My Own Work | >Re-PHOTO

On Yer Bike!

The Climate Emergency Bike Ride organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change last Saturday morning was pretty straightforward to photograph. It can sometimes be useful to actually go on a bike when photographing bike rides, but it wasn’t convenient to do this on Saturday as I was going on to photograph other things where a bike would have been very much in the way.

Of course I could have left my bike somewhere locked up, but in London I normally like to use my folding bike, and these are very attractive to bike thieves because of their relatively high value and being so easy to transport away in a car boot or the back of a van. The big advantage of the folder for me is that it is so easy to put it onto a train – including the London Underground.

Anyway, I was without a bike, so an essential piece of research before the event was to find out the important places to be on the route and work out how I could get to these. Fortunately for this ride it turned out to be pretty simple – from the start at Lincolns Inn Fields I could go with the bikes the few hundred yards to Holborn Station, jump on a Piccadilly line train to Picadilly Circus and jog the quarter mile from there to the first stop outside BP’s Offices in St James’s Square in time for the ride to arrive.

Then it was only a few yards to the next call for the ride. From there I could make my way back to Piccadilly Circus and on to Marble Arch with plenty of time to spare for the bikes to arrive at the end of their demonstration.

One thing I’ve learnt is to avoid trying to use buses when moving from one part of a demonstration to another. Marches or bike rides both tend to cause traffic chaos, and it can be extremely frustrating to be sitting on a bus in a traffic jam unable to get where you want to be.

Advance planning is also needed because some weekends the London Underground system has large parts shut down for engineering works, so I check Underground (and bus) journeys on the Transport for London web site. It isn’t infallible – last Saturday it was telling me I couldn’t use the train from home up to London which was actually running normally, and it isn’t unusual for it to suggest completely nonsensical routes. Particularly if I intend to photograph several events on the same day, the actual working out of the journeys between them can take an hour or two.

Everything worked out fine on Saturday, and I got to the right places on time, even managing to fit in a few more photos on the way.

The only real photographic problems were at the start of the ride in Lincolns Inn Fields where a low winter sun was shining from behind the riders. Even the fairly effective lens hood on my 55-200 zoom had to be augmented by a carefully held hand, while those on the wider zooms are pretty ineffectual at the best of times. But by working slightly from one side and keeping a careful eye in the viewfinder for flare I was able to get some decent pictures making use of the lighting – and of course using fill-flash to bring out some shadow detail.

Using flash also creates problems, particularly because cyclists – like the police – tend to have lots of bits of reflective clothing as well as other reflectors on their bikes. Often quite a little work is needed in Lightroom to tame these images, and that ‘magic’ highlight removal tool got a fair bit of exercise on images like these:

You can read more about the demonstration, part of a day of actions over Climate Change aimed at pressing the government to take effective action at the Copenhagen talks and in its policies here, on My London Diary, where there are also more pictures from the event.

We Remember Ian Tomlinson

Last Wednesday, 1 December, was exactly 8 months since the death of Ian Tomlinson after a police assault at the G20 protests. The Ian Tomlinson Family Campaign wants a full investigation to find out what happened and to bring those responsible for his death to justice.

They decided to hold a public Candlelit vigil in Royal Exchange Buildings where he was assaulted and invited the press and others to attend. I’ve written a more detailed account of the event on My London Diary (and also on Demotix) so I won’t repeat the details here, where I want to look mainly at some of the problems in photographing such an event.

Firstly of course there were perhaps 30 other professional photographers there- including some from the national press and the picture agencies as well as other freelances, along with several TV crews and some other videographers. This made it fairly difficult – and at times impossible – to get into the positions for taking the best pictures (and also means that the chances of getting my pictures used in the news media is even lower than usual.) Working in confined spaces with professional photographers generally isn’t too bad – everyone appreciates the problem and within reason people cooperate with each other (with a few exceptions.)

Working with digital has actually made it a little harder, with a growing tendency by some photographers – even when working with DSLRs when they can’t see the image – to hold their camera out in front at arms length to take pictures – and usually getting it into the frame of the rest of us. They wouldn’t actually walk in front of us to take a picture, but somehow they seem to think it’s ok to shove a camera out there.

Working with videographers, particularly from the TV stations can also be rather difficult. They tend to like to set up on large tripods and take and stay in a good position, and sometimes feel they have a right to barge in front of stills photographers. Actually on this occasion they didn’t do so, but it still creates a barrier to movement in a way that still photographers don’t.

