Thursday 22 January 2015

Day 22: Red Eye at night

On the way home in the wee small hours on Saturday morning I spotted, from the back seat of my Uber cab, that the London Eye was very red. And despite being rather tired I was pretty sure it was blue last time I looked. When I remembered a couple of days later, I googled the colour change and found some bumf on Valentine's Day. But that's weeks away, why would it be red now? I searched further and discovered that I saw the very beginning of the new Coca Cola sponsorship, and they'd turned it red in honour. I wonder if they wanted to make it red AND white, but we're thwarted. There was enough drama about the single orange pod EDF instigated, too much branding apparently.

So Coca Cola have transformed the London night skyline with a red eye, being more partial to red than blue, I'm rather delighted about that. Will it have the lasting effect their transformation of Father Christmas undertook? Though it is not entirely true that the infamous red suit is purely the work of Coca Cola' marketing people. But when they commissioned some images for advertising in 1931, the artist, Haddon Sundblom, solidified the occasional red coat wearer into the jolly, round, white bearded, pink cheeked, white trimmed red suited figure we all recognise today, so I think they can claim a lot of the credit.

After dark I was drawn to our full width of the building balcony on the 14th floor to capture the image. It's certainly mighty cold up there but if you nip between the two walls of glass that surround the balcony, I can poke my camera through the gaps and photograph without the reflections of our building and/or the Shard obscuring the image. Any other floor I'd have to fight with the motive sensitive ceiling lights and that can cause major challenges in post-processing. Here, I just have to fight with frostbite.

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