I'm so soaked to the skin
Nov. 24th, 2003 01:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaSo, I set up this photo competition. Somehow I didn't find things to photograph in Ireland, and then I forgot my lightmeter when I went to Whitby, so here we are, a week to go, and I have no photos. Never mind, I thought, on Saturday I'll go to London and take lots of pictures in the city centre. Simple.
I bounded out of bed (moderately) early, got dressed, got my act together, and packed up my camera gear. Two SLRs, a couple of lenses, a lightmeter, a tripod. All of it obsolete, heavy, clunky even, but beautifully engineered and functional. I opened the front door... discovered it was tipping down. I forgot to book the weather. Still, they don't call me dauntless for nothing, so out of the cupboard came the big old army coat, and I set off.
On a whim, just as I was leaving, I'd grabbed my walkman and a few tapes - something I've not done in ages. And so I walked down Iffley Road in the rain, listening to my walkman which has been in disuse for years, wearing a coat that hasn't been out since my student days, a rucksack full of toys from previous decades. And I realised how long it's been since I actually set out to do something just by myself for the day. And I remembered walking endlessly round Darlington as a teenager, wearing thin my tapes of Boys Don't Cry and Surfer Rosa.
But today it was The Stone Roses, and for some reason the music, the rain, the wet leaves on an all-but-deserted Iffley Road all combined to give me an impression of inherent Englishness that I'd find very difficult to explain or justify. Then suddenly, an unholy row above me: shouting, screaming, hooting, and an infeasible number of red-and-white clad bodies leaning cheering out of a tiny sash window - I guess we won the rugby, then.
Hopping onto the Oxford Tube, I switched the Stone Roses off to talk to the driver, and was suddenly struck by how long it is since I've seen anyone with a walkman. The woman sitting opposite me had a tiny mp3 player clipped to her jumper, and even the student further along had a Discman. A tape suddenly seemed almost unbearably antique. Not to worry, it suited my mood.
Worth noting in passing is a piece of graffiti in the cut through from Cowley Road to St Clements - hurrying for the bus, I didn't want to stop and get my camera out. In black lower case letters, on a red wall, it simply says "dahlias, ephemeral in time".
No miracles occurred on the M40, and it was raining as hard as ever by the time I reached Marble Arch. The winter weather was gloomy, the Christmas lights were on, people hustled and bustled with umbrellas, stepping through the puddles and reflections on the pavements. Trying to frame shots to catch the atmosphere, I suddenly realised my Critical Error.
The previous evening I'd loaded up my (borrowed) Olympus with film - trying to save time, but failing to register that 200 ASA was clearly not what I wanted. So, it was open the lens out as much as possible in the hopes of getting remotely sensible exposure times, and I fought my way up through the crowds.
By the time I'd reached Piccadilly Circus, I'd nearly finished the film, and nipped into Boots to try and find something more sensible. I eventually tracked down some 800 ASA film - not that it was labelled that, of course. No, it's called Kodak Ultra Extra Max with Caffeine, or something. Still, if Boots were alarmed by a bedraggled, dripping thing pawing through their films reading all the small print on the boxes, they didn't show it.
I took a couple of photos of the fountain with the horses there, hoping to be able to get shots fast enough to "freeze" the water. So, on a fantastically wet day, as I tried to take a photo to represent the word "water", an enormous raindrop fell in my eye, blinding me for some minutes. Nice to know the world is still not without irony.
Late afternoon, as it started to gloom in properly, I realised that my hands were now too wet and cold to function properly, and, worse, I'd completely missed my dinner. I pottered into Yo! sushi, and was spectacularly disappointed. Yes, so I know it's the McDonalds of the sushi world, but I've usually been impressed by it. Their miso soup seemed thin and insipid, the avocado maki I ordered were visibly elderly. Watching the conveyor belt go round for some time, hoping for sashimi that wasn't salmon, I eventually rescued a plate of mixed salmon and tuna. Then wondered how long it had been going round for. Weeks, possibly.
