Wildlife Photography Exhibit

Ironwork at the V&A museum

One very grey day recently we headed out to the Natural History Museum to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award.  I went last year, and I really recommend this yearly exhibit if you happen to be in town when it's on (if you like animals and landscapes that is).  All the shots are really good, though having been twice now there are obviously certain shots which are classics.

There always seems to be a really long exposure of the night sky, so that the landscape has some colour but there are stars in the sky, really gives quite a creepy feeling.  You don't expect to see colours and stars at the same time.  There is also always a shot of the northern lights, that's just a given.  They are pretty cool.  I would love to see the northern lights, apparently this year is meant to be a real good one too.  Maybe next winter.

I always like the children's categories as well, they are pretty young kids, under 11, 11-14 and 14-17 are the categories I think.  They are all pretty talented, but what is funny about them is that they are pretty much all taken in the child's backyard.  I guess kids are quite restricted in their ability to get around, which means the city kids really have no chance in this award.  Unless the judges like shots of pigeons.

The glass sculpture in the entrance hall

Unfortunately no photos allowed, probably for the best though, it was absolutely seething inside.  Normally on a miserable day in Australia you would take the kids to a shopping centre, here in London they are much more cultured, they take them to a museum.  Turning up, the line for entry to the museum stretched all the way across the forecourt.  Luckily we had pre-booked tickets, no queue for us!

Since we were in the neighbourhood and had some time to kill before our planned outing to Skyfall, we thought we'd pop in to the Victoria and Albert Museum afterwards.  Another great building, across the road from the Natural History Museum.    I think officially it is a museum of art and design, basically it's a museum of stuff.  Or rather it is a bunch of separate museums all stuck under one roof.  You have, say, ironwork, and jewellery, tapestries, statues, architecture, glass work, and a lot more.  You could imagine that each section could really be it's own museum.  It makes it slightly strange to visit, because there's no real theme joining everything together, apart from the fact it's all stuff.  But if you were really into jewellery or iron gates or something, it would probably be really good to visit.

Scale model of a Japanese building

Tiny glass jar - made in 1400BC in Egypt

My favourite was the architecture section, they had all these little scale models of different buildings (built by the architects when planning the design) and went over the different aspects of the buildings, from all over the world.

Another section I quite liked was the cast section, there are these massive halls, and I am talking airport hanger high halls, full of replica statues.  So if you don't want to bother visiting Florence you can come here and see Michelangelo's David.  It was full of various statues and building parts.  It looked a bit like it was in the middle of renovations though, so we couldn't get down there amongst the statuary.