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Vauxhall: Digital Strengths Part 1

My trip to Vauxhall showed two real advantages of digital over film. I’d gone there to photograph a protest: Capgemini Cleaners Demand Living Wage – but when I got off the bus at the stop just across the road they were nowhere to be seen. I was a few minutes early, and from experience I knew they didn’t always start their protests on time, so I wasn’t too surprised.

But rather than just hang around, I went for a little walk, starting off by going to the riverside, where thing had changed a little since I was last there. South of Vauxhall Bridge used to be the Nine Elms cold store, a vast concrete slab from the early 1960s, demolished in 1999, having been disused for some years – it enjoyed a brief afterlife as a recording studios in 1990. Part of this St George’s Wharf area was fairly quickly redeveloped as rather quirky expensive riverside flats, certainly not to everyone’s architectural taste (if taste is the right word for them), but the 185 metre tall cylindrical Vauxhall Tower took some time to get planning permission (a GLA folly along with the Shard) and has yet to be completed. One of the objections was I understand that it might be a danger to helicopters coming along the Thames to land at nearby Battersea Heliport, and in January this proved only too true, with two men being killed when a helicopter hit one of the cranes at its top in fog.

I made a panorama here in 1999, in which the remains of part of the cold store are visible above the green diamond of grass to the right of the trees (see detail below.) To its left the St Georges Wharf site is clear and you can see past to the MI6 ‘Spook’s Castle’ immediately north of Vauxhall Bridge.

I decided on the spot to make a digital panorama from what I thought was the same position. Working from memory, I went about a couple of meters too far south, but it wasn’t too bad a guess. The whole panorama is too wide to sensibly show in this blog, but I have included it on my London Diary in Vauxhall Images. Here is a crop from the centre of the image, taken in light that made the most of the view:

Had Vauxhall Tower been there in 1999, I think I would have only have recorded the lower 13 or 14 of its 52 floors on the film image, taken with a 26mm lens on a roughly 56mm length of 35mm film – just over one and a half times the length of a normal 35mm negative. The horizontal angle of view was roughly 120 degrees, and the camera had a ‘swing’ lens that rotated to project the image onto a curved film, avoiding the ‘wide angle distortion’ which makes images with a horizontal angle of view of more than around 90 degrees impossible on normal rectilinear lenses. The result uses a cylindrical projection, which takes a little getting to grips with.

Here’s roughly the same area from a picture taken in poor light when I was waiting for the protest a week or two ago:

Even from the crop you can see that the film image is a better picture, mainly because of the lighting, but also because of the changes in the scene. I also took rather longer thinking exactly where to take it from, and the small difference in position does make a better picture, particularly since moving forward a little gave me a slightly better view of the river and a better angle on the patch of grass – which was then unfenced.

With digital, there are no real limits on the horizontal angle of view – you just take more pictures to stitch together – and really very little on the vertical angle. Using a focal length of 16mm with the camera in portrait orientation didn’t quite allow me to get the top of the tower in view, so I simply took another row of images with the camera angled up, and let PtGui (with a little help from me in masking some images) put the whole lot together. As you can see in Vauxhall Images I decided to stop at around 180 degrees horizontal, and I’ve also included there a section of the digital image cropped to the same angular dimensions, in Vauxhall Images. Had I set out to produce something more like my original picture I would have worked with a different lens with a less wide view and would only have needed a single row of images.

Although digital allows much more freedom in making panoramas (and the results are technically better in almost every respect too) it is can be more time-consuming, having to make the dozen or so exposures needed, and gives problems with subjects that move. But stitching the images together is often faster than scanning a film image to make prints.

In terms of technical quality, the digital image, produced on the D800E wins hands down, enabling considerably larger prints. So although I still like using film for panoramas in cameras such as the Horizon or the Hassleblad X-Pan, and they do have the advantage of giving a decent idea of the finished image in the viewfinder, in most respects digital wins hands down.

A few minutes after taking these images I walked along towards Vauxhall bus station, where I found the cleaners were gathering to start their protest. But more about that in my next post.

Tortured to Death

Sometimes its a problem trying to find a different picture when you are photographing a protest. Although the protesters themselves sometimes seem happy with just a lot of people behind a banner or holding up placards, pictures like that seldom have a great interest for those who weren’t there.

