Cycle, Cemetary and Surfing

Angel in Brockley Cemetery

The weekend in London was full of fun and games, I met new people and saw more outside of the core of the city.

On Saturday Alex and I got on bikes and rode around the Thames, eventually heading southwest toward Wimbledon (Map and route at end). Riding a bike in London is pretty fun. Although many would say that it is exceedingly dangerous, I would say that as long as you are comfortable on a bike in traffic and you have your wits about you, everything should be fine. As long as a Lorry doesn’t pass you on the inside of a corner up a hill... then you might have some trouble. As we went along we passed by a few parks where a lot of people walk their dogs, play with their kids or enjoy a game of cricket. I took only one picture from the trip of these startlingly mottled trees that lined the Thames providing some great shade and a place to catch our breath and grab a drink of water.

Thames Shoreline, Saturday afternoon

On Sunday morning I woke up to find an email from a Couch Surfing group dedicated to photography in London. Reading through all of the forum talk, I found that there was a photography afternoon organized out in Crofton Park, which is south east of the city. After checking the trains heading that way I saw that the pub that it was centered around was pretty easy to navigate and the trains left from Victoria station every half hour.

Welcome to the Graveyard

I left the flat and caught the 1:38pm train thinking I would be late for the 2:00pm meeting time. The trains operate awfully efficiently from what I can tell and I was at the pub by 2pm. I was only the second person to arrive, so I waited for a while with the one other person more to come. I was only able to tell that he was with the photography group because of the Nikon DSLR he was holding. Camera guys stand out!

Resting Easy

After an hour of chatting, there was myself, an Italian, a North Vancouverite and an organiser who lived just down the way from the Jam Circus Pub where we were. Knowing that not many more were likely to show up and getting a bit antsy to get over to our shooting location I headed over to a local cemetery with my new Vancouver friend Araz (sorry if I got that one wrong!) .

Wrapped Up

The Brockley Cemetary (Lewisham) was fascinating. It is the only completely unkempt cemetery I’ve ever been to. Nature had long since taken hold of the grounds and only the paved paths provided any indication of what routes to travel. The grass was a few feet high, thorn bushes were littered around and most of the grave stones were hidden in ivy. Not only was nature at play here but weather and possibly the local teenagers made sure that many of the tombstones were cracked, overturned or simply broken into many pieces. While I found this all to be a bit odd, the cemetery had quite a number of stones from eighteen and seventeen hundreds. The mixture of the age and decrepitude on the grounds made for an excellent location to shoot at and I enjoyed the two hours I spent capturing the essence of the grounds.

Philadelphia.
Flash shot through branches for effect

Shooting technique

I decided pretty early on that I wanted to work with the nature of the place and distil the eerie nature. However, doing so at the brightest time of the day is much easier said than done! In order to capture what I wanted the use of flash would be pretty much compulsory.

The Memory of our Dear Boy

The trick about flash is to use it in such a way that it is either very obvious or not at all. I chose the latter for much of what I was doing, simulating a much later time of the day. I made sure to set my camera to under expose the scene by at least a stop or two (half or a quarter of the light needed) and then used my flash to light whatever it was that I thought was important. In all of these shots the flash is not mounted to the camera, but instead is tethered via a sync chord.

Foreshadowed Cross

Using largely aperture priority (Av) and the flash set to auto (plus a little compensation for the under exposure) all of these photos were really more about placement of the light than anything else. I found that with the flash in the sync chord I would leave the camera on my tripod and then be free to hold the flash wherever it was that I wanted within the 6 foot reach of the chord.

Post Processing and Socializing

Couch Surfing Group

After shooting for two hours in the cemetery it was getting pretty close to five o’clock and it was begining to sprinkle rain so I packed up my gear and headed back to Jam Circus. When I got there I found that many more people had joined, as there was promise of a beginners Photoshop lecture. While everyone was setting up their machines with a version of Photoshop, I set about transferring and editing the pictures I had taken from earlier in the day with Lightroom. While I was editing I got a chance to chat with a few people and talked about the pictures we had taken and my Lightroom workflow . At about the same time as I finished editing, the lecture on basic camera usage started and I was happy to join in while my photos were uploading onto Facebook via the pub’s wireless.

Back to Back

The organiser went over such things as ISO, shutter speed and aperture, while I chirped in from time to time injecting little bits of knowledge like what Mirror Lockup was or about Medium Format cameras.

After a time I got to talking with a gentleman who worked with the BBC managing their database of information. He showed me various pictures of the 40 petabyte (1 petabyte = terabytes gigabytes; 1 terabyte = 1024 gigabytes) data solution that they had come up with and all of the optical cabling and servers that were required to service it. Pretty incredible stuff! Apparently this is only one of the data centres for a small section, and the main BBC database is actually over 400 petabytes!!

Later on, the topic of the talk moved to Photoshop basics, and how simple image manipulations are done. When I had joined the conversation people were in the process of using their new knowledge and I was able to walk around to a few of the various computers people were working on and show a few pointers, like how to use adjustment layers instead of adjusting photos directly.

Engulfed

Wrapping up

By 8:45 everything had pretty much been wrapped up and I had met quite a few new people and learned a few new things along the way.

I learned how Couch Surfing works, and the type of kind people who attend group events. I tried new techniques with my camera and got a chance to try out how editing on the go works, while trying to keep everything manageable (camera, computer, card reader, portable hard drive etc.). I used the London train system, which is pretty damned good. I saw some of the massive amounts of information that go into maintaining a video editing system and lastly I was able to meet some people that I will hopefully be able to go out with later in the week in London to capture some of the more unique aspects of the city.

Stormy Horizons

The whole day was pretty fun, and I only wish that I was able to be in London longer, as although this was the first meeting of that group, they were talking of planning a whole lecture series and trips through the country.

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Cycling Route

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