Review of 2013....

Soooooooo, it has been rather a long time since my last post. This has been due to a number of reasons, partly laziness, partly lack of inspiration and frustration with the 365 Project, and partly because I have been in Romania for the last 3 weeks and internet connections there were few and far between. I will finish off the 365 Project, I have a bunch of photos on the back burner that I need to process and get written up and I will try to have that done by the end of the month. For now, I'm going to do one of those lazy Review of the Year posts with some of my favourite pictures from 2013. I won't include any from the period I haven't posted yet, you'll just have to be patient for those.

In 2014 I will be going back to my usual format of a post every fortnight or so. I think this gives me time to get some decent photos together and the words to go with them. I think the daily requirement of the 365 Project ultimately lowered the quality of what I do here, which was one of the reasons I became increasingly disenchanted with it. However, this does not foreshadow the year ahead, I am optimistic and enthusiastic about the blog for 2014. I have had 70,000 hits so far which is orders of magnitude more than I ever expected and so thank you to everyone who takes time out of their day to see what I've been up to. I'll try to raise the bar.

The last 12 months have been the most traumatic and difficult of my life, much of it self-inflicted, but there were certainly some good times too. Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me this far.

Gargoyle from inside the Natural History Museum, January.

View from Westminster Bridge, January.

Chain in Vienna, March.

St. Marco's piazza, Venice, March.

Venice, March. 

 

Parliament Square, London, May.

Pocketwatch, May.

Parliament Square, London, May.

 Dead flower, July.

 Olympic Park, September.

365 Project: Photo 297

Sunset in the Olympic village.

365 Project: Photo 244

This one actually took some doing. I was bored so I wondered into the Olympic Park to see if I could get a nice foreground for the sunset. For the first time in ages, though, the sunset was a rather muted affair and so I failed. As darkness fell the lights in the RUN sign outside the Copper Box became more prominent and so I tried to work with them for a while. Then it occurred to me that, although I'd been there for nearly an hour, I hadn't seen a single soul run by, just an endless procession of cars. All of a sudden a bus went by and I realised I could try to set this shot up - light trails and a juxtaposition of theme between the vehicle and the sign. Unfortunately, it was Sunday night and I had to wait for 35 minutes for the next bus. And so I waited. And waited. And waited. I passed the time by practising with cars and eventually the bus arrived and I got my shot. Annoyingly, I didn't have my tripod to hand so I think the focus is a bit soft but there was no sign of the proverbial second bus turning up and so I called it quits.

365 Project: Photo 216

I went for my first jolly around the newly opened Olympic Park today. There still seems to be lots of sections that are closed, there are still significant building works going on, but some of the green spaces are available which is good news as this is something that Stratford is severely lacking. I was a little underwhelmed by the park. The section I was in consisted of a pleasant enough river with some good reed beds that local wildlife will, presumably, love. A couple of footpaths corkscrew their way up a little artificial hillock that I suspect the designer wanted to look like Hobbiton but actually looks more like Teletubbyland.

Having said this I am aware that I am, in general, fairly biased against the Olympics and anything to do with it, except the sport. I've no problem with people having running and jumping contests, long may they continue, but the Olympics is little more than an expensive, bloated, corrupt cartel of tax dodging business opportunities. This probably tints my view a bit. To be fair it probably just needs a year or two to bed in; it wasn't that long ago that this was a heavily polluted industrial area so ultimately it has to be a good thing that it is now a potential haven for wildlife. One definite positive that only occurred to me later on was that it is possibly a good dark sky site; there didn't appear to be any street lights in the area and no fences to keep people out so stargazing options may have just significantly improved. Obviously it's not the mountains of Paranal but as far as Stratford goes it's as good as it gets. Hopefully. 

365 Project: Photo 213

Totally off theme today, I just liked the line of these blocks of flats and there happened to be some decent clouds around.

365 Project: Photo 212

Personally, I couldn't give a rat's ass about the Olympics but I gather people find these buildings inspirational, which is handy for me because the theme was Inspiration. I just liked the pretty clouds.

365 Project: Photo 211

Intent. I guess a lot of people have the intent to run but what they often underestimate is the amount that running sucks. This is near the Copper Box arena in the newly opened up Olympic Park.

365 Project: Photo 198

Something Beginning With S. Naturally, sunset. The sky was most impressive over Pudding Mill Lane and the Olympic Park tonight, there has been very little processing done here, I just added a frame. I took this on my phone, if it were on my proper camera I would have cloned out those annoying lamp posts at the bottom.

365 Project: Photo 168

A beautiful sunset over Stratford and the Olympic park tonight.

365 Project: Photo 151

As all the horizontal lines may well give away, I took this photo out of a train window. I was on my way to Liverpool Street and so go passed what's left of the Olympics on the way. On the left we have the stadium and the Orbit and on the right there is the swimming venue. Behind all is a rather lovely sunset.

365 Project: Photo 103

We went up the ArcelorMittal Orbit today. I was quite excited initially as I love any opportunity to get up high and have a look about but that excitement soon turned to frustration as I quickly realised that a lot of the vista was compromised by both the wire mesh that covered the outside areas but also the structure itself. It's almost like it was built the wrong way around; to the south and the west there are unbroken views to docklands and the City respectively. I can't help but feel, though, that many people are going to want to look the other way towards what was the London 2012 Olympic Site and is slowly becoming the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Sadly, the views in these directions are all universally blocked; there's certainly no wide open, panoramic opportunities; the best you can do is to stick a long lens on and try to get some detail shots. So it would appear that they have managed to make a viewing platform without a view. Good job.