The light in Royal Exchange Buildings was fairly dim – it’s a pedestrian area and not particularly brightly lit. I’d prefer not to use flash for a candlelit event, or at least only to use it sparingly to keep the effect of the candles. Using too much flash – as the the first picture – does create a very artificial effect an, with flash on camera particularly, does rather make people look like cardboard cutouts.

This was taken at ISO2000, 1/60 f9, and flash is the main light source. The aperture ensures that I have sufficient depth of field to keep everyone sharp and even at f9 the ambient light does give some – if limited – background detail at 1/60s. I’d started taking pictures as they walked towards the event, moving backwards as they came; I hadn’t wanted to get in their way or stop them, but seconds after I started taking pictures I found myself with other photographers on both sides and behind me shooting over my should and I – and the family – had to stop.

From there I managed to find a space crouching in front of the TV cameras and very close to the family. Having taken a few pictures with flash to make sure I had something sharp – if rather boring – I stared working by available light. Using the Sigma EX 24-70 f2.8, exposures were pretty variable, ranging from 1/20 to 1/60 at f2.8 to f3.5 at ISOs between 1000 and 3200. Many frames were not sharp due to subject movement or camera shake, and the limited depth of field. The lens is just very slightly soft at f2.8 but good enough to use, particularly in difficult conditions.

Mrs Julia Tomlinson

Flash is of course more intrusive, and although we had been invited to photograph the event and I wanted to produce pictures that might generate more publicity for the family campaign, I still found it hard at times to take pictures and wanted to do so with the minimum of intrusion. So when the family moved to the spot where Ian Tomlinson actually collapsed and died I needed flash to prevent blurring when they were laying flowers, but went back to available light to photograph them paying their respects after a short prayer from the minister present.

But after taking this I was not sure if it would have sufficient depth of field (looking at it now, although only Ian Tomlinson’s widow is really sharp, the image still works) and decided I had to take a similar picture using flash.

It is sharper, the colour is more accurate. Although probably I could process the raw file rather more carefully to get a better result, I think I prefer the atmosphere of the exposure using available light.

The story made the front page on Demotix, and I also published it on Indymedia, as well of course with a few more pictures on My London Diary.

Bhopal – 25 Years On

Twenty-five years ago people living close to the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India woke up in the middle of the night coughing and vomiting and began to flee for their lives. Around 3000 died that day and perhaps 8000 in the next 3 days, a death toll that has now reached around 20,000. Probably half a million were exposed to the deadly cloud of gases from the factory, and as it hugged the ground, children were at even greater risk. Twenty five years on, there is still around a death a day directly attributable to the leak, and pollution leaking from the plant continues to pollute drinking water, leading to around ten times as many birth defects in the area as would normally be expected.

Bhopal was not an accident. Although it’s exact time and scale could not have been predicted, the disaster was the inevitable consequence of cost-cutting decisions made by Union Carbide management. It was cheaper to cut the plant maintenance so that the safety systems no longer worked, cheaper to leave the toxic material (it was no longer being used) in a site surrounded by half a million people than to dispose of it safely, cheaper not to train staff properly or inform them of the risks, cheaper to cut corners.

You can read a little more about Bhopal in my feature on Demotix, which reports a memorial service held on December 2, 2009 in a rather damp Trafalgar Square, organised by the Bhopal Medical Appeal.

Photographically the main problem yesterday was the weather. It was raining as I left home for the run to the station (that’s run using feet, not as in school run – and only necessary because I never quite get organised in time for the five minutes or so walk) and about 50 yards down the road I remembered I hadn’t put my umbrella back in my camera bag – it’s generally a fairly vital accessory in London, but there was no time to go back.

Fortunately the downpour only really got fully into gear as I came down the footbridge and into the ticket office, but as I sat on the train and it battered against the windows I wondered if the event might be rained off and my journey wasted. It cleared to just a little light rain more or less as I arrived at the square, and although the light was pretty low and there were plenty of puddles the umbrellas and the reflections on the wet paving stones perhaps improved some of the pictures.

