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.