Wednesday 14th was the day of the ceremonial procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall where her late majesty would lay in state until the funeral.

I was allocated an elevated “rota” position on The Mall . The procession was due to start at 2:30pm but having checked out the position the day before, I wanted to ensure that I had the forward corner position to enable me to shoot the approaching procession so after waiting for a pret to open for my breakfast, I arrived at the position slightly after 7:35. Yet again a long wait ensued.

The above image shows my position. An hour or two before the procession I set up a GFX50R with the Laowa 17mm, clamping it to the scaffolding to be triggered by a pocket wizard setup to get a wide image of the procession. The difficulty then is to ignore the camera and not keep fiddling / testing / adjusting it all the time up to till its needed.

The GFX was being triggered by either the HS2 or TX3 which I would be shooting in a burst mode, however the GFX would only fire on the first shutter press. To get rou5nd that and get a burst from the GFX I set it up in a bracketing mode (shutterspeed) at +/- third of a stop which got be 5 frames per burst.

Alongside the GFX I had two other cameras set up: The X-H2S with the 150-600 plus an X-T3 with 50-140 (both triggering the GFX).

As the procession moved down the Mall I started with the longer of the cameras, trying to pick smaller frames and members of the royal family from the scene.

Shooting with a fixed shutter speed and a changing aperture (due to the zoom), the ISO was reducing as the procession moved closer. These three images give an idea of the flexibility and aperture changing.

Once the procession got to this point it was a quick switch to the X-T3.

Then back to the X-H2S for the final image(s) as her late Majesty moved away.

Once out of view it was sit down, edit the images (on the iPad following the workflow I have outlined previously), with pre-set metadata in ShutterSnitch, waiting for the public to disperse so I actually had a strong enough signal to actually transmit the images. (Long story but it seems 4G is far more robust in these situations than 5G).

So after getting to the stand at 7:40am(ish), I finally left it at about 3:30pm (maybe later). However the day was not finished yet, during the time on the stand I received details that I would have a 30 minute position at the Laying in state .. but thats for the next post..

I look forward to hearing your comments… Until the next time..