Brick Lane By Night

Last Saturday night I joined up with the people from London Photo Walk to go on an all night solstice walk. We covered about 23km over 11hrs or so. It was a long but extremely rewarding night and I look forward to doing it again next year.

Given that this took place all through the night exposures were all very long, generally 15-30 seconds. It was also quite difficult to even know exactly what you were pointing your lens at as it was so dark in some of the back alleys and so composition wasn't always straightforward. This meant that over the 11hrs I only took about 100 photos; but there was a definite benefit to this. It was a bit like shooting with film, you were forced to put a lot more thought into what you were doing. If you pressed the shutter at the wrong time then you wasted half a minute of your life, which may not sound like much but it is quite the motivator when the wind is blowing at three in the morning.

As I said, we covered a lot of ground that night but the four photos in this post are all from the ever fascinating Brick Lane; one of my favourite streets in the world. Endlessly interesting and always full of life I have spent countless hours walking it's length, generally in the dead of night, but this was the first time I had ever taken my camera with me. I think it paid dividends. It isn't very difficult to make great art look good and obviously street art lends itself to street photography, something I normally struggle with.

Except for the fox, each of the pictures here have undergone quite a lot of post processing to bring out the best in them, or, rather, conceal the worst in them. These pictures were quite busy and messy to start with and mostly what I have done is to crop them down and remove colours to hopefully simplify them and make them easier on the eye. The shot below is a great example of where the original exposure wasn't up to snuff. There was different coloured crap all over the floor, the edges of other artworks to either side and and some unattractive lintels over the top. I cropped out most of all that, made it black and white to remove the distracting colours and then just allowed the reds and yellows to come through to keep it simple. Hopefully the result is a more satisfying picture that allows you to focus on the graffiti. It's a cliche but less is often more.

Review of 2013....

Soooooooo, it has been rather a long time since my last post. This has been due to a number of reasons, partly laziness, partly lack of inspiration and frustration with the 365 Project, and partly because I have been in Romania for the last 3 weeks and internet connections there were few and far between. I will finish off the 365 Project, I have a bunch of photos on the back burner that I need to process and get written up and I will try to have that done by the end of the month. For now, I'm going to do one of those lazy Review of the Year posts with some of my favourite pictures from 2013. I won't include any from the period I haven't posted yet, you'll just have to be patient for those.

In 2014 I will be going back to my usual format of a post every fortnight or so. I think this gives me time to get some decent photos together and the words to go with them. I think the daily requirement of the 365 Project ultimately lowered the quality of what I do here, which was one of the reasons I became increasingly disenchanted with it. However, this does not foreshadow the year ahead, I am optimistic and enthusiastic about the blog for 2014. I have had 70,000 hits so far which is orders of magnitude more than I ever expected and so thank you to everyone who takes time out of their day to see what I've been up to. I'll try to raise the bar.

The last 12 months have been the most traumatic and difficult of my life, much of it self-inflicted, but there were certainly some good times too. Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me this far.

Gargoyle from inside the Natural History Museum, January.

View from Westminster Bridge, January.

Chain in Vienna, March.

St. Marco's piazza, Venice, March.

Venice, March. 

 

Parliament Square, London, May.

Pocketwatch, May.

Parliament Square, London, May.

 Dead flower, July.

 Olympic Park, September.

365 Project: Photo 244

This one actually took some doing. I was bored so I wondered into the Olympic Park to see if I could get a nice foreground for the sunset. For the first time in ages, though, the sunset was a rather muted affair and so I failed. As darkness fell the lights in the RUN sign outside the Copper Box became more prominent and so I tried to work with them for a while. Then it occurred to me that, although I'd been there for nearly an hour, I hadn't seen a single soul run by, just an endless procession of cars. All of a sudden a bus went by and I realised I could try to set this shot up - light trails and a juxtaposition of theme between the vehicle and the sign. Unfortunately, it was Sunday night and I had to wait for 35 minutes for the next bus. And so I waited. And waited. And waited. I passed the time by practising with cars and eventually the bus arrived and I got my shot. Annoyingly, I didn't have my tripod to hand so I think the focus is a bit soft but there was no sign of the proverbial second bus turning up and so I called it quits.

365 Project: Photo 061

The theme today was whimsical but I wasn't feeling very inspired by this, plus, I was on a London Photo Walk from Tower Bridge to Westminster and so I was always going to use one of my netter photos from that for today. The idea behind this walk was to do some night photography and so we met an hour or so before sunset, the best one we'd had in a couple of weeks, and made our way along the river. This shot is a 30 second exposure of St. Paul's cathedral from the South Bank. I had a boat move through the shot and it left a nice little light trail along the river which I'm quite fond of. I also like the way the water has smoothed itself out and the buoy is all blurred from bobbing about whilst the background remains crisp.

Starry, Starry Night

First of all, a spoiler. The last photo in this post is a very special one. It's not one of mine and in of itself it is unremarkable but its importance can't be understated. More later.

