Jermyn Street, London, 17th June 2006

Keeping with the same theme of clothing here’s another juxtaposed picture that doesn’t quite work, mostly because the three men in the background are on the other side of the road and therefore a bit too small and dark to be noticed easily. Central London has very few wide pavements and roads that allow more free flowing movement of pedestrians and more importantly for the photographer, nicely lit areas. This last point may partly account for the lack of decent reflection type pictures that you see in London, that and our lousy weather.

Oxford Street, London, 29th July 2006

I’m not one to normally get involved in political matters but recently in the news the French President Nicolas Sarkozy has spoken out against Muslim women wearing the burka in France, even calling on it to be banned in public. A case in this country was heard five years ago when a court upheld the ruling that  Muslim schoolgirl Shabina Begum be banned from wearing an Islamic gown to lessons, arguing that schools were allowed to enforce their own dress code. Just as Muslim women in Islamic countries are restricted in the way they dress, it’s likely that any laws or rules that stop someone from dressing how they like will only result in people protesting against it in some form.

I like the way the womans head in this shot has been framed by the blue backdrop in the window display but more interestingly is the fact that underneath her Islamic gown you can spot she is wearing that most western of clothing items, a pair of jeans.

New Bond Street, London, 17th June 2006

This is one of those pictures that I felt I only got half right. The man gazing lovingly at the mannequin in the shop window is a great moment but unfortunately the rest of the composition falls a little short in my opinion. The left side of the picture is an unholy mess with those two women and may have benefited from say a real couple looking lovingly into each others eyes. It may have been a kind of ‘match shot’ but it would have worked better than this.

Liverpool Street, City of London, 5th June 2006

This shot of a man reading the Standard Lite was taken just a few months before the launch of a rival free newspaper The London Paper in September. The launch of both these free papers has been heavily criticized for the amount of rubbish and waste paper they produce in a world that has become increasingly sensitive to environmental issues. In this busy London street a man stops in the middle of the pavement to read an article forcing other pedestrians, notably the man on the right to maneuver around him. I guess you could say the picture is a statement about how annoying those papers are in a not so obvious way.

Charing Cross Road, London, 17th June 2006

People reading maps in central London is something of a cliché but occasionally it’s possible to make something a bit more interesting from it. I like the fact that the boy holding the bottle has just spotted me, while his family make a lovely tree shape behind him as they pore over the map. I took the picture below in exactly the same spot years ago and didn’t really think it was particularly great but for some reason it’s quite popular on flickr, which just goes to show that maybe I’m not that good at spotting good pictures in my files.

Charing Cross Road, London, 1995