Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

A Wet Valentine

Feb 14th was a busy day for me, and a very wet one, not good news for those of us in Staines, where the Thames was still running very high, with water flowing slowly across the road in front of our house, and the sewage blocked for five days. Though we were fortunate that the ditch on the edge of the garden was still taking the flood water away. (It’s rising again as I write, almost 3 weeks later, despite a few nice dry days – another 8 inches and we will have significant flooding again in the area.)

It was a relief to get onto a train up to London and get away from it all for a few hours working, but I could have done without the rain reminding me of it and adding to my worries.

I’d only intended to pay a brief call to ‘One Billion Rising‘ in Trafalgar Square, part of an international day of protest over violence against women. I don’t usually bother with ‘photocalls’, often finding them rather boring, as this one was, but I did enjoy – despite the rain – meeting and photographing some of the women who had come to take part in the event.

It was only raining lightly when I arrived, but was it obvious from the start that umbrellas were going to be a major theme in my images. The only pictures that don’t feature them are a few of the dancers on the stage under cover, though even there, parts of the stage were wet and those dancing in front at ground level were doing so in shallow puddles.

Umbrellas, particularly coloured or patterned ones, do offer some potential to make pictures, but I was concentrating more on the people beneath them.

Also of course concentrating on trying to keep the front filter on my lens free from raindrops. I wasn’t 100% successful, but there were enough pictures were either there were none or they had the impact in the less essential areas of the images. In the top image, there is some slight blur and diffusion in a few areas on the right of the image, still visible at web size, but these don’t detract from the image.

They are less noticeable than when I first saw the image enlarged on my screen in Lightroom thanks to a little post-processing. Using the the local Adjustment Brush tool can reduce the effect. Increasing both the contrast and clarity in the area cuts down the effect of diffusion, and then the highlights and exposure can also be adjusted to bring the diffused area to more closely match its surroundings. The treatment needs a little tweaking for each area you use it on, but it’s convenient to set up a preset as a starting point – and mine has values:

Contrast +22
Highlights -22
Clarity +32
with all other settings at zero.

It’s just another reason why I don’t take a notebook computer out with me and send off files from location (or in this case the rather dryer setting of a nearby bar or coffee shop.) I need a good screen and plenty of time to get things at least approximately how they should be.

Of course it would help at least to some extent if I used an umbrella to keep drier while taking pictures. But I just don’t have enough hands and it also restricts mobility – and using a wide angle I just would not have been able to get close enough for some of these pictures holding a brolly. Using a wide angle – especially one with a large glass filter like the 77mm on the Nikon 16-35mm – also greatly increases the rain gathering power, and with wide-angles the lens hoods are of very limited use in protecting them from rain.

I did deliberately photograph one of the celebrities at the event, Bianca Jagger, of course holding an umbrella, and certainly it is a rather different image of her than some. But there were few others that I recognised (or recognised me.)

Story and more pictures at One Billion Rising – End Violence Against Women.

I didn’t really have time to stop and send off pictures in any case, as I needed to be away and doing other things. The first of which was just a few hundred yards down the road at Downing St. I wasn’t there to photography David Cameron, but someone far more famous (or at least Charlie X posing as someone more famous) Charlie Chaplin, who I’ve met and photographed at a few protests.

Charlie Chaplin against Climate Chaos was a one-man performance, and possibly because of the by now heavy rain, I was the only photographer in sight. And it was very much a performance, with Charlie keeping to his character in mime, which made it just a little difficult to communicate with each other.

Of course most photographers also do a little bit of mime, especially useful when abroad when you don’t speak the local language, or when working in noisy situations. I occasionally use gestures to ask if I may photograph someone, but much more often to thank someone whose picture I have taken.

There were really only a couple of pictures that I could think of to take in the situation, and you can see them with a few minor variations on My London Diary. I would have liked a few more people on the street to use in the background for some images, but apart from the police on the other side of the gates, there were only two other people on the pavement in this part of Whitehall in the five minutes or so I was there (one in red is almost entirely and deliberately behind the Climate Chaos poster) – I’ve never before seen it so empty.

One of these pictures has proved more popular than anything else I too on the day, though I think I was only making the best of a bad job. It certainly was a fine example of Climate Chaos, with a storm lashing London that would normally have hit the north of Scotland, but I don’t think I managed to capture this.

But I was very pleased having taken a few pictures to wave my goodbye and dash across the road for the bus to take me to my next appointment, for which I was already a few minutes late.

Continue reading A Wet Valentine

Women Are Beautiful

I suspect I would not have bought a copy of Garry Winogrand‘s ‘Women Are Beautiful‘ if it hadn’t been on sale, reduced from £5.95 to £4.50, as the figures still pencilled inside its front cover confirm. Not that I didn’t admire his work, but at the time I was pretty strapped for cash, a father with a wife and young family to support. You can pick up a copy now for around $400 up, more if you want the hardback.

I’ve since bought various other books by and on Winogrand, but this, his second book still remains my favourite, although at the time it was largely dismissed by the critics, savaged by some feminists and bought by very few. Which is why I got it cheap, and why it is rather expensive now.

