The start of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics provided a great opportunity for protesters against the Canadian Tar Sands and they took it. Trafalgar Square was celebrating the event with a giant screen and an ice sculpture and I think they had hoped this would attract the crowds. Unfortunately it didn’t.
It will soon all melt, just leaving a mess
But at least the Canadian Tar Sands Oil-ympics provided an hour or so of interest, next to Canada House – and you can see the pictures I took of the events and the medal ceremony on My London Diary, along with a little more about why people are protesting against the tar sands – and the companies who hope to profit from this environmentally disastrous project.
‘Shell’ get off to a good start in the relay
Perhaps it was rather better as an idea than in the actual execution and I found it hard to produce pictures that really satisfied me. Perhaps it didn’t help that the 24-70mm I’ve mainly been working with recently was in for repair (again after a couple of weeks.)
One of the first things I photographed seriously was sports, though I soon got bored with it.
A couple of the canoeing images I took around 35 years ago now did quite well at the time. The only reason I took them was really that I’d just bought a new lens, one of the first of a new generation of zoom lenses, a Tamron 70-220mm Adaptall, introduced in 1973.
As well as the novelty of the zoom (really only common on movie and TV cameras before – I’d used one working in the educational TV studio where I really started learning practically about photography a few years earlier – these lenses also incorporated a rather clever idea that in theory enabled you to use the same lens on cameras with different mounts. The lens came with its own mount, and you then bayoneted a slim adaptor on to that suit the camera you were using. Lenses were rather simpler things then, and apart from actually holding the lens in place, the only other linkage that cameras provided was a mechanical one, indicating the lens maximum aperture and stopping it down to the taking aperture when you pressed the shutter release.
It wasn’t a really bad lens, but unlike now, there was still a considerable gap in optical quality between prime lenses and zooms such as this, and after a year or two I sold this lens second-hand and bought a couple of superb primes (a 105mm and 200mm) that actually together weighed slightly less than the zoom. I think it was almost 20 years before I bought another zoom lens. Now I take perhaps 95% of my pictures on zooms.