George Osborne, the Conservative Shadow Chancellor and Richard Jackson, Labour, at the Tatton count for General Election 2010 the by Neil Alexander
I was asked to shoot the return of the elections in the constituency of Tatton where George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, was standing for re-election.
This was going to be a first for me and I learnt quite a lot from the experience, so I thought I’d share the lessons I learnt. I was given a “Counting Agent” pass which gave me open access to the whole area. The TV crews were squeezed onto a tiny platform raised a foot off the ground, and not allowed to leave, whereas the press photographers were restricted to shooting from way up in the gallery. Me, I was on the floor right in amongst the action.
I had been told right from the get-go in no uncertain terms that I could not shoot any pictures of the counters or the ballot papers even from a very wide angled perspective, so this left me without a great deal to focus on. After about 15 minutes, I noticed that the BBC News website, which was being displayed on a large flat screen displaying the other results from around the country, were accompanied by numerous photographs of various election counts varying from wide-angled overviews, to close up focuses on ballot papers and people counting them. I was led to believe that this is actually against the law – so either I was feed inaccurate information or the Beeb were blatantly flouting the law, either way I didn’t want to risk getting ejected so early on!
George Osborne, the Conservative Shadow Chancellor and Richard Jackson, Labour, at the Tatton count for General Election 2010 the by Neil Alexander
The first thing I did when I got there, was assess the ambient light. The count was to take place inside Macclesfield Leisure Centre, so I figured the sports hall would be fairly well lit. It wasn’t! I calculated that in order to be able to hand hold the 70-200mm racked all the way out on the D300, I needed to use the glass wide open at F2.8 and the camera’s ISO at 3200 (the highest it will go). (1/focal distance * 1.5 for cropped sensor=1/300 sec.)
So 1/300 sec was the minimum shutter speed that I ought to be shooting at if I wasn’t going to be using a flash, which I didn’t want to do early on whilst the count itself was in progress. I knew that later on, when the results were announced, using a flash wasn’t going to be an issue.
This didn’t really give me a great scope for movement. There were several scenes where I needed a deeper depth of field than 2.8, however stopping down meant I had to compensate with shutter speed. Having assessed this early on, I was disappointed that I didn’t think of bringing my monopod, and so a great many of the images I shot at long focal lengths were riddled with camera shake. Something else that I ought to have done, was to take an accurate white balance reading. I left the camera in Auto White Balance, and spent ages in post trying to fix this as the colour cast was horrendous.
Another important lesson I learnt, was that when using flash always make sure that you have spare batteries handy, not in your camera bag 30 yards away! As the results were about to be announced, I managed to jostle my way to the front of the crowd. I fired off around half a dozen frames and my flash died! I had two choices: stay and shoot without flash, or try to squeeze my way back to my camera bag to get replacements and then try to get back to the front of the crowd again probably missing most of the decent opportunities to shoot! In the end, the TV crews fired up their lights which lit up the scene like a Christmas tree.
George Osborne, the Conservative Shadow Chancellor and Richard Jackson, Labour, at the Tatton count for General Election 2010 the by Neil Alexander
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![wpid1008-Cyprus-by-Neil-Alexander-Lge-1[1]](http://manctog.com/wp-content/uploads/wpid1008CyprusbyNeilAlexanderLge11.jpg "wpid1008-Cyprus-by-Neil-Alexander-Lge-1[1]")
Just a quickie today.
This was taken just before dawn on the shoreline near Limassol. Its a 20 second exposure at F22 ISO 100 to lengthen the exposure time in order to get the smooth misty effect on the sea.
Swinging Tyre over the River Bollin by Neil Alexander
As part of my final A-level project for this year, I’ve been spending a lot of time round one of my old play areas as a kid. The River Bollin meanders from the hillsides on the edge of Macclesfield Forest, through deepest darkest Cheshire, crosses the Manchester Ship Cancal near the Lymm viaduct and gets swallowed up by the Mersey shortly afterwards. As a youngster, it was a great playground. Whether it was bike rides around the valley, mammoth bridge building with the Scouts or just pottering around with an OM10, this place holds a lot of memories for me. So it was I decided to venture back there and make some photographs.
On this particular morning, there were a few clouds in the sky pre-dawn, but it looked as if I’d be set up for some nice dawn light over the particular location I’d chosen. I played with a few compositions, and tried different exposures and then waited for the sun to rise, which it promptly did. Followed closely by really dense morning mist! I’d set up a composition on a fallen tree about 50 yards down the stream. By 5 minutes after sunrise, and long before the sun had got up over the far embankment I could barely see my own hand, never mind my proposed composition.
