Cuba Street, Isle of Dogs

Cuba Street is a narrow road that runs from the old West India Pier into the Isle of Dogs. This is that view.

It did not look like that when I was using the RiverBus to get there more than thirty years ago. It was all pretty derelict. The cream building on the corner was there then, but it was an old-school pub and I think scruffier. Go to the river end of Cuba Street, and look up what is known in the trade as the Limehouse Reach, and that view has not changed for almost forty years. Which is probably why I find it so restful(!). 

Autumn in Regent's Park

No further comment needed.

Canary Wharf - Security

I think the area within the North and South Colonnades, which has the the Underground station in the middle, is patrolled by security officers and may well be owned by the Canary Wharf people, and therefore private land. I was approached by a friendly security officer, who explained that their concern was people taking photographs of entrances to buildings, security camera locations and the like. We parted with a handshake and I carried on.

He meant an entrance like this...

Outside that are I didn't see any security at all. I suspect the use of a tripod within that area requires permission from the Estate management.

Canary Wharf Towers

I went to Canary Wharf the other week. The first developer in there was a Canadian firm called Olympia and York. In Canada, it's so darn cold and the snow is so darn deep that the shopping centres of many larger towns are actually built underground. Not all of them, but certainly Toronto, where O&Y came from. The O&Y buildings have their shops below ground, and may other developers have followed this lead of doing nothing at street level. 

Another way of saying this is that there is no "street" at street level in Canary Wharf. "Street" should mean shops, cafes, restaurants, cars, taxis, buses, signs, lights, fly-posted adverts, and so on. At ground level. Flats, offices and light industrial ateliers from the first floor up. There are a few coffee and food trucks and some buses, but that's about it. 

The City of London is an industrial estate, but it has a variety of architectural styles and various eateries and drinkeries at street level - while Cheapside and Princes Street / Moorgate have actual recognisable retail outlets. But Canary Wharf is just a collection of high towers with some "architectural" gimmicks that only ever looked decorative in the architect's sketches. Metal-and-glass is metal-and-glass no matter how you angle it - it does not have the texture of stone or brick.

The Second Guitar

Telecasters are for professionals. Julian Lage plays one. Everyone in Nashville plays one and has another as a backup. Show up with a Tele and people will assume you can play anything from chicken' picken' to Jimmy Page licks.

This is not me. Also, the neck is half a baseball bat, and I can't get on with it.

Jazzmasters are for indie guitarists, and I'm just a little too old to fall into that demographic. By a few decades. Also, a real Jazzmaster has the rhythm circuit control on the upper section of the body, and quite a few of the Fender models don't now. The Squires do, and the Fender Vintera's. I played a Vintera a few months ago, and it needed to be better finished for the £1,000 price tag. Sounded nice. Then there's all that stuff about how the bridge is not the best design, and the neck needs re-setting to make it better. Maybe not.

But still, and all, never say never. And also, I need a single-coil guitar with Fender wiring. The McCarty is double-humbuckers with Gibson wiring.

I was browsing the Regent Sounds website, which goes under "day-dreaming", and came across something only a guitar nerd could love. A mash-up of a Jazzmaster (body, neck, headstock and neck pickup) with a Telecaster (bridge pickup and ashtray, selector switch and controls).

You know when you see the girl across the room and know you have to talk to her?

That feeling. Well, nearly.

Except about a guitar.

(Musicians are not normal people. Amy Winehouse even wrote a song about a new guitar.)

So the next time I was in town, I wandered down Denmark Street, like I had any right to, and into Regent Sounds. They set me up with a Fender Blues Junior, and I noodled around for a while. Yes, it balanced on my knee. No, it did not weigh 9lbs or so. It sounded good. I knew I was going to buy it.

So I did.

And eventually, UPS delivered it.

It sounds and plays real good.

Here it is...

Worst Photo Ever

It's a big claim, but I think this one is a pretty good contender. 

It's boring to look at - oh look! a bush! and water! - it's has far too much shadow and is black in places it should not be dark in. The sky isn't quite blown out, but neither is quite convincing. How much did the X-E4 and lens cost? Getting value for money then.

I should have taken the shot with my iPhone, which would have given me this.

 

It's not from the phone, but it is as close as I can get with Photos to that eerie iPhone sky and foreground clarity. Shadows is maxed out and Brilliance tweaked down a touch. It's a much better-looking shot, and probably bears a strong resemblance to what I actually saw, which was something like this...

The sky is slightly fuzzy, but that is what midday glare does to our eyes. The shadows under the bush are more realistic, but overdone in the trees in the background.

I would never have taken that photo with the OM10 and Kodak ISO 200, or if I had, I would have focused on the bush and water, and tried to keep the sky out of the frame. Keeping the dynamic range low was something else we did by instinct back in the day even though we didn't know it was called that.

But with a super-clever digital camera, for some reason, I expect to be able to point the lens at whatever mess is in front of it and have the camera sort it out. Wrong. The old rules still apply. When shooting JPEG. (1)

And if I do follow the old-school rules, any big-brand camera will produce a really nice JPEG.

My candidate for Worst Photo Ever is not such a one. Not only is it technically poor, and shot with no care at all, it's not very interesting to look at. Green, right?

There's a reason why hip street photographers don't take photographs of what's left of Epping Forest - in this case a little corner of Highams Park Lake. Trees have lots of shadows created by the leaves. All those leaves are the same colour, but some reflect the light and others bounce it around, depending on where the sun is. Trees do not have neat geometrical shapes, and make a poor background for someone in a red coat striding purposefully from the shadows on the left to the light on the right. As opposed to a staircase in the Barbican, say. Or a street scene with a nice even light and some not-too-deep shadows.

Anyway, the weather looks highly un-photogenic for the next few weeks, so I won't be taking the X-E4 anywhere soon. And I will not be taking another photograph of anything green or plant-like when I do.



(1) Why? Digital cameras can create RAW files and JPEGs. RAW files are a copy of the data from the sensor, and need to be processed to be at all pleasing, so processing the messy bits out is all one with processing the nice bits in. RAW requires a monthly subscription to Lightroom or Capture One, and either putting in a heap of time developing one's own presets to turn the dull RAW file into something worth looking at, or putting in a heap of time experimenting with other people's presets. 

JPEGs are the camera's attempt at doing all that processing for the user, using the photo-relevant camera settings and algorithms the camera engineers have devised. Here's the thing: Apple has way more engineers working on that sensor data-to-JPEG / HEIC conversion than Fuji, Sony, Panasonic, or any other mere camera maker will ever be able to afford, and the iPhone has a chip way more capable than a camera chip will ever be, so the resulting computational photography will produce far superior conversions of RAW-to-JPEG / HEIC than the camera makers ever will. (Given a reasonable amount of taste on behalf of the engineers and product manager.) The camera companies are still comparing their gear to top-end film cameras, and may be missing the part where we-the-customer will be comparing it with what the top-end phones do.

The Looming Walkie-Talkie, Fenchurch Street

 

It looks like some weird Photoshopping, but it is what the camera sees. It looks just like that.