It helps if there are some interesting placards, whether because of the words or images on them, and a little animation in the people taking part often helps. People shouting or blowing horns or whistles often attracts attention and gets passers-by to look, but although it tends to attract photographers too, it often adds little to a still photograph – unless you are careful to ensure you capture it at a suitable moment. But protests where people just stand and talk to each other are often tricky to cover. Even worse if they turn away from the cameras when they do so.

Protesters tape up a poster of Arafat Jaradat

I don’t set things up to photograph, though if others set things up it sometimes provides opportunities, though I still try to take different photographs. But more often I’m looking out for things that are happening – like these two people putting up a poster on the wall.

The poster shows Arafat Jaradat, a Palestinian who died after being tortured in an Israeli jail, and whose death was the reason for the protest, outside the main London office of the security firm G4S who provide the security systems for the jail and interrogation centre – you can read about it and see more pictures in Tortured to Death in Israeli G4S Prison on My London Diary.

The placard and its message were a powerful graphic black and white statement, and I tried to present it a little differently by taking an image of one woman holding it, with intensely coloured blue headscarf and purple gloves. I thought it worked well with the dull orange of the office foyer behind (a very different colour temperature and less bright than the pavement outside.)

Posters and a banner outside the G4S offices in London

I tried to improve on the simple row of people holding up posters and the banner by including at left the face on the poster. With the 16mm there was perhaps an awkward empty area of pavement at the right, and the best picture came when one of the protesters – dressed in black and white to echo the poster – walked into frame. She apologised for getting in the way of my picture.

Uncorrected view from the 10.5mm semi-fisheye

The protesters were actually scattered over quite a wide area and it was hard to include more than a fraction of the over 20 people there in any one image. When I made a picture from a similar position with the 10.5mm fisheye I was careful to crop so as not to include the whole of the banner at right. I knew that I would get a curved arch above the line of protesters, which I think helps the image.

On My London Diary you can see several other pictures made with the 10.5mm, which often provides a different view. In most of them I’ve corrected the images to cylindrical perspective – as in this example. Particularly when there are people close to the edge of the frame they otherwise look distorted.

10.5mm image corrected – otherwise the woman at right would look very distorted.

But my main problems covering the event were to do with temperature, and this seemed to be one of the coldest places in London, with large buildings around perhaps channeling the bitter east wind through the area. Even though I’d dressed for the weather it was still too cold for me to stand around in one place for very long; I’d been outside taking pictures for several hours and I had to leave halfway through the protest.

Continue reading Tortured to Death

Lensculture March 2013

I’m always pleased to get news from Jim Casper of a new edition of Lensculture, though I’ve not yet had time to look through all the material on it. Of what I’ve seen so far, the highlight is a set of work from Michell Sank, In My Skin, work from her project about “young people under 25 in the UK who are challenging their body image “, though I find it hard to understand why some of those she has photographed have any problems with what seem to me perfectly adequate forms. I’ve managed to live with all my own imperfections for a very long time without getting too worried.

I’ve also enjoyed looking at Gloriann Liu’s essay on Long Term Refugee Camps in Lebanon and several other pieces on the site, though as always Lens Culture covers a wide range of photographic practice, including a few things that do nothing for me. But there is plenty that does.

Winogrand

An interesting interview in Mother Jones Never Before Seen Photos From Legendary Street Photographer Garry Winogrand with Mark Murrmann talking to Ted Pushinsky, a San Francisco street photographer who got to know Winogrand in his later years and at times drove him around Los Angeles as he hung out of the car window taking pictures, as well as walking the streets with him.

And I think there are eight or nine of the “never before seen” photographs that I’ve never seen before, though they do include one or two I never want to see again and which I don’t think do anything to enhance Winogrand’s reputation. It’s good to hear of a new show, but I’m not sure it will add much to the 1988 MoMA show – and you can see some of his work in their collection. There is a good selection of links on American Suburb X, and pictures at various galleries including Kopeikin and Fraenkel.

More about the new retrospective show – the first for 25 years – which opens at SFMOMA today and continues until 02 June 2013 (press release here) and later travels to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (March 2 – June 8, 2014); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 27 – September 21, 2014); the Jeu de Paume, Paris (October 14, 2014 – January 25, 2015); and the Fundacion MAPFRE, Madrid (March 3 through May 10, 2015).

