The Climate Emergency Bike Ride organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change last Saturday morning was pretty straightforward to photograph. It can sometimes be useful to actually go on a bike when photographing bike rides, but it wasn’t convenient to do this on Saturday as I was going on to photograph other things where a bike would have been very much in the way.
Of course I could have left my bike somewhere locked up, but in London I normally like to use my folding bike, and these are very attractive to bike thieves because of their relatively high value and being so easy to transport away in a car boot or the back of a van. The big advantage of the folder for me is that it is so easy to put it onto a train – including the London Underground.
The start of the ride – sun right behind the riders
Anyway, I was without a bike, so an essential piece of research before the event was to find out the important places to be on the route and work out how I could get to these. Fortunately for this ride it turned out to be pretty simple – from the start at Lincolns Inn Fields I could go with the bikes the few hundred yards to Holborn Station, jump on a Piccadilly line train to Picadilly Circus and jog the quarter mile from there to the first stop outside BP’s Offices in St James’s Square in time for the ride to arrive.
I was waiting at St James’s Square when the ride arrived
Then it was only a few yards to the next call for the ride. From there I could make my way back to Piccadilly Circus and on to Marble Arch with plenty of time to spare for the bikes to arrive at the end of their demonstration.
The end of the ride at Hyde Park
One thing I’ve learnt is to avoid trying to use buses when moving from one part of a demonstration to another. Marches or bike rides both tend to cause traffic chaos, and it can be extremely frustrating to be sitting on a bus in a traffic jam unable to get where you want to be.
Advance planning is also needed because some weekends the London Underground system has large parts shut down for engineering works, so I check Underground (and bus) journeys on the Transport for London web site. It isn’t infallible – last Saturday it was telling me I couldn’t use the train from home up to London which was actually running normally, and it isn’t unusual for it to suggest completely nonsensical routes. Particularly if I intend to photograph several events on the same day, the actual working out of the journeys between them can take an hour or two.
Everything worked out fine on Saturday, and I got to the right places on time, even managing to fit in a few more photos on the way.
The sun was not far out of the frame for this image
The only real photographic problems were at the start of the ride in Lincolns Inn Fields where a low winter sun was shining from behind the riders. Even the fairly effective lens hood on my 55-200 zoom had to be augmented by a carefully held hand, while those on the wider zooms are pretty ineffectual at the best of times. But by working slightly from one side and keeping a careful eye in the viewfinder for flare I was able to get some decent pictures making use of the lighting – and of course using fill-flash to bring out some shadow detail.
Using flash also creates problems, particularly because cyclists – like the police – tend to have lots of bits of reflective clothing as well as other reflectors on their bikes. Often quite a little work is needed in Lightroom to tame these images, and that ‘magic’ highlight removal tool got a fair bit of exercise on images like these:
You can read more about the demonstration, part of a day of actions over Climate Change aimed at pressing the government to take effective action at the Copenhagen talks and in its policies here, on My London Diary, where there are also more pictures from the event.