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Budget Day March

My last photographs on Budget Day were of an early evening march and rally against austerity and the cuts in public services, with George Osborne confirming the expectations that he would say these needed to continue despite the continuing lack of growth in the economy and the growing evidence that his plan is not working.

It was dusk as people began to gather – though it hadn’t been that bright all day, but it was definitely getting darker, and although I could take pictures at high ISO, as usual flash generally helped. It wasn’t a huge march, but it was quite lively, though it was tricky to catch that in the pictures.

People walking along the road with placards and banners somehow just didn’t get the spirit of the event, and I needed to find something more dynamic, with a group of students who were making rather more noise, even though I wasn’t recording sound.

This is perhaps an image with a suitably ‘bad’ composition and a little chaos that for me gets a little closer to the event, taken with a very wide angle rather close to the woman with the microphone, deliberately pushing her into the corner of my frame – and this is exactly the full frame. I had the flash angled around 45 degrees to the right and have had to do a little dodging and burning as usual to bring the lighting to something rather more even. The shutter speed (1/60s f5 16mm ISO 2500) is slow enough to give a little blur on the hand in the centre of the frame (over the headline message ‘MORE TORY CUTS’) but fortunately the rest of the image is sharp.

I didn’t stay too long at the rally opposite Downing St, as it was just too cold. There does seem to be rather a lack of street lighting in the area, so again I was mainly working with flash, though I did make a few exposures with available light, such as this:

Also taken at 1/60 second at ISO 2500 at 16mm, this was underexposed by a couple of stops, which Lightroom coped with pretty well, but much of the light was a nasty orange, only partly correctable. I’ve tried to get reasonably sensible skin tones with a colour temperature setting of 3313Km but the placard is noticeably pink.

Flash – as in this picture taken with the DX 18-105mm at its longest – around 158mm equivalent – does give a better and more predictable light – in this case at 5450K.

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Budget Strike!

I often have a problem with photographing pickets, although there have been plenty of opportunities in recent times. They tend to be at their best early in the morning when people would be turning up to start work – and I’m not really a morning person. When I had to start work at 8.30am it was always a struggle, and when I got the invitation a few weeks back to photograph a picket at 5.30am it didn’t take long for me to say no.

My first train into town on a weekday doesn’t get in until a little after that – I don’t think I’ve ever caught it, though I have at times travelled ridiculously early when I’ve been making long distance trips, but generally I don’t like to do anything that starts before around 10.30am unless it is sure to pay well as it means I have to pay the excessive full fare.

Of course there are times when pickets keep on later, and there was still a group of PCS members outside the House of Commons as I walked by around 11.30am on Budget Day, and with them showing their support were two of the MPs I often photograph at protests. I’d photographed the two of them separately with some of the pickets when Jeremy Corbyn asked me if I’d like to take both of them together, and called John McDonnell over.

It would perhaps have been better had I moved a little lower or used a wider lens and got the clock on that tower in the background in the picture.

Just down the road, the PCS were holding a strike rally, with a giant screen on which the proceedings inside Parliament were being played. Every time I see Prime Minister’s Questions I’m appalled by the failure to engage in proper discussion and the silly points scoring from almost all of those who take part. It rather clearly makes the point that parliament has become a farce.

Hearing ministers stand and make statements that are clearly untrue, and that you know they must know are untrue doesn’t inspire any confidence in democracy, and I think the two women in the foreground here were thinking much the same as me.

The giant screen made a useful background to photograph the speakers against – and while they were speaking the sound from the chamber was off so we didn’t have to hear the lies.

But I would certainly trust Zita Holbourne or Mark Serwotka rather more than the gentleman behind them.

The PCS members present had come her to see the budget speech by George Osborne, and to give their reaction. It was loud and negative, with a great deal of booing, blowing of whistles and shouting.

And one protester in particular had come with a poster which made very clear the distress and deaths that the cuts are causing.

People are dying because of inappropriate management targets in the NHS, because of the Atos work capability tests which remove benefits from the severely ill and disabled (the Glasgow test centre is known as ‘Lourdes’ because all those who go in with severe disabilities emerge somehow miraculously fit for work), because of poverty which forces many to choose between fuel and food. Even relatively prosperous areas such in the London suburbs now need food banks, mainly kept busy by people who, under the strict targets set by the politicians, are now cut the victims of a cut the benefits first, ask questions later policy, with emergency support now largely unobtainable from official sources.

