to, the real star of the occasion, for me, was the audience that the Liberty League people had managed to assemble for this event.  It would have been quite something for me to have listened to a succession of very good talks.  It was something else again to be part of a 200-strong audience listening attentively to those same talks, most of them of less than half my age.

So, here are some crowd shots:

The more I study the world and its ways, the more importance I attach to the influence of gatherings like this one. Getting a couple of hundred of Britain’s most committed libertarians and free marketeers together over a weekend, and permanently connecting them with each other, will have network effects beyond calculation, especially when you consider how much easier it now is to do networking electronically.

So who put this event together?  Well, I did some asking around, and three people kept getting mentioned:

Left: Anton Howes; centre: Christiana Hambro; right: Stephen Davies.

The latter two are both briefly biographised at the IEA website, and Anton Howes is likewise described on this list of Liberty Leaguers.  Hannah Besford, Will Hamilton and James Lawson, also on that Liberty Leaguers list, also got several mentions, not least in the conference progamme (i.e. on page 2 of this), as having contributed importantly.  Notoriously, when credit is to be shared among humans for their cooperative achievements, there are frequent mismatches between who gets given the credit and who did the actual work, so my best guess could be seriously off.  Nevertheless, my best guess is that the three people pictured above were the prime movers (certainly among the prime movers), all three of them having decided independently that what the British free market/libertarian movement needs is a succession of gatherings like this one, wherever in the UK it makes sense to stage them.  So, that is what they have been doing, this latest London event being merely the biggest of such events so far.  There have been several others during the last few years, and it looks like there will be many more.  I certainly hope so.

So here are three more digital photographers digitally photographed by me on March 5th, to add to the ones in this photo-collection:

I chose those for all my usual kinds of reasons, to do with focusing and composition and suchlike, which is not major my purpose now.

What I have done is reduced the size of the little photos above, that you click on to get the real photos, from 166 pixels wide to 165 pixels wide, and shoved a small space in between.  I’m hoping that 165 x 3 + 2 spaces won’t go beyond the 500 pixel limit, but only posting it will tell.

Which means that this posting is liable to be posted, and then reposted a few times, while I work out what works. I can’t tell from within my blogging software whether these new spaces and pictures sizes are a good fit, or if I’ll have (e.g.) to make the pictures a bit smaller.

It goes with saying (surely a more rational way of saying “it goes without saying”, if you immediately then say it) that I am a bit apologetic about this disruption.  But in truth, not very apologetic.

The reason I am doing this is that I have now got my Google Nexus 4 supersmart mobile phone, and have been looking at how this blog looks on it.

Point one: obviously all the regular stuff on the left that you don’t read should be on the right.  That may one day happen, and may not.

But the other thing is that when I do these little clutches of lots of little clickable photos, then on the GN4, just as on my computer, I get a small white space between each horizontal row of pictures and the next row down, but not between each picture, sideways.  If you get my drift.  And a much better arrangement would be to have spaces between each picture, if only to make the pictures easy to see as separate pictures, especially on something like the Google Nexus 4.

So now you know.

A BIT LATER:  Too wide.  The blurry digital photographer behind the focused leaves, who was supposed to be on the right, has moved himself to a new row below of his own creation.  So now I will make the small pictures 164 pixels wide rather than 165.  Isn’t this exciting?  Well, probably not.

A BIT LATER STILL: Done.

British Summer Time began last Sunday, and I surely wasn’t the only Brit taken by surprise.  According to our excellent and invariably accurate short range weather forecasters (the long range climate guessers are something else entirely), the current (bitterly) cold spell that we are enduring will only end around the middle of this month.

On April 20th, two friends of mine are to be married, hopefully in the warm outdoors, and I hope to be taking photos of it, in the warm outdoors.  They hope, as do I, that the cold will soon abate.  Fingers crossed.  The weather is getting sunnier now, but is still amazingly cold.  Coldest March Britain has had for over half a century, they are saying.  It was several years ago now that they (i.e. the long range climate guessers) changed Global Warming to Climate Chaos.  Wise move.  Wiser would have been to shut the fuck up and let Western Civilisation (a) proceed without them fucking with it, and (b) deal with any climate dramas if and when.

Meanwhile, the cold has kept me from roaming London taking snaps during the last week or two.  Instead I roam through my recent archives, looking for interesting snaps taken on warmer days.

Days like March 5th.  I have already displayed here a number of snaps taken that day.

Here are some more:

This time there are more of those commonplace things that look better in good photos, as I hope you think these somewhat are, than they do when you actually see them.  That’s if you even do see them, as in notice them.

Besides which, a double decker bus advert may be pretty obvious stuff to a fellow Londoner.  But what if you are one of those lost souls who lives outside London?  Or worse, who has never even been to London?  Or perhaps never even set eyes on a double decker bus? A double decker bus advert must seem, to such a person, almost unbearably exotic and glamorous.

Note, in the first picture, top left, reflections of these buildings.