Yesterday I woke up early to partake in my favorite London activity: queuing for day seats. A friend and I saw Harold Pinter’s “Old Friends.” I wanted to see it because it got rave reviews, plus it stars Kristin Scott Thomas, and I’m a sucker for seeing celebrities up close and making awkward front row eye contact during the curtain call. Thomas and the rest of the cast were brilliant, but when the show was over my friend and I looked at each other with the same “OK, who’s going to say it first?” face. “I didn’t get it,” she said. I didn’t either. This shouldn’t have surprised me considering under its review “Time Out London” ran a section titled “WTF is going on in ‘Old Times?'” Yet after reading the various theories, part of me wants to see the show again. Maybe when it’s warmer.
After I got my tickets I had the usual day seat conundrum: Do I waste the time and money to go home only to come back in a couple hours, or do I wander around London until lunchtime? This time I decided to bring my new camera and wander around London, especially since I was meeting my friend for lunch before the show. I formulated this plan from the warm comforts of my flat. After I stood in the cold for an hour queuing, walking around for three hours in the cold didn’t seem like the brightest idea. But I had my camera with me and I wanted to get more practice with it — and I wanted to see the pelicans. So despite it being in the opposite direction of the theatre and restaurant, I meandered down to St. James’s Park in the hopes of witnessing this:
If my post title didn’t spoil it for you already, I did not get to witness a pelican trying to eat a pigeon, but I did get some photos of other birds.
Here is the obligatory pigeon on a sign photo:
Trying to be artsy:
I don’t know what this funny black bird is called (should have read the sign above, perhaps?) but they were everywhere and they have weird feet.
Birds going crazy over some bread and I experiment with shutter speed:
This girl was happily feeding the geese until this seagull wanted in on the action:
I wandered through the park trying to find the pelicans, until I noticed a crowd.
Pelicans! They were just standing around like they’re used to people surrounding them with cameras.
All my pelican photos started looking the same, so I moved back to the geese and a black swan sneaking up on them:
OK, one more pelican pic:
And the funny-looking black bird again:
Classic London scene as I left the park:
So apparently the Horse Guards Parade actually does involve parading through the streets occasionally? Caught this procession as I left:
I like the juxtaposition between the old fashioned horses and taxi speeding by.
In fact, I liked the speeding taxi effect so much I tried to replicate it. I had watched a Youtube tutorial about making the car focused and the background blurry and vice versa, but it was a lot harder to achieve in practice. I stood there on the street corner constantly photographing cars driving by and adjusting my camera settings. Since I still don’t know my camera very well, most of the photos turned out horrible and overexposed. This is the only picture that turned out kind of neat:
As I was working my way towards the restaurant, I passed Chinatown, which still has its Chinese New Year decorations up:
…And that’s all the photos I took. Apparently I have a thing for testing my camera out on birds — they’re easy to find in London and more interesting than the same tired shots of Big Ben.