On that same photowalk with GodDaughter 1, five years ago, that I mentioned yesterday, and a bit earlier than when I took yesterday’s photo, of her and her shadow and my shadow, I took these photos:

You can see how that little mind of mine was working, can’t you?  That being one of the amusements of me taking so many photos that comes across years later.  I can now see exactly what I was thinking, in a little photo-moment, five years ago.

I encounter an interesting sculpture.  (I find that I like sculpture more and more, provided I like it of course.) Then, in the distance, I see a favourite Big Thing, in this case the Big Olympic Thing.  I line up the Big Olympic Thing up the sculpture.  I line it up again, this time including only that very recognisable top of the Big Olympic thing, and putting that right on top of the sculpture, like a handle.  Good.  Nice one.

Then I draw back, and take another shot that provides some more context, while being careful to keep the Big Olympic Thing present, to one side.  What I do not do, regrettably, is photo any sign or caption which told me about this piece of sculpture.  What is it?  Who did it?  When?  Why?  What’s it of?  There must have been some clue I could have photoed.

Happily, this is the twenty first century, and a little descriptive googling ("sculpture clasped hands” or some such thing) got me to places like this, which tell the story.  And it’s quite a story.

I follow Real Photographer Charlie Waite, and recently, this photo appeared at his Twitter feed:

And then it disappeared.

What gives, I wonder?  I found it fascinating, but is it an act of social media aggression to have immediately copied it, and now to be displaying it here?  I don’t yet know the rules for such things.

The first fascinating thing, to me, about the above photo is how impossible to get to and from those houses look.

But the second fascinating thing about this photo is how it contrasts with this next photo, of the same houses, which I found here:

This second photo shows that these houses are actually not at all impossible to get to or from.  By showing the bigger picture of the landscape, the landscape is, so to speak cut down to size.  (Also, the mountains are not actually blue.)

Did Charlie Waite take the first photo down because he does not want his camera to be telling lies?  However beautiful and awe-inspiring?  Perhaps.

If you do four photos, adding very little in the way of verbiage, are they still quota photos?  Probably, but what the hell.  Today was hot, and this morning’s England v India test match finale was very tense.  So this here’s your lot:

The Battersea Power Station is now smothered in cranes, so you’ll at once realise that the top two of these photos were taken earlier.  1.1, 2005, is a favourite view of many photoers, from Ebury Bridge, at the far end of Warwick Way from me. 1.2, 2012, was taken from the south end of Vauxhall Bridge.  2.1, 2016, how it from the top of Westminster Cathedral, in 2016.  2.2, 2017, is closer up, when I was checking out the beginnings of the work to extend the Northern Line, in 2017.

Whether you like Battersea Power Station or not (I happen to like it a lot), you’d surely agree that it is a very recognisable edifice, and I can understand why many regret that it is about to be surrounded by apartment blocks, of a similar height to the main body of the Power Station.  But, that’s London for you.

Radio early bird Julia Hartley-Brewer tweeted this photo, early this morning:

Best comment:

Enjoy it while you can Julia, because after BREXIT there will be NO sunrise. The Polish and Romanian workers who lift the sun up every morning will be gone.

Those laser beams that her camera has created make the sun look like a ... white hole.

On August 2nd 2013, exactly five years ago today, there was a clutch of orange umbrellas above Lower Marsh.  (Also (see bottom right), 240 Blackfriars Road was under construction.) I don’t believe I mentioned these umbrellas at the time I photoed them, and now, I can’t google my way to any sort of explanation of them.  But, I think I recall investigating them at the time, and I think they were some kind of advert for an art gallery.  This guy agrees that these umbrellas were indeed there, then, but he doesn’t say anything about them either.

Anyway, here they are, as I photoed them then:

The bottom left one looks to me like the head of some kind of oriental feline creature.

Indeed:

Taken from the top of the Tate Modern Extension, about one month ago.

I think the reason it looks (to me) like a model is the way the river looks.  That doesn’t look like water.  It looks more like some hardboard painted the colour of the river,and then covered in transparent glue, to make it look like it’s water.  Something like this is how modelers do it.  So if it looks like this, it makes everything else look like it must be a model too.

It’s also something to do with the lighting of the entire scene, at that time of the evening when it doesn’t know if it’s daylight or evening.  Magic hour, I believe, is what the movie people call this time.

I already very much like the latest City Big Thing, the Scalpel.  Very recognisable, no matter how far away you are.

