Back in 2008 I photographed the London celebrations in Chinatown for the Year of the Rat, which took place on February 10th, 2008, and wrote this short text:
Chinese New Year Celebrations, Soho
Soho, Westminster, London. Sunday, 10 Feb, 2008
The Chinese New Year celebrations in London have rather got out of hand, with more and more people flooding in to Chinatown, and an incredible amount of sponshorship for the event. There is strong evidence in the programme, now 120 thick pages mainly of advertising, along with some of the most tedious photographs you will ever see. The genuinely useful content in it could have been handed out on a much more user-friendly 2 sides of A4.
But if you can avoid the worst of the crowds, it’s still a fun event and at times spectacular. But there are 51 other weekends of the year when its probably more interesting to come and see Chinatown how it really is.
http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2008/02/feb.htm#chinese
This year the celebrations are almost certain to be considerably more muted and mainly on-line. The Chinese New Year is actually in two days time on 12 Feb and in more normal times would have been celebrated next Sunday rather like in 2008 with crowds in Soho and a procession, with events in Trafalgar Square and Leiscester Square. But for the Year of the Ox I think you will have to make do with a virtual celebration – and perhaps a Chinese takeaway.
It’s a while since I’ve actually gone to the celebrations in Soho. Said to be the largest celebrations of the New Year outside Asia, the event has become far too crowded for me, and frustrating to try to photograph. Back in 2008 I went early, before the crowds built up, but later it became very hard to get the pictures I wanted.
Using a fisheye lens did enable me to find a little space where there was really none; some of these pictures I ‘de-fished’ to give straight verticals but others I left with the obvious curvature. But more of the pictures were taken with the 12-24mm Sigma lens, giving a very wide rectilinear view even on the DX Nikon D200 I was then using.
Some of the other images – including three here – were taken on a Leica M8, mainly with a 35mm Summilux F1.4 lens. Although this was fine when taking pictures, it was an older lens and required considerable fiddling with software to get usable results, as not only did the sensor vignette badly, but the vignetting came with colour casts.
The M8 was a good black and white camera, but something of a disaster with colour. Leica and most early reviewers had failed to notice that because the M8 sensor had no IR filter it recorded much black clothing as strongly magenta, and there were other incorrect colours. The company eventually supplied those who had bought the camera with two IR cut filters, but that limited my choice of lenses to two – and one of my favourite lenses could not take a filter.
Given those limitations, the M8 was fine to use, with a simple interface that enabled you to take still pictures without the huge thick manuals that most digital cameras need. But I soon get fed up with all the hassle of processing the images, and got rid of it. It was an expensive experience that soured my whole view of Leica, and why I now use Fuji cameras rather than Leica.
We can also wish ourselves Happy New Year “Xin Nian Kuai Le” or “San Nin Faai Lok” and hope for ‘Happiness and prosperity!’ doing our best to pronounce 恭喜发财 / 恭喜發財, something like ‘gong-hey faa-choy‘
Chinese New Year Celebrations, Soho
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.