So I decided to try to do something with what little I could see. I moved a little farther back up the stream and chose this shot instead of a tyre on a rope hanging from a branch over the river. I wanted to try and soften the water with a long exposure, but I also wanted a really shallow depth of field. To add to my woes (I had already waded too far into the river, and the water had breached the top of my wellies – I hate soggy socks!) & as I appeared to have misplaced my 77mm ND filter, I realised I was going to have to use the 72mm ND400 on a 77mm wide Tamron 70-200mm F2.8lens. Now I’ve tried this before and it works, you just have to make sure that the lens is pointing upwards slightly and rest the smaller filter up against the lens front inside the lens hood, and you may have to crop out a tiny bit at each corner. (The hood for this lens is really long, so there may be a few light leaks from the smaller filter, but generally I haven’t noticed any) The problem I had was that the tyre wasn’t far off the top of the water so to get my camera pointing upwards it was practically in the river itself! Thank heavens I had my little Nikon View Angler thingy as composing would’ve required a snorkel.
Anyway processed in SilverEfex Pro. Exposure was 1 sec at F2.8 ISO200.
Another couple of frames from my recent trip to Cyprus taken near the castle in Limassol having just eaten a fine lunch in the “Finest fish restaurant in Limassol” – it wasn’t half bad.
The image above was shot using the 18-55mm F2.8 at 2.8 with a shutter speed of 1/500sec and a circular polariser. In amongst the cloth hanging from the store on the right you can just about make out the back of a head. It’s the head of an old woman whom I presume owned the store. Initially she was looking straight at me and I figured that this framing with her face peeking round the corner of her door would have made a great image, but as soon as I turned to point the lens in her general direction she turned her head. Every now and then she’d quickly turn round to see if I was still watching and I’d try to get a frame or two off, but she was just too quick for me. We played a little cat and mouse like this for a few minutes, but I eventually gave up and decided to leave the poor woman in peace!
This was taken looking the opposite way up the street. I’d seen the tourists (pale skinned, eating ice-creams & carrying a rucksack – dead giveaway!) and decided that the pretty flowers on the street could be quite well accompanied by the red of the rucksack and the outlines of the people if I threw them sufficiently out of focus. So I shot this at F2.8 1/6400 sec at ISO200, still with the polariser. I think that’s about the fastest shutter speed you can get out of the D300, and the image is still a little too overexposed for my liking. I guess I could have tried stopping down to maybe F4 or even 5.6, but then I wouldn’t have managed to same quality of bokeh.
It was certainly an interesting part of town to explore, but shooting in the early afternoon sun at latitudes like this is always going to produce very harsh contrast between the shadows and the highlights. At least with the first image, the canopy acts almost like a giant scrim, but with the bottom image the contrast between the bright white flowers and background contrasts too much with the deep shadows middle right. I guess if I’d been sufficiently on my toes, I could have whipped out a collapsible reflector to filter out some of the sunlight falling on the flowers, but the tourists would’ve wandered off by then.
Moral of the story – need to be more alert!
Limassol Shoreline at dawn by Neil Alexander
This last week I’ve been in Cyprus. Primarily it was a relaxing family holiday. We’re both self-employed, and it’s hard work being the gaffer, the tea boy & the office grafter all in one go. It’s like a perpetual juggling act, so when the opportunity comes for a break, never mind how long or short it is, we seize it by both ears and plant a big smacker on it’s lips! However, leaving a camera behind would be a cardinal sin. I normally use my LowePro Computrekker AW when I travel, but its a rucksack and loaded up, its heavy. And when you’re travelling especially with tired little kids, heavy certainly ain’t what you need! 
Therefore a roller was in order. After extensive research, I plumped for a Think Tank Airport International V2.0 and it was great. I wish I’d got the Low Divider Set too as I ended up having to remove all the padding and replace it with the divider set from the CompuTrekker so that I still had the space in which to fit a 17″ Macbook Pro.
After a lengthy velcro session, I had managed to get some semblance of organisation going on within my new Think Tank / LowPro hybrid and slotted the Mac into the space perfectly. Fully loaded with Mac the bag weighed in at 14kg, which was going to get me into trouble had it ever been weighed, but size wise, Monarch’s overhead lockers weren’t a problem.
In it I managed to fit:-
The locks are all of ingenious design and I was much happier leaving a bag full of gear in my hotel room while lounging by the pool than I’ve ever been before. All in all, a very cool bag and extremely practical for travelling.
