My local Royal Wedding street party
London was awash with street parties on the day of the Royal Wedding a couple of weeks ago and we headed down to the local one in Battersea after the proceedings to see what was going down. If you’ve ever been to Battersea you’ll know that it is a little bit disjointed, with super nice areas like the square and the riverside as well as the less enticing side further in towards Clapham Junction. The street party was taking place in the middle, on Battersea High Street. That street is narrower than your average residential road and is lined with shops and restaurants with a market present on weekends. I was curious to see how many people would actually turn up..
When we got there I was shocked to see the whole road totally rammed from side the side. There must have been around 2000 people present at any one time. There were stalls running down the center of the road with a giant screen down at one end and a stage at the other. People were drinking, dancing, laughing and it was the most jubilant scene I have ever witnessed in South London (we don’t get many tourists here).
There were kids running around dressed like superheroes (eh?) and merry grown ups dancing, eating and drinking.
There were also a lot of interesting faces and outfits:
This woman told me that she had been featured on TV for the whole day thanks to her costume. I don’t think there’s anything particularly outlandish about it.
A solid effort from this guy.
If you’re one of the 2 billion people who watched the wedding on TV you will have seen the celebrations happening live and will have some idea of what it was like in London on that day. But seeing it in person, even miles away from Buckingham Palace, was something else!
Photo notes
- Camera was a D7000 with 70-200 VRII and 24mm f2.8 Nikkor.
- No external flash was used.
- The light on the day was fairly overcast but there were bursts of sunlight coming through the clouds on a few occasions.
- Shooting on an overcast day generally means that the light is incredibly soft and often very flat, because there is very little contrast. One way of dealing with this is to put your subject under a frame or something else that will add some direction to the soft light. Clearly this is more reportage than portraits so I didn’t bother trying to move people into better light.
- Where the sunlight does come through, hard shadows would form, an example being the last photo above. I had to be careful to position myself and wait for a moment that gave something akin to side lighting rather than full on direct light in the face, which can result in squinting eyes and ugly nose shadows.
- I was shooting at f2.8 with both lenses which results in fairly shallow depth of field (dof). This was important because the street was so crowded that I needed to isolate the subjects effectively, or it would look too busy. The downside of shooting wide open is that the shallow dof can make it hard to acquire focus and you have to nail it on the eyes for the photo to look right. I therefore chose to shoot in 9 point C-AF mode, selecting my initial focus point manually with the thumb stick on the camera.
