Feb 14th was a busy day for me, and a very wet one, not good news for those of us in Staines, where the Thames was still running very high, with water flowing slowly across the road in front of our house, and the sewage blocked for five days. Though we were fortunate that the ditch on the edge of the garden was still taking the flood water away. (It’s rising again as I write, almost 3 weeks later, despite a few nice dry days – another 8 inches and we will have significant flooding again in the area.)
It was a relief to get onto a train up to London and get away from it all for a few hours working, but I could have done without the rain reminding me of it and adding to my worries.
I’d only intended to pay a brief call to ‘One Billion Rising‘ in Trafalgar Square, part of an international day of protest over violence against women. I don’t usually bother with ‘photocalls’, often finding them rather boring, as this one was, but I did enjoy – despite the rain – meeting and photographing some of the women who had come to take part in the event.
It was only raining lightly when I arrived, but was it obvious from the start that umbrellas were going to be a major theme in my images. The only pictures that don’t feature them are a few of the dancers on the stage under cover, though even there, parts of the stage were wet and those dancing in front at ground level were doing so in shallow puddles.
Umbrellas, particularly coloured or patterned ones, do offer some potential to make pictures, but I was concentrating more on the people beneath them.
Also of course concentrating on trying to keep the front filter on my lens free from raindrops. I wasn’t 100% successful, but there were enough pictures were either there were none or they had the impact in the less essential areas of the images. In the top image, there is some slight blur and diffusion in a few areas on the right of the image, still visible at web size, but these don’t detract from the image.
They are less noticeable than when I first saw the image enlarged on my screen in Lightroom thanks to a little post-processing. Using the the local Adjustment Brush tool can reduce the effect. Increasing both the contrast and clarity in the area cuts down the effect of diffusion, and then the highlights and exposure can also be adjusted to bring the diffused area to more closely match its surroundings. The treatment needs a little tweaking for each area you use it on, but it’s convenient to set up a preset as a starting point – and mine has values:
Contrast +22
Highlights -22
Clarity +32
with all other settings at zero.
It’s just another reason why I don’t take a notebook computer out with me and send off files from location (or in this case the rather dryer setting of a nearby bar or coffee shop.) I need a good screen and plenty of time to get things at least approximately how they should be.
Of course it would help at least to some extent if I used an umbrella to keep drier while taking pictures. But I just don’t have enough hands and it also restricts mobility – and using a wide angle I just would not have been able to get close enough for some of these pictures holding a brolly. Using a wide angle – especially one with a large glass filter like the 77mm on the Nikon 16-35mm – also greatly increases the rain gathering power, and with wide-angles the lens hoods are of very limited use in protecting them from rain.
I did deliberately photograph one of the celebrities at the event, Bianca Jagger, of course holding an umbrella, and certainly it is a rather different image of her than some. But there were few others that I recognised (or recognised me.)
Story and more pictures at One Billion Rising – End Violence Against Women.
I didn’t really have time to stop and send off pictures in any case, as I needed to be away and doing other things. The first of which was just a few hundred yards down the road at Downing St. I wasn’t there to photography David Cameron, but someone far more famous (or at least Charlie X posing as someone more famous) Charlie Chaplin, who I’ve met and photographed at a few protests.
Charlie Chaplin against Climate Chaos was a one-man performance, and possibly because of the by now heavy rain, I was the only photographer in sight. And it was very much a performance, with Charlie keeping to his character in mime, which made it just a little difficult to communicate with each other.
Of course most photographers also do a little bit of mime, especially useful when abroad when you don’t speak the local language, or when working in noisy situations. I occasionally use gestures to ask if I may photograph someone, but much more often to thank someone whose picture I have taken.
There were really only a couple of pictures that I could think of to take in the situation, and you can see them with a few minor variations on My London Diary. I would have liked a few more people on the street to use in the background for some images, but apart from the police on the other side of the gates, there were only two other people on the pavement in this part of Whitehall in the five minutes or so I was there (one in red is almost entirely and deliberately behind the Climate Chaos poster) – I’ve never before seen it so empty.
One of these pictures has proved more popular than anything else I too on the day, though I think I was only making the best of a bad job. It certainly was a fine example of Climate Chaos, with a storm lashing London that would normally have hit the north of Scotland, but I don’t think I managed to capture this.
But I was very pleased having taken a few pictures to wave my goodbye and dash across the road for the bus to take me to my next appointment, for which I was already a few minutes late.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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