And I didn’t get too wet, although one or two pictures were lost due to raindrops on the UV filter which protects my lens. As usual I kept a decent-size microfibre cloth in a plastic bag in a pocket and wiped the front of the filter fairly obsessively to try and keep it clear. Probably I should have resisted the urge to economise and gone for a more expensive chamois leather, but at least with the microfibre I don’t have to worry about producing it while photographing animal rights activists.

Umbrellas may keep people dry, but they also put their faces into deep shade, especially if the umbrella is dark. So flash became pretty essential on many of the pictures to put some light under them. I still can’t quite work out how the camera and flash modes interact with the Nikon D700and SB800, and I think there is a little bug in my camera (perhaps that same one that occasionally produces random heavy underexposure and thinks I have that elusive f0.0 lens.) And I forget to wait long enough for the flash to recharge far too often – as always. Sometimes of course it helps to have this kind of unintentional flash bracketing.

The wet pavements did mean that the idea of people getting down on the ground draped in white sheets to represent shrouded bodies wasn’t practical – but perhaps they were easier to photograph standing up.

One Law For All

The idea that we are all equal under the law is a vital part of our understanding of human rights and equality, but it hasn’t always been like that (and still isn’t in some respects.) At least until relatively recently in the UK, some of the medieval privileges of the church still gave clergy (or at least Church of England clergy) some special protection, and institutionally the Christian churches are still protected by laws such as our blasphemy laws.

On Saturday, Peter Tatchell reminded us that the church still enjoys some extra protection, and that he had been convicted under the 1860 Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act after his Easter demonstration in Canterbury Cathedral – and he was fortunate to be up before a judge with a sense of humour, who fined him £18.60 for the offence. And at the same event, Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris told us of the need to repeal the Blasphemy laws (and he’s tried.)

But although ‘One Law For All’ is against all religion-based law, it’s main focus is on Sharia law, because of the special position it has in many majority-Muslim countries around the world, but also because of attempts to introduce it – if only on a voluntary basis – into the legal framework of countries including the UK.

The problem with Sharia – as with our largely vestigial religious laws – is that it was conceived in a very different society to that we live in. At the time it represented a radical and forward-thinking approach to issues of justice and the rights and responsibilities of men and women compared with the then current practice. But times and societies have changed dramatically since then so that the views codified then no longer represent the kind of spirit and way of thinking that they then did. Laws need to evolve as society evolves or they become ossified into reactionary and outdated practices.

The idea that disputes in 21st century Britain should be settled by rules fixed absolutely more than a thousand years ago in a very different feudal society is untenable.They conflict with the ideas that have developed since about human rights in general and about the equality of women in particular.

The use of Sharia law is no more acceptable than would be tribunals based on fundamentalist Christian precepts or indeed those already existing of the Beth Din, although I think it is beyond dispute that our ideas about human rights and the value of human life have been very much influenced over the centuries by the insights of all three religions. And while I found myself very much in agreement with the aims of the ‘One Law For All’ campaign there was a kind of sectarian anti-religious fervour from some of its supporters that I found both a distraction and a detraction from its purpose.

Photographically there were few problems with what was a relatively small event – a couple of hundred people, including a very large number of speakers. It was perhaps difficult to know how to make use of the row of small coffins in front of the main banner and hard to incorporate them with the speakers; shooting wide enough to get them in made the speakers on a small podium a few metres further behind rather small, and moving further back to cut down the effect of the different distances wasn’t possible as the audience was in the way.

I did try to use just the words ‘NO SHARIA’ from the banner with some of the speakers, but it wasn’t very exciting. But there was considerable freedom to photograph them from different angles and distances and I felt I did get at least one decent picture of almost all those who spoke.

One Law For All does have some graphically very strong placards, but it was perhaps a pity that there were not rather more of these. They worked rather better in the demonstration in Trafalgar Square last year where they formed a good background to many of the speakers. But I did get a few pictures I liked of the audience.

Partly because I was still feeling a little drained after the flu, I’d lightened my camera bag by taking only the D700 body and a few lenses – the 24-70mm, 10.5mm fisheye, 20mm and a 55-210mm. I took a few pictures on the 20mm, but nearly all on the 24-70 and 55-210, and kept finding myself wanting to change between these two. It would have been a lot easier with two bodies.

Part of the reason for the frequent changes was simply the very large number of speakers – and I’d decided I would photograph each of them. In most cases I took both full length pictures with the wider zoom and also fairly tight head shots with the longer lens.

