Photo Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Big Ride And More

It was a gloomy and damp day, the rain varying between the occasional spot and heavy downpour as I rushed from what for me counts as a early morning event – 10.30am at Tower Hill for Workers Memorial Day with speeches and wreath-laying at the statue of the Building Worker there to Park Lane in Mayfair for the Big Ride. Of course 10.30am isn’t really early, and only meant me leaving home around 8.45am, but I’ve long got out of the habit of early rising (and had not got to bed until after 1am.) On weekdays I don’t like to travel in the morning rush hour if I can avoid it, because it costs me two or three times as much for the privilege of often standing in a crowded train for 30 or 40 minutes. But this was a Saturday, so at least I was travelling rather cheaper and got a seat.

I arrived at Park Lane just a few minutes after the time I’d been told people would start gathering at Brook St, to see everyone around there cycling away, and thought I might have missed it. Running with a fairly heavy camera bag isn’t my idea of fun, and I could have done without the 700 yard dash to find where the front of the ride was actually assembling and I was able to take some pictures. The rain wasn’t too heavy, though it did cause some problems, and working as I do most of the time with a very wide-angle means their is no way to stop drops of rain getting on the lens, its effects usually impossible to spot on the small images on the back of the camera, and this made a few images unusable. Sometimes you are lucky and it isn’t in a really critical area of the picture, as in this case:

You can clearly see the diffusion it has given on the top left of the sign reading ‘Grannies Want To Cycle Too’ although I’ve reduced the effect considerably in post-processing in Lightroom by darkening the area and increasing contrast and sharpness. You can see it again on the bottom of the flag in this picture:

I was also trying hard to remember that 16mm is usually a mistake with bicycle wheels at the edges of the frame, and trying to work more towards the 35mm end of the lens.

Although the SB700 flash unit’s instructions are very clear about not letting it get wet, it seemed to keep working fine, and I needed a little fill from it for most of these pictures of people. I still am not quite used to the various buttons and switches on this unit, and after seeing the results when I got home reached for my black tape. Since I take more than 99% of the pictures on the TTL setting the unit now has a small piece of tape preventing me from shifting it from that position accidentally. It does take a bit of doing without the tape, but I found I had managed it. Similarly the switch which changes from even to standard and centre-weighted coverage is fixed at the even end. It’s easy to peel off the tape should I need to change the setting.

Incidentally I’ve been pleased so far with the SB700, though even on the wide setting I don’t think it has the same evenness of coverage I got with the SB800. But a little fall-off around the edges is often a good thing. Using the built-in ‘wide panel’ or the clip on diffusion dome should give more even coverage for those pictures that need it. Without the wide panel in place on the full-frame camera the flash is reasonably even only for focal lengths of 28mm and above. With it the 17mm indicated on the panel isn’t quite true, but using this or the diffusion dome is generally pretty even, and with the two together, things are excellent. But there is a catch. Using the panel or the dome makes the unit much less efficient and increases the recycling time. So almost all the time I work without either.

It is largely a myth that these things make your flash softer. Neither greatly increases the size of the light source, and diffusion without an increase in size simply reduces the amount of the light emitted that misses the subject – unless there are suitable surfaces around to bounce some of it back. To get a softer effect you need a large diffuser or reflector.

For using as fill I now have the flash usually set at -0.3EV and the two camera bodies also with some negative setting, typically also -0.3 or -0.7EV. Often I seem to want a little less fill with the longer lens on the D300, so it’s convenient to use the flash compensation on the bodies to allow for this. Quite why Nikon hide away what is probably the most important information on using the flash in pages E23-E24 of the manual, after a lot of esoteric stuff on advanced wireless operation is hard to understand.

As usual I was spending almost all of the time between actually taking pictures holding my microfibre cloth over the front of the lens to keep it dry, though occasionally using it to wipe the flash too. Mostly it worked, as you can see in Big Ride for Safe Cycling on My London Diary, where there are some better pictures than in this post.

