Framedlight

Another day in London and two exhibitions - contrasting ones at that. I had booked for a tour round the Charlie Waite exhibition at the National Theatre with CW himself (and a few other people) and thought to go to the Dennis Hopper exhibition in the morning - a bit of a contrast. I enjoyed both very much. The edginess of Hopper and the historical context was nostalgic. It seems a more innocent time when there was optimism in the air rather than the doom that clouds our vision now. They were looping a scene from Easy Rider onto a wall which the children were enjoying. I had forgotten that Hopper had directed Easy Rider, as well as acting in it. His passing is a bit of an end of an era. I cannot forget how chilling he was in Blue Velvet. The Waite was a triumph, breathtakingly beautiful pictures of a rural idyll, and also some monochrome prints that I enjoyed very much (including the deckchairs shown below - an early picture). Charie added some backstory which was nice. He is such a pe...

Mairi and I had a day in London and went to 2 photography exhibitions - the Landscape Photographer of the Year at the National Theatre and the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery. We chose those two as they are ending next month. I must admit, much as I am a landscape photographer, I preferred the Taylor Wessing exhibition. People always find other people interesting and the variety of portraits was good. I even bought the book which was £15.00 - very reasonable and then we discovered we could get the ticket price off of it so even less. The only downside of the book being that they did not include much of the description with the photographs. Being on the South Bank was a good opportunity for photography and we also had a visit to Kings cross to see Hugh, my son, for lunch, so a small inclusion from there.

As I threatened!! More pictures from our expedition to London last week. These were taken with the Fuji XE-1 using the 18-55mm lens. I experimented with setting an auto ISO of 3,200. We were changing environments from dark to light quite frequently and I hoped this would save me from continually changing the ISO. It did work and gave me speeds of 1/30th sec and up (the Fuji has a vibration reduction system). It's not something I would do in landscape photography, but in street where there is a need to react quickly, without fussing over controls I found it quite useful. I usually kept the aperture at f8 or 5.6. All the photographs, bar the first one which was taken outside the Whitechapel Gallery, were taken around Somerset House, over Waterloo Bridge, through to the South Bank and ending up at Waterloo Station. As I said in my previous post the light was overcast and misty. Whitechapel Gallery By Somerset House By Somerset House Thames from ...