View allAll Photos Tagged flat
Alviso Flat lies just a hundred yards north of the Alviso Marina County Park. Situated just west of the 1880 South Coast Pacific railroad grade, the flat is a widening of the ditch flanking the rail track. I have no idea why the ditch widens here but it makes an interesting and photographic landscape feature. The area fills with a few inches of water during our winter rainy season and tends to dry out in the summer. This has been an exceptionally dry winter so I was a bit surprised to find water in the flat during this January visit. Perhaps it is due to the adjacent salt ponds, which were relatively full, or a connection to the New Chicago Marsh on the other side of the track. This marsh is running with much higher water levels since the Salt Pond A16 construction project.
As you walk along the levee past Alviso Flat you can see the vague remnants of a few marsh channels. These are much more evident from the air as is the color du jour of the flat’s shallow water (in this case light brown).
Fellow KAPper Dave Wheeler, who was visiting from Maryland, accompanied me on this outing. You can see Dave’s white Rokakku kite in several of the images.
I am taking these documentary photographs under a Special Use Permit from the California Department of Fish & Wildlife. Kite flying is prohibited over the Eden Landing Ecological Reserve without a Special Use Permit, as is access to this part of the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge.
The setting sun glows between the flats down at the links. Liked the contrast between the flat in the shade and that illuminated. The Haar gave the scene a painting like effect.
They look as if they've been there forever and most possess a monumental grandeur which is hard to equate with a sudden speculative spree. But London's mansion blocks were the high density housing of their time and a source of much controversy and concern
The story sounds surprisingly contemporary. In the late nineteenth century central London was running out of space and wealthy bachelors and well-bred families were finding it difficult to locate suitable accommodation.
Flats were the obvious solution but in the eyes of the fashionable and the fastidious sharing a roof with total strangers was simply unthinkable.
Flats were damned with a double dose of original sin. Since the first to be built in London were philanthropic ventures, Model Dwellings for the deserving poor, they were forever equated with the lower orders and therefore beyond the pale.
But even worse, flats were foreign. The French, more specifically Parisians, lived in flats and everyone knew what a badly behaved, unhygienic, morally corrupt lot they were.
French flats, as R. Phene Spiers told the Royal Institute of Architects in 1871, were small and poorly designed, forced the upper classes to live in close proximity to their servants, and generally lacked refinement and sophistication.
In Paris, he continued, "utterly dissociated and discordant people" lived under one roof, but this would never do for London, where delicate English ladies would suffer "incalculable distress" if they encountered a common artisan on the stairs.
The French, he concluded, clinching the argument, "use very little water, believing they can wash themselves with the corner of a wet towel."
Convincing uptight English Victorians to live in flats was therefore a tall order, and there weren't many speculators keen to test the market.
When the first great mansion block, Albert Hall Mansions, was started in 1876 the developer Thomas Hussey worried that the scheme might fail and Norman Shaw, the architect, divided the block plan into three distinct sections, to be built separately, in an effort to minimise the risk.
As it turned out they had a winner on their hands and Albert Hall Mansions, with its ornate red-brick exterior, Dutch gables, triple windows, and iron balconies, kick-started the late-Victorian craze for mansion blocks which continued well into the new century.
Once Shaw had shown them how to do it more and more developers took the plunge and a rash of mansion blocks appeared in Kensington and St John's Wood, Marylebone and Maida Vale, Belsize Park and Battersea, Fulham and Chiswick.
As the fashion took hold whole streets were give over to mansion blocks Fitzgeorge and Fitzjames Avenue in West Kensington, Prince of Wales Drive in Battersea but the building frenzy came to a halt with the war, and never really revived.
Some exceptional mansion blocks were built in the thirties but thereafter the energy of the initial flurry was never reproduced.
Ballet flats are recycled from centuries, its just a fashion classic. I like ballet flats because they can be wear in any occasions, even to school. And woman's should not always wear heels that would be boring so abandon the heels for a day and try on the ballet flats.
(Tantilla gracilis). Deep East Texas.
The flat-headed snake is a tiny fossorial snake associated with deep sand habitats. In the Pineywoods of East Texas the loss and degradation of sandhill habitats has likely resulted in significant population declines for this species. The fossorial and secretive nature of this species makes it difficult to assess population trends. The above individual was found at a high quality sandhill in the Big Thicket region.
Rainwater, leaves, and bits of ice in an ancient pothole on the cliffs overlooking the Potomac Gorge along the Billy Goat Trail
Cayton Bay just outside Scarborough on a Saturday morning. Only managed to get a few shots before it started raining. Also the surf was so flat we couldn't get any action shots, had to settle for a thought provking, moody look. All credit goes to my friend Alistair who was freezing his bollocks off posing for this! :)
All comments well received.
Badwater Basin in Death valley is known for its vast salt flats. When visiting the area this winter, there were relatively few flat salt flats to be found.
Just after we got back into Vancouver, we got a flat tire. We filled it with sealant and tried to re-inflate it. We drove it to the gas station with low air and the tire almost fell off the rim. Then we had to wait for CAA to fix it for us - they were pretty busy because of the weather. We tried to change the tire, but the truck didn't have a jack.