Continuing on the vaguely tech side of thing, here is a pair of pictures, one take on the D700 at 16mm with its normal rectangular perspective and the other on the D300 with the 10.5mm fisheye (almost impossible to keep raindrop free) and then converted to cylindrical perspective.

Of course they are from a different viewpoint but give a good idea of the different ways the two depict more or less the same subject.

After then end of the Big Ride (and again I was annoyed to find that while the organisers had said the finish would be near Blackfriars it was actually more or less at Temple, another unnecessary 700 yards I could have done without and which meant me arriving a few minutes too late) I dried out and warmed up in one of my favourite London galleries, the Courtauld Gallery.To be honest I wasn’t that impressed by the current show there, Mondrian || Nicholson In Parallel, though I did feel that while Nicholson’s work looked better for actually seeing the works, Mondrian is actually more impressive in reproduction. But the Courtauld has one of the finest collections anywhere of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works.

Then, feeling rather better I took a bus to my final event for the day, in Whitehall, opposite Downing St, Support For Palestinian Hunger Strike. By this time the rain had almost stopped too. Again here is a pair of pictures taken with the 10.5mm and 16-35mm from a very similar position which I think demonstrate the uses of both lenses. It was of course a tableau set up for the media, the kind of thing I don’t generally relish.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Two To Tango

One of the things that I find relatively few photographers really seem to appreciate is that much of photography is really a collaborative art. It’s perhaps obvious in some branches of photography – where would Bailey have been without Shrimpton? But most of the collaborations I’ve been involved with have been considerably less intimate, often a matter of a few fractions of a second, and are often unwitting at least in detail on the part of my photographic co-respondents.

I’ve never been a great fan of David Bailey (or of fashion as a genre, though it has provided a living for some fine photographers), but when I was invited to apply for a post writing about photography for an Internet site back in 1999 by sending a trial article, I chose to make him the subject. He had made his name by going to New York with the Shrimp in 1962, and it amused me to make my own debut as a Londoner for a New York based company with a piece about another Londoner. Looking back, it isn’t a piece I’m particularly proud of (perhaps one of the few of the hundreds I wrote that I’m pleased is no longer on line), but it had a certain edge and humour and it got me the job.

I didn’t see BBC4’s We’ll Take Manhattan which was screened in January, though I suspect I would have been unable to watch it in its entirety, but the video about its making is almost certainly a more interesting piece, and considerably shorter. It’s also worth noting, as ‘Daks’ comments on the The Arts Desk piece that as usual film-makers rewrite history to suit their purposes – as well as presenting a highly censored version of Bailey-speak.

It should also be noted that the shoot was January 1962, and Diana Vreeland did not join Vogue until April 1962; in January she was still editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. Bailey also claimed to have met Shrimpton at VOGUE studios where she was being photographed for a Kelloggs advert by Brian Duffy, who was one of the ‘terrible three’ (Bailey, Duffy, Donovan), so the BBC production was also not accurate with how they met. (Fashion Theory, Lustrum Press 1978)

Daks also goes on to point out that the BBC also showed ” a great documentary on Bailey – Four beats to the bar and no cheating“. You can watch it as four clips from a broadcast on Swedish TV starting here on YouTube. I’ve only watched a little of it so far. Or you could just watch Blow Up again.

I’ve always thought of My London Diary as being at least in part for the people who collaborate with me in the making of the pictures, some more actively than others. It’s one reason why I put so many pictures of most events on it – so that the people I’ve photographed can see the pictures I took of them. Often people will ask me where they can see the them – or if I can send them a copy – and it’s easier to give them my card and tell them they will be on the site in a few days, and that they can e-mail me.

One group I like photographing is Climate Rush, and I was with them a couple of times towards the end of April. Here’s Tamsin Omond cleaning up the London Air:

and I think this is the best – though you can see some others too in Climate Rush Spring Clean London’s Air on My London Diary. Earlier I’d grabbed a picture of her with the duster between her teeth that I quite liked too.

