Concrete Car-Park #1

From the monochrome beauty of Luke's portrait yesterday, to the brutalist style of this all-night underground car-park.

My fisheye lens has bent and warped and smoothed the angularities a bit and which has been post-sharpened, to make it look even more clinical. This could become an occasional series, where a semi emergency blip is required.

To look in LARGE

I've taken ultrawide and fisheye pics here before - and got into all sorts of trouble. Leave it to 5 a.m. and the Sainsbury's staff (it's under the supermarket) come in and don't take kindly being in one's snaps. The last time, as I rushed to get the movement of a car, contrasting with the solid concrete pillars, it stopped abruptly and I was reckoned to be a security risk! Head of security were summoned and they examined what I had taken. I announced, with disdain, how on earth could I be spying on staff members when in a fisheye shot, they appeared so darned small, if at all! "Well, you could blow it up" (as in an enlargement) was the reply. Cavorting with a tripod these early hours just now would have really got them riled; I was expressly told to never photograph here again!

Another, earlier pre-digital time, I had experimented with my (then) new fisheye lens around under here and had got them printed in the processing place that I was after a job at. As I was chatting to the shop's boss, his best customer came in, a very successful society photographer who often snapped the rich and famous in London. This chap, Richard, saw my snaps and was really intrigued. I had never spoken to him before. He was fascinated and asked who had taken them. I denied all knowledge of them and profusely declined that I had taken them. WHY? Well, who knows, embarrassment, shyness, but I do know that I was never offered that job I was after. Perhaps after that.

Back to the portrait of Luke - thanks ever so much for hoisting him well up into the Spotlights!