LONDON DIARIES 9

The problem with enthusiasm is that it’s not always the most practical mindset, which is why I’ve recently found myself juggling about five different projects simultaneously. Individually, they’re all awesomely fun… Take photographs? Sure. Start a street photography collective? Oh, hell yeah. Create a magazine publication, write a blog, sort out my “real life”… absolutely. But when the twist is that I have to do all these things AT THE SAME TIME: well, I’ve found myself taking a lot more power naps recently.

With that in mind, I’ve found myself several blogs behind schedule. If I had one scrap of common sense, I’d shrug them off and pretend those shoots never happened. Instead, I’m using an unusually quiet Saturday to catch up on the backlog. I didn’t make notes (I’m not that organised, unfortunately), so I’m writing from memory. I mean, it helps that I’ve got the photographs to trigger those memories 😉

PJ and I used to always shoot street on Thursdays in 2018, until other circumstances forced us to change our regular weekday. We took advantage of it being school holidays to allow us to shoot on a Thursday again this time. I’d originally mentioned Greenwich as a potential new location to check out, but PJ hadn’t felt like making the journey, so I’d filed it under “at some point”. But we had no concrete plans for today. Plus, it was the fourth anniversary of my dad’s passing, AND my ex was due in court that morning to face criminal charges against me, so I needed a massive distraction. Here’s the diary of the day:

SOHO

We did our standard Paddington to Oxford Circus tube journey, and walked over to Chinatown. I just checked my IG account, and I’ve already shared 11 shots from this day onto my account, so technically this was a good day’s shoot. But I wasn’t really with it all day. I kept feeling awfully emotional about the significance of the date. There wasn’t much going on to photograph during the walk – or maybe there was, and I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to notice. I loved those Mulberry posters on the phone box, though. They’ve since been replaced by Wrangler ones, and they’re not as good.

CHINATOWN

We arrived in Chinatown at approximately the same time as every delivery van in existence, so it was difficult to get decent compositions, although in two of the examples above, the vans actually added to the shots. We decided to go to Leon for an early lunch (Korean chicken burger and goji juice, in case you’re interested. Why would you be?…), and then returned for a few more photo opportunities. The sun was out enough to cast some interesting shadows, which is normally our cue to get ourselves over to the South Bank.

TRAFALGAR SQUARE

Off we went towards the South Bank. Our regular route takes us via Trafalgar Square, which is my least favourite place to shoot in London. The light is too harsh, the people are too “touristy”, and there’s no interesting backgrounds to contribute to compositions. But today, there WAS somebody in an enormous (and I mean ENORMOUS) panda costume, so for once PJ was spared my monologue about how they should just let the pigeons back so at least we’d get interesting shots there (she doesn’t disagree, partly to shut me up, and partly because she doesn’t like the guy who handles the hawk, employed to scare off the pigeons, because he wouldn’t let her photograph him one time).

SOUTH BANK

It was worth going over to the South Bank for the shadows, and for an interesting crowd. It was at this point, around 2pm, that I casually slipped into the conversation that “seeing as we’d already managed to capture some decent images so far today, wouldn’t this be a good time to check out Greenwich? If it sucked for photography, we’d lost nothing, but if it was good, we could definitely go back for longer another day?” And because PJ is good like that, and because I was still being a miserable cow because of what day it was, we walked over to Bank and got on the DLR.

GREENWICH

We wandered down to the river to get a closer look at the Cutty Sark and the skyline, noticing that there was a river taxi service back to the London Eye, but neither of us were willing to queue with the seemingly hundreds of half-term families. Something for another day, definitely.

Greenwich is definitely going on the list of places to return to – it’s a shame it’s so far out of zone 1 though. It’s also a shame that I spent so long procrastinating today, and wrote only one of blogs that I was supposed to. I blame Ricky Gervais for making a new show that I needed to binge watch, and the people I follow on Instagram for putting out such engaging content.

The next blog will be the final instalment of London Diaries, because I would rather spend my time blogging about other specific things, rather than feel obligated to keep up a series that repeatedly journals the same areas. Next time, I’ll be combining photographs from my two most recent shoots, and sharing images from another new location, Notting Hill.

Stay Curious,

We don’t normally go shooting on Saturdays.

“You know what’s good on Saturdays? Camden Market,” I said to PJ. And I was technically correct. We just went there a couple of decades too late.

