Budget Day March

My last photographs on Budget Day were of an early evening march and rally against austerity and the cuts in public services, with George Osborne confirming the expectations that he would say these needed to continue despite the continuing lack of growth in the economy and the growing evidence that his plan is not working.

It was dusk as people began to gather – though it hadn’t been that bright all day, but it was definitely getting darker, and although I could take pictures at high ISO, as usual flash generally helped. It wasn’t a huge march, but it was quite lively, though it was tricky to catch that in the pictures.

People walking along the road with placards and banners somehow just didn’t get the spirit of the event, and I needed to find something more dynamic, with a group of students who were making rather more noise, even though I wasn’t recording sound.

This is perhaps an image with a suitably ‘bad’ composition and a little chaos that for me gets a little closer to the event, taken with a very wide angle rather close to the woman with the microphone, deliberately pushing her into the corner of my frame – and this is exactly the full frame. I had the flash angled around 45 degrees to the right and have had to do a little dodging and burning as usual to bring the lighting to something rather more even. The shutter speed (1/60s f5 16mm ISO 2500) is slow enough to give a little blur on the hand in the centre of the frame (over the headline message ‘MORE TORY CUTS’) but fortunately the rest of the image is sharp.

I didn’t stay too  long at the rally opposite Downing St, as it was just too cold. There does seem to be rather a lack of street lighting in the area, so again I was mainly working with flash, though I did make a few exposures with available light, such as this:

Also taken at 1/60 second at ISO 2500 at 16mm, this was underexposed by a couple of stops, which Lightroom coped with pretty well, but much of the light was a nasty orange, only partly correctable. I’ve tried to get reasonably sensible skin tones with a colour temperature setting of 3313Km but the placard is noticeably pink.

Flash – as in this picture taken with the DX 18-105mm at its longest – around 158mm equivalent – does give a better and more predictable light – in this case at 5450K.

More pictures from the event: Budget Day Protest against Cuts & Austerity

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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