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Hogarth, Progress & Copyright

There is, I think, something very photographic about the work of William Hogarth, widely acknowledged as the father of visual satire for his works such as ‘Gin Lane‘ and ‘Marriage à-la-Mode‘. His paintings and the more widely disseminated etching made from them, which sold massively during his lifetime and still continue to sell almost 250 years after his death in 1764 are full of ‘decisive moments’, and rely very much on a feeling for gesture and symbol which would have made him as perceptive as a photojournalist. And as Martin Rowson says in his piece at the Tate on ‘The grandfather of satire‘, illustrated by an etching of ‘Beer Lane’, his work provides “an image of eighteenth-century London that many people probably now take at face value, almost as if it were a photograph.” The word ‘almost’ of course is important, and what Hogarth crams into a single image would take a photographic essay to explore, and the world of Hogarth is one of caricature rather than visual accuracy.

Hogarth sold and published his own work, and made a good living out of it, enough to buy a house in the country at Chiswick. Then it stood alone surrounded by fields, by the late nineteenth century it was on a pleasant village lane, and now it is more or less submerged by the Hogarth roundabout, with one of London’s more curious flyovers. You can buy a print of Rowson’s take on this at Hogarth’s House and can see a rather unsharp version of it on Weekend Notes, which also has more about the museum which is free to visit and has two decent pubs a short walk away. But to see his paintings, visit the Soane Museum in Lincoln Fields, which you can see in the video by Ian Hislop in an article on Hogarth by The Idle Historian.

Hogarth was also important to photographers in helping to establish the principles of copyright (which was vital to his living as a print-maker), with the Engravers’ Copyright Act (also known as Hogarth’s Act) of 1735, providing the first real protection of artists copyrights, which in the course of time was extended to photographs, and is currently under severe attack from the Enterprise And Regulatory Reform Bill – with Stop43.org leading in putting forward the case for photographers.

I thought about Hogarth last week, as together with a few of my family we small family outing to Chiswick for a meal together in a pub and then a visit to Hogarth’s House, now a small museum owned by the London Borough of Hounslow and then walked on through the grounds of Chiswick House to the station for the train home. You can see some more pictures from that outing on My London Dairy in Chiswick & Hogarth, and I’ll write a little more about them in a later post. But for the moment I’ll simply say that ‘No Nikons were used in their making.’
Continue reading Hogarth, Progress & Copyright

St Pat’s in Willesden Green

Saturday was one of those days when ‘logistics’ were very much at the forefront, and I left the Syrians disappearing into the Hyde Park underpass at 1.20pm and by 1.50pm I was walking along the side road next to Willesden Green station where the Brent St Patrick’s Day Parade was gathering. Fortunately the trains were running normally on both parts of the Piccadilly and Jubilee lines, though it still involves a very long walk between platforms at Green Park.

Most years the Brent parade has actually been on St Patrick’s Day, but this year this was on Sunday, and the main London parade was taking place then, so Brent held its parade a day early. There had been some doubt until a fairly short time previous as to whether it would take place at all, as Brent council like all others has been hit by the cuts, and one cut was the funding for community events such as this. The parade went ahead despite this – and the mayor came along as usual, walking at the front with St Patrick.

Unlike the big London occasion, the Brent parade is truly a community event, and perhaps because of the uncertainty it was a little less so this year, without the usual large crowds on the streets. The weather hadn’t looked good earlier in the day, and it rained a little on this parade, and being on a Saturday was perhaps a reason for the schools being absent. Last year, when St Patrick’s day actually fell on a Saturday I’d noticed the crowds were down on previous occasions, such as the 2011 parade.

So compared to previous years it was just a little disappointing, though there were still people on the street to watch, particularly in front of some of the local bars, with people getting into the hats, the spirit and the Guinness of the event.

The parade ended at Willesden Green Library, where there were related events taking place, but by now I was getting rather cold and tired and it was time to go home. You can see more pictures in St Patrick’s Parade Brent.

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Syrians on the March

Syrians gathered in Belgrave Square for a noisy protest across the road from the Syrian Embassy for a march to Downing St on the second anniversary of the start of the uprising there, a fight against the Assad regime that gets bloodier and bloodier. In my report Syria – Two Years Fight for Freedom on My London Diary I quote some figures about the numbers killed by the brutal regime which “has so far killed over 70,000 people, injured 320,000, imprisoned 160,000, and caused several million to become refugees inside and outside of Syria.” Syrians feel let down by the international community, which has largely stood back and watched this happen without managing to take any effective action – as I mention, one of the posters “included the question ‘Hey World, How Many Kids Should Be Killed Before You Do Something?'”

