Finally! It’d been a long cold winter watching the shadow sweep across tall buildings, it at last it appeared again from ground level, just where I expected after the shot on 11th.
It was a more fortuitous capture than that dry prediction implies though. I’d arranged to meet a friend for outdoor lockdown exercise (a socially distanced walk to Borough Market), and it was meant to be a bit earlier than this. As it turned out, all the extra layers we needed to put on pushed the time back so much the shot was on. She didn’t know about this of course, so as we were approaching I was checking the time and pondering how to explain it. We arrived at the spot at nine minutes to twelve.
You can dress up my explanation any way you like, but it boiled down to “Can we stand still on the street in freezing temperatures for nine minutes so I can take a photo of the Sun through the top of the Shard? It’s for a thing.” Bemusement gave way to accommodation gave way to frostbite, and while I could still use my fingers I took the picture from just south of the huge wooden box they’ve put there to hide a construction site.
I had high hopes of this shot being one in which I could see us on the View from the Shard shot, but it wasn’t to be.
We didn’t linger long after midday for obvious reasons, and perhaps the camera doesn’t take the shot at bang on twelve. Plus we would have been little more than a pair of pixels at this range (with a couple of pixels of social distance between us of course). I’d mulled the idea of wearing a retroreflective T-shirt for this series of shots to show up on the View as a bright gleam, but it was not the day for such things.
Still, after a long break watching it remotely, it was good to see it again. I celebrated the capture by buying a piece of Roquefort the size of a child’s head. It was still going, just, by the time of the next one.
Shard Analemma 