Standing Underneath Dinosaurs!

My long dream of visiting the Natural History Museum and photographing the 'Dinosaur Hall', was, frankly, a bit of a nightmare.

The idea of going on a teeming wet rainy day seemed a great idea - but so did half of London and a quarter of the rest of the world too!

After queueing for 40 minutes just to get in, all these people, in wet clothes, mostly, removed said garments and had them draped over the majestic bannisters and up the steps - and on the floor. Where many just sat and just stared at and twiddled with their devices...

To make it worse, the second upper floor was completely closed, for 'refurbishment', so the wonderful photos I had seen before were simply unobtainable. 

I did try and ask people to move but wield a fisheye and anything remotely close appears as if it's ginormous. 

I had purposefully packed my Sigma circular fisheye  for potentially getting me something a bit different, but because it's for full-frame FX only, (on DX, its angle of view is similar to a normal fisheye but with the outer corners blacked out) I had to take the very old almost 7 year old falling to bits D700. And rearrange my whole kit around that system, such as the lovely old professional 17-35mm f2.8 I used for yesterday's Blip.

So, I was damned sure I was going to use this circular fisheye (Nikon, nor none of the other independents even make such a lens, though Sigma offer a DX 4.5mm version too, which has been on my wishlist for years!).

As I've found out before, trying to look absolutely directly upwards, getting the shots level and perspectively true is akin to attaining the impossible - the heavy (1kg) camera literally sitting on your face. Whilst wearing a rucksack, damp clothes and with little demons - er, delightful children, running about underneath you, bashing into your legs.

This shot may have taken 1/20 sec to actually expose, but took over half an hour to fully edit. It almost looks nothing like the original - the lens is never superbly sharp and the edges are always soft. This is probably due to the enormous 360 degree angle of view of the little circle that takes up just 70% of the image area. 

The differences in light was enormous, from black shadow to burned out - you have to get some sort of rescueable balance and then meticulously alter each and every part. Against any light source, you get weird and horrible internal reflections in the corners of the frame - no problem if you can crop them out but you can't - so lots of boring cloning out.

You basically wonder if all the effort was worthwhile - and if you say 'Wow', or 'What's this joke'? I'll let you decide - personally I sway from one side of to the other.

But, I was intent to see some more of the Museum, some of the big scale interactive sets were impressive - going up an escalator into a volcano being one - but £15 to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Whatsit exhibition had me quickly hotfooting it into the next annex!