Today we return to one of my favourite London Street Photography Meetup themes - Man vs. Architecture and this time, in and around King's Cross. I'm immediately so much more in my comfort mode, especially after being rather overwhelmed at Portobello Road Market last week.
I love this theme because the man element is a silhouette, a shadow and figure to give context and scale to the architecture. It seems so less "street" and confrontational than other street photography, and I can look for the leading lines, popping colours, negative space and shapes that I am drawn to.
To mix it up, we firstly had the extra dimension of shooting up from below, or down onto the below, from above. There's a mezzanine level at King's Cross which lends itself perfectly to this challenge, and a few of our group opted to descend the escalator and take up residence there. Including Darren, who continued with his great tradition of inciting security guards by taking photographs somewhere they feel he shouldn't, and then being thrown out of the place. He can add King's Cross to his long list now!
Secondly we were to frame our subjects in some form, possibly architecturally. I opted to frame my 'men' in the shark tooth edges of the enormous, sometimes blue, tree-like canopy of the station roof, stripes of light in the underground tunnel or within a bubble.
I'd been unaware of the tunnel before (I've since learnt it was open two years ago) and even though it causes my Q's EVF to strobe in an extraordinarily freaky way, I just couldn't get enough of giant ever-changing multicoloured barcode.
As we strode down towards Granary Square I thought I'd explore the viewing platform that I'd seen, but never climbed up. This seemed the perfect occasion, this is Man vs Architecture so you'd think it would add another dimension to that theme. However, I'm entirely perplexed as to its purpose. It's not very high, the buildings around are much taller and the fountains and general frivolity of Granary Square are too far away. I had to Google its raison d'être afterwards and I believe it's so we can peer into the large construction site below, I guess it's trying to best the perspex viewing windows set at various heights into some other sites. But I really don't get it. I recall we looked at it with interest when we attempted (and pretty much failed) to view the Lumiere festival activities around King's Cross, perhaps that little bit of extra height would have helped us. But the fafillions of people who turned up for that event was ill have most definitely precluded entry to this recommissioned storage container.
And, on top of everything else, I noticed randomly there seemed to be rather a lot of sausage dogs out and about, I couldn't resist one's startled expression!
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