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.

Slow Shutter Speed

I don't always carry an SLR or DLSR with a couple of extra lenses when I visit central London especially if the purpose of my visit is social rather than photographic. Instead I carry  a compact digital camera - it's light, and very portable. I've being trying out my Coolpix indoors with the flash turned off - one of my requirements for such a camera is the ability to switch the flash on or off - so I can choose when to use flash and not have the camera decide to use it for me. The camera records only jpg's. Here are some photos taken with this camera; no flash, hand held, relatively slow shutter speeds,  moving people are blurred.

 

 

A very different technique to those I usually use. Think I might try this out some more, and also different locations and lighting conditions.

Shadows

Lately I've been photographing people and their shadows.

Having found the location - it often means coming back to the same place at different times of the day  - with the sun shine (and more importantly the shadows) at different angles - to assess its suitablity, and then asking someone to walk through the appropriate place.

Digital InfraRed

The weather for some of the days last week was ideal for InfraRed photography, at least as far as foliage is concerned - blue skies with a little cloud, bright sunshine, and fairly freah vegetation. Here are a few more pictures - digitial, not film. The first is in Green Park in central London - it was good to get away from the traffic and noise of the city whilst photographing the trees.

The second and third pictures are in the local Richmond Park. I dont have to go too far unless I want to.

Ship in a Bottle

Next up on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square is "Nelson's Ship in a Bottle" by Yinka Shonibare MBE - one of the first sculture to give a direct nod the the adjacent monument.

 Here's what it looked like on May 23rd, the day before it's unveiling  -

and a few days later (note the clouds ... we had over summer in London, in 23/5 and its now over for another year ...) -

I wasn't expecting very much beforehand but now that I've seen it, I like it.

I may try to photograph it again, from a different angle. Whilst I enjoyed the bright May sunshine, it does make photographing a "bottle" a little more difficult,  with refections and hot spots. What looks interesting also
is capturing Nelson's column through the Bottle - you can the effect in one of the above.