"...they had a moment's glimpse of an interior of glittering plate-glass and rich morocco, and the magnificent motorcar, immense, breath-snatching, passionate, with its pilot tense and hugging his wheel, possessed all earth and air for the fraction of a second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance, changed back into a droning bee once more."
--from
Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
Like Toad, when the motorcar zoomed past, it's easy to become entranced and overwhelmed by the motorized vehicles in London. Not only because they're caroming around a turn in a direction that seems counterintuitive to an American, at a dizzying speed to boot, but because their styles are different from the typical models in the US. Aston Martins, Mercedes, Bentley--all roaring past in an explosion of metal through an intersection.
I am learning to be mindful of these vehicles and their utter willingness to plow through a crosswalk, confident of their right of way. I look both ways, even when I can't hear any engines at all, especially when I'm trying to take pictures.
While shooting along Whitechapel and in Trafalgar Square, I discovered a new setting on my camera today--Multimotion. It captures an object (in my case, a vehicle) in motion and then splits the motion into its component parts. The effect can be quite startling!
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