Tag: Year of the Rooster

Chinese New Year – Soho 2005

Chinese New Year – Soho: On Sunday 13th February 2005 I went to Soho to photograph the Chinese New Year Parade and festivities in Soho’s Chinatown. It wasn’t quite the last time I photographed the event, but was the last time I tried to cover it seriously – the following couple of years I did go and take a few pictures in Soho, but 20 years ago this was my last major coverage, and the piece I wrote for My London Diary explains why.

Chinese New Year - Soho 2005

Like all of my posts at the time it was published without capitals and separated from the pictures which accompanied it, making it rather less accessible. It had made some kind of sense when I started the site around 2000, but as I began to put longer articles and more pictures on line the site was in need of a redesign, which I finally got around to in 2007-8.

Chinese New Year - Soho 2005

Ken Livingstone, the leader of the Greater London Council from 1981 until its spiteful abolition by Margaret Thatcher in 1986 leaving London without effective overall government for 14 lost years had beaten the Labour Party and the Tories to become Greater London’s first Mayor, running as an Independent in 2000, and London began to come together again.

Chinese New Year - Soho 2005
The Year of the Rooster – Chinese man on bicycle with rooster

The success of his first term in office led to him being adopted as Labour candidate for the 2004 Mayoral election. Despite his opposition in many areas – notably the Iraq war – to New Labour, the party knew they could not beat him, and he had had another successful term for London.

Chinese New Year - Soho 2005

But by the end of the term some of his policies had become unpopular among many and a highly successful campaign for Boris Johnson – complete with false allegations and misinformation – led to his defeat in 2008. Standing again for Labour against Johnson in 2012 he lost again, defeated largely by media bias and false claims by the Johnson campaign that he was guilty of tax evasion and by some Jewish Labour supporters of antisemitism following some careless remarks.

Livingstone put much effort into bringing London’s varied ethnic groups together, giving official support – as he had in the GLC – to anti-racism policies and various cultural events. By pedestrianising the North Terrace of Trafalgar Square in 2003 he revived the space for Londoners to celebrate diverse cultural events including St Patrick’s Day and the Chinese New Year. But this also changed the nature of these celebrations.

Here is the piece I wrote in 2005 – with the usual corrections.

Chinese New Year – Soho,

Sunday 13th February 2005 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 Chinatown, but it’s now more of an ordeal, with far too many people coming in to watch and too much organisation.

Ken 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, decided to give it and those horribly ingratiating speeches from local dignitaries and politicians, all keen to say “Kung Hei Fat Choy!“, a miss.

However, if developers Rosewheel get their way, Chinatown may not survive for much longer. Today in Chinatown things were much as before, swirling crowds and lots of excitement.

I joined them to photograph a couple of lions in action, then felt I’d had enough and went home.

Many more pictures on My London Diary.

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Chinese New Year 2005

Chinese New Year 2005

On Sunday 13th 2005, 17 years ago, London was celebrating the Chinese New Year of the Rooster which started the previous Wednesday – it was 4072.

Chinese New Year in Soho is something I’ve avoided in more recent years – as I wrote in 2005: “I used to enjoy the rather anarchic celebrations in Chinatown, but it’s now more of an ordeal, with far too many people coming in to watch and too much organisation.”

Trying to photograph in such crowded situations was a problem, and one I confronted in two main ways in 2005, something reflected in the two pictures above. At the top is a picture taken standing back some distance with a telephoto lens, while the lower picture is taken with a fisheye lens, both on a Nikon D70 DX camera.

De-fished version

Usually now when I use the a fisheye lens like this, I would convert the perspective to give straight verticals – as in the above image. But back in 2005 I didn’t have a good plug-in to do this conversion, and although it was possible with various programmes I was using for making panoramas it was a rather time-consuming process.

For this particular event I rather liked the fisheye effect, at least in some pictures. Although it does clearly misrepresent those faces close to the edges of the picture, for me it pulls the eye towards the centre of the picture and perhaps gives a greater impression of the crowding I was working in.

A small problem is that the image you see in the viewfinder is the fisheye one, and not that in the ‘de-fished’ version. But as you can see, the fisheye image which you see has the same horizontal limits at the centre of both the horizontal and vertical sides, with just a little of the image towards the four corners being lost. It’s still possible to frame accurately when working.

It’s not I think correct to call the effect of the fisheye lens ‘distortion’. It is simply a different way of recording the subject on a flat rectangle. Most fisheyes I’ve used (and I own four different examples, for DX and full-frame Nikon, for Fuji and for micro 4/3) seem actually to have rather less actual distortion than my ultra-wide rectilinear (i.e. ‘normal’) lenses.

In the de-fished image you can see that as well as the verticals of the building being straight, people at the edges of the picture are also shown naturally, unlike in the fisheye version. I was also taking some pictures with an ultra-wide 12-24mm lens (equivalent to 18-36mm full-frame) and with that at its widest faces at the edge would have been rendered a little stretched out horizontally.


I’m not sure what some major agencies would make of conversions using software like this, whether they would regard it as an unacceptable alteration of the image. For me its just one of many acceptable corrections of the image, but clearly it does alter the image as recorded by the camera. It would be possible to design a specialised wide-angle camera which carried out the correction in firmware but the market for this would probably be small. Rather it could be provided into normal digital cameras as an option – far more useful than all those special effects which clutter the menus on many cameras now.

More pictures on My London Diary – scroll down a little from the top of the page.