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Thames Path Panoramas – Vauxhall to Wandsworth 2014

Thames Path Panoramas: Back in January 2013 I had photographed and taken part in a rather less bloody re-enactment of the Epiphany bloody armed insurrection by Thomas Venner and fellow Fifth Monarchists against the re-imposition of the monarchy in 1661 being performed by Class War for film director Suzy Gillett. I’d tried hard to avoid getting in the way of the camera but do appear for a few seconds as the insurrection made its way to seize St Paul’s Cathedral.

On Sunday 5th January, a year less a day later I and others involved were invited to a private afternoon screening of the film at the Cinema Museum close to the Elephant & Castle. As it was a fine day I went up some hours earlier to walk and photograph a little nearby section of the Thames Path.

I’d been making panoramic photographs since the 1980s, at first by cutting and mounting together a few prints from black and white images. Back in 1991 I’d bought my first panoramic camera, a Japanese Widelux F8 with a lens that swings around while making a picture on 35mm film, held in a curve so that the centre of the lens remains at a constant distance from the film. Later I bought several more similar but much cheaper cameras made in Russia and a Chinese beast taking 120 film.

These cameras all produced a very wide angle of view – around 120 or 130 degrees – but with a different perspective to “normal” cameras, with some characteristic curvature of objects. The normal rectilinear view stretches out objects at the edges of the frame and is only really usable up to around a 90 degree angle of view. Later I did work with a Hassleblad X-Pan camera and with a 30mm lens which gives a 94 degree horizontal view – around the maximum usable for a rectilinear view.

Digital methods changed the game. At first I used a film scanner and software that enabled me to merge several scanned images. Then things became even easier when I shifted to a digital camera. For projects such as ‘The Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood‘ I combined up to around 8 different 12.3Mp digital images form a Nikon D300 to make very large prints with wide angles of view.

But by 2014 I was working with a Nikon D800E and it had occurred to me that there was a simpler solution with its 36.3Mp images. I could use the 16mm Nikon fisheye which gives 180 degree diagonal coverage filling the frame and then convert these images digitally from their fisheye projection to the more friendly cylindrical projection of my panoramic cameras.

I could now make panoramas almost as easily as taking any other images, capturing moving as well as static scenes with ease. For most panoramic images it is important to have the camera level, and the D800E had nice clear indicators that could be displayed in the viewfinder to ensure this, and with an f2.8 lens tripods became a thing of the past.

For these images I used the incredibly flexible PTGui software, but later found the simpler Fish-Eye Hemi plugin for Lightroom more convenient, though PTGui allows some interesting options. Unfortunately this plugin is no longer available, though I hope it or a similar plugin will be made available again. Using it you transform the images without any loss of image at the centres of both horizontal and vertical sides so you can visualise what will be in your final image when looking at the viewfinder while taking images.

Many more pictures at Thames Path Panoramas.

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Childrens’ Day at Notting Hlll – 2010

Childrens’ Day at Notting Hlll: Sunday 29th August 2010 was the first day of the two day festival though it’s called Childrens’ Day there are also plenty of adults there and sometimes having some rather adult fun. You will fine rather more pictures of children in the collection on My London Diary than in this post.

It does have the advantage of being just a little less crowded than the main Monday of carnival, when even though I try to avoid the most crowded places where it’s hard to move let along take photographs, but there is perhaps just a little less excitement and mayhem.

But by 2010, the carnival had begun to lose its charm for me and was no longer one of those dates entered into my calendar at the beginning of the year, and I had decided only to go on the slightly quieter (it’s relative) day of the year.

The sound is always a vital part of carnival, but can be a threat to health. When the beat makes your internal organs jump up and down and you can see the tarmac vibrating you know its really a bit too loud. And it could take several days for the pain in my ears to dissipate and normal – or at least near-normal – hearing return.

When I was young I seemed to recover but I think now the changes could well be permanent. My hearing isn’t perfect and some of those high notes are long gone, but its good enough to get by most of the time and I don’t want to risk it more.

I used to laugh a bit at the TV crews at carnival wearing ear protectors and think they were missing the spirit of it, but at least they were sensible. But I don’t think I could have produced the work I did wearing them.

