New Year Of The Rooster: Celebrations in Soho on Sunday 13th February 2005 marked the beginning of the Chinese New Year on the previous Wednesday.
Here’s what I wrote back then, and a few of the pictures – with more of course still on-line on My London Diary.
Chinese New Year
Soho
Sunday 13th London was celebrating the Chinese New Year of the Rooster which started the previous Wednesday. Happy 4702 to all.
As a rooster myself I was pleased to read my horoscope for the coming year. Not that I believe such superstitions for a moment.
I used to enjoy the rather anarchic celebrations in Cinatown, but its now more of and ordeal, with far too many people coming in to watch and too much organisation.
Ken [Livingstone] may be proud of having got something done about Trafalgar Square and be keen to have as many official events with various communities as possible, but it was better when various groups just did what they wanted to.
This year we had a procession down the Charing Cross Road with crowds penned behind barriers. Spectacle rather than event.
I did the official bit in Trafalgar Square last year – dotting the eyes on the dragons and all, [this year I] decided to give it and those horribly ingratiating speeches from local dignitaries and politicians, all keen to say “kung heI fat choy!”, a miss.
As you can see, because of the crowds making photographing from any distance difficult I took many of these pictures using a fisheye lens, and had posted them without any attempt at altering the fisheye perspective.
In later years working with fisheye lenses I would probably have used a plugin to reduce the curvature these lenses produce. Unfortunately Imadio who sold the ‘Fisheye-Hemi’ plugin I then used went out of business, and the plugin no longer works, as it was written to check back to their web site every time it was used that I was a registered user. I feel rather cheated having paid for it and no longer being able to use it.
It’s possible to get the same – or similar – results in Photoshop without the plugin, but rather a pain to do so. Photoshop does offer an Adaptive Wide Angle filter, but this seems to produce excessive cropping of the image. Here’s my rough correction of the image above in which the image curvature is less pronounced. But it would be nice to have a plugin or Photoshop action which would do the job properly.
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