A Year in Pictures – 6 September 2015 – The Golden Hour

My wife and I had tea on this beautiful Sunday with friends who live on Eel Pie Island, which stands in the middle of the Thames at Twickenham. It is a place like no other and many artists live and work here and there are a number of business related to boating. It is eclectic, funky and utterly wonderful. It was on this island that that many great British bands had their first forays—too many to mention but this was where musical revolution occurred.

The island's hotel, where these performances took place, is no more and on its site a group of houses stand, but you get the feeling as you walk around the island that this is the soil out of which amazing flowers can still bloom.

As the nights are drawing in as summer draws to an end, what photographers refer to as "the golden hour"—when the sun is low in the sky and the temperature of light turns to warmer frequencies, more blue and less yellow—comes ever earlier in the day, so I was able to get this quick snap on my phone of a tree near our friends' house before my wife and I headed home across the slender pedestrian bridge that connects the island to Twickenham town.

A Year in Pictures – 5 September 2015 – Pembroke College Oxford

The colleges of Oxford University invite their alumni every few years to a dinner. The invitations are issued to those who joined the College in a particular year and a number of year groups are invited at once. The dinner is called a "gaudy", for the Latin gaudere, meaning 'to rejoice'.

This year it was the turn at my alma mater, Pembroke, for those matriculating in years 1974 to 1976 to get merry and have a chance to sleep it all off in College accommodation, which has seen considerable improvements in comfort since the 1970s (although the music was better back then, of course). It was indeed merry and I greatly enjoyed catching up with some of my closest friends as well as the challenge of recognising less familiar faces beneath the accumulating patina of age. The last such dinner for my year was in 2009, so by the time the next invitation comes round (and God preserve) the challenge will have become more demanding.

Here are some shots of Pembroke, taken before I caught the train back to Twickenham, where the rugby crowds were swarming past my door to watch England defeat Ireland.

A Year In Pictures – 2 September 2015 – Another Monstrous Carbuncle (Final, er, maybe...)

It's been a few weeks since my last post and I have a shedload of photos to work through from my holidays, but I really could not let this day go unmarked.

The reason? 20 Fenchurch Street in the City of London (aka 'the Walkie-Talkie') has received an award. It has been declared the worst building in the UK of 2015 by the magazine Building Design and is thus this year's recipient of the Carbuncle Cup.

Here is a shot of it taken this morning as I walked to work along Lombard Street. It certainly looks a bit blue doesn't it, dear readers?

A Year in Pictures – 27 and 28 July 2015 – Nada for Now

Dear readers and friends,
Although I have taken several hundred photographs over the last two days, they are for a private portraiture project and I am not able to share them with you.
Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible!
Best wishes,
Me xx

In the meantime, here's something from my holiday in Germany last year.

Heiliger Georg
Berlin

A Year in Pictures – 26 July 2015 – Nerdery

Today I was checking that my lenses were focusing correctly by reference to the concentric circles visible on my laptop screen in this picture. It was all rather tedious. Added to which I realise that I don't understand how Adobe Lightroom is arranging my image files. It is the quest to improve my images that gets me through times like this. Deep breaths and plough on...

A Year in Pictures – 25 July 2015 – Little Purple Flower

"Flowers…are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out values all the utilities of the world"

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

Lobelia

A Year in Pictures – 23 and 24 July 2015 – Music and Rain

On Thursday 23 July we celebrated St James's Day at St Katharine Cree in the City of London.

St Katharine Cree is a Guild Church, its territorial parish having been taken from it by the City of London (Guild Churches) Act 1952 and passed to St Helen Bishopsgate. However we continue to honour St James as well as St Katharine in recognition of the incorporation of the parish of St James Duke's Place into the parish of St Katharine Cree in the 19th century.

For the last few years, the Evensong in honour of St James has been followed by a party with live jazz in the churchyard, weather of course permitting. The band, called Fascinating Rhythm, includes me on percussion for this particular gig. Here are three of us, captured on camera during a number where my musical input was not needed. The female vocalist is, sadly, just out of shot.

On Friday, 24 July it rained during all the hours of daylight, the fall becoming particularly heavy in the afternoon—not conducive in the least to music in the open air.