But of course Climate Rush, whose tagline is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s “Well behaved women seldom make history” and have adopted the suffragette slogan ‘Deeds Not Words‘ isn’t just Tamsin. She was at the solidarity protest for the Russian anonymous women’s punk band Pussy Riot the following Monday, but the best pictures I took in Protest Supports ‘Pussy Riot’ were not of her.

It wasn’t easy to make a picture that included the flag of the Russian embassy (not that anyone recognises the Russian flag now) visible at the top right, and the placard – from Pussy Riot in Moscow – is perhaps a little less clear than in some of the more obvious images I took, but I felt this was an image that reflected Pussy Riot more than the others which you can see on My London Diary.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Handling Disabled Protests

I don’t have any problems with protests by the disabled, but the police don’t quite seem to know how to deal with them, particularly when they have attracted enough attention for there to be crowds of photographers present. The latest protest by DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) again resulted in them being able to block a major road through central London, just as their protest in January (Disabled Welfare Reform Road Block) though this time it was at Trafalgar Square rather than Oxford Circus and on a weekday rather than a Saturday.

I can’t decide which of the two similar pictures I prefer:

When I sent off the story to Demotix, I chose the lower of the two, where I’m closer to the face of the man in the foreground and the chain is a little larger. That he is looking in my direction also makes for a stronger image. But on putting the work on My London Diary in the post Disabled Activists Block Trafalgar Square I chose the upper picture for the ‘front page’. I like the two hands of protester and police officer on the chain, clearly linking them together. I think when I first saw them I thought that the hand and camera of another photographer at top left was an unfortunate intrusion; now I’m inclined to think that it works together with the videographer and photographer at the right to show how this protest took place with pretty massive press interest.

Incidentally, the guy with the video camera has himself been in the news, fighting not to hand over his work from the Dale Farm eviction to the police in what is clearly a ‘fishing expedition’, a move by the police that could seriously endanger the often tricky relationship between photographers and protesters. As NUJ General Secretary Michelle Stanistreet says,

“This case is a defence of press freedom – journalists are not evidence gatherers for the police.”

Earlier in the DPAC protest there had been an incident that seemed to be to be of near farce, when the police stopped the protest on the Charing Cross Road, and tried to insist that it proceed on the pavement rather than on the roadway.

This is just one of a number of pictures that I took while police argued with protesters who they had stopped, creating a far greater traffic hold-up than if they had simply allowed the march to continue.

It wasn’t a request that the protesters were likely to accede to, not least because it was hardly a practical suggestion, given the fairly narrow and somewhat cluttered pavement and a protest with a number of people taking part in wheelchairs and mobility scooters. But it did provide a good opportunity for photographs.

Disabled people are rightly very angry, with recent changes in welfare provision and in particular the imposition of testing procedures that are ill-thought out and administered with an incredible lack of common sense, common decency and competence by a private company highly paid on a contract that rewards them for refusing benefits rather than doing the job properly.

More about the protest at Disabled Activists Block Trafalgar Square on My London Diary.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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May Day Mayhem

Curious things were afoot elsewhere on the web on May Day. I was busy taking pictures most of the day, finishing at the London Stock Exchange a little after 7pm where I was one of very few photographers present when OccupyLSX actually arrived at its doors and set up a token camp.

It’s a nice story and I had some decent pictures – though it had been a day when I’d forgotten to increase the ISO as the light had dropped, and not all of them were sharp enough. People will move, and the best pictures are usually when they are moving.

So for once I put myself out and got the work ready to file within around 90 minutes of taking them. But it proved impossible to upload them to Demotix, whose servers were severely overloaded, and when I did finally manage to upload them, the server failed to process them. After an hour or so of trying I had a story with a single image visible on Demotix and it took another thirty minutes and many retries to get the rest there.

You can see the piece at Occupy London gets to London Stock Exchange on May Day
on Demotix. And eventually it will be posted in more depth on My London Diary, where of course you can see my account of their October attempt in Occupy London Kept Out Of Stock Exchange.

