Category: Photo Issues

Feeling against the police was running high and was expressed in placards and banners including one referring to the well-known song

Perhaps the police actually read my stories on Demotix  (usually very similar to those I post later with more pictures on My London Diary.) Actually I know some of them sometimes do, because I’ve had officers making comments to me about things I’ve written in the past. And I’ve recently sent in a Freedom of Information request and am waiting to hear what – if anything – they have about me on their files, or rather those files they are prepared to admit exist (they’ve been caught out a few times lying over such matters.)

The previous week, after Friday’s protest I’d written

I found it hard to see any reason for the large police presence and stopping them walking into Montague Place as they wanted. It did seem an incredible and pointless waste of public money, and it resulted in more inconvenience to the public than if the event had not been policed at all.

But I think in this particular case I wasn’t the only journalist make the obvious clear, and perhaps even some of the police themselves may have realised that the heavy-handed policing of protests against a police presence on campus is counter-productive.

Other banners were less contentious – such as ‘Make Love not Student Debt’

So, unlike the previous week, where they came in force to London University, for the Cops Off Campus National Student Protest in exactly the same place they sensibly kept out of sight, and the protest passed off more or less peacefully, with far less mayhem than if they had turned up.

The Book Block with shields bearing the names of well-known titles for protection

There was a little damage to the gates of Senate House, and later, in an event I thought was probably staged for the press, to the doors into the entrance area of the building, when a few students attacked them using rubbish bins as battering rams. But there was no real violence and no attempt to occupy parts of the university, which would have broken the High Court injunction.

A clown mimes taking my photograph – and is caught by my flash

The protest was about a serious matter, and one which raises questions about the nature and purpose of universities that deserve proper debate, it was also an enjoyable and at times exhilarating event, with various groups enjoying themselves in their different ways, and ended with those taking part feeling a sense of achievement. It seems clear that the attempt by the London University management to stifle protest and freedom of speech and assembly has failed.

Two major issues remain to be settled; the future of the University of London Union and the proper treatment of low paid workers at the university who deserve decent conditions of work and pay. Until the management behave reasonably over these issues, protests will continue.

The book shields were useful in pushing against the gates

Photographically there were few problems, and it was largely a matter of being in the right place at the right time. When the students decided to go through the gates of the Senate House I had to move out of their way, and it was too crowded to get a really good view, though the fisheye did help a little.

There were some interesting faces in the crowd, and as well as taking pictures of the speakers I also took some of those listening to speeches.

After I left to go home there were further protests around central London by some of the students, where the police did show up (if sometimes rather late) including at the Royal Courts of Justice where the inquest into the shooting by police of Mark Duggan which sparked riots in Tottenham and elsewhere was taking place. It’s always difficult to know when to leave.

Cops Off Campus National Student Protest
Continue reading Peace as Police Stay Away

International Human Rights Day, 10th December, commemorates the day in 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This has become politically controversial here in the UK, as our government, while claiming still to be in support of the declaration is rather noisily and busily trying to find ways to get around some of its consequences. There seem to be some groups – such as prisoners and suspected terrorists – that they don’t feel qualify for human rights.

The Syria Peace & Justice group were told they can’t protest directly outside the UNHCR offices.
But this is a pilgrimage not a protest they told the commissionaire.

As Herman and Chomsky pointed out 25 years ago in their classic book ‘Manufacturing Consent‘ there are ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims in the eyes of our politicians and dominant media, and many in power would like to restrict these universal rights only to those they consider ‘worthy’.

Given the political climate it perhaps is unsurprising that International Human Rights Day passes unobserved officially in the UK and those who rely on mainstream media would be totally unaware of it.

But the Syria Peace & Justice group chose the day to try to highlight the desperate situation in Syria and to call for an end to all human rights abuses there. They began the day by making a pilgrimage around as many as possible of the embassies of countries who are in some way or other involved in Syria, as well as the UN High Commission for Refugees offices and our own government offices and ended with a candlelit vigil on the pavement outside the Syrian Embassy. It wasn’t a huge protest – the group is a small London-based grass-roots one only formed a couple of months ago, which includes people of various nationalities and backgrounds united in their desire to see peace and justice. But many others would support their aims.

