Re-photo

Shrove Tuesday in England means one thing – pancake races. Starting (as I was reminded in the Lady Mayoress’s speech at the Guildhall today) in Olney in 1445 when a housewife late for the Shriving service ran down the High St clutching her frying pan and wearing her apron, in recent years the observance has grown exponentially, and is now observed in shopping centres and other venues across the land.

I could indeed have stayed home and photographed such an event in one of the local shopping centres ten minutes walk from my house, but there were other races around central London that I was sure would be of great interest.

There are five that get into our main listings online and in print, starting at around 10.15 next to the Houses of Parliament. Here teams from the House of Lords, House of Commons and the Parliamentary Press battle it out on a course in Victoria Gardens. I photographed this in 2008 and haven’t felt moved to return since. It involves just a little of a rush for me, as the first train I can get to London without paying excessively high fares gets in at 10.04. If it gets in on time (and often it is just a few minutes late) this gives me 11 minutes to cover the almost a mile to the venue in Victoria Tower Gardens. Easy if I take my bicycle, but a little of a rush on foot.

Today it wasn’t great cycling weather, with a temperature in the early morning at home around zero, and I wasn’t feeling like rushing, so I opted to start at the Guildhall in the City of London, where people were gathering at 11.30 for a start to the event at 12 noon. A train and a bus got me there nicely in time.

It was hard to choose what equipment to take. The more interesting pictures are the kind of thing that a Leica would be great at, drifting easily around more or less unnoticed, and a 24mm or 28mm would have been fine. But the M8 unfortnately just isn’t up to the job (or at least not in my hands), and though the Fuji X100 would have been good in some ways, its fixed 35mm lens is just not wide enough. And I did also want to be able to photograph the actual races, where a longer lens and an SLR would do much better, and there are also situations where something wider than 24mm helps. So in the end I went with my standard camera bag, the two Nikons and a few lenses. Actually the cameras – and particularly the 16-35mm lens –  did do a pretty good job but having the largish bag on my shoulder did restrict movement through the loosely packed crowd.

Looking at my three favourite images there, they were taken at focal lengths (35mm equiv for the DX lens) of 22mm, 42mm and 25mm and I could have worked quite happily with – for example – a 24mm and a 50mm lens.

I’d decided to leave the Guildhall event early to cover a very different pancake race in Spitalfields. 1.14 miles is not a great distance to cover in 15 mins, though doing so in part through pedestrian clotted streets, with a number of major roads to cross and carrying a heavy camera bag makes it just a little more of a challenge, and I was just a little out of breath when I got there, just as the races were about to start. Ideally I like to be at events early, as often the best opportunities for photography come before the actual start – and that was certainly true with the Guildhall event, where the actual races were hardly enthralling.

But at Spitalfields, with its lighter touch organisation (which threatens at times to become chaos) and people very much more prepared to let their hair down, there isn’t really the same problem, and there were plenty of opportunities between the races and probably the most interesting part of the event is the prize-giving ceremony.

I didn’t do very well at photographing the actual races. Dray Walk is a fairly narrow street between some tall buildings, and on a truly gloomy day like this was, is pretty Stygian in terms of lighting. Being close to the action as I was requires a pretty high shutter speed or flash to avoid blur, and I just hadn’t thought enough about it. Or at least had just somehow thought that ISO1600 should have been good enough in the middle of the day. But with the 18-105mm even with the the ISO at 3200 I managed to get some things unsharp. It’s a while since I’ve really done much real action photography and I wasn’t in any case interested enough to really think about it.

More on the two events at Great Spitalfields Pancake Race and Poulters Pancake Race.

(more…)

I couldn’t stay in Enfield with the Chase Farm protest because I wanted to cover the Cleaners Protest at Barbican. At least it was an easy journey, as trains from Enfield Chase run into Kings Cross, and though the Circle Line was suffering its New Zealand inspired closure so I couldn’t get the underground to Barbican, I could still jump onto the Northern line to take me to Moorgate, from where it was just quarter mile or so walk to the main entrance of the Barbican Arts Centre, a prestige arts centre owned by the City Corporation of one of the richest cities in the world, where the cleaners are paid less than the living wage.

So I was easily there at the time advertised for the protest. But there was nobody else there. I wasn’t all that surprised. Most of the cleaners are from Latin America. When I was in Brasilia, people told me that if they wanted people to actually arrive on time for an event they said “3pm English Time“.

So I didn’t assume that the protest had been cancelled and go home, but told myself I’d give it a half hour. It was too cold to stand waiting, so I went for a walk to look at an area nearby where I’d photographed some buildings and see if anything had happened to them. It was now an empty block. There were a few pubs I could have gone in, but none looked very inviting and I walked a bit more mainly to keep warm before making my way back to the Barbican. Twenty minutes after the advertised start there were now three people waiting to take part but soon a few more arrived, and 40 minutes late the organisers of the protest turned up. So perhaps I could have marched to the hospital in Enfield after all and not missed the cleaners.

Once they had arrived things got pretty animated, with lots of banners, placards and noise, including some new air-horns with pumps attached, along with a few whistles and some seriously large and loud drums. And of course a megaphone so that people going into the Barbican Arts Centre could be told why there was a loud protest taking place.

The sun we had seen in Enfield had long been replaced by thick cloud, and as the protest got under way around 4.15pm it was beginning to get pretty dark. I turned the ISO up to 1600, and working with the 16-35mm was able to work at around 1/50 f4 in the dimmer areas, going up to around 1/80 at f4.5 further away from the buildings. But people were generally pretty active although this was a static protest there was a lot of movement, and I should have used a higher ISO to get a faster shutter speed, as quite a pictures were not usuable as some of the people were blurred. The cleaners and their supporters generally protest in a very active way, with a lot of waving and shouting, and today probably jumping up and down to keep warm. The 16-35mm isn’t a very fast lens at f4, but it is usable wide open, and usually I need the depth of field that f4 gives.

With the longer 18-105mm on the D800 I was struggling even at ISO3200; I don’t like to go higher than this as the results can get noticeable noisy, but it might have been better to have done so. Both lenses do have VR, but it doesn’t seem to be as effective as it should be, and can’t deal with subject movement. Both lenses also seemed to be having occasional focus problems in the low light.

I’m still not used to the focus settings on the D800, which only has a 2-position focus switch at the left of the lens for AF-M, rather than the 3 position C-S-M of the D700, which seems much better. It’s far more difficult to change from single focus to continuous focus, and much harder to tell which of the two you are using. I can’t understand why Nikon made this change. And the three-position switch on the back of the camera was also much easier than pushing in the AF-M button and twiddling the front command dial, though this does give more options, even if I don’t know what they mean. I need to find time to study the manual again.

Eventually as it got darker still I finally had to get out my flash – still the Nissin. The results just aren’t as good, even though I was still working at high ISO to pick up as much ambient light as possible and avoid the worst effects of flash. I decided I’d done all I could and in any case it was time for me to leave and send in my stories for the day.

I’m still not sure if I prefer the Nissin to Nikon flash units. At the price it certainly does a pretty good job most of the time, and as with the Nikons I also occasionally get pictures that are ridiculously over-exposed. None of them work too well at close quarters.

I took in three Nikon flash units into Nikon for servicing thirteen days ago (I was sure I had a fourth somewhere but couldn’t find it.) The two SB800s are now repaired and I’m awaiting their return. The SB700 which I thought only needed a new flash shoe fitting –  I’ve just told them to re-cycle as the estimate was close to what I originally paid for it, and slightly more than I could get a new one for on eBay. I should have tried Araldite!