I visited London on Friday for what the lady at the train station coffee shop called a “jolly” I was meeting a friend for lunch and another friend for coffee. I was also planning to try some street photography. It’s something I love looking at, other photographers street photography that is, but something I often feel nervous about doing myself. I find though, that having the camera lens to look down helps ease the anxiety I often feel in busy places like London. Though the first photo I’ve shared today, has no people in it.
When the new part of Kings Cross was opened a few years back a tunnel opened to take pedestrians from either St Pancras or Kings Cross up towards Coal Drop Yard. (Coal drop yard is where back in the olden days, coal was dropped. Now it is a “destination” for the young, the hipsters and the hungry. It has restaurants and street food vendors.) This underground corridor is striped on the ceiling and one wall and the other wall is a continuous screen which sometimes contains adverts, information or art but usually it’s just left blank but displaying different colours. Pale or pastel for most of the year but in the summer to celebrate gay pride it is the bright vibrant rainbow colours pictured above. Also I think the green lines added to the floor as an aid to social distancing shown in the picture above, actually help create that sense of curving movement or journey in the photo.
Below is a picture of the same tunnel taken two years ago, with a strategically placed silhouette of a person in it. My Dad particularly likes this photograph so I have a large pint out of it I need to get framed and take up to him in a couple of weeks time. It was meant to be a present in 2020 but Covid prevented me getting it to him.
I didn’t just photograph tunnels on Friday. I also took some pictures around Angel, Islington and the Kings Cross area. This photo, below is taken outside Google’s offices at StPancras. I was focussing on the tree and after taking the photo I noticed the little boy playing by the water. He’s out of focus and I wouldn’t share a photo of a child if they were identifiable with out permission, but his hat obscures his face so I think in this case it is ok. What I didn’t notice until even later when I was looking at the picture on my computer screen was the young person reading! If only I’d noticed them when I was framing the shot! But these are the trials of a visually impaired photographer and I’ve learnt not to feel upset or disappointed when I miss an opportunity. Instead I felt grateful that I could still crop the photograph in a way that brought attention to them as part of the whole scene.
The Happy Salmon 