I’ve almost got around to writing about it a number of times over the last few months, with several exhibitions of Winogrand’s work, and a giant heavyweight volume on him, 465 pages from SFMoMA/Yale, edited by Leo Rubinfien with essays by Sarah Greenough, Susan Kismaric, Erin O’Toole, Tod Papageorge, and Sandra S. Phillips and 460 pictures which I’ve not quite managed to finish reading, though I’ve spent quite a lot of time looking at the pictures. It’s a nice publication and, if you have room on your bookshelves, worth getting, but I think the considerably slimmer ‘Women Are Beautiful’ with its 85 or so plates probably tells you more about the man and his photography.

As well as a book, Winogrand also sold a number of copies a portfolio of the same name, and I think you can see most or all of the pictures (and the cover) from this at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.

This same portfolio of 30x40cm black and white prints can also be hired as a show from the collection of Lola Garrido through diChroma photography in Madrid. Currently, as
L’Oeil de la Photographie reminds me, this is on show until 23 March in Moscow. Garrido is quoted there as saying “He’s one of the photographers that has done the most for women’s liberation, The first to photograph women as they really are” although whether that view would have gone down well at the UCR discussion Confessions of a male chauvinist pig at the time of the show Rethinking Winogrand’s Women at the California Museum of Photography last year is open to doubt.

Certainly for me one of the attractions of the work was what seemed to be an incredible directness of vision, a spontaneity and an honesty. It wasn’t work that was fitted easily into the times, when any demonstration of male gaze was subject to denunciation as rabid chauvinism. Even now, to judge from the Rubinfien book and show, this work is difficult and under-represented, as commentators including Tyler Green and Nick Shere have noted.

The work from Women Are Beautiful was also shown last year in Worcester, MA, and you can see a viedo of curator Nancy Burns talking about the show at Worcester Art Museum as well as an article in The Daily Beast, which some might find an appropriate title. The pictures there are reproduced courtesy of the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, where you can see more of his work from the project.

Most of the text in ‘Women Are Beautiful‘ is by Helen Gary Bishop, with a lengthy essay ‘First Person, Feminine‘, followed by a shorter note about her admiration for ‘Winogrand Women‘ who seem confident, “aware of the place they occupy in space and time.” She sees him as “genuingly attracted by the dynamics of the female being” and having “caught the conflict of the feminine creature: the body as object vying with the self as person.”

Winogrand’s own short contribution is to the point, but I think perhaps has some element of self-deception. He writes:

“By the term ‘attractive woman,’ I mean a woman I react to, positively… I do not mean as a man getting to know a woman, but as a photographer photographing… I suspect I respond to their energies, how they stand and move their bodies and faces.”

His was work that inspired me to go out and photograph on the streets too, with rather mixed results. Many but not all of Winogrand’s women were photographed on the streets of New York where I think street photography was perhaps rather easier and more acceptable. But while I can see why he wrote ‘not as a man getting to know a woman‘ I think it is impossible – and would be unnatural – for men (or at least hetero or bi-sexual men) not to see and react to women in a more visceral way than he suggests. Even the purest photographer can’t deny biology.

Belly-Hangers

It probably isn’t a surprise that Wikipedia has a page on Clothes hangers. On it I learn that the the shoulder-shaped wire hanger was invented around 1870 in the USA, though it cites three different claims for its genesis. You can also find there about its role in the 1981 film Mommie Dearest, in which Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford screams the line “No wire hangers, ever!” and its other film roles, as well as the many uses to which these simple twisted wire hangers have been put.

One of which is of course back street abortions. And Dunaway’s line (which according to Wikipedia “quickly worked its way into pop culture” but never before made my acquaintance) would have been a very appropriate slogan for the protest at the Spanish Embassy against the proposed new laws in Spain to get rid of the laws which for the past 30 years have allowed abortions under similar restrictions to those in the UK and deny the right of women to access safe and legal abortion.

Spanish women and their British supporters were protesting with the slogan ‘My Belly is Mine‘ and were using decorated coat hangers as a symbol of their protest, so naturally these ‘belly-hangers‘ were going to play a central role in my images from the event, though there were some at the protest that would probably have been little use to the back street illegal operator.

The belly-hangers were collected in and taken in a box across the road, together with messages from the women, to the embassy. There was a conversation on the entry-phone and the women were told to wait. Then another conversation and they were told to leave the box on the step, and they did so, taking a few belly-hangers to hang on the fence outside. Five minutes later a police officer came back to the women bearing the box of belly-hangers, but nobody would take them back.

I expect they just went into the police station dustbin, but it would be nice to think that somewhere inside the police station an officer was hanging up his jacket on top of the decorated message ‘No More‘.

Story and more pictures at Bellyhangers to keep Abortion Legal

Continue reading Belly-Hangers

Slough of Despond

I grew up with The Pilgrim’s Progress, introduced to it before I could read, not the actual book but a rather tedious card game bases on Bunyan’s book.

“This miry slough is such a place as cannot be mended: it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run; and therefore it is called the Slough of Despond.”