I had three other stories to post from earlier in the day, but I needed to eat and sleep. I hope Demotix will have quietened down enough for me to post those later today.

Vaisakhi Gravesend

I always enjoy photographing Vaisakhi celebrations. They are colourful and the Sikhs always welcome people taking an interest in them, and are very open to being photographed. So although I think I’ve probably photographed enough over the years I find it hard not to go and photograph another. Although the events follow a similar pattern, every Gurdwara does things a little differently and I’ve tried not to return to the same places too often to get a little variety.

Of course like all religious festivals you need to behave with suitable respect, and that means wearing a suitable head-covering (I keep a suitable head scarf in my camera bag in April, given to me on one of my first visits to a Gurdwara – though these are normally available at the entrance to most Gurdwaras) and I make sure I wear a decent pair of socks without holes for when I take my shoes off inside the Gurdwara. Occasionally you need to take off shoes on the street, and I wear a pair that will fit in my camera bag in place of my cameras – which will be round my neck.

This was the first time I’d been to the Gurdwara at Gravesend, although I’ve photographed around the area – a little under 30 miles east of central London on the Thames, and taken the ferry across from here to Tilbury, the site of London’s remaining docks. Gravesend is the major town in the area and has a large Sikh population, with perhaps 5000 people coming to Vaisakhi from across Kent and south-east London. There has been a Gurdwara in Gravesend since 1956, but the present one only opened two years ago; one of the largest in Britain it cost £12 million.

It certainly is a grand building, and on a very large scale, but I found it less impressive than Southall and lacking the friendly intimacy of smaller Gurdwara I’ve visited. Even with the large crowds around for the occasion it seemed rather empty, perhaps because there seemed to be little going on inside. At most other Vaisakhi events I’ve attended the worship hall has been packed with people for a lengthy service culminating in the ceremonial taking out of the Guru Granth Sahib (the Sikh holy scripture) to be carried around the neighbourhood in the procession, but when I looked in the room was almost empty.

I went outside and stood in the crowd watching a demonstration of Sikh martial arts, when I noticed a commotion at the other side of the yard, and made my way through a dense crowd to see what was happening. It turned out to be the bringing out of the Guru Granth Sahib, which most of those present had failed to notice, though the crowd was beginning to gather close to the float on which it was to travel. I should have talked to some of the organisers and found out in advance what was likely to happen and when rather than assuming it would happen as I expected.

Fortunately I was able to get some good pictures of the ceremony once I was there, and the Gurdwara made a good backdrop for some of the pictures, although the sun caused a few problems.

As you can see from the shadows it was only just out of the picture here. For some of the pictures I had to hold up a hand to act as an extra (and more efficient) lens hood.

I was also having problems with the D300, now very much in need of repair or replacement. I’m still dithering about what to do. Two things put me off the D800 – the giant files and the weight of the body. There’s the price as well, but though I certainly couldn’t justify it to my accountant, I could find the money. Unless Nikon come out with something new that suits me better I might end up getting one mainly to use in DX mode with DX lenses.

Sometimes the D300 works fine for quite a few frames, but then the mirror will stick up. I’m getting used to dealing with it, and have added “Lock Mirror Up For Cleaning” to my custom menu, and work with this available at the touch of the menu button. Then it’s just press the OK button twice, followed by the shutter release, turn the camera off and on and you are back in business – almost as fast as winding on film in the old days. Except that now it doesn’t always work the first time, and occasionally needs 2 or 3 cycles to bring it down. And while I can sometimes work for 20 or 30 or even more frames without it sticking, sometimes it does it after a single frame. It goes without saying that this is far more likely to happen when things turn interesting and I need to take pictures fast. So probably there are rather more pictures taken on the D700 with the 16-35mm than usual. Though at times I was so close to the action that it was the only possible lens.