Because of the large number of embassies and other places involved the pilgrimage was split into two groups who met up in late afternoon outside the US embassy. This presented my first dilemma in covering the event, as I couldn’t split myself in two! I decided to start with the group at the UNHCR as it was the UN’s day, and to go with them at least as far as Downing St and the Foreign Office, before trying to join the second group who had started in Kensington.

The Syria Peace & Justice group were joined by several others as they posed in front of the Houses of Parliament.

At Downing St, one of the pilgrims had permission to take their letter in, but they arrived late, and had to wait for a suitable gap, and rather than waiting with her I went on with the rest of the group to take photographs outside the foreign office and in Parliament Square. From there I took the tube to Hyde Park Corner and rang the leader of the second group to find out where they were. They were heading for the Iraqi embassy, but by the time I got arrived there had already moved on. Two buses later I finally caught up with them outside the former Iranian Embassy which was closed by William Hague threw out the Iranian Embassy in 2011 after the UK’s embassy in Tehran was attacked and looted. It now appears to be a part of the Omani embassy.

At the Kuwaiti embassy they let someone in to deliver the letter calling for peace and human rights.

I walked down with the group to the Kuwaiti and French embassies and then left them to go to the US Embassy where I found the other group had arrived. Taking pictures there was a little tricky as it was now dark, and they were in a particularly badly lit area. I tried both using ISO 3200 and available light and adding flash, but neither worked too well with the pilgrims being rather spread out. You can see these and more pictures from earlier in the two pilgrimages at Human Rights Day Pilgrimages for Syria.

There was another event I wanted to cover a couple of miles away and I left them to take the tube there, returning for the candlelit vigil an hour and a half later outside the Syrian embassy.

Flash enabled me to bring out the Buddhist monk in a dark background area.

Candles provide enough light to illuminate a very small area, and the pavement outside the embassy had a little ambient light from the street lighting, but it wasn’t really enough to fill in the shadows. I got the best results by just adding a little flash fill, using ISO3200 with the candles as the main light source and a mix of flash and ambient in the shadow areas.

Peace pilgrim ‘Earthian’, a “citizen of the earth” made a peace pilgrimage to the Middle East on foot without a passport

I used the built-in wide-flash diffuser screen on the flash and also the small white bounce card, generally angling the flash head up at 45 degrees. Where there were subjects close to the camera on one side, I angled the flash away from them to reduce the coverage (even with the wide-flash adapter there is a lot of fall off at the edges with the 16mm.)

I worked with shutter priority, setting a speed of between 1/25 and 1/60s (with a certain random element from my habitual finger-fiddling) and adjusting both exposure bias and more often flash level to get the results I wanted, checking on the rear screen. The ambient levels varied considerably in different areas of the vigil, and the headlights of cars driving by also occasionally added a contribution.

More pictures from the candlelit vigil at Human Rights Day Candlelit Vigil for Syria.
Continue reading Human Rights & Syria

Tibetans walk backwards in front or Parliament in human rights protest

I spend quite a lot of my time covering protests walking backwards, and have the bruises and scars to prove it from various encounters with curbs, vehicles, lamp posts and other street furniture. Fortunately none of these occasions has been seriously damaging, other than to my dignity, long since a lost cause.

Human rights for Tibetans in Tibet also seems increasingly to be a lost cause, as Western nations eager for business with China put their own national interests in profit above higher concerns. Of course its always been so, and we even once went to war with China to force it to allow our drug traders to operate.

So while the west has made noises about human rights violations by China since the invasion of Tibet in 1959, these noises have been getting softer and softer over recent years and are now a mere formality, while China has ramped up its efforts to completely eradicate Tibetan culture, committing atrocities against the Tibetan people – with over 1.2 million deaths. In recent years around 130 desperate Tibetans have set fire to themselves in protest, and the Chinese response has been to arrest and torture family members, charging them with abetting self-immolation.

They started to protest in Parliament Square but were soon told to leave by the GLC’s ‘heritage wardens’

Human rights are indeed going backwards in Tibet, and Tibetans decided to march backwards in London past the Houses of Parliament to Downing St to highlight what is happening there and as a direct response to China becoming a member of the UN Human Rights Council, despite its own terrible human rights record and its record of support for human rights violations by other countries.

