I’ve just about recovered from my first all-night photowalk, organised by the lovely people at London Flickr Meetups. We started off just before sunset on Saturday night, going all the way through to sunrise the next morning. It’s an annual event to coincide roughly with the shortest night, the summer solstice on 21 June.

There were about 15 of us who started off near Tower Bridge to catch the sun going down around quarter to nine, and after that we headed through London – up over London Bridge to Monument, St Paul’s, along Fleet Street and up to Covent Garden, Leicester Square (where we stopped in the early hours for some Chinese!), on through Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, catching sunrise behind the London Eye from Westminster Bridge. By that time – sunrise was scheduled for 4.42am – our group had come down to 12, but another (rival!) group joined us on the bridge instead of their original location once they realised they wouldn’t have time to get there.

Conditions weren’t perfect for either sunset or sunrise, with clouds just in the way, but I think we managed to get some decent shots regardless. (If in doubt, expose for 30 seconds and it’ll look great, was the lesson I learned on the walk!) You play the hand you’re dealt, I guess, even if it involves an ugly platform stationed in the middle of the Thames that wasn’t there when the walk organiser did his recce!

My thanks go to Adrian for organising the walk brilliantly – he’s got some brilliant shots from the night, and you can see everyone’s here. I’m already looking forward to next year!

I posted the other day about the Elephant Parade in London, a series of 260 small elephant statues dispersed around the capital in herds or alone, indoors and out, to raise awareness of the plight of the Asian elephant. They’re a big hit not only with the general public, who seem to enjoy either climbing on or painting on them depending on mood, but also with photographers – whenever I’ve been out to shoot them, I’ve not been alone.

I mentioned also the difficulty in taking good photos of the buggers – a quick look through the Elephant Parade London 2010 group pool shows a lot of entirely uninspiring shots. An easy excuse is that a lot of them seem to be with point-and-shoots, but then again I’ve seen some exceptional photos coming out of non-DSLR cameras, so it’s a lazy excuse at best.

Lazy is what I think describes most of these shots. There is little attempt to think about composition beyond ‘get it all in shot’. When the comments I hear making about the elephants is often to do with their ‘character’ – as if they were a little more than decorated fibreglass statues –  I wonder why all these lazy shots don’t attempt to bring out that character in their photography.

These elephants all look the same, coming from the same moulds (well, two different moulds – but still, you get my point), but they’ve been decorated to stand out. In some cases, the decoration is intricate and in others entirely subtle.

The trick is to use the statue’s unique features and focus on details, tie it in to the environment it’s in, or shoot other people interacting with it. If all else fails, change your angle.

Anyone and everyone can walk up to an elephant and take a snapshot with a point and shoot. Do something different and you’ll get a decent photograph.

I popped down to Green Park the other day to hunt for elephants. Not real ones, obviously – but some of the elephant statues in the Elephant Parade.

There are over 200 dotted across the city, and although there are maps and numbers and a guide to which ones are where – just choosing to go and hunt is quite fun.

It’s quite hard to shoot elephants that all look, aside from colours, exactly the same (I think there are two models – one walking, one sitting) in a way that isn’t that dull, but using the patterns and environment around the elephants made it a little easier. I got some good shots shooting through the trunk of one elephant at another one behind it, which I’m sure will make it onto Flickr in good time. (In fact, here’s my Elephant Parade flickr set.)

Anyway, enjoy this one for now, and get hunting!

(There’s a PhotowalkLondon that’s doing an elephant hunt next week – you can see who’s going and RSVP here.

Yes, the best camera is the one most readily available (trying to avoid use of the trademarked phrase!), but it’s no use if it’s not easy to use, pleasing to use and produces decent results.

I’ve seen a lot of pics recently from @Documentally on twitter, and they all have something of a really interesting feel to them compared to the bog-standard shots I get from my iPhone, and of course it turns out he’s using a funky app to produce them. Not one with ‘recipes’ and an ‘ecosystem’ behind it designed to self-promote an already highly-promoted professional photographer, but an app designed simply to simulate an old bit of kit.

Hipstamatic is awesome. It’s not quite as fast on my iPhone 3G as the demo suggests, but it’s still fun to use and produces some cool results, like this shot of a 393 bus opposite Sainsbury’s in Camden. It’s not a technically brilliant shot – there’s camera shake, for a start – but it looks damned fine to me. And that’s all that matters.

