Category: Political Issues

I’ve often written about my love for the fisheye lenses, the type that give a 180 degree view across the image diagonal, filling the whole frame with the image, first the Nikon 10.5mm for DX format and latterly the 16mm FX; both light and reasonably fast at f2.8. I use them when I want or need to work really close to the people I’m photographing, particularly in crowds and also for panoramic landscapes, usually with little in the close foreground. Where they seldom if ever work is at moderate subject distances.

Both lenses need a little help from software, and Lightroom (or Bridge or Photoshop) do a great job of removing the colour fringing which is otherwise rather pronounced on large prints. When I first started using the 10.5mm it was sometimes a problem, and reducing its effect in old versions of Photoshop something of a trial, involving careful selection by colour and desaturation. Now it’s automatic and does a much better job.

Also the curvature due to the spherical fisheye perspective is usually a distraction, and software that converts to a cylindrical perspective which gives straight vertical lines is often essential. Photoshop offers to correct it to rectilinear, but that only works if you are willing to accept a narrower horizontal angle of view and a definite softness at the image corners. Rectilinear images are really limited to a horizontal angle of view of around 90 degrees, while the fisheye covers around 147 degrees.

Just occasionally I take an image that – at least for me – works well without that conversion. If you are a photographer you probably noticed that the image above was taken with a fisheye; but to the ordinary viewer it just seems a ‘normal’ image.  And I want people to look at the pictures and not have problems with them seeming unnatural – I try hard to avoid a ‘lensy’ look, whether from ultrawide or extreme telephotos.

The picture was taken as protesters held a rally on the road close to Yarl’s Wood, one of the UK’s detention centres where we hold people seeking asylum indefinitely, sometimes for 18 months or more, treating them as criminals rather than as refugees. Yarl’s Wood is miles from nowhere, 5 or so miles north of Bedford on the edge of an isolated business park on a former WW2 airfield. The protesters come mainly in coaches and form up by the side of the road to march the three-quarets of a mile or so along a footpath to a field adjoining the prison.

Once we were outside the prison, it rained, or rather poured, as you can see in some of the pictures. I got out my umbrella, which kept the worst of the rain off my cameras but they still got wet. I got wet too, and the ground got wetter still.

Down by the fence, against which much of the action was taking place, the mud got muddier, with water filling furrows running through it. It got hard to move around at any speed, walking on the filthy greasy surface, struggling to keep balance.  Fortunately the rain was a brief shower, or rather a series of brief showers, with the sun coming out between. But I was getting covered with mud just trying to move around, though fortunately kept my balance, though I saw a few others falling over and getting plastered with mud.

There is a slope in the field going down to the fence, and also a ditch which is just wide and deep enough to be difficult to cross, but not impossible. Hard to jump with camera gear and a muddy landing on the other side, though at one point the protesters  had put down a pallet to act as a bridge.  From higher up in the field we could see and wave to the prisoners inside, many of whom were holding up notices to the windows, clearly delighted to see there were people who knew what was happening to them and cared about it.

Even the sun caused problems for photographers, making it difficult to photograph the people putting banners up on the fence from some angles – except when the clouds came over again.

From higher up the hill, we could see some of the women holding things at and outside the windows, which will only open a couple of inches. One banner read banners ‘We came to seek refuge not to be locked up‘ and another ‘We are from torture we need freedom‘. Others wrote their phone numbers on sheets of paper so that the protesters could contact them and relay their messages over the public address system they had brought.

I didn’t have a very good day there. I was very unsteady on the mud, and had forgotten to bring my 70-300mm lens which would have been rather more useful for photographing people at the windows than the 28-200mm. Photographing through the wire fence is a pain too, with autofocus struggling to get the window frames rather than the wire fence sharp – and modern lenses are not good for using manual focus. And as I walked away I realised that I’d lost my umbrella.

I stayed for a couple of hours and was then pleased to walk away, and find somewhere to scrape the worst of the mud off my boots, which weighed several times as much as usual.  It was several days later that I finally got rid of all the mud. But the feeling of shame that my country could treat people seeking asylum like those locked up at Yarl’s Wood can’t be washed or scraped away.

More pictures at MFJ Meet Outside Yarl’s Wood and MfJ ‘Set Her Free’ protest at Yarl’s Wood.

I’ve been back with the protesters to Yarl’s Wood since Novemeber, and another protest is planned there and at other detention centres around the country on May 7th, 2016. More details of this and other protests from Movement for Justice.
Continue reading Yarl’s Wood in the mud

I have a slight problem with language. Or rather I don’t really have a problem with it, but some other people do, and they get offended by seeing some of the slogans on posters and placards. I don’t like to offend people gratuitously, and I was pleased to be able to find a viewpoint when making this photograph which obscured a vital letter ‘F’.