Blue, white, red, yellow and a little green in the flags – and one man wears a Union flag as well

Protests by Tibetans are always colourful, with so many of them wearing or carrying the brightly coloured Tibetan flag – something that would rapidly lead to arrest and torture in Tibet. At times the colours tend to dominate the pictures and I sometimes find it overpowering. Visually you can have too much of a good thing.

They are walking backwards but it isn’t very obvious.

It was also a slight problem to convey the fact that people were walking backwards in a still image. People walking backwards do look rather similar to people walking forwards, and it’s something that makes far more impact in a moving image than a still. There is something about the postures in the images from a distance, but working close, I don’t think it is possible to tell.

Walking backwards in Whitehall – but impossible to tell.

However it was a welcome change to be able to walk forward while taking the photographs!
More about the protest at Tibetans Walk Backwards for Human Rights.
Continue reading Walking Backwards for Tibet

There are some surprisingly dark places on the streets of London, despite the huge output of light which makes the sky starless there. The area of street actually below the offices of Transport for London (TfL) is well lit, but police had taped that area off, and although people were still walking through as usual, cutting off the corner on their route towards the station on their way home, the protest there was kept on the pavement outside, where it was several stops darker.

We were there because of the number of cyclists who are being killed on London’s streets, mainly by lorries and buses – six in the previous few weeks – and TfL are seen to have failed to properly consider cycle (and pedestrians) in their transport plans, which have largely been directed to getting faster movement of cars and lorries.

I have the feeling that these changes in lighting have become greater in recent years. Certainly this is true on the suburban street were I live, where a couple of years back the council ripped up all the old lampposts with their mercury vapour lamps and replaced them with new posts carrying much more directional LED lighting on the grounds of economy. It is brighter in places (and light enough inside my house to go down the stairs with reasonable safety in the middle of the night) but midway between the lights the road is rather darker. And perhaps less makes its way into the night sky, though we still seldom see more than a handful of stars.

I set the sensitivity on both Nikons to ISO 3200, generally a practical limit for decent quality at full size, but it was still only giving me exposures of between 1/10 and 1/50s at full aperture as I moved around. Which wouldn’t have been too bad, but often the people I was photographing were moving too and were blurred on the images.

Lenses for digital SLRs are large and heavy things, and apertures of anything affordable and luggable tend to be rather limited, The 18-35mm is a nice lens, but only f4. In the old days I’d instead have been working with the Leica or Konica body and an old 35mm f1.4 Summilux in low light (I had wider lenses too but they were slow, only f4 or even f4.5 so stayed in the bag when it got dark, though I might have occasionally used the 50 f2.) The whole set of lenses was of course lighter and less bulky than the Nikkor.

In colour I’d probably have been using ISO 400 film, while in black and white it would have been Tri-X, pushed to perhaps ISO 1600. But that F1.4 lens (it had cost me around a month’s wages) gave me a 3 stop advantage in terms of exposure – making the ISO 400 equivalent to ISO 3200, and the black and white like working at ISO 12,800. So perhaps things haven’t changed as much in practice as I sometimes think.

Of course with the f1.4 lens wide open, there wasn’t a great depth of field, particularly at close quarters. And of course I could buy fast primes to use on the digital cameras, and perhaps I will, though I think not for the Nikons.

With the right adapter that 35mm f1.4 does work on the Fuji-X cameras (it won’t work with the official Fuji adapter for M mounts lenses, but does with a much cheaper Kipon) but the 1.5x multiplier makes it a standard rather than a wideangle lens.)  But the newly announced 23mm f1.4 (35mm equiv) is tempting, and I’ve recently bought the 14mm f2.8 (21mm equiv.)

