Friday was our last full day of the workshop. We’ll have a final class tomorrow morning to review today’s work and also create a summary of our best work for the week. But after that I’ll be officially on my own until I fly home Sunday.

I’ve settled into a regular routine each evening and morning. I return to the room after dinner and any evening shooting that I did and begin the daily photo editing. This consists of three steps:

• Copying all of the images from the memory card in my camera to my iPad, and then from the iPad to a small external SSD drive for a backup.
• Importing all of those files into Lightroom, the program I use on my iPad and the Mac in my office, where I can select the ones I like best and make them look a little better through magic.
• Sending the set of selected images to Steve for him to review and use in the next day’s class.

This typically takes an hour or two. I might have anywhere from 300 to 1,000 images to sort through, and select 25-50 for further processing.

After breakfast in the hotel dining room (1), I come back up to my room to write this blog. This takes an hour or so. Writing the blog requires selecting the images that tell the story, further editing to fit the blog, constructing the collages, and of course the writing itself. This may all sound very tedious, but I enjoy it.

After the blogging is mostly done I head out to class. The location is only five minutes from my hotel, so depending on exactly when I leave I have lots of time to wander around the area and see if there are any picture opportunities. Yesterday I got quite a few decent shots. People heading to work, empty stores, shopkeepers setting up for the day or waiting for the customers to arrive.

We had two visits on the agenda. The first was the Borough Market, a sprawling food market which dates back to the twelfth century, although most of the current buildings were built starting in the mid-nineteenth century. The market is located on the South Bank of the Thames and far enough away that another ride on the tube was necessary. I wrote earlier about our Oyster cards, which are pre-paid weekly passes for all mass transit in London. So these trips are reasonably painless (2).

The Market was extremely crowded, as much of London is these days. And the weather has progressively warmed up this week, reaching about 90F on Friday. This temperature is hot in the US, but is brutal hee where many homes don’t have A/C. The Market itself is covered but open air, and the heat is compounded by the crowds and all of the hot food preparation going on. I don’t know what the temperature reached inside, but it was oppressive.

There are two ways to get pictures of people on the street. The most direct way is to simply ask them if you can take their picture. Most people, including me, find it difficult to walk up to a stranger and ask to take their picture; they’re afraid of rejection or of the person acting very negatively towards them. However, whenever I get the courage to do this, I find that almost all people are fine with it.

The other way is to try and find opportunities to see people in interesting situations, or poses, etc. and take the picture without asking. Again, it can be anxiety producing – will they be angry if they “catch” you? My experience is that most of the time it’s no problem. If someone objects, I’ll either not take the picture or even delete it. It’s just a picture and not worth annoying someone.

After we were all exhausted by the heat and crowds, we left the Market and stopped for a hydration break. Then we walked about 15 minutes to the Tate Modern Museum, our last official photo stop. I didn’t take a lot of pictures there, because I don’t usually like to take pictures of art. It seems that the artistry would be in the original work, and not my photograph of it. But I did find a few images of people that worked for me.

On the way out of the museum, I came across this image.

We ended the day by stopping for a drink at a riverside bar, and then heading to Chinatown for a long dinner and conversation with friends I probably won’t see again soon, if ever.

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(1) They have a very nice buffet breakfast, along with a la carte options, all included in a single supplement to the room rate. It’s surprisingly well priced when I compare to the breakfast places around this area.

(2) Except for the crowded trains, the lack of A/C in many of them, the long walks between train lines, etc. But I jest – I found the tube a convenient way to get around reasonably efficiently.

(3) The woman upper right image asked me to send her a copy of the picture, which of course I did last night.