Re-photo

As usual zombies were thick on the ground in London in October, although the group who were putting in an early pre-Halloween appearance for charity on October 13 were  a very much more organised group than most, on a charity pub crawl raising funds for St Mungo’s, a charity that really does help the homeless to help themselves. Despite the name it isn’t a religious organisation, but took its name from the patron saint of Glasgow, the home town of its founder, although it began with a house open for rough sleepers in Battersea, and it seems a very good cause which people can get involved with in different ways – giving money, fund-raising event such as this and volunteering to help in some of the over a hundred projects it runs.

So perhaps this event attracted a better class of zombie, as the undead aren’t generally  noted for their charity, which perhaps just doesn’t usually go with eating flesh and brains, although most zombies I’ve actually photographed in past years have seemed to have a greater interest in drinking alcohol. And I was photographing them at the start of a day-long pub crawl around London, a fun event with a serious purpose.

There may well be a special connection between zombies and Glasgow, certainly my first experience arriving in the city centre there around closing time in the early 1960s was interesting, as was a week staying on Sauchiehall Street in the  European City of Culture in 1990. Seriously it is a city I liked and we went back to stay there for a few days in 2008. 

Were these zombies on a Glasgow street in 2008?

But probably the start of their day, around lunchtime, wasn’t the best time to photograph them, and things would have got a little livelier (perhaps not the right word with zombies in mind) after a couple of pub visits. Zombies are after all really creatures of the night, and despite the horror costumes (or because of them) some were still just a little shy.

The bright low winter sun gave me a few problems, and at one point I found myself needing fill flash but having the SB700 on the wrong  camera, and no time to swtich it over in the fast-changing situation I made the wrong decision to keep on working without flash, forgetting completely the built-in flash on the Nikon D700, which would have helped at the flick of a finger. Stupid. I’ve just got out of the habit of using it, as the accessory flash units usually do a better job.

Of course it was possible to more or less rescue the images in post-processing thanks to Lightroom, but certainly some of the better pictures I took would have been improved with some fill flash. By the time I’d paused long enough to change the flash around the situation had disappeared.

The other reason it was probably a bad time was quite simply the huge number of other people around taking pictures. Perhaps later in the day they would have thinned out a little. This was an event that seemed to attract a real crowd of photographers, perhaps the kind of event that gets listed in amateur magazines as a photo-opportunity.

I had other things to photograph, and so wasn’t able to spend more time with them. I knew too that I would be photographing zombies again in a couple of weeks time.

More pictures on My London Diary: Zombies Invade London.

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Occupy protesters shout at police who stop them getting to the Stock Exchange – Oct 2011.

I wanted to photograph the first anniversary of the unsuccessful attempt by Occupy London to go to the Stock Exchange which led to their camping outside St Paul’s Cathedral both because of an interest in the Occupy movement (see Occupy London Kept Out Of Stock Exchange), but also because I had been there last year, as well as seven and a half months later when they finally achieved – if only for a couple of hours – their objective.

Occupy tent in the Stock Exchange doorway – 1 May 2012 (Stock Exchange Occupied)

I wrote more about the anniversary event almost a month ago in
Occupy London, and you can now see more pictures from the day on My London Diary in Occupy Global Noise Street Party.

One of the pictures I took early on that day, taken with the 20mm, was of a small boy kneeling in front of the very tall Cathedral door.

Processing the image  in Lightroom, it is possible to correct (or nearly correct) the convergence of the verticals, which gives this

second version of the image. I actually prefer the original, which to me gives a greater sense of the looking up that you have to do when you are standing there under the portico, although the lower version gives me a greater impression of the huge scale of the door compared to the child. The ‘corrections’ also means that most of the tiles on the floor have to be cropped, which I think is also a great loss, giving a picture of a flat vertical surface rather than the three-dimensional quality of the original. And simply graphically the expanse of tiles is more interesting, whereas the narrow strip left of the lower image simply distracts. Somehow too, the lines and diagonals seem to direct my eye towards the child, an effect that is lost when they are reduced to the narrow band.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with correcting verticals, and it is something we all learnt to do in the darkroom days, though digital makes it considerably easier and more powerful. [You can also use horizontal correction and make the doorway rectangular, but this simply would look unnatural as you see the inside of the door frame at left, but not at right, so the image is clearly taken from that side.] We are seldom aware of the vertical convergence when we view a seen, and in some respects correcting it better fits out visual experience – as too does the kind of correct I often make from fisheye to cylindrical perspective.  Sometimes it works, and other times, as I think in this case, the image is better left more or less untouched.

