Trip to Highgate Cemetry

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We had a fantastic afternoon going around Highgate [and Hampstead] today [bank holiday]. We took the paid tour around the west graveyard, a first for both my wife and myself [who’ve clocked up about 15 years of London living and working between us]. If you are ever in town, do it: It is fascinating. Learn about Victorian Londoners in the 1860s too poor to bury an elderly relative, whom they propped up in the corner of a house with 60 people living in it. They had this poor dead bloke in the living room for a fruity 8 weeks over the summer. Yum.

I was gutted as in the preamble, the spry lady who introduced the tour guide said, ‘no big cameras’. I asked her again on the way in and she said something along the lines of ‘be discreet, and sensitive to the fact that it’s an actively used graveyard.’ There are 180,000 people buried in both sections. This came out quite nicely:

though I ended up being pretty rapid, snatching photos with my 10-22mm. On the east side, where you have to take a photo of this:

 

[I’ll come back to this. The cropping is annoying: I can’t keep all of the text with the Big Man’s head in the right part of the image.] But I think this really says it all:

And a couple more:

Broken tripod…

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This is annoying: I only bought this tripod about a month ago, and it’s broken already:

The leg clamp in the top centre is showing the small brass pin that acts as the hinge. The retaining plastic has sheered off. I’ve only used the tripod a couple of times, and it hasn’t had the chance to get knocked around. It looks like the hinge mechanism has broken under its own pressure.

Update [05/09/2008]

I got in touch with the eBay seller about the fact that the broken hinge. Not only did he replace it very rapidly, but he refunded the postage on the returned tripod.

Visit to the Oval

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I was taken to the Oval a couple of weeks ago [very kindly at the expense of a vendor] for the England vs South Africa 4th test. I’ve always wondered what the chances were of being turned away at the turnstile of some event because I was carrying a bagful of equipment. I decided to take a chance this time as I hadn’t paid…

I spent pretty much the whole day shooting with my long L lens [100-400mm]. I find this quite a tough lens to use: obviously you are operating with a very narrow angle of view but – not wanting to sound like the lily-livered office dweller that I am – handheld it really starts to get heavy over a period of hours.

I tried to be systematic, despite a certain beer oriented clouding of judgement, and started to crack off a series of pictures framed on the batsman to co-incide with each bowling delivery. It has to be said that after about 60 repetitions, it starts to get fairly tedious. See earlier reference to beer.

Perseverence paid off – almost spectacularly, but not quite, with this shot:

This was, without doubt, the most exciting single picture that I’ve ever taken. I have a mate [who very kindly me leant me his Nikon D300 a few weeks ago – fantastic machine, enough to make me want to abandon the Canon ship on the spot] who likened taking a photo to a golf shot. I like the analogy a lot: the convergence of propicious circumstance, the satisfaction of connecting with the sweetspot… I just really, really wish that I’d cranked up the ISO to 400, which I did later in the day. This is almost fast enough: if you look closely between the ‘e’ and the ‘s’ in the lettering of the advertising hoarding, you can just see the bails flying. Bringing it up to 1/500 second that I was able to get later in the day would have just sharpened it up.

Frustratingly, this is the only time I’ve managed to have a backup disaster and delete the original data. For those who are interestied I shot this at 1/200, F5.6, and on aperture priority at 400mm.

A work colleague made a very interesting comparison with a shot that appeared on the Beeb website [picture 8]. There was a group of professional photographers sitting on the boundary about 20-30 yards to our left, one of whom must have caught this. Interesting to note the difference in talent, kit, and technique 😉