It’s a little bit late, but I’ve been quite busy and haven’t had time to post this (as simple as it is to do). In the past few days I’ve been photographing sports and treasure hunts, hosting a barbeque and generally getting some rest before I start work.

Anyway, these lovely people pictured here in the UCL main quad on Gower Street are supporting the Hope Not Hate campaign, fighting to prevent a certain political party to gain representation in the European Parliament. Although nationally 2 members of said party were elected, the great work of campaigners like these stopped any being elected for the London region.

It may well be full of tourists – the really annoying, large groups that manage somehow always to get in the way as you’re moving about, the kind that give all other tourists a bad name – but I do have a penchant for Covent Garden. Not for any of the shops, mind, or indeed the transport museum (haven’t been to one of those since holidays with my grandparents as a child), but for the street performers.

Not the ones that line up by the tube station who seem, by and large, to be the same bunch of stand really still and then scare little children performers who also colonise South Bank, but the ones that actually perform little circus tricks outside the west end of the market, or inside at the other end, are those that really interest me. (We’ll conveniently ignore the classical music performance area downstairs!)

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Going to university in central London, and it being both exam season and Spring, it’s only natural I should make use of the fantastic green spaces London has to offer. Off the top of my head, I can think of the major parks – Regent’s, Hyde, St. James, Kensington Gardens (part of Hyde Park, ok, fine!) – as well as the myriad squares in Bloomsbury, places a bit further afield like Clapham Common and that random bit near the London Eye.

Inside these spaces is a plentiful array of wildlife, and taking my camera along to a revision session in Regents Park the other day, I came across this little chap nibbling away next to the Broadwalk. Like most animals living among London’s 7 million human residents, he was pretty tame and didn’t mind me too much as I walked slowly around him to get a better shot. I ended up crouched about 1.5m away from him, leaning against a tree as he munched away on sycamore seeds.

It’s possibly a bit of an error to take my camera with me to what’s meant to be a revision session – but that didn’t quite matter on this one, as it ended up being a bit too windy to sit in the park too long…! I’ve got 3 exams left and then just over a month to do as I please before I start work – which will, of course, mean going out to fill my new 1TB hard drive full of photos

I took time out this evening from revision to pop along to Talking Politics with Eddie Izzard, where the infamous comedian talked for a short while about his own interest in politics – culminating in restating his intention to run for some political office, at least, in the next 10-15 years. Needless to say, the audience was behind him on this.

But the evening wasn’t about Eddie Izzard, for he was there to ask a few gentle questions of MPs Tessa Jowell and Ed Balls, both well-known Labour ministers. There was some talk about whether holding a costly Olympic Games amidst the recession is a good thing – resoundingly yes, Jowell said, when the Olympic site will have employed some 11,000 workers, and created hundreds of new apprenticeships – and also, at the very end, talk about twitter. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of year again, when the UCL Fashion Society, or Modo as it’s more commonly known, holds its annual fashion show. They’re they only student fashion society in the country (apart from Central St Martin’s, which has a fashion course – UCL doesn’t!) that holds a show entirely composed of students. All the designers are students. All the models are students. The stage is built and lit by students. It is also, of course, photographed by students. (Albeit one of whom could afford to have two D40s around his neck!)

The theme of this year’s show was ‘Elements’, although some designers took this more seriously than others. One designer even had one of the models sewing his collection together on the first night – but that’s not to say that the whole show didn’t look pretty awesome for a bunch of lazy students being in charge. It was quite telling that the timelapse I shot of the stage being constructed involved a lot of inaction… Read the rest of this entry »

I just happened (honest…) to be in Whitehall this evening, and caught a protest opposite Downing Street against the proposed building of a third runway at London Heathrow airport – check the gallery at the bottom of this post.

Two MPs (Labour’s John McDonnell, and the Lib Dem Susan Kramer) and one MEP (Jean Lambert, the Green Party MEP for London) attended and spoke to the sizeable crowd; a counter-protest was scheduled for the same time down in Parliament Square, but by all accounts it had only about 35 people compared to (at my random estimate) around 150 in Whitehall, so I didn’t bother going down. The crowd on Whitehall provided more than enough interest to shoot for a full two hours, although I’ve only selected about one in ten shots to be shown here.

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Another Portland Rise post, I know – but we have a great relationship that I’m sure is going to live on for some time yet, so don’t be surprised if there are yet more to come over the years!

The band played a really great set at 229 the other day, a video of which is floating around somewhere on Facebook only at the moment – when they get it up onto their MySpace I’ll let you know.

Anyway, here’s a quick selection of shots from the gig – enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »

I figured this one needed a post of its own, since it’s such a great sequence of photos.

My housemate Jem (who is also in the band Portland Rise) decided he’d try bicycle-kicking a snowball. Needless to say some of his other attempts were not so successful – check out this one of him on his bum, for instance.

Ideally I would have straightened these all out, made sure the crop and exposure was identical and then thrown them together, but I was tired last night and have lots to do today, so I’m afraid you’ll have to make do! Needless to say, I could if I wanted…

Looks like yesterday was it on the snow front – no fresh snow overnight and quite bright sunlight today leading to a lot of melting, which is a shame. It was fun while it lasted.

(This is one of the little side projects I mentioned in the panorama post, if you’re wondering. First time I’ve thrown a sequence like this together – will give it another go when I can to get the horizons matching up.)

It doesn’t happen very often, and certainly not this heavily. It’s still snowing as I type this, and the snow we disturbed earlier (most of it) has been replaced. There’s a good couple of inches on the ground.

It looked for a long time like it wouldn’t settle, but it soon started building up and we decided to venture out. At first we were timid (I certainly was about taking the camera out), but eventually we descended into snowball fights – unfortunately undocumented, as I quite wisely moved the camera back inside.

We fought one another, locking one housemate out the front while gathering snow from out back to throw at him from the windows. Then, a house a few doors down decided to come out – and we had a bit of a neighbourhood snowfight.

Update: It’s now Monday morning and there has been yet more snow. A good 3 inches. And there’s more filtering slowly down. You can’t see at all where we were messing about last night, the buses are all cancelled and even with the heating on the house is freezing. Have added two new pics, including one I quite like of icicles hanging from a lampost. Hope you enjoy them as much as I have been enjoying the snow! Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll be honest – I’ve known Portland Rise (warning: MySpace link) for a few years, back when they used to have another member and a different name, a different sound. However, I do like their stuff on a non-friend level too, with several of their tracks on my iPod.

It just so happens that they played a small gig the other day at a Battle of the Bands at UCL Union, and of course I popped along (still sans flash – need to pick up a new one very soon!) to take a few photos. They’re mostly of frontman George, with one shot that I liked of another band’s frontman too (apologies to him for knowing neither his name nor his band’s name!), but the larger pic above is of the entire threesome. Read the rest of this entry »