Compounding this is that I don't care about the Olympics; I don't have that well spring of good will and joy that many people seem to. I didn't watch any of the Olympics, either on TV or live. I'm pleased that it went well and that Team GB was successful but basically I just don't care about and, for me, there is no justification, under any circumstances, for spending £12,200,000,000 on a month of sport. None. And there's not even a good view of it.

365 Project: Photo 053

I'm going off piste again today. I don't know what the theme for today was but here is a sunset from the bridge on Angel Lane heading towards Stratford station. The odd looking structure in the background is The Orbit on the Olympic Park. Once it opens up again, presumably some time later this year, I'll hopefully have a little trip up there.

The Lea Valley

The ArcelorMittal orbit

Over the past 6 months or so as I walk to work I've been able to watch a strange structure slowly rise up out of the ground on the Olympic site. Now, I'm no fan of the Olympics but I do like interesting architecture and, living just a few hundred yards from one edge of the site, I've been able to watch a lot of building work in the last 5 years. Aside from the stadium and other main venues there have been bridges built, canals dredged, roads widened, stations redeveloped and railway track laid; being a bit of a geek I really enjoy watching these sorts of things develop as I walk or ride by. I like to watch the process, stage by stage, note the sequences, watch the people and observe how order is slowly borne out of seeming chaos. It was a treat then to see something so unusual as the Orbit emerge so close by.

This image is a panorama of three photos stitched together. Click on it to panorama-fy it up a bit

The Olympic site, which will be known as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park once all is done and dusted, is situated in the east end of London on what was largely an industrial area in years gone by. From my point of view the main item in favour of the Olympics has always been the redevelopment of this land into what should eventually be a pleasant and green space, which is always good. Criss crossing the whole site is the river Lea and the associated canals that used to supply the industry of past. Linking this area to other patches of more natural looking life is a route known as the Greenway. This stretches from the Royal docks further south on the Isle of Dogs (not only is this no longer an island but no one seems to be quite sure anymore as to the dog reference either) up through West Ham and Plaistow into Stratford, where I live, and on into Hackney. It's a sort of ribbon of green that picks it's way through the city and, as you walk along it, if you don't look too closely and avoid the horizon you can almost fool yourself that you're taking a turn through the countryside. Almost. Maybe a small town.

This looks more like the nice end of my home town than the edge of Europe's biggest building site

The route is almost entirely raised up on a large bank that gives away it's heritage upon closer inspection: it's a sewer. But not just any sewer. The Great Stink of 1858 and the cholera outbreaks of the same decade were what instigated legendary Victorian engineer Joseph Bazalgette to construct London's famous sewerage works. The Greenway rides atop the Northern Outfall Sewer which is responsible for taking all of north London's waste down to the Thames at Beckton. At the time it still wasn't common knowledge that cholera was caused by a bacterium, the sewers were built solely to remove the stink which happened to result in the water quality improving which got rid of the cholera.

Okay, I can feel myself getting over excited now so I'm going to stop talking about sewers. The point is that there are thin veins of greenery threading their way through what is normally considered a pretty grim part of the city and they're really quite nice. They are also currently the closest you are allowed to get to the newer building work (barring special events) passing within just a couple of hundred yards of the new stadium - near enough to hear builders guffawing with laughter when something large and expensive sounding got dropped.

I exposed for about 1/3 second to get the blurring effect on the water

So, for more than five years I had been living in the Lea Valley and completely ignoring it. This has clearly been a mistake. As my wife and I left the Greenway and started following the canal around the north of the Olympic site we managed to forget that we were right on top of a vast construction site. With the stadium and Orbit out of view behind us we were just left with one and two storey residential buildings, the tranquillity of the slow moving water and the ducks and swans that made it their home.

Even the water ways here that look natural have been heavily modified by man's hand. The river has been 'canalised'; which basically means it's been levelled off, made a bit straighter and generally made more navigable. Whilst on the walk I spotted that some signs said Lee and others Lea with no apparent rhyme or reason. Investigations revealed, though, that the parts that are still fairly untouched are still called Lea, whereas man-made sections and modifications are distinguished by being called Lee. Neat.

One of the great things about canals, asides from their history and functionality, is that they tend to be rather still; combine that with a windless day, like we had, and that means you can get some very nice reflections in the water. The above shot was at a sort of T-junction that was more open than most areas and therefore the water was more disturbed but I still loved the reflection from this construction site.


Another reason why I enjoyed this little excursion so much was that it was an opportunity to get out with my new camera. I bought a Sony A65 in the January sales and am very impressed with it so far. I wasn't sure at first as it's an SLT camera, not an SLR, but it has more than held it's own and is definitely opening up some new avenues for me. I won't go into any more detail here, I'll probably give it it's own post in the near future and clearly label it as a techy sort of post so that those not interested in geeky detail can skip over it. I'll be doing the same with a post on digitally incorporating textures into images at some point too.

The old canal with traditional barges moored and the 'Gherkin' rising up on the horizon

A couple of hours of walking took us two thirds of the way around the Olympic site and from there we got the train home. I suspect I shall be spending a lot more time walking along these canals this year. I think a wander down to the Royal Docks on the Greenway wouldn't go amiss either. Home just got a little bit nicer.