Last Saturday’s Iranian demonstration in Parliament Square was in several ways an easy event to photograph, not least since the organisers were very keen to have the press take pictures and had organised the event in a way that made it easy for us to work.
Working in Parliament Square gives you a very obvious way of showing where you are in your pictures, with the gothic clock-tower of Big Ben instantly recognisable around the world. I’ve taken many images with it in over the years, sometimes having to perform some fairly extreme contortions to do so, but here it was easy to satisfy my desire to include it in some images.
Most of the pictures were taken on a Nikon D300 with the Nikon 18-200mm lens, (27-300 equivalent) and it was a pleasure to be working with this again and not to have to change lenses to zoom in to a tight head shot. I really do prefer the D700, but lenses for that are rather more conservative in zoom range (and considerably more expensive.) I was using the D700 for the more extreme wide-angle view, with the Sigma 12-24mm. Its a nice lens, and still going strong after six years of my normal abuse; though it did need a facelift when the front element got a few small craters in it – the element is too bulbous to allow you to protect it with a filter.
The 12-24 is a very useful lens on DX format – where it becomes equivalent to 18-36mm, but on full frame it is just a bit too extreme at the wide end. The distortion at 12mm is almost always a noticeable problem, and I really need to avoid the last few mm of focal length. So it’s useful zoom range is really only something like 16-24mm. I hope soon to replace this by Nikon’s latest 16-35/4 VR zoom – supposedly available here from Feb 19, though I don’t know yet when my dealer will get supplies.
Given the 1.5x factor with the DX format it really makes more sense to use this with longer lenses. If Sigma manage to sort out my 24-70mm that would become a 36-105 equivalent on the DX body, useful whenever I need it’s f2.8 aperture, but otherwise the 18-200 is just so versatile.
Back to the demo – as usual more about it and more pictures on My London Diary – in the end it’s people that make pictures interesting for me, and sometimes it’s just a matter of expression and fitting them in to the overall picture. But who could fail with this face?
Although getting the right combination with the placard of Maryam Radjavi did take a little bit of doing – and this was probably about my twentieth attempt.
Here’s a slightly less obvious picture of Big Ben, along with some street theatre the protest organisers had laid on for the press.
This was quite tricky to photograph, mainly because a dozen or more photographers and a couple of guys with video cameras were also trying to get the same picture. You have to learn to pick the right place, get there before the rest and stay there until you are sure you have your picture. Sometimes in situations like this the very wide angle of the 12-24 does come in handy, because if you move back with a longer lens someone is almost bound to jump in front of you.
