Look ... It’s an Eagle

It’s been lovely spending the day in London with my youngest son and getting to see his new home. We met at King’s Cross and took the tube to Camden Town from where we walked via Regent’s Park to St.John’s Wood to find ourselves at Lord’s Cricket Ground. There was no plan to do that. It just evolved. Once there the natural thing was to do the tour, so I got a chance to see (and photograph before I got a telling off) the famous Ashes Urn and the Long Room and the player’s dressing rooms. The sense of history was palpable. It was rather sobering to be able to stand on the famous player’s balconies imagining what it must be like to be next man in, facing the walk through that ornate Long Room - as all the greats of the game have done - before setting foot on the most revered patch of grass in the entire world. Some players crumble under such weight of history and expectation. Others - the true greats of the sport - thrive on it. The tour finished with a visit to the modern and futuristic Media Centre, a spectacular place to watch the cricket from. I did rather wonder if my eldest son, studying Sports Journalism, will ever be sat here in a professional capacity. I’d love to think so.

From Lord’s we headed to Kensington to visit the “Only in England” exhibition at the Science Museum, showing photographs from Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr. The most poignant images for me were the ones where I could easily have been in the photograph myself, a child of the same age as those being pictured on beaches on the south coast. I learned a lot from trying to understand why some images were so much more compelling than others.

Time disappeared quickly and after a wander around the permanent collections we headed to Roam’s University of Westminster Campus. A chilled evening has just been enjoyed where I managed to recover my lost form at Pool to give Roam a bit of a thrashing. It was good to find out that he’s become a much better loser than he ever was a kid! Thank goodness!

It’s been very hard to choose a blip from the many shots taken today which I like. In the end I’ve picked one from quite a few I took on the tube. I felt like I could just ride the underground all day taking photographs without once ever surfacing. All London’s cosmopolitan glory is on display down below! I also gave lie to the belief that everyone keeps to their own space on the tube. I actually found it very easy to establish eye contact and strike up conversations. I also found it surprisingly easy to take candids. I guess Londoners put up with pretty much anything.

I want to experiment with colour in my street photography, something I’m not so confident around compared to black and white. I think it’s a lot harder to get an image to work, but I really liked the way the colours balance here. I’m trying to educate my eye to be more colour aware. I’ve currently got a very monochromatic kind of perception. I hope you think this works too.