6k has Flickred a wonderful little collection of photos he took on a recent expedition to France (he blogs about these here), of which this was one of my favourites:

I particular like the extreme middle of this photo, which I have taken the liberty of cropping out and lightly sharpening:

I love roof clutter.  So it’s no surprise that I also love rail clutter.  And France, so excellent at roof clutter, also does rail clutter exceptionally well.

Rail clutter embodies the exact same aesthetic contrast that roof clutter points to.  One part of what you are looking at is obsessed over, aesthetically.  The facade of a building is minutely contrived to look the way it should look.  And then on top of it, you can just shove up anything you like, to let out smoke, receive and send signals and generally do stuff on the roof.  Well, rail clutter is a lot like that.  The trains (especially the trains in France (and especially the high speed trains in France)) are aesthetically magnificent, or at least are intended to be are are considered to be by their creators (and I happen to agree with them).  Yet all around them is rail clutter, to feed the power into the trains, and this clutter is built in a totally functional manner, to do that job, no matter what kind of a jungle of mess that results in.

Let’s see what the photo-archive tells me about how this obsession played out on my own most recent expedition to France.

Here are two rail clutter photos, both featuring one of those beautiful trains, and both taken at Quimper railway station:

On the left, you can pretend that the rail clutter isn’t there, if you really want to.  But on the right, the photo is photoed in such a way that you really can’t do that.  Look at that clutter!  I lined it all up with itself, just like 6k did in his rail clutter photo.

Here are a couple more photos of Quimper, taken from the footbridge over the main railway line off to the west of the city, right near where my hosts live, and in particular of the twin towers of Quimper Cathedral.  These two photos point to that same rail clutter aesthetic contrast by shoving it next to a cathedral, instead of next to a train.  But it’s the same point.  The cathedral has been obsessed about aesthetically for centuries.  The rail clutter just looks how it looks and to hell with that.

But for me, perhaps most interesting of all, here are a couple of photos which point to a closely related phenomenon, which is the matter of clutter actually on the top of the trains.  That’s right.  Trains also, themselves, have roof clutter on their roofs:

I remember noticing this phenomenon, pretty much for the first time (as in really noticing it), when I took this little clutch of photos.  From that same footbridge in Quimper.

I have the feeling that British trains are not so roof cluttered.  Memo to self: look into that.  But that can wait.  There’s been more than enough cluttertalk for this posting.

Photoed by me last Monday, from the train on the way back from Denmark Hill (which is where I also photoed that helipad (better to scroll down to that)):

The train being the explanation for that reflection, on the right there.

At the time, of course, I was merely going for that rather splendid Big Thing Alignment, of The Shard with The City Big Thing Cluster.  And at the time, I was merely regretting that it probably wouldn’t come out quite as sharply as I’d have liked, and so it proved.

What I was not going for was a machine in a foreground with the words “REACH FOR THE SK...” on its arm.  Presumably reach for the SKY.  Which is, I think, rather suitable.

Shame I didn’t quite get all of that little slogan, but I got enough for the photo to be worth showing here.

This afternoon I went on a really good photo-expedition, to Denmark Hill, as it happens.

However, today’s overwhelming photoing sentiment, for me anyway, is, for now anyway, regret.  That I missed, until I heard about it about an hour or more too late, this, what would seem to have been one of the biggest flypasts that London has recently witnessed, and maybe ever will again.  Damn.

So, no photos today.

Not even this one.

Last Saturday, in the afternoon, while the rest of England was obsessing over Sweden v England, I was taking the train from Victoria around the south of central London to South Bermondsey, to see an actual man, about a metaphorical dog.  My train stopped off at Denmark Hill on its way to Bermondsey, and there I took another of those inside-a-train photos, with yellow tank tracks on it caused by the lighting in the train:

That looks like some sort of helicopter landing and taking off pad, of the sort that they have on top of hospitals.

If this was the twentieth century, it would have remained a mystery, to me, for ever, unless I happened upon someone who knew what this was and I happened to ask him.  But it is the twenty first century, and just now, I googled “Denmark Hill helicopter pad”.  And in no time at all, I learned that this was a helicopter landing and taking off pad on top of a hospital.

To say that I unreservedly love the twenty first century would be to overstate matters.  But it does have its features, in among all its various bugs.

So much for the certainties of this situation, as revealed by the internet, one of the better features of this century so far.

Now for some guesses.

Why the ramp, leading from the pad, to the hospital?

Why not a lift, into which bodies can simply be wheeled, in about ten seconds?

