OK, here's what should be a simple story that I'm going to drag out a bit because there's a few interesting angles to it.

 

You are looking at an advert on the wall of a Tube stop in London. Baker Street, I believe. These things are all over the Tube and London as well. Jack Daniel's has a huge push here and is somewhat popular. It seemed really odd to me at first because it's so, well, unabashedly rural America feeling.

 

There are some photographic details here that are interesting. First of all, it's actually a bit dodgy to take a photo in the Tube. When I've asked previously, I've been told that it's OK if you are not on the platform, but they don't allow it on the platform for fear that the flashes will disturb the driver of an incoming train. However, there is no sign prohibiting it and it is a public place. With six minutes until my train arrived, and me not using a flash anyway, there wouldn't be any safety issues, so I went ahead and shot a half dozen photos.

 

I went through this logic in my head because I'm on CCTV in a pretty significant Tube stop.

 

Anyway, the picture is not really distorted. The Tube is, well, a tube. The advert was glued to the concave side of the tunnel. The barrels drift in and out of focus for one of two reasons. Most likely, this was shot with a tilt-shift lens or a large format camera. With this type of setup, you can move the plane of focus around in three dimensions. It's quite popular in food and fashion photography. Normally, if you have a shallow depth of field it will show as a plane of focus (things in focus) parallel to the back of the camera (known as the 'film plane'). With a tilt-shift lens, you can actually tilt the lens up and down, side to side, etc. This allows you to throw the plane of focus out of a parallel plane and create an effect like this.

 

Or they might have just done it with a nice gaussian blur with a layer mask and gradient fills in Photoshop.

I am located relatively near Paddington Station. But I live north of there, near Paddington Green. And I work east of there, near Paddington Street and Paddington Gardens. But this story is all about Paddington Green.

 

It's a marvelous park. Just a beauty. It has a football pitch, track, batting cages, basketball courts, a field for cricket, a restaurant, public restrooms and two kids playgrounds. And probably a few other things I've forgotten.

 

Actually, a lot of parks in London have a snack bar and restrooms. It is awesome when you have kids, let me tell you.

 

The moon came out just before dusk this evening, which was awesome, because it was one of those rare times you can actually take a picture of it and have it come out. So I did.

 

 

My American friends may not be aware of just how many middle eastern folk there are in London. This scene, whilst a bit unusual for the playground, is not at all uncommon near where I live. Edgware road in particular has a lot of middle eastern shops and restaurants. This is a terrible photo, in retrospect, because of all the fences.

 

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This family is sitting in this table on the edge of a brand new playground. The green fence is the normal old English iron border fence. The one in front is a construction fence because they really did just finish this park recently.