And though it doesn’t worry me, I normally use asterisks in captions and articles to avoid offending others with words such as f**k. Though myself I feel more offended by issues such as poverty and homelessness than in language that is a part of normal speech for many. At heart I think it’s a class issue, and I’m much more upset by class prejudice than by swearing.

The protest for free education with its slogan ‘No Barriers, No Borders, No Business‘ was certainly a good one for placards, with a wide variety, including at least one in Latin. I was fortunate to have benefited from free education, which did for me include an O Level in that language, but probably even those without that advantage could understand the gist of this one, ‘Omnia Sunt Communia‘.  But I did have to turn to Google to find that it was a phrase pinned by his torturers on reformation theologian Thomas Muntzer who led the German peasants revolt of 1525.

Fittingly for an education protest there was a ‘book bloc’, including here I couple I’ve read and including here two other authors I’ve photographed, though perhaps a shame that one of the volume titles includes a spelling error.

There were a few flares set off during the march, and something of a scramble by photographers to photograph them. I didn’t get any particularly good pictures, though one was enlivened by a masked protester holding up his hand to try and block my lens – which made me widen the view of my zoom to include him. But mostly people were friendly and happy to be photographed.

The ‘black bloc’ took on a more uniform appearance for the protest, most wearing identical jackets and trousers to make themselves rather less identifiable. But even so some were unhappy about photography. They were carrying black flags on sturdy poles and at times used them to restrict access to the bloc – as in the picture above.

I left the march as it went down Millbank to speak to and photograph a protest that was also taking place along the edge of Parliament Square, where campaigners from the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign who have mounted a weekly vigil for his release opposite Parliament every Wednesday when Parliament was sitting were celebrating to welcome him home. There celebration was a little muted, as although he was the last British resident there, over a hundred men still remained captive.

I shared their rejoicing over his release, and also as I photographer flet glad I would not have to continue photographing – at least occasionally their weekly vigils. With similar protests on a regular basis it does become hard to say anything new, both in the text and the images. Protests against Guantanamo will of course continue, and I’ll still go to photograph them when I can, including the regular monthly event at the US Embassy.

I caught up with the students again outside the Home Office, but arrived a little too late to cover the protest there fully. From there they went to the Dept of Business, Innovation & Skills – which, as I commented ‘is now responsible for the universities which are no longer seen by government as a part of education.’

Here they made a fairly half-heated attempt to push through a police line, but were repulsed. Then a large group of police arrived and mounted a charge against the students, including many of those who had simply been standing and watching. I saw several photographers also being assaulted by police and got pretty roughly pushed to one side myself.

The police regrouped and stood watching the students. More police arrived and formed a tight line across the street, kettling the protest. I decided I’d had enough, but had some difficulty as officers refused to allow me through the line despite showing my press card. I walked along the line and eventually found an officer who let me through, and walked away. I’d gone about a hundred yards down a side street when I heard a lot of noise, and turned around to see a crowd of students running, having broken through the police line.  But I was tired, having been on my feet too long, and couldn’t face running after them – and continued on my way home.

Flares are coming back into fashion. Not the flares I used to wear back in the late 60’s, natty though those were. I had to get rid of mine long ago, as although the legs were still wide enough, it has been some time since I had a 32″ waist.  But flares at protests.

As a photographer I have mixed feelings about them, or indeed flames of any sort. They certainly add a little colour and excitement, but they do create problems with exposure that are sometimes insoluble, and often very easy to get completely wrong. Good though Nikon’s matrix metering is, it usually fails in these situations.

The smoke too restricts visibility, and once you are inside the cloud it can get very difficult to see and photograph. I also worry about the effect of the smoke on my lungs, and it certainly can be very unpleasant.

Lightroom does often need to come to the rescue, and the De-Haze slider introduced not long back can often help. Even better is the more recently addition of De-Haze to the local adjustments brush.

Protests outside SOAS are often visually interesting, and the flares certainly added something. I was also pleased to be able to support Unison Branch Secretary Sandy Nicholl who I’ve photographed at many different protests over the years, and who had been suspended by management for his trade union activities, in particular related to the then current student occupation of part of the university gallery building. You can see and read more at SOAS Shut Down after Sandy suspended. A few days later he was re-instated. Probably the protest helped management see sense.

