Back in January I had a very busy Thursday, starting with an event on the other side of London to where I live, Stop Arming Israel picket HP at BETT, a picket by a group I’ve now photographed on quite a number of occasions. Most of their protests against Hewlett Packard’s support of the Israeli war machine have been outside HP’s offices in the middle of the City of London, but this was at ExCel on one of London’s former docks, well to the east of the centre. It’s an area I first photographed in the 1980s – with a few images you can see in my book ‘The Deserted Royals‘, though fortunately now much easier and faster to get to.
I spent an hour or so there taking pictures, then took a walk across the Lower Lea Crossing, from where I took the picture above of Bow Creek. It was a fine day for January, and decent weather for panoramas, though I would have liked rather more interesting clouds. Thanks to my recent computer problems I’ve not had the opportunity yet to process the panoramic images I made – so I’ll hopefully write about them later. Though I’m always rather loath to put a message on line “<small”>more pictures coming shortly” as I think there are still some such gaps waiting for me to fill as far back as October 2002. Really I will one day!
Next was a trip up west, to the Ritz and Mayfair, where I had expected to meet rather more members of Class War than the three who turned up for Class War visit ‘Rich London’. It was all just a little tamer than I had hoped for.
But it did make me late for what was the largest event of the day, the West Hendon march for Social Housing, in one of London’s north-west suburbs. It took just a little finding too, and had me cursing my smartphone as it showed me a black area instead of the map I’d told it to load. Paper maps have the advantage of not needing a signal. I was annoyed to have arrived just a minute or two too late for the photographs outside the community centre where the protesters had been holding a meeting, seeing them dispersing as I rounded the corner a hundred yards or more away.
Fortunately the best was yet to come, though there was around an hour of waiting around with relatively little to photograph. A few groups stood around outside the community centre talking, some with placards and banners, while others sensibly kept in the warm inside. I took a few pictures inside, had a free cup of the hot soup and talked to some of the protesters, many of whom I knew from other events. Finally it was time for the next part of the protest, the promised giant banner drop.
As you can read in West Hendon march for Social Housing there was then a rather long memorial event for a local war hero, the only female Sapper of WW1, who locals are hoping to commemorate in the area. It was an interesting story, and one which I did a little more Googling on before writing my piece for My London Diary, but I wandered off shortly before the end to take a few pictures of the various posters I’d seen on some of the flats.
It was getting steadily darker and darker, and I was trying out a new toy, a Neewer CN-216 LED light, which has 12 rows of 18 LEDs (which explains the 216 in its name.) Its a slightly chunky box, about 5.5 inches wide, 3.75″ tall and2.25″ deep with a reasonably sturdy fitting on the bottom to attach it and angle it up and down a bit on a hot shoe. Fitted with 6 AA batteries it weighs in at a smidgeon over a pound (458 grams.)
It doesn’t really produce a great deal of light, though noticeably more than the earlier and cheaper LED lights I’ve tried. Enough to make a difference when fairly close to you subject, but not really an alternative to flash at more than a few metres away, even when working at ISO 3200. When it got really dark I was working with it at 1/30th f2.8 ISO 3200.
In the image above, as the march turned off from the Edgware Rd, the CN-216 provided useful fill on the closer figures, while streetlights gave reasonable overall illumination. When a little later we got to darker streets and the CN-216 became the main light source it was less useful.
D700 16mm 1/15 f4 CN-216 ISO 3200
D800 18mm (27mm equiv), 1/60 f8 ISO 3200
The two pictures above were taken within a few seconds of each other, both in a dark area with inadequate street lighting. Both have had considerable burning and dodging to partly equalise the lighting across the image. The CN-216 is a rather larger light source than the flash, but still the normal inverse square law more or less applies, doubling the distance from the light giving only a quarter of the illumination.
I’d chosen 1/60th for the flash exposure to reduce or eliminate any motion blur and the kind of double image that often results from slow shutter speeds. There is a four stop difference between the two images (two stops in aperture and the same effect as two stops in the different shutter speeds) and it’s this that makes the main difference between the two images.
Another image taken with the aid of the CN-216, this time with the 16mm fisheye at 1/30 f2.8 close to the end of the march. Hendon seems to have some pretty dark roads. The LED light doesn’t of course cover the full 180 degree diagonal, and you can see some fall-off in the banner at upper left. This was an advantage for the figure at the right, as he needed less burning – and was so close that with an even light spread would probably have been to far burnt out. The girl at the centre, although a little further away was almost at the limit of the highlights.
The lens comes with a pair of diffusers, one plain the other an orange to convert the light from daylight to roughly tungsten. So far I’ve always used it with the daylight diffuser in place. Vignetting is noticeable with any wide-angle lens, but can be corrected with Lightroom, so isn’t a huge problem.
The CN-216 is just about powerful enough to be useful for this kind of work, and working with portraits at close distances you might sometimes even want to use the control wheel which dims the light rather than work as I did always on full.
Ideally I’d like a light with at least twice the output, especially since I have no really fast lenses for the Nikon. Usually the f4 16-35mm is fast enough, but rather limiting for this use. The two faster lenses I have are the 16mm f2.8 fisheye, a 20mm f2.8 and a60mm f2.8 Micro Nikkor. The CN-216 would be more useful with the Fuji XT-1 where I have a 35mm f1.4, 18mm f2.0 and 14mm f2.8 (52mm, 27mm and 21mm equivalents) as well as a f2.8 fisheye.
And the best thing about the CN-216? The price. If I believe the specifications, the light output is much the same as that from other models costing well over £100. Without batteries it cost me a little under £30 including postage from eBay.
The link for the story and more pictures again: West Hendon march for Social Housing
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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