D700. No flash. 16-35mm at 18mm, 1/30 f4

Back with the cyclists, for most of the evening event I worked with the 18-35mnm at f4 on the D700, and with the 18-105mm DX lens (27-157mm equiv) on the D800E, working with flash with the longer lens. It has a variable max aperture from f/3.5-5.6 and I was using it at full aperture, mainly at the wider end, where its focal length overlaps with the wider zoom. I was still using ISO 3200 to get as much exposure as possible from the ambient light, and had the shutter speed set at 1/25th with the camera on shutter priority, so rather curiously the exposures were sometimes greater with the flash than without it! I was using flash more for the different lighting effect it gave, as well as the ability to get sharp images in some of the darker zones.

There were several videographers present at the event, and some of the time putting their video lighting into all or parts of the scene. Sometimes this can be useful for still photographers, and I stole some of their light for my pictures! But it isn’t always helpful, sometimes decidedly unflattering and can put colour balance out, and using flash does help reduce its effect.

D800E. With flash. 18-105mm at 21mm (35mm equiv) 1/30 f5
The climax of the event was the die-in, when over a thousand cyclists put their bikes on the ground and got down there with them. The street was covered with bikes and bodies, making it virtually impossible to move around. One or two photographers were in the middle of it, either by accident or design, and they did spoil the pictures a little. I’d decided that it was best to work more or less from the edge, getting more cyclists in view, and had chosen to be where I thought they would be most crowded. The background with Southwark Underground station also seemed to be the best.

D700, 18-35mm at 28mm, 1/40 f4

I took a few working with the D700, mainly at 16mm, then switched to the D800E; after a few not very successful attempts with the longer focal lengths I wwitched to the 10.5mm fisheye. It’s the fastest lens for the Nikons that I own at f2.8, but I was using it around f4 for these pictures as I still had the ISO at 3200 and slowish shutter speeds. It was this lens that produced the best images of the event.

D800E, 10.5mm, 1/40 f4.5
Continue reading Cyclists Die In London

Nikon D800 in DX mode, 10.5mm, Fisheye-Hemi plugin
The Free Shaker Aamer march in Battersea wasn’t a particularly easy event to photograph, and I had to work hard to get decent pictures. There were around thirty people taking part, many of them dressed up in the orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuits, some with black hoods covering their faces. The black hoods can be dramatic, but they are very much a cliché, and I do like to see people’s faces in my pictures. Fortunately as you can see here some people wore hoods and others didn’t.

Battersea is where Shaker Aamer’s family lives, and hopefully where he will come back to when he is eventually released from Guantanamo, though the US and British authorities would like to send him back to the country of his birth, where he would be locked away and unable to testify about his torture since he was captured 12 years ago in Afghanistan. His evidence will certainly embarrass both US and UK intelligence agencies.

Probably most people know this part of Battersea better as Clapham Junction, one of the world’s busiest and best-known railway stations. Clapham was a more up-market place when the station was built (and probably the influential folk of Clapham didn’t want a nasty smelly railway through their backyards) so although the station was built among the slums of Battersea, the railway company opted for a more prestigious name. It was after all only a short ride in your horse and carriage from Clapham, though now the 37 bus probably takes a little longer through London traffic.

When I first went there, Northcote Road, a quarter-mile south of the station, was a fairly typical inner London street market, lots of fruit and veg, cheap clothing and the rest. Good transport connections have meant it has come up rapidly in the past twenty or thirty years and it’s now extremely gentrified, with stalls selling a dozen varieties of olives and olive oil, artisanal bread and the rest, most of the old pubs now replaced by rather trendier establishments.

The protesters were handing out leaflets on the street, just south of the street stalls, where the pavement widens out slightly in front of a Baptist church but is still rather constricted by some bicycle parking stands, and the march was to start from the corner there.

It wasn’t easy to take an overview showing all the banners and a reasonable number of protesters, partly because half of them were standing behind me on the roadside edge of the pavement and the rest – in picture – up close to the church so that people could still walk along the pavement. And there were enough people walking along it to mean I spent a lot of time waiting for a clear view.

I could only stand rather close, partly to avoid the clutter of the bike stands, but also because if I moved further back I would have had the other half of the protesters in the way too, not to mention having to spend most of my time jumping out of the way of traffic on the fairly busy road. This was another occasion where the extreme wide angle of view of the 10.5mm full-area fisheye proved its worth.

