I’ve got a photo-essay up at Samizdata about One New Change, which maybe should have had a more compelling and informative title than “One New Change”.  Something like: “The roof of One New Change and what you can see from it”.

When on my way to One New Change, walking there from Lower Marsh (i.e. from this shop), I took many other photos, including the ones that follow of bridges.  The sky was especially photogenic that day, which was about one week ago.  The weather then was generally horrible, but that afternoon seemed like a break in it, and so it proved.

First, a favourite London footbridge (one of many favourite London footbridges), the one that helps to take travellers from Waterloo railway station to Waterloo East railway station:

I love the adhoc-ness of it.  I bet when they first put that up, they didn’t think it would still be there however many decades it is later.

Next, one of London’s great out-in-the-open dramas, namely those mysterious columns that used to support an earlier version of Blackfriars railway bridge, and have been there ever since, just standing there, doing nothing but look mysterious.  The drama being: what will happen to them?  Obviously something.  But what?  When?  ( Will I live to see it?)

There is now much activity on and next to these columns, because, as already noted here, they are rebuilding Blackfriars railway station on the revised and still busy version of Blackfriars railway bridge, all the way across, with entrances on both sides of the river:

But, are they only using the columns to help them build stuff on the old bridge?  Will anything permanent be placed on the columns?  Little walkways across to Blackfriars road bridge?  A couple of little shopping places?  Or will they just be left there, again.  Like I say, they ought to make something of these things.  It’s the kind of thing that architects and designers happen, just now, to be doing really well.  So, do it, I say.

Next, how the new Blackfriars railway station is looking, with me looking back into the afternoon sun, which makes it all seem rather foreboding and funereal:

The big metal thing in the foreground is because this was taken from the Millennium Footbridge, the one that joins Tate Modern to St Paul’s.

Finally, from the same spot but looking the other way, down river, which totally cheers up the lighting because now the afternoon sun is behind me, a
classic Shard shot, complete with a couple more classic London bridges, Southwark, and in the distance, Tower:

Between Southwark Bridge and Tower Bridge, there is another London bridge, namely London Bridge.  But you can’t see much of that.

As I say at the end of my Samizdata piece, I think the Shard now looks great.  I think it is the best London Big Thing of the last few years, edging both the Gherkin and the Wheel into also rans.  I also think it may be the best thing that Renzo Piano has ever done, judging by what I have seen of his other stuff.

By the way, I would have liked rather more than just the one somewhat-beside-the-point comment that it has attracted so far, on that Samizdata piece about One New Change.  Vain and selfish and silly I know, but there you go.  So if anyone reading this cares to oblige with something pertinent, there, I would be most obliged.

As I think I’ve said here before, I often don’t know which of my photos I like best until I have completely forgotten taking them, and then find them again, months later.

This didn’t seem anything very unusual at the time.  But now I find I like it quite a lot:

That’s the new entrance to Blackfriars railway station, done in the now familiar structure-as-decoration style.  I like all those shadows.

During the depths of Modern Architecture, concrete monstrosity style circa 1965, they often didn’t bother with big front doors on the front of buildings, that you could tell was the front door I mean..  Now they really like them, and spend money on them like they’re building a stately home.

I took that photo on the same day as these.

One of my favourite buildings in London is Westminster Cathedral, and this is a recent picture of it (also featuring nearby flats), that I took last month:

And by going to the website linked to above, I just found out you can go up to the top of this tower, and stay as long as you like.

Blog and learn.

There was that hideous cold snap in early February (which is not that surprising), which was the time, fool that I was, I chose for my recent trip to Paris.  And then at the end of March there was a warm snap, when I was back in London.

So here are some snaps of the other kind of London’s Millennium Footbridge dug up from the archives, taken during that warm snap:

And now it’s back to being cold.  Sign of advancing years: being acutely sensitive to temperature.

Last Tuesday, at 10pm, I met somebody at Piccadilly Circus.  I seem to recall it being on QI that actually the Eros Statue isn’t really an Eros Statue, but despite that, we met next to the Eros Statue.  It sounds more exciting than it was.

While waiting for this person to arrive, I of course, took photos of people taking photos:

And on the way home, I photographed some Modern Art:

That’s in a tube station.  Green Park, I think.

Last night I went along to that meeting that Simon Gibbs and Andy Janes flagged up in comments on the previous posting here, and am very glad to have done so.  I will try to do a write-up of it for Samizdata (although I promise nothing).  Meanwhile here are a couple of pictures I took:

On the left, the guest speaker at the meeting, Tom Burroughes.  On the right, a snap of somewhat over half of those present, including Tom.