Though perhaps I might otherwise have used the D300 with the 10.5mm fisheye. The procession took a couple of hours to go around town, but there are only so many pictures you can take, and I took advantage of the free food that is on offer at these events. Some delicious minty curried beans, several vegetable samosas, a cup of chai and some fruit juice.

I’d decided earlier when I looked at the route that things might be interesting in the back streets around the much smaller Ravidas Gurdwara which the Vaisakhi procession was to pass. There were a lot of stalls giving away food around there and the procession stopped and there were speeches, but none I could understand.

Here I made my way back along the length of the procession filling the narrow street and photographed some of the lorries, coaches and floats coming behind the congregations on foot which follow behind the Nagara drum, the Sikh standards, the Panj Piyare with their raised swords and the Guru Granth Sahib.

You can see pictures of some of these, and many more in Gravesend Vaisakhi on My London Diary. I left the procession as the end of it passed the civic centre on its way back to the Gurdwara where the celebrations were to continue both on that day and with a service the following day.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Olympic Site Lock Down

This weekend is the last time – at least until the end of September – when you will be able to walk the section of the Capital Ring that goes along the Greenway from close to Pudding Mill Lane station to Hackney Wick. For a couple of weeks you will still be able to access the You Tube from Pudding Mill Lane Station, but all access will cease and the View Tube close down a couple of weeks later.

I went there on Friday April 13 for two reasons, firstly to check what was still open for the workshop I was running in 8 days time for the Museum of London based at the View Tube, and secondly as I’d been asked by a friend who works for a foreign news agency to show him around the area.

We walked down from Stratford Station, a much busier area now that the Westfield shopping centre has opened, going through the 60s council estate which seems to be being deliberately run-down – with many empty flats despite Newham’s desperate housing shortage which got them in the news this week for trying to rehouse their homeless more than a hundred miles away. It’s certainly a prime site for private development, with large new blocks of flats and hotels appearing on nearby Stratford High Street every time I pay a visit.

At City Mill Lock I was surprised to see a small boat actually in the lock. Until a few years ago, this had old wooden gates that were long beyond use. The City Mill River was widened and made navigable for large barges as a part of a flood defence and employment provision scheme covering the area in the 1930s, but seems never to have been used by barges, and was more or less completely abandoned by the 1960s. Those wooden gates don’t look as if they were replaced in the 1930s, but a few years back I watched the lock being completely refurbished with completely new gates. But this was the first time I’d actually seen them in use.

The double gate was needed because the Waterworks River which it leads to, underneath the bridge from which I was photographing used to be tidal, and its level could be either above or below that of St Thomas’s Creek and the City Mill River at the further end of the lock. Probably it was never really needed, as the Waterworks River was only navigable around high tide, so the lock would only be needed when the level was the same or higher, and with the new lock on the Prescott Channel, built but hardly used for the Olympics, the river is no longer tidal.

My friend also took some pictures, and we walked down the steps to the lock side, where the man operating the lock – a G4S security guard – objected to having his picture taken. My friend laughed at the man, and told him he had every right to take photographs and the argument continued for a minute or so. I stood a little to one side as a witness, ready to take pictures should the situation escalate, thinking to myself that it was a pity my camera didn’t take videos or at least record audio, as still images really didn’t capture the situation.

Although the security man objected to being photographed, it became clear that he wasn’t actually going to do anything about it. His objection was that it would have been polite to ask his permission rather than security related.

I talked to him briefly about the lock and the Bow Back rivers, and we had a polite conversation, though I found he knew rather less than me. Had I been on my own, after taking the overall picture from the bridge I would probably have done this before going on to take his picture, but that’s just a difference in the way we chose to work, not something I need to do. If he’d been reluctant to be photographed and I needed the picture I would have still have taken one, but usually people don’t mind if they know what you are doing. But I didn’t particularly want a closer picture of him – I was more interested in the boat going through the lock and a picture that showed that and him operating the gates.