The 55-200 Sigma is a ‘DX’ format lens, but certainly at the longer end seems to cover the double size FX frame with decent corner to corner sharpness, certainly good for portraits. At the wider end it does vignette slightly (and I had to saw a little off the lens hood which vignetted even more than the lens) and at 55mm I have to crop the frame by a couple of millimetres, but it still gives a reasonably sized file. Its big advantage so far as I’m concerned is its weight – a ridiculously featherweight 335 g.

There is a little more about the event and a few more pictures in my account on Demotix, more to follow on My London Diary

Paris 1984

In 1984 we took the Hoverspeed hovercraft and express coach to go for a couple of weeks – part work, part holiday – in Paris with Linda and our two boys, then 5 and 8. We were staying in a luxury self-catering apartment at the bottom of the hill in Montmartre. The luxury was a bonus, as we had paid a very basic price through the booking agency but had struck lucky – the normal room price was several times what we had paid.

I was working on a more serious project (more in a later post) in black and white, but as well as having a family holiday I also found time to take some colour. By then I was shooting colour on Fuji film, and the colour quality was a distinct improvement (and they forced Kodak, who for a long while had been squatting on their Kodachrome laurels, to considerably notch up their game also.)

By this time I’d also upgraded my cameras, and was now working with two Olympus OM bodies; I’d replaced the Russian Zenit with an OM1 in early 1974 shortly after they were introduced, added a OM2 a few years later, followed by an OM4 at about the time of this trip. (My Russian rangefinder had also been replaced over the years by a secondhand Leica M2, which had seen 20 years of rather active service before coming into my possession.)

These colour images were probably taken with an Olympus OM4. By this time I’d got over a brief early affair with zoom lenses and was back to using primes, in particular a 35mm shift, 28mm, 50mm and 105mm (and at times also 200mm and 20mm.) All except the 105mm Tamron where Olympus lenses.

The OM4 was for me the more or less perfect SLR. Small, light, reliable and with the best metering system ever, particularly for those of us who had learnt to work with the zone system. If it wasn’t for the need to use digital I’d still be working with my pair of OM4 bodies now (and I kept the OM2 – at some point traded up to an OM2n – for backup.)

This morning I climbed the ladder to the loft again and searched through various boxes looking for the transparencies I felt must be there somewhere. Eventually I found a few boxes, though I think there may well be one or two more there.

Despite a major setback, the black and white work I took on this trip eventually formed a show, and a number of the prints from it are still hanging on my own walls – and that’s something for another few pages of web site. The colour slides just came back from processing, were probably projected a few times and then all but a few went back into their boxes and were put in storage – until now.

I’ve put forty-five on them on the web now on my ‘new’ Paris site; for the moment the site is basically thrown together very simply in a very simple way, and I’ll add some more content and sort it out a bit later.

Paris Colour 1

I didn’t take many colour pictures on my early trips to Paris. The one film that I exposed in 1966 was also exposed to the less than pure water of the lake at Versailles for an hour or so and then allowed to dry (or not) in the camera. Since the film processing was included in the cost I sent them away to be developed. They came out, but with a certain amount of staining and unevenness and an overall brown cast.

In 1973 I took rather more colour and with less dramatic faults, but not a great deal more interest. Linda was keen to have some visual material to use with language teaching, so I was taking pictures of everyday objects like post boxes, of shops, of postman delivering letters and so on for this purpose, as well as more conventional tourist images.
© 2009 Peter Marshall

I think most of the cololur was probably taken with the Olympus SP, with its fixed slightly wide-angle lens whenever we went anywhere I though would be of interest photographically. We did go to Versailles again, but this time I kept hold of my camerasm taking rather too many pictures both inside and outside the chateau.

We came back to Paris a couple of times in the next few years, but I didn’t take many pictures as we were just passing through. In 1974 we were on our way to Provence and went around the city by train, and in 1975 we were on our bikes. Again we didn’t stay long in Paris, simply making our way from the Gare du Nord to the Gare Montparnasse in the early morning rush hour to catch a train on to Angers from where we cycled up the Loire valley. It was a few years before I returned to photograph Paris again.

Paris 1973

This morning I would have been going up to St Pancras to catch the Eurostar to Paris for the photo show, but as I mentioned in my earlier post Paris Photo 2009, I’ve decided not to go.

