Yesterday I spent a delightful day with Goddaughter One, walking along just a few of the river and canal banks of East London, not far from where she lives.  Both of us have the Billion Monkey bug bad, and the good news is that Goddaughter One’s current camera uses the same Compact Flash cards that I used to use and still had a small stash of, so I was able to pass these all on to her.  She may be about to upgrade to a Digital SLR, to enable her to control the focussing in particular and overall artistic results in general more tightly than she can now, but the SLRs she has her eye on also use Compact Flash cards.  Sometimes, things just work out.

On a fine day like yesterday, these waterside places become a magical secret land that a central Londoner like me would never normally see, of slightly muddy towpaths, along which joggers and polite cyclists can journey for vast distances while hardly ever setting trainer or wheel on a road, on their own version of the M25.  Goddaughter One and I only travelled for about five degress, such was our leisurely progress.  After yesterday, I feel like I have another 355 degrees yet to explore.

Some of the buildings next to the water are domestic, cute and no doubt rocketing in price, but most are still industrial.  Sometimes distant landmarks, such as the Gherkin or the Docklands towers, can be glimpsed.  More often, the architecture is what I suppose you’d call Seventies Modern Vernacular of a sort that without the water would be very dull, but next to the water, and what with all the greenery of lower land prices than next to most of the London bits of the mere Thames, has a charm all its own.  However, the 2012 Olympics are rapidly approaching and will no doubt change a lot if this part of London into something smarter, more developed and less mysterious.

Yesterday was the first nice day for ages, and if anything it was, photographically speaking, too nice, with bright sunshine out of a cloudless sky of the kind that even in the depths of winter can burn the top off a city photograph, or else plunge its nether regions into a most unrealistic state of darkness.  But walking by the river offers many opportunities to take the dazzle out of such light by bouncing it off the water, as the pictures below often illustrate.  Buildings that are bleached almost completely white, suddenly burst into all manner of varied colours in their reflections.  Even the dreariest modern structures, especially in the bright sunlight of yesterday, can result in wondrous reflections which the human eye doesn’t make much of, but which cameras love.

The graffiti where I live is all hostile, and fiercely resisted by Westminster City council.  But this is a world, with no buildings that are venerably ancient and few that are even shinily modern such as would be hurt by it, in which graffiti seems to fit in and to be welcomed.  The wall paintings here have an artistic confidence, and hence a welcome appearance to them, that is quite lacking in my part of town.  When smaller and more unofficial freelancers join in with smaller and more mysterious squiggles, that too feels like a natural part of the local ecology.

Goddaughter One loves to photograph things like bags and beer cans stuck in trees or floating in water, ending up with snaps that blur the distinction between humankind and its detritus and nature.  This is not to my taste, but each to his/her own.  Whatever is your preferred subject matter, stick with it, and you’ll get good at it.  And in general, photo the stuff that the tourists don’t bother with.  And photo things like plastic bags, because they’ll be utterly different in a decade and the photos will mature in treasurability, like a wine collection.

Part of our walk involved a couple of detours away from the water, when waterside progress was interrupted by construction work, or when Goddaughter One wanted to show me the best local view of the Docklands Towers.  Those detours were also most pleasing.  I photographed street names, so that I could later check in my A-Z exactly where we’d been, a procedure that I recommend to all Billion Monkeys when they wander about in strange parts of town.

Click and enjoy.