We went on and up to the Greenway and the View Tube, and although we saw (and he photographed) some of the other security men around, none of them objected. Of course they are used by now to crowds of tourists with cameras. But in other areas around the Olympic site there can still be problems with over-zealous security men who don’t know or understand the law, as some of my colleagues found a few days later. A group of them were stopped and two were assaulted while photographing the Olympic site from the public highway. What was particularly worrying was that their manager who came out after a minute or two defended their behaviour and is reported to have said that ” they were trained to deter people from taking photographs.” The report continues: “We asked for police to attend and two SO23 officers soon arrived, confirmed that our behaviour was entirely lawful and the G4S guards retreated back into the Olympic site.”

There will I’m sure be further such incidents, and G4S and other security companies really do have to address the issue of keeping within the law and giving their personnel the training that is needed to do the job properly. Any manager who thinks that they should be “trained to deter people from taking photographs” should at least be severely disciplined and sent for re-training in a proper attitude towards the public, if not dismissed.

© 2005 Peter Marshall
Paths like the one across this bridge were closed years back – and no doubt that iconic ‘F**k Seb Coe’ graffiti we all photographed has disappeared

Most of the rights of way that existed across the Olympic site were extinguished some years ago, leaving only the Greenway and the Lea Navigation towpath. Part of the Greenway has been closed for some time, at first for the Olympics and following on for the construction of Crossrail, and this section is expected to remain closed for another couple of years. After the end of May there will be no public access to the rights of way in the area at least until the end of September.

While I was there I made several new panoramas, including this from the exact spot where I photographed around ten years ago before any of the disruption, and have continued to do so except when access was impossible or for a period when the view was almost completely blocked by the blue fence. I found someone sitting close to it and painting the scene.

and continuing around the site a further view from a different viewpoint – the side window of the viewing gallery at the View Tube.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
Southern end of Olympic site from View Tube – 200 degree view
Rt click &’View Image’ for larger version

The two views use a different projection, the upper one is equi-rectangular and the lower cylindrical, usually more suitable for extreme angles of view. Both are quick stitches using PTGui, and not quite finished images, and a little on the dark side.

More pictures at Olympic Site Revisited.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Pillow Fights

It’s good at least occasionally to have a rest from more serious events, and International Pillow Fight Day provided that on April 7.

It was hard to pick out a single image from the many I took during the 30 minutes, though the set does I think give a good idea of the event.

I first photographed International Pillow Fight Day in March 2008, when the London event took place in Leicester Square.

It was perhaps a little easier then to get in among the midst of things as the fight was in a slightly more confined space, and it was easier to take photographs because there were relatively few photographers present. This year there were hordes of us, and rather a lot of those taking part were busily performing for the press rather than just getting on with having a good time belting hell out of each other with their pillows. The pillow fight day is an idea of the urban playground movement, which aims to get people off the couch and taking part in things, and I’m not sure that I think acting up for the media is really much better than being a passive consumer of it. People should get on with their own thing.

This year I had some technical problems. My D300 suffered a mirror lock-up – which it frequently does – and in the heat of the moment I couldn’t clear this. Normally it’s simply a matter of using the menu item which is supposed to lock it up for cleaning, pressing the shutter release to lock it up, then turn the camera off for it to come back down into place. But the menu item was greyed out and unavailable. Once I had time to think about it I realised that this simply meant the battery was getting low, but in the heat of the pillow fight I simply thought the thing had finally given up the ghost. I’d been intending to use the10.5mm fisheye and get in really close, but only managed a single frame during the actual fight before the camera locked up.

I was also perhaps a little nervous about my equipment, having just got a new Nikon SB700 flash, I carefully put it away in my bag before the feathers started to fly. If you photograph in the middle of things, pillow fights can get pretty physical, and I didn’t want it to get damaged before I’d really had a chance to use it. Although my cameras stood up well to a little battering, I did get the D300 I was holding to my eye hit hard by a pillow and knocked into my upper lip, which hit a tooth and I was photographing for a few minutes with blood dripping.

