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.

On Tuesday 28 July, we went to see performance number 30,367 of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap at St. Martin’s Theatre in London .

We went in part because the play has been running for 74 years, and is the longest running play in the world. So we figured something must be good about it to have survived that long.

Some passages in the play tell its age. Characters speak about rationing, which ended in Britain in 1954, two years after the play debuted.

Agatha Christie wrote Three Blind Mice in 1947 and it aired on the radio that year. She wrote it for Queen Mary’s 80th birthday and it was popular and so she expanded it into a full-length stage play and renamed it The Mousetrap.

It’s a murder mystery in true Agatha Christie style. The relevance of three blind mice is that the nursery rhyme melody is the killer’s ‘signature’.

The plot is built on a real-life tragedy of a child who died in 1945 on a remote farm of neglect at the hands of his foster parents.

The boy was starved and then beaten, and the case was notorious and led directly to the 1948 Children’s Act that mandated that local authorities had to establish a dedicated Children’s Department and appoint a Children’s Officer to monitor foster homes.

Looking at the circumstances from today, 80 years later, I think about how the war was still on, and literally millions of people were dying in theatres of war around the world. And London and other cities in England had been bombed and thousands died.

Yet somehow the death of a ten year old child shocked the nation. Maybe the nation was hanging on to some kind of sanity in the face of six years of war.

The theatre is small and cosy, and we sat just a few rows from the stage. The stage set was the drawing room of a country house, and it was quite a setup. That’s an advantage of running one play and not having to take down the set to make way for something else.

The scene is the drawing room that leads off to the entrance hall, around a corner so we never see the front door, but only hear it bang shut.

Another door leads to the dining room, and a staircase leads to the upstairs rooms, while another door leads to the back stairs. So when characters leave by one door and enter by another, it builds out in our minds the image of the country house of which we only see the drawing room.

What did we think of it? The acting was good, purposely dated, and there was a moral heart to the play, incidental to the main plot, when one character speaks about the need to face difficulties that still inhabit the mind long after the events.

When the play ends and the players are lined up to take their bows, one player stepped forward to swear us all to secrecy over who the killer was. And in the best tradition I can only tell you that….

The exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London is on now, and ends 6 September 2026. I snapped these with my phone to show the many faces of Marilyn Monroe.

Tamara and I came out of the exhibition feeling positive towards Marilyn and what she gave out to the world.

The texts below are quotes and descriptions from the exhibition.

With Marilyn, the love affair was not posing for the camera. It was love for her audience – her public – who eventually would see the photo. She loved the public, her fans, more than any one human being.’
Sam Shaw

I now live in my work and in a few relationships with the few people I can really count on. Fame will go by, and, so long, I’ve had you fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle.
Marilyn Monroe

She was much more of a partner than I’d expected. The first hour or two I had an idea of what I was after. I had all kinds of imagery floating around, and she was picking up on it, performing it all!
Bert Stern

Fashion photographer Bert Stern (1929-2013) was commissioned to photograph Marilyn Monroe by Vogue: it was one of the star’s long-held ambitions to appear in the magazine. The session took place in across three days at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, where Stern made more than 2,500 images, aided by props such as sheer scarves and jewellery. Music and champagne contributed to the relaxed atmosphere of the sitting.

Reviewing the contact sheets and transparencies, Monroe crossed out several images that she disliked.

The urgency and expressiveness of her interventions rendered the rejected images particularly compelling.

Her apparently harsh critique was the the subject of considerable fascination when they were published after her death, and in the decades since.

Vogue did not consider the nude images suitable for publication, and commissioned a second session focussing on high fashion, which were published in the magazine a month after Monroe’s death, accompanied by a moving tribute from the author Joan Didion.

Life magazine, 3 August 1962 Interview with Marilyn Monroe by Richard Meryman, photographs by Allan Grant Since its publication this article has taken on a particular resonance as Monroe’s final interview, published just days before the news of her death emerged.

Monroe was used to media exploitation, and she urged Meryman to ensure that her words would be taken seriously:

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship…We are all brothers. Please don’t make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe!
Marilyn Monroe

‘She romps, she squeals with delight, she leaps on to the sofa. She puts a flower stem in her mouth, puffing on a daisy as though it were a cigarette. It is an artless, impromptu, high-spirited infectiously gay performance. It will probably end in tears’
Cecil Beaton

George Barris’s joyful photographs of Monroe on Santa Monica beach, taken just days before she died, were initially published in the UK – first in the Daily Mirror and later in Town magazine. In his article, the journalist, David Robinson wrote: When she died, everybody tried to explain her, which would have interested her a lot, because she was all her life trying… to explain herself.’
Terence Pepper Collection

Just The Right Number Of Cooks

‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’, the saying goes. Maybe these cooks are not too many, though, because they are at cooking school. Not that I knew that then when I photographed them.

I was heading for ‘The Classic Camera’ shop, which is in a courtyard very close to The British Museum. It specialises in Leica cameras and although I am not in the market for a Leica, I am kind of interested in the little D-Lux 8 mini Leica.

The Classic Camera’ a nice shop to in which to browse. And the man in the shop was interested in talking about the transition from film to digital.

As soon as I came into the courtyard off the street heading to the shop, I saw lots of white coats. I couldn’t see them clearly but it was enough for me to get my camera out and ready, because who knows.

And when I saw they were all cooks, well I was surprised.

And here is a lesson for you dear reader. First, I had my Ricoh GRIII with me. It has a fixed 28mm lens, which is good for getting in on the action and making the viewer feel they are in the scene. But it also means getting close, and I was somewhat nervous because I thought maybe the assembled cooks might take offence.

At that time I didn’t know they were all at school leaning to be cooks. And I don’t know how much difference it would have made if I had known.

All I could think of what that I was not on a public street. And that is a big factor in the right of a person under UK law to photograph strangers.

Now, let’s say there had been a parade or a protest march on the street and I had been shooting constantly for the previous hour. Then I would have been hot to trot, freer and more intoxicated with the feeling of photographing. But this was not how it was and I was a bit hesitant.

So I took a couple of shots and then went into The Classic Camera. When I came out, the cooks were gone.

A waitress was picking glasses and asked her if she knew who they were. Oh yes, she said, they were at the cookery school in Le Cordon Bleu – where she worked and outside of which we were standing.