Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

Iconic British Phone Booths in Marylebone May, 2017 With cellphones prevailing many of these lovely totems of once up a time in Britain, always a popular photo opp, have been revamped as cell phone hot spots and  wifi zones . Speaking of which, I shot this pair with my iPhone. There is even talk of transforming the red phone boxes into mini-offices! Long may they reign! Posted for British Isles Friday hosted by Joy Weese Moll.

 The Marble Arch   St. Martin's (where we saw The Mousetrap) Sir John Soane's Museum The weeks pass so quickly and are so full of strange happenings these days that Friday hits me in the face hard. How can it be British Isles Friday again? I feel as taken by surprise as if I looked up from my desk to find a whipped cream pie being thrown at my face.  Hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquake, terror attacks.  There’s so much going on, do you feel the same way I do?  Overwhelmed by it all? A vulgar, mean-spirited, loose cannon ‘running the country.’  That stupid saying ‘The world is going to hell in a hand basket’ feels absurdly true.   We had an earthquake here in Los Angeles. A jolt, like an elevator settling, a ‘nothing burger’ as some might say. That was followed by the truly horrible Mexico quake where we watched four story buildings collapse before our eyes, watched first responders try to dig out victims, rubble by rubble with their...

By the time you read this, you will have already seen some spectacular photographs of the eclipse. Good. Because you won’t find them here although this shot of the totality taken by my husband Mark is pretty awesome. It’s what we saw but not all of what we saw. All in all though, the research we did about taking photos of the eclipse on our iPhones proved to be right. Unless you got incredibly lucky, had some special skill sets and filters, knew how to adjust the ISO and other techie doodads, your pictures would be grainy, the sun small and unimpressive. In other words, nothing like the eclipse we would be seeing with our own eyes. Relax and watch the eclipse, most of the articles advised. After all, maxxing out at about two minutes, the totality itself wasn’t going to last that long. And while there’s another eclipse coming to the eastern states in 2024, for most of us, this would be a once in a life time event. For someone like me, a rank amateur who loves taking pictures with ...