Adventures of an Idiot - occasional ramblings of a photography freak

Lunchtime Tuesday last saw me jumping on a train to Brighton. Had to get to a meeting there early evening, preparing for a demo the following day.

Crashed with some like-minded types overnight then up bright and early Wednesday morning.
Well, that’s not strictly accurate… at least as far as being bright goes. For it wasn’t. Quite grey in fact. And wet.
I surfaced about 0730 and went out into the town in search of sustenance. Which I eventually found. By which time I’d realised that the weather didn’t bode well. It was that fine drizzly rain that seems fairly harmless… but spend any time in it at all and before too long you’re soaked to the skin. Great. And it looked like it was settled in for the day (which turned out to be pretty much the case, finally petering out about mid-afternoon).

So this was going to be a first for me… shooting pics of a protest in the rain.
Well, the Canon with the long lens was out for a start, neither lens or camera being in the least weather-resistant. All down to the GX10 then. At least that’s weather-resistant… though not the lens. So I rigged up some sort of protective covering consisting of a plastic bag with a hole punched in the end and a couple of hair bands to secure it at each end.
Seemed to work ok, though I won’t really know ’til I get to use the lens again I s’pose. I’ll be really narked if the lens is ruined though cos its the new Sigma I was using.

Anyway, what I ended up with is a batch of some of the horriblest (horriblest? Surely that can’t be a proper word?) protest pics I’ve ever taken.

In a couple of senses.

Firstly, the event itself was pretty horrible in that it was yet another demonstration of the increasingly heavy-handed policing that seems to have become the norm nowadays.

I don’t want to get too deeply into that here though. After all, this is supposed to be a sort of photoblog rather than an “issues” one, so no doubt I’ll post about this aspect elsewhere. When I finally get the time, that is.

More to the point, the pics themselves are nearly all a bit naff. Dunno whether that was down to the “protective sheath” (hmm… interesting phrase I’ve used there!) I’d cobbled together for the lens, or the weather, or maybe a combination of both. The main problem area seems to be focus… or rather, lack of it. Maybe the plastic was getting in the way of the mechanism a bit. Or maybe the rain was throwing the autofocus off a tad. Oh well. That’s another lesson learned.

The only positive side to this, far as I can see, is that the crappiness of the pics gives them a sort of raw (no pun intended), real-time, “as it happens” sort of feel. Maybe. And of course the blurriness helps to conveniently obscure some of the faces.

Towards the very end of the day, when a few intrepid protesters had established themselves near Brighton Pier, I was at last able to get the Canon and long lens out for a few shots, but by that time the light was already beginning to fade.

Anyway, the event was the “Shut ITT” demo in Brighton, targeting once again the American-owned armaments manufacturer EDO. Background to the event can be found at www.smashedo.org.uk and the full set of pics are here.