The Syrians were protesting in a fairly dense crowd inside a large pen, but unlike some events it was easy to move through and to get to the centre where things were happening. The people want publicity for their cause and a keen for the press to get good pictures, and with a few quiet words and gestures made way for me to move past. Almost everyone – men, women and children – was happy to be photographed, and very friendly. This, unlike some, was a crowd where I felt welcome.

Visually, the many Free Syrian flags often provided some drama – and it is a better flag to photograph than some with its black white and green bands and red stars, whether waved, worn or painted on faces.

The woman on the left in this image saw me taking photographs of hef friend and ruashed forwards to kiss her – this was the second or third frame as she turned round and smiled at me. I showed them the picture and they laughed. Most of the time I was working with the 16-35mm, and there was little room not to be very much in people’s faces, and that big lens (considerably larger than the 18-105mm DX) with its 77mm filter and large lens hood can be rather intimidating, but not I think with this crowd.

Most of the time I was too close to some of the people for flash to be an option, but although the light was fairly even overall – a dull overcast day with still the occasional spot of rain – I needed it for some of the pictures, for example where the face of this man was in shadow against a bright background.

I continued to take pictures for the first quarter mile of so of the march, and left it as the tail end disappeared below my feet into the Hyde Park underpass. Standing above as the march approached I wished I had put the 70-300mm into my camera bag that morning, although I’m not sure I would have made many good pictures.

Views from a height are seldom as interesting as I hope they will be, although probably the main reason I take few now is that climbing up on street furniture and walls is rather a strain for me now, and unless – as in this case – I’m on really solid ground I tend to lose balance and start shaking.

But a longer lens would have got a more compressed view when the march was approaching that would have been full of those flags. Here I used the lens at 66mm (99mm equiv) to take in more or less the whole width of the march, framing to get the banner at the bottom, at right and at top left to the edgies of the image. I rather like that the large banner is part obscured by the three men – two with megaphones – in front. It’s message is still clear and it’s sometimes good to leave a little for the viewer to do. One thing that didn’t quite work for me was that the young girl on her father’s shoulders at the centre of the banner has her held held firmly down – I would have liked her to be looking up at the camera.

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So you want to be a wedding photographer?

One of the great influences on photography in the last century was the art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch, (1898-1971), who spent 24 years at the magazine from 1934-58. Brodovitch began his ‘Design Laboratory’ with courses for designers and photographers in 1933, with separate classes for designers and photographers, but it was perhaps after the war that they became more important.

Among the photographers who attended his courses were Diane Arbus, Eve Arnold, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand, Tony Ray Jones, Hiro and a personal friend of mine, John Benton-Harris.

In the American Institute of Graphic Arts biography of him, Andy Grundberg writes:

As a teacher, Brodovitch was inspiring, though sometimes harsh and unrelenting. A student’s worst offense was to present something Brodovitch found boring; at best, the hawk-faced Russian would pronounce a work “interesting.” Despite his unbending manner and lack of explicit critical standards—Brodovitch did not formulate a theory of design—many students under his tutelage discovered untapped creative reserves.

But perhaps his worst put-down when students brought work that did not meet his creative standards was “So you want to be a wedding photographer?”

It was a quotation that came to mind a couple of times today, first when I read an article For Photographers, Competition Gets Fierce in the New York Times, which talks about how many unemployed ‘digital debbies’ with little or no previous experience “are taking their fancy digital cameras and booking jobs shooting weddings”, seriously undercutting the pros at the game.

Back in the distant past, we had a professional photographer at my wedding, though I don’t really understand why. In those days photography was black and white, and he obviously had no idea how to use it, and the prints are flat and lifeless. At a glance they seem over-exposed, taken with no feeling for composition and printed on the wrong paper grade – there’s professionalism for you!

My own father’s wedding was I think recorded in only one photograph, a highly detailed view of a large group with my parents at the centre. It seemed perfectly adequate, although it might have been better if my father had not been holding a baby when it was made (it wasn’t actually his, and I only came along, the fourth child, some fifteen years later in case anyone was having doubts about my legitimacy.) I find it hard to understand why now people want large albums and even videos of the occasion.

Given that so many people attending weddings now take digital photographs, its hard to know why we also want professionals to take pictures, and harder still why they should employ those without some kind of track record at ‘under $1000’, when what they are getting is unlikely to be much if any better than friends could provide for free. Although weddings have provided a useful income for many professionals for many years, I’m not sure this is necessarily a good thing; wedding photographs don’t seem to me to be particularly worthwhile and few of those who get a living income from them have used the support to do anything more worthwhile.

