I always enjoy photographing the annual Tibet Freedom March, although of course I would prefer it to be an event celebrating the achievement of freedom rather than bemoaning its loss. Although the spirit of Tibet is kept alive, China’s rise as to become the major world power seems to make any attempts to put pressure on it to ease conditions in Tibet likely to be ineffectual; but perhaps China will develop as a more democratic nation as it gains in wealth.
Coming in a generally wintry month here, the colour it brings makes a welcome change, and I think most years recently the sun has been out. Certainly this year London felt a little warmer than it has for some months as we gathered outside RIBA, opposite the Chinese embassy.
RIBA of course houses one of the largest collections of architectural photographs anywhere- between 700,000 and 1.5 million pictures – and more than 40,000 – not all photographs – are available on-line at RIBApix. That makes it almost as large an on-line collection as My London Diary, where you can see my pictures from this year’s Tibet Freedom March!
If you are “an up-and-coming architectural photographer” then you could consider the opportunity of putting your work on RIBApix
But back to Tibet and the march. As well as being very colourful (often rather too colourful for my taste, with those strong primaries of the Tibetan flag) the march tends to be fairly densely packed and also full of interest. It’s also relatively slow-moving. Taken together these things provide an ideal situation for the kind of close wide-angle work work in crowds that appeals to me.
So it was a good day to work with the 16-35mm, and I took quite a few frames at the wider end. But I could go even wider, putting the 10.5mm fisheye on the D300.
The 10.5mm is a full-frame fisheye, filling the whole sensor on the D300 and giving a diagonal field of view of 180 degrees (horizontally it is “only” a little over 140 degrees.) Its also a lens that lends itself to the use of various software tools to alter the perspective of the image. You can process the files to give a rectilinear panorama for example, though few subjects survive this treatment unscathed – rectilinear perspective seldom works above a roughly 100 degree angle of view.
So here is the march at Piccadilly Circus taken with the 10.5mm
and its a picture I quite like, but a click in Photoshop applies the Image Trends Inc ‘Fisheye-Hemi 2‘ filter to give a slightly different effect.
It produces a result that I think is more ‘natural’ looking, in particular reducing the distortion of the figure at the extreme left of the picture and eliminating the curvature on the placard. Probably a little over 50% of the pictures I take with the 10.5mm look better treated to this realignment, though I’m not sure that Reuters or the World Press Photo would approve.
It hasn’t actually eliminated all curvature, and it actually looks less distorted than a rectilinear version would. There are other alternatives to the Fisheye-Hemi plugin (some of which have the advantage of being free) but this is the one that most often works for me. It makes use of almost all the pixels in the image (losing a few in the corners) retaining the full width of the frame that I shot and almost all of the subject matter – the face that I placed at the left edge of the frame is still at the edge.
It works well in this case, particularly because I had the camera level when I took the picture, and so the lamp post and buildings at right of the frame become both straight and upright.
What is does lose is a little of the kind of outwards thrust and dynamic of the original image, where the woman in the centre really almost bursts out of the frame towards you. I was indeed very close to her when I took the picture; one of the problems of using this lens effectively is that you sometimes have to really invade people’s personal space. In marches where they are moving forwards and you are walking backwards as you take your pictures it can be difficult to avoid collisions!