Dancing has also often been a part of protests here, and on this occasion it was the ‘Strikey-Strikey‘, a version of the hokey-cokey with a mad rush into the centre of the circle at the end of each verse. As someone who photographically likes to be in the middle of things, I was rather in danger of being overrun, particularly as most of the time I was viewing the scene through a 16mm lens (and sometimes, even worse, the 16mm fisheye), which makes anything more than a few feet away seem quite distant.

I almost missed the flares – and I think the few other photographers who had been at the protest mainly did, leaving before the end when they were set off. It’s always hard to know when it is safe to leave an event, and its often a case of what is next in your diary for the day. Fortunately I had a little time spare before an early evening meeting and was in no hurry to leave.

We are also in an age where getting images on-line fast is more important in terms of earning than getting good images. Agencies want them if possible before things happen, and at many events photographers are sitting down and tapping away on their notebooks less than ten minutes after they have started. Apart from missing the development of stories, they are also having to work with jpegs, sending them off with little or no adjustment. While that’s fine for some images – particularly those in relatively flat lighting – it would have been pretty hopeless with the images I took of those flares.
Continue reading Flares

I’ve always found London’s Barbican Centre a rather confusing place, in fact the whole Barbican estate, a brutalist conception where painted yellow lines on the pathways were found necessary to guide people from the various Underground stations to performances at the centre.

Nikon D700 16-35 mm: 1/25s, f/4, ISO 3,200, -0.3Ev

It’s the different levels that really make it difficult, with the main walkways being well above ground, linking with a grand post-war scheme that saw a future City of London where pedestrians and road traffic would move at different levels. Away from the Barbican itself, only traces of this concept remain, with parts across and along London Wall having been demolished relatively recently, but most was simply never built, impossible without major demolition (which the Luftwaffe had previously carried out on the Barbican) and incredible expense.

But inside the Barbican too is confusing, with different levels and no really clear definition of spaces. Regular visitors and those who work there doubtless soon become used to it, but as an infrequent user I still have problems.

D700, 16mm fisheye: 1/40s, f/3.2, ISO 3,200, -0.3Ev

But on this occasion I didn’t have to worry. The protest by the United Voices of the World, the union representing the cleaners at the centre began at the entrance to the centre on a proper London street shown on the A-Z, and when a small group of cleaners led by UVW General Secretary Petros Elia ran inside, evading the security staff, all I had to do was follow them into those confusing depths.

D810, 28-200mm in DX mode, 28mm (42mm), 1/60s, f/3.5, ISO 3,200, -0.3Ev

Outside it was dark, with relatively little light from street lamps and in some areas where the protesters were standing rather more coming through the glass doors and windows of the Barbican entrance. With the Nikon D810 I was working with the 28-200 mm f/3.5-5.6 in DX mode (42-300mm equiv) at full aperture and ISO 3200, in shutter priority mode at around 1/60th second, augmenting the available light with a little flash from a SB800. The flash wasn’t doing a great deal (though you can see its effect in some images) as I was using the 16mm fisheye on the D700 at similar apertures and ISO, without flash at shutter speeds from 1/15-1/50th.

When we rushed inside, the light levels were not all that different,but I had changed from the 16mm fisheye to the 16-35mm f4. I generally prefer not to use flash when photographing such incursions, as it makes it much more likely that security will take notice and ask you to stop taking photographs or to leave. I did take a few images with the D810 and flash, but generally needed a wider angle of view, and almost all of the better images were made with the 16-35mm.

D700 16-35 mm: 16mm, 1/30s, f/4, ISO 3,200, -0.3Ev

The spot which the UVW chose for its protest inside was in a foyer area of the centre, and overlooking it was a balcony from a higher level, draped over which was a banner for an event taking place on that weekend, ‘Battle of Ideas’ with its message in large capitals ‘FREE SPEECH ALLOWED’. This protest wasn’t what they had in mind, but the banner certainly fitted. Although the security weren’t too happy about the protesters being there and speaking out.

D700 16-35 mm: 16mm, 1/60s, f/4, ISO 3,200, -0.3Ev

It was at first difficult as the protesters were largely facing the banner, but eventually I was able to get the picture I wanted.

D700 16-35 mm: 16mm, 1/50s, f/4, ISO 3,200, -0.3Ev

The Barbican’s reaction was one of moderation, and when the protesters carried on after being asked to stop and leave, they called in the police, and a very polite conversation ensued, with the protesters agreeing to leave peacefully and continue their protest outside.

More pictures and text about the cleaners demands for a proper living wage and decent conditions of service at Cleaners protest in Barbican.

Continue reading Free Speech in the Barbican