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Well, actually a second-hand lens, always the best way to go if you can find what you want from a reliable source at the right price. A friend happened to mention he was about to put his Nikon ED AF Nikkor 70-300mm f4-5.6 D lens on eBay, and I told him I’d be interested.

I’m not a great fan of telephoto lenses. I’ve always thought of photography as a very tactile medium and of taking things from further away than you can touch as some kind of occasionally necessary aberration. Even with landscapes, I’ve always been happier with those that at least start more or less where I’m standing, and if possible I’ve always included foreground, particularly with the panoramas. But of course there are times when you have to work from a distance, and things that only a lens with a very narrow field of view can do.

The 18-105mm DX Nikkor I usually have sitting on my D800E body actually does most of what I need, but just occasionally I want something longer. When I started working with a DSLR I had a cheap Sigma telephoto zoom, something like a 50-210mm, though I don’t remember the details. I think it cost me under a hundred pounds new and was only a DX f5.6 lens, but it gave reasonably sharp results. But it’s real value for me was it’s small size and low weight, I think around 300g.

Red Army Choir members talk to a fan who had brought a 1956 record to sign

It’s also the only lens I’ve had stolen from my camera bag while I was working, otherwise I’d probably still be using it. I use a shoulder bag with an easy access zip across the top so I can just put my hand in and grab a lens or a flash, and while I’m working seldom bother to zip it up. One day in Trafalgar Square I was in a crowd photographing the Red Army Choir, using a wide-angle lens and towards the end of the day reached into the top of my bag for that Sigma and it wasn’t there. Of course I try to be more careful after this, but I did lose a SB800 flash the same way a few years later during a packed underground journey.

I tried to buy another lens exactly the same, but it had been discontinued. While its mediocre specification had attracted me it obviously hadn’t sold it to many others, and the replacements were larger, heavier and more expensive and didn’t appeal. After a while Nikon brought out its first Nikkor 18-200mm DX, which was twice the size and weight (and about 5 times the price) and I bought that; more versatile but not as sharp, it served me well until I dropped the D200 with it attached on the road photographing the front of an EDL march a few years later. The D200 survived but the lens was only fit to bin.

I tried and bought a few possible replacements, complicated by the change to FX format cameras with the D700 (and now the D800E) including a disappointing Sigma, but ended up with just using the cheap Nikkor 18-105mm. It isn’t a pro lens, and it shows in the build quality (I’m now on my third, though again I managed to drop one) and the price, but with Lightroom’s profile doing a little correction – as with all my lenses – it works pretty well. But just sometimes not quite long enough.

Nikkor 70-300 on D700

The Nikkor 70-300 is also not a pro lens, so it is reasonably small and light, a little over 500g and it fits neatly into my camera bag. It covers full frame, but I intend to also use it on the DX format, where it becomes a 105-450mm equivalent. At the near end it has excellent sharpness, but does seem a little soft towards the longer extreme.

Nikkor 70-300 on D800 in DX mode

On my first day out with it I used it rather more than I will normally to try it out, taking 131 frames, almost half as many as I took with each of the 20mm and 18-105mm. The second event I covered, an anti-nuclear protestoutside the Japanese Embassy in Piccadilly and later outside the London offices of the Tokyo Electric Power Co who run the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, gave me plenty of time to play with the new lens, both on the D700 as an FX lens and on the D800 working in DX mode.

Nikkor 70-300 on D700

Later, outside the offices of G4S on the second anniversary of the killing by G4S employees of Jimmy Mubenga when they used illegal restraint techniques on the plane when he was being forcibly deported from Heathrow, I took a few more. This  EXIF data shows the focal length in use for this frame, taken full frame on the D700 to be 155mm.

More about the events – and more pictures:

Solidarity with Japanese Nuclear Activists
G4S Killed Jimmy Mubenga

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