Anyway, this is just a quicky to try and get me back to somewhere near my posting schedule (bandwidth was prohibitively expensive over there), so I’ll have plenty more images to show over the coming days…..
Macclesfield Forest by Neil Alexander
For the final part of this year’s Photography A-level I’m working towards at the moment, I have been given the theme “Rhythms and Cycles”. I have chosen to make a series of photographs of the the River Bollin. I wanted to show the cycle of water from the rain falling around the start of a river, along its course to where it meets with the sea. I chose the Bollin as I grew up with the Bollin Valley almost as a second back yard, so revisiting it 30 years later felt appropriate considering the theme.
When I first became familiar with the river around the 70s, it was a stagnant polluted mess. I believe that industrial setups in the Macclesfield area used to discharge their raw waste straight into the river, and it just stayed that way. Eventually the Bollin Valley Partnership was formed and they managed to breathe new life into the river and its environs.
After extensive research I finally managed to chart the course of the river in its entirety (on most maps, it appears to disappear in Macclesfield and gets quite tricky to find again the other side), and worked out where the main catchment area lies on the edge of Macclesfield Forest.
Macclesfield Forest by Neil Alexander
For this first shot, I wanted to make an image of a dank wet forest scene to depict the catchment around the source of the river. Well I got what I wanted! In fact, I got a little more than I bargained for. By the time I was finished, I was absolutely soaked and having left the camera’s rain hood in the car it got increasingly difficult to get it out without drowning it.
I then decided that I wanted to produce this series in black & white. So these images are multiple frame HDR images processed in Photomatix and then converted to black & white in Silver Efex Pro. It may be a little overdone though – I’ve just printed them A3 so I need to get them up on the wall and digest them over a few days.
Up until now, pretty much everything I’ve done with off-camera flash has been done in full manual mode on the flashes and on the camera using Pocket Wizard Multimaxs. The reasoning behind this is that I wanted to fully grasp the concept of off-camera lighting and how ratios between the flashes and the ambient can affect the overall lighting of a given scene, and to at least begin to try to understand this behemoth of a topic before venturing into semi-automatic use using Nikon’s CLS system. So the other night I decided to try and give Nikon’s TTL flash system a whirl.
Actually getting the damn flashes to fire was quite a bit tricker than I’d anticipated. I knew that I had to switch the SU4 mode off, but I still couldn’t get both SB900s to fire. So I eventually reset both strobes, changed the channel on the D300 and TaDa!
So my two lucky subjects for this shoot, were two Brahma beer bottles that I’d had chilling in the freezer for the last couple of hours. I was particularly parched and this pair looked rather tasty – so I had to work quickly before my subjects vanished. Firstly I set the camera up on a tripod and composed my frame. I then dialed in an exposure that would completely eliminate all the ambient light (1/60 at F8 ISO200 if memory serves). I then set up a shoot through umbrella up to camera left pointing down onto the bottles, aimed slightly in front of them. As the edge of the umbrella was probably about 2 to 3 feet away from the bottles (I couldn’t get it any closer because of the edge of the table), I had to dial this one up to +3 stops.
This gave me a nice soft light cast over both bottles. I then felt that I needed a little kicker light off to the other side. So I attached my longest grid to another SB900, dialed this down to -1 stop and directed it at the necks of the bottles producing the little highlight that you see down the necks of the bottles.
All in all, quite an interesting experiment and the Nikon CLS system is definitely very easy to use, though I am glad that I invested all that time over the last few months in full manual as it made deciding on my exposures and flash levels much easier. And more importantly it meant that I could pop the top of one of those bottles much quicker than if I’d been using the Wizards and doing!!
Early Friday morning I headed into Manchester to shoot some more streetscapes. It was right nippy, and I haven’t managed to locate my photographer’s carpenters fingerless gloves for some time now. However I still managed to put in some time with some long exposure using some ND filters. I shot this with an ND400, and merged 3 separate expsoures together (3, 7 & 15 seconds) in Photomatix.
These are the 3 original exposures:
 3 Secs |  7 secs |  15 secs |
I found that once the exposures had been merged and the result tone-mapped, there were issues with the text on the signage to the right. There must have been just enough of a breeze to cause it to flutter slightly and become rather blurred in the tone-mapped output. I opened this tif and the raw file from the shortest of the exposures and proceeded to use a layer mask to just let the sign from the sharpest image (the shortest one) show through. I also had to use curves a little to bring out the sign, as being from the shortest frame it was a little dark.
