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.

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.

No, not taken by me, of course not.  By my compulsively globe-trotting friend Michael Jennings, who has recently been trotting around in Georgia ...:

Foreigners, eh?  An endless source of fun.

… and in Warsaw:

The Warsaw one being bigger, because the title of the email in which this one arrived went:

This is my favourite photo for quite a while.

I’m guessing this is because the old Soviet-imposed Palace of Culture is upstaged behind and beside by skyscrapers, and in front by Polish people actually having quite a good time, buying stuff, doing capitalism etc.

I can remember when that bag of wind John Gray was saying that liberated Eastern Europe, for which people like me had such high hopes, would all end in tears, because in John-Gray-world high hopes always do.  But look at it now!

I visited Warsaw in 1984, I think it was.  I recall rather liking that Palace of Culture, even though I wasn’t supposed to, on account of the nastiness that it was built to spread, and probably also because of the defencelessly fine stuff that got smashed to rubble to make way for it.  I could entirely see why the locals all hated it. I, on the other hand, considered it to be an example of one of my laws, which states that the splendour of a building is inversely proportional to the excellence of what goes on inside it when it first opens for business.  Later, better things can get done in the thing.  But the tendency is: not to start with.

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.

So, on with the wedding.  I’ve done the weather.  I’ve done signs.  I’ve done weird technological things.  Now for some preparations.  The signs, the technological things and the preparations all having been snapped while I waited for things to get properly started.

The good thing about signs, technological things and preparations is that they stay still, and are hence rather easier for a photo-dumbo like me to photo.  Especially in all that bright sunshine.

But when it comes to preparations, there is also the fact that the work done by those preparing all these preparations deserves recognition, before all those damn people arrive and muck everything up.  One of the particularly nice things about this wedding was the way that the help was, as it were, included.  The people being paid to help make the wedding all just so were all treated as humans, rather than as invisible wage slaves.  They were included, so to speak.  Various paid helpers were, for instance, thanked, by the Groom, in his speech.  Nice touch that, I think.

Note the big circular greenhouse-like structure featured in photo 1.2 there.  Chatting with one of those helpers, I learned that it was the fairly recent addition of this piece of architecture to all the other architecture at this place that really turned it into a great wedding venue, because then they had a nice big space where people could shelter if the weather was not good.  The floor, being made with big stone slabs, could get wet without any permanent damage being done.  Imagine what it would be like on a rather rainy day, with sunny intervals and scattered showers, with people going out and getting mud all over their shoes, and then coming indoors to avoid the scattered showers.  On carpets: nightmare.  On stone slabs in a big greenhose, containing big mats to clean your shoes if you wanted to venture onto the carpets: no worries.

But on the day of this wedding, the weather was perfection.  It has now reverted to being cold and miserable, which just goes to show that this wedding’s weather luck was better even than it seemed on the day.  Not only did this burst of perfect weather follow two months of weather misery; it also preceded more weather misery.

So, photographic possibilities temporarily exhausted, I sat down in the sunshine and read some more of Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, until other people finally started arriving.  I have been thinking quite a lot lately, as a particular thing, about the matter of optimism and pessimism.

In the last of those pictures, the “Thank You” is to us guests, for showing up.

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.

My thanks to my next Last Friday speaker Rob Fisher, for the link to these photos:

My inclination is not to discuss the matter of supposed overcrowding, more to note that here we have more Art without Artists.  Although perhaps photographer Michael Wolf would say he is an artist.

The idea of that category of photo is that here is a photo of something real, which resembles (reduces the thing to?) abstract art.

Were all those abstract modernists prophesying the inceasing rectangularity of regular life to come?

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.