For some reason I didn’t get an invite to photograph the party, and I don’t think he has much to celebrate at the moment. But students seized on the opportunity to make a protest against university tuition fees, cuts in public services and in particular the loss of the EMA, the Educational Maintenance Allowance for 16-18 year olds, marching from Trafalgar Square down Whitehall and on past Parliament to the Lib Dem HQ in Cowley St.
Perhaps because of the weather it was a small protest, with only around a hundred taking part. It had been raining more or less all day, and perhaps the other nine hundred or so who had signed up to come on the Facebook page had decided they could wait until the next protest – which comes on Tuesday. At 4pm when it was due to start there were probably more press than protesters in a wet Trafalgar Square, though a few more arrived a little later, and the light was already disappearing. So it was another day when I had to use flash.
The lens hood for the 16-35mm isn’t very effective at keeping off the rain – and I was holding a cloth over the lens between pictures, and wiping the UV filter as often as I could. But you still get drops landing on it while you are framing the image, causing blurred areas on the pictures.
Flash also lights up the falling drips, giving white spots on the images, an unnatural effect which doesn’t often improve them. I wanted to get plenty of detail in the background, so I was using slow shutter speeds with the flash, which tends to be rather hit or miss.
ISO1600 1/13s f8
I soon switched to using 1/60 and had to put up with a rather darker background – it was getting around 2 stops less exposure.
This was the call to start the march, and a picture I almost missed, very much grabbed on the spur of the moment, without time to think. This is actually the angle I took it as, though the picture is cropped at left and bottom, as there was too much of that close white coat in my way when I took it.
Again as I tried to photograph the start of the march, there was another photographer in the picture. I usually like to avoid other photographers in my pictures, unless there is a very good reason to do so, but sometimes there isn’t any choice. Possibly he adds something to the picture in this case. I’m someone who likes to work close to things, so I get in the way of other photographers trying to take pictures fairly frequently and they do the same for me. But when everyone is trying to photograph the start of a march I usually work from one side (as I was here.)
Apart from getting less in the way, I also usually find it makes the pictures a little more dynamic than a frontal view. There is usually plenty of time to get in close in the middle a little further on in the march without getting in other people’s way if I want to.
Of course we all get in each other’s way at times, and often other photographers will ask people to get back so that they too can get a picture. But usually I’m happy just to work with what’s there – as in this case.
Trafalgar Square and Whitehall are of course fairly well lit, but the entrance to Cowley Street where the police had a barrier to stop the protesters was about as gloomy as it gets on London streets.
And it was here I made my big mistake of the day. I’d started taking pictures around dusk using a mixture of available light and flash at ISO1200, and the D700 works fine in program mode for this, automatically altering the aperture when you switch the flash on. But I altered the ISO to 3200 to cope with the lower light level and forgot to change to aperture (or shutter) priority mode. In ‘P’ mode the camera sets the aperture according to the ISO, and at 3200 it sets f10, which largely cancels out the advantage of setting the higher ISO (see p382 of the manual.) There must be a reason for this, but I can’t see it – surely it would make more sense to chose a single value – such as f8 -irrespective of ISO and to allow the aperture control to be used to vary this, as it does in non-flash P mode?
I knew I wasn’t getting what I wanted, but couldn’t work out why and how to put it right. Of course the viewfinder display should have given me the information to work out what was happening, but somehow when I’m taking pictures it becomes completely invisible. Of course it’s usually there, but I just don’t see it.
I might have spotted my mistake, but it wasn’t the only problem I was having (along with the rain and being jostled by guys with big video cameras.) The D700 was in one of its moods where it wouldn’t focus, and half the time when I pressed the release nothing happened. I started getting most of the information display blanking with a message [CHR] where the number of pictures remaining usually appears.
Turning the camera off and on didn’t help, but the error message disappeared for a bit when I opened the battery door and let the battery slide down for a few seconds then closed it up again, rebooting the camera. After a few exposures I had to repeat this.
Later, back home in the dry, I found on p413 of the manual that this indicates a memory card problem (so why CHR?) I hope it was just a dirty connection, and I’ve cleaned the card (a fast genuine SanDisk) as best I can, using a glass fibre contact cleaner brush and then pushing it in and out of the camera a few times. At home it now works perfectly!
I also cleaned the SB800 flash and hotshoe contacts, where there also seems to be a bit of a problem – I sometimes have to wiggle the flash a little after seating it to make a good connection.The cleaning doesn’t appear to have helped with this.
As you can see on My London Diary, I got some pictures, but they are not quite what I would have liked. By the time I finished taking pictures I’ve given up on the flash and was shooting by available light, largely provided by others using video cameras. But at ISO3200, 1/20,f4 few were as sharp as I would like and the colour with very mixed lighting was rather odd.
Available light: ISO 3200, 1/20, f4
At one point I changed the flash setting and tried a really long exposure with flash, 2 seconds at f10, deliberately not keeping the camera still. While the shutter was open after my flash three flashes from other photographers fired, each adding it’s contribution to my exposure, along with some video lighting.
The result was mildly interesting.