Tag: Thames

Straight 8, the result

Steve Hickey

Well, I finally got around to seeing my Straight 8 film last month. To my surprise it was chosen for one of the London screenings, so on June 12th we had a family outing to The Vue Cinema in Piccadilly to go and see the result. Popcorn and all!

I have pretty much never shown unedited film, or even stills, for that matter to anyone. There’s always been some kind of edit, however minimal. Now here I was sitting among strangers – film makers, in a proper cinema, to watch something I hadn’t even seen myself!  Which was filmed with a 35 year old camera I had only used once to check it was working!

Obviously I must like making life hard for myself but that’s the partly the point of Straight 8. It’s not easy to produce something within the constriction of the 3 minute 20 seconds of film without having the luxury to edit afterwards. The only thing I had control over was the soundtrack, and I thought well at least that’s not too bad – people will have something to listen to.

My film was towards the end of the 25 shown so I had time to enjoy the others, the time flew by and then mine was up! The interesting thing was when my film came on I found that I wasn’t particularly nervous – I was more nervous in the pub before. I was just as interested to see if it had worked out as perhaps the rest of the audience were – well my family anyway.

My thoughts on seeing it? Yeah, it’s rough and raw – but that’s Straight 8. It was mostly a feeling of relief that it had kind of worked out something like I planned but really it inspired me to do it again. Push myself with a more difficult theme next time. It’s just a bit of fun so might as well push the limits – I played it a bit safe this time.

You can see my film above and if you want to see the others from the screenings the link is   www.https://vimeo.com/straight8/videos

WInston Churchill, Havengore ceremonial

Steve Hickey
Churchill boat
The ceremonial guard at the front of the Havengore.

 

Back in the city today and I managed to get down to the river  to get a few shots of the start of the ceremonial event for the anniversary of Winston Churchill’s funeral. I remember watching the funeral on TV when I was young and that kind of thing always sticks in the memory so it was interesting to see a recreation of the event.

The boat which originally carried his coffin, 50 years ago today, retraced the route along the Thames – so I thought that I would go and get a few shots for stock. I know the area really well and had a place in mind to shoot from but as I couldn’t get down there until 45 minutes before the event I thought maybe I might have a struggle with crowds – but only a few tourists were around.  Even when the boat passed the crowd was very light and also not many photographers were near my position – always a good thing! Weather was good, bit of hazy sun and not too cold. The boat moved pretty quickly, much quicker than I expected, and from my position it was all over in a few minutes. I had  quite a few shots in the bag so as the boat moved on I packed up and headed for the station.

The fact that there weren’t big crowds did kind of make me wonder about the relevance of the anniversary for the average person on the street. There’s been a lot of media focus on the anniversary, a lot of stuff on TV,  and for those closely involved it’s obviously an emotional event, but as for the general public – many don’t seem to take much notice.  I found that there’s a few  commemorative things going on including an exhibition at the Science Museum which runs until 2016.

There’s also a General Election coming up in a few months – but whatever any of us might think of Churchill, it would be a shame if the anniversary of the death of a major world statesman were to be hijacked for political reasons. That wouldn’t happen would it?

 

The photograph above taken with a Canon 1D3 with 300mm f4 and 1.4x converter.

London Bridge : winter sunrise

Steve Hickey

This is a time lapse test which was shot in late November. Photographed  using a Canon 5D mk2 and testing the Magic Lantern firmware.

The shoot  started at 5.30am and lasted just over 3 hrs. The morning was pretty cold at first so I was grateful for the warmth of the rising Sun towards the end.

While I worked on the images this week it reminded me that although we are at the start of winter, spring isn’t too far away.