And in the book, one of Bunyan’s excessively characterless characters tells Pilgrim how the king’s labourers have tried for 1600 years to make the slough a better and firmer place, tipping at least 20,000 carloads if not millions of materials from all over the kingdom into it to try and render the ground firm without success.

Slough has always seemed to be trying to emulate this description, most recently with a large redevelopment area called Heart of Slough, and it’s a place I find acutely depressing to visit at the best of times, though it perhaps gets better if you know it. Or perhaps not. There are some interesting places to visit not far away, and I sometimes struggle through it on my way to Burnham Beeches or Stoke Poges.

But there are some good points to Slough; for years until I was diagnosed with diabetes I was often kept alive by the sugar surge of a Mars bar on lengthy photographic outings. Mars were one of the first major companies to set up on the Slough Trading Estate, one of the first business parks in the UK, a few years after it was founded in 1925. (I did once spend several days photographing what is still the largest business park in single private ownership in Europe.) It’s perhaps a point in Slough’s favour, though it may well have contributed to my condition.

It was the trading estate that caused John Betjeman to write a few years later “Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now.” But Betjeman was a snob who looked down on the ordinary working people (though he wanted to spare them from those bombs, which were reserved for the bosses with a “double chin” and “desk of polished oak“.) Ordinary people working in the offices and factories were beginning to earn enough to dream of and even buy cheap houses, to talk about “makes of cars In various bogus-Tudor bars” while “Their wives frizz out peroxide hair… And paint their nails.” Though he did feel it wasn’t their fault they knew no better – “and often go To Maidenhead“, not having had the benefit of his privileged upbringing in Highgate and education at Marlborough and Oxford (where his tutor thought him an ‘idle prig’ and he found better things to do than work for his courses.)

Vaisakhi procession in Slough, April 2009

But the best thing about Slough is perhaps its ethnic diversity, and the best time to go there is for Vaisakhi.

But that would not have been a popular sentiment for the rather disgruntled and disappointed group who were gathering at Slough station when I arrived there on February 1st.

I can understand many of the frustrations and lack of power that drive people to support groups like the EDL, but am appalled by their gullibility in believing the lies of the media and disappointed by they failure to lay the blame in the correct place.

As the old slogan goes: “Unemployment and inflation are not caused by immigration” though perhaps now we should replace inflation by financial collapse, though it wouldn’t scan. The enemies of the workers are not immigrants, but bankers and the other greedy rich, and while the Labour Party has moved away from its traditional working class base, the left has failed to attract support (not least because it is so dominated by the middle class and mired in irrelevant factional squabbles.) Leaving empty ground for the EDL and other simplistic right wing drivellers including the saloon bar rhetoric of UKIP and the nuttier reaches of the Tory party.

I tried hard to be fair to the EDL, and to report accurately why they were protesting and what they actually did and said on the day (though I wasn’t able to stay and report on all the speeches as the police were still beating back the counter-protesters.) There are a small minority who are sincere in the belief that the EDL is not Islamophobic but is only opposed to the actions of a few Muslim extremists (and I pointed out to them that the great majority of Muslims are also opposed to these extremists), but they seem to be greatly outnumbered by those whose chanting clearly displays a more general and widespread hate of all Muslims.

The EDL walk along the High St after the riot police and horses have cleared the street

Slough was clearly something of a disaster for the EDL whose numbers were low – considerably lower than expected. Their ‘We go where we like’ turned out to mean ‘so long as several hundred police with riot shields and horses clear the path for us.’ The antifa and local youths would certainly have been more than a match for them had the police not stepped in on the EDL side.

The police get ready for a baton charge against a large group of local youths

While the EDL were clearly losers, I’m not sure there were any real winners on the day. The police didn’t manage to prevent public disorder – in fact they contributed greatly to it. I felt the decision to force a way through was wrong, amounting to the police taking sides, and creating more public disorder by doing so. They should perhaps have accepted the impass and kept the two sides apart while telling the EDL to hold their rally where they were stopped before returning to the station.

The antifa claimed a victory but didn’t manage to prevent the EDL from holding a rally – though their actions did mean (with the help of the police) they were denied a platform with the speeches being made to an otherwise empty town centre with only a few police and journalists close enough to hear what was being said – if they had been listening.

A police horse out of control on the Hight St

Many shops lost trade, with most of the High Street closed off most of the afternoon, and doubtless many Slough shoppers were inconvenienced by the closure and by some bus diversions. Some were visibly scared by what was happening, particularly those unfortunate enough to be near the out of control police horses.

And this photographer was bruised by a plastic bottle thrown by one of the Slough youths, threatened and abused by some of the EDL, and hit on the ankle when a group of EDL threw down a barrier and tried to rush out of the rally pen. I’m still limping a little two weeks later, though I think nothing is broken. Many of us also got pushed around by the police rather roughly.

My report on the event and more pictures:
EDL Saved by Police in Slough.
Continue reading Slough of Despond

Don’t Trust the Media

Photographers sometimes get a bad name, but it’s really the people who use the pictures who should get the blame. Sometimes there is sloppy reporting, sometimes it’s deliberate policy. Even the big names in news – the BBC, CNN – have agendas (and some so-called news organisations have little else.)

