The Barnet Spring march had met at the oddly named Finchley Central station (it always seems to me to be in the middle of nowhere very much) with snow falling lightly and the temperature stuck around zero with a cold East wind bringing a little Siberia to England. The weather truly seemed determined to provide a pathetic fallacy for our economic and social conditions, with austerity and a whole raft of anti-social measures coming in to aid the cold in killing off the disabled and the poor. And in Barnet to freeze out local democracy in favour of the Orwellian-named ‘One Barnet‘, selling off local services to be provided though contracts with commercial providers, leaving little role for those elected once the contracts have been signed.
Surprisingly it was the council themselves and not protesters who compared the approach to Ryanair and easyJet, producing the epithet ‘easyCouncil‘ as if offering a low-quality service on the cheap was something to be proud of. More about Barnet and more pictures from the event at Barnet Spring – Save Local Democracy.
Of course I’d read the weather forecast and like most of the marchers had gone prepared, in my case adding a thermal long-sleeved vest and long-johns and an extra pair of socks to my normal winter gear. And I’ve found I can still use the Nikons with slightly thicker Polartec gloves, so I wasn’t too frozen, though hanging around waiting for the march to start wasn’t pleasant.
But having a couple of cameras hanging around my neck at least provides a reason to keep on the move which helps to stop me getting too cold, though I do tend to have my jacket open a little when its actually snowing – as it was fairly slightly – so I can slip the camera not in use inside it to keep dry. One big advantage of fitting your camera strap to the bottom of the camera is that lenses hang down and don’t usually attract raindrops or snowflakes as they do on a normal neck strap, but the big filter and minimal lens-hood of the 16-35mm make that a real magnet for them.
I’m just a little worried about taking my D800E out in the wet, as I still haven’t had the cracked window of the top-plate display replaced – when I took it into my normal repair company shortly after the small accident they told me they hadn’t been trained on these cameras and couldn’t handle it themselves, it would have to go back to Nikon. So it’s still just covered with some by now rather worn waterproof transparent tape, which I suspect is no longer that waterproof, and certainly rather less transparent in places. But I’ve also discovered that it’s rather easier to read the things I need to see on the rear panel by pressing the ‘Info’ button.
Once the march started the snow had eased off and I actually began to warm up a little, until we’d gone about a mile. I’d just started to try and take a few images to illustrate the winter conditions, stepping back a little to photograph over car roofs with an inch or two of snowy icing and the odd tree and patch of grass, when it really started to snow. And when the march turned around in North Finchley to head for Friern Barnet, it was really marching into a small blizzard.
Soon I couldn’t keep the lenses clear for long enough to take pictures, and so I did what any sensible photographer in the situation would have done, and as we were passing a bar I took shelter, a glass of beer and a short rest until the worst of the snow shower was over.
When I came out it was still snowing, but rather less, and I could still see the bus at the back of the march in the distance. I jumped on a local bus going in the same direction, and let it take me most of the distance – it was soon stuck in a queue of traffic a couple of hundred yards behind, and I sat on it eating a sandwich or two. Getting off a couple of stops before it reached its destination, the newly re-opened Friern Barnet Community Library – I’d been at the Victory Celebration a month earlier – I was able to run and get there just before the protesters arrived.
It was inside the library in the warm and with the breath of more than a hundred people adding to the humidity that one of the real problems of hefty glass like the Nikon lenses came to the fore. Having been thoroughly chilled to zero degrees for several hours, they soon began to steam up, quickly becoming more or less unusable. While the miniature optics of compact cameras and phones quickly adjust and warm up, the large elements in big lenses take literally hours to see clearly again.
Soon the only usable lens I had was the 10.5 semi-fisheye, and then that began to mist over as well. Probably the only solution is to take a compact camera as well and keep it warm in an inside pocket ready for interior use. Perhaps it’s time to update my ancient phone to one that can take pictures as well as make phone calls.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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