Category: Photo Issues

The decision by the UK Borders Agency to withdraw the licence from London Metropolitan University to have overseas students seems to be particularly spiteful, obnoxious and counter-productive. It will cause great and entirely unnecessary disruption to the lives of those students who were following their courses assiduously, with many personally disastrous effects, while those who made use of London Met without being genuine students – assuming they exist – will have already melted away.

Financially it may be ruinous to one of the UK’s largest universities, possibly effecting the futures of many home students. But the biggest financial damage is likely to be to the UK economy. Overseas students studying here make a large contribution to our economy, both directly and indirectly, and the cavalier treatment those at London Met have received at the hands of the UKBA is likely to result in the loss of many millions – if not billions – as future overseas students decide to study where they are made welcome and promises are kept. This senseless action will cost the country dearly at a time when it can least afford it.

Given that the protest outside the Home Office was outside of student terms, most of the students at the protest were postgraduates, and the protest was surprisingly large. Police had provided a rather smaller pen than was necessary, and photographing the protesters was hampered by them keeping the pavement in front of it clear, moving on anyone who stopped to take pictures.  We were made to stand a couple of yards back on a small grass covered bank, though I did slip down and take a few pictures occasionally before getting moved on.

The speakers too were standing on that same bank, and it was difficult to work in front of them – there was really little or no space that the police would allow – except from inside the crowded pen which was a little far away, and also sometimes difficult to find a space. Most of the time I was having to work very close from on the steeply down sloping edge of the grassed bank or even closer to one side.

Then there was the lighting. It was a sunny day with quite a bit of cloud, but when the sun wasn’t behind a cloud I often found myself working into it; sometimes dramatic but almost always giving problems with flare. In the image above I’ve made the two large greenish circles above and to the left of the head almost invisible by darkening and desaturating them so they almost match the greyish background, but some frames were ruined.

Photographing people in the crowd was also rendered tricky by the extremes of sun and shade. In the top picture I’ve done considerable ‘dodging’ and ‘burning’ in Lightroom to reduce the contrast, particularly in the face at top right, which started with probably even greater contrast than that at bottom left – where I liked the dramatic poster-like effect.

The Home Office is an interesting modern building with a jutting out roof with large horizontal areas of colour glass, through which the sun was shining, giving large patches of coloured light on the pavement and people. Again the effect can sometimes be interesting – as in this picture of one of the speakers:

where the orange-red on his hair, shoulders and hand adds something to the image, but on some other subjects it just creates an unpleasant colour cast – the blue in particular is difficult to work with. I’m not quite sure about the bright orange fingers of the woman below, caught in one of these patches of strongly coloured light, though it would probably be possible to reduce the effect by a little local painting with a suitable complementary colour – although this would go beyond what some would consider acceptable for news images.

Those fingers make her look as if she is wearing some curious rubber gloves with nails on them. I used another frame where the effect was less obvious.

The protest got a little more active after the speeches were over and the petition handed in and the employees from London Met had left for their afternoon’s work, as the students decided to head for Downing St. Police halted their impromptu march after a few hundred yards, but after some discussion and negotiation and being held for around a quarter of an hour they were allowed to continue to their destination.

This is a picture taken between a row of police stopping the front of the march toward the long end of the 18-105mm, and so depth of field was a little limited. I didn’t quite get the focus right on this one, it seems to have been on one of the hands rather than on the face in the middle and I didn’t notice. The D800 can actually spot faces in images and automatically focus on these at least in some modes which should have made this image a little better, but I probably wasn’t using the right mode. There are just too many things to remember, too many things I still have to learn about this camera, but I’ve been too busy using it!

You can see the pictures from there and more from the Home Office, as well as more information about the story in Don’t Deport London Met Students on My London Diary.
Continue reading London Met Protest at Home Office

I’ve got a little behind putting my work on My London Diary and today it was work that I took on 1st September in Walthamstow. Although it was a good day for Walthamstow, it wasn’t one of my best occasions. I really didn’t feel at my best and at the critical moment went the wrong way and found myself in the wrong place. And I let myself get upset by being sworn at, threatened and generally harassed.

Things started well enough, at the rally before the march by ‘We Are Waltham Forest’, a group of local people and organisations put together to oppose a march and rally by the English Defence League into their community supposedly to ‘take back their streets’ in Walthamstow.  Walthamstow is a place with a strong identity and radical tradition, where one of the great English socialists lived – and it’s William Morris Gallery has just had something of a facelift, and it is now one of London’s more mixed multicultural communities – as the image above perhaps shows.

