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!

Stop-motion test from Josh Blacker on Vimeo.

With two weeks of leave getting underway, I thought I’d spend a good part of it trying out new things with my camera. Of course, I’m still hunting elephants here and there, but since they’re getting passé now, last night was my first attempt at a short stop-motion animation.

It’s entirely rough around the edges, for which I offer no apology. I wasn’t paying too much care as a) I wanted to get it done before my girlfriend got home and b) it was a test to see how well it would work. I put it together using iMovie (again, just testing!), which was a massive pain – there seems to be no way in the latest version of iMovie to import photos that aren’t in your iPhoto library. After a few fraught attempts resulting in a locked iPhoto library, I managed to just about get it done.

The individual frames are 0.2s each; rather than go for smooth 24fps motion (which would have required about 600 more shots!), I thought a slower framerate would preserve the ‘stop/go’ quality without ruining the action, which it just about does I think.

Anyway, I’ll be shooting another later this week, taking more time and care to get it right. Let me know what you think.

The exhibition is part of this week’s Arts Festival, showcasing the work of the arts societies at UCLU. My photos cover last June’s Quad Play, and the Modo fashion show and the UCOpera production of Genoveva from this academic year.

Dan’s done a great job mounting the prints – I’ll get a shot up on the blog when we’re done putting them up.

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.

A couple of weeks ago I went up to Scotland for a short retreat with some colleagues, staying in a cottage near Gatehouse of Fleet.

It was great to get out of the city for a while, especially to somewhere so remote. For the first few days I was still getting used to the lack of unnatural sound and light, and by the time I’d settled in to the simple life, we were back in London. The weather wasn’t amazing – it was Scotland, after all – but it didn’t rain on us too much, and I managed to lug the camera up several hills in thick fog without causing any (lasting!) damage. I must, however, find a better solution to carrying my tripod than the case it came in.

This view is from a hill overlooking Loch Whineyeon, which we walked up to a couple of times. I had a sneaking suspicion that the sun would rise on the left of this shot, in the small dip, but never managed to get up early enough to get there for it. (I’m sure the beers every night didn’t help!) This is definitely a place to go back to – I really want that sunrise shot!

The full set on Flickr can be found here – it will be updated every day for a while.

Harmony on Heels from Josh Blacker on Vimeo.

I promised video, and here it is – pretty much straight from the 5D mkII. No fancy camerawork, shot at 70mm, and two clips slapped together. Easy.

Given recent developments following the election, I figured it was about time I posted this image that I took on Sunday 2nd May, less than a week before Britain went to the polls. I’d been invited down to take some shots for Chuka Umunna, Labour’s (eventually successful) PPC for Streatham, for what was a bit of a surprise visit – I had my suspicions, but they weren’t confirmed until I arrived at the New Testament Church of God in Brixton  and saw all the live transmission vans outside.

While I don’t want this blog to be about anything more than my photography (I have other places to discuss my opinions on other matters), I will say this: the Prime Minister, as he was then, gave a thoroughly impassioned speech about his core values. Referencing the parable of the Good Samaritan and other biblical stories, he made the case for not passing by on the other side when we should be doing all we can to help others less fortunate than ourselves in this world. The next day he gave his speech to Citizens UK, and it was that Gordon Brown that I saw in Brixton.

Plus, it was quite fun to be in there with the couple of press photographers, being ushered to the front by aides and being let into the inner circle of what’s going on. That, and hearing people afterwards making sure they’d got the radio mic off him as he left for the car…

(On a technical note, I shot this event at ISO 3200, and the shots look like they’re at about 200. I haven’t even applied noise reduction in Lightroom. The 5D mkII still amazes me, even after a two months now.)

After a long week spent in Scotland with (mostly) glorious weather – more on which in a blog post soon – I came back to the downpour in London with over 1,000 frames to sort through and edit. What more could I want than to take even more photos of yet another event?

Thank goodness this one had my girlfriend in it…

Harmony on Heels are an all-female choir based in North London who sing quite fantastically; next time you get a chance, go and see them! I’ve got a little bit of video from the 5D mark II as well, which I’ll post soon.

I’ve not been abroad properly for a holiday for a long time – when I went to Tallinn two years ago and saw this amazing sunset, it was for a debating competition! – but when I got the chance to spend a week with family in Duras, I couldn’t turn it down.

We travelled around quite a bit, visiting Bordeaux, the immensely impressive Dune du Pilat, and various small towns along the way. The mirror-like water feature on the riverfront in Bordeaux gave some stunning shots, the largest dune in Europe was difficult to shoot in a way that really showed just how big it is (I’m still not happy with this shot), and the markets offered plenty of cheese, meat and veg, although a little later in the year would probably be more colourful.

This being the first big excursion with the 5D Mark II, I wanted to make as good use of it as possible. This shot of the chateaux in Duras is at 17mm, and you can really tell on a full-frame sensor, where my 17-40mm f/4L is coming into its own.

Being used to the grey misery of London, I did find it quite difficult shooting in the bright sunshine of southern France – often at f/8 or f/16, the glare on the LCD screen often made me unsure whether I was getting a good exposure or not, since the bright sunshine/dark shadows made me wonder if contrast was going to be an issue that even Lightroom couldn’t handle.

You can find more shots from the holiday here on Flickr.