Of course William Randolph Hearst never actually sent the famous telegram “You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war!”, but it represents the attitude of those who run the media so well, that there is truth in it although it never happened. The bias isn’t always or just political, but also one that favours the sensational. And of course one that deifies ‘celebrity’, even if most of the celebrities are people I’ve never heard of, nor want to.

I’ve often come home from events I’ve photographed or been a part of and read the stories in the newspapers or watched the few seconds of TV coverage, and have seldom found the reports in the ‘mainstream’ media particularly accurate or convincing. Often it isn’t the journalists fault, and they are simply not given the time or space to cover things adequately, but there are clearly some things that a matter of deliberate distortion, as well as sometimes a complete failure to understand the issues.

Of course we all see things through our own eyes, from our particular viewpoint. We chose what and when to photograph (and I’ll confess that I’ve sometimes deliberately decided not to photograph something because I know how it would be used by the media to misrepresent an event.)

The proliferation of social media and the stories that people post on Facebook and in blogs etc, and perhaps particularly images have almost certainly lowered the standards of accuracy, particularly for the large media organisations who pick up the more trending of these stories and run with them, often apparently without applying the checks of traditional reporting. But just as anyone can now tell lies to the world, anyone can also pick up on the obvious deceptions and post about them.

This is something shown superbly in the photo-gallery and comments of Dr Dawg in Dawgs Blawg, Constructing “Venezuela” protests, a truly brilliant piece of work. As Dr Dawg writes “There is no flabby pretense of “objectivity” on the part of the international media when it comes to Venezuela.” While bloggers, web sites and news organisations are happily reporting bloody government repression recycling pictures taken at quite different events in Chile, Argentina, Egypt, Singapore, Greece and elsewhere, they seldom find time or space to mention the country’s “substantial progress on a number of fronts for years now—a sharp reduction of dire poverty, major advances in education, reduced child mortality, and rapid steps taken towards gender equality, maternal health, and environmental protection.”

Dr Dawg’s favourite re-purposed image is an aerial view of a huge “religious procession, reincarnated as an anti-government protest.” Since the article was published three new examples have been added to the list – and perhaps there will be more by the time you read it as the post Constructing “Venezuela” protests ends with:

Readers are invited to contribute more links to this international cavalcade of anti-government protest and government brutality in the make-believe land called “Venezuela.”

Of course there are protests in the real Venezuela, and some of the comments reflect this, though seldom in a way that would aid understanding of what is really happening there. Nor can you rely on the international media – or for that matter on the statements of the Venezuelan government or supporters such as the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign. If you really want to know what is happening you need to look at a wide range of different sources and to recognise the point of view embodied in each of them. Don’t trust the media; view them all critically.

Cleaning the Royal Opera

.IWGB protesters inside the Royal Opera House foyer

I’m not in favour of contests and awards. Certainly I won’t go to photograph the stars arriving at things such as the BAFTA awards at the Royal Opera House (ROH), though I did pop in there briefly last month, along with workers from the IWGB (Independent Workers Union of Great Britain.) The bus taking them around on the second day of their strike at the University of London paid a visit there after the lunchtime rally outside Parliament stopped around the corner, and we were all told to get off quietly and made our way into the foyer of the ROH.

There was a little pushing I think to get inside, though I simply waited briefly until they were occupied grabbing one or two and walked in with the rest of the protesters. Inside were a few police watching, as well as ROH staff, and members of the public at the box office.

The IWGB strikers were there in support of their union colleagues who clean the ROH, and who are demanding a living wage and union recognition. Although the vast majority of cleaners and porters there are IWGB members , the ROH management and Mitie, the contracting firm that employs them, has recognised another union, Unison, and refuses to talk to the IWGB.

The IWGB was threatening to strike on the day of the BAFTA awards – Feb 16th. It was a strike that they ROH would have found intensely embarrassing and would have gained huge media coverage, with support from both Equity and the Musicians Union, and, unlike Labour Party shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt, trade unionists would not have crossed the IWGB picket lines.

The first response of the ROH and Mitie was to recognise another union that has few if any members among the cleaners and porters and to negotiate with them, conceding the demand for a living wage. The first the IWGB knew about this was when they began their protest inside the ROH, when a man who later introduced himself as the Unison Health and Safety Rep tried unsuccessfully to take the microphone away from IWGB President Alberto Durango, telling him that Unison had reached an agreement with the management.

Some time later Mitie did confirm in writing that they had agreed the proposals on the IWGB and the strike – which had received 100% support in a ballot of members – was called off.

Of course there is still a dispute over union recognition, though it seems to be crazy for management not to recognise the union that the workers actually belong to. It does seem to be an area of employment law (governed by the Employment Act 1999) which appears sadly deficient in some respects. Mitie doesn’t like the IWGB because it is good at organising members and representing their interests, and appears to be happier at dealing with a larger union which cannot involve the workers.