So instead, I’m standing at my computer with an espresso and a croissant, mentally supplying the smell of stale smoke from Gauloises and the noisy traffic in the street outside and dreaming of the city. In my dream I’m in a very particular cafe, just a few minutes walk from the Rue de Rivoli where Paris Photo is held, and later in the day I’ll stroll through the passage across the street and into the Jardin du Palais Royal and down through there, out by the Theatre and across the square, untidy with traffic to wait at the crossing before descending the escalator into the basement depths of the Carrousel du Louvre and Paris Photo.

As in previous years it will be a fantastic show, and I’m sorry to be missing it, though I do find the venue a little difficult. I don’t think “I didn’t know I was agoraphobic until I went to Paris Photo” would be a good advertising slogan but it happens to be true so far as I’m concerned, and on my first visit I found myself rushing in panic for fresh air after a couple of hours in the depths.

So rather than go to Paris (and I will go again next year for the Mois de la Photo and Paris Photo if not before) I’ve decided to bring a little Paris into my life here and on the web.

Flea market, Paris, 1973

I don’t think I’ve written before here about my first published portfolio. In fact it only came back to me yesterday evening when I started thinking about this series of posts. Although I’d had an interest in photography from an early age (doubtless aided by the occasional image of scantily dressed young ladies that appeared in the Amateur Photographer which I devoured religiously every week at the local library as a teenager) and actually owned a real camera (a story for another time) since I was around 14, I only took up photography practically at the age of 25.

Paris at the start didn’t actually help in this, as on my first visit there in 1966 I dropped my camera – a Halina 35x – into the lake at Versailles as I was getting into a boat with my girl friend – and it was only recovered after quite a few minutes sitting on the bottom of that murky water. It never quite recovered despite careful cleaning, and the shutter gave random timings regardless of its setting but generally slower than 1/30s thanks to the rust on the shutter blades.

I visited Paris again in the summer of 1973 (by which time that girl friend was my wife) and we stayed an attic room in a huge mansion in the centre of Paris that was now a student hostel. We were broke, and walked the streets all day living on baguettes slit in half with a strip of dark chocolate or cheap cheese in the middle and cheap wine eaten in small squares as we followed the Guide Michelin walks around the grand and not so grand areas of Paris. In those days the walks in the guides were more detailed, and they were at least twice as long and twice as many as in modern editions.

Occasionally we treated ourselves to a plat du jour in the kind of cafe where French workmen eat and on rare occasions to one of the cheap tourist fixed price menus, but mainly we lived on bread, and eating as much as we could of it at the hostel breakfasts with jam and honey.

At night we staggered up four or five flights of the grandest staircase you can imagine (though rather less grand by the time you got to the top where our room was) and collapsed onto a bed lit by the dimmest imaginable of electric bulbs – more a nightlight than anything you could see by.

Memories are dim too, but it was one of our most enjoyable of holidays, and also for me the first time when I really got down to some serious photography; over the two weeks or so we were there I took around 20 films, probably more than I had taken altogether in the previous six months.

Fortunately by then I’d finally given up on the Halina 35x (a solid Hong Kong made viewfinder 35mm camera with a decent 45mm lens which sold for £7 13s. 3d in 1959 – but definitely not waterproof!)

I carried two cameras around Paris, one the tank-like Zenith B, an M42 Russian made screw-mount SLR with a 55mm f2 standard lens and my first telephoto, I think the surprisingly small Russian Jupiter-9 f2 85mm (like most Russian lenses, derived from “liberated” Zeiss designs.) It was a camera where everything was manual, and using it was hard labour. The Zenit had a lousy viewfinder for an SLR, dim and hard to focus, and winding on often required suprising force – and it was easy to accidentally rip a film from the cassette trying to wind on to frame 39.

As a contrast, also hanging around my neck was an Olympus SP, arguably one of the best fixed-lens rangefinders every, with automatic exposure, spot or centre-weighted metering and a fine 42mm f1.7 lens. YOu could also use the metering for manual exposure. Perhaps the only better camera of a similar type I’ve used is the Minolta CLE – one the best of the Leica M range – which is almost the same size.

After coming home I sent a dozen or so prints mainly from Paris to a photographic magazine. A few months later, picking up a copy at W H Smith’s I was delighted to find several of the pictures I sent reproduced with a short text as a portfoliom for which I received £25. This was my first real publication.

