But this is supposed to be a photo blog

What sort of photographer am I? A photo-opportunist? No; I’m not a cad. A photo-forager? No; I don’t usually go out deliberately looking for photos. I once fancied myself a photo-flaneur, loafing about aimlessly aiming to stumble upon some moment of photographic bliss, but my recent reading of Edmund White’s book The Flaneur put paid to that conceit, and it’s not really what I do anyway. Perhaps I was just attracted by the Gauloise fragrance of the word and its hint of continental intellectualism. Still, I have contributed one or two photos to the flickr group Gallery Flaneur. No, I just go about my daily business with a camera in my pocket. If anything that strikes me as beautiful, interesting, telling, touching, important or just useful: snap. Serendipity. So I suppose I am a photo-serendipitist.

Example 1. Northwood House, Leeds, taken from the top deck of the number 36 bus as it stopped for a moment at traffic lights just north of Leeds bus station. This handsome old building (Grade II listed) rising out of a sea of urban ordinariness was an arresting sight, vaguely reminiscent of the gunship The Fighting Temeraire being towed away to be broken up in JMW Turner’s painting in The National Gallery. Ricoh GX100 compact camera with a bit of postproduction tweaking to get rid of the squashed flies and grime on the bus’s window.