London A Global City

I'm not from London. I have lived here for 18 years so like most people who've been here that long, I've become a Londoner. What that means is that I've taken on the values of the Metropolis. It's now my city as much if not more so than my home town of Liverpool. I bring with me what a lot of people who migrate to capitals bring. An endless sense of wonder at the sheer diversity of a global city containing millions of people from all over the world, not least the endless stream of pleasure trippers keen to see the sights.

The British Summer

It's been a hot summer this year but now we're into July all the rain which didn't fall for the last three months has begun to descend in the last couple of weeks. It's wet, warm and very shiny. I feel for the tourists in their plastic poncho family outfits, trudging the wet warm streets getting splashed and possibly a summer cold for their troubles.

I was in Town

I had an appointment in the West End today so I thought it would be a good opportunity to describe the cast of a million faces. Everyone's represented here and that for me is what's so great about the city. Everybody is welcome and everyone can be anonymous if they want to. Nobody looks twice if you have green hair and that's part of London's charm. It's accepting and not just tolerant but welcoming to diversity. There aren't many places like it, even if it does tend to rain, right in the middle of the holiday season.

Technical

It's tricky shooting with a brolly over one shoulder in the rain, in the middle of a crowd, bustling with all the other umbrellas. It was overcast (as it usually is when it's raining) so all I really had to do was up the ISO to 200 and find a good few spots where people don't have to go around me / kind of a bit out of the way so people aren't that aware I'm there.

I used the shutter priority mode today as I wanted to catch the action of people skipping through the rain so I let the camera control the aperture to balance the image with the shutter / ISO I had chosen. It works quite well and gives quite a flat but not overexposed image. This allows me to work fast and catch moments which disappear in seconds and allows me to perform slight adjustments to the contrast in order to heighten the mood and then cropped wide to give the sense of my line of sight.

The sheer diversity of people on one street corner, albeit the corner of Oxford Street and Regent Street in London was the focus of my attention. The ordinary nature of diversity is the study and I wanted to capture the normality of that in a global city. Did you see the flying girl's legs ?