WAIT! ‘They’ moved the George Square webcam

Funny thing, when I suffered a recent (very) nasty sore throat, one of the things I DIDN’T do was spend ages online – and now realise I got out of the habit of looking at regular haunts.

George Square’s webcam is a handy weather check for me, being close enough to show impending change, but far enough to not just show what’s happening where I am.

With the return to some substantial rain this morning, it was time for one of those checks – surprisingly, the square was completely deserted, but then again, it did just look as if it had drowned in a sudden downpour.

But, it looked ‘wrong’.

A quick dash into the archives showed I was right, and it seems they (whoever ‘they’ are) had pulled back the zoom, and widened the lens to catch more of the view.

I think it might be an improvement, and catch more of anything that might happen there.

Another surprise – Falling in Love mural Candleriggs

Either I made a very bad search, or nobody is ‘Looking Up’.

I only found one mention of this intriguing mural I happened to spot in Candleriggs recently, when I… looked up.

According to that one mention I found, it is titled Falling in Love.

It doesn’t appear in any online views taken in 2020, but the one pic I did find was dated 2021, so it’s fairly recent.

This view puts it in better context.

Those colours may be familiar

I was intrigued to note the colours used in this piece, as they reminded me of the colours used in another mural I came across recently.

I couldn’t find a name on that one, but if the distance between the signature and the subject on the above is anything to go by, I wasn’t looking far enough!

Check out this post to see what I’m thinking about, Still Christmas graffiti to be found out there – this time near Victoria Park

Hmm… I suppose I should have referred to that as a mural, rather than graffiti, given my recent (negative) observation of the masses of ‘word’ graffiti vandalism I’ve noted appearing recently. I thought this was mostly south of the city, but am now finding it much closer to home.

I hope the damage these morons are causing to property does not adversely affect the popularity of the art trail murals we’re seeing now. The public can be fickle, and not appreciate the difference.

Glasgow, Argyle Street, 01 March 2023

I’m not a great one for ‘people’ pics, but the chance to grab this view of Glasgow’s Argyle Street when the bus stopped seemed appropriate.

I wish I’d been around to take more like this in the past few years, to compare the crowds, or lack, perhaps.

Afraid there’s not much zooming quality in my online pics, I just don’t have the space for big detailed zoomable pics.

One detail that isn’t obvious in the pic taken at this angle – the decorative railings at the front don’t look damaged, but are fairly well wrecked, after some moron didn’t bother stopping at the traffic lights we’re stopped at.

Shady’s back

I was almost getting worried about ‘Shady’ (nay, not really – see A little bit of Glasgow in China for background), who seemed to have disappeared recently, while his traditional counterpart was still in place, telling fortunes as usual.

He could have come to grief during the rain and flooding of the past few weeks, if his hat had come off and been washed away!

No worries, as he just turned up in a video shot last night, complete with hat, and faithful followers.

🙂

A little bit of Glasgow in China

After my recent post A little bit of Korea or China in Glasgow, I had to go with the matching location swap after overhearing a conversation on the bus.

There’s quite a few second-hand shops in Dumbarton Road, with some specialising in items like furniture and white goods.

I wouldn’t dare to suggest they were inebriated, but the two characters sitting behind me were not holding back in their descriptive comments, bases on their many years of local experience, of people and things seen along the road. At one stop, just outside one such shop, a couple of characters were propping up the door, one wearing the sort of suit that gives suits a bad name, and the other wearing a Trilby, maybe one size too small – I wouldn’t have trusted either as far as I could have thrown them.

The pair behind me were of the same opinion, and their assessment of the pair isn’t even repeatable – the most polite being “There’s a shady pair of b*st*rds, you wouldn’t want to have ANY dealing with those c*nts, just look at the one in the hat, shady as f*ck”, (add Glasgow accent for effect).

Seems they’d lost four customers just based on their looks alone 🙂

It reminded of a Chinese fortune-teller I’ve seen fairly often in recent weeks, together with a much more traditional one nearby (the long white beard type, wearing traditional Chinese garb), both popular as many Chinese people still like to consult them.

I don’t know about people from Changsha, but I’m pretty sure there wouldn’t be many people from Glasgow beating a path to his door while he was wearing that hat.

What’s wrong with this pic?

I’ve been meaning to take this pic for some years but, somehow, always forget all about it whenever I’m nearby.