2010 wasn’t the final carnival I attended – and one year I might just go again though I’ve not done so since 2011. But if I do I think I’d probably only stay long enough to drink a can or two of Red Stripe and probably take few pictures.

As I commented on My London Diary I took only one DSLR camera – the Exif Data remings me it was a Nikon D700 – and one lens, a Sigma 24.0-70.0mm f/2.8 and I worked all the time in full-frame Raw mode. The great majority of the pictures were made within 1-2 metres from the subject so people were very aware a photographer was pointing a large camera and lens at them, though many were too engaged in what they were doing to act up for the camera.

I was pleased with the pictures, but the small versions on My London Diary don’t really do them justice. So I’ve included a large one at the top of the post. Like some of the other pictures it was taken in a heavy shower that sent many of those watching rushing for cover but the carnival continued. If you double click on the top image it should open at a larger size on its own page in your browser.

More on My London Diary at Notting Hill Carnival.

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The Perfect Camera

I recently came across a post on Petapixel, My 10 Year Search for the Perfect Camera Brought Me Back to APS-C written by international photographer and filmmaker based in San Francisco Kien Lam. Although I try to avoid thinking too much about gear, like most photographers I suffer from a considerable amount of insecurity and the feeling that somehow a better camera or lens would improve my work.

It’s a feeling that over the years has led me to buy numerous cameras and lenses, most of which now lie unused in cupboards either because I can’t be bothered to sell them, or because of a feeling that one day I might just take them out and use them again.

Things were rather easier in the days of film, and there were usually what seemed to be very good reasons to change to a new camera. I got fed up with the Zenith B because it was a clunky beast that required so much force to wind on film that it was easy to rip a film in two. Its one camera I didn’t hang on to when I moved to the Olympus OM1, which compared to it seemed an almost perfect camera – and one I used until various bits fell off and I replaced it with an OM4. I still have two of these, to my mind still the most perfect cameras of their type.

But I still bought other cameras. For some types of photography I preferred a rangefinder Leica. Starting with a battered secondhand Leica M2, I later bought a nearly new Minolta CLE, another great camera with decent exposure metering well before Leica’s own. Leica’s shutter was noisy and intrusive compared to the Hexar F, another camera I loved, though its fixed 35mm lens wasn’t quite wide enough. The main problem I had with its silent mode was that I was often not sure if I’d actually taken a picture or not.

Then there were cameras of a more specialist nature, each with their uses. Several swing lens panoramic models, medium format and even 4×5″ cameras, and another favourite, the Hassleblad X-Pan.

The came digital. After some compact cameras I started seriously with the Nikon D100. The pictures were fine but the viewfinder was abysmal, reason enough to upgrade to D70, then the D200 when that came out. Then the D300… Cameras were beginning to seem disposable, each new model offering more pixels. Then came full-frame, and really I should have resisted, but I didn’t. I didn’t really need the extra pixels, but again the viewfinder was better, though I ended up taking a lot of images in DX mode and enjoying being able to view outside the frame lines.

Most of those digital cameras I’ve actually passed on to friends or swapped including the disastrous Leica M8 with its colour problems. It was that swap that really got me into Fuji, with the X Pro1. A nice optical viewfinder but rather poor with lenses outside its range which needed th electronic version.

I’ve still got my Nikon kit, two working bodies, though a couple went beyond economic repair, and various lenses. The D810 is now mainly used to ‘scan’ negatives, though occasionally taken out until the virus lockdown for its low light capability. But I find the kit too heavy for me now, and looked around for a lighter system.

For a while I used an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II which seemed in some ways very similar to my old and well-loved OM film cameras. Some fine lenses – both Olympus and Panasonic Leica – but just occasionally I felt there was something lacking in the images from the smaller sensor.

Eventually I went back to APS-C, and like Kien Lam to Fuji, though to the less expensive options of a Fuji XT-1 and an XT-30. It was the latter than decided it for me, roughly as small and as light as the Olympus, and I bought it rather than commit to Olympus by buying a second Olympus body. Unlike Kien Lam I’m not searching for a perfect camera, and I certainly spend a lot of time swearing at the Fuji cameras with their complicated buttons and menus. But the lenses are excellent (though some are rather expensive) and I’ve yet to find myself thinking that any particular image would have been better on full-frame.