What a shame that London apparently has no gallery interested enough in photography (or considered important enough) to put it on here!

Bill Wood’s Fort Worth

Thanks to a Facebook link by Rina Sherman for reminding me of the work of Bill Wood Jr (1913-73), a commercial photographer in Fort Worth Texas from 1937 to 1970 when he retired because of ill health. Most of the pictures in the collection that was bought by actress Diane Keaton, who has a great passion for photography, date from the 1950s on, when Fort Worth was a rapidly expanding city, and Wood provided the images that represented the new citizens as they wanted to be seen.

I don’t know how representative the book and show at the ICP in 2008 was of his work as a whole; a search in the ICP collection on his name brings up 348 objects, most of which are photographs by Wood, and most of which have an image on line. Although not all have a great interest, they are almost all carefully composed, straightforward images, clearly made for a particular purpose by a skilled craftsman. He wasn’t a photographer who took a huge number of pictures, and only made photographs for his clients, usually taking only a single or small number of exposures. The 10,000 negatives in the collection that Keaton bought are mainly from the 1950s and 1960s, and represent only an average of 500 pictures for a year – less than many photographers now take in a day. Even in the days of film, when Winogrand went to make a very different view of Fort Worth, he probably took more pictures in a few weeks than Wood in a lifetime.

There are pictures here that could well be mistaken – seen out of context – for the work of one of the photographers of the ‘New Topographic’ school, many of whom worked in similar environments on the outskirts of other US cities. And sometimes reminders of images by other well-known post-war photographers who worked in America, though Wood’s viewpoint is a very different one from any of these photographers.

You can hear Keaton and fellow curator Marvin Heiferman talking about the work on a Studio 360 public radio broadcast from 2008, and there are a number of reviews of the show and book online, including one by Ken Johnson in the New York Times and Melanie McWhorter in Fraction Magazine. There is also an article in North Texas’s Art&Seek, which includes the Pontiac/Kleenex image mentioned in the radio discussion.

Uxbridge

Perhaps the most surprising thing about my visit to Uxbridge to photograph Hillingdon Marches Against Cuts on the last evening of February were my bus journeys.

Uxbridge isn’t far from where I live, both towns on the edges of Middlesex, around 8 miles in a straight line, and perhaps 11 on a bicycle. If you’ve a half day to spare, and don’t mind some rough tracks you can even do it on a fairly pleasant and virtually traffic free route using local footpaths and just the odd bit of road to get to the canal tow-path that takes you there.

I’ve cycled it many times in the past by a more direct route, which takes you along some of the most dangerous roads and junctions for cyclists in the country, heavy with traffic to and from Heathrow, full of drivers more worried about catching planes or suffering the effects of jet-lag, and engineered without the slightest thought of cycle safety. If I’d been going for a daytime event I’d probably have done it again for this event, though I’ve never found a very good way to carry a heavy camera bag on my bike.

Public transport around London concentrates on going in and out of London, routes like spokes of a wheel from centre to periphery. Even more local routes tend to follow a part of this pattern. Drivers at least have the M25 that takes you around – and with its aid can make this journey in around 20 minutes on a good day, though often it takes rather longer. It took me careful planning and three buses and around an hour and a half from my door to where the protest was gathering.

But at least there was a protest to report on once I’d arrived, perhaps a little over fifty people going to lobby outside the London Borough of Hillingdon council meeting. It’s not particularly unusual to turn up to cover events to find nobody there at all, or just one or two people, and nothing to write about or photograph.

Again it was just getting dark as the protest gathered, and I was able to photograph at ISO 3200 with the fading daylight and a little help from fairly bright street lighting and shop windows in the broad pedestrian area. Although I now have three working i-TTL flash units – two SB800s repaired recently by Nikon and a Nissan unit – there is a limit to how much I can carry or work with around my neck, and I’ve decided I can only work with one flash for the normal two cameras I work with. Usually I put that on the D800 with the 18-105mm DX lens as I can work with slower shutter speeds with the wide angle 16-35mm on the D700, and then occasionally swap it on to the D700.

