London Photos: London life in images by Kim Gilmour

The famous Cutty Sark tea clipper, now in Greenwich, UK.

This is a polaroid sx-70 manipulation, which is to say I used nothing more than a wooden skewer to smoosh around the emulsion of a polaroid shot. There is no Photoshop here and no digital effects.

This is Tower Bridge on the Thames. The Polaroid on the left is an SX-70 manipulation by me, the one on the right by Kim (easily the best of the two), both photos being taken within a minute of one another. The yellow dots are due to a defect in the old camera, but I kind of like it.

Crap camera phone pic for now – will go back to take better ones soon, but I couldn’t resist…


Guess who?

So, yes… Went to see The Weather Project at the Tate Modern today… it was very impressive! Enter the Turbine Hall and you’ll see a misty, smoky atmosphere with a huge sun in the distance. Look closer and the sun is, in fact, simply a back-lit semi circle reflected in slanted mirrors four stories high. Dozens of people were lying on the ground looking at themselves. We also went to lie down and gaze up at ourselves and everyone else. Smoke and mirrors indeed! Find out more at the official site.

PS: AG, RG is emailing you

An official photo of the Emap Awards evening held at the Grosvenor House Hotel last Friday night, hosted by Chris Eubank (yawn!). Around 70 magazines from the Emap stable were in attendance.

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1. Our last chance to see Blaine baiting
2. Check out the Tate Modern’s new installation at the Turbine Hall and take pics of the sun
3. Sleep

Headache-inducing tiles, perhaps, but the busiest tube station in London takes its symmetry seriously.

Get your lardy ice cream here! Who is Mrs Wilde? How long has she been making candy floss, and how long has the packaging had that scary clown on it? Does she ever leave her van?

Bonsoir! A short note to say bienvenue to all the hundreds of Belgian visitors that are coming to this site, but how did you come to find Fotos a Londres? We have not been able to see referrer logs from you, so I’m assuming this site was mentioned in an email newsletter. Thanks for letting us know!

The now closed-down Coffee Republic on Edgware Rd, London

We went to Walthamstow markets (postcode: E17) for the first time yesterday. An extended Leather Lane/Chapel Street (I work in Clerkenwell) for the senses, a Portobello Rd without the tourists (or the antiques), a mile of shopping without the fashion, and a “cacaphony” of activity. And what photo do I take? A brick building just above one of the market stalls for Polaroid purposes. I did take about half a dozen photos with my film camera, but there are still 30 left on the roll so it’ll be a while before those are seen.

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Well, although there was no Photoshop involved in the manipulation of this SX-70 Polaroid film, I did use it when scanning this image in of these Trafalgar Square smoochers! But apart from the scan and a slight sharpen, there are no special digital effects here. I used a keyring, a stick and a skewer to get these effects. The photo was taken at around 4.30pm today. No one was actually in the fountain – it’s getting a little too cold for that! I purposely left the sky as it was.