I had a friend visiting this past week from the Homeland (Lethbridge in this case) so it was a busy 6 days of pretending to be a tour guide or tourist depending on my level of familarity with the given outing.  We covered museums, a musical, a bus tour & boat ride, lots of walking and a healthy sampling of London pubs in our time together.  Not to mention the excurisions she handled on her own.  Friday was her last full day here so I took the day off and we wandered through Regent’s Park to the London Zoo.

I had my camera handy for the latter, there’s a few shots here and the rest in the gallery.

Got together with Neal, Mitesh and Neal’s friend Shaz this past weekend for a few shots of the city.  I was hoping for a longer day so that I could put the strobes & light stands I was hauling around (my poor back) to use, but that will have to wait for another time I guess.

Anyways, here’s a couple of shots I rather liked plus a few more in the gallery.

I pieced together a couple of Panoramic images from the snow day yesterday.  They’re all of the Tower of London, one from the afternoon and two from the evening.

They’re fairly large images, just so you know!

All of those Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” adaptations I watched growing up as a child led me to believe that every year the city of London was covered in a fresh blanket of snow.  I can tell you that generally that’s a terrible, terrible lie.

However, starting late Sunday night the snow started to fall and it kept on falling well into Monday.  At first it was just enough snow to make it stick to the ground, then it started piling up.  Pretty soon, it was the “worst snowstorm in 18 years“.

As a Canadian, it was pretty funny to watch the city grind to a halt after the first few inches of snow formed on the ground.  All bus services suspended, the same for overland trains and most of the Underground was disabled as well.  The city was eerily quiet, not just from the lack of people but also the dampening effect of all this white stuff.

To be fair to the English, they just haven’t got the infrastructure in place to deal with this sort of snow fall.  I saw one sand/salt truck out on my walk into the office and many different implements used for shoveling snow from brooms and dustpans to sheets of wood and anything flat and sturdy enough to scoop it away.

Work was more or less cancelled but I decided to walk into the office anyways and take a few photos along the way.  It felt a bit like being back home, only not quite so cold.  It was a really cool day, and I had a pretty happy grin on my face for most of it.  That being said, I’m pretty happy that it’s all melting under the bright, sunny sky today.

I don’t think anybody should have to suffer more than a day or two of winter after all.

Photos from the rest of my journey into the office are here.

I spent my Sunday afternoon wandering around the Covent Garden area with Mitesh, Neal and Tyla taking a few photos. I don’t think it was a particularily inspired day, but there were a few good shots to be had.

We ran into some tripod police at Sommerset House, but he was actually really nice and let me take a couple of shots before moving us along. Then while taking some shots of the ice skaters we were approached by another security guard and requested to fill out some waivers stating we wouldn’t sell any of the photos we’d taken there. Not that we could without several dozen model releases from the people there, but we signed anyways to keep them happy (and the girl was a Canon shooter herself, so we chatted for a bit).

The most important lesson I learned from the day was that I can NEVER move back to Canada. It was hovering around 0°C and I was freezing! Toque, gloves and warm socks couldn’t keep my extremities from going numb so I can’t see how I could ever cope with the regular -20 weather of home.

Anyways, a couple of photos from the day and the rest are in the gallery.