I’d set the ISO on my cameras to ISO 3200 as we entered the foyer, and the lighting inside was a little dim, but just workable. At full f4 aperture on the 16-35mm shutter speeds varied from 1/20 to 1/100 th in various areas. For static subjects I would have been quite happy, but with these shutter speeds subject movement presented something of a problem. I prefer not to use flash if I can avoid it, both because it creates its own problems of uneven lighting and because I’ve found I more often get asked to stop taking pictures if I’m using flash, probably because it is just more obvious.

But once I was sure I had some pictures, I switched on the flash, still keeping the ISO at 3200 but bouncing in a little extra light onto the closer subjects from the low (and fairly white) ceiling and switching from program mode to shutter priority at 1/60th or 1/100th. Later when I moved in close to photograph an argument, I switched the flash off to be less intrusive. Bounce flash from the ceiling doesn’t work in any case when you are very close to your subject.

While I was photographing, one man, I think one of the ROH management talked to me, asking me why two of the other people taking photographs had masked their faces. “Are they ashamed of what they are doing?” he asked, “Why do they feel a need to hide their faces?”

It wasn’t a question I could answer. As I told him, I wasn’t ashamed, but proud and the only thing that hides my face is a beard. Personally I think masking by photographers is largely if not entirely an over- dramatic affectation.

Continue reading Cleaning the Royal Opera

Open Top Bus with ‘3 Cosas’

The bus in front of Senate House, University of London

I’m not generally an early riser or at my best in the early morning. Getting up when it’s dark seems unnatural to me, though I did it for around 30 years every winter when I worked as a full-time teacher, I never really adjusted to it, nor to leaving work after dark to come home.

For some years I travelled to work by train, but fortunately further away from London than where I live, so travelled in relative comfort, looking across to the crowded platform on the up side of commuters who would be standing in packed trains and bumped around the 40 or so minutes to Waterloo. My wife then took a train around an hour earlier than me to be reasonably sure of getting a seat.

Occasionally now I find myself coming back from London during the rush hour, often having to stand at least part of the way, which after four or five hours working on my feet is something of a pain. Sometimes the trains are so packed that even if you can’t find anything within reach to hold on to there is no room to fall down. Though the trains do run a little more smoothly than they used to.

But the journey times are longer now than when we moved here, thanks largely to the threat of penalties for late running introduced in a misguided attempt to make a privatised railway more competitive. And for the privilege of travelling during these uncomfortable times you pay more. It costs me roughly double the fare to go to London before 10am (and it is cheaper after noon.) A return fare to Waterloo is more or less the average payment I get from my main agency for image use – and about ten times the lowest fee they sold an image for last month.

So it has to be a very special event that gets me out of bed early and on a crowded train at around 7.30am. I was lucky to get the last empty seat in a full carriage, already with some people standing when it drew in, having to squeeze between two rather wider commuters on a seat made for three people of normal width.

At Waterloo, the queue for the bus I’d intended to get stretched way back, and I decided to walk the mile and a half instead, though I managed to jump on a different bus at the next stop for a third of the mile of it.

And it was a special day. The cleaners from the IWGB were on the second day of a three day strike at the University of London in their struggle for the same conditions of work – sick pay, holidays and pensions – as directly employed workers there. These three things are the ‘3 Cosas’ in the name of their struggle, which unites workers (many Spanish-speaking and originally for Latin America, hence the name) from various unions with the support of students and university staff, though this strike was also about getting recognition for their union and saving jobs of staff currently employed at some of the University halls of residence. The main union, to which most of the cleaners belong is the small IWGB, the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain, and this is not recognised by the University or their contract employers, now Cofely GDF-Suez. The IWGB had arranged for an open-top bus to take them on a tour around London to various suitable locations to protest or hold rallies.

I’ve photographed many protests with the IWGB, including those inside John Lewis stores in Stratford Westfield and Oxford St, as well as at the University of London Senate House, and when I’d met some of the leading figures from ‘3 Cosas’ at a protest the previous week they had urged me to come, telling me they’d reserved a seat on the bus for me.

Fortunately although this was a January and the wettest January since proper records began, the sun shone on us (at least most of the time.) The top of the bus was very crowded, but I was able to find a good position, though it was tricky to move around much (and if I moved away I would have been unlikely to get back), so most of my pictures were taken from a relatively small area, working very close to people.

I’d started off taking pictures mainly with the 16-35mm on the D700, but I found I was just too close most of the time for this to be useful. I could take pictures of individuals with the 18-105mm, like that of IWFB president Alberto Durango (38/57mm, 1/500s f8 ISO 800) but wanted to give more of the impression of the event as a whole. There were quite a few IWGB flags around which I wanted to get in the background, but they were blowing around even here as the bus started to move off, and I was pleased to have got a frame where the logo was visible behind Alberto shouting to encourage the workers. The background at left is Russell Square and at bottom right through the bus window is part of the address of the university offices in Stewart House.

I’d decided the best position would be close to but not quite at the front of the bus, and most of the pictures were taken from here. There are quite a few I like, and you can see the best of them in ‘3 Cosas’ Strike Picket and Battle Bus.

