Category: Political Issues

Cyclists Die In London

There are some surprisingly dark places on the streets of London, despite the huge output of light which makes the sky starless there. The area of street actually below the offices of Transport for London (TfL) is well lit, but police had taped that area off, and although people were still walking through as usual, cutting off the corner on their route towards the station on their way home, the protest there was kept on the pavement outside, where it was several stops darker.

We were there because of the number of cyclists who are being killed on London’s streets, mainly by lorries and buses – six in the previous few weeks – and TfL are seen to have failed to properly consider cycle (and pedestrians) in their transport plans, which have largely been directed to getting faster movement of cars and lorries.

I have the feeling that these changes in lighting have become greater in recent years. Certainly this is true on the suburban street were I live, where a couple of years back the council ripped up all the old lampposts with their mercury vapour lamps and replaced them with new posts carrying much more directional LED lighting on the grounds of economy. It is brighter in places (and light enough inside my house to go down the stairs with reasonable safety in the middle of the night) but midway between the lights the road is rather darker. And perhaps less makes its way into the night sky, though we still seldom see more than a handful of stars.

I set the sensitivity on both Nikons to ISO 3200, generally a practical limit for decent quality at full size, but it was still only giving me exposures of between 1/10 and 1/50s at full aperture as I moved around. Which wouldn’t have been too bad, but often the people I was photographing were moving too and were blurred on the images.

Lenses for digital SLRs are large and heavy things, and apertures of anything affordable and luggable tend to be rather limited, The 18-35mm is a nice lens, but only f4. In the old days I’d instead have been working with the Leica or Konica body and an old 35mm f1.4 Summilux in low light (I had wider lenses too but they were slow, only f4 or even f4.5 so stayed in the bag when it got dark, though I might have occasionally used the 50 f2.) The whole set of lenses was of course lighter and less bulky than the Nikkor.

In colour I’d probably have been using ISO 400 film, while in black and white it would have been Tri-X, pushed to perhaps ISO 1600. But that F1.4 lens (it had cost me around a month’s wages) gave me a 3 stop advantage in terms of exposure – making the ISO 400 equivalent to ISO 3200, and the black and white like working at ISO 12,800. So perhaps things haven’t changed as much in practice as I sometimes think.

Of course with the f1.4 lens wide open, there wasn’t a great depth of field, particularly at close quarters. And of course I could buy fast primes to use on the digital cameras, and perhaps I will, though I think not for the Nikons.

With the right adapter that 35mm f1.4 does work on the Fuji-X cameras (it won’t work with the official Fuji adapter for M mounts lenses, but does with a much cheaper Kipon) but the 1.5x multiplier makes it a standard rather than a wideangle lens.)  But the newly announced 23mm f1.4 (35mm equiv) is tempting, and I’ve recently bought the 14mm f2.8 (21mm equiv.)


D700. No flash. 16-35mm at 18mm, 1/30 f4

Back with the cyclists, for most of the evening event I worked with the 18-35mnm at f4 on the D700, and with the 18-105mm DX lens (27-157mm equiv) on the D800E, working with flash with the longer lens. It has a variable max aperture from f/3.5-5.6 and I was using it at full aperture, mainly at the wider end, where its focal length overlaps with the wider zoom. I was still using ISO 3200 to get as much exposure as possible from the ambient light, and had the shutter speed set at 1/25th with the camera on shutter priority, so rather curiously the exposures were sometimes greater with the flash than without it! I was using flash more for the different lighting effect it gave, as well as the ability to get sharp images in some of the darker zones.

There were several videographers present at the event, and some of the time putting their video lighting into all or parts of the scene. Sometimes this can be useful for still photographers, and I stole some of their light for my pictures! But it isn’t always helpful, sometimes decidedly unflattering and can put colour balance out, and using flash does help reduce its effect.


D800E. With flash. 18-105mm at 21mm (35mm equiv) 1/30 f5
The climax of the event was the die-in, when over a thousand cyclists put their bikes on the ground and got down there with them. The street was covered with bikes and bodies, making it virtually impossible to move around. One or two photographers were in the middle of it, either by accident or design, and they did spoil the pictures a little. I’d decided that it was best to work more or less from the edge, getting more cyclists in view, and had chosen to be where I thought they would be most crowded. The background with Southwark Underground station also seemed to be the best.


D700, 18-35mm at 28mm, 1/40 f4

I took a few working with the D700, mainly at 16mm, then switched to the D800E; after a few not very successful attempts with the longer focal lengths I wwitched to the 10.5mm fisheye. It’s the fastest lens for the Nikons that I own at f2.8, but I was using it around f4 for these pictures as I still had the ISO at 3200 and slowish shutter speeds. It was this lens that produced the best images of the event.


D800E, 10.5mm, 1/40 f4.5
Continue reading Cyclists Die In London

November is Over

Even for My London Diary, November is Over, and has been for a few days – I’m well into December already in putting my work on-line. There have been so many other things happening that I’ve got rather behind in posting about my work here on >Re:PHOTO.

