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Saturday, August 5, 2006
A Long Saturday
This morning was my morning to get up with the kids. Lest you think that this is a weekend deal, it's not. I get up with
the kids three days a week, Monday, Thursday and Saturday. Alex invariably gets up first. If I'm lucky, that's after six.
Today it was at five thirty. Ouch. Playhouse Disney doesn't even come on until six.
I've also been working a lot lately and I went into the office today. I left the car for Kara and took the Tube. That
turned out to be a mistake. Warwick Avenue was shut down - the Bakerloo line was closed from Paddington to Queen's Park. Not
good. So I ended up walking to Edgware Road. It was quite pleasant, actually. It wasn't that hot out yet and the sun wasn't
too strong. I didn't end up sweating.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I ended up walking all the way home from work. When I got to Baker Street, I made
it all the way down to a train. But then it just sat there. Eventually, the conductor came on and told everyone to get off.
But people just sat there looking at each other. That did it for me. I left.
There's only one stop between Baker Street and Edgware Road - Marylebone. But Marylebone is only three streets away from
Baker Street. I'm not going to wait at Baker Street. If I walk to Marylebone, which is fast, I'll likely end up waiting for
Baker Street to resolve before I catch a train, but even if I do, I can only go one stop to Edgware Road. There's no point
in me taking a bus from Paddington to Warwick Avenue either, because I can walk there faster from Edgware Road. If you followed
all of that, you probably live here.
But it does make a nice end to the day when you get to take the cut-off on Blomfield Road and walk by the canal to home.
And it was a pretty evening for it, as you can see.
Regent's Canal I
Technical Data: Canon EOS 10D, 4.0, 1/125s
Canon 24-70mm 2.8L @ 55mm (88mm effective)
White balance: auto, RAW, ISO 100
Friday, August 4, 2006
Where Have I Been Lately?
No, I mean on the web. Here are
some of the more interesting places:
A guy was using Google Earth to look for secret things and he finds a terrain map (an actual physical scale model of terrain) in China of a disputed
border region China has with India.
Vanity Fair has a chilling
but fascinating account of what happened inside NORAD on 9/11 as validated by recently declassified audio tapes
of the communications that occurred within the facility that day.
The finches that Charles
Darwin studied have been caught evolving very, very quickly on the Galapagos Islands.
George W. Bush is really
a robot with a German pilot.
And if you want some very
straight and smart talk on whats going on in the Middle East, I highly
recommend Juan Cole.
The Smallest Car?
I heard that there was a scene in The Da Vinci Code where a car chase took place with Tom Hanks driving a smart car. If I ever got out to see a movie, I'd probably have fun watching that. I remember how astonished I was to see them around
when I first started traveling to London. And there are a lot of them around.
Certainly they are cheap, but they are also very handy in the city for several important reasons:
- You don't have to pay the congestion charge
- You can park in really small spaces
- You can park 'head-in' in a parallel parking situation
That's right, I'm not kidding. If you pull a smart car in, head-on, to the kerb in a parallel parking zone it will
fit in the spot and not stick out into the street. I haven't been able to catch that on film yet, but I'll surely post it
when I do.
OK, but the irony of this is that the smart car is not the smallest production car in London, as far as
I can tell. That award goes to the truly microscopic G-Wiz.
By the way, my apologies for the skewed perspective on the photo. I've been carrying around my Canon G3 because I generally
want to have a camera at hand, but I'm finding that the lens distortion, particularly barrel distortion, is really disturbing.
In this photo, for example, I made a point of standing directly in front of the G-Wiz with the camera about half-way up so
that the perspective on the car would be generally plumb. Clearly I wasn't in the right plane, but you can see the brutal
curve of the distortion.
Anyway, this car is small, man, really, really small. I have seen these things parked head-on as well. Now this neighborhood
has pretty generous sized parking spaces, but still. You can see by the Range Rover and the staggering amount of empty area
within the parking space that this thing is basically a human space suit. It's also totally electric, as far as I know and
it runs silent. There was some promotional stuff on one I saw recently that said the running cost was 1p per mile. Kara and
I did some quick math and figured that our car (a diesel stick that gets great mileage) is probably ten times that cost. It's
a lot of money.
We don't really drive that much at all. We only have to get petrol once a month or so. It generally costs at least £70,
sometimes more.
We also probably can't pull our car into our garage. Now I should point out that I am so super lucky to even have a garage
that I can't tell you. But it is very, very small. We have gotten various cars into it, including a Ford Focus. But we gave
up. It's just too hard.
Even when we got the Ford into the garage, the only way we could get out of it and into the house was to empty everyone
out on the street and then have one person drive it in and line up the driver-side door with the hallway door inside the garage.
