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.

It may well be full of tourists – the really annoying, large groups that manage somehow always to get in the way as you’re moving about, the kind that give all other tourists a bad name – but I do have a penchant for Covent Garden. Not for any of the shops, mind, or indeed the transport museum (haven’t been to one of those since holidays with my grandparents as a child), but for the street performers.

Not the ones that line up by the tube station who seem, by and large, to be the same bunch of stand really still and then scare little children performers who also colonise South Bank, but the ones that actually perform little circus tricks outside the west end of the market, or inside at the other end, are those that really interest me. (We’ll conveniently ignore the classical music performance area downstairs!)

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Going to university in central London, and it being both exam season and Spring, it’s only natural I should make use of the fantastic green spaces London has to offer. Off the top of my head, I can think of the major parks – Regent’s, Hyde, St. James, Kensington Gardens (part of Hyde Park, ok, fine!) – as well as the myriad squares in Bloomsbury, places a bit further afield like Clapham Common and that random bit near the London Eye.

Inside these spaces is a plentiful array of wildlife, and taking my camera along to a revision session in Regents Park the other day, I came across this little chap nibbling away next to the Broadwalk. Like most animals living among London’s 7 million human residents, he was pretty tame and didn’t mind me too much as I walked slowly around him to get a better shot. I ended up crouched about 1.5m away from him, leaning against a tree as he munched away on sycamore seeds.

It’s possibly a bit of an error to take my camera with me to what’s meant to be a revision session – but that didn’t quite matter on this one, as it ended up being a bit too windy to sit in the park too long…! I’ve got 3 exams left and then just over a month to do as I please before I start work – which will, of course, mean going out to fill my new 1TB hard drive full of photos

I took time out this evening from revision to pop along to Talking Politics with Eddie Izzard, where the infamous comedian talked for a short while about his own interest in politics – culminating in restating his intention to run for some political office, at least, in the next 10-15 years. Needless to say, the audience was behind him on this.

But the evening wasn’t about Eddie Izzard, for he was there to ask a few gentle questions of MPs Tessa Jowell and Ed Balls, both well-known Labour ministers. There was some talk about whether holding a costly Olympic Games amidst the recession is a good thing – resoundingly yes, Jowell said, when the Olympic site will have employed some 11,000 workers, and created hundreds of new apprenticeships – and also, at the very end, talk about twitter. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of year again, when the UCL Fashion Society, or Modo as it’s more commonly known, holds its annual fashion show. They’re they only student fashion society in the country (apart from Central St Martin’s, which has a fashion course – UCL doesn’t!) that holds a show entirely composed of students. All the designers are students. All the models are students. The stage is built and lit by students. It is also, of course, photographed by students. (Albeit one of whom could afford to have two D40s around his neck!)

The theme of this year’s show was ‘Elements’, although some designers took this more seriously than others. One designer even had one of the models sewing his collection together on the first night – but that’s not to say that the whole show didn’t look pretty awesome for a bunch of lazy students being in charge. It was quite telling that the timelapse I shot of the stage being constructed involved a lot of inaction… Read the rest of this entry »