I’ve spent today adding around 25 pictures to the set from Paris in 1973 that were already on my smallest web site, peter-marshall.com. Later, probably tomorrow, I’ll put up some of the colour work I did in the city in the early 1980s.

New Colour on the Lea

For various reasons I’ve been unable to get out and take pictures this month. First there was the swine flu which put me out for a week, and I’m still not 100% fit – the flu has long gone but I’ve still a bit of a chest infection which gets me coughing whenever I exert myself, and sometimes even if I don’t.

Then there’s been the weather; unless there is something really important – or someone is paying me – I’m not normally going to photograph in the raging gales and pouring rain we had on Saturday. Perhaps I should get a waterproof camera and put up with it.

But the weather didn’t just put me off, it also closed the railway line that I rely on to get to London, the flooding rendering a bridge unsafe. Three days later it’s still closed to traffic and we’re hoping it will reopen by the weekend. Meanwhile, there’s a bus link and an extra 45 minutes or so on what is normally a 30 minute journey. Instead of a little over an hour spent travelling in both directions its now more like three.

And of course, being November it now gets dark so early. Unless I pay higher fares to travel early there is really little time to work if I come up and want to photograph by daylight. Of course I should be taking advantage of the fact that I can now take night photographs and still get home in time for a good dinner, and perhaps when I feel a bit better I will. But for the moment I’m mainly staying in and getting on with various things around the house. Sunday I gave the eucalyptus tree its annual trim and Monday I cut down most of the creeping plant that covers much of the front of the house.

But I’ve also found time to get on with scanning the slides from the River Lea in the 1980s I found the other day. The Epson V750 really does do a very good job of 35mm, hard to tell the results from those with my dedicated film scanner, a Minolta Dimage Scan MultiPro, probably (especially when used with the Scanhancer diffuser) the best non-drum film scanner ever produced.

Unlike Minolta (now out of business), Epson are still bringing out software updates for this scanner, and had I downloaded and installed the latest version at the start it would have saved me some time, as it turns out to be more reliable on my system than the older version I had installed.

Epson also supply a set of ICC profiles for use with the scanner (for transparencies, mono transparences and reflective material) and with correctly exposed slides – Agfa, Kodachrome and E6 – this generally gives excellent results. The Epson software also lets you adjust the exposure3 – black, white and mid points precisely, though it is just a little fiddly as it shows you the histogram of the original rather than the result, and you have to make an adjustment then click to see its effect.

Using the scanner with the film holder which holds 12 mounted slides, the software automatically detects and crops the image areas (it is sometimes fooled by some very dense slides), allowing you to set the exposure individually for each of them then click the scan button and forget about it until all 12 have been scanned. Scan times are pretty short, but of course depend on resolution and on whether you choose to use the various software corrections such as Color Restoration, Backlight Correction, Dust Removal and Digital Ice.

I’ve tested most of these things and so now normally leave them all switched off. They must have their uses (other than for marketing) but I’ve failed to find them. I scan 35mm colour transparencies at either 2400dpi or 4800dpi if I’m feeling serious, and in 48 bit colour, using the scanning software in standalone mode.

At 4800dpi the scans are rather large – around 150Mb – and handle a little slow on my ageing computer. 2400 dpi gives files at roughly 3000 x 2000 pixels, good enough for prints up to around A4 in size or even a little larger. 4800 dpi gives files around 6000 x4000 pixels, and there is little point in any higher resolution as the files essentially contain all the detail that there is in the slide.It is also the highest actual optical resolution of the scanner.

Using the software in standalone mode means I can continue to work in Photoshop while the scan is taking place. All slide scans benefit from some dust removal, however careful you are – unless perhaps you actually work in a ‘clean room’, but I’ve only ever found one effective piece of software to do this. Polaroid some years ago made their ‘Dust & Scratches‘ filter for Photoshop – and other apps that use Photoshop plugins – available free of charge (it also runs as a standalone program if you don’t have Photoshop.) At settings similar to those shown below it removes most small dust spots and loses very little if any detail; at higher levels of some sliders you can get some nasty artefacts produced, so it has to be used with a little care.

Since Polaroid had its problems, this software has disappeared from the Polaroid site, but you can still find it on the web, though perhaps you shouldn’t tell too many people, just rush off and download it before it disappears. Of course it may not work on Windows 7 or recent Mac versions, but its fine on Windows XP.

