We Moved!

We moved to London. And a day or two ago I went into town with no particular aim in mind. It was crowded with shoppers and raining. wanting somewhere to sit down, I went into the National Portrait Gallery to grab a coffee. This is a shot of the vestibule, with the entrance off to the left, out of shot.

Why take the shot?

I was kind of interested in the couple sitting on the far side, not so much for his beard and red shoes, but for their relationship. In fact, were they related? What little signs told me they were?

So I took the shot but with a wide 28mm full-frame-equivalent lens on a Ricoh GRIII, the couple are very small in the picture. They occupy about two percent of the area of the frame.

With the latest iterations of Photoshop, however, one can crop and then increase the size of the cropped area, and sharpen it and clean up any apparent noise – like this.

The London Underground

After the coffee I walked up to Covent Garden and decided to get the tube back home from there. The lifts were out of action, roped off with yellow tape, so I and hundreds of others had to walk down the 193 steps of the narrow emergency spiral stairs to the platform.

Passing us coming up the 193 steps of the narrow winding staircase were hundreds of people. One woman had come to a halt, standing by her suitcase.

A voice on the loudspeaker was telling us that the platform is 15 floors below ground. And something about parents with buggies and strollers who should do something, but I didn’t catch what it was.

Perhaps the lifts were working but only for those people. And if so, why not the woman with the suitcase?

You know how it is, there is a crush of people all doing as they are directed to do, and you just go with the flow and the scene passes in a blur.

I have taken the tube to and from Covent Garden many times, and occasionally wondered what taking the steps was like. You can see the start or end of the stone steps near the lifts, and they beckon gently saying ‘Try me.’

But now the lifts were out of action I was glad I had to walk down and didn’t have to walk up.

I took the Piccadilly Line to Green Park and changed to the line to take me home. At Green Park the staff of the London Underground had stopped people getting on the trains because there was such a crush of people.

On one side of the passage leading to the train was a queue seventy yards or more long, with people waiting patiently. Coming along the passage were more people joining all the time. I, however, was going the other way and it was clear.

Writing this I cannot help but think of how my sense of good fortune was tied to the situation others faced. I was going down, not up the stairs at Covent Garden, and I was going away from and not stuck in the queue of people at Green Park.