{"id":1723,"date":"2012-09-20T19:48:12","date_gmt":"2012-09-20T19:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=1723"},"modified":"2012-09-20T19:48:12","modified_gmt":"2012-09-20T19:48:12","slug":"carnival-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=1723","title":{"rendered":"Carnival 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nDancers at Notting Hill Carnival act up for the camera, 2012<\/small><\/p>\n

I’m not quite sure how many times I’ve photographed the Notting Hill Carnival. I didn’t go for many years perhaps because back in the 70s and 80s it had something of a bad reputation. But around the end of that decade I told myself that I was missing out on one of the major festivals in London, and it was time to go there and to take pictures.<\/p>\n

Then I travelled light and rather in disguise, packing a couple of Leica bodies (well, one was a Minolta CLE, one of my favourite cameras of all) along with a spare lens or two, a water bottle and film into an old khaki army surplus webbing haversack (you can still get them for around a fiver.) It was the film that took up most room, with perhaps a dozen cassettes of Ilford XP1 and half a dozen of colour neg. To save space I took them out of their plastic pots and packed them in bulk in plastic bags.<\/p>\n

I did find myself in a lot of densely packed crowds, where I hung the bag around my neck in front of me to keep it safe.\u00a0 Back then I made sure not to take anything with me that I would really miss – no wallet, no credit card etc, just a few pounds in cash. There was a lot of pushing and shoving at some points, and some people did lose bags.<\/p>\n

One year I was in a crowd were we were all pressed together close to one of the sound systems, when I suddenly realised that there was a hand in my trouser pocket and it wasn’t mine. I grabbed the guy by the wrist and slowly pulled it out of my pocket to find it clutching a wallet – but it wasn’t mine, and it was empty. In the middle of a crowd where many around me were possibly mates of his I decided it wasn’t a good time to make too much of a fuss.<\/p>\n

Now, more than 20 years on, most of the time carnival seems rather less dangerous, although things sometimes get a little ragged later on – but I’ve always gone home by them. This year I only went on the Sunday – Childrens’ Day – which is less crowded. And I went with my normal photographic bag and didn’t feel at all unsafe. Except from being smeared with chocolate or other materials that people on the carnival throw at each other. I did have to spend ten minutes when I got home using a damp cloth on my trousers.<\/p>\n

But somehow, carnival doesn’t quite see the same to me. Perhaps I’m getting older, but after a couple of hours I really felt I’d had enough.<\/p>\n

\"\u00a9<\/p>\n

Probably I should have had a Red Stripe and taken a rest. It really is a great event, and this year the weather was fine, and not too hot, but I think I get tired rather faster than I used to.<\/p>\n

\"\u00a9<\/p>\n

I was using both the D700 with the 16-35mm and the D800 with the 18-105mm. But perhaps I should have gone with a lighter bag and cameras more like the Leicas that I first went with – but I’ve still not really become fond of either the Leica M8 or the Fuji X100. Perhaps I should try using the M8 simply as a black and white camera – which it does pretty well. The X100 can work well, though too often I find myself trying to work out why it isn’t doing what I want it to do, even though I’ve updated the firmware which has improved it a lot. Somehow nothing is quite intuitive with it.<\/p>\n

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You can see more of my pictures from the afternoon in\u00a0 Notting Hill – Children’s Day<\/a> on My London Diary<\/em>.<\/p>\n

________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

My London Diary<\/a> : Buildings of London<\/a> : River Lea\/Lee Valley<\/a> : London’s Industrial Heritage<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.<\/small><\/p>\n

To order prints or reproduce images<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n

________________________________________________________<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dancers at Notting Hill Carnival act up for the camera, 2012 I’m not quite sure how many times I’ve photographed the Notting Hill Carnival. I didn’t go for many years perhaps because back in the 70s and 80s it had something of a bad reputation. But around the end of that decade I told myself … Continue reading Carnival 2012<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-own-work"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}