In case you are not buddies with me on the Facebooks or - gasp - perhaps friends with me in real life, you may not know that I'm in the midst of a month-long trip to England. So far I find the country expensive, accessible, unfashionable, storied and quite rainy. Perhaps you think it's unfair I call England unfashionable, but really it makes me much more comfortable wearing my normal stuff around since everyone else
also looks a mess. British people also tend to have, on average, much weirder hair than Americans. I like that.
Here are some images from my first week or so of travels. Most everything here is from Oxford, where I'm staying with George while he does all manner of really boring physics things that he's really excited about. These are in chronological order, but otherwise nonsensical.
"Punting" or DIY gondolas, as I call it, is apparently a popular tourist activity. George has yet to punt me anywhere.
This is what George does all day.
Oh really, did you think I'd take pictures of
landmarks or
pretty things? You obviously haven't been reading my blog very long.
Merton's library. One of if not the oldest academic library in Britain. Apparently these are the first bookshelves in the United Kingdom.
This image is from London. This is right outside the Houses of Parliament, in the River Thames. But immediately after I took this image, my camera said it was out of juice, so this is it for London, for now.
And the rest are from inside Oxford's Ashmolean Museum - a pretty cool repository of all the stuff Oxford has collected and been gifted over the years.
So that's it for England for now. It's been a pretty chill week but Saturday early we head to Paris for the weekend! And I'll spend more time in London next week. Hopefully I'll be able to steal some more fast internet to upload photos. Until then, cheers!
I had clearly done a piss-poor job on the previous post with showing you what Oxford looks like. It looks like this:
Obligatory Eiffel Tower and George-and-me-on-the-Eiffel-tower tourist photos:
Notre Dame. I loved how none of the other signs were in Japanese.
Multiple people taking photos with iPads. Who carries around an iPad on their tourism trips? These folks. There's definitely a post to be written about how trying to take pictures of everything prevents you from actually enjoying the thing in the moment. Just cameras... everywhere... of everything. One lady was literally taking a picture of each stained-glass window, even though they all pretty much looked the same. She wouldn't stop and look at each one to admire it, she'd just take the photo and move on. We live in a weird time.
More random from Paris and, naturally, I went a bit overboard with compositions in the modern art museum.
And, finally, from this morning back in Oxford. Looking forward to one more day here before I head into London. Then second-shooting a wedding in a castle (!) and then a glorious week in Belgium. Yes, when I travel, I do it big. Until next time!
I found the process of shooting and review so useful, I'd really love to put together a group of photographers here in town to do this on a regular basis. If that kind of thing intrigues you, drop me a note. I want to seriously limit the number of wedding photographers in the critique group, but certainly I realize that's who most of my readers are! I'm thinking monthly hard-core brutal photo critiques, with more occasional intensive projects. Ripping off Spencer, of course, but keeping it more or less the same group of people and, obviously, making it free and local. Let's talk about it.