Limehouse Cut Walk

Saturday and another walk/shoot, once again in Tower Hamlets and as promised to myself last week, visiting the gnarlier waterside locations.

I picked up my good friend Ian on the way and together we strolled through Wapping investigating the odd cobbled alley and shadowy places in our hunt for views and new, interesting things to stimulate our short attention spans. The plan was to make our way to Limehouse Basin and then to follow the Limehouse Cut for a bit, looking for gritty scenes of dereliction, urban decay, vandalism etc etc. You get the picture? Well, I did. Sort of.

This is a deceptive picture. Despite the 'prettiness' of the scene, the canal boat is chugging along through a fairly industrial part of London, with several abandoned old buildings, construction sites and graffiti daubed walls.

The Limehouse Cut is a shortish length of canal that links up with the Lea Navigation (a "navigation" is a canal that runs alongside an un-navigable river) which goes all the way to Hertford in, umm, Hertfordshire. Its almost dead straight apart from a few turns near to Limehouse Basin. In the days when the canals were heavily used for cargo transport, Limehouse Basin was the narrowboat "port" in London - so densely packed with narrowboats that it was possible to cross the basin simply by leaping from boat to boat. It forms the entrance to the Regents Canal, part of the Grand Union Canal network that covers England. I digress.

Drowned Trollies. Look carefully, there's a whole fleet of them there! It seems these days that canals are considered to be reliable repositories for trollies and other valuable things - I once saw a Sony Viao laptop on the Regents Canal bed.

Where were we? Oh yes, walking along the canal into the less salubrious parts of the East End. I love it. Ian wasn't as enthusiastic, but I think he was still pretty interested. We came across a vast, long 70s style tenement block - only six stories tall but long, depressing stories. Many of the windows were boarded up with steel - it looks as though the dreadful place is about to meet the wrecking ball. What were its architects thinking? Were they over optimistic that their building would bring out the best in people? Because it didn't. Call the Design Police!

Homes for the terminally monochrome.

But I do confess, despite the building being ugly, moribund, and reeking of hopelessness, I was glad it was there. It was Canon fodder (see what I did there?) and I shot off a couple of frames knowing that there was almost no point in converting the images to monochrome because they seemed to have had their colour confiscated by the architects. Perhaps they thought poor people on housing benefits don't deserve colours? (There's evidence of a rebound against that sort of thinking in abundance: shitty 'affordable' housing tarted up with splashes of bright colour - "give them pretty colours to stimulate their dull minds").

Instant Kill. This vehicle was spotted by Ian. Thank you Sir! Click to enlarge.

After wandering back down the canal for a bit we cut through the streets of Poplar (?), through a couple of housing estates and back down to the river.

Thank God someone has done the decent thing and saved these old warehouses from demolition. They are actually swanky apartments, I think, but from the outside, they are gorgeous! The creek on which they lie is lovely too, the perfect place for me to moor my Dutch Barge.

I found a gate with stairs down to the 'beach' alongside the river and wasted some time badly exposing some old timber structures. I was trying to use fill in flash to good effect, but frankly underachieved in meeting my objective and then... nothing. No power. Clearly my camera battery is begging to be thrown into the Thames - just 46 exposures! Thank God that didn't happen on Friday's Chinese food shoot.

Chain and shackle. One of the things I love about Adobe Lightroom is that you can de-saturate images and then use "split toning" to colourise the highlights and shadows. This particular image was very green in full colour - the algae is a "chemical green colour" that looked false.

We stopped in at the Prospect of Whitby for a quick pint and then moved on to... Bugger! I cannot remember its name, for another beer.

All afternoon I'd been getting warning signals that my headaches where about to make an appearance and true to their word, they did. And when they strike, I know to GO HOME NOW!!! I won't go into the fun I had on the tube with my head. Suffice it to say, it was not the best journey ever.

Despite the headaches, another excellent afternoon. I'm seeing an image of myself doing similar tomorrow, possibly around Greenwich...Wanna come with?

See a selection of the pics here.

Railings, Pilings and Boy.

Copyright 2008 Paul Davey

I love Adobe Lightroom. It makes playing with images a breeze and if you mess up, the original is still there. I shot this last Sunday on my Wapping/Docklands walk. I was quite annoyed when the kid walked into shot - I don't like photographing random people, especially kids given the RIDICULOUS paranoia people have about anyone with a camera. Anyway, there were more people approaching, so I thought sod it, and banged off a couple of pics anyway. Composition-wise, I would like to have had the kid a little closer - the "rule of thirds"and all that, but I was hardly in a position to start directing my unwitting model. So I ask this: Is the picture improved by the kid being there, or is he a distraction? I cannot decide.

For those interested, I desaturated then used split toning - warm yellow for the highlights and blue for the shadows - just a tad, you understand...

A short walk...

To see a bigger selection of images click here.

Yesterday, being both sunny and Sunday, I elected to take my camera and myself for a walk around Wapping, an area of cobbled streets and old converted warehouses, riverside apartments and Thameside lovliness that I rather like.

