These are extras being prepped before they walk on for something that is being filmed. The street is around the corner from Abbey Road, which is down to the left and around the mini roundabout and the famous zebra crossing.

The man I asked said he was an extra. and that they were filming an advertisement. I gave him an old fashioned look and commented ‘not for the thirty trucks that were lined up and a Local Authority road closure’.

We agreed that they were prepped to say that and that was more than the ‘sorry, can’t say’ that they usually said.So it is a period film, and my guess is that is about the Beatles. Big deduction, huh!

The sun was low over to the left and it has cast a slight haze or bloom across the photos. When will I ever learn to put on a lens hood?

Cameras As Recording Instruments

This morning, a day after I went to see what there was to see, I looked again through the photos I took.

I found that one of the women in the shot was holding a copy of The Silver Book by Olivia Laing. The setting is Italy in 1974 in what is described as a period of political turmoil and the height of Italian cinema. The book was written in late 2024 and published in November, 2025.

The woman holding the book is dressed for the period, so she could be one of the extras. If the film is intended to be set in the period of the clothing then I guess it depends how much attention to detail the continuity people gave the props.

But there is another shot that shows more, and here below is the full frame and a crop.

So the film could be about the Beatles, and set in the relevant period.

Or it could be a science fiction film with a woman transported to the scene from 2026.

Or it could be a thriller set today, where people in period costume besiege the Abbey Road studios in a reflection of the political turmoil of 1970s Italy.

Or….

Or fill in with your preferred plot.

At the end, I have put another photo I took a little while ago showing a scene that you can see pretty much any day on Abbey Road at the crossing.

There are two proof houses in England, one in London and one in Birmingham. If you had asked the question one hundred years ago you would have got the same answer.

When the trigger on a gun, rifle, shotgun, pistol, revolver or whatever is pressed, it sets off the sensitive detonator in the cartridge, and that in turn sets off the main explosive powder in the cartridge. That explosion ejects the bullet or pellets out with force. As we know, even a small bullet can travel two miles when it is shot out of a gun barrel.

So as you can imagine, the pressure inside a gun is huge. And the gun and the barrel have got to withstand that pressure over and over again.

A proof house is where firearms and gun barrels are tested, inspected, and stamped with proof marks to show they are safe for use, and it is illegal to sell or transfer a firearm that doesn’t have a valid proof mark.

Proof houses are established by Act of Parliament, and in days gone by, by Royal Charter. The London Proof House is operated by the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers, incorporated by Royal Charter in 1637, and carries out the statutory proof of small arms under the Gun Barrel Proof Acts.

Testing involves firing the guns in a special chamber, to make sure that they are safe, and do not have any defects that causes them to blow up.

When I passed the proof house, I wondered whether the name on the building was current. I was thinking that maybe it was an old sign, maybe the proof house had moved or maybe there weren’t any proof houses any more, So I rang the buzzer and a man came to the door and I asked him. And yes, it is still a proof house. I think I sounded amazed when he told me.

It didn’t strike me at the time, but looking at the photo above on the screen it struck me that the two very tall posts with cameras were placed there specifically because of the nature of the building.

And in the photo below, you can see the proof house set against other buildings. It is another example of London being surrounded by skyscrapers like invaders from another planet

By the way, I don’t know any of the people in the photograph in the previous post, Velvia: Ideal For Landscapes.

And if you wondered whether the man in the Panama hat in that photograph is looking at me, you can see from this crop here below, that he is not.

I try not to act like a magnet when I am taking a candid photograph, so that people do not sense that I am including them , but I am not sure that we humans have much control over that.

I wonder sometimes how our detection of others has changed, if at all, over the millennia. The rise of individualism is not necessarily the same as the sense of being an individual, but I wonder.

In close-knit communities I can imagine that a person might be so integrated with others that the others inhabit a person like a little gathering in the person’s head pretty much all the time.

A mother thinking about her baby is an example we all recognise. In many cases the baby is pretty much there in the mother’s head all the time.

What is the force that caused us to seek to be individuals? What is the repelling force that looks for breathing space and pushes others away and makes us build an image that contains only ourselves?

And ironically, with the break-up of community we are all looking for connection.

Which image do you prefer? One is a JPEG straight out of the camera, and the other is a RAW file with no adjustments and then converted to JPEG.

The JPEG is set to one of Fuji’s presets, which in this case is Velvia Vivid. That is set to replicate Velvia film that Fuji has made for years, dating back to long before digital cameras arrived on the scene.

Velvia is described as “Vibrant reproduction, ideal for landscape and nature’.

The thing is that I shoot RAW, and the only reason I have the camera set up to shoot JPEG simultaneously is that the Fuji X100F has a quirk. The quirk of the X100F that when you look at the screen on the back of the camera to review a shot you have taken, the maximum magnification is less when you only shoot RAW. Why is that? No idea.

So I shoot RAW plus JPEG and ignore the JPEGs when I download them to the computer.

But today I decided to run this test.

Which image do you prefer?

To the left of the frame, in the direction in which the woman is looking intently, is The Tower of London. In the gap between the trees is the Four Seasons Hotel at Ten Trinity Square at Tower Hill. I went into the hotel for a look at the magnificence.

Rooms at the Four Seasons are pricey, with a small double at £750 and a junior suite at £1,350 per night. The building itself is magnificent, with corinthian columns, and huge doors, as befitted its original purpose as the headquarters of the Port Of London Authority.

For 57 consecutive nights beginning on 7th September 1940, London was bombed by the German Luftwaffe, and over 40,000 people died in the raids.

The Port Of London Authority (PLA) building was the centre of administration for the London ports wartime emergencies committee, and on the nights of 8th and 9th, and 29th December 1940 The Tower of London and The Port of London Authority building at No. 10 were hit and the rotunda at the PLA building was destroyed.

After the war, the PLA cleared the rubble and left the central area as an open courtyard. In the 1970s the Port of London Authority relocated and a hotel chain bought the building and converted it to the luxury hotel it is today, including reconstructing the rotunda and the domed ceiling through which light softly filters.