The audience too included people from all communities, and the event was next door to perhaps London’s largest street market and a short walk along this would also show people from many diverse backgrounds getting on with each other.

It was an impressive march, and people in the shops and houses along the route came out to watch and greet it, obviously giving it wholehearted support. I’m not sure what the police expected to happen – they were present in large numbers – but it seemed unlikely to me that they would have been able to stop it reaching its destination had they tried.

In fact it stopped itself, on the junction with Forest Road, along which the EDL were expecting to march to the civic centre for a rally, with large numbers of people sitting down on the road. Others just stood around, and a few danced to a samba band. Walthamstow was clearly not about to be moved.

I walked down to where the EDL where expected to arrive, although they had been held up when RMT members had refused to let them on the train they had intended to take.

As usual, the EDL were mainly not happy to be photographed, and I was sworn at, threatened and the target of various gestures as I took pictures – as you can see on My London Diary. It was just as well that there was a tight line of police surrounding them, although at one point a man did push through to put his hand across the front of my lens before police pushed him back. But working with a wide-angle – the 16-35mm -between the closely packed police wasn’t easy.

I think this woman was trying to hold her hand up between my camera and her face rather than give a salute, but I’m not sure. There were some rather strange things in the march – for example one man carrying a a Serbia Montenegro flag (perhaps a fan of war criminal Slobodan Miloševic?) and another wearing a military cap was carrying a copy of an English translation and interpretation of the Koran.  But at times the 18-105mm (27-157mm equiv) DX lens wasn’t long enough for what I wanted, and I wasn’t particularly happy with what I had managed.

In contrast to the other march, few people came out onto the streets as it passed, and those who did either made clear their opposition – and got a great deal of abuse in return – or turned their backs on it.  If they were in Muslim dress or black they got abuse anyway. The EDL claim not to be racist, but clearly there were many among the couple of hundred on the march who were not toeing that party line.

I only saw one person show support, an old man who came out of his house and raised his hands in support – at which the marchers went wild, shouting, whistling and raising their arms in return with gestures of approval.

As the march approached the blocked junction it was clear that the police were going to divert them down a side street. There were a few hundred counter-demonstrators on the road, but I thought that they would actually try to stop the march a little further on where it would have to cross the Chingford Road to get to the Council offices, and went a little ahead. By the time I realised that things were happening on the corner I had missed much of it, and the police were blocking the way. I guess I was trying to be too clever and so missed the obvious.

EDL supporter argues with police

I think the police had also probably prevented the protesters from going up the Chingford Rd from the junction they had blocked, as there were only a few protesters as the EDL escorted by a large police presence, made their way across without incident.

Outside the civic centre there was a small group of EDL, including both ‘Tommy Robinson’ and Kevin Carroll who was speaking. A few yards back, police were holding a large crowd of angry counter-demonstrators from ‘We Are Waltham Forest.’ Although their counter-protest had set out to be peaceful, things were now getting rather heated, and plastic bottles and parts of placards were beginning to be thrown towards Carroll at the microphone. When a half-brick came over I decided that it was no longer healthy to be standing in the middle. I was tired and a bit fed up at having missed the main action so far.

The main group of the EDL were being kettled where I had parted company with them in a side street a few hundred yards away, and it was fairly clear it would not have  been safe to let them approach. Attacking the police, as many of the EDL had earlier, had clearly not been a smart move, particularly as they were already clearly seen as troublemakers by wanting to march into the area. I didn’t think the police were likely to allow them continue, and decided the event was more or less over and it was time for me to go home.

I don’t think there would have been much more to photograph, although the police did rather rub the EDL’s noses in it, making their failure rather more of a humiliation than it would otherwise have been.  But the people of Walthamstow had made it very clear that the EDL were not welcome on their streets.

I had taken a number of decent pictures – as you can see in Waltham Forest Defeats the EDL on My London Diary – but I hadn’t been feeling too well and I hadn’t really had a good day.

Continue reading Walthamstow Wins

‘Vedanta, the whole world is watching you‘ said one of the posters at the protest outside their AGM

but my own back was turned at the critical moment when protesters threw fake blood over another protesters covered with a white sheet on the steps leading to the AGM, and by the time I realised something was happening and had run the 20 yards or so to the scene those who had spilt it were fleeing stage left and stage right. They included two men dressed in suits who I assumed were Vedanta security men.