There are still a few events I have yet to write about covering – such as the die-in by cyclists outside the HQ of Transport for London in the picture above, but it’s well past time to post the complete list of work on My London Diary for last month.

I was away from home for nine days in Germany because of a family event, so missed a few things. I think like many photographers I take considerably fewer pictures when I’m on holiday, unlike most other people. Though things have changed dramatically over the years with now so many non-photographers taking random images all day every day and posting them on Instagram or Facebook… Back when I was young, if you saw a cat you just stroked it. I don’t think I’ve taken a cat picture yet this year, but in Germany I did photograph a dog, though this is the only place I’ve so far published the picture:

But few of my family images make it to the web – there are just a handful among the other pictures from Germany which were more about the places we visited.

my london diary
November 2013


Left Unity’s instigator Ken Loach ponders his vote at the founding conference

Left Unity Founding Conference
Cyclists ‘Die in’ at TfL HQ


Islamists Protest Angolan Ban on Muslims


Cultural Workers against Zero Hours


4:1 legal minimum NHS staffing
Justice Not Jumpers at NPower HQ


Rocks where I climbed happily as a child
Virginia Water


End Drone Attacks in Pakistan


Remember Ricky Bishop – Jail his Killers
Free Shaker Aamer March in Battersea
German Holiday
Bonfire of Austerity Blocks Westminster Bridge
Anonymous March on Parliament in London
City Link & Cleaners at John Lewis
LoNdOn ZoMbIE WaLk VII


Gurkha Veterans Hunger Strike
Free Kieron & Arctic 30

 

Continue reading November is Over

Spare Rib and Derivatives

I’m not entirely sure what to make of the British Library’s attempt to put Spare Rib online and make it freely available. In principle I think its a great idea, and would generally love to see more good free content of all kinds on the web, and many would certainly find this an interesting read and a useful resource. But the proposal fails to consider the rights of those whose content it is.

It would certainly be a better solution than what has happened to many periodicals, which are put on-line behind a subscription paywall – it was certainly galling to find myself being asked to pay a fee to access an article that I wrote years ago for an academic publication. Less of a problem for those who work in academia or at other institutions that subscribe to such services. But I’d much rather that content – which I’d actually supplied without recompense – had been made available freely to all.

Of course the rights of the creators of the material deserve consideration, although the commercial service in question had never asked me in any way, and I think the same is true of many other such paid content. I’d provided the material for publication in print, but not in any way signed away my copyright, but along with all the other contributors find that other people are now charging for my content. I think the companies concerned probably defend their actions by saying there is no charge for the actual content and that payment is for the supplying of content. Legally I doubt they have the right to supply my copyright content free of charge unless I grant that, though it is possibly a grey area.

I don’t think I ever supplied material to Spare Rib over its 21 years of publication (1972-93), so I’m not directly involved, but at least the British Library, who want to put it on the web, is trying to get clearance from those who hold copyrights in all the material. There is a curious statement in The Guardian feature about it, “Copyright laws demand the British Library locate and gain permission from the majority of them“.

Under current law they surely need permission from every person whose material they publish, though in the case of those who cannot be found they might well go ahead, inserting a notice requesting anyone who has not been located to contact them – with the clear statement that they will remove any content if requested by the copyright holder.

Likewise, if there are former contributors who are not prepared to have their content presented, then the BL needs to block out those sections of the issues. It would be a simple matter and almost cost-free to simply blank out parts of the issues from the files for use on-line. There isn’t so far as I’m aware any provision in copyright law that says if 91% of contributors are prepared for their work to be used, the other 9% will just have to lump it.

Apparently, a sample of those concerned have already been contacted (and if that includes you, particularly if you are a photographer, I’d advise you to read the advice from the NUJ London Photographers’ branch), with a request for them to give (or withhold) permission within a week of receiving the request, though this contradicts the date of the end of January given by the Guardian. The end of January might be reasonable, but I don’t consider ‘a week’ to be so. There is a long blog post, Beware the Spare Rib Digitisation Project, which gives one well-informed view from a contributor.

Photographers are I think in a slightly different position from writers, in that many are far more reliant than writers on the reproduction of older work as a significant source of income. For many, their archive is their pension. So photographers as a group are more worried about unauthorised usage of their work.

The BL would also appear to have selected an unsuitable form of licensing to apply to contributions, the ‘Creative Commons Attribution Non- Commercial 3.0 Licence, and any successor version as published by Creative Commons.’ Apart from the open-ended nature of the statement, this allows any non-commercial user to ‘copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format’ and to ‘remix, transform, and build upon the material‘, so long as they give an appropriate credit and indication of any changes from the original. This is a ‘Free Culture Licence‘ which is probably not what many content creators would want.

I’m not entirely happy about Creative Commons Licensing, which although it has some very positive aspects seems to be widely regarded as giving a right to do what you like with material covered by it. Few read or understand the small print. I think many photographers would be unhappy with having their work remixed, transformed or built upon, at least without knowledge of how and why this was to be done. And, where appropriate, the payment of a licence fee.