16mm rectilinear view – 16-35 f4 Nikon zoom. 1/160 f6.3 ISO 800

As the bus was getting ready to leave, I was photographing mainly with the 16-35mm and switching between this and the Nikon 16mm f2.8 D AF full-frame fisheye on the D700, keeping the DX 18-105 (27-157eq) on the D800. I’m impressed by the 16mm, a beautifully light and compact lens for full-frame, and the results are perhaps slightly better than the 10.5mm DX (which is also slightly heavier.) Most if not all the pictures I took with this lens have been post-processed using the Fisheye-Hemi plugin, which retains the centre of all four edges of the frame, but loses a little from each corner to provide a very wide but more natural view. It requires just a little mental gymnastics in use, remembering that the corners of what you see will be lost, but the results are interesting. The two pictures above and below are a couple of ‘before and after’ pictures, the first made with the 16-35mm rectilinear lens, and the second a minute or so later from the same position after a lens change, with the fisheye and later processed with the plugin.

16mm cylindrical view – 16mm Nikon f2.8 D AF full-frame fisheye/Fisheye-Hemi processed. 1/160 f6.3 ISO 800

Of course people have moved a little betwen the two pictures, but it gives a very good idea of the different views the two lenses give. The 16mm rectilinear lens gives a horizontal angle of view of around 96 degrees while that of the fisheye is significantly greater at around 140 degrees. It is a great lens for working in very confined spaces – such as on the top of the bus.

Both 16mm’s offer a great deal of depth of field, even if wide open, and with the fisheye, auto-focus is normally just a nuisance. After it had focussed a couple of times on objects less than a foot away I remembered to turn to manual focussing, set it at around 5ft and forgot it. It was a bright day, and once we had pulled out of the shadow of buildings and on to the road the exposures were around 1/500 – fast enough to counteract the vibration on the bus – and f11, where everything from around 18 inches away to infinity was sharp. Of course I could have worked at lower ISO, but there seldom seems to be any real point given the quality at that rating.

Once the bus was moving it was difficult to change lenses – I had to leave my bag out of the way under a seat to move around a little in the crush – but I didn’t want too in any case, as the fisheye was so useful, producing many images I like and could have got no other way

Of course I was also finding pictures to take with the D800E and the 18-105mm DX, including this one of the bus reflected in the glass-fronted building, which gives a better idea of how crowded the bus actually was. I’m almost invisible in the image, just able to poke a lens between a couple of people from the middle of the bus. It was pretty hard to get a clear view from where I was standing, and I was also watching careful to get a good view of the flags blowing in the wind. It would perhaps be a good idea to flip the image horizontally so that the mirrored text read the right way, but I rather find it annoying when people do that, or turn reflections upside down, so I’ve left it as a mirror image.

It was a long ride, taking in much of north London mainly because of one-way road systems and the difficulty of taking a large vehicle along narrow streets. I also rather suspect the driver got a little lost, especially when we went past Kentish Town station (and we passed Mornington Crescent both on the way to The Guardian and on the journey down to Parliament.)

More at ‘3 Cosas’ Strike Picket and Battle Bus.

Continue reading Open Top Bus with ‘3 Cosas’

Twilight at the Israeli Embassy

Solidarity with African Refugees in Israel was the third protest I managed to photograph on Wednesday 22 Jan, after starting shortly after 11am at the Irish Embassy for Release Margaretta D’Arcy Now!, and then going on to Malet St to photograph the Student march to protect Education. It was a long day for me, although it perhaps wouldn’t seem much if I said I was actually taking pictures for around four hours, I also spent another roughly three hours travelling, and then probably five or six hours editing the images and writing and posting the three stories, it all adds up to around 13 hours.

Few photographers spend the time I do editing their work or writing stories. It doesn’t pay. To increase the chances your pictures will be used you need to file them within minutes of taking them. This often means filing almost before the event has started – take a few pictures, file, then if you have time and it looks as if something interesting might happen and you don’t have another story to cover, perhaps hang around and take a few more.

I prefer to take pictures until either the event finishes or I have to leave, then think about them and how they relate to the event before I file them. I do more post-processing than most photographers, though I try to be careful not to let it show. I want the colour balance and contrast to be how I see them, and to dodge and burn to get the tonal right too. Of course I don’t add or subtract content, and my aim is always to get the image to work , to convey what I was trying to convey when I took it.

The protest was in support of African asylum seekers detained without trial in Israel who are on hunger strike

Back to that Wednesday, by the time I got to the protest opposite the Israeli Embassy it was 4.30pm, more or less sunset, though the sun had mainly long disappeared behind the buildings of Kensington High St, and I was working in twilight. Fortunately the protesters had chosen to defy the police and set up on the lighter side of the street, in front of the road on which the embassy stands. Occasionally you can just see an Israeli flag flying if you look down on the left, but I think they often take it down when protests are expected, and I don’t think it was there.

I started with taking pictures at ISO 1600, but soon the light was falling quickly, and to get reasonable shutter speeds I had to increase the ISO setting, ending up within around 15 minutes at ISO 3200.