Mind you, Pret at Marble Arch gave me really nasty tea, too. Maybe it just wasn't a good food day.
Warm, at least, I wandered round Soho for a while, but between the angry glares of market stall holders and the uncertain looks of people round sex shops, I was too daunted to take many pictures. I wandered intermittently round thefleshpots record shops of Ber Wick Street - which were gratifyingly full of enthusiastic people. I didn't quite manage the Full Ber Wick (which for reasons which now escape me is defined as buying fourteen albums), but did pull off a creditable Half Ber Wick. Not my fault, it waggled its cheap CDs at me.
Considering the list of words I needed to illustrate - sadly a list written some months ago when sky and grey were not synonymous, and green still existed - I thought of grey and corner. With that in mind, there seemed only one place to go.
Walking into the Underground, I realised I should actually have been there all day. Warm, dry, and all people come to you eventually. After all, if I'd sat near a staircase on the floor, scruffy and unkempt as I was, I could have cheerfully taken photos of people - everyone would have been far too busy Not Seeing me. A quick trip to Waterloo, and I was at the South Bank centre.
Meanwhile, the weather had decided that I was having far too much fun, and redoubled its efforts. Huge, rolling clouds of rain were proving death to camera lenses, and rapidly numbing to fingers. I tried to take some time exposures of the strangely Metropolis-esque buildings across the Thames, and of the Eye, and the South Bank Centre, but the soddenness of everything was making juggling a light metre difficult, and there was no time to focus before the lens fogged up. I relied on the borrowed Olympus' internal meter, pulled the lens out to infinity, and hoped for the best.
Waterloo station toilets provided a handy warm air dryer, which made both my hands and cameras more functional. Distinctly wet feet were reminding me that waterproofing spray does not work in a talismanic manner - you actually have to get round to putting the stuff on your boots - and my coat was beginning to weigh more than I do. Despite that, warm hands made me feel prepared to go outside again - but a trip onto Waterloo Bridge soon demonstrated that the rain was still prepared to slather over the lenses, and it was probably going to outlast me by some considerable margin.
I gave in gracefully.
Now, of course, I need to get the films developed. I doubt they'll be ready by the last day of Novemeber, sadly, so my twelve photos may be a little late in appearing. Very late, if the pictures haven't come out...
I bounded out of bed (moderately) early, got dressed, got my act together, and packed up my camera gear. Two SLRs, a couple of lenses, a lightmeter, a tripod. All of it obsolete, heavy, clunky even, but beautifully engineered and functional. I opened the front door... discovered it was tipping down. I forgot to book the weather. Still, they don't call me dauntless for nothing, so out of the cupboard came the big old army coat, and I set off.
On a whim, just as I was leaving, I'd grabbed my walkman and a few tapes - something I've not done in ages. And so I walked down Iffley Road in the rain, listening to my walkman which has been in disuse for years, wearing a coat that hasn't been out since my student days, a rucksack full of toys from previous decades. And I realised how long it's been since I actually set out to do something just by myself for the day. And I remembered walking endlessly round Darlington as a teenager, wearing thin my tapes of Boys Don't Cry and Surfer Rosa.
But today it was The Stone Roses, and for some reason the music, the rain, the wet leaves on an all-but-deserted Iffley Road all combined to give me an impression of inherent Englishness that I'd find very difficult to explain or justify. Then suddenly, an unholy row above me: shouting, screaming, hooting, and an infeasible number of red-and-white clad bodies leaning cheering out of a tiny sash window - I guess we won the rugby, then.
Hopping onto the Oxford Tube, I switched the Stone Roses off to talk to the driver, and was suddenly struck by how long it is since I've seen anyone with a walkman. The woman sitting opposite me had a tiny mp3 player clipped to her jumper, and even the student further along had a Discman. A tape suddenly seemed almost unbearably antique. Not to worry, it suited my mood.
Worth noting in passing is a piece of graffiti in the cut through from Cowley Road to St Clements - hurrying for the bus, I didn't want to stop and get my camera out. In black lower case letters, on a red wall, it simply says "dahlias, ephemeral in time".
