christmas tandem

This year's christmas lights in Oxford's High Street feature a few bicycles, very fitting for one of the UK's biggest bike hotspots, also including a tandem:



Wondering whether they picked up abandoned bikes from the street and painted them ...

Oh, and I have to admit I haven't written a single xmas card this year - if you were expecting one, I'm afraid this seasonal blog post is all you're going to get.

happy holidays!


PS (2011): the tandem is there again this year, and somebody else took a much better photo of it, which you can see on flickr

oxford night life

continuing my occasional "Oxford by Night" series, here's a view of Blackwell's bookshop, which is of course about a million times larger on the inside than it appears to be from the historic facade. Sign of the time, too, that the only writing one can read from the other side of the road says "buy one get one free".

oxford by night

Last week's long, clear winter nights were perfect for a bit of after-dark photography:



Bath Place, access to the Turf Tavern, popular watering hole, but practically impossible to find if you don't know where it is.



Hythe Bridge Street



Xmas lights in Cornmarket Street

oxford enlightenment

nights are drawing in, so I can continue my series of photographs of Oxford by night:




this one, in case it isn't obvious, is of a builder's scaffolding where someone forgot to switch off the light ...

More pix on my view profile, and a smaller selection appears in larger format on fotocommunity.

liege

On my recent trip to Germany, I stopped over in Liege, which isn't all that pretty, but gets a lot better after dark:



and it has a spectacular new railway station by Santiago Calatrava under construction:



which looks even more stunning from the inside, with whe white scaffold viewed against a blue sky. I've uploaded a few photos of that to VIEW and to my MySpace photo album.

kunst am bau

Some rather horrible buildings only reveal their inner beauty after dark, as for instance, the Oxford Zoology / Psychology building, which has this charming side entrance reminiscent of Mondrian's art:



I also admire the huge cube of unused space behind these windows ...

upstairs downstairs

As chemistry is all about energy levels, I thought this shot of the staircase of the new research lab provided a neat metaphor. And I like the look of it, too, even if I say so myself.



Further nightlife impressions are in my photoalbum on MySpace.

united colours of biochemistry

I still haven't managed to visit the artworks inside the new biochemistry building here, but as I was wondering how those coloured panels look by night, I went to have a look. Here's the L-enantiomer (from the Left):



... and here's the R version:



Couldn't quite make up my mind which to show, as colours are nicer for R and composition is better with L.

oxford by night

As I am now learning to use my new digital camera, and as I spend a lot of time walking around with my son during weekends, I hereby announce that there will be more photos on this blog from now on. Emerging themes are "Oxford by night" (about the first thing that struck me about digital photography is that it is so much easier to make decent photos by night, and I'm planning to make use of that), urban wildlife, abandoned shopping trolleys and bicycles, and the writing on the wall.

Watch this space, and be very afraid. As a warning, here is one of my Oxford by night photos:



Locals will recognise this as The Plain, coming off Magdalen Bridge.