Police try to get protesters to move across the road. They agreed not to block access but stayed

This was a fairly lively protest, and most of the pictures were taken at 1/80th second. Using wide-angles as I mainly do, slower shutter speeds can give sharp images and camera shake would seldom be a problem even at 1/15th – especially if I remembered to check that image stabilisation was on with the 16-35mm, but many parts of the image would be blurred unless people were standing still and quiet.

Available light, D700 16mm (16-35 zoom)

There is just a little blur at the left and around three quarters of the way up the frame in some of these images – due to a small greasy mark on the lens which wasn’t really noticeable in the viewfinder or display on the back of the camera. Nor for that matter did it really show up when I looked at the front of the lens, though it was there if you looked carefully.

It’s possible to reduce the diffusion that this creates, using Lightroom‘s Adjustment brush with a little added contrast and ‘clarity’ and sometimes a little decrease in ‘highlights’ and adjusting the ‘exposure’ settings on the brush helps too, but it doesn’t quite disappear, though it is perhaps unlikely to be noticed by most. I’ve perhaps left it a little too light in the image above.

A minute later, same lens & camera, with SB800 flash

I took some pictures with available light and then switched to flash, working in Shutter priority mode with shutter speeds of 1/30 to 1/80s. The difference between the two pictures above, taken around a minute apart is fairly obvious. The available light image makes it look lighter than it was, but the lighting is much more even. With flash, using a single SB800 unit on the hot shoe, there is a very obvious falling off in the flash illumination, even though I’ve burnt in the closer parts of the scene to compensate to some extent.

The upper image actually makes it look rather lighter than it was when I took the picture – probably I should have made it darker – it hardly looks as if it was getting dark at all. The flash picture is better in this respect, and the uneven lighting concentrates attention on the nearest figure, the woman bashing the pan lid. The upper image is more about the overall scene, with the policeman’s hand in particular claiming our attention; together with the expression on the face of the woman closest to the camera it makes a more interesting image.

Both were taken with the 16-35mm at its widest on the D700. In available light I was using Program mode at ISO 2800 at f4. There is greater depth of field in the flash image, as this was taken using Aperture priority at f8. Looking at larger images the wooden spoon is a little blurred in the upper image (at 1/80s) but pin sharp with the flash. In part this is because it was not actually moving when I took the picture, because although the short flash duration would have made it sharp in any case, there would have also been a blur with the ambient exposure. It’s an effect that might have improved the image, and one that you can see in some of the other pictures in Solidarity with African Refugees in Israel.

The effect of flash falls off dramatically with distance – roughly following the ‘inverse square law’ which states that if the distance doubles the amount of light drops by a factor of four. You can minimise the effect by trying to keep everything more or less the same distance away, for example by taking a group with a banner from directly in front, but that tends to be rather static and boring. One small trick is to try and make use of the natural fall-off in flash illumination towards the edges of its coverage, by swivelling the flash head away from the closer parts of the subject, but most flash images require considerable burning in of the closer parts and brightening up of the more distant areas.

Wherever possible I like to use available light, as it usually preserves more of the atmosphere of the scene, as well as often cutting down on the post-processing required. By the time I finished taking pictures at this protest, around 40 minutes after sunset, twilight had passed and most of the available light came from the street lighting. In the final picture I took, this was augmented a little by a man in the picture with a light on his camcorder. Working at 1/15s at ISO 3200 I had an exposure bias of -1.33 stops to get it to look like night, so the real ISO was around ISO 10,000 and set the aperture at f8 to give me sufficient depth of field from the speaker I was standing next to right to the street behind at 16mm.

It’s sharp but very noisy, but the noise on the D700 (and D800E) has a quality that reminds me of film grain, though more even, and I think in this image is attractive. Rather less so are the horizontal streaks that the Nikon sensor gives in highly underexposed areas, but these are hardly noticeable here even in the full-size image, and making those areas a little darker would reduce the effect further. In this case, mainly because of very uneven lighting, quite a lot of post-processing was needed.

Continue reading Twilight at the Israeli Embassy

Pinkwashing

Pinkwashing was a new term for me, though I’ve photographed events about ‘greenwashing‘ before (for example Rev Billy’s protest against BP sponsorship of Tate Modern), and both are forms of deception practiced by the public relations industry, trying to cover up the real situation. In this case it was the Israeli Tourist Board who were promoting Israel as a great place for gay holidays,

It perhaps attracted more attention than might otherwise have been the case because they were doing so on the same day as several protests were taking place against Israel on the 5th anniversary of the ending of the Gaza Massacre, Operation Cast Lead. The protesters outside the arcade where the Gay Star Beach Party LGBT tourism event was being held hoped to persuade those intending to visit the party to boycott Israel until it ends human rights abuses and recognises the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and complies with international law.

I like this picture because it seems to encapsulate what the event was about as well as having some visual interest. It wasn’t set up in any way, and took quite a few frames to get what I wanted. It would have been a short cut to have directed the person holding the Palestinian flag to hold it in the correct place, but this was definitely one of those ‘images snatched on the run’ (perhaps a possible translation of ‘Images a la Sauvette‘) although I had to make several snatches before I got what I wanted.