There is a more restrictive non-commercial Creative Commons licence, Attribution No-Derivatives 4.0 International with no adaptions allowed that could be applied to allow copying and redistribution but not remixing etc, which might be more acceptable to some. But copyright law gives content creators – including photographers – important rights, and perhaps we should rely on that rather than CC. The UK Copyright Service has useful fact sheets on Fair Use and Fair Dealing, the latter of which represents UK legal thinking on the issue and allows considerable private and other use. It’s perhaps a position we and the BL should note and rely on rather than going along the CC route.

Personally I think derivative work can be rather fun, though it can also get people into legal trouble, with expensive court proceedings – particularly in the USA, which often end up with some fairly unpredictable results.  Mr Brainwash seems to lose because his work is judged mediocre (also see here) and it’s hard to disagree, but it’s worth reading Andy Baio’s Kind of Screwed for some other examples, though I think his conclusion about his own case is wrong – the ‘Kind of Bloop‘ album cover looks more like a poor copy of Jay Maisel’s photo than a ‘transformative work‘ to me.

I’ve allowed my own work to be used in a derivative fashion on a number of occasions, sometimes without payment, mainly for purely non-commercial use. But I think artists should request permission and where they intend to see the work should offer me a fee – as most have when approaching me for permission.

But there is yet more to the story over the BL and Spare Rib. BL make much of wanting to preserve the valuable magazine (as the Guardian article quoted above shows. But it has already been preserved on microfiche – and is available as such through the B. And as the Register make clear, no permission is needed to preserve the material, and the request isn’t about this, but about making it freely available on the web.  There is more about this in The Register who also tried to get some clarification over BL’s intentions, so far without success.

The Power of Photography – Marcus Bleasdale

Watch National Geographic Live!‘s short film of Marcus Bleasdale talking about the D R Congo and how he hopes his pictures will improve things in The Power of Photography to Witness. As it says on the page:

Photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale wants to make people angry; as angry as he is about Africa’s first world war and the surprising way in which we are funding this violence.

On his own web site you can hear him talking at more length about one of these images at the start of another short film, Avoiding Photographic Dangers.

His work in the Congo is in ‘The Rape of a Nation‘, which is one of a number of stories on his VII page.

I’ve written a number of stories on the war in the Congo, seen from the considerably safer viewpoint of London’s streets and the protests by Congolese on them to try to focus public attention on the conflicts there, and the links between this and our mobile phones, computers and other electronic devices. But Bleasdale’s images bring home powerfully what happens there and its effect on the people.

You can find out more about what is happening on the Raise Hope for Congo website. Many organisations are working in the Congo, and in 2008 the BBC Radio 4 Today programme published a list of charities who work in Congo and deal with survivors of sexual violence, including Merlin, part of Save the Children. Others include War Child and Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

 

Free Shaker


Nikon D800 in DX mode, 10.5mm, Fisheye-Hemi plugin
The Free Shaker Aamer march in Battersea wasn’t a particularly easy event to photograph, and I had to work hard to get decent pictures. There were around thirty people taking part, many of them dressed up in the orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuits, some with black hoods covering their faces. The black hoods can be dramatic, but they are very much a cliché, and I do like to see people’s faces in my pictures. Fortunately as you can see here some people wore hoods and others didn’t.

Battersea is where Shaker Aamer’s family lives, and hopefully where he will come back to when he is eventually released from Guantanamo, though the US and British authorities would like to send him back to the country of his birth, where he would be locked away and unable to testify about his torture since he was captured 12 years ago in Afghanistan. His evidence will certainly embarrass both US and UK intelligence agencies.

Probably most people know this part of Battersea better as Clapham Junction, one of the world’s busiest and best-known railway stations. Clapham was a more up-market place when the station was built (and probably the influential folk of Clapham didn’t want a nasty smelly railway through their backyards) so although the station was built among the slums of Battersea, the railway company opted for a more prestigious name. It was after all only a short ride in your horse and carriage from Clapham, though now the 37 bus probably takes a little longer through London traffic.

When I first went there, Northcote Road, a quarter-mile south of the station, was a fairly typical inner London street market, lots of fruit and veg, cheap clothing and the rest. Good transport connections have meant it has come up rapidly in the past twenty or thirty years and it’s now extremely gentrified, with stalls selling a dozen varieties of olives and olive oil, artisanal bread and the rest, most of the old pubs now replaced by rather trendier establishments.

The protesters were handing out leaflets on the street, just south of the street stalls, where the pavement widens out slightly in front of a Baptist church but is still rather constricted by some bicycle parking stands, and the march was to start from the corner there.

It wasn’t easy to take an overview showing all the banners and a reasonable number of protesters, partly because half of them were standing behind me on the roadside edge of the pavement and the rest – in picture – up close to the church so that people could still walk along the pavement. And there were enough people walking along it to mean I spent a lot of time waiting for a clear view.

I could only stand rather close, partly to avoid the clutter of the bike stands, but also because if I moved further back I would have had the other half of the protesters in the way too, not to mention having to spend most of my time jumping out of the way of traffic on the fairly busy road. This was another occasion where the extreme wide angle of view of the 10.5mm full-area fisheye proved its worth.