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At bloody last. For over one and a half years I had been waiting and I was finally going to get a chance. For 18 months I had been waiting to be in a rural location with a clear, cloud-free night. My goal was to take pictures of the stars and so I needed to be somewhere rural so as to avoid light pollution and I needed it to be cloudless for, well, obvious reasons. 

I am passionate about stars and the cosmos they sit in. I read more about physics, and astronomy in particular, than any other topic; more than the biology of my day job and the photography of my spare time. Asides from their preternatural beauty I love that they give up so many of their secrets simply by our study of the electro-magnetic radiation they give off; of which the visible light we can see is but one segment.

Within about 17 minutes of the Big Bang nearly all of the matter and anti-matter initially created in the universe had annihilated each other and left only hydrogen (75%) and helium (25%); all the other elements of the periodic table, which today make up about 2% of the matter in the universe, was created in the extreme conditions found inside stars where the intense temperature and pressure literally fuses protons together. What this means is that every single thing you can see is made of atoms that were created in the inferno of a star - we are all made of star dust.

In my first two photos here I have tried to capture the Milky Way, running top to bottom through the centre of the picture, with mixed success. The first one probably shows it most clearly but the exposure was a bit on the long side (188 seconds) so the stars are starting to move; they're in an awkward stage where they're not in sharp focus but they're not drawn out enough to be a proper star trail so it just looks a bit blurry, which isn't great. But I do like the garden being in the bottom of the frame as it gives the shot some context and sense of scale. What did surprise me was the orange glow in the lower portion of the sky, there was no hint of that with the naked eye. It looks as if I'm still in London and there is a city's worth of light pollution just around the corner but the nearest street light was about half a mile away in a small village, the nearest town was over 4 miles away; and yet there is still so much light pollution.

I tried to address the glow with the second picture by not including the horizon and pointing the camera straight up into the sky which seemed to do the trick although the exposure, again, is a little too long at 147 seconds.

The picture I was most pleased with was this next one, which was the first I took. I ended up taking five photos in all over the course of an hour starting at about 3am. Given this was my first attempt and, if I'm honest, I was quite drunk, I think it's not too bad. This was a long exposure of just over 9 minutes and so that nasty orange glow is back but this time the stars have moved enough for it to give a proper star trail effect. Next time I'm going to see if a soft ND grad filter will help with the orange cast at all. I deliberately aimed at Polaris to get a pin wheel effect; Polaris remains motionless in the centre and all the other stars have an increased degree of movement as they radiate out. What I really like about this photo is how the long streaks allow you to see the actual colour of the stars for what they are; very few are white, most of them are blue or a yellow/orange colour which you just can't make out with the naked eye. If you're reading this on your phone then you might struggle to make out the detail, I recommend having a proper look at home on your laptop (does anyone still have a desk top these days), click on the picture to engalactify it.

Overall I was quite pleased with how the session went, I learnt a lot. Hopefully I won't have to wait so long for my next chance to refine my technique. Next month we are going to Iceland and if there are clear skies then there will be a decent chance of seeing the aurora borealis so no prizes for guessing what I'll be blogging about in October.

I'm going to end this post with that special photo I promised you. It is a photo taken by a machine and inspired by one of my personal heroes. The machine was the Voyager 1 spacecraft, the person was Carl Sagan. In 1990 the primary mission was over and he finally persuaded NASA that this was an important image to try and get. NASA were reluctant as they would effectively have to point the camera at the sun and they were afraid it would fry it and, also, there was no scientific merit in the endeavour. Sagan knew better, though. You can see the Earth halfway down the brown streak on the right hand side. It is a pale blue dot (as this photo is now known) only  0.12 pixels in size; the streak itself is lens flare from the sun. This photo of our planet was taken by a man made object from 6 billion km away. Think about that; it's amazing. We did that. I'll let Dr. Sagan close up.....

'From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.'

Dr. Carl Sagan

Tower Bridge

Think of a London landmark.......

Got one? Okay, what was it? The Eye? The Gherkin? St. Pauls? Big Ben? (don't bother, pedants) I'm willing to wager many of you would have picked Tower Bridge, and not just because I've shoved a great big picture of it in your face. It is, truly, iconic; recognised the world over as a symbol not just of London but also the Victorians that built it. But why build it? The river Thames is the life blood of London but it is also a significant barrier. In the mid 19th century east London had become one of the largest ports in the world and there was a commensurate explosion in it's population; in fact, from 1831-1925 it had a higher population than any other city on Earth. All these people obviously needed to get around and at this point there was no crossing further west than London bridge; there was no Rotherhithe tunnel, Dartford tunnel or QEII bridge although the Blackwall tunnel wasn't far behind, it opened in 1897. This bottleneck led to massive congestion and journey times of several hours to cross the river. But it wasn't simply a matter of throwing up a standard issue bridge; this was one of the busiest ports in the world and the design had to allow for the passage of ships of all berths; with this in mind the City of London Corporation opened the design process to public competition.

