Two variations from Rochester

The Seven Dials Rapscallions were present in force at the Rochester Dickens Festival in December 2014.They are wonderful character actors, who really convey a sense of Victorians living on the ragged and bloody edge. Phil and I were lucky enough to get some of them to pose for us.

The problem, as always at a street festival, is to put the characters in a context that tells the story in an effective way. The pictures here were taken in the middle of Rochester High Street. As you can see in the originals, below, the modern context is anachronistic, jarring and distracting. So when I shot this, I had the idea in mind of making composites of the characters against a suitable simple background. Phil is, of course, the compositing maestro, but it really isn't something I particularly do. However, this was a good stimulus to give it a try.

Leaving the festival, we stopped along the way back to the car to photograph various walls and side streets that we could subsequently use as backgrounds in compositing -- and got a lot of funny looks in the process :-). Photographing the background on the same day means that the lighting was rather similar; I used the same lens as I had for the characters, so the perspective should look similar both for both character and background. In this case, I used the 24 mm f/2.8 AF-D lens that Phil had kindly lent me for the day. The 24 mm lens is not a classic portrait lens: used close in, it distorts and gives an exaggerated perspective to the subject. But the great thing is it lends an air of unreality to the image that contributes to atmosphere.

Both these pictures were made just by placing the character (cut out of the original image) on the background, and making separate monochrome conversions in Silver Efex for foreground and background. I tweaked local contrast on the character primarily to grunge up the skin texture, and tried to increase the sinister feeling by selective darkening around the edges of the background. Simple, but quite effective, I think.

The backgrounds were easy -- the walls and streets just needed straightening and cropping to shape. The characters -- well, cutting characters out is more difficult for me. Not being a regular compositor, cutting characters out of the background is the least of my skills; there is an added difficulty in that the plane of focus was very narrow on the characters eyes, meaning that some of their clothing was actually slightly soft. However, Topaz Remask made short work of cutting the characters out. I followed the method shown in one of their tutorials, and it worked like a charm.

My thanks to the two actors featured here, as well as my apologies. They don't look nearly as sinister in real life!

Rochester Dickens Festival 2014

One of the Rapscallions

Last Saturday (7 Dec 2014), Phil and I went back to Rochester for the Rochester Dickensian Christmas Festival. It really doesn't seem a year since I last wrote about this – you can see last year's account here. The big difference was that the weather was more difficult: windy and rainy for much of it, in the light was variable to murky. Nevertheless, I had a great time photographing the characters.

The people who dress up for this festival are truly wonderful: they're always willing to chat, and they put enormous effort into their costumes. The Seven Dials Rapscallions had an area cordoned off, as last time, where they set up camp. They were wonderfully co-operative for pictures; I also got some photos of some of the individuals out on the street later on. I didn't have much of a chance to talk to the steam punks this year, although, as before, they were out in force. Nevertheless, Phil and I did chat to one of their members who gives every impression of being the older brother of one of our street photographer friends, who also happens to use an Olympus camera.

As well as the characters the Fabulous Fezheads were playing. I've added a couple of wide-angle shots of them at the end of this post. I'd not heard them play before, and they were absolutely brilliant. They describe themselves as “England's Premier Sand Dance Illusionists”: imagine the Nutty Boys crossed with a 1920s music hall act crossed with Morris dancers and you would not even be close to what they are ;-)

This time, in addition to getting portraits of the characters isolated using the 105 mm f/2 DC lens, I wanted to get in close to some of them with wide angles. Some of the pictures you'll see below were taken with either my 35mm lens or Phil's 24 mm f/2.8 AF-D. The idea was to get some pictures with an exaggerated perspective so as to give an almost cartoonish effect. I think that many of Dickens own characters are so intensely portrayed in his writing that an exaggerated perspective is the direct way of portraying them. The pictures were all taken on my D700, using auto ISO with aperture priority. Simply processed through Lightroom as normal.

A sing along with the crowd before the parade

Fagin leads the parade

Mr Mayor, I presume

The Fabulous Fezheads, Victorian characters and mobile phone photography - all at once!

Rochester Dickens Festival December 2013

A character in the parade for the Dickens Festival

Last Saturday, 7 December, I went with Phil plus our friend Katrina and her son Oliver to the Rochester Dickens Festival. I had not been to one of these before, and it's quite a long time since I've been to Rochester in any case.

Rochester is closely associated with Charles Dickens: his house at Gad's Hill Place is near Rochester, and several buildings in Rochester and its vicinity appear in his books (perhaps most famously, the churchyard of St James, Cooling, is supposed to have inspired the setting for Pip encountering Magwitch at the beginning of Great Expectations).