This particular frame – corrected as usual with Fisheye-Hemi – stood out from the rest because of the figure holding the ‘Bring Home Shaker Aamer‘ poster at the extreme right. The woman is Joy Hurcombe, the Chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, and she has her hood pulled back from her face to better see where she is going as she walks towards me. She had been standing at the far end of the row, next to the man just to the left of her head, and rather small in the pictures, but I saw the possibility as she walked towards me and quickly took a couple of pictures. As well as adding a little dynamism to the image – and the slight angle she is at adds to the impression of movement- I like having a similar figure at both edges. I would have liked another couple of inches at the left to show the edge of the poster held there. Were I to develop this image again I would add a little brightness and contrast to that sign on brown corrugated card.

I usually try to keep the fisheye level when taking pictures, which avoids the splaying out of the verticals. But this was a picture I had to take very quickly, and I think it actually helps here. I’d chosen to work from this side of the scene because of the group of three people around the blue banner which makes a nice contrast to the orange suits. I seldom like to work from the centre with groups as I find it makes for less interesting pictures.


D700, 16-35mm at 16mm
Joy was walking across in front of me when I made the first picture, to take the microphone and speak at the street corner, and I followed her to photograph her speaking.

There was a woman a metre or so to her left as she spoke dressed in an orange jumpsuit and black hood, and I moved close to her, filling the left of the frame, with Joy speaking in the centre. It wasn’t bad, but in the background between the two figures there were a couple of people talking who were rather a distraction.

I don’t like to set up pictures or direct events, but after trying 14 frames and not getting an image I felt was quite strong enough I asked the woman to move closer to Joy, then moved across in front of the two of them and knelt down, partly to more or less hide the figures behind these two. I moved in close and went down on my knees and edged a little closer – I was using the 16-35mm on the D700 at 16mm – and tried to fill the frame as much as possible with the two women and the posters they were holding and in the background.

There were two figures at the left – a child and father that I was watching too, and wasn’t sure how to cope with; I took a series of 8 frames watching them and the speaker’s face, which much of the time was turned a little too much away from me. But in this frame she turned towards me and the man was behind the other woman’s arm, with the boy looking towards the speaker.

This is a picture I don’t think I would have got on film, firstly because I would not have been so sure that the previous 14 frames weren’t quite what I wanted, and second because I would not have gone on working for 22 frames – and quite likely would have had to stop and change films with only 36 exposures to play with if I had tried.


D700, 16-35mm at 16mm
After a couple of short speeches the march formed up to make its way to a longer rally inside Battersea Arts Centre, which I didn’t go to as I was due at another event. I photographed the two large banners at the front and those holding them, then walked behind them inside the main body of the march, again working with the 16-35mm. There I took another picture with Joy in it, almost the only face visible, though there are ten orange jumpsuits visible in a nicely chaotic grouping.

I walked up towards Clapham Junction with the march, still taking pictures, trying without great success to show the kind of area it was and the people watching the march as it went by. But as with most marches and processions the most interesting things usually happen before they move off (or sometimes after they finish.)


D700, 16-35mm at 19mm

D700, 16-35mm at 18mm
I was feeling that my pictures so far were far too orange. It’s a striking colour, though one that digital sensors have something of a problem with, particularly with bright fluorescent dyes, tending to lose highlight detail. But not everyone was wearing orange, and the posters were black and white.

Several of the marchers attracted my attention and I tried to make pictures with them as the main figure, moving in close with the 16-35mm lens, using it at the wider end. Walking backwards and just to one side of her, I took three frames of this woman holding a poster. The second of the three was unusable because she had closed her eyes. The upper one which was the first frame, with the lens at 19mm was in some ways ways the better picture, with a more dynamic tilt to the poster a slightly closer viewpoint and less of those distracting yellow lines, but in the end I chose to use the lower one (made three seconds later – I’d zoomed out very slightly to 18mm and we’d walked a few yards down the road), mainly because her eyes are wider open and I prefer her expression, but also I like having both of her black gloves.

It isn’t just the pale blue of her jacket, although it was a change from all that orange, but I think there is a determination in her stance and expression that attracted me. It seemed very much a picture of protest.

Continue reading Free Shaker

More Germany – Neumünster

We (myself and Linda who you can see if you look hard in the picture above) were in Germany over the period including Remembrance Day, when for at least for couple of weeks beforehand it seems to be increasingly obligatory to wear a poppy in the UK.

I’ve seen over the years a change in the way we treat annual remembrance and I think it has become far more celebratory and militaristic than in my youth, when “at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month” the traffic still pulled to the side of the road for two minutes of national silence. The silence and the thoughts surrounding it was then the main event, while now it seems to be more an occasion for military parades.

I think the changes are linked to there being fewer and fewer people remaining who actually fought in the two world wars. Certainly many of those who survived the ‘Great War’ (in which my own father took a very minor role) had a huge sense of its futility and a longing for peace. But they are no longer with us. Television  has also played its part – while back then people took part, both in the silence and in local events on the Sunday, now more just watch the major parade in Whitehall, complete with its BBC commentary.