But should you really want to be a wedding photographer there is some very good advice on some things to avoid in 32 Tips For Taking The Perfect Wedding Photo which is subtitled ‘Avoid disaster and embarrassment by following these simple rules.’ Thanks to EPUK News for directing me to this page, which I’m sure would have had me laughing all the way down the aisle even if had drunk a few less glasses of a good Bordeaux before reading it. My apologies for any errors of typing, sense or grammar.

Whittington’s Turn Again

Supporters of Whittington Hospital fought a hard and successful campaign back in 2010 against plans to cut its A&E and maternity services, but like many other London hospitals are now threatened by another round of cuts and closures, largely driven by the greed of friends of the government who would like the large amounts spent on the NHS to bleed into their pockets which lies behind much of the current NHS reforms.

Part of the proposals for the Whittington would see around a third of the site sold off for development and there would be wards closing with fewer beds available, reduced maternity services, and 570 jobs lost, in a area where existing provision is hard pressed with bed occupancy rates at 10% above recommended levels. So it isn’t surprising that there has again been a great public outcry, and the Defend the Whittington Hospital Coalition had called for another march.

It was a cold, wet morning, enough to put many off from coming to march a couple of the miles and stand in the rain listening to speeches, but there was still a hardcore of a couple of thousand supporters who turned up at the starting point by the time the march actually began. Earlier it had seemed rather empty, but many turned up sensibly – given the weather – at more or less the last minute.

As often, the protest was advertised with a time for people to meet an hour before the march was due to start. When going to cover the events I always try to arrive at the earlier time, or even sometimes a little before, as travelling times in London can be unpredictable. Often the time before a march starts is by far the most interesting for photographers, giving you time to work with people, and at some events there are speeches or other activities before the march sets off.

There was little happening when I arrived at Highbury & Islington on the morning, except for people – including one dressed as the Grim Reaper, wielding a scythe with the message ‘NHS Privatisation’ and others handing out placards at the station entrance, and a couple of hundred yards down the road a bus and a few people standing in the fairly light rain. But people were beginning to arrive and get ready and I started taking pictures.

Among the crowd that was building up were apparently a number of celebrities, few of whom I could recognise (partly because I don’t own a TV and seldom read the popular press), though occasionally there was a small crowd of photographers and fans who obviously did.

Among those I did know were the remarkable Hetty Bower who became a pacifist in 1914, and had marched all the way to the hospital in 1910 and was hoping to do so again today at the age of 107. There were some familiar politicians too, including Natalie Bennett the Green Party leader, though one local MP was noticeably absent.

As usual when it rains, I was holding a cloth on the front of the lens most of the time, and wiping the filter before taking pictures, but there were still a few frames made unusable by drops on the lens. I followed the march for a short distance up the road, and then rushed back to the station to go across London for another protest. Although it was some miles away, it was a fast journey on the Victoria Line and then a short hop on the Piccadilly, both of which were working normally that weekend.

More pictures at Whittington Hospital March Against Cuts on My London Diary.

Continue reading Whittington’s Turn Again

Fukushima

As soon as I saw this young girl dressed as a sunflower I knew there was a picture there, but it took me a while to find. I started with a close up, but wasn’t entirely satisfied with either this or two other images of the girl with two women.

There were of course plenty of other sunflowers, a symbol of renewable energy, with the sun as a smiley face in the centre of the banners reading ‘Nuclear Power? No Thanks’. Many of those taking part in the protest were carrying sunflowers, and there were other symbols around, including the CND one above and the radiation logo.

And there was something surreal about the fluorescent yellow barrels of nuclear waste that were parading around, although my best attempt to capture that was ruined by another photographer going into the scene to take photographs; not that I’m blaming him – he was just getting on with the job in his own way, and I know I often frustrate others doing what I want to do. But there was something about the barrels that worked best from a distance and I couldn’t manage that without others getting in the way, so I had to settle for a closer view.

I tried but failed to make a decent picture using Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa, because this was a Fukushima 2nd Anniversary protest, and one led by Japanese Against Nuclear UK.

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Riverfront

As I’ve often noted, it is rare to find serious writing about photography that actually looks at photographs, so don’t miss Joerg Colberg’s Meditations on Photographs: Riverfront by Curran Hatleberg which does just that. And admirably.

