Stowage Now

I was going to meet a couple of friends for lunch in Greenwich today and stopped off in Deptford to photograph some of the areas I photographed back in the 1980s, including the scenes in yesterdays post Stowage, Deptford.

It was hardly possible to recognise the area which has almost completely changed. Apart from an Electricity sub-station on Stowage itself, about the only buildings left standing are a couple of pubs on Creek Road.

And sadly, one of them, The Hoy, open as a pub for a couple of hundred years,  now appears to be a trendy café, though I had neither time nor inclination to examine it more closely.

To the south of Creek Road there are still just a few of the old industrial properties, but they are now behind hoardings and the yards between them and the river a dense overgrown wilderness, doubtless soon to be replaced by flats.

Mostly the area is tall slabs with a lot of glass, and down the alleyway between them you can just see the Laban building.

Images in this post are panoramic with a roughly 146 degree horizontal angle of view, taken on the Nikon D800E.  They have an aspect ratio of roughly 1.5:1, and normally I make use of this to provide the equivalent of using a rising or falling front by cropping the image to around 1.9:1, but here I’ve used them without cropping.

With such a wide angle of view, on sunny days the sky varies considerably in brightness across the frame, and at times the sun is actually inside the frame.  With the bottom image, I made the exposure as the woman walked into the frame. Afterwards I moved slightly to put the front of the lens in the shade of the lamppost which is on the right edge of the image, but by then the woman had moved out of sight.

Quite a few of the panoramas I make start with a reaction to the scene like this, which I then try and re-make more carefully, particularly getting the camera more accurately level. With the D800E you can display visible markers at the centre of the right hand viewfinder edge and the bottom centre which show lines when the camera is tilted and a small triangle when the camera is level. Getting both to show a triangle can sometimes be difficult, but unless the camera is level both side to side and front to back it’s hard to get a straight and level horizon.

When I catch up with things, my full set of pictures from Deptford and Greenwich today will appear on My London Diary.


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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 taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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