The person holding the flag was talking with someone else and facing away from me, holding the flag on a fairly long pole back over the right shoulder. The flag was fluttering a little in the breeze and also moving fairly dramatically, and I was trying to catch a moment when I could read the text of the banner, see the flag properly, seethe person speaking and read the message on her poster, ‘Queers opppose Israel’s Occupation of Palestine‘. And all of this would be nothing if it didn’t make a decent picture.

Most of the rest of the work was more straight-forward people doing the kind of things that people do at protests – speaking, holding placards, banners etc. One or two of the pictures stand out for various reasons, perhaps a memorable face or a slightly unusual pose or a gesture. I like this one because the woman is very obviously reading the poster she is holding up, which is perhaps a little odd, and the man on her right is looking at it too, and again I’ve been able to move to a position to get a Palestinian flag in the background.

Later in the protest was a rather unusual incident, in which someone who appeared to be drunk came up and started shouting and contradicting the man who was speaking. As he became more agitated and moved towards the speaker in an aggressive manner I felt that perhaps I should actually physically intervene, but decided that I needed to take pictures in case there was to be a need for evidence of what had occurred. Fortunately others did intervene, in particular the woman in this picture and the following three or four frames show something of how the situation developed.

I continued to photograph him, mainly from fairly close with the 16-35mm lens, but working calmly and trying hard not to be confrontational. Another photographer, a woman, made a point of ensuring he knew she was photographing his threatening behaviour, and he started to chase after her until another of the protesters got between them and started talking to him.

It was probably a coincidence that although the police had come to take a look at the protest earlier there were none to be seen when this man was threatening the protesters and the photographer, though there have been occasions when the police have deliberately gone away on similar occasions. One of the protesters did phone for the police but it was probably a coincidence that he left a few minutes later, well before they arrived.

You can see more pictures in Israeli Gay Tourism Pinkwashing.

Continue reading Pinkwashing

Staines Flooding

Flooded towpath in Staines, around a mile from my house

Monday in Staines

I’m sitting in the upper floor of my home typing this, early on Monday, around 16 hours after we received a severe flood warning, telling us we were likely to be flooded by the rising Thames and might have to be evacuated. At the moment there is water in the street outside and if it goes up perhaps 6 inches it will start to come inside. Worse still, it isn’t actually the River Thames that the water is coming from, but it is coming up the sewers. We can no longer pour water down our own drains or flush the toilet, and it is possible that before long we will lose power, so I may not finish this post, and their could be a few days before my next.

Flooding on the tow-path in Laleham, around a mile and a half from where I live, Sun 9 Feb 2014

That’s the scenic side of flooding, and I’ve never seen so many people out with their cameras taking pictures before (it was almost hardly worth me bothering.) It was also unusual that everyone was talking to each other about the situation. Here too we blame the Environment Agency, in part for not properly dredging the Thames, but I think that’s probably a minor issue.

River Crane at Baber Bridge

More importantly we’ve allowed so much of the area to be concreted over, and failed to keep drainage and sewage systems up to date. In 2011 the Environment Agency deliberately release sewage from Heathrow into the River Crane rather than let it back up into the airport after a flow control valve jammed. Here the sewers are ancient and work has not been carried out to keep them in good working order, let alone replacing them by a more modern system which would separate sewage and rainwater. The sewers here and genuinely Victorian, more houses have been added since they were laid and there seems to be little understanding of the system by the people who work on them.

But of course the underlying problem is climate change. We’ve known about the problems of greenhouse gases and global warming for many years, although there are still some (mainly in the pay of fossil fuel industries) who continue to deny them. What little action has been taken by governments around the world, ours included, have been too half-hearted and too late. Again the fossil fuel industry with its extensive lobbying, particularly in the US, but also in the UK and elsewhere must bear much of the responsibility.

Though we can take pretty pictures of floods, the reality isn’t so nice.

This is a street a little nearer to us, one that was flooded in January and is now flooded again. My own street is rather narrower and at the moment has less water. It can take weeks, months or even years to recover from flooding. If we get flooded I’ll try and document it, but may be rather busy!

Finally, here’s a picture from Sunday evening of one of our local parks. Normally the only water is in a paddling pool way out of picture.

We’ve been busy moving all we can either to our upper floor or at least onto tables etc a few feet above ground, but there are limits to what you can do in preparation.

Wednesday Update

Today, Wednesday, we are still waiting to see if we will flood, with water on the street outside, but at the moment it is running away into our ditch (the same one that made the Environment Agency classify our property as at ‘serious flood risk’, which led to an insurance company refusing to give me a quote) and so far that has saved us. Drains remain blocked. The Thames has gone down two inches since yesterday when it reached its peak level here in the afternoon, but groundwater is still rising. Heavy rain is forecast for tonight. But so far we’ve been relatively fortunate; every news bulletin there are reports of people in the area whose homes have been flooded.
Continue reading Staines Flooding