I’ve also photographed a pillow fight that had a more straightforward purpose, in January 2011 outside Walthamstow station over the plans by developers Solum Regeneration to build a 14 storey hotel and 8 storey blocks of flats.

It was rather too spread out to generate the same kind of energy as the larger events, and that shows in the pictures.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Photography and Privacy

The Wire has some useful advice for photographers by Cleland Thom arising from a complaint brought to the Press Complaints Commission over a case involving a guy smoking a hookah in a Glasgow café.

Of course the PCC isn’t exactly everyone’s favourite at the moment, and its rulings aren’t law, although they often reflect their view of the current UK law. Of course this differs in various countries, and in Glasgow it is in any case Scottish rather than English law that would apply. But even so it it probably pretty good advice for keeping out of trouble, though perhaps a little over-restrictive.

The case was dismissed, though with some criticism that the photographer had perhaps misled the complainant over a technicality.

The advice says that a small café or restaurant is a private place, where a person would have a reasonable expectation of privacy, whereas I think in the only similar case I can remember a judge decided it on the basis that someone at the back of a café could reasonably expect this, while had they sat in a prominent position they would have had no such expectation.

Further the advice suggests that the photographer should identify himself, the publication that he/she is working for and the particular use that will be made of the picture. There are problems here for the freelance and I think that usually a rather less detailed and more inclusive statement will have to do. But obviously as Thom says, if the subject places restrictions on how a photograph may be taken or used – such at not showing his or her face – then the photographer should respect these and see that they are passed on with the image. (This paragraph also relates to the fifth point about re-use of the image.)

Probably the least clear of Thom’s five points is:

It is OK to includes images of bystanders in the background, provided they are unlikely to object. If consent is not given, then do not take the photo, unless the photographer is already aware of a clear public interest issue.

The second sentence here seems to contradict the first, suggesting that consent is necessary, while the first leaves it to the photographer to decide whether or not they would be likely to object. It would seem to me that if they are easily recognisable in an image they are not ‘bystanders’ but a part of the subject and should receive the same consideration as the main subject. If they are not readily recognisable then there is no problem in including them.

Fortunately most of my images are taken in public or quasi-public places where no one has any expectation of privacy, so I don’t need to worry about consent. Though I still do get occasionally get people who come and tell me “You can’t take my photograph” or “You should ask before you photograph me” and demand that I delete the pictures.

This happened again when I was photographing a protest last Sunday (not the one shown above), and I tried to point out to the person concerned that the point of public protest was to try to get publicity for a particular cause, and that taking part in such a public event she had implied her permission to be photographed. Not of course that I needed any such consent. (And of course as a photographer I’m pleased when people at such events decide to wear masks if they wish to hide their identity as it usually makes for more interesting images.)

© 2012, Peter Marshall
An anti-abortion campaigner supporting the 40 Days For Life pickets outside BPAS clinic. Later in the event he was attempting to hide from photographers behind this poster and at a previous protest he told me I could not photograph him or use his picture. Of course I could and did.

In the UK at least you do not in general need permission to photograph anyone or anything in public places, although many places which we think of as public are actually private. In general there are no restrictions on photographing people without their consent, and the publication of the images is only restricted by the possibility of defamation. (There is also the possibility of public order offences related to images of an indecent nature, and some restrictions on photography of police, security services, military establishments etc, but these are special cases.)

There are often times when I do ask people if I may take a picture, usually when it involves getting very close to them, invading what we think of as our personal space, or when I want their cooperation in some way. It’s generally more a matter of politeness than anything else. But I hadn’t even noticed this person when I was taking pictures – she was just one person among around 20 in one of them. And of course I didn’t delete the image.

More pictures from Stop Harassment At Abortion Clinic protest on My London Diary.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Limited Editions?

I’ve never been in favour of ‘limited editions’ of photographs. It has always seemed to me to be a repudiation of one of the intrinsic properties of our medium, its reproducibility.