My guess is that nothing is allowed to protrude above the surface of the pad, in case helicopters are blown into it by a gust of wind, or in case they miscalculate in some other way.  No protrusions.  Not even for seriously injured bodies, perhaps close to death.

So, the ramp.  And for the first few scary yards of it, there are no fences to stop you or the body trolley you are pushing being blown off, just a horizontal bit of wire netting to catch it and you, and prevent the very worst, just like the similar horizontal bits that surround the pad itself.  So, take care.  But, as you descend the ramp, a fence slowly rises up around you that will impede any ill-judged horizontal meandering you may blunder or be blown into doing, without in any way impeding the helicopters.  And, as soon as you have got down below the pad, you go under it, into a lift.  And you are in the hospital and can breath easy, even if the body you have brought with you may be breathing very difficult.

It’s my belief that if you look at my photo, you will see, if not all, then at least most, of the above.

I recall reading, once upon a time, that digital photoing is a substitute for really looking closely at stuff.  We photo things instead of really looking at things and really seeing things, said whoever it was who was grumbling.  My experience has been the opposite.  For me, digital photoing has meant spending so much time looking at and seeing things that the problem has been finding the time time to be doing anything else.

In an earlier posting this week I said I was about to have a – by my indolent standards - busy few days.  It certainly didn’t help that I picked about the hottest week London has experienced in a long time for all this gadding about.

Earlier in the week I did some socialising with GodDaughter 2, and on Friday, it was her official graduation ceremony.  In my eyes (and to my ears) she had graduated already, with her graduation recital, but on Friday the Royal College of Music made it official.

I took a ton of photos, of which this was just one:

That’s the Official Photoer, photoing all the soon-to-be-graduates, and presumably quite a lot of us friends and family behind as well, just before the stage filled up with RCM grandees, and the speechifying and graduating got under way.

And here is just one of the (us) unofficial photoers, together with a couple more that you can make out above and beyond this lady:

I’ve taken many, many more photos in the last few days, over five hundred at that graduation ceremony alone and many more besides, but those two will have to do for now.

I’m knackered.

I have what passes for me as a busy few days coming up, and this posting is me getting ahead of myself, with a quota photo:

That was taken from the top of the Tate Modern Extension, on the same day I photoed that pub fire.

What with the smoke from that fire, on an otherwise totally cloudless evening, having been blowing directly towards and in front of where the sunset was asserting itself, I rather think that the lurid colour of the sunset was enhanced by the smoke from the fire.  In fact, looking again at my photo, I rather think we can see the suggestion of a band of smoke just below half way down.  Yes, I’m fairly sure that’s the fire, photoshopping the sunset for me.

It’s an ill wind ...

I like these sculptures.  But I didn’t encounter them in a park, the way they are at the other end of that link.  I encountered them on the ground floor of the Cheesegrater.

And, of course, photoed them:

The ground floor of the Cheesegrater was only pretending to be a park.

I remember when there was no way to learn about interesting and admirable conductors, other than just listen to their performances and gawp at their photos on record sleeves.  Now there is Twitter.

E-PS’s thoughts about leaving New York, as reported by the New York Times, can be read here.

And here is a photo taken by E-PS as (or perhaps just with which) he said Bye to New York, on June 15th.  From a ship?  An airport?  A motorway service station?  His Hew York home?  A friend’s home?  A friend’s boat?  Here’s a horizontal slice of that photo:

Click on Bye above, and get to the original photo, as tweeted.  It’s nothing special.  Not super-high-definition.  Not professional.  Taken with his smartphone would be my guess.  But so often, amateur photos like this can be amazingly evocative.  They give you a sense of what the place is really like, when what the pros show is is what they want it to have been like.

The tallest tower is presumably the replacement for the Twin Towers.  Which I miss, even though I’ve never been anywhere near them.  Only seen them in movies.

Yesterday, before Gurrelieder, I had twenty minutes to fill, and ran up to the top of the RFH, and took photos.

This was one of my favourites, of a favourite London building, and a favourite other place to photo London buildings.

That’s Richard Seiffert’s One Kemble Street, with its seldom noted other than by me hairdo of roof clutter.  And lined up right in front of it, the ME Hotel Radio Bar, from which, a while back, I photoed those seven London bridges:

There is also some older-school roof clutter to be seen there, in the form of a chimney array.  You see those a lot If you want to, that is.

The funny thing is, I didn’t need to be attending a concert in order to make this short climb.  I could just go to the RFH, go in, go up to that viewing spot, photo my photos, go down again, and leave.  Memo to self: do this, soon, and quite often.