This particular frame – corrected as usual with Fisheye-Hemi – stood out from the rest because of the figure holding the ‘Bring Home Shaker Aamer‘ poster at the extreme right. The woman is Joy Hurcombe, the Chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, and she has her hood pulled back from her face to better see where she is going as she walks towards me. She had been standing at the far end of the row, next to the man just to the left of her head, and rather small in the pictures, but I saw the possibility as she walked towards me and quickly took a couple of pictures. As well as adding a little dynamism to the image – and the slight angle she is at adds to the impression of movement- I like having a similar figure at both edges. I would have liked another couple of inches at the left to show the edge of the poster held there. Were I to develop this image again I would add a little brightness and contrast to that sign on brown corrugated card.

I usually try to keep the fisheye level when taking pictures, which avoids the splaying out of the verticals. But this was a picture I had to take very quickly, and I think it actually helps here. I’d chosen to work from this side of the scene because of the group of three people around the blue banner which makes a nice contrast to the orange suits. I seldom like to work from the centre with groups as I find it makes for less interesting pictures.

D700, 16-35mm at 16mm
Joy was walking across in front of me when I made the first picture, to take the microphone and speak at the street corner, and I followed her to photograph her speaking.

There was a woman a metre or so to her left as she spoke dressed in an orange jumpsuit and black hood, and I moved close to her, filling the left of the frame, with Joy speaking in the centre. It wasn’t bad, but in the background between the two figures there were a couple of people talking who were rather a distraction.

I don’t like to set up pictures or direct events, but after trying 14 frames and not getting an image I felt was quite strong enough I asked the woman to move closer to Joy, then moved across in front of the two of them and knelt down, partly to more or less hide the figures behind these two. I moved in close and went down on my knees and edged a little closer – I was using the 16-35mm on the D700 at 16mm – and tried to fill the frame as much as possible with the two women and the posters they were holding and in the background.

There were two figures at the left – a child and father that I was watching too, and wasn’t sure how to cope with; I took a series of 8 frames watching them and the speaker’s face, which much of the time was turned a little too much away from me. But in this frame she turned towards me and the man was behind the other woman’s arm, with the boy looking towards the speaker.

This is a picture I don’t think I would have got on film, firstly because I would not have been so sure that the previous 14 frames weren’t quite what I wanted, and second because I would not have gone on working for 22 frames – and quite likely would have had to stop and change films with only 36 exposures to play with if I had tried.

D700, 16-35mm at 16mm
After a couple of short speeches the march formed up to make its way to a longer rally inside Battersea Arts Centre, which I didn’t go to as I was due at another event. I photographed the two large banners at the front and those holding them, then walked behind them inside the main body of the march, again working with the 16-35mm. There I took another picture with Joy in it, almost the only face visible, though there are ten orange jumpsuits visible in a nicely chaotic grouping.

I walked up towards Clapham Junction with the march, still taking pictures, trying without great success to show the kind of area it was and the people watching the march as it went by. But as with most marches and processions the most interesting things usually happen before they move off (or sometimes after they finish.)

D700, 16-35mm at 19mm

D700, 16-35mm at 18mm
I was feeling that my pictures so far were far too orange. It’s a striking colour, though one that digital sensors have something of a problem with, particularly with bright fluorescent dyes, tending to lose highlight detail. But not everyone was wearing orange, and the posters were black and white.

Several of the marchers attracted my attention and I tried to make pictures with them as the main figure, moving in close with the 16-35mm lens, using it at the wider end. Walking backwards and just to one side of her, I took three frames of this woman holding a poster. The second of the three was unusable because she had closed her eyes. The upper one which was the first frame, with the lens at 19mm was in some ways ways the better picture, with a more dynamic tilt to the poster a slightly closer viewpoint and less of those distracting yellow lines, but in the end I chose to use the lower one (made three seconds later – I’d zoomed out very slightly to 18mm and we’d walked a few yards down the road), mainly because her eyes are wider open and I prefer her expression, but also I like having both of her black gloves.

It isn’t just the pale blue of her jacket, although it was a change from all that orange, but I think there is a determination in her stance and expression that attracted me. It seemed very much a picture of protest.

Continue reading Free Shaker