Back when I was standing shivering in my Boy Scout shorts at the local war memorial at least we sometimes got to hear first-hand what some of those who had actually been Desert Rats or taken part in the D-Day landings really thought and felt, often in terms that the BBC  would still not deem suitable for broadcast. Sacrifice was remembered, celebrated but not glorified.

The silence on the anniversary of the Armistice which ended the ‘Great War’ in 1981 is a Commonwealth event which began in 1919 when King George V took up the suggestion of an Australian journalist and made a proclamation calling for perfect stillness so that “thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this particular anniversary isn’t observed in Germany, but the Sunday closest to November 16 is observed as a national day of mourning, with church services and the laying of wreaths on monuments to those who died in the two world wars, like that above. But we saw no parades or signs of militarism. Perhaps it’s healthier for nations to lose wars than win them, though I think we needed fight to defeat the fascists.

We arrived at the town hall in Neumünster a little after 11am on the 11th November and were surprised to find we had just missed the start of an event outside. We’d heard a band before we’d seen anything and I’d rushed around the corner, but they were marching off by the time I came close. They stopped in the yard outside the entrance to the main hall and I quickly took a few pictures of the carnival fools on their way inside for an important event in their annual carnival. I read about it later in the local newspaper, but didn’t entirely understand, but I think it was the crowning of the carnival king and queen for the year.

It was here I came across one of the limitations of the Fuji X-E1 for covering such events. I’d smiled at the two ladies dressed as witches and raised the camera and framed the picture, then found I couldn’t take a picture, but had to wait for what seemed like ages until the camera had finished writing to the card. Fortunately they waited long enough before going inside for me to quickly make a couple of exposures.

But apart from this, the Fuji worked well, and the technical quality of the images is outstanding.  It’s a great camera and easy on the shoulder.

Neumünster is an interesting town, and one which became an important centre for textile manufacture in the late nineteenth century. From the tourist information centre we picked up the free booklet with a trail around the town. We followed it around though not necessarily in the right order and with some detours, but you can find pictures of most of the sights it points on in German Holiday, as well as others more interesting to me on its route.

It seems a good example of a town guide (though I had to rely on Linda to translate it from German), or at least it reflects my interests in the former industries and the flowering of architecture the wealth from them produced in the twenty or so years before that Great War. And you can mention the wars in Germany now, though probably its best to keep quiet about that World Cup. And football in general given England’s performances in recent years.


One of Neumünster’s ‘Historic Buildings’, N0. 9 on the town trail
Among the 40 or so sites of which Neumünster is proud is its only remaining cast iron urinal, painted in an attractive green; now closed for business (or rather replaced by a nearby public toilet.) It was surrounded by temporary fencing, and I took the picture poking my lens through this. Presumably it will soon be renovated and opened for public viewing if not use. There is a little flare at the top as the only possible viewpoint was with the sun shining more or less directly into the lens. I’ve reduced it in the image above, but at the expense of getting the upper parts too dark, too dull and with a slight shift towards blue.  If I ever need to print the image I’ll re-work it more carefully.

Given the textile history of the place (and it now has a fine new building to house its textile museum – which we didn’t visit this time), surely some guerilla knitting was inevitable, and we found some, as you’ll find if you look through the whole set. The old textile museum was certainly worth a visit and I remember particularly enjoyed the section on the Jacquard looms, though modern museum displays can often be rather disappointing, often sacrificing information and artifacts in favour of impact. Like everyone who visits a museum is a bored twelve-year old.  I hope not.

It was particularly interested to see again the scenes of some of my favourite colour images from past visits – and to find out what colour they really are, not always too obvious from the transparencies I took at the time or the prints from them. It was a reminder again of how much truer to life digital colour is than film ever was.

I’d forgotten from the earlier visits that Neumünster got its name from the new church that was built there – now a rather old church. We hadn’t gone inside it on our previous visits, but it is beautifully kept and has a simple rather austere beauty that I admire. It’s a picture that breaks one of my normal guides – get away from the middle – in favour of one of Minor White’s ‘Three Canons’, “Let the subject generate its own composition.” Rules are of course made to be broken when it suits.

But it’s perhaps the rather odd things you come across that are more interesting – like this oddly painted swan locked away behind the glass doors to an empty shop. Or indeed the image at the top of this post.

I’ll post some more pictures from Germany in another post or two, but you can already see all that were fit to post in German Holiday.

Continue reading More Germany – Neumünster

The Cost of Coal

More fine work by Ami Vitale in slide shows for the Sierra Club multimedia web site ‘The Cost of Coal‘, with sections on West Virginia, Michigan and Nevada.

Its a presentation that brings home the real cost of coal in terms of the health of the people who live in these areas. Sierra‘s executive editor Steve Hawk and photographer Ami Vitale

“spent about a month on the road, talking to people on porches in West Virginia, at playgrounds near Detroit, and in darkened single-wides in the Nevada desert. Our concept was to show how coal damages lives in all three phases of its energy-generating cycle: when it’s extracted, when it’s burned, and when the leftover waste is discarded. DIG, BURN, DUMP. That was the title we’d envisioned.