Then you could open up the driver door into the hallway to get out of the car. Sound crazy? A lot of people do it here on
my street.
The other night, I saw this guy drive his brand new, jet black (it was so black, light just fell into it) Aston Martin
into his garage. He had the rear-view mirrors tucked back and let me tell you, those sports cars are wide, wide, wide. And
so here's this guy with a £100,000+ car squeezing it into his tiny garage with like 5 to 10 cm of clearance on either
side. And he has to back it out every time he wants to drive it. It's a lot of work.
So small cars are very useful in this town. But the G-Wiz might be a bit too small for me.
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
A Run-In With Charles Dickens
I don't usually turn down the top of Marylebone High Street when I go to work. There's a cut-off that is more direct.
But this is the view from Marylebone Street (which is, of course, not the same street).
By the way, this photo, this view of Marylebone High Street does not do it justice. It is an unbelievably awesome high
street. It is filled with great restaurants, boutiques and other specialty stores. The top of the street, shown above, is
a bit dull, really. It picks up right around the corner in the center of this shot.
At some point I should probably talk about the big 'C' signs you see here. They are for the infamous congestion charge - a toll (currently £8) you have to pay per weekday for crossing into the best bits of central London in a vehicle. It's
a long story.
Anyway, that's all not the point. The point is that even though I don't walk this way to work regularly, I do walk by
this intersection a fair bit and although I've noticed an intricate frieze carved into the side of the building on the right
above, I never really looked at it, if you know what I mean.
Earlier this week I did look at it. And it turns out that Charles Dickens lived and wrote here for some time. The frieze
was put up to honour the site. So that's my chance encounter with Dickens. I don't think it's the first one. I think, actually,
that I went to a birthday party for a friend of Katherine's and saw another Dickens house. But I don't think we'll be invited
back there, so I'll probably never know. I'm kidding, of course.
OK, one final amusing story. My dad told me once that he felt like he really knew London when I could give directions
on the street to confused tourists. This week, I twice gave out directions to confused people, although neither of them were
tourists. The first were confused enough that they pulled over to ask me for help right in front of the address they were
looking for. Imagine that?
The second guy was an American pulling a large piece of baggage on wheels. He pointed towards Oxford Street and asked
me if Great Portland Street was in that direction. I pointed towards Great Portland Street (90° anti-clockwise from where
he was pointing) and said that it was that way.
He was confused because he was looking for Great Portland and Devonshire, and he was standing at the intersection of
Marylebone and Devonshire Place. Just to be clear, this is London we're talking about here, Devonshire Place ≠
Devonshire Street. I told him so, and then told him that yes, I was sure. I used to stay in hotels over there and I know the
area well. Then, since he mentioned he had come straight from the airport, I asked if he had a map or how he knew to get off
at Baker Street. He didn't. He said he just headed east on the tube and got out at Baker Street because it seemed central
and so many other people got off there.
So I say, 'You know there's a tube stop for Great Portland Street? With that bag, you might want to just head back
to Baker Street. It's only another stop or two down the line.'
He chose to walk. But he walked in the direction I gave him.
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
Good 'Ol Prestwick Airport
Ah yes, Glasgow Prestwick International Airport. PIK, as we say in the travel industry. But only to mean the airport. If that doesn't make any sense, try looking up PIK
in Wikipedia and see what happens. I am not responsible for the results. You have been warned. Anyway, it's a nice quiet little
airport. One that's handy if you need to do maybe a little extraordinary rendition or something like that.
Anyway, I don't know if you hear this in the U. S., but I've been hearing about PIK a few times a week now. I've been
hearing about it because the United States is using it as a stop-over for flying weapons to Israel and the public has not
been very happy about that. So the Foreign Office steps in and decides that, like, weapons, you know, should probably be sent through, like, a
military airport or something?
Which entirely misses the point, I think. But then there at the end of the article is the real punchline.
In my view, we are partisan in this conflict when we are allowing British airports
to be used for logistics for Israel and we are not honest brokers any more and our policy towards Lebanon is biased and I
think we have severely damaged our reputation in the international community
--Labour MP Mohammed Sarwar
Now, if Britain's reputation as an honest broker has been damaged by allowing its airports to be used for military
supply shipments, what can you possibly say about the United States? We are actually providing arms to Israel while
rejecting calls for an immediate ceasefire. It's hard to find much diplomacy in that policy.
But we get all this visibility into the dynamics of the situation because of what we hear has happened at PIK.
You'd think that after the whole CIA torture flight thing (generously called extraordinary rendition above) the British would
just find another airport to use.