Not this time – and it was as awkward as expected. The building is just too wide to catch with a wide angle lens setting, so it had to be a set of pics, to be stitched together later. This is fine, I’m getting better at avoiding the many mistakes this allows for.

However, I found an odd problem with this pic, and couldn’t work out what was going wrong EVERY time I stitched the images together.

I spent WAY too much time trying to find out why the upper left quadrant came out distorted, and there didn’t seem to any sort of mistake on my part when I took the source images.

I’ll tack the answer to this at the foot of the post, so you can stare at the final image for a moment, and see if the horribly obvious answer is… obvious.

I wanted an oblique view to go along with the façade, mainly because I wanted to refer to the space behind the flats in another forum, to be more accurate I wanted to refer to the space behind the flats which occupied the ground BEFORE the ones pictured here, which were only completed in 2019.

The previous block of flats was seen to be deserted in 2009, when the building was sealed by metal shuttering applied to the doors and windows, and the next sighting I have is 2012, after the building had been razed and the site cleared. I don’t have info for any events between those years, such as the final demolition.

I really will have to digitize my pics on film one day – I know I have pics of those earlier flats.

I had to go back for my oblique view much later, as something was blocking it, and it had started to get dark, as witnessed by the street lights, but the shot was fine.

Did you spot it, the mistake I DIDN’T make?

Hopefully, you noticed the way the left-hand corner of the roofline kick up as it moves to the left, and slopes up from the otherwise horizontal line of this building’s roofline.

I’m used to stitched images developing errors like this on rooflines, where the image being stitched is always distorted at the edges, where lines slope up and down as they run from the centre to the edge. It’s a normal effect of standing at the centre of a building, and pointing the camera at one side or the other.

The software usually corrects this invisibly without any action needed, so isn’t normally seen.

Suffice to say I saw the rising edge, thought it was some sort of processing error, and spent some time trying to find the cause.

I never did find it.

On this building, the damned roofline slopes upwards, as a design feature, as the roofline goes from right to left!

Architect 1 – Apollo 0.

Odd MOJO down Saltmarket – then London Road

This is one of those odd pics I took, but which ended up endlessly dropping to the bottom of my ‘Things to do’ pile for some reason.

In this case, the pic dates from late 2015, which I think is roughly when the sign appeared on the formerly unoccupied premises.

The reason it got shuffled until it got forgotten was simply that I never saw the shutters raised, and there didn’t seem to be anything definitive online (or at least I did a very poor job of finding, if there was).

If nothing else, I like to know what I’m posting pics of, especially if it might be controversial (for good or bad reasons) as I like to decide if I want to be targetted by loonies, and not be surprised by posting something I don’t know the real meaning of.

I forgot about it, and since I never seemed to pass along Saltmarket when the shutters were raised, I REALLY forgot about it.

Miscarriages of Justice Organisation

Fast-forward about six years, and there was more strangeness.

I look at completely random pics online, ‘random’ in the sense that I don’t send a pic search engine after anything specific, but merely suggest the subjects should favour something like Scotland, or Glasgow. It’s not something that’s accurate, but it has the advantage of throwing up tenuously related pics that you would probably never find by looking for with an accurate search.

In this case, my eye spotted a pic supposedly related to Glasgow, showing a window with the organisation’s name, and what looked like a church or similar building down a side street in the background – although the thought was wrong, it looked similar to the front GoMA (Gallery of Modern Art), but it wasn’t. Given the angle, and point the pic was taken from, such a view would have been impossible, as Queen Street (GoMA’s location) has NO side-streets.

I quickly located the source of the image, the organisation’s current website – but for some reason, they did not include their address. I had to find that from other sources online.

Luckily for me, there aren’t many locations in Glasgow with a building having substantial columns in the background (and a wedding gown shop), and I identified St Andrews Square.

So, I had to head out and get a new pic, and prove to myself I’d found the right place.

Unfortunately, it was a gloomy and dull evening, and the pic is terrible, but it did the job.

Miscarriages of Justice Organisation

I should have looked wider, and caught the columns of St Andrews down James Morrison Street on the left, but it was so grey, dull, and gloomy, that I had to shoot wide, or the camera just protested at having nothing to focus on, Plus, the wide aperture would have thrown all the background stuff out of focus anyway.

Looks like another one for the list of places to go back to, for a pic on a nice, bright, sunny day.