But we kept hearing a different phrase, from all quarters. First, from defiant Donna Branham in Appalachia, whose once tight-knit family atomized after a mountaintop-removal mine shuttered her hometown: “They always talk about the cost of coal. I can tell you the true cost of that lump of coal. It cost my family.”

Coal as the web site says is truly “a dirty industry” and one that is supported in the US by massive lobbying. Companies like those owned by the Koch brothers put massive amounts into lobbying (though they make more from oil, another polluting fossil fuel)  They are reported as putting “more than $20 million on lobbying in 2008 and $12.3 million in 2009” and were named as the US’s “most prominent funders of efforts to prevent curbs on fossil-fuel burning” by Los Angeles Times reporter Margot Roosevelt.

Fracking and oil from tar sands are other examples of fossil fuel extraction that is causing massive environmental damage, and of course while the extraction has terrible local effects, the use of these fuels which generate large amounts of carbon dioxide is a global disaster. The results seem increasingly likely to be catastrophic, perhaps terminally so for our civilisation.

The Beyond Coal campaign by the Sierra Club states clearly:

Coal is an outdated, backward, and dirty 19th-century technology.

Not only is coal burning responsible for one third of US carbon emissions—the main contributor to climate disruption—but it is also making us sick, leading to as many as 13,000 premature deaths every year and more than $100 billion in annual health costs.

The Beyond Coal campaign’s main objective is to replace dirty coal with clean energy by mobilizing grassroots activists in local communities to advocate for the retirement of old and outdated coal plants and to prevent new coal plants from being built.

It aims to close a third of the US’s 500 coal fired power stations by 2020, replacing them “by clean energy solutions such as wind, solar, and geothermal” and wants to keep  “coal in the ground in places like Appalachia and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.” It’s literally vital that we cut carbon emissions drastically.

I’ve not photographed the environmental destruction caused by opencast mining in the UK at sites such as Ffos-y-Fran in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, though long ago I did photograph some of the disused deep mines there, closed not because of the pollution but because we could get cheaper coal from overseas. And more recently I’ve photographed a number of protests in London related to dirty coal, and mining and power generation using coal.

This was a protest on April 1 2008, dubbed ‘Fossil Fools Day’ against the company that owns the open cast mine at Merthyr.

And in 2011 there was a protest against the activities of the Koch Brothers outside their London offices, though it was too windy that day to put up the giant banner – which was used a couple of months later at the US embassy.

and it was used again for another protest outside their offices the following year:

when the Koch brothers were also with the protesters for a very cold open-top bus tour across the city to the US embassy.

Continue reading The Cost of Coal

October Buses

My last two stories for October came along together – in best London bus tradition – on a Thursday evening on the last day of the month.

Probably I should have stayed at the first event, where a small crowd was picketing London University’s Senate House against the invitation to speak at a meeting there given to former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, a man described as a para-military drug gang leader responsible for a ‘dirty war’ against the people of Colombia, responsible for the deaths of thousands and the internal displacement of millions of Colombians. The BBC call him a ‘tough conservative’ whose ‘ political life has been dominated by the desire to rid the country of the rebels who killed his father 20 years ago.’ The opposition in Colombia call Uribe the ‘Vulture of Death‘. He has condemned the efforts by his more reasonable successor to negotiate with the FARC rebels which currently look likely to reach a successful conclusion.

I photographed the protesters moving in to the area in front of the main entrance under Senate House. It’s fairly well lit and for most of the pictures I was able to work at ISO3200 without flash, resorting to flash only when I wanted to be sure of stopping a little action – you can see the pictures at Protest Against Colombian ‘Vulture of Death. Mostly I used aperture priority on the 16-35mm, stopping it down around half a stop from wide open – though that really isn’t necessary with this lens.

But I thought it unlikely that they would actually enter Senate House itself, and that almost certainly Uribe would be brought in, probably with a considerable entourage of bodyguards, by one of several other entrances, and I felt that little more would happen.

I decided I could leave Senate House and catch a bus to Kensington, where a protest calling for the release of the Greenpeace Arctic 30 was taking place close to the Russian embassy. This is one of several embassies in a private road close to Kensington Palace where protests (and photography) are forbidden, and the protests take place a short distance away across the busy Notting Hill Gate, opposite one of the embassy outposts.

Travelling by bus in London in the rush hour is seldom a good idea. My journey started well as the 390 arrived just as I reached the stop and I jumped on, but it was soon caught in the Oxford St traffic jam, moving in fits and stops at around walking pace. Around Bond St the announcement came that the bus would terminate at Marble Arch, and I jumped up and ran down the stairs to get off at the stop before and wait for the next service in the right direction.

This was a good move, as when my bus got to Marble Arch there was a large crowd waiting for it, and room for only a few. The bus crawled along the Bayswater Road and eventually brought me to the stop opposite the protest. The 3 mile journey had taken roughly the same time as I could have walked it. I should have taken the tube – even with a longer walk to the station at each end I would have saved 20 minutes. But fortunately (as I’d guessed) it didn’t really matter – this was a static protest and still in full swing when I arrived.

