There are often pictures that I take that don’t fit into the stories on My London Diary. Nothing really odd about them (that might be more interesting.) Sometimes I tag them on at the end of a story, but that hardly makes sense, and almost certainly means that I won’t ever be able to find them again.
Here are three I took kind of on my way home on October 31. I’d decided to take a little look around the West End to see if anyone was out celebrating Halloween on the streets, but at around 7pm wasn’t surprised not to find anyone. But as I went around, both walking and from the bus I took a few pictures. Here’s one of a shop getting into the spirit of the evening.
Its a place where during the day you will see guys standing in front dressed in union jacks and tourists posing with them for photos as well as going in and buying tourist stuff. Probably not the kind of thing I would normally take a picture of, but standing there I wondered if it might serve as a statement not about what night it was, but about the state of the UK economy.
I was really hanging around until I could use my ‘Super Off Peak’ rail ticket after 7pm, and it was time to get on a bus to the station. (‘Super Off Peak’ was a super wheeze thought up by the rail companies to make loads of money, by keeping the Super Off Peak only slightly more than the previous excessive Off Peak fares and then putting time restrictions on them so you have to buy an more expensive Off Peak ticket to travel out of London between 4pm and 7pm.)
I couldn’t resist taking a couple of pictures on the way from the top deck of the bus. The first was in Trafalgar Square, where a bus gives quite a good view of our National Gallery, but what really attracted me was the red man hovering in front of its dome.
The bus wasn’t stopped long at the lights and controlling the reflections in the window is always a problem, especially if you want some of them, as I did. I wondered for just a few seconds about whether to Photoshop out those bits at top right, but decided it was against my principles, although perhaps I might just make them a little less obvious…
The way to avoid reflections completely when working from buses (or through windows of any type you can approach closely) is to use a rubber lens hood, though it might be hard to find one except in a 49mm filter size. Back in the days of film, using an Olympus OM camera this wasn’t a problem, as almost all of the fairly wide range of lenses I owned took 49mm filters – the odd one out was 52mm. This lets you form a light seal even at a bit of a slight angle to the window, without pressing the solid bit of the lens against the window – which would pick up nasty vibes from the bus. Without it I’m left using my dark coat sleeve to do the best I can.
The other problem is dirty windows. It adds another aspect to choosing where to sit on a bus, assuming you have a choice. Fortunately you only need a fairly small patch of cleanish glass to work through. But some buses don’t have one.
I was on a nearly empty bus as we went over Waterloo Bridge, and as I’ve photographed the National Theatre at night quite a few times both from the bus and from the bridge, I moved over to a seat on the other side. Nothing very special about this picture that I can think of, other than some slightly unusual lighting.