The heritage business is huge in the UK at the moment – the Medway/Thames estuary area is Dickens country, just as the area around Haworth is Bronte country. So it's inevitable that there should be a Dickens Festival. I don't know what it is, but there seems to be a communicable urge doing the rounds in the UK at the moment that makes people dress up in period costumes as living history re-enactors. I went up to Biggin Hill a couple of weeks ago for an evening photoshoot at the Heritage Hangar, and, naturally, there were re-enactors posing with the Spitfires and Hurricanes. You almost cannot avoid re-enactors at any organized event, but, it really can add to the fun and atmosphere.

A solid crowd packed Rochester High Street to follow the parade

 What I had not expected was the crowds! We got to the bottom of the High Street just before the parade was due to set off, and started taking some pictures of the characters. But it quickly became impossible to move around very freely with the density of both costumed characters and spectators, and once the parade started it was just a question of going with the flow and following along at a very slow walking pace.

Never having been to such an event before, I wasn't quite sure what to take in the way of gear. I was hoping to get some good street shots with quirky characters in interesting framings or juxtapositions. So, I took a 35mm prime lens along with the D700, with the intention that that would be my main lens for the day. I thought I might be able to take the occasional opportunity to get close-up portrait of one or two people, so I also took a 105 mm lens with this in mind. However, the density of people was such that it pretty rapidly became impossible to frame individuals or even groups in a way that fitted with my original idea. The 105 became my lens for the day after about the first 5 minutes, with the aim of just picking out individuals and suppressing the busyness of the background.

Anyhow, the four of us had a very entertaining day, and I got some pictures that I like. I had not expected just what a target-rich environment it turned out to be. The costumed characters were so happy to be photographed, and so cooperative it was a real pleasure. It was great fun that there were some anachronisms as well: I don't think Sherlock Holmes ever appears in a Dickens novel - much less with a camera :-) -  and I can’t quite work out what the Confederate general was doing in Victorian Britain either. The wonderful steam punks from Great Kentspectations  were out in force, although, somehow, I'm still not sure how they fit into the Dickens universe**.

After the parade, we were wondering where to go for lunch, and found a bunch of stalls out by the castle. Because there were so many people in Rochester, the cafes and restaurants were simply overflowing and, although dying for a coffee, we couldn't find anywhere with free space. However, the stalls by the castle were not completely overwhelmed, so we stopped by them for lunch.

The Taste of Thailand stall was there: they set up on our campus several times a week as well, so I am very familiar with their delicious green curries and Pad Thai; Phil, Katrina and myself chose Pad Thai, which had a suitably re-vivifying effect.

During the afternoon, it was a case of pottering around catching the occasional costumed character and generally soaking up the atmosphere. One of the things I loved was a French band of buskers called "Sur les Docks" - very energetic players and excellent musicians.

First time at a such a crowded festival – what did I learn photographically? Taking a fast portrait lens was really helpful – shooting wide open, or nearly-wide open, meant I could isolate characters against the background, even when it was really busy. I think I also need to be much more active at getting in and photographing them: if Phil or Katrina got to a character before I did, I tended to leave them to it. There was a wonderful Miss Havisham, for instance, with spiders in her veil: but because Phil and Katrina spent some time photographing her, I didn't want to bother her myself. Next time I shall! Something that was extremely helpful was shooting the D700 in ISO-unlimited fashion (this is Britain in December, after all, where the light rarely gets better than murky). I set the camera on manual with auto-ISO and a shutter speed of 1/250, and just changed aperture for what the picture needed. The liberating thing about the D700 is that you can simply forget about the ISO for the most part and just choose shutter speed and aperture according to what the picture needs. (Then again, the size of the D700-105 combination, its weight and the loud clunk of its shutter are not so liberating….)

Anyhow, I'm looking forward to going back another time. If you've not been, as long as you do not have a fear of being tightly hemmed in in a vast crowd, it is a great day out.

**UPDATE 13 December 2013. Victoria Sparks from Great Kentspectations got back to me after reading my comment above that I didn't see where the Steampunks fit into the Dickens universe. Here is what she said. "We see steampunk as a branch from the Dickensian/ Victorian culture, most of our characters and looks are based on Victorian Science fiction (H G Wells, Jules Verne) and also alternative Victorian history (who's to say some of Dickens unfinished pieces didn't include characters like us :P ). Our main goal is to have fun and bring something different to big events like this, it is our 4th time at the Dickens festival and our popularity is growing within the public and the re-enactors groups too, some gave us the name "the new Victorians" which we thought was lovely." Thanks so much, Victoria - much appreciated, and I'm looking forward to meeting you again the future.