The protest pen here is perhaps one of the darkest places on a main road in central London. I took a few pictures without flash at ISO 3200, but it was clear that I was going to need flash.

Again I was working with Aperture priority, setting the aperture at f5.0, though since I’d also set the minimum shutter speed to 1/80 I might just as well have used manual, and I think all the images are at f5.0, 1/80s. At ISO 3200 there was generally just enough ambient to show the background, leaving it looking like it was night and avoiding burn out in a bright doorway and the lighting on a nearby pub. The actual level of the ambient light did change a little with the light from the passing traffic.


I particularly wanted pictures of the two journalists – Keiron Bryan from the UK

In front of the protest was a display of black and white photographs of around half of the Arctic 30, all with wide black borders, and pictures of the others were held up by the protesters. All that white did upset the metering a little, and I was working with an exposure bias of -1 EV. For the wide-angle you need to use the built-in diffuser to get fairly even coverage, and I often use the small built-in white reflector with the flash head angled up at 45 degrees too.  For those pictures where I was much closer to some of the photographs than the others I tried to even out the lighting a little by twisting the flash head off-centre away from them, making use of the fall-off, though even so some compensation was needed in post-processing.


and Russian freelance photographer Denis Sinyakov, who I’d just written about.

I’ve seen some other pictures taken of the event that show all the things about direct flash that I don’t like, the flatness and black backgrounds. It doesn’t have to be like this, and while I like to keep flash simple – one flash in the hotshoe – it isn’t hard to do considerably better. I’m sure I could improve on what I do by taking flash off the camera, using multiple flashes and so on (like the Strobist) but I’m reasonably happy with these results – more at Russia, Free Greenpeace Arctic 30.

My decision to leave Senate House was probably a bad one. The protesters did manage to get inside, and protested in the lecture theatre where Aribe was speaking. If I’d stayed I might have got some better pictures. But then I wouldn’t have covered the Arctic 30 protest. I’ve not yet worked out how to be in two places at once, or mastered time travel, though I was accused of being ‘Dr Who’ the other day when friends I’d been with earlier turned up at a protest to find I’d beaten them there.

And yes, there were two cows on the top deck of the bus on my way home.

Continue reading October Buses

Koudelka Cop-out?

Can you photograph something as contentious as the Israeli “separation wall” in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and refuse to discuss the politics?  It’s a question that has aroused debate following the publication of a two-part interview with Josef Koudelka on the New York Times Lens blog on the publication of his new book “Wall: Israeli and Palestinian Landscapes“, images made in 2008-2012.

There is a fine introduction to the controversy by Henry Norr on Mondoweiss, which also looks at the slowness of the NY Times to correct an error of fact about the wall which Norr pointed out on pubication, but took much prodding and nine days for the paper to admit and correct. Norr asks why it should take so long and require a  “great deal of consultation” to correct a simple fact. If the NY Times can’t get facts right, who can? And what business does it have publishing a newspaper?

Norr gives the links to the Lens posts, but it is worth reading his piece before you go to them, so I won’t post them here. But the problems in the interview – at least as printed by the NY Times – are discussed in some detail in another post he refers to, The Moral And Intellectual Cowardice Of Josef Koudelka, written by photographer Asim Rafiqui (you can see his Idea of India online.)  He also links to a post by a Nazareth based prize-winning journalist, Jonathan Cook, A photographer who obscures the victims, who takes up Rafiqui’s complaint.

Cook makes the point :

By all accounts the photographs are an unequivocal indictment of Israel’s imprisonment of the Palestinians. If only the same could be said of his interview.

and Norr too makes the point that much of the details of the situation are given in the book (if in very small print) along with the photographs (though he doubts if many will read them.)

Like Rafiqui I’m an admirer of Koudelka’s work (his Magnum portfolio has a good selection up to 2004) and I also find the evasive NY Times interview rather shocking.

Addition:

I wrote this yesterday, here is another post on the issue I’ve just seen:
http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/koudelka-interview-follow-up-2.html

It seems fairly clear to me that the interview reflects a lack of integrity at the New York Times rather than the “cowardice of Josef Koudelka”.  As Jim Johnson writes:

‘Although I would need to inquire further, the problems seem to lie primarily with editorial decisions at The Times rather than with Koudelka.’

I won’t be Xmas Shopping at John Lewis

It was kind of by accident that I found myself photographing a protest by the IWGB cleaners and RMT drivers actually inside John Lewis’s flagship store in London’s Oxford St. I’d had a phone call earlier in the week telling me there was going to be a protest, but there were few details, and I’d expected it to be on the pavement outside.

I wasn’t surprised when I turned up on time and there was no sign of anything happening. Some  protests seldom start on time and I’ve often been the first to arrive, so I hung around on the corner outside the store where I thought I’d be likely to see them and waited, keeping my eyes open.

