Skip to main content

Leeds canal, early in the morning

On a grim, bleak Tuesday morning I found myself, once again, in Leeds. Something that seems to happen on a daily basis. That's because I work there. Well, somebody has to!

Behind my office there is a canal, and every so often when I have a few spare minutes in a morning I like to walk that way rather than taking the short route through the rushing crowds of commuters. And on the way this morning, I took some photographs.

The wonderful thing about grim weather is that conditions are really, really stable. All of these pictures except the last one were taken with the exact same settings; f/4, 1/125th seconds, ISO 800. For the last one I knocked the shutter speed up to 1/200th, although it didn't make much difference.

The old, the new, the wet ... older canal-side buildings on the left, the railway crossing in the middle,
and in the background the new office buildings of Wellington Place, one of which is mine.
A handy barge for carrying scaffold. Behind it the locks are being renovated.
The railway crosses the canal. The labelled tracks above filter the trains onto the many
 and various platforms of Leeds train station. 
Under the bridge the puddles and dim lighting are eerie. Water is reflected on the top of the tunnel.
Under the bridge ferns and other plant life grows on the stone walls.
Electric lighting gives the whole place a rather peculiar glow.
Looking down the canal the railway curves off towards Wakefield.
Beyond the old stone walls, some greenery starts to make an appearance.
The river is rather swollen from the large quantities of rainfall of late.
The new blocks of flats beyond Wellington Place curve off into the distance. Peculiar looking
 buildings making a rather oppressive looking channel between the looking architecture.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fairy Lights

Street lights at night can be very pretty. For someone who lives close to the centre of a large city, skirting round the edge of the town centre can provide a host of beautiful views at night. One advantage to using a wide open lens when taking these pictures is the capture of bokeh, or creative blur. An extreme example is shown to your right; a mass of coloured circles that roughly represent the city they are part of. A more subtle example, of course, is in the picture of the day at the top of this post. The lights cluster around the top of the leaves like fireflies, obviously part of a cityscape but at the same time abstract. The extreme out of focus image is a blurred version of the picture on the left. A view over Sheffield from Pitsmoor, looking up Netherthorpe Road and up to the university. Even when the buildings are focussed (roughly; I'm still practicing) the lights take on the shape of the lens's aperture. I try to incorporate some foreground focus wh...
4 comments
Read more

In which I complain that coding standards are a waste of time

Just kidding. I'm not going to rail against coding standards. No, I'm going to rail against the absolute and dictatorial enforcement of coding style guidelines, to the point where a single misplaced curly bracket can fail the code review of a thousand line project before it's even started. I'm going to rail against the fact that many people these days don't actually know that coding style guidelines and coding standards are not the same thing. Coding style guidelines are not coding standards. Coding standards are rules on how to construct software. Rules that have practical and defined benefits. Rules than can be proven to assist in the structured and correct building of code. For example: Do not perform database access in the constructor. All database access should use the framework's DAL. Do not rely on complex instantiation instructions; provide a factory method. Do not inherit from a class in a different module or library; only encapsulate. Avoid sin...
2 comments
Read more

DeCSS on Ubuntu 9.10 and later

It used to be the case that enabling DVD playback on Ubuntu was a case of installing ubuntu-restricted-extras and that was that. Unfortunately DMCA nonsense in the US has buggered that up for all of us and so now there's an additional step. So, without further ado, here are the commands that need to be run at a command line: sudo apt-get install libdvdread4 sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh Voila! DVD playback a-la Ubuntu.
2 comments
Read more