I’ve never quite worked out how flash is meant to work on the Nikons, and occasionally it seems to have a mind of its own, with random highly over-exposed frames, or refusing to allow the camera to set a shutter speed above 1/60 second despite being able to sync at much higher speeds. There are times when almost every setting on the camera or flash appears to interact in some strange way to stop me doing what I want. At one point I simply had to stop taking pictures, turn off flash and camera and try and set everything back to my normal starting settings. I’m still not sure if it was me or the electronics that have become confused beyond use. But Nikon do seem to have built some assumptions into the flash system that are not designed to work the way I work. And it would be nice to be able to set whatever aperture and shutter speed I like when working with the camera in manual exposure mode and then have the flash do its best to provide the appropriate light output in TTL mode, at least so long as the speed was within the sync range.

But though I curse about it and am often confused by it, flash does occasionally come up with the results, often when I least expect it. I didn’t have any time to think about this image, just saw it out of the corner of my eye and swivelled around and pressed the shutter. Of course the face and fluorescent jerkin were far to bright and needed considerable burning (and possibly I could do it a little more carefully than in the on-line version) but for me it is a powerful image of an independent spirit.

At least using flash you have a sensible colour temperature to work with, even if the auto white balance hasn’t quite done the job and my tweaking isn’t perfect in some of the results. Outside the Civic Centre it was rather like working in a black hole, and what little light there was seemed to be from sources that were rather deficient in some colours, with the results looking unnatural whatever combination of colour temperature and tone I selected.

I’d spent a lot of time working out the bus journey to Uxbridge, as there were perhaps a dozen different possible bus routes to take into consideration, and had decided it wasn’t worth trying to plan ahead for the journey home as I didn’t know what time I would finish. Uxbridge is in Greater London that has decent bus services, but I live in the outer regions of Surrey where they seldom venture at nights. A bus came just as I was getting to the stop and I had to run a few steps to get on it. I leafed through the bus timetable booklet sitting on the bus, and came to the conclusion I would have a long wait for a connection on the route I’d thought I would take, and it was worth trying another of the many combinations, and I got off earlier than planned to change buses. I was lucky and next connection – still a Greater London service – came within a minute. And at the next stop – Heathrow Terminal 5 – my local bus home came in as soon as I’d walked the few yards along to the right stop. Despite it taking its usual magical mystery tour around the local area, I was back faster than possible according to the timetables – and faster than I would have cycled.

Continue reading Uxbridge

Photographing Vultures

Although I don’t much like working after dark, it can often add a little drama to images, and digital cameras work so much better than film in low light. As I’ve often mentioned, the really important thing for me about this is that it enables me to produce much better images with flash.

The protest against vulture funds – companies that have bought up bad debts run up in the past by failed regimes for a small fraction of the original load (in this case the Argentine junta) and pursue their successors in courts around the world for every last penny started as light was fading fast, and I took my first pictures as the protest was starting by available light.

The light was rapidly fading, and soon most of the ambient was coming from street-lights and the windows of shops and offices, and was extremely varied in both quantity and quality. Most of the pictures I took were using flash, and in the images in Vulture Funds – Claws off Argentina! there are some examples of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ flash techniques. ‘Bad’ flash is sometimes all you have time to do, when you haven’t got time to do anything but grab the moment, and the obvious defects can sometimes produce interesting results.

So while I dislike the obvious shadow of the placard, the over-lit face of the young girl holding it does make her stand out in a dramatic fashion. Taken with the lens at 18mm (27mm equivalent) she was pretty close to the camera, and was moving around pretty rapidly. My main aim in framing was to include the message of the placard – slightly truncated but it still gets over the message that the vultures should take out their claws – and also I’d been trying hard in other frames to get in the ‘drop the debt!’ message on a number of t-shirts worn by the protesters. But the walker at top right with shoe and saucepan (and the other saucepan) is an example of the little bit of luck we need and just occasionally get.

This was taken in a particularly dark bit of pavement at one edge of the protest, and was one of a series of around 50 pictures I’d made trying to get a strong image from these two kids, who were very playful but extremely uncooperative. I could have posed them – and another photographer did, but that would have lost the incredible energy that I saw. And I don’t do that sort of thing! People posing for me of their own accord I’m happy with.

Of course the picture from the camera didn’t quite look like this. Her face was very close and like the placard needed considerable burning down to give an effect like that I saw, while the young boy’s face was rather darker, and needed some dodging. Using flash often needs quite a lot of post-processing. One thing I missed when doing it on this image was the biscuit in the girl’s mouth, which could have done with rather more toning down.

