example22 | Ignore Me While I Talk About the Weather

All day, it's been pouring with rain, reducing the view to fuzzy shapes and grey outlines. Suddenly, at sunset, the rain stopped, the view returned and there was the weirdest lighting effect. Every single building somehow ultra-real, in pin-sharp focus. Overhead, heavy unbroken slate-grey clouds. On the horizon, a long line of puffy, billowing clouds, starting out small on the right in Westminster, growing bigger towards the left as they moved behind St Paul's, and all of them lit sodium-lamp yellow by the setting sun (out of sight, over my right shoulder). It looked, I swear to god, exactly as though Parliament was on fire. And, for the finishing touch, there was even a vertical chunk of rainbow rising out of the Barbican on the left.

I don't know why I'm telling you this. Probably because I felt I should record it somehow, but failed miserably to get it on film (auto-exposure and auto-white-balance are not good for this sort of thing, and there's only so much horizon will fit in the frame).

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I'm really glad you saw it too. He looked out of the upstairs window to see why the outside light was suddenly sodium yellow, and screamed to me to get Small outside to see the rainbow. We couldn't see the horizon, but did get a good 300 degrees of rainbow going down into the alley and then got a faint but unmissable double rainbow backing it up. Then the lower clouds came over and we had to explain to Small why the rainbows had gone away, but the light was still spectacular, I can't really imagine what it must have been like from your balcony.
I tried photos, but even if the rainbows come out ok, the lighting ambience was uncatchable.

My pictures were interesting (although Turner would really have been required for a decent stab) but I've lost my Flickr details. I'll post them when I get round to sorting out a new account.

You're on my friend's list at Flickr as "Stockwell Penguins". Hopefully that will be enough to get a password reminder out of the system.

Ooh, apostrophe crime. That'll teach me not to try and type with a baby on my lap. She can reach the laptop touchpad now.

Thanks, that inspired me to get my act together and find that actually I only needed my e-mail address to change the password anyway.

Ignore Me While I Talk About the Weather

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Flickr

Re: Flickr

Re: Flickr

Right, if this doesn't work I giveup