New Scotland Yard

Before Christmas was certainly a turbulent time, for a period of four weeks during November and December London saw four major protests by students against the reforming of tuition fees proposing that it will be possible for them to be tripled from £3000 per year to £9000.
The day the bill was being debated in Parliament saw the fourth and largest protest that saw widespread disorder and acts of criminal damage (partly thanks to barriers being put up around Parliament square which were then used against police and the concrete bases that held them in place being used to smash windows of the Treasury).
Another unfortunate event (apart from the attempted high treason on Oxford Street) was that one protester had to undergo an emergency operation after suffering serious head injuries after allegedly being struck by a police truncheon.
The following week saw a protest outside the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police at New Scotland Yard calling for an end to police violence against demonstrators, a few of those present symbolically sported bandaged heads and the mother of the hospitalised student was also present


During the month of protests there was quite a strange tense atmosphere in London, to act against the police containment tactics the demonstrators had resorted to splintering into small groups in order to both evade the police and cause the most amount of disruption.
One day I was shooting in the city and heard that small groups were running across the square mile bringing traffic to a standstill, when I arrived at my next job that evening at offices bordering Trafalgar Square I found the area in lock down with ranks of police surrounding a group of protesters still making their voices heard



On another note I've recently switched to Adobe Lightroom 3 from Camera Raw for editing my pictures. Initial impressions are that it has some very useful features such as adding keywords on import and a real time preview for both White balance changes and applied presets. On another note there are also a number of 'useful' features that could be better described as 'annoying'. One case in point is the message that pops over the image each time you apply a change in the the basic panel which only serves the purpose of informing you of the change you've just made (I know what change I've just made - I was the one who pressed the button...)
I've come across quite a few sites offering tips including Lightroom Killer Tips, The Lightroom Lab and Presets Heaven. For a complete workflow reference book I can highly recommend the book The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby.
One option in Lightrrom 3 is to change the 'identity plate' located top left of the interface from the standard Lightroom logo to one of your own choosing. This seemingly vain and rather pointless option has been put to good use by the photographer Gavin Gough, he chooses to use this area to show a Greyscale gradient which is incredibly useful if you are editing pictures on a laptop screen. The Greyscale gradient can be seen below both by itself and shown in it's place via a screenshot from my Laptop.
It can be downloaded from this page on his site and I can strongly recommended using it - ensuring that you can see the division between all the blocks of grey acts as an indicator that you are viewing the screen at the correct viewing angle



As a way of taking this principal even further I decided that an even better option was to have the same image also open onscreen in a vertical position. The viewing angle can change quite dramatically as you tilt the laptop screen forward and backwards - especially on the 13inch MacBook Pro which I am now using which unfortunately does not ship with the matt screen option, only the impossibly reflective and highly critiscised gloss finish.