Tag: patterns

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The Portal colourful light machine

Thousands of colourful lights in a dark mirrored room.

The Portal is a light machine at the Steampunk HQ in Oamaru, New Zealand. It was designed and built in 2014 by the Steampunk HQ team with De Gest Construction. Lighting by Angus Muir Design. Soundtrack composed by Jac Grenfell. Sculptures by Donald Paterson. It’s a dark room filled with thousands of colour lights as you can see. The experience last two and a half minutes. According to the sign on the door. “The Portal is light machine that transports you to other alternative realities. It is the Steampunk HQ Space-time travel gateway. It is the most hi-tech device still operational in the building. It was carefully preserved by the SPHQ time travel officers – it was their only means of returning to other worlds. You will be transported to places unknown…”

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DNA Library at Museum of the Future


A dark room filled with an array of colourful lights in glass tubes. In the foreground there are three tubes in focus, each containing a purple object. The background has hundreds of mostly green dots of light.

This was on of the most visually unusual libraries I have photographed. There were no books. It’s on the fourth level of the Museum of the Future in Dubai. Walking into a large dark room, filled with coloured lights. At first it is hard to know what you are looking at. There are 2400 crystal specimen jars suspended in mid air. Each jar displays a specimen of the flora, fauna and animals in the library. In the three jars I’ve focused on in this photograph we can see what I think are jellyfish lit up in purple. I could be wrong though. I thought that the purple contrasted well against the mostly green lights in the background.

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Colourful old fishing ropes

A heap of ropes in various shades, intertwined and overlapping, forming a complex and textured arrangement.

There are often visually interesting details in harbours beyond the obvious boats and seascapes. Ropes and cray pots can often be overlooked. I really like the texture and patterns of these intertwined and overlapping ropes. Especially the colourful nature of them. That purple rope really stands out. This scene was taken in the small picturesque Craster Harbour in Northumberland. It is definately an improvement over this Blue Rope Detail photograph from 2010 taken in Wales. Maybe someone reading this knows why the ropes are coloured? Surely it isn’t just for the interest of photographers?



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London Eye with swirling railing

One of the best views of the London Eye is on the opposite bank of the River Thames by Westminster Bridge. After getting the standard shots, I experimented with the curve and swirl of the railing. Given this particular day was so cloudy I ended up editing this into a black and white photograph. The building to the right of the giant ferris wheel is County Hall. In the foreground on the left is a crowd of tourists waiting for a boat to take them on a cruise up the River Thames.