Last night I went up to Alexandra Palace in north London for one of the city’s best displays. Because the Palace is on top of such a big hill, you get fantastic views across the city, and every now and then there’s a little burst of fireworks in the panorama in front of you, even before the main display starts. We managed to watch most of a display in Greenwich while walking back down, which puts the view into perspective.

It was a bit crowded – something like 50,000 people – and there was a bit of a mad rush after getting food and so on to get to a half decent spot, on a fairly steep slope. Luckily, with my brand spanking new Velbon Sherpa 250 tripod, this wasn’t much of an issue. I took plenty of photos during displays last year, so I wasn’t paying much attention to the camera this year, except to have a little experiment with zooming in and out during a shot at one point – you can see the half-decent result here.

Taking photos of fireworks is pretty simple, really – so long as you do have a tripod. The basics are:

• Manual settings!
• Low ISO for best colour reproduction and least noise
• Quite narrow aperture for depth of field – I was using f/11 most of the night – so it doesn’t really matter if your focusing is off.
• Long exposures. A lot of my shots were on 2.5″, although at times I went up to 15″. Try out various combinations for different effects, and find your own personal style.

I’m off to the Lord Mayor’s Fireworks on the Thames again next weekend, so expect more soon!

The colours of Autumn are beautiful, even if not all of us are lucky enough to live in New England (see this picture from Maine, for instance). Luckily for me, as I’ve mentioned before, London has massive open spaces. I was able the other day to head up the BT Tower and the view from 34 floors in the sky over London really does show just how massive our parks are.

This shot, then, was taken at the weekend in Regent’s Park, one of my favourite haunts. The park’s trees are slowly turning into cold skeletons for the winter, and some of them are really quite stunning, like this one that’s green-orange-red. I’ve bumped the saturation of these colours up slightly, just to bring them out a bit more as the image was quite flat in its raw state, but it still remains true to reality.

Expect more autumnal scenes in the near future.

Things move a whole lot faster these days. The death of Michael Jackson was announced last night, and this evening saw a tribute flash mob at Liverpool Street station, inspired no doubt by previous mobs held there. Organised by Milo Yiannopoulos via twitter, his blog, facebook and various other places, the mob was too big for the station itself and the police directed us outside onto Liverpool Street itself.

After something of a shaky start – standing near the press photographers, it was clear they had no idea what was going on, and nor did a fair chunk of the crowd – speakers were set up and tunes played.

There was certainly disappointment when the police shut the mob down after only four songs – and there was little or no actual moonwalking to be had; in the cramped confines of Liverpool Street, amid (let’s say) 400 people, there wasn’t enough room, so most settled for singing along, moshing and hand-waving.

Big props to the hundreds of people who came out – except those that, at times when the crowd was getting excited, wondered if it was Michael Jackson arriving to reveal the whole thing had been a sick publicity stunt. Semi-funny, but ultimately in bad taste.

There’s a whole set on Flickr here, while you can listen to some of the singing and music on AudioBoo (having some trouble embedding the new player, so click through for now).

I was passing through Trafalgar Square last night (as one must when travelling from one side of the city to the other during a tube strike) and finally got to see the upgraded fountains. They now pulsate with myriad different colours, which is not only quite an attractive thing for them to do (not to mention opening up the possibility of themed displays for patron saints’ days and so on), but also means you can get some cool nighttime shots of them in action. There’s a few more on flickr.

Also, in unrelated news, I must stop being so parenthetical (using brackets so much [like this]).

It’s lucky I keep my camera so close to my desk, really. I had a quick look out of the window, and there was this squirrel, just sitting there on the shed next door (it later hopped down to our fence), munching on what I think is probably an old KFC chicken drumstick.

This is why your camera should be around all the time, battery charged and blank SD/CF card inside. Keep a useful lens on – what useful is depends on your own prefence, of course, but this was shot at 248mm, so quite some zoom – and always be ready to pick it up, click the lens hood off and shoot.

Don’t ask me why a squirrel was gnawing on a chicken bone. So far as I know, they’re herbivorous – I can only imagine the Colonel’s secret recipe contains something particularly delicious for an urban squirrel!

It’s a little bit late, but I’ve been quite busy and haven’t had time to post this (as simple as it is to do). In the past few days I’ve been photographing sports and treasure hunts, hosting a barbeque and generally getting some rest before I start work.

Anyway, these lovely people pictured here in the UCL main quad on Gower Street are supporting the Hope Not Hate campaign, fighting to prevent a certain political party to gain representation in the European Parliament. Although nationally 2 members of said party were elected, the great work of campaigners like these stopped any being elected for the London region.