The picture on the left shows how good speaker photos can be, even in poor light.  The picture on the right shows the usefulness of having a wider angle lens that I have hitherto had.  However, only a rather small proportion of the rather few snaps I took came out well, which was a slight disappointment.  The new camera is better for this kind of thing than the old one, but not as much of an improvement as I had been hoping.

Or maybe I am just getting used to it, and my standards have gone up.

Here’s another picture that works better with the new wider and more panoramic lens.  It’s the venue of the meeting, the Rose & Crown, taken when I first got there:

Another for the Pubs Dwarfed by Modernity collection.  Pubs in London are like Churches, in that they have a habit of surviving when all around them is replaced by higher rise modernity.  (Of course, you no longer see the pubs that perish.)

I had been wandering around in Southwark beforehand, mostly snapping the Shard through random architectural and other junk in the foreground.  As a result I found myself approaching the Rose & Crown from an unfamiliar and more interesting direction than usual.

Last week I journeyed to the Monument and walked up the 311 steps to the top, to take photos with my new camera.

Many were standard views, of this sort:

What I had particularly come to see was how the Shard was looking, from this particularly fine vantage point.  Very fine, I think:

But what, you may be asking, is that metallic interruption in the foreground, bottom left.

It’s the wire netting, which was, a few years ago, put around the viewing platform at the top of the Monument, replacing the bars that used to be there.

Here’s what this wire netting now looks like:

And here are couple of snaps I took exactly (almost to the day) seven years ago:

Those bars were much more convenient for digital photography, I think you will agree, especially when you realise that the holes in the new wire netting are only just big enough to take pictures through, with a camera like mine.  (The snappers with cheap little cameras actually have it easier.) Equally as good as the size of the gaps between the bars is that you could rest your camera on a horizontal platform which interrupted the vertical bars and which might have been put there for that exact purpose, and swivel your camera through nearly 180 degrees.

Health and safety?

Partly because of the above, and partly because of the weather that day, the pictures I took seven years ago are actually better than the ones I took last week.  Here are a couple more:

On the right there, where the Shard now is.

LATER: More snaps by me from the top of the Monument, that same afternoon last week, this time time of bee hives.

Google Earth is a source of endless fun.  Here, for instance, is a famously spectacular image, suitably flattened to fit in here:

That’s a slice of the first of these, which I found via here.

I have been making ever more use of Google Earth in my explorations of London.  It can’t tell you much about where you can go, but it is great at telling you where you went.

So, for example, I recently managed to get into this huge expanse of almost complete nothingness, surrounded by photo-ops on all sides, which is to the south of the Royal Victoria Docks:

I’m talking about the big grey slab there, and the more vegetated area between the grey slab and the river, where the ground rises, to keep the river in check presumably.  If you want to find that for yourself on Google Earth, type in “west silvertown tube station”, which is to the top right of that vast expanse.

At the extreme westerly point of the ground I covered, I found a nesting goose, and took a photo of her.  Mrs Goose is on the left:

At which point Mr Goose showed up, and drove me away.  He looks happy enough there, on the right, but that’s because by then I had retreated.  A real photographer would have advanced again, made him angry again, and got a shot of him being angry, while very slightly risking death, again.  I only wished I had done that when I got home.

Last night I journeyed forth with my camera, and eventually found my way to Stratford, near where the Olympics is being rushed into existence.  The tallest and most visible Olympic Thing is the Big Thing already featured in an earlier snap here, last Sunday.  That tested my new superzooming superpower to the max.  This time I got closer:

You can also see the big stadium there.

I’m still not sure what the point of this Big Thing is, but I think I quite like it.  I certainly like photographing it.  I wish Paris had got the damn Olympics, but if London does have to accommodate these idiot contests, we’ll at least have a Big Thing to show for it all.  But why couldn’t they just have bought the Big Thing, and skipped the Olympic bit?

Perhaps the point of this Big Thing is to communicate the struggle involved in being an Olympic athlete.  I really don’t know.  Meanwhile, it communicates the struggle involved in getting the damn Olympics ready in time.

When I am very old, and immobile, I will still be a photoblogger, posting pictures that I took one, two, five, ten, even twenty years ago.  I won’t be frustrated by not getting out any more.  On the contrary, it will be my chance to catch up, and with photos that are all the more fun for being of stuff which is now often quite different.

Photos like this one:

What I love about that is that it looks like it’s been Photoshopped with some sepiation trick, but it is actually real.  As is demonstrated by the red advert middle left.

It’s the Shard, again, by which I am currently fascinated, as are many other Londoners-with-cameras I believe.  But don’t you just love, also, those almost biological creepy crawlies in the foreground, between the train lines?  The thing is, it takes me a while to realise how good a snap like that is.

This is the same DLR railway line from which I also took this snap, also involving the Shard, and also involving other things - in that case another Big Thing.

