Borough Market lunch

Working near St. Paul's, Borough Market in London is only a pleasant 20 minute walk across and along the river from my office so every now and then I head there for lunch.

Going to Borough Market is a dangerous proposition for my wallet though: I find it hard to leave without having spent at least £10-15 as all the food options tend to be around £5/6 each and none quite fills you up. My regular combo is a cheese toastie from Kappacasein followed by the confit duck wrap from Le Marché du Quartier at the other end of the market.

The market has undergone some renovations in the past few years and new sections have opened. Today's photograph was taken walking through the more permanent west side of the market, looking through to one of the newer sections with loads of stalls selling everything from fine cheeses to teas.

The light in the market is gorgeous and one day I need to spend some solid time just in the market watching the light and the people to get some really good images. This one was a bit more off-hand—the scene caught my eye and I had the X-T2 with me so fired off two quick frames. With more preparation and fore-thought, I'd have had the camera set to a faster minimum shutter speed.

I think it was the lady towards the centre of the frame that caught my eye: I liked the way the light was falling on her and a small gap had opened in the crowd. I also love the lady with the dog in the bottom left. It's a shame the dog isn't in focus but that's the kind of thing that happens with snapshots like this.

After watching an Elia Locardi video, I decided to give Nik Color Efex another go. I've never really dug into it deeply at all, but the 'pro contrast' tools looked handy for the dynamic contrast effect that adds contrast while attempting to protect the extreme whites and blacks in an image. That along with the tonal contrast controls that allow you to adjust contrast to highlights, midtones and shadows separately really helped to pull out the liveliness from the raw file.

I also used Nik's output sharpener rather than Lightrooms sharpening tool which did a pretty nice job too. You can definitely push the X-T2 files further with sharpening in Lightroom than the X-trans II files, but they still get the 'squiggly worm' effect quite quickly so while Iridient doesn't support the compressed raw format for the X-T2 yet, I'll probably make use of Nik Sharpener for a while.

Google made the Nik Collection free a few months ago so I'd highly recommend downloading them and giving them a go. They haven't been updated in forever but they still provide some lovely tools in amongst the more garish effects and their control point method for adding effects selectively is quite handy. The pre- and post-sharpening tools are great, particularly when prepping for print.