It also seemed unnecessary, as most photographs are produced as actual photographic prints in relatively limited numbers – few photographers sell more than a few copies of any image as actual photographic prints, although they may get reproduced in thousands or even millions in newspapers, magazines, books or images on screen. Paradoxically while limited editions have been seen and marketed as a way to artificially produce scarcity, in many cases they will actually have resulted in more prints of an image being made.

Over the years many photographers have indulged in dubious practices on limited editions in various ways. Often an edition is not actually printed, but prints are actually made to demand, and may differ significantly from each other. Others have produced several limited editions from the same original – a practice that would be acceptable if made clear at the time that the first was being marketed, but perhaps not if decided on at a later date.

Of course there are positive aspects of limited editions. Some photographers like them because they feel they enable them to put a finish to older work and allow them to concentrate on new projects. Others see them as a useful marketing tool to make a living, and I’ve nothing against photographers making a living, although there are photographers who have managed it without limited editions.

The recent sale record-breaking sale of new prints of old work by William Eggleston has raised some interesting questions, not least about limited editions, with one major collector of his work who owns a number of his limited edition dye-transfer prints suing over the new limited edition of these same photographs. The details of the case so far are well covered in the three links from PDN Online that I won’t go into them further. It’s also interesting to read about them and the possible museum in Eggleston’s home town MemphisNewsPaper.

But this case also raises interesting questions about the photographic obsession with ‘vintage prints’, with the new large ‘pigment prints’ selling for an order of magnitude more than the orginal dye transfer edition. Possibly because they are better prints (though I’ve not had the chance to compare) and almost certainly because they are larger.

The new Eggleston prints are inkjet prints, or as the galleries prefer to call them ‘digital pigment prints.’ I don’t know on what paper, printer or inks these were made, but they are basically similar to those many of us can produce on our own printers, except for the size of 44″ x 60.

Craig J Sterling on Beyond the F-Stop comments “the digital print, in my opinion, has finally been legitimized … yes!” Looking around the giant dealer trade show in Paris eighteen months ago I’d certainly come to the same opinion, although as with these prints the labels went to great lengths not to include ‘I’ word; “inkjet” is still taboo in the trade. Sterling has also written about Limited Edition Prints, and includes the idea that it only became possible to produce true editions of photographs with the advent of digital – in the darkroom every print is an individual performance.

Although I rather doubt if the case against Eggleston will be successful (but I’m not a lawyer) it may perhaps serve to make photographers rather more careful particularly in those US states that have laws about editioning of art works. But what I would really like to see is more photographers adopting a democratic rather than an elitist stance towards selling photographs.

Eggleston’s work doesn’t need to be printed huge, and I’ve often thought that much if not all of it works better in books than on the exhibition wall (and the same is true of most photographs.) You can buy a copy of his ‘The Democratic Forest’, arguably his best book, for around £30 if you shop around, which gets you not just one but a sequence of 150 of his images for something like $578,460 less than that single large image of a tricycle. I know which makes more sense.

Arthur Tress On The Street

Discoveries in street photography aren’t always what they are hyped up to be, but Arthur Tress‘s rediscovery of some of his early work holds more promise than most. Tress took around 900 photos during a short stay in San Francisco in the summer of 1964, and stored the prints that be made from them in a community darkroom there wrapped up in a parcel at his sister’s house when he went off to work elsewhere.

Forty-five years later in 2009 he came across them again and decided they were interesting, and took them to show curator James Ganz at the de Young Museum.

The show Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964 opened there on 3 March and runs until 3 June 2012, and there is just a little more information in the press release. If you – like me – can’t get to San Francisco, the best place to see them is on Tress’s own web site. Of course his later and better known work is also worth a long look. Accompanying the show is a book of the same title, and also worth reading is an interview with him by Jim Kasson from 2002 on the web site of The Center for Photographic Art in Carmel. Although I wrote about Tress’s work on several occasions on another site I’m surprised to find that this seems to be his first mention here on >Re:PHOTO.