By the way, saying that’s a great photo doesn’t feel to me like boasting.  The real geniuses of such things are not me or my fellow snappers.  They are the techies who put the toys in our hands, that enable us to make such magic, just by going … click.

For some time now I’ve been missing this blog, and the chance it gives me to put up thoughts and photos that will go nowhere else.  And now feels like a good day to resume here.  I don’t know how often I will be posting over the coming months, but more than during the last two months is the overwhelmingly likely state.

The mere clocks changing shouldn’t affect reality, but it does.  For one thing, the evening rush hour is over one hour earlier, and the evening, just after that rush hour, is a very good time to be out photoing.

Yesterday, for instance, just before it got too dark, I photoed this:

You think it a bit dim and blurry?  For me, that’s a big part of the point.

I was beside an elevated road going north/south between the Dock and the river, looking north.  In the background there: this.  Maybe one day soon I will have something wise and Samizdata-ish to say about this Big Olympic Thing, on Samizdata.  Meanwhile, here it is, here.

I was trying to photo the new Ski Lift Thing they are now nearly finishing, which will take digital photographers, and people, over the river between the Dome and the Royal Victoria Docks.  I did take some snaps of that, but when I got home and looked at what I had, the above image seemed like the most intriguing one I had.

I have a new camera.  My thoughts about it here, i.e. there.  As is explained there, this new camera means I’m now cranking out many more decent photos, which I think intensifies the need for this blog to stay up and running.

I just bought a new camera, the Panasonic Lumix FZ150, and it is great.  Here are some snaps I took with it, on Monday, of a few of my fellow digital photographers:

The light was fading quite fast while I was taking these, and trust me, these are much better snaps than I could have taken with my previous donkey-driven camera.

One of many reasons to keep this blog going is if I find myself enthusing about someone or something rather too much to accommodate it all on Samizdata.  Too many photos of one event.  Too much cricket.

Well, now I find that I have too much enthusiasm for Steve Baker MP.  Had I not already done two SBMP Samizdata postings last Friday and last Sunday, this at Baker’s own site would have had me doing another.

I recall being at the Evans home on the night of the last general election.  The only thing Tim Evans cared about - the only thing - was whether Baker won or lost.  Thank goodness he won.  I had never heard of this man until that night.

As explained here in an earlier posting, I recently decided to blog more at Samizdata and less here, and I am very happy to report that this is exactly what has been happening.  (It is one thing to “make a decision”, quite another to actually do what you merely “decided”.) But if postings here do still make their way into your life, may I wish you a very Happy Christmas, and assure you that it is at least my present intention that, from time to time (and perhaps if the mood takes me more often than that), things will keep appearing here.  In this connection I particularly like the words at the top of one of my favourite blogs, this one, which say: “Here’s a bunch of thoughts that won’t go anywhere else”.  Although with me it’s more likely to be photographs.

In that photographic trivia spirit, here is a picture I really like, which I took in 2004, which I found when rootling through my photo-archives looking for suitable photos to enliven Christmas at Samizdata:

Like so many of the more enjoyable things in life generally, and communication in particular, this is a modified cliché.  The usual picture taken from this spot, in front of Tate Modern and looking over the Millenium Bridge to St Paul’s Cathedral, is take from the bridge, leaning against that glass barrier at the back.  Quite right too, it’s a fine snap, the only problem with it being that you will have seen it already a dozen times.  So there is a slightly different version of the same splendid view.  Hope you like it, or at least what it is of, and as I say, Happy Christmas.

On Saturday I went to St Paul’s Cathedral, front of, to hear Kevin Dowd and Gordon Kerr address the Occupy St Paul’s people.  In the event I head very little of what they said, Kerr having been and gone before I even got there.  But I was very impressed that they did it.

If my time at Occupy St Paul’s was anything to go by, it has all been thoroughly domesticated.  Somebody is definitely in charge of this thing, and with a combination of threats and negotiation, a stand-off agreeable to all has been achieved.  There is no sense of impending violence.  Nobody yelled at me when I wondered about in among the tents, taking photos.  Nobody yelled at Kevin or Gordon for spouting Austrian Economics.

Click at will for the big pictures.

My usual preoccupations are in evidence.  There are many signs.  There are, of course, digital photographers, because I was not the only one taking photos.  Many were just photo-ing St Paul’s.

The bloke in the cap taking photos is Nigel Meek, the Editorial and Membership Director of the Libertarian Alliance, who apparently showed up as a result of that Samizdata posting (already linked to above) that I did flagging this up.  Afterwards (he told me later) he went out drinking with Kevin and Gordon and had a great afternoon of it.

If this demo is anything to go by, the tent makers have done a good trade.