It was Monday, 29th August 2005 and I decided to turn up at the Notting Hill Carnival, London, England before it started. The plan was to get a good spot, capture properly composed images and move on to another appointment for the evening. The carnival parade was supposed to start at 11:30 a.m. and finally started at 11:53 a.m. At 3:43 p.m. I captured my last image and left.
For the capture of the images I had gone digital. What am I talking about? I finally left the camera and rolls of film at home and decided to capture everything with a compact digital camera. The camera was a Kodak CX7530 Zoom Digital Camera. The specifications were three times optical zoom which ranged from 34 to 102 mm (35 mm equivalent), five Megapixels and ISO 80 to 800. My pocket was full with AA nickel metal halide (NiMH) rechargeable batteries and 128 Mb SD cards.
For colour reproduction Kodak had to be one of the experts. Kodak was the known name for colour photographic films so they had to come up with a decent digital camera which reproduced images to the same colour as their photographic films. If you do not keep up with the changes you will be left behind. For a while Kodak flooded the market with quite a lot of compact digital cameras which were quite good. Technology has moved on and digital cameras now exist in mobile phones.
It was a clear blue sky and the sun was shining. As you can see from above I picked a good location with the sun behind me and the shadows not interfering with the images. The reproduction of skin colour was extremely good. I carried the digital camera with me when I did weddings and took it out to capture some images but never used it for the majority of the images. The issue was that everybody had a digital camera and if they saw me taking most of my wedding shots with a pocket camera they might ask for their money back. Everybody expected me to turn up with a big camera and my big Metz flash gun. When I eventually purchased a digital camera for weddings everybody started asking me questions. Is that digital was the key question? Everybody was expecting to hear a click because I still had the big Metz flash gun attached to the digital camera. The impetus for a change to a digital camera was the customer expectations. Every time I took a picture people would come running towards the camera to see how it looked. The time for change was long overdue.
It has been fifteen years and as people we have changed. The method of capturing and presenting the images has changed. It used to be magazines but now it is social media and a website. Everybody can tell a story with an image and a caption to express your thoughts.
The previous four images have shown the changes in carnival costumes. For the latter two images I had to use the zoom because the dancer was 2 metres from ground level. Was it for safety reasons or better viewing?
Here are my remaining images from 2005. Enjoy the memories.
As I was leaving the crowd was arriving. Come early and capture the best shots. It will also give you time to notice how things have changed, and you can capture it for future comparison with other images.
Due to COVID19 there is no Notting Hill Carnival for 2020, and no parades, no people, no images.