Finally I’ve got around to putting the some of the pictures I took on November 3 at Rich Mix in Bethnal Green, where the East London Photomonth was holding its open exhibition, the Photo Open, and also having a party, though I left before that got started.
The Photo Open is a completely open show, “open to all kinds of photographers and exhibits a wide range of subjects and approaches” with a small fee (£10 / £5 for concessions) for each image submitted. All of the images sent in are projected as a part of the show, with a relatively small number – around 20 or 30 – selected to be printed and put on the wall. The show is sponsored by theprintspace, who make these prints.
I’d taken both the Fuji X100 and also the D700 with me, as I was calling in at St Paul’s Cathedral to photograph OccupyLSX there on the way to Bethnal Green. Unfortunately it had started to rain just as I arrived there and I’d only taken a few pictures, not actually getting out the Nikon which I had intended to use while I was there.
I’d thought the Fuji would be ideal if I wanted to take a few pictures at the opening of the Photo Open, mainly with the idea of posting some here – as I did here in Photomonth Photo-Open 2011 on November 4th.
At the time my computer was broken and away for repair, and I was relying on a fairly ancient notebook with very limited software, and in particular not enough memory to either run Lightroom or Photoshop. I’d set the Nikon to produce jpegs as well as RAW files, and relied on an ancient copy of ACDSee and image editor FotoCanvas to process the Fuji RAW files.
Now that computer is back, though it’s just died again, but I have a new one, and have just processed the RAW files and put a larger set of the images from the evening on My London Diary. Its perhaps interesting to compare a few of the images:
Of course there are choices that I’ve made to present the images differently, and in particular to make the images rather brighter and cooler, but the upper images of each pair more or less reflect the jpeg that the D700 produced.
The last images I’ll post are from the Fuji.
This is an image processed by Lightroom, and I didn’t use any from the Fuji in my original post here on Re:PHOTO. But what I can show you is the difference between a file saved from the RAW image in Irfanview and below it one processed in Lightroom. The Irfanview file was quite a bit darker, so I’ve adjusted the levels in Photoshop to be similar. By mistake these are adjacent files, but very similar, taken within seconds at the same camera settings.
I’m not quite sure what this proves, though perhaps it does show why I like to work with RAW files and use Lightroom.
