Carnival Time Again

How time flies. This time last year - the August Bank Holiday in England - I went to the Notting Hill Carnival in west London for the first time in many years. Now it's a year on and here I go again.

Thankfully there was some half-way decent light - photographically speaking - the people in the event are fast moving and rarely stay put for long, and I didn't want to have to use either flash or slow shutter speeds - time enough for that for the upcoming Night Carnival in a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to doing an edit of my images captured over the weekend - probably down to about 10 or so, from the 300 taken.

Summer ?

Nothing much to blog about, photography speaking, over the last few weeks - I have to thank the vagaries of a summer here in London for that. I've never really been into photographing indoors - in a studio for example (perhaps I should ?) and I don't expect it to be wall-to-wall sunshine outside, but when the light out there is consistently flat, dull and uninteresting outside - in August (it's supposed to be summer here !) then I think I can complain.

However it's not been all bad - I've been to a few photographic shows, and took my camera to visit Brick Lane and Greenwich.  I hadn't visited the Brick Lane area of London for some time- a  year or so perhaps  - and found much has changed since then.  Some of my photos taken then found their way into my Associateship (of the Royal Photographic Society) panel - which you can see on my website here. My last visit to Greenwich was more than a few years ago and the financial area in London's Docklands has sprouted up since then. The views across London of the much older historic areas of the Naval college buildings in the foreground and the modern architecture of  Docklands in the mid distance are worth it. The East/West meridian runs through the observatory at Greenwich (and  haven't you heard of GMT ?), and there were long queues of people waiting to stand astride it with their left side in the East and right in the West.

The photographic exhibitions I've been too include "Exposed" at Tate Modern, the RPS,153rd International Print at Spitalfield, and the Press Photographer Year 2010 the National Theatre on the South Bank. It is always a good idea, I think, to see exhibitions such as these - you can learn from comparing  your own photographic work to what you see on the wall, and also see what others are doing. Shame the London Salon had to be cancelled at the Cotton Centre this year - thats the 2nd time this has happened in the last couple of years.

Camille Silvy Exhibition

      Spent a very pleasant couple of hours on Thursday last at the Camille Silvy Exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in central London. Camille Silvy was a French photographer who was worked in London 1857 - 1867 and the exhibition covers this period.
     Included are several prints made up from more than one negative - for example "River Scene, France" (there are 3 versions on display) and "Twilight", one of the Studies in Light. A figure in "Twilight" (1859) is thought to be the earliest use of using blur to suggest movement. Very easy to do these days with Photoshop and computers, but in the late 1850's there was only a wet collodion process and large format glass negatives.
    Much of Camille's work was commercial carte-de-visite, he employed 40 or so workers in a "photographic factory". An 1863 self protrait is duplicated 4 times on one print, almost foreshadowing Warhol. My visit included an hour long tour of the exhibition with it's curator, which made the exhibition come to life - for the pictures are 150 years old from the early days of photography, and having a commentary on them and why they were choosen was fascinating.