Showing posts with label east london. Show all posts
Showing posts with label east london. Show all posts

Wednesday, 26 August 2015

Sinking into mundanity on a Sunday. In which we take a ride on the Airline skyride over the River Thames



I am feeling a bit stir crazy after a whole day at home in the rain.

I worried myself quite a lot by doing things that have been left undone for months.

  • some ironing ( don't tell my other half )
  • cleared the dead coals and ash from the fireplace ( our last real fire was at Christmas time)
  • tidied my desk and polished my keyboard. no more dirty querty.
  • found my ipod ( missing for 8 months)
  • created a large pile of stuff for the charity shop, but didn't go to the charity shop as it was raining.
  • paid bills


What was all that about?

Life is too short for household chores.

I need adventure.

New Zealand beckons, and my visa has been approved. I am probably just getting organised, about 3 months too early. Wanting to leave the house clean and tidy.

I shouldn't complain.

Other Half treated me to a mini adventure on Sunday.

He took me on the London Emirates Airline cable car ride over the Thames. Last time we attempted the crossing it was too windy and they closed it just as we arrived. This time the air was still, and the sky was grey.

He knows how to give a girl a good time.

He allowed me to use my Oyster card. Who would have thought a sky ride could be purchased with an Oyster Card?

We took off in our cabin from the foot of the O2 and headed skywards towards  Royal Docks, East London.

The view was scenic.

East London is growing fast. New builds everywhere.




I spotted some cones.




And a beach.



No swimming allowed though.






  Danger of drowning.



We explored the Royal Docks, walking all the way around, inspecting the rapidly changing scenery.

No ice cream. No coffee. OH was heading towards his lunch. I had just had breakfast.



We walked down to the foot bridge that you can just see in the distance in the image above, doing a circular tour.


Happy hikers passed us by; one dragging a tyre behind him perhaps in an attempt to get as much exercise as if he were climbing a grassy mountain or distant hill.

A lot of concrete here.


 

I didn't try to climb the wall. Nor was I thinking of it. Wallspikes or not.

We encountered a new sport; riding on a jet of air pumped out of a tube by a jet ski. It obviously doesn't count as swimming.

I heard the instructor advising his client

'time's up mate'

'on the way back I want you to swim like a dolphin. Push your head under the water'

And to my surprise, he did.

And looked just like a dolphin to me.




The lift on the footbridge is broken.





At the far end, more development opportunities abound. An old Spiller 'millenium' building. Built in the 1930's.


Coming back round we could see the dome, the airline and the new houses. 






We flew home again. Across the river and back to the Greenwich peninsula.










Back on the South side we popped over to the dome to find out how much they charged for climbing onto its roof.

£38.

I am sure you can guess that we didn't take the opportunity.

The airline ride goes much higher. And all for a few pennies on my Oyster card.

A fine morning out, before the rain arrived. We completed the day with a trip to town to buy a new wire brush to clean the BBQ as the mouse has eaten the old one,  and a new sink tidy.

We know how to have a good time.




Tuesday, 24 December 2013

Christmas greetings - with a bit of red from the Greenway

Happy Christmas © Caroline Fraser 2013

It's that time again.

Blowing a gale outside.

presents wrapped...........and unwrapped because I couldn't remember what was in them; foolishly thinking that I would remember ............

labels added to save a second unwrapping before the intended recipient's official unwrapping.

Time to make a festive e-greeting for my friends and acquaintances.

Time for a bit of 'fiddling'. This is not a rude word in my book,  so please no rude comments.

When OH asks me what I am doing as I sit glued to the mac, he gets the same answer every time; 'just fiddling'

Which really means that I don't wish to explain that I am experimenting with pictures that I know he won't be interested in, playing around with layers and seeing what I can create from a simple image or two. Only by experimenting can new ideas take form, and while most of them are discarded along the way, once in a while something good comes from a few minutes or more spent in Photoshop with old or new images.

A Christmas greeting then.

What can I do in a few minutes before heading out to spend time with friends?

A quick look back through my folders of photos for 2013 tells me there aren't any snow pictures. For when I visited iceland to take snow and ice pictures it rained incessantly.

So a bit of red then?


Browsing through my folders from 2013 brought back memories of another cloudless ( almost) sky day and a long hot walk through a part of London I never knew existed.

Back in the heady days of summer I went on a guided walk in Stratford, east London, on the  Greenway.



Greenway




I never can resist a lamp post

Walking along the top of the 'Northern Outfall Sewer"  has its down sides on a hot day, but the mixture of Victorian architecture and new London tempted my fellow photographers to get snapping.

I lapsed back into my suburban photography mode

fence

tree

house

lamp post

tower

fence, wall, bush, tower


This seems to be a habit that I can't break.



fence, tree, tower

fence, tree

fence, tree 2

I have a desire to break the image in half, horizontally.


or if not, then vertically

tree, post

towers and posts

Anyway, I was looking for some red for Christmas

And saw this


red and white

Back in the summer I experimented with multiple exposure of this red and white tape and got this....



more tape; multiple exposure


Which I did nothing with until today.

I popped it into Photoshop with another almost identical image and put one on top of the other.

Blended them with multiply mode and a little bit of  Topaz Adjust from Topaz filters and made this

Happy Christmas

Which is nothing like the original, but with a bit of 'fiddling' I now have an abstract that will be my Christmas e-card as I like the reds and the pearly whites.


Happy Christmas!