Broadway Market

A few weeks ago you may have seen this graffiti laden post on the Regent's Canal, well I also spent an hour or so walking down Broadway Market and these are a few shots of what I came across. As you may remember, I was part of a much larger group, London Photo Walk, and as we progressed through the market we were certainly getting lots of strange looks.

My favourite is this first one of the dog. He was stood like that for over five minutes waiting for his master to come out of what I think was a chip shop. It caught the eye of several people and I wasn't the only person to capture it. If you're so inclined you can anthropomorphise all sorts of emotions and stories onto the little guy. Unfortunately, when the owner did emerge it turned out to be a rather unpleasant drunken tramp type chap.

This picture of a tower of suitcases isn't quite the one I wanted; what I wanted was to be right at the base of the tower looking up with a seemingly huge mountain of suitcases filling the picture. It was just outside a little flea market shop and stood about 6 feet high; I got down on the frozen concrete floor to try and get it right. If it had been warmer I could have composed it better - getting the tower square on, controlling the depth of field more and so on - as it was I just wanted to quickly get up off of the ice cold ground. This is my next best effort. It's retro look could well lend itself to the texturing/antiquing effect that I blogged about previously.

This last one is a curious one. I'm not really sure why I like it, I just do. The overcast conditions helped bring out the rich colours in the brickwork and obviously the painting is an unusual one. Maybe next week I'll look at it and decide it's rubbish but, for now, it remains.

Painting With Light

Here's one hot off of the press for you. These pictures have literally just been taken and are still a bit wet so handle with care.

For a few weeks now I've been meaning to try out a new technique known as light painting. This is basically where you black out a room, or go out at night, and then use a long exposure and a torch or other light source to paint an image of some kind. This is basically my hallway (I couldn't use the front room because Sue wanted to watch Men In Black) with me sat on the floor using a mixture of phone and iPod to 'paint' with. I set up the remote within reach of Sue and got her to control the exposure in bulb mode which basically means she pressed a button every time I yelled Now! She was thrilled to be my assistant for this.

Anyway, after a lot of trial and error, I almost managed to get something passable. The trick lies in being able to visualise what you've already painted because you can't see it. I also needed to learn to cover the light with my hand to, effectively, take the pen off the paper so to speak. There's definitely a knack to this. I've thrown in one or two of my botched attempts and I need way more practice but hopefully you'll be able to see what I was aiming for. And thank you to Sue for being my glamorous, sofa-based assistant.

A woeful first attempt

This heart is a bit abstract but you get the picture

Smiley face? Just.

Regent's Canal

Reflection of a gas holder in the frozen surface of the canal

Another week brings me to another one of London's canals. Last Saturday saw me up and out in the biting cold to join in on my first ever London Photo Walk. What they seem to do is meet up every six weeks or so and wander along a predetermined picturesque route somewhere in the capital. There's no fee or dues to be paid, it's just a group of like minded people out and about with their cameras - it was great.

The route started at London Fields, went down through Broadway market and then out along Regent's canal before returning back to London Fields. At first I felt pretty self-conscious, I get nervous about street photography at the best of times nevermind when there's scores of strangers around and it's your first time at a new event. This wasn't helped by the fact that I was feeling a bit tender from the night before. The jitters quickly disappeared though as being in such a large group was actually a big help, everywhere I looked there was someone with a camera in front of their face snapping away.

Not only did this large group help give me a bit of a safety-in-numbers style boost in confidence but they also gave me lots of good ideas. If I saw someone near me take a shot then I wanted to know what it was of, sneaking a peak over their shoulder to see what they had captured. This gave me a fresh perspective on scenes that I might otherwise have passed over unnoticed.

The Regent's Canal is linked to the Lea Navigation canal that I blogged about a few weeks ago near the Olympic Park via the Hertford Union Canal. The canal itself was probably a little less pleasant than the Lea, perhaps not benefiting from an Olympic inspired clean up. One similarity between the two though was an array of excellent graffiti; I know many consider this nothing more than vandalism but, in the right setting, it's rapidly becoming one of my favourite art forms. I suspect that, as I and numerous others on the walk were photographing the big bird motif, we may well have caught the artist in the act. It looked a lot brighter than everything else in the area and the man standing furtively next to it with a carrier bag of what could well have been spray cans was behaving very strangely. He clearly didn't look comfortable having people paying close attention to what he was doing, but at the same time he didn't leave, he must have had more work to do.

The only draw back to this excellent event was the biting cold. Those that know me will know that I love the cold, it's very much my sort of weather; this was a different matter however. To be able to use my camera properly I can't be wearing gloves, they're too clunky and I can't feel my way around the camera. No gloves and two hours at sub zero temperatures left my hands a little worse for wear. For the last half hour I couldn't feel the shutter button and often actually had to watch what my fingers were doing to know what I was up to. When I text my wife once it was over it took me nearly five minutes to write a simple message because I couldn't really move my fingers. Making a fist as quickly as I could took me nearly five seconds and my little finger wouldn't move at all. My hands were in not inconsiderable amounts of pain into the next day and holding anything with them was particularly painful.

I now own a lovely pair of fingerless gloves.

Snow What?

Well, it finally happened. We've had a very temperate winter so far here in the UK, one of the warmest on record, but this week Europe has been gripped by particularly cold Siberian weather fronts and some snow has finally made it to the majority of Britain, even the south east. So for those of us that have been out and about in the white stuff here is a post that's as fresh as the snow depicted. These images were hand reared on Hampstead Heath, they have been fed only the choicest, natural, organic feeds and were humanely dispatched in a low stress environment. They were rapidly blogged and are to be consumed with 48 hours for the freshest flavour.

My favourites are the panoramas (click them to enamazingify) and this first one. As soon as I saw everyone sledging down the hill I was put in mind of this classic painting by L.S. Lowry.