After applying this, I then take a quick look at the histogram using the Levels dialogue (Ctrl-L) and adjust those if necessary, as well as setting the mid tones to an appropriate value. Most scans need nothing doing at this point. If I’m still not satisfied by the contrast and the colour balance I then go on the the Curves dialogue (Ctrl-M) and use the middle eye-dropper from there to select a suitable neutral in the image, after that making any adjustments needed to the curve to get the contrast and brightness I want.

Large scans I tend to save at this point and write to CD later in case I want to work on them at a later date without the time involved in re-scanning. Then I cut down the image from 16 bit per channel to 8 bit so I can save as a jpeg on my hard disk (usually at quality 11) to give a master file from which I can print, make web size jpegs etc.

Working at 2400 dpi, I can process the scans as above in a couple of minutes, more or less at the same speed as the scanner works. That way I can probably do decent quality scans from around 20-30 slides an hour. Working at 4800 dpi slows things down to perhaps a quarter of this rate, but is still significantly faster than the Minolta slide scanner, where two high res images an hour is a good rate.

Having produced around 150 images, there was then the problem of putting them all on line. Rather than hand-crafting web pages I decided to use a Lightroom HTML web gallery. This produced the structure of the new site pages in a matter of seconds, but I wasn’t happy with the quality of the images. Fortunately it was a simple matter to copy better files to replace them – making sure of course they were the correct size in pixels. Possibly I could have got Lightroom to produce better files by altering some of the parameters, but it was easier to use those I had. I do normally use Lightroom to produce my images for the web after all.

Possibly on Stratford Marsh…?

There are pictures in these sets that I would normally have edited out (and one I left out by mistake) but with historical archive material some of the finer points of photography are perhaps less important than the subject matter.

I haven’t captioned these images either, which at least solved one problem, which is that as well as not having a proper filing system, at the time I was not particularly interested in knowing the exact locations of the colour pictures I was taking. Of course it is vital to their value as historical record, and while I do know most of the locations there are a few – such as the couple above – that are annoyingly hard to place.

The two galleries are linked into the rest of my Lea Valley – River Lea site – at the bottom of the page. Clicking on my name on any of the display pages takes you back to the home page for the site.

Hard Times On-Line

One of the oldest and most respected of on-line photography magazines looks likely to halt publication at least temporarily – following a decision by Canon to end its sponsorship.

I’ve often admired ‘The Digital Journalist‘ for its great features on photojournalism, linking to a number of them over the years. Its editor, Dirck Halstead, had become Life magazine’s youngest war photographer during the Guatemalan Civil war when he was only 17. After that he went to college and then worked for UPI for 15 years and was in charge of their picture bureau in Saigon during the Vietnam War. From 1972 he covered the White House for Time for 29 years, making 47 Life covers, as well as working on many films. You can see over a thousand of his pictures in his on-line archive.

With this background, Halstead was able to make his site an authoritative one, getting pictures and features by some of the best photojournalists in the 145 issues produced over 12 years to date. He headed up a strong team on the magazine, including Horst Faas as Europe Editor and Marianne Fulton as Dispatches Editor. Contributing editors include many more fine photojournalists, and then there are around a dozen contributing columnists and photographers – you can read the full and impressive list on the magazine’s credits page.

All this of course needs substantial funding, and this comes through sponsorship and advertising. Canon was the magazine’s principal sponsor and in a letter in the November issue Dirck Halstead writes:

“Unfortunately, our principal sponsor, Canon, whose market has also been impacted by these turbulent times, has decided they can no longer afford to provide their financial backing to The Digital Journalist. We are very grateful for the generous support they have given us over the years. “

Halstead’s letter starts with the grave news “I am afraid that the December issue of The Digital Journalist may be our final issue, at least for a while” and the magazine now has PayPal links asking readers to donate funds for the future of the magazine. It came as a surprise to me that, according to Halstead, the site only has “more than 10,000” loyal readers, though I’m not sure exactly what that number means. I hope they do come up with the money to keep going, as well as to carry out the kind of funding they had been hoping to actually “send photographers out into the world to do their work, documenting the important stories that shape our lives and history.”

>Re:PHOTO of course operates on a very different budget. Like zero, or rather a small negative amount that comes from my pocket to pay for the web hosting. And a great deal of unpaid work by me. It’s a part of what I somewhat laughably call my business (it was only just in profit last year, though earlier years have been better) and it promotes my own photography as well as commenting on issues which I hope are of interest to you guys who are reading this.

