Yes, it’s the London Eye again. I travel into town by river, if I’m coming in from work, and want to get anywhere in the vaguely Soho area, and so I did on Tuesday night. This isn’t really very good at larger sizes, but it’ll do for on-line.

Louise Bourgeois’s Sculpture “Maman 1999”, outside the Tate Modern, with the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral below. (St Paul being the titular misogynist, of course.) This is another one of those shots that’s going to niggle at me, as however much I like parts of it, it’s still full of little imperfections, particularly in the bottom left and right corners.

As is almost always the case with by B&W work, I’ve left the merest hint of a colour wash in – a very slight red tint, this time around. I experimented with versions of this where the red was a much stronger element, but in the end, settled on this.

A retake, several years later. If you look back in my flickr archives (in fact, if you look in my “Most Interesting” photos), you’ll find a shot titled “An Otherwise Dull Day“, taken years ago when I was first getting interested in photography. I like the shot, but there were things about it that niggled at me, especially as the standard of my photography has improved. So when I was passing the spot where I took the original the other day, I thought I’d have a go more or less the same shot again, with the benefit of several years practice. I like this shot rather better – it’s better composed, and much better post-processed. Let me know what you think?

Possibly the nerdiest photo I will ever post – at my players urging, I took a photo of the final do-or-die dice roll of our long running Mage RPG. The roll was a success, the world was saved, and here it is, captured for posterity.

I actually quite like this as a photo – post-processing it for colour was a bit of a bastard, as the yellow backdrop was made even yellower by the tone of the light in my living room, and anything that toned that down often did weird things to the colour of the dice, but I like the backdrop and the effect I eventually decided on.

Belfast has a large wheel set up for the next little while, and it looks terribly festive. I took a ride on it with my brother and cousin on Boxing Day. I’m not sure if I like any of the views I got from it enough to post them, but I do like this shot of the thing itself.

I saw these all-wax candelabras in a Chelsea shop window, and thought they looked like 3D rendered objects somehow given physical existence, and the post-processing on this shot is my attempt to bring that out, while leaving just enough detail in to make it clear that they are, in fact, real.

Snapped at my company Xmas party. This one’s a bit of an unusual crop for me, but I only saw the photo op (including the most obvious bit of the post processing – this is one of those shots that I knew *exactly* what I wanted to do to it before I took it) as we were leaving, so snapped it very quickly, resolving to fix the composition a bit in Lightroom.

To me, the obscuring pillar on the right is an integral part of the shot, but I’m curious to know if it works for you.

I’m not actually sure if these lights are just up for Christmas, or a permanent part of the fixtures at Tooting’s most recently revamped nightspot. But I only spotted them the other day, so I figure they count as festive at the moment.

(OK, the term “nightspot” is generous. “Grim drinking hole” might be more accurate. I don’t drink there, anyway. I just thought a picture of the lights might look pretty.)

Suddenly realised I never got around to blogging some of the other half-decent shots I got and White Mischief: From The Earth To The Moon, so you might get a few more in the near future. This one is a shot of the Pianist from the 1927 Cabaret.

“I dreamt we were standing,
by the banks of the Thames.
The cold grey water rippled,
in the misty morning light.
Held a match to your cigarette,
watched the smoke curl in the mist.
Your eyes, blue as the ocean between us
smiled at me” – The Pogues, “Misty Morning, Albert Bridge”

I don’t cross the Albert Bridge going to work, but I was thinking of that song when I took this photo in the fog the other morning on my way in. Obviously, I’ve doctored it, to make it look and faded, to lend it its own air of nostalgia.