Another example of flash is this image of the vultures with pans holding the banner. I’d decided to work (as usual) from the side and needed a fairly high viewpoint to see the pans they were banging behind the banner. Flash was essential, but the nearest part of the image was perhaps a couple of feet away from my lens and the furthest perhaps ten or fifteen. Using the inverse square law, the difference in light from the flash would have been in the order of something like 25:1, perhaps 4 or 5 stops.

You can cut down the ratio simply by aiming the flash away to the right, swivelling the head on the SB800 around 45 degrees. I was using the built in diffuser and rather ineffective reflecting white plastic, which gives slightly more even lighting and there was still more than enough light at the left edge of the image. Using a high ISO 3200 also helped, giving a little fill from the street lighting, although most of the light around was actually from the windows behind. Because there was a lot of vigourous pan-bashing happening, I was working at a fairly fast shutter speed – 1/320 – and the results for this particular image would have been better had I thought to move to a slower speed. I’d simply forgotten to do so.

Again, a straight jpeg would have showed much more uneven lighting, and I’ve dodged and burnt to get the result I wanted, rather more like how the scene actually appeared than a completely straight result. I haven’t got it completely right, and the light is still rather uneven. The furthest parts of the image are also noticeably ‘noisier’ as a result of needing to be brightened in post, but the result is still usable.

One of the things I also found it that photographing vultures isn’t too easy. It was very easy to find angles from which vultures don’t really look too much like vultures. I’m rather more used to photographing people – and there are plenty of examples of that to, as well as more in the issue in Vulture Funds – Claws off Argentina!

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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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Watermarks & Copyright

What if The Masters of Photography Used Horrendous Watermarks? by Kip Praslowicz, a photographer from Minnesota, had the ‘idle thought … it seems like many amateur photographs spend more time putting elaborate watermarks on their images than they do making images worth stealing.‘ So he took some famous pictures and put over them the kind of watermarks he was thinking about, and you can see the results.

As you can see on his page, it generally makes something of a mess of them, although I think I prefer his version of the Gursky, certainly it seems somehow more honest to have the image covered with dollar signs.

His post also links to a few other amusing posts on other sites which also amused me at least slightly. But I wasn’t entirely convinced with the premise behind his post, as there are plenty of examples of professional photographers and agencies which have covered their images with obtrusive watermarks (though perhaps quite at the level of his made-up examples.)

Paranoia about the use of images from the web doesn’t only affect amateurs, although it’s good to see that many photographers are getting over it, and at least one major agency that used to splatter it’s name over everything on-line has now abandoned that practice.

But visible watermarking remains quite a good idea, so long as it isn’t obtrusive, particularly with the kind of copyright legislation the UK government is trying to stealthily push through – read more about it in The Copyright Fight on the BPPA site and on Stop43.org.

I got a little fed up with the rather frequent unauthorised use of my images from the web a few years ago and decided to add a fairly discrete copyright message to every new image I put on the web. It’s very easy to set this up in a Lightroom preset – though I see I haven’t yet got around to changing the year to 2013!

It took me around 30 seconds to produce a new watermark file to get the year correct, selecting File, Export and my web export preset (it’s called Diary – for My London Diary), scrolling down and clicking on the name of the old watermark preset – pm2012 – and then choosing Edit Watermarks, changing the 2012 into 2013, clicking on the old name at the top left of the Watermark editor, selecting ‘Save Current Settings as new Preset’ and naming it pm2013.

I don’t take many pictures in the snow, so choosing a light grey for the watermark and a fairly high opacity makes it reasonably legible on most of my images. Of course the images on the web also have my name, contact details and copyright information in the metadata. My camera is set to add it automatically into the EXIF data as I take pictures, and the import preset which brings the images from the card into Lightroom adds it to the IPTC. But often these are routinely stripped from images. The watermark takes a little more effort to lose.

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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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More on World Press Photo

Rather than write in detail about this again, let me just direct you to a piece on PDN Pulse by David Walker, World Press Hits Pellegrin with Wet Noodle (And Other Contest Scandals) which gives details of the complete failure to take any action over the recent problems with work by Pellegrin and others I mentioned in the recent post Magnum Failure.

