(To see the video in HD, click Vimeo)

Last night saw the second instalment of Super Busking in Covent Garden with The Feeling taking to the street.  I don’t know if it was because it was a Friday or because the Feeling are just more popular but last nights crowd was much bigger, even though it was freezing!

Again this is all in aid if homeless charity Crisis so to donate head over to their website www.crisis.org.uk

(To see the video in HD click on Vimeo)

In what has become something of a Christmas tradition in London in recent years, last night saw the first night of Super Busking in Covent Garden.  The premise is pretty simple, instead of seeing the normal street performers in Covent Garden, during the Christmas season well known singers and bands take to the street and start busking for charity.

Each act is only announced two hours before they’re due to take to Covent Garden and perform.  Last night was the first for this year and saw the band Athlete perform to the christmas shopping crowds.  Other acts due to perform this year are The Saturdays, Jamie Cullum, the Stereophonics and the Feeling.

Of course, this is all for Charity and this year the Charity is Crisis, the homeless charity that does excellent work throughout the country.  If you want to donate to Crisis just head over to their website www.crisis.org.uk

I’m not the only one in my family that enjoys going to Speakers Corner, my brother does as well.  So this past Sunday, during his short visit, we headed to Hyde Park to listen.  I decided to use the opportunity to film some more footage and do a third Speakers Corner video, the result of which is below.

We hadn’t really planned on staying too long at the corner, but the Speakers were on top form and we were enjoying it too much, especially my brother.  So we ended up spending quite a bit of time there listening to about five different speakers.  As usual Diane was there and was drawing the largest crowds.  Also in Hyde Park that morning was a run for charity so quite a few of the runners joined the crowd after they finished.  One of the highlights of this visit was hearing Diane trying to criticise these runners who were raising money for cancer charities!

All the speakers, except one, took a largely religious theme this time with two Speakers holding bibles and two others sharing their views on religion.  One of the Speakers (the lady in Pink) ended up in a discussion with my brother – you can see the end of her retort 3 minutes, 48 seconds into the video.  Unfortunately I wasn’t filming the start but the whole thing was hilarious.

As always the Speakers were equally thought provoking, crazy, maddening, confused and inadvertently hilarious.  Hope you enjoy the video. 

So Friday was a very busy day in London, rushing around the city with my brother doing lots of touristy stuff.  My feet were not happy at the end of the day, so thankfully today (Saturday) was a much more relaxed day.  I’ve decided instead of uploading a series of photos from the day, I would show you this short timelapse video I recorded over the weekend.  This is my first attempt at this sort of thing so I hope you like it.

(To see the video in HD, please click here)

We started off by going to Horseguards Parade just off Whitehall.   For those of you who don’t know London, Horseguards Parade is a large parade ground which is used for a number of large ceremonial events including the Trooping of the Colour ceremony for the Monarch’s official birthday.   For the 2012 Olympics in London the Parade ground will be the venue for the Beach Volleyball.  We were there to see the Changing of the Guard Ceremony.  While the larger ceremony at Buckingham Palace is the more impressive ceremony, the crowds are much smaller here so you see a bit more.  While we were there we saw David Hasselhof walking towards Buckingham Palace – odd!

After that was finished we headed to Chinatown for some lunch.  We went to an excellent place called Baozi.  Really excellent sezchuan food, which oddly isn’t always easy to find in Chinatown.  Most times i’ve eaten in Chinatown i’ve come away disappointed at the quality of the food but not here, I would be happy to recommend the food at Boazi.

After lunch given that we were just around the corner from Trafalgar Sqaure we decided to head back and see some more of the Fourth Plinth project.  This is a public art project by Anthony Gormley, you can read more about in my previous post on the 4th plinth.  If you watch the video above you can see the process that happens every hour with a new member of the public raised onto the plinth.

Given that both my brother and I are avid photographers we decided to try some night photography in London, after all there are plenty of good places for night photography in the city.  We decided to focus on Westminster,  shooting the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye and everything in between.  Unfortunately I pretty much suck at night photography and this trip was no different, I got hardly any photos I was happy with, but I will try to upload the one shot I was happy with later! 

So Saturday was a much more relaxed day, but still as enjoyable and thankfully the weather held for most of the day.  For Sunday’s post we return to Speakers Corner and head to the Photographers gallery!

(To see the video in HD, click on Vimeo)

Last week I showed you a video I shot at Speakers Corner.  Well I enjoyed it so much I’ve decided to make it an ocassional feature.  It won’t normally be weekly, it’s just that its happened this way with the first two parts.