I got there (well, to Tower Hill tube station) around two-ish and doing my best not to look like a tourist fought my way through the crowds past The Tower of London to St Katherine's Dock. I love that place; the absurdity of boats in the middle of a city still excites me - although not enough on this occasion to switch my camera on. Naturally, I went to have a look at the two magnificent Dutch barges moored there. I am obsessed by Dutch barges. I heart them big time and will one day have one to cruise the canal systems of Europe.

Carrying on, I wandered down Wapping High Street and started shooting the things that interest me; little passages leading to the river, the river itself, yellowing leaves against the crystalline blue sky juxtaposed with old Wapping warehouses...

Not the greatest pic, I grant you, but I love the colour of those leaves.

And now a short rant: There is a law, I believe, that any new development along the Thames MUST allow public access along the river. Why then, do various developments have the walkways but block access to the public. Its not bloody good enough and it must stop. Give us OUR river!!! No doubt they do this because there may have been in the past, incidents of petty vandalism. Well, I am going petty vandalise your bloody locked gates with an angle grinder!

Back to my walk: I carried on walking where posssible, alonside the river and shooting pics greedily. There was a bunch of sea kayakers paddling out with the tide, enjoying the waves and the wakes of the Thames Clippers.

Its hard to imagine a better way to spend an afternoon than paddling down the Thames on an outgoing tide. I miss my sea kayaks.

There were open RIBs full of tourists smashing across waves - plenty of into-the-sun shots and there was a flourescent green football that seemed to keep me company bobbing alongside. I took a quick shufti around Limehouse basin - pleasant but always in my mind, a bit of a wannabe compared to St Kath's. Knocked off a couple of shots of reflections (I'm building a reflections library) and then carried on down the river to docklands.

There is something special about Docklands on a Sunday. During the weekdays its exciting and busy, but so many people see it like that. On Sunday's it seems almost like its been let down by its people...its quiet and uncertail of itself - almost overdressed. But its great for photography.



I unfortunately was using my ancient Canon 50-200 F3.5-5.6 (with a 1.6 x magnification) lens which wasn't wide enough for a lot of shots, but I made do - and I'm almost glad I didn't have a wide lens because I got some good shots of reflected buildings on other buildings cropped tight. I underexposed quite a few of the pics deliberately, and I have to say, I'm tickled pinkish with the results...

Under exposed, yes, but I love it.. will have a further play with this in Lightroom

This old crane was a perfect subject for black and white - although I did actually use split toning to warm up the highlights just a tad. Click on it to see (if your monitor is good enough - its very subtle).

I carried on walking past a youth activity centre and, more importantly, past five Dutch (spits) barges rafted up on the other side of the harbour and eventually ended up next to the river again, opposite the millenium dome. It was 4.15 and I decided to walk round the Isle of Dogs along the river rather than cut back across Docklands. Again I had to contend with the blocked off walkways which if nothing else, considerably lengthened my journey. Lesson learned: Don't walk along the river. Buy a Dutch barge.

A lovely LuxeMotor Dutch barge. I find its almost impossible to get a decent side-on shot of these 30m plus boats - this was shot from across the river and its lines are somewhat interfered with by the ugly houseboat behind.

The afternoon light was slowly developing into something special and I was constantly checking behind me as well as in front and to the side to see how various landmarks were reacting to the light, and banging off a shot here and there. The tide had gone out a fair bit exposing the foreshore. I was tempted to walk along it, but am as yet not sure whether its nice hard pack the whole way or whether it suddely get soggy/muddy. But the light on the sand and pebbles was magic and I got a couple of decent shots in.

I should have been on the ground for this old rope... it was just dying to be properly photographed...

Brutal Monolith. Reduced the saturation and cranked the warm tones big time...

As I neared Wapping once again, the sun was setting and the moon was rising right behind Docklands... the light was PERFECT. It weas then that I discovered my CF card was full. No problem. I knew I had several shots that were throw-away quality so I threw them away... and then, with a lovely classic Camper & Nicholson yacht motoring upstream in the foreground, the moon rising behind the golden light-bathed docklands I raised my camera, composed my shot, pressed the shutter button and... nothing. Flat battery.

I thought these pilings would be great in mono, but the warm tones from the afternoon sun won in the end

There's nothing you can say to yourself when that happens. So I phoned my good friend Ian and went for a few pints which was, as always, truly excellent even though he had to endure me recounting my woes about batteries, shite lenses and the need for a new camera, a second new camera and, ahem, a third new camera (just a point and shoot pocket camera). And new lenses. And a Dutch Barge.

Eventually I tubed it home and this was when I discovered, very frustratingly, a useful little trick: If your camera battery is flat, remove it. Then put it back into the camera and power up. Hey Presto! It works! I was furious, especially as I now had enough power to review all my shots, including zooming in to check sharpness etc. I tested the auto focus (my 50-200 lens is getting my blame for guzzling power) and it worked fine. Such a waste.

A fine day all the same!