As the title of his post suggests, WPP are basically trying to say it doesn’t really matter that a photographer wilfully misrepresents the subject. The PDN piece also links to another good post by photographer Kenneth Jarecke on his Mostly True blog, which discusses the case and also Pellegrin’s reaction to it.

There is a lot of discussion on Mostly True, and again much of it worth reading, but in the end I think the issues are simple. What Pellegrin did simply was not acceptable for a documentary project; he should not have misrepresented it as documentary work.

I hope that both WPP and POYi will reconsider. Magnum will lose what respect it has among photographers – and the informed public – unless it puts pressure on both Pellegrin and the organisations to get the project withdrawn from the contests. At the moment they are all just trying to defend their backs rather than to correct the error.

And it was an error, and Pellegrin needs to admit it rather than blustering against everyone involved in bringing out the true story. It certainly isn’t enough to say “Looking at the presentation on the World Press Photo and POYi sites, I do regret the formulation, ‘where these pictures were taken’ in the background text in relation to Shane’s picture.” Of course there is nothing wrong with taking portraits in a documentary context, but this was a picture that was out of context in the actual story he was attempting to cover. Pellegrin attempts to plead innocence but his response pleads ignorance, which isn’t a defence. If he didn’t know it was because he didn’t ask the right questions, and having a good picture certainly doesn’t absolve you from this essential part of the job.

And I’ve just come across another post worth reading – Is it Lying? by Samuel Corum.

Direct Action Network Roadblock

This isn’t the greatest picture I’ve ever taken, but it shows an interesting moment in the protest by the Disabled Peoples Direct Action Network at the end of the Fuel Poverty Action rally in Whitehall. The text about both actions is at Fuel Poverty Rally & DAN Roadblock.

Earlier in the day I’d missed an attack on a photographer by a group of those marching with the South-East Alliance, but this time I was wide awake when others had failed to notice the start of the move by protesters to block Whitehall, as the small group of wheelchair protesters had moved quietly a few yards along the road and the woman closest to me had just eased two wheels of her chair onto the road.

At the back of the picture are the police, seemingly quite oblivious to what is happening, with a Forward Intelligence Unit looking rather backward. Closer to the action, but in a small group talking to each other rather than alert to what was happening are three photographers – and there were others around mainly equally oblivious.

Had the other photographers been close enough for me to reach out and touch to alert them to what was happening I would have done so, but it was important to me not to do anything that would interfere with the action that was proceeding – my job was to report it.

I moved in front of the protesters as they moved out into the road and stopped the traffic, keeping slightly out of the way so that it really was them stopping the traffic and not me.

We had all been given a hint in advance that some kind of direct action would be taking place, but hadn’t known exactly what, where or when. I’d been watching carefully for hints, clues or signals and had spotted and read them more or less correctly and was in the right place at the right time. There are times – and this is one – where you need to try and read situations rather than simply respond to them, though at times I have read them in a disastrously wrong way.

Where there is a choice I seldom want to work with groups or speakers head on. It’s usually better to be a little to one side, particularly if people are using microphones. So when the road was blocked, I moved a little to one side, while the main crush of photographers was directly in front.

Looking from the side concentrates your view on those closest to you, while a head on view leaves everyone at the same distance and thus scale. Later I went further to the side and was then able to move in close without blocking the view of other photographers when an officer came to talk to two people he had identified as leaders of the protest – one was holding a megaphone.

© 2013, Peter Marshall
An officer tries to persuade the protesters to move
Even when I moved around to the other side to get a better view of the exchange it was the officer rather than me who was blocking the other photographers.

But then I had to move back to allow another wheelchair user came up to join in the conversation. After taking a few more pictures the officer moved and I then felt that I was perhaps getting a little in the way of others. I went down on my knees top take a few pictures from a low angle and be less in the way before moving back a little. Once I’d got the pictures I wanted it gave others a chance to get theirs.

Of course we all get in each other’s way from time to time, and, like the photographer in the image above, we get in each other’s pictures. It’s inevitable when more than one or two photographers are covering an event.

But most of us realise the problem and try to work in cooperation with other photographers. It’s mainly the amateurs, often using their phones who walk in front of other photographers, though a special place in hell is reserved for those few video crews who think they are more important than the rest of us because they work for one of the big media companies.

More pictures at Fuel Poverty Rally & DAN Roadblock.

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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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