Somewhere on >Re:PHOTO it says I welcome contributions of material to be published here that fit within the general idea of the site. I’ve been very pleased to publish a few pieces – mainly exhibition reviews – by John Benton-Harris, whose work I admire. Contributions are welcome from others too, so if theres an issue in photography youre burning to write about do get in touch – but the rate is exactly what I get – zero.

I’m pleased to say that this site too has its loyal readers and from time to time I meet some of them when Im out taking pictures. It certainly it gets a pretty healthy number of page views – around 2,800 per day on average at the moment, and rising. But hardly I think in the same league as The Digital Journalist.

I do hope The Digital Journalist manages to keep going, though I think it likely it will need to very much tighten its belt. A tighter financial climate and the shake-up that is causing may even improve it. Although it does deal with the changes and developments in the industry, it often seems very much stuck in an earlier age, and just occasionally strikes me as being written for retired photographers by retired photographers.

Lea Valley in the 80s

Clearing out accumulated junk from the loft on Friday I came across several box files containing mounted transparencies from the distant past when I used to shoot on colour transparency.

Bow Creek

Way back it was the only colour generally accepted for publication, and although very little of my work actually got published, like all photographers with aspirations of seeing their colour work in print I shot colour transparency. The boxes were a mixture of Kodachrome, Agfa and various E6 emulsions. In those days I was extremely short of cash, and worked quite a lot of the time from bulk film, loading 36 exposure cassettes of both black and white and colour transparency film from 100 ft rolls using a bulk loader.

Most of the E6 I saved even more money by processing myself. There were various processing kits on the market, differing in their ease of use and in the colour and quality of the results they produced. And you did need to maintain a fairly accurate temperature at least in the first development. Although I did have some failures, it perhaps surprising that much of what I processed came out well. (The first few films I processed in the 1970s were E4, but when E6 was introduced in 1975-7 both films and processing were considerably better.)

Lee Navigation

What in particular caught my attention in the box files were half a dozen boxes labelled ‘R Lee’ and dated from 1982-3. The River Lee, for many years London’s forgotten river, has now become a fairly hot property as the main Olympic site straddles its various streams between Stratford and Hackney Wick.

Back in 1982-3, I hadn’t really worked out any proper filing and storage system for slides – and its a problem I only really solved by stopping shooting – at least for myself – on transparency film around 1985. I changed to using colour neg largely because of its greater latitude; shooting mainly in daylight, transparency gave dark empty shadows as soon as the sun came out, and I didn’t like the effect. But I was also influenced by seeing the work of other photographers who had discovered the benefits of colour negative, in particular it seemed possible to produce more natural and more subtle colour.

Lea Navigation

There were good systems for slide storage, but one thing they had in common was expense, and I was generally skint. Since I often used slides in slide shows at this time, all of my slides were mounted in slide mounts. The absolute failures were binned, those I might use immediately went into a slide album. The rest went back into boxes and eventually inside larger boxes into the loft.

Lee Navigation

Dark and relatively dust-free storage means most of them are still in decent condition, and I’ve now spent around 20 hours looking through them and scanning those of more interest to me.

Bow Back Rivers

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that many are variants on slides already in one of my few albums, though sometimes they are in better condition. A few really add to my record of the area at the time, but most reflect my absorption at the time with colour and form.

Stratford Marsh

Dating and pinpointing the locations on them is difficult – with little or nothing to go on expect possibly a month and year scrawled on the mount or on the box. Quite a few I recognise, and yet others I will be able to place from the contact sheets of my black and white work, generally rather more carefully marked up.

Kodachrome did at least come back in card mounts with a frame number on them, which can be useful, but unfortunately I didn’t add a film reference number or date.

I also curse the fact that I took so few pictures. Some days I perhaps walked ten miles around the area and only made a dozen exposures. Surely there was far more of interest.

Of course I was mainly photographing in black and white at the time, and you can see some of the pictures I took on my River Lea – Lea Valley web site, where there are already around 20 of my old colour pictures. Looking at those I’m reminded of how tricky it is to get the colour correct from slides compared to digital – I hope some of the new scans are better. If I can find the slides I made the existing pictures from I’l try to do some new and better scans too.