Even with the 16-35mm I couldn’t include all of the scene, and by the time I’d really realised what was happening it was over.  I was just a little annoyed that I hadn’t been warned something was about to take place.

I’d been busy photographing Bianca Jagger who was one of the protesters who have bought shares in the mining company so that they can attend the AGM and ask questions about the activities of this company ‘owned by billionaire Anil Agarwal, backed by the UK government but opposed by groups in India, Goa, Liberia, Namibia, South Africa and Ireland, Zambia and Sri Lanka for the environmental damage, pollution and human rights abuses caused by its mining of bauxite and other minerals.’

Wearing her white suit she had to pick her way very cautiously over the Kensington Gore on the steps; it is supposed to be non-staining, but I wouldn’t entirely rely on it.

What was needed was a hose to wash the theatrical blood away, but instead they sent out an inappropriately equipped black woman cleaner. I felt sorry for her as she tried to deal with the mess, supervised by a young woman in a smart black dress and heels in what seemed like a colonial parody.

The charges against Vedanta are horrendous and you can read more about them on My London Diary in Vedanta AGM Protest, and of course on web sites such as Foil Vedanta, where you can read a more accurate account, complete with pictures of the bloody incident.

But had the organisers thought to make sure the couple of press photographers present were watching when the event was going to happen, it would have got them rather more publicity.
Continue reading Vedanta – My Back Was Turned

As a former teacher I still have some interest in matters of education, and like many last month was appalled to hear that some exam boards, under pressure from the government and their regulatory body, had decided to change the marks needed to get a C grade for GCSE English between the January and June exams.

This meant that many students who got a mark that would have given them a ‘C’ grade in January were downgraded to a ‘D’, which is just unfair. A ‘C’ in English is a basic qualification for many further courses and something many employers insist on. Although not originally intended to be used in this way, a ‘C’ is a pass and a ‘D’ a de-facto fail, and the decision by the exam boards will blight the lives of many for years.

I’m not actually a great believer in examinations. Or more precisely I think that getting a good grade in examinations shows you are good at taking examinations rather than very much else. Because of the pressure that schools face with inspections and targets, teachers have become very good at getting pupils to do well in examinations, largely to the neglect of education. And unfortunately most of our examinations are very poor instruments for grading anything useful.

I taught quite a range of subjects over my teaching career covering various aspects of science, art and photography, business studies and computing. Two courses stood out for me. One was an intensely practical and vocational computer-based course, with on-screen learning and assessment coupled with various lab exercises, the Cisco Networking Academy programme. But although our educational establishment showed some interest in this initiative, it wasn’t really possible to integrate this into our education system. Even students who wanted to go on to study computer science could get no credit from the universities from following these courses.

But what I most enjoyed teaching was on the Art and Design courses we ran using photography as the medium. Although there were things called exams, basically the courses involved students in producing a portfolio of work. We worked to a fairly well structured course, making sure we taught the basics, but students showed their ability by their research and development of their own ideas in photographic projects to meet the briefs we wrote. The only difference for the exam was that the brief came from the exam board, and there were rather notional time limits.  Essentially this was a course where the portfolio that each student assembled was what mattered and the grades given by the board (based on our teacher assessment and external moderation) were simply a reflection of this.

The protest happened because of the anger of teachers at the way students they had taught had been penalised unfairly by the exam boards, and the disastrous consequences this would have for these individuals and also for many schools. The lower pass rate will give the government the excuse to take over many schools and impose their policies of increasing privatisation of education.

One young teacher in south London had decided on the Friday evening before the bank holiday weekend that teachers should take some action to show their outrage and had contacted others on Facebook. It wasn’t a good time to organise, with most teachers making the most of the last week of their summer vacation, and it was perhaps surprising to find almost 30 of them outside the Department of Education.

What I could have done without was another photographer who arrived a short time after me and decided he needed to organise them for a photograph. Fortunately after he had spent a few minutes doing so, things more or less returned to normal and the protest continued.

Of course I am sometimes guilty of just a little arrangement myself. I did suggest to this woman she stand in front of the sign, and she is looking at me because I’ve just previously taken a picture using flash. And I did take advantage later of her waving the head and dunce’s cap around in front of the other protesters for that other photographer – who by that time had become a part of the situation I was photographing.

But the pictures I find more interesting are not to do with organising people (which should get any real news photographer fired) but those that simply happen and I manage to be in the right place at the right time.

It’s sometimes a thin line, but I try to stay on what I think is the right side of it. More pictures at Regrade GCSE English.

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

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