No miracles occurred on the M40, and it was raining as hard as ever by the time I reached Marble Arch. The winter weather was gloomy, the Christmas lights were on, people hustled and bustled with umbrellas, stepping through the puddles and reflections on the pavements. Trying to frame shots to catch the atmosphere, I suddenly realised my Critical Error.
The previous evening I'd loaded up my (borrowed) Olympus with film - trying to save time, but failing to register that 200 ASA was clearly not what I wanted. So, it was open the lens out as much as possible in the hopes of getting remotely sensible exposure times, and I fought my way up through the crowds.
By the time I'd reached Piccadilly Circus, I'd nearly finished the film, and nipped into Boots to try and find something more sensible. I eventually tracked down some 800 ASA film - not that it was labelled that, of course. No, it's called Kodak Ultra Extra Max with Caffeine, or something. Still, if Boots were alarmed by a bedraggled, dripping thing pawing through their films reading all the small print on the boxes, they didn't show it.
I took a couple of photos of the fountain with the horses there, hoping to be able to get shots fast enough to "freeze" the water. So, on a fantastically wet day, as I tried to take a photo to represent the word "water", an enormous raindrop fell in my eye, blinding me for some minutes. Nice to know the world is still not without irony.
Late afternoon, as it started to gloom in properly, I realised that my hands were now too wet and cold to function properly, and, worse, I'd completely missed my dinner. I pottered into Yo! sushi, and was spectacularly disappointed. Yes, so I know it's the McDonalds of the sushi world, but I've usually been impressed by it. Their miso soup seemed thin and insipid, the avocado maki I ordered were visibly elderly. Watching the conveyor belt go round for some time, hoping for sashimi that wasn't salmon, I eventually rescued a plate of mixed salmon and tuna. Then wondered how long it had been going round for. Weeks, possibly.
Mind you, Pret at Marble Arch gave me really nasty tea, too. Maybe it just wasn't a good food day.
Warm, at least, I wandered round Soho for a while, but between the angry glares of market stall holders and the uncertain looks of people round sex shops, I was too daunted to take many pictures. I wandered intermittently round the
Considering the list of words I needed to illustrate - sadly a list written some months ago when sky and grey were not synonymous, and green still existed - I thought of grey and corner. With that in mind, there seemed only one place to go.
Walking into the Underground, I realised I should actually have been there all day. Warm, dry, and all people come to you eventually. After all, if I'd sat near a staircase on the floor, scruffy and unkempt as I was, I could have cheerfully taken photos of people - everyone would have been far too busy Not Seeing me. A quick trip to Waterloo, and I was at the South Bank centre.
Meanwhile, the weather had decided that I was having far too much fun, and redoubled its efforts. Huge, rolling clouds of rain were proving death to camera lenses, and rapidly numbing to fingers. I tried to take some time exposures of the strangely Metropolis-esque buildings across the Thames, and of the Eye, and the South Bank Centre, but the soddenness of everything was making juggling a light metre difficult, and there was no time to focus before the lens fogged up. I relied on the borrowed Olympus' internal meter, pulled the lens out to infinity, and hoped for the best.
Waterloo station toilets provided a handy warm air dryer, which made both my hands and cameras more functional. Distinctly wet feet were reminding me that waterproofing spray does not work in a talismanic manner - you actually have to get round to putting the stuff on your boots - and my coat was beginning to weigh more than I do. Despite that, warm hands made me feel prepared to go outside again - but a trip onto Waterloo Bridge soon demonstrated that the rain was still prepared to slather over the lenses, and it was probably going to outlast me by some considerable margin.
I gave in gracefully.
Now, of course, I need to get the films developed. I doubt they'll be ready by the last day of Novemeber, sadly, so my twelve photos may be a little late in appearing. Very late, if the pictures haven't come out...
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-24 01:48 am (UTC)Told ya. Smug now ;-)
Unfortunately, smug, but without good photographs, due to aforementioned lighting conditions... :(