Walking the camera

So here’s some of what I saw on my stroll in town at the beginning of the week. It’s been ages since I’ve been out actively taking pictures, as opposed to just being out and about, and by chance having my camera on me. There’s a huge difference. I recently watched an old documentary following Joel Meyerowitz shooting on the street (sadly the picture quality is rubbish), and it was so exciting to see how he worked and what he thought about what he saw, when he saw it. There’s a huge treasure trove of old documentaries about famous photographers on YouTube that I’ve only just discovered, and I’m looking forward to diving into them soon. And my intention for 2020 is… to take pictures more intently. Hehe.

Sitting out on the bench

The sun has been out for a few days, and I knew that it wouldn’t last, so I took my camera out for a walk in town on Monday. I walked streets I’ve never been on before, and ended up in St James’ Park, where I sat down on a bench, soaking up the rays and resting my legs. After a while I started taking pictures of people walking past, trying to catch them at the moment they blocked the sun - ‘cause you know how I loves me some silhouettes. Hopefully it’ll be sunny again soon, as it would be fun to collect some more of these.

Today

8.17am

On the way to the Ponds for a dip this morning, with 0 degrees in the air, 6 in the water. Glorious.

14.45pm

Best leg warmer there is.

An arty November Sunday

Let’s continue with back tracking through my 2019, shall we? On a Sunday back in November, we went with a couple of friends to see the Antony Gormley exhibition at the Royal Academy. I’m lucky enough to be able to go to exhibitions on weekdays when it’s less busy, but we this time we went on what must be the busiest day in the week. It was actually quite nice to feel more collectively that we were sharing an experience with a lot of people at the same time.

Our friend’s daughter mimicked the statues throughout the exhibition which made us chuckle.

Most of the rooms were so busy that you had to simply walk behind each other in a circle to have a look at whatever was in the middle, like some sort of circle dance.

I have no idea how they managed to fix most of the art works into the spaces without wrecking the place, and I must say I enjoyed the contrast between his modern sculptures placed within the very classical Royal Academy.

Here we had to squeeze our way through, walking around the perimeter of it, in a neat little line.

This room could only be seen though a door opening, the whole floor was filled with water. Would have been fun if you could wade your way through it :)

We couldn’t figure out how they’d installed these thin metal rods that would span across four rooms or so, without them bending at all. So much of Gormley’s stuff makes you wonder “What the?! How the?!”.

I think this was hand drawn with chalk. Made your eyes hurt.

My favourite parts of the exhibition were his early watercolour work, as well as his notebooks. If I was to steal one thing from the show it would have been this last rusty coloured painting. Ha - just realised that it’s yet another painting with someone facing away, and here in silhouette, which reminds me a lot of a certain someone’s photographs… hmmmm.