Camden Town in the 1990s was so much fun – an area famed for being a Mecca for subcultures. Cyberpunks and Goths and Indie Kids would mill around the streets, each sporting the styles of their respective scenes. The whole place was a feast for the senses: loud music blaring from every stall, the scents of street food and incense filling the air, stalls filled with bootleg records and outlandish clothing and bizarre handmade goods… there was always a vibe around the place that encouraged individuality, and told the misfits that this was the one place they could comfortably be themselves.

Camden Market wasn’t just one market. It was a collection of several smaller markets all in close proximity to each other, linked by Camden High Street. The roads offered a variety of small pubs that doubled as music venues, where a lot of the Indie bands of the nineties first started out. Fast forward to 2019, and that whole atmosphere has gone. Camden these days is just another tourist trap. I’m in my thirties now, and so I don’t know if “scene kids” even exist any more (I’m the mother of teenagers though, and from what I can tell, it doesn’t), but if they do, they’re not hanging around Camden, that’s for sure. Long story short, we didn’t end up spending much time in Camden in the end.

This London Diary instalment is relatively short, due to poor light, indecisiveness, and a lack of inspiration. Not every shoot is a success.

Walk from London Paddington to Camden Lock

We left ridiculously early and ended up at London Paddington before 8:30AM, so we decided to walk to Camden. We’ve been consciously trying to stay above ground as much as possible over the past few months to get more of a sense of where locations are in relation to each other. We’ve been surprised on several occasions about the proximity of places compared to how they look on the Underground map. The walk from Paddington took us along the Grand Union canal path, so it wasn’t the most exciting journey in the world, aside from the section that passed through London Zoo, so we got to see some warthogs from a distance (always a novelty in London). I took a few snaps with the Huawei P20 Pro en route (above)…

… a couple of selfies with the Samsung Galaxy S7…

…and a couple of photographs with the Fujifilm X100F (which, for reasons that made sense to me at the time, are all in 1:1 format this week).

Camden Town

This was the result of shooting around Camden: eight mediocre photographs. The ONLY exciting thing that happened the whole time we were there was that I found a vintage camera stall that had a Mamiya RZ67, which the guy let me have a play with. I didn’t buy it, because a) it was £1000, and b) it wasn’t the Pro II version, which has extra fine tuning on the focus dial, but it was great to get an idea of the size and weight of it, and to actually look down through that viewfinder. And now be lusting after owning one even more.

Brick Lane

So we headed East, heading for Shoreditch and Brick Lane, defecting en route to Starbucks by Spitalfields Market purely because they sold pancakes (I ordered some bizarre frappe thing instead of their coffee, because I don’t hate myself). The light was still woefully flat, and neither of us appreciated beforehand that Brick Lane Market is really an exclusively Sunday thing.

It was turning into one of those days where we didn’t know where we wanted to be or what we wanted to do. But where do we normally go when all else fails? Chinatown and Soho… so we walked back towards Liverpool Street to get the number 8 bus westbound, capturing a couple more shots along the way, including a pretty epic soft tiger toy that somebody had left by a bin.

Chinatown + Soho

I haven’t been particularly excited about ANY of the shots I took on this day. Writing this blog forces me to review my photographs far more than I have done previously, and everything that I shot this Saturday just reminds me of the kind of images I was producing a year ago. That’s why it has taken so long for me to get this edition of London Diaries published on the site: I’m not proud of these photographs, and I’m reluctant to post them as examples of my work. However, I think that if I’m going to write this blog, it needs to be honest, and so what if I had an off day? Everybody has off days, right?

Some very angry people, + a bit of photojournalism

Just as we were about to leave Central London and begin the journey home, several police riot vans sped past us and turned just off of Piccadilly Circus. Two separate protests had inadvertently merged – one a group of Pro-Brexiteers, angry about the UK not leaving the EU swiftly enough, and the other a group protesting the lenient sentencing of a hit-and-run driver who had killed three teenagers. We followed the sound of the angry mob, and came across this scene. The atmosphere was horrific, a police officer had just been punched in the face when we arrived, and it didn’t feel like a particularly safe place to be taking photographs, but it was interesting to try to capture the moment. First time in ages that I wished I had a telephoto lens, because I definitely didn’t want to get any closer than where I was standing.

So that was that. The moral of the story this time is to have a plan (and a back up plan) when you go out shooting, especially if your time is limited. There isn’t normally a moral to these diaries, but it’s an added extra to compensate for the mediocre photography.

On the plus side, the next instalment is going to look totally fantastic in comparison to this one.

Love from London x