This Sunday was really hot in Hyde Park which usually brings people to the Corner and this week was no exception.  It may also have had something to do with the festival in Hyde Park!  But there was a pretty good turnout of Speakers so I could film some new people rather than those that turn up every week.

Anyway I hope you guys enjoy it, there’ll be another video coming later this week of Speakers dealing with hecklers which should be worth a watch.

So it took ages to upload but here is my short video from today’s moonwalking flashmob in honour of Michael Jackson.

The quality isn’t brilliant, turns out in the middle out a tightly packed crowd with a lot of journalists elbowing their way through, isn’t that easy.  Enjoy.

(To see the video in HD, click on Vimeo)

Yesterday London had quite a few protests going on, four in fact.  There was a protest by the Hilsborough Justice Campaign which attracted around 4,000 people, there was a massive protest by the British Tamil community, the daily protests against the Iranian elections continued in Kensington and in Trafalfar sqaure there was a protest for refugees rights.  So I faced a dilemma in choosing which to shoot.  In the end I decided to go for the refugees rights protest mainly because I thought it was a story that needed telling (asylum seekers face an extremely difficult situation in the UK and can be left destitute for years).

The protest was called to mark International Refugee Day and was to support the campaign to end destitution of refused asylum seekers.  Amnesty International’s London groups teamed up with other organisations including the Refugee Council to hold the rally in Trafalgar Square.

While I was filming at Speakers Corner yesterday I heard a large amount of noise off to my side.  I turned to see a large crowd heading in my direction.  They were clearly heading towards a protest as most carried placards and there was a little bit of chanting.

As you will see in the video and from some of the placards this was a Sikh protest against the Caste system.  It was also an event in memory of a religious leader who was killed a number of years ago.  Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find much information on this event, but I think its an annual protest as I seem to remember seeing a similar protest last year.  If anyone can tell me any info about the protest i’d love to hear it.

If you’ve followed my blog for a while, or my photostream on flickr, chances are you know I used to visit Speakers Corner in Hyde Park quite a lot. I find the place really fascinating, and I love listening to the different speakers, even if most of them are a bit mad! Well last year I would go on a regular basis and I would photograph all the speakers, but it sort of fizzled out.

Because the same speakers tend to turn up week after week, with just the occassional new speaker, I got a bit bored photographing the same people all the time. So as winter came I sort of gave up on the corner, feeling I’d exhausted all photographic possibilty (that sounds a bit pompus!). Anyway with my new camera and its ability to take video I decided that I should give the Corner another chance.

So this Sunday just gone I headed to Hyde Park to see what I could get with video. And I was pretty impressed with what I got. The video above is just a short three minutes or so, but I filmed much more. I finally started to feel like I was getting the hang of video and was very happy with the results. Certainly having a monopod helped things immensley, I could focus on what I was filming rather than on keeping my hands still. I think with Speakers Corner video has the advantage over photographs, because you can really see what it’s about, you can convey a lot of the passion and expression in a photograph, but by itself I think it’s hard to get across the Speakers message.

I can see a lot of possibility for video at Speakers Corner, so don’t be surprised if you see some more later on.

This morning I decided to try out some more video with my new 500D, as I really want to get a handle on how to use it.  Well it turned out to be a bit of a disaster really, for a number of reasons, some my fault, and some not.  I headed into central London to film some of the rehearsal for next weeks Trooping the Colour.

My main realisation from this outing was that when using the video, I really should be using a tripod whenever possible.  Handheld just makes life so much more difficult.  As you can see from the video there’s quite a bit of shaking.  Unfortunately my tripod is broken at the moment, so I haven’t been able to use it with the new camera.  So tomorrow i’ll be heading out to buy a new tripod.

Secondly I realised that I really don’t know what i’m doing with video!  Until I got my 500D i’d never shot any video, so I had no starting point.  To be honest i’ve not really read the manual either.  I really need to spend some time studying the camera and learning about video.  Admittedly it would be useful if the video had manual controls, so i’m keeping my fingers crossed that there will be a firmware update from Canon like they’ve just done with the 5D mkII, but I don’t have high hopes.

The final thing I learnt today is that its not a good idea to film in the rain, although I guess that’s sort of obvious!  When I left the house it was fine and the weatherman had said that it wouldn’t rain until the afternoon so I figured it would be safe.  Turned out I was wrong, by the time I got to the Mall it was pouring it down.  I only stayed a short time, but even in that time I got soaked through!

So a few lessons learnt today.