Oxford St is pretty busy on a Saturday afternoon even two months before Christmas (the decorations were up in the shops), and a lot of people walked past, but still no protest. But finally I saw a familiar figure approaching and walked up behind him. “Fifth floor” he told me out of the side of his mouth and I followed, a few paces behind, up the series of elevators, as he made his way to the restaurant area. It did rather feel like something out of a spy movie. I lost him again there, looking away for a couple of seconds as a group of people came between us, and spent a rather frantic half minute or so searching the whole eating area until I came upon him again, now with a group of cleaners, and getting out flags and banners for the protest.

Until now I’d been trying hard to look inconspicuous, as if that large black bag on my shoulder wasn’t a camera bag and I wasn’t a photographer, but now it was time to get out a camera. I decided that working inside the store I would only need the wide-angle 16-35mm on the D700, and set that to ISO 3200. There would be quite a lot of movement and the light levels in parts are quite low – the first pictures I made were around 1/60 f4, but the lighting got better when we moved out into the main part of the store, and there exposures around 1/125 at f5.6 were typical.

Apart from their lack of support for the cleaners and the victimisation of staff who have supported them, the John Lewis Partnership are in many ways an admirable organisation, generally treating their direct employees – or rather ‘partners’ – well, and they get a share of the profits as a considerable annual bonus. But the low paid workers in the store such as the cleaners are not employed by JLP, but come in on a contract from another employer who cuts costs by low pay and poor conditions. Somehow the JLP management think it isn’t appropriate for them to insist that people who work for them in the same shop – or in the lorries that make their deliveries are treated fairly. ‘Never knowingly undersold‘ is the JLP slogan but they can add to that ‘Never caring about how the low paid workers we depend on are treated.’

But JLP staff handled the protest very professionally and simply stood back and let it take its course, applying a little persuasion to the protesters to leave, encouraging them to make their way down the escalators. One person who tried to physically object to the protesters was quickly moved away by security. I wasn’t hassled in any way, and my main problem was avoiding knocking into any of the shop displays as I took pictures. At times I did think of myself as an elephant in a china store.

It was on the escalators that I took some of my favourite images, including one of the protesters making their way down and the people looking up at them, in the foreground a woman blowing a red vuvuzela. At first I was a little disappointed that this horn wasn’t in focus, but I don’t think it matters, and may even be preferable – and at 1/100 f4 it wasn’t possible in any case. Even at 16mm focal length depth of field has its limits. The ‘hyperfocal distance’ is around 7 ft, so to get the figures on the ground floor sharp it was impossible to have anything less than 3’6″ sharp too. Of course I didn’t have time to look it up on the spot, things were moving far too fast. That I got it about right can probably be put down to the camera’s autofocus system and a bit of luck. But I was pleased I was using the D700.

Nikon changed the way you control focus between the D700 and the D800, and I think rather for the worse. With the D700 you have a three-position switch at the left of the lens for focus mode – C, S, M (continuous, single and manual) and another 3 position switch on the camera back for autofocus area mode – single point, dynamic area and auto area.

For fast changing situations like this I generally use S mode and auto area. On shutter half-press, this puts little red rectangles briefly on the areas chosen for focus, allowing you to decide if the camera has got it right. If not I try again, possibly with a slight movement of the camera. Usually it works, though it can sometimes get too fixated on near objects in the frame. Its easy and fast then to use to rear of camera switch to change to dynamic area or single point (which both work the same in S mode.) You don’t need to think about it and can do it pretty well without looking. And change back equally easily.

On the D800/D800E, forget about changing focus mode in a hurry. The switch on the front of the camera only switches between auto and manual. There is no switch on the back of the camera. To change from C to S or between area modes you have to press the little button in the centre of the AF/M switch, look at the LCD screen and use the control dials. Probably you will need to read the manual too! Why, Nikon, Why?  I think the change was to enable Nikon to give the user more control over exactly how the autofocus works, but it does so at the expense of usability. Surely the most important thing in a camera. Stick the more fancy focus bits on a menu – we don’t really need them when we are working.

I don’t think the protesters actually intended to go down into the basement, but its always hard to know which floor you have got to.  I think some stores deliberately hide the ground floor to stop shoppers escaping. We wandered around there, eventually finding the up escalator and make our way to the ground floor, where there was time for a short rally before the police arrived around 20 minutes after the protest started and told the protesters that the management had requested them to leave and they would be committing an offence unless they did so. And so, rather slowly, they did, and I photographed them coming out of the store and continuing their protest on the crowded pavement outside.

By now it was around 5.30pm and getting dark, and in most areas darker than inside the store (it looks lighter in the photographs than it actually was.) I took a few pictures using flash, but wasn’t happy with them, and went back to working by available light, still at ISO 3200.

A couple of weeks later I met some of the protesters again, this time in a protest outside John Lewis on Oxford St. One of them had earlier gone inside with a small child, intent on buying a toy for them and had been recognised and asked to leave. It seemed rather petty.

More pictures – and more about the protest – at Cleaners Invade John Lewis Oxford Street.

Continue reading I won’t be Xmas Shopping at John Lewis