Over 8 years fifty designs were submitted before one that fulfilled the stringent criteria was settled upon and the successful architect was one Horace Jones in collaboration with John Wolfe Barry. This was not without controversy however. Although there were submissions from established and proven engineers like Joseph Bazalgette, who designed the Victorian sewer system that I mentioned in a previous post, Jones' design was deemed the best. The only problem was that Jones himself was on the judging panel; so no conflict of interest there, then. Bazalgette didn't do too badly though, the Hammersmith bridge is one of his. Having muscled his way into the contract Jones actually died only one year into construction at which point George D. Stevenson took over, and that's probably a good thing. Jones' original design was merely to clad the structure in brick, it was Stevenson that decided to clad it in Cornish granite and Portland stone and add in the neo-Gothic elements that are very much a part of it's character to this day.

Right, let's break out some stats. 70,000 tons of concrete went into sinking the two piles beneath the towers, which themselves, combined with the walkways, needed 11,000 tons of steel to be completed. It's actually three bridges in one; two suspension bridges linked by a bascule bridge (bascule being French for see saw). Prior to 1976 the bascules were operated by steam power, the steam was collected in 6 accumulators so that there was always sufficient power at hand whenever a boat needed to get through. This was the most sophisticated design in the world at the time and meant that it only took about 60 seconds to raise the bascules to their maximum 86 degree elevation. The walkway across the top exists solely so that foot passengers could continue to cross the river when boats were passing but, due to lack of use, they were actually closed 16 years after opening. They were reopened again for tourists in 1982.

A panorama from the centre of the bridge. From left to right you have City Hall, the Shard, HMS Belfast, Tower 42, the Gherkin and the Tower of London. Click to en-awesomify.

The history of this bridge has not been without incident, no less than three planes have been flown between the bascules and the walkway; firstly, in 1912 pioneering avaitor Frank McLean flew down the Thames in a seaplane but, to the consternation of the local constabulary, he flew underneath London bridge and between the walkway and bascules of Tower Bridge. The second time was by an RAF pilot that was annoyed by a lack of celebration for the organisation's 50th birthday in 1968 and the last time was in 1973 when a somewhat unstable stockbroker pulled off the feat twice before flying on to the Lake District and killing himself as his plane crashed. And let's not forget the incident when a number 78 bus found itself rather near the gap as the bridge began to rise. The driver, Albert Gunton, took the split second decision to floor it and jump the small gap that had opened up.

My trips to the bridge have not been so eventful, I've never even seen it raised up, not for the lack of visiting though. Tower Bridge marks either the start or end point of possibly my favourite walk in all of London which basically consists of a loop along the north and south banks crossing at Tower Bridge and Westminster and I walk it regularly. The photos in this post are from two separate trips about two weeks apart. The daytime ones were taken on a random day off earlier in March and the night time ones were a couple of weeks earlier after a particularly crappy day at work; I was feeling rather stressed and could think of no better way to chill out than to go and visit one of my old buddies. I had wanted to get the sundial and fountain shots for a long time, unfortunately I was there at completely the wrong time of day so I was shooting into the sun. I need to go back in the early morning to get the best light for this direction.

I've also thrown in a picture of the Shard just because I've become slightly obsessed with that building. I can't wait for it to be completed and the viewing deck to be opened up to the public, the views will be spectacular - eleven months and counting. The last picture is clearly a long exposure but it's not the best as my tripod wasn't high enough to see over the railings so I had to do it handheld, which was less than ideal. Still, it leaves me something to aim for when I inevitably return, for return I will. This talismanic structure is, quite literally, one of my favourite places on the planet and I'm always excited to see it, like an old friend that I haven't seen or heard from for a year or two, but I know that time and distance won't have diminished our relationship. A lot of water may have flowed under the bridge but my love of this city grows stronger and for me there is no greater emblem of this than my old friend, the Victorian masterpiece, Tower Bridge.

Birthday Blog

One year. That's how long I have been writing this blog now. It is customary upon reaching such milestones to undertake a little naval gazing and so I beg your indulgence. This is my 42nd post in 52 weeks which, frankly, is a pace I sometimes struggle to keep up. My first post, was read by three people and one of those was probably me; I can now expect to get a few hundred readers per month, so thank you to all of you that do. To mark this auspicious occasion I have amassed 10 of the best photos posted from the last year. I have selected them based on a mixture of my own personal preference, comments I have received from you guys and which posts have got the most views. So, in no particular order.....

This is a view of the Nile from a hill top cafe in Aswan

Close up of hieroglyphs with very shallow depth of field

You need straight trunks and high branches to get this classic shot

Possibly my favourite picture I've ever taken

This is a close up of a goat's horn with it's out of focus fur as the background. I love the detail

This shows what can be achieved with a long exposure and a, mostly, steady hand

It took a lot of work, good timing and a good deal of luck to get this shot

I love the atmosphere in this shot of my wife in a Vietnam market

I like the depth of field in this one, it nicely sums up the look of a Vietnamese temple complex

This is Eleanor and Sue in the War museum in Ho Chin Minh City, the girls stance and the sobering content make for a compelling image

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.