Wonder what their reaction would be if Donald Trump and his entourage turned up on their doorstep one day?

After all, they’re the most wronged people in the whole universe, ever – aren’t they?

And Donald Trump does claim he has a Scottish parent.

Another clothes shop follows Glasgow’s lead

Seems the earlier idea has caught on, and canny clothes sellers are seeing the wisdom in catering for a large section of the population.

Introduces window displays for drunks.

Shop Windows for Drunks

Surely lots of sales to be had in this market segment, if not for all the trousers with no knees from all that crawling around, then those worn out by constant washing (at least by those who bother) thanks to lack of bladder control – not the wearer’s fault nowadays, with council’s closing nearly all public conveniences to save money.

Glasgow, Montana – Even has Glasgow International Airport (NOT an April Fool’s either)

Not even an April 1st effort to foll you.

I had to look twice as I followed a route description being given on a map.

Reason being I saw not only Glasgow as the moving finger moved – I saw Glasgow International Airport too.

Normally, this wouldn’t even be worth mentioning, but things were a little different to normal.

The map in use was for Montana – and that’s definitely NOT in Scotland.

Have a look – afraid it’s not too detailed (you can go find a proper map if you care) since this is grabbed from the video it was spotted in.

Glasgow Montana

While I was perfectly aware that there were more Glasgows around the world, this is the first one I’ve come up against.

And I was genuinely confused for a moment, given that it has an adjacent airport, also name Glasgow International Airport, just like the real one 😉

People’s Palace Glasgow panorama -Take two

I stitched up a panorama taken from the top of the People’s Palace a few years ago.

People’s Palace Glasgow Panorama

It was good enough, but I can never remember to kill the autoexposure on such shoots, and it can show.

Although the stitching software I was using back then often fixed this, if I made a really bad job, then it couldn’t cope – it may have been able to merge the edges of the individual images, but it couldn’t fix the most extreme exposure variations across the field of view.

I was curious to see if some alternative software I’d acquired over the years was any better (or worse) at coping with my mistakes, so dug out the original set of images.

I think the second version came out better.

As a bonus, I got to include more of the vertical aspect due to the way this software stitches the individual sections together, and has the added bonus of being able to automatically fill in the black gaps left where there was no image recorded.

Peoples Palace Panorama Ver 2

I’d probably still say I was disappointed with the high flats on the left.

Unlike the area on the left, which has improved contrast and definition, the flats remain fairly grey and bland.

There is more detail there, but to get it out I’d have to resort to more time-consuming masking, and this stuff is just for fun. I spent less time on the second pano than I did on the first.

Unlike the fellow who claims he just spent 16 hours removing all the advertising in Times Square (I applaud the idea, but not the time spent not being paid, even if the result looks great), I really don’t like to spend more than 5-10 minutes on processing an image, unless it’s something special.

FYI – while the above images have been compressed (to save my web space), and are about 4,000 pixels wide (and a little grotty if you try to zoom too far), the originals are over 26,000 pixels wide – I have to confess what I see is considerably better than gets shared in the blog.

Surprise ghost sign find in night wander in Glasgow

In one of those intriguing ‘chance finds’ that arrive as something of a surprise, I found a ghost sign in Mitchell Street.

It’s usual to walk along the eastern side of this street thanks to the collection of well-known murals which can be seen along its western side.

For some reason, I crossed over and walked along that western side. I think I saw some paint peeling off the wall on the eastern side (as I turned off Argyle Street), and cross over for a better look – but there was nothing to be seen.

Although it was fairly dark (this was evening), as I walked northwards, I noticed what looked like some old signwriting.

It was, and I was able to take some pics and add another couple of ghost signs to my collection.

Bear in mind that these are actually night shots, and were taken with the benefit of ‘new’, white LED street lighting.

The first is the company’s name only, and a little harder to see.

Wylie and Lochhead Ghost Sign only

The Wylie & Lochhead (cabinet makers and upholsterers) sign is just too wide to catch with a wide angle lens (due to being in a narrow street), but it can be made by stitching two shots, then correcting for perspective.

Wylie and Lochhead Ghost Sign

I usually preach ‘Look Up’, to spot items not normally seen, but this provides a further lesson to just ‘Look Elsewhere’, as habitual routes along streets might mean missing interesting features in areas simply not seen as a result of following the same steps every time.