A Change of Perspective

London, a Leica M6 and a Little Kindness

New York has rather spoiled me.

Before September’s trip with the kids, London was the place I went when I wanted to lose myself in street photography. There was always somewhere to walk, something happening, another reason to keep the camera out.

Returning on Saturday, for my first proper London photography walk in quite a while, I found myself making comparisons. After the hurly-burly of New York, London felt surprisingly subdued. Somewhere I had regarded as a photographic mecca suddenly seemed a little less overwhelming.

Perhaps that says more about what I brought home from New York than it does about London.

Finding My Feet Again

I started at Green Park and headed up Regent Street towards Oxford Circus. I wanted to see how Oxford Street was changing as it moves towards pedestrianisation, and to get a feel for what it might become.

I could imagine something of the Saturday-morning atmosphere I enjoy in Brighton’s neighbourhoods: people taking their time, stopping for a conversation, making use of the street as somewhere to spend time. I hope that feeling finds its way into this part of London.

From there, I walked Oxford Street between Selfridges and Centre Point, then wandered through Soho and Chinatown.

I was also trying Flâneur, an app that let me map the walk. By the end, the orange line recorded 4.3 miles and just under three hours of wandering. There is something satisfying about seeing a morning’s movement laid out afterwards: the detours and changes of direction that make perfect sense when you have a camera in your hand.

London took a little adjusting to. I had arrived with New York still setting the pace in my head, and it took some walking to become interested in what was actually around me.

There were photographs to make and different perspectives to find. Familiarity can make that harder to recognise. You think you know a place, then visit it after being somewhere else and discover that your expectations have changed.

A Small Repair

There was another reason for the trip.

At the beginning of the year, in the unsettled period leading up to my redundancy, I dropped my Leica M6 and damaged the rewind crank. My head was in the shed. I wasn’t thinking properly, and the camera paid for a moment’s distraction.

I took it into Aperture to see whether they could help.

The stop and the chat broke up the day. Then came the good news: the camera could be sorted, and the man in the shop repaired it for free.

A small act of kindness, and one I appreciated enormously.

It brought me back to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I read some fifteen years ago. What has stayed with me is a way of thinking about the things we use and look after. We carry them through our lives, and inevitably they acquire marks from the experience.

The little dinks and dents become reminders of where we have been, including the periods when we haven’t quite been ourselves.

That doesn’t make damaging a camera any less frustrating at the time. I would certainly have preferred to keep the rewind crank intact. But having it repaired felt like finally attending to a small piece of unfinished business from a difficult year.

The M6 was ready to go again. So was I.

I shot a quick roll of film, then rushed home to get it developed. After a morning spent wondering whether London could still excite me in the same way, there I was, impatient to see what I had brought back.

I’m grateful to the gentleman at Aperture. He gave me back a working camera, and the afternoon took on a different feeling because of it.

London can wait a little while before its next comparison with New York. I have a roll of film to look at first.

Until next time, keep snapping.

First Roll Loading Kodak Vision3 250D — and what Soho handed back

I've been shooting predominantly black and white for a period of time now of the 35mm film cameras. Years, really. Colour always felt like it needed a reason — a justification for the extra visual information it brings to a frame. Black and white strips a scene back to its essentials. Tone, texture, shadow, geometry. It's a clean way to work.

So loading up a roll of Kodak Vision3 250D AHU into the Nikon F80 felt like a deliberate step off familiar ground. This is a motion picture film stock — designed originally for cinema use in daylight conditions — and it's been building a serious following among still photographers. I'd read about it, seen other people's results, and kept putting it off. This time I just loaded it and went out.

I headed into London a couple of weeks ago for an afternoon with no real plan beyond Soho and the West End. That's usually how the best days go. No agenda. Just walking, looking, reacting.

"I wasn't prepared for quite how warm it would be. Not warm in the pushed, processed way you can fake digitally — warm in the way afternoon light in London actually looks."

The film

The warmth hit me the moment I got the processed film back. Vision3 250D AHU has a quality to its colour rendition that's difficult to articulate but immediately visible in the frames. It's not the oversaturated, high-contrast look of some colour negative stocks. It's quieter than that. More honest. The way light falls on a green café awning, or a pink coat, or an orange shopfront — it's rendered with a cinematic restraint that suits documentary street work perfectly.

