There Be Dragons (and Lions)

 © 2000 Peter Marshall
Chinese New Year, Soho, London, Feb 2000

2012 sees the Year of the Dragon, just as it did in 2000, but this year it is the water dragon and then was the metal. But London’s Chinatown will be full to bursting again today as the Chinese New Year is celebrated, though this year I won’t be going to join the crowds.

© 2000 Peter Marshall
Chinese New Year, Soho, London, Feb 2000

I’ve photographed the Chinese New Year on quite a few occasions, and it was one of those events that even before everyone was a digital photographer was decidedly over-saturated with photographers. All of the amateur photographic magazines listed it in their ‘events to photograph’ and clubs organised day trips to the event.

© 2000 Peter Marshall
Chinese New Year, Soho, London, Feb 2000

It can still be enjoyable to be there, though perhaps Chinatown is better almost any day of the year if you want to eat there or take pictures of anything other than the lions or dragons. I quite like photographing in crowds, but today it will just be too full of people. If I went I might not even bother to take a camera, though actually I’d take one – perhaps just the Fuji X100 – just in case something came up.

© 2000 Peter Marshall
Chinese New Year, Soho, London, Feb 2000

In 2000 I took three cameras, and one was the Konica Hexar, the film equivalent of that Fuji, with a fixed 35mm f2 lens, which achieved cult status as the ultimate available light fixed lens camera and in ‘stealth mode’ had the quietest shutter and motorised film advance ever made for 35mm, although this was hardly needed at such a noisy event. Using it I took around 20 frames on Ilford XP2 black and white chromogenic film.

© 2000 Peter Marshall
Chinese New Year, Soho, London, Feb 2000

My second camera was also a Konica, the then very new Hexar RF, a camera that was everything the Leica M7 a couple of years later should have been and wasn’t, surely the ultimate film Leica, though like the later Leica models not engineered as well as the M2. It could have been one of the two other Leica fitting bodies I owned. I took around a dozen frames and then obviously gave up, and went to do a little urban landscape elsewhere in London away from the crowds. All the pictures I took with the camera that day were with a very wide angle lens, the 15mm Voigtlander which had come out the previous year, and seems to have been the only lens I took with me.

© 2000 Peter Marshall
Chinese New Year, Soho, London, Feb 2000

But this was also the first time that I tried working with a digital camera, although one that was fairly primitive by today’s standards, a FujiFilm MX-2700 which was one of the first 2.3 megapixel cameras available in mid-1999, with a fixed 7.6mm (equiv to 35mm) F3.25 lens. The pictures – up with the best at least in consumer digitals of the time – as you can see here are a little crude, with rather garish colour and a distinct lack of detail in the skin tones, and I struggled to get a decent 6×9 inch print from the 1800×1200 pixel jpegs even when taken at the finest quality. But they do give some idea of what it was like, and it probably won’t be very much different this year.

Some years I stuck it out longer in Chinatown and took rather more and better pictures – including one that has made me a decent amount of money over the years in a few books, although I don’t think it was anything very special. But today I think I’m going to stay at home and rest my aching knee, still recovering from a minor slip getting down from a fence a couple of weeks ago.

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