Monday, July 31, 2006
An Interesting Photo
I had to take a walk down to Clifton Gardens over the weekend. I should explain for those of you who don't know Maida
Vale or Little Venice that Clifton Gardens is like a mini-high street for Little Venice. And for my American readers, I should
also explain that the term 'high street' is similar to how we would use main street, but it's quite a bit more prevalent.
Streets are often named high street. My office, in fact, is on Marylebone High Street - the high street for the Marylebone
section of London. But in Little Venice, we're not big enough to actually have a high street named high street, so Clifton
Gardens is our high street.
But none of that has anything to do with the picture. Well, OK, maybe it does, since the photo was taken right around
the corner from Clifton Gardens.
Double VW
Technical Data: Canon EOS 10D, 2.8, 0.4s handheld
Canon 24-70mm 2.8L @ 28mm (45mm effective)
White balance: auto, RAW, ISO 800
I really wanted to do this in black and white, but to be honest, the colour version is still much better as a photo.
I'll let you decide - I've put the colour version at the bottom of the post.
But that's not what I wanted to point out, really. What I wanted to point out is that I took this photo in failing light
(nautical twilight, actually, and it lasts a long time in London). I had to jack the ISO up to 800 to get the photo (I will
almost never go to 1600), but more importantly, I had to hand-hold the camera.
So I shot this thing wide open at 2.8 at a shutter speed of 4/10 of a second. That's a long, long time.
That's by far the slowest speed I've taken a hand-held shot with and come out with a usable image. The reason it worked here
is because, well, nothing was moving.
So let me take you through some first-hand experience with slowish shutter speeds. By the way, shutter speed
designations, traditionally referred to as Tx, are a very confusing way, in my opinion, to evaluate hand-held
speeds. The reason is that the range of shutter speeds we're talking about here is roughly 1/250s through 4/10s. That is actually
two orders of magnitude difference. It's much easier to see if you express them in milliseconds (ms; 1,000 milliseconds is
one second).
So this photo was taken at a shutter speed of 4/10s (400 ms). That's almost half a second. But as I said,
the subject wasn't moving. I was looking across the street at these cars and there was nothing to brace the camera on, so
I used a little trick. I threw the continuous shooting mode on and held the shutter down until I had taken three photos. This
trick works pretty well - the middle photo is usually the best one because your body has adjusted to the sensation of the
camera's components moving and whirring (this is an SLR, so the mirror flips up before a mechanical shutter trips, etc.).
If the subject had been moving, I wouldn't have even tried unless I was going for some kind of funky special
effect.
I shoot people in low light a lot, though, and that's my basis for a lot of comparison. I wouldn't bother
even shooting at 4/10s (400 ms). My lower limit is 1/30s (33 ms). At this speed, I can usually keep the camera steady enough
for the image to be sharp if the important bits are not moving around too fast. These are people we're talking about - they
move around. At 1/30s (33 ms) this movement is really obvious in blurry hands, hair any so forth. But if you catch a person
in just the right moment you get a spectacular picture.
1/60s (17 ms) is more reliable. If someone is basically stationary but animated, you'll see the movement.
But if they're not moving around too much you get reasonably sharp photos.
At 1/125s (8 ms) or 1/250s (4 ms) you basically get more headroom in the amount of tolerable movement. For
people as subjects, 1/250s (4 ms) is enough to freeze people even in some forms of activity. But that shutter speed presents
much less of a challenge for the photographer. The challenge comes down in the lower range - naturally lit subjects that demand
a wide open lens and a slow shutter speed.
Now I've just casually discussed all these speeds, but if you look at the millisecond range I've gone from
4 ms to 400 ms. This happens because in photography everything is doubles and halves and so forth. I'm not going there now,
so don't worry. I'm just saying there's a huge difference between 4/1000 of a second and 4/10 of a second.
The other interesting thing about this is that if I'm shooting at 1/30s, I'm probably shooting at 2.8.
It's very challenging to shoot wide open, especially if you are shooting in the telephoto range. I get a lot of photos ruined
because the focus is wrong. I'm not embarrased about it or anything. It's part of the process of learning how to do it right.
The fact of the matter is that I rely on the camera's autofocus. It's not a precise tool. It will sometimes lock on to the
background behind someone, or it will be focused on the tip of the nose and not the eye or something. Yeah, that's right,
with a 100mm lens on at 2.8, if I missed the focus point by a couple of centimetres the photo would be no good. The flaw
is fatal and very obvious. I should pull some out sometime to show you what I mean.
Anyway, if you made it through all that stuff, you deserve to take a look at the (currently) better version
of the photo in color.
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