The midtones are where it really earns its reputation. There's a richness in the middle of the tonal range that I haven't found in other stocks I've tried. Skin tones are warm without being ruddy. Shadows hold detail. Highlights — even in the direct afternoon sun I was shooting in — don't blow out catastrophically. For a daylight stock at ISO 250, it handles the contrast range of a busy London street remarkably well.

What Soho gave me
I started on the south end of Soho, working my way north through the afternoon. The Mediterranean Café on Old Compton Street stopped me almost immediately — a place that's been there since 1927, its deep green fascia catching the sun at an angle that Vision3 handled beautifully, the warm gold of the signage glowing against the paint. A man stood in the doorway, just watching the street. I got one frame and kept moving.

Around the corner, Reckless Records — that vivid orange shopfront with its illustrated window display of musicians — was being interrupted by a delivery driver in a hi-vis yellow jacket unloading boxes from a truck. The contrast of orange and yellow should have been too much. Vision3 made it work. That's one of its qualities: it handles colour density without letting things fight.

On D'Arblay Street I found two women in matching pink coats, both consulting clipboards outside a restaurant, deep in conversation. The warmth of those coats against the cooler tones of the street behind them is the kind of colour moment that simply doesn't exist in black and white. You don't get to choose that. The stock gives it to you.

"Vision3 250D handles colour density without letting things fight. That's one of its qualities — and Soho tests it constantly."

The Las Vegas arcade on what I think was Wardour Street gave me one of the more unexpected frames of the day — a motorcyclist in a full helmet standing at the crossing checking his phone, the enormous neon Las Vegas signage blazing behind him in red and gold, Hello Soho stencilled across the frontage. Vision3 renders neon brilliantly. The warmth of the sign, the cool blue of the afternoon sky in the upper corner of the frame — it's exactly what this stock was made for.

There was a quieter moment mid-roll that I keep coming back to: two women sitting outside a café in a narrow Soho alley, a red awning above them, dappled light falling across the table. No action. No joke. Just two people and an afternoon and the quality of light that Vision3 seems built to hold.

The three jokes

And then London started doing what London does.

The first one I almost missed. I was walking past the Hippodrome on Cranbourn Street when I clocked it — a man standing on the pavement, back turned, the word Randy's written in large script across the back of his white jacket. Behind him, filling the entire frontage of the venue: Magic Mike Live. He had no idea. The street had assembled itself into a perfect joke and was waiting, with infinite patience, for someone to walk past with a camera.

The second came at a crossing near the top of Charing Cross Road. A tour guide — grey hair, suit jacket, every inch the professional — was trying to marshal his group through the lunchtime traffic. His technique was to hold a green bottle above his head like a torch, a beacon for anyone who'd wandered off. He was checking his phone with the other hand. I pressed the shutter at the exact moment his arm went up. He was, without any doubt, leading them to the pub.

The third was the one I'm most pleased with. A London black cab, completely wrapped in the Sandals Caribbean holiday livery — blue bodywork, the Sandals script in cream, Get Closer to the Caribbean. Passing directly in front of it at that exact moment: a woman in a full Hogwarts Gryffindor robe, red and gold striped scarf trailing behind her. On her feet: sandals. She was heading somewhere else entirely, completely unbothered.

Three found jokes on one roll. Colour made all of them better. Black and white would have served the geometry. Vision3 gave you the blue cab and the red scarf and the warm pavement and the whole absurd London afternoon.

What comes next

I finished the roll on Old Compton Street — a delivery rider on a PORT bike outside Pizzeria da Michele, checking his phone in the late afternoon light, the gold lettering of the restaurant sign warm above him. A good closer. Unhurried. The sort of frame that makes sense at the end of a day's shooting.

One roll is not enough to draw firm conclusions about a film stock. But it is enough to know whether you want to shoot another one, and the answer here is unambiguously yes. Vision3 250D asks you to work with colour rather than despite it — to look for the moments where the warmth of a late winter afternoon in London becomes part of the story rather than just the backdrop.

After years of reaching for black and white by default, that's a different kind of seeing. I'd been missing it without quite realising.

I've already ordered more rolls. Spring is coming, the light is getting longer, and the streets are filling up again. If the first outing with Vision3 250D is any indication, it's going to be a busy few months.

Black and white isn't going anywhere. But colour just made a very strong case for sharing the bag.

Until next time, keep snapping