Flash mobs can be rather tricky things to photograph, particularly for those of us who find it difficult to be at the right place at the right time. According to the FAQ on the UK Flash Mob web site, a flash mob is “a sudden gathering of people into a crowd that do something unusual for a few minutes in unison and then disperse.” I photographed one of their events – the London start of a Flash Mob Global Pillow Fight in Leicester Square – earlier this year.
‘Stop Airport Expansion‘ was both the name of the group who had organised the event (and an earlier one to celebrate the opening of Hedatrow T5 that I missed) and the message they wanted to send to the elusive Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly, who has refused to visit local authorities or meet with local people who will be affected by airport expansion, particularly by a third runway at Heathrow. The ‘Stop Heathrow Airport Expansion Flashmob‘ took place outside the offices of the Department for Transport in Marsham St, though where she was at the time nobody seemed to know.
I’ve been opposed to the expansion of Heathrow as a local resident since I used to watch the aircraft low over the garden from my pram. The airport began with deception before my birth, pushed through in wartime (and diverting resources from the war effort) and has continued to grow and grow, repeatedly breaking promises that each new development will be the last. I photographed marches against the building of the third runway at Heathrow in 2003 as well as earlier this year.
People did appear fairly dramatically just before 11 am, although there were perhaps not quite enough of them to make a real mob.
And when someone (at right above) blew a whistle just before 11.02 (their clock was wrong) everyone took it as a signal to throw their planes, though they did pick them up and throw them again at around the correct moment. They had to pick up the planes in any case, as police had warned them they might otherwise be charged with littering.
Catching good pictures of paper planes in flight turned out to be surprisingly tricky. I’d fortunately realised there might be a problem in advance, and turned the D300 on to the high speed mode. Usually I leave the camera on the low speed continuous setting, which I’ve set using the custom setting d4 to be 3 frames per second. I find this is the fastest speed I can leave it on and reliably take a single exposure by a short shutter press that doesn’t jab and cause camera shake, while allowing me to take a sequence of images by holding my finger down.
Up till now I’ve also been using the 14 bit RAW setting, which restricts the maximum frame rate to slightly slower than this, at 2.5 fps. I’ve seen reports that there is very little advantage in using this compared to the 12 bit setting, but hadn’t found the time to test it out for myself. (I’ve continued to use RAW compression which I tested on the D200 and found made no discernible difference in my kind of pictures.) But waiting for the mob to flash, I’d remembered to set the bit depth down to 12 bit so I could shoot 12 bit RAW bursts at 8 frames per second.
You can see more of my efforts at photographing the Stop Heathrow Airport Expansion Flashmob on My London Diary as usual.
I didn’t notice any drop in quality in these files compared to the 14 bit ones, but the extra number of pictures on a card was significant (the manual suggests around 1.3 times as many.) I found I got almost exactly 100 files per gigabyte compared to around 79 using 14 bit, a very slightly smaller difference. I’ll perhaps get round to making some more careful comparisons of image quality for myslef shortly – and when I do will write more.
Even in 1/8th of a second, a paper plane moves a considerable distance, and catching them flying low with the added milliseconds of reaction time and shutter lag was a lottery in which I had no outstanding success. Of course I could have set something up, but I’m not that sort of photographer.