London, its been all too long since my last visit, through the summer I was travelling to London nearly every weekend for street photography, most of the time I was out shooting with my good friend Christian Cross. I had early start (8am) after a night of no Sleep (again, maybe because I was so excited about London), the funny thing was, Christian hadn’t had a good nights sleep, however, we don’t get many chances to work together, so we thought to hell with it and decided to head out anyway. But where to go? Lots of great places to shoot street photography in London and myself and Christian have been to most of them, so this time we were looking for something a bit different.
A good friend of mine and fellow street shooter Brian Boyce had shown me some photos he had taken at the Ryoji Ikeda A/V artwork test pattern exhibition at The Vinyl factory London which was still on. So I message Christian to see if he fancied having a look, turns out he had only been thinking about going here a few days before so it was perfect. We met up in Trafalgar Square and headed towards the Strand where the exhibition was on. As we were walking past Somerset house and we were early, we thought we’d have a look. At this time of year they have ice skating rink, so we decided to stay there until the exhibition had opened, both of us managed to get some good photos around Somerset house which was a bonus.
We left Somerset House just before midday, arriving at the gallery just as it was about to open. We was one of the first people in that day, before we entered the gallery we were asked to remove our shoes and I have to say the first thing that entered my mind was, I hope someone is wearing striped socks.
The test pattern exhibition was dark and loud and to our surprise quite small. There was flashing lights being projected from above, lighting up the white floor and the people in the room, this was making for some very interesting photos.
First thing I will say about photographing in there, it wasn't easy focusing, this was the first of many challenges we faced in the gallery. The camera did hunt a fair bit, but as always I made it work. Even with this happening, I will say it was a lot of fun trying to get a good photo. Christian was using manual focus on his Fuji X100F and for the most part, I stayed in Autofocus.
Even though the test pattern light was black & white I decided to shoot in classic chrome while Christian started in monochrome and after a while, he switched to colour.
It wasn't easy trying to separate people as they kept standing or sitting together, again here in lies another challenge. Once you got someone standing or sitting by themselves I had to get them In focus and again this wasn’t easy. Both of us sat in different areas of the exhibition, trying our luck to get different photos from each other, again not easy.
Christian was shooting with the 23mm F2 lens which is fitted on the X100F and I was using my trusty 56mm F1.2 and I was shooting wide open, which helped me keep the ISO Low. Even though we were taking photos in the same place and most of the time of the same people, we know we would come away with some very different looking photos. We stayed in the exhibition for about hour and a half, by which time both of us had killer headaches lol, I just want to say that it was worth it, once we started going through the photos, which we did over lunch at the Maple leaf bar near Covent Garden.
Before we left the gallery we took an hour to have a walk around the other exhibitions, these were spread out across 3 Floors. Both of us got some good photos in and around the rooms and halls of this massive building.
The exhibition is well worth a look if you're in the area - More info here
Once we were at the bar another friend of mine and Christian, Kobe meet up with us and we headed out back onto the streets of London, at first looking for a good coffee house to finish going through our photos, but we never found anywhere and in the end, we decided to just keep shooting. We headed down Oxford street and then onto Regent street. I know Christian got a few good photos, but I didn’t really get much. It wasn’t until I was back around Kings Cross station that I got a few more photos.
Yet again I had another amazing visit to London with Christian and I can't wait for my next visit.
Below is a select of mine and Christian’s photos from the day. All of my photos are straight out of camera and using the Classic Chrome preset.