Certainly there is more that could be said about this particular picture, and having started with this kind of largely formal analysis I would want to locate it in both a social and political context and in a photographic one. Colberg in his final three sentences instead goes off on in what is to my mind a tangent about staged versus street photography. It’s a subject about which I have my own views, but I don’t think one that particularly relates to this image, but most photography in any case exists somewhere between these two extremes, and in most of my own pictures although not staged there is some degree of interaction between observer and observed.

But don’t stop when you come to the end of Colberg’s post (though you could perhaps omit the last three paragraphs), follow the link in either his post or here to the work of Curran Hatleberg, new to me. There are two sets of pictures on his site, and ‘Riverfront‘ comes from ‘The Crowded Edge‘. Scroll through the images and after the / you came to the second series, ‘Dogwood‘.

Click on his name and you find the information “Curran Hatleberg was born in 1982 in Washington, D.C. and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. A graduate of the University of Colorado and the Yale School of Art, his work has been shown in galleries both nationally and internationally and is included in multiple collections. He currently teaches photography at the International Center of Photography and Norwalk Community College.” You can also find a set of his pictures on the Yale University School of Art site, some of which perhaps relates more directly to Riverfront.

Vauxhall: Digital Strengths Part 2

As my previous post explains, I’d gone to Vauxhall to photograph a protest by cleaners at Capgemini who were calling for the London Living Wage and an end to racist discrimination at work, as well as fighting the threat of redundancies. I’d arrived early, taken a short walk and digitally re-photographed a panorama I’d taken on film almost 14 years earlier.

Usually on the digital cameras I work with auto-exposure in P mode. The Nikon exposure system is generally smarter than me and also allows a flick of the thumb to give me a different shutter/aperture combination while keeping correct exposure. Almost the only time it doesn’t work is with flash, where it almost works with flash fill (and will work with a little tweaking) but fails when you want flash as the main light source and generally shutter priority (or occasionally aperture priority) is your best bet.

The other exception is panoramas. Although the PtGui software can cope with frames with different exposures it is still best to decide on a suitable manual exposure and take all the frames using that – and with a fixed manual focus. So I’d put the camera into manual mode, with the correct exposure for the light in the open area by the river.

I’d been surprised to find the cleaners in the bus station, and rushed to join them and take pictures, and in the rush left that camera at those same manual settings. The end of the bus station was in fairly deep shadow, and I think the day had become even gloomier, with the result that – until I noticed a few minutes later – I had taken pictures that were perhaps 3 or 4 stops underexposed.

I’m not a fan of ‘chimping’, as looking at images on the camera back while taking pictures disturbs the connection with the subject which for me is vital. Few things too are more annoying than photographers who stand in the way of others (or rather of me) looking through the images on the backs of their cameras. But just occasionally it makes sense to stand back from the scene and at least have a quick view at the histogram, and when I did I got something of a shock.

If I’d made the same mistake working on film, I would simply have had to write off those pictures – and might well have gone on for much longer until I’d finally noticed the error in the viewfinder, either by spotting the little ‘M’ or noticing that my exposure values weren’t changing. I’m generally so engaged in the image that I just don’t notice such things.

Also on colour negative film, it would have been difficult or impossible to really recover those images. If I’d realised, changed films and marked the underexposed roll, pushing development was never really much of an option with colour neg, and with transparencies a 2 or 3 stop push generally produced interesting graphic effects rather than pictures.

Lightroom does a rather better job, although for the first time ever I wished that its Exposure slider went past the +10 that I used for this image.

Lightroom’s exposure slider at +10 for this underexposed image.

It isn’t perfect, but doesn’t really stand out as being too much different from the pictures I took with the other camera body which got the exposure correct – such as this example:

A correctly exposed image developed with Lightroom’s exposure slider at 0.

It is possible to see the difference, even in these small versions, but probably most viewers wouldn’t notice it unless it were pointed out. Digital copes much better with underexposure than film.

Where film – and particularly black and white film – does better is with over-exposure. Although digital cameras have improved a little over the years (and RAW processing software too) it’s still fairly easy to produce completely washed out highlights.

I have most problems with flash, which seems occasionally simply and randomly to deliver rather more than it should, but it isn’t unusual to get a problem in other images. The occasional peek at the histogram (or a ‘flashing highlights’ image display) can be useful, and I generally work with a third of a stop exposure compensation to give me just a little more headroom – and you need it to get that fill flash right, with the flash set at around -2/3 or -1 stop, as the camera seems to ignore the contribution from the flash in its exposure calculations.

The cleaners want Justice.

More pictures and more about the protest at Capgemini Cleaners Demand Living Wage.
Continue reading Vauxhall: Digital Strengths Part 2