Category: Political Issues

Sometimes its hard to know whether our current government are obtuse or devious. The public are rightly concerned about the activities of lobbyists in Parliament, particularly those pushing particular commercial interests. Part of the reason we’ve yet to get effective environmental policies is undoubtedly the activities of lobbyists on behalf of the big energy companies, though perhaps they really have enough politicians in their pockets to get policies tailored to their needs in any case. And it would be hard to exaggerate the number of them who have direct interests in issues like the privatisation of the NHS which is going on apace while being denied.

But back to lobbying and the gagging bill. Rather oddly it turns out to be something with very little effect on commercial lobbying, but likely to effect all the charities and other groups which use elections as a legitimate way to put their causes forward, as well as the campaigning activities of trade unions.

My own feeling is that government is in a mess, with little real examination of the affects of policies, and some fairly unscrupulous if not dishonest and misguided individuals in cabinet offices. We have a bunch of crooks who are prepared to tell lies about what is happening, to misrepresent statistics and to flout the law to pursue policies which benefit themselves and their friends. If the courts rule against them, they appeal. If the appeal fails they change the law.  Previous governments often got things wrong, often made a mess of things – both Labour and Conservative – but I think we now have something different, with the deliberate misleading of the people. Its perhaps something that really first became obvious with Tony Blair,  lying to us, spectacularly over Iraq, but which has got far worse, far more endemic.

A photographer in the background I could have done without

But perhaps I’m just getting old and even more cynical. Of course there are still members of parliament in all parties who are there for the best of motives, working hard for the people they represent, plugging away at good causes, rebelling against bad laws, but few are likely to end up as cabinet ministers, and if they do it will mean compromising their beliefs.

I’m not sure there is a solution to this, but if so it would be most unlikely to be palatable to parliament and stand no chance of being enacted. At least not before our civilisation collapses – and with luck it will see me out, though I don’t give it too long.

I didn’t sit down to write a political rant, but to write about photographing this and possibly another protest against political madness. In the morning it was the about the misguided gagging bill, or to give it a more official title, the Transparency in Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning, and Trade Union Administration Bill.  Protests like the one I photographed have actually had some effect, and the government has had to undertake further consultation having realised it had little chance of passing through the House of Lords.  Part 1 of the bill completely fails to tackle corporate lobbying, part 2 would basically suspend democratic debate by non-party advocacy groups for  a year before every general election and part 3 would involve trade unions in unnecessary and restrictive red tape.  I think it unlikely that it can be transformed into a satisfactory piece of legislation in the five weeks proposed.

Photographically the main problem was other photographers getting in the way, most notably when the organisers of the protest were setting up some photo opportunities. I don’t always want to take part in these, but I’d try to keep out of the way and out of the picture for those who do, and found myself wishing others did when one walked into the background to take a different picture just as I was taking mine. The top image was taken during the main photo-op, though it is only a detail and not the whole view, which to my mind was very boring. But it was a rather more boring picture than this showing most of the whole  group that a national newspaper chose to use, despite being offered several more interesting pictures.

After I’d been photographing this protest, essentially about freedom of speech, I was flabbergasted when a woman approached me and suggested I should not use some of the images I had taken. I had photographed – mainly at their demand – a group of teenage girls who had been taking part in this public event, and somehow she thought I should not use these. It was hard not to be rude.

More pictures at Don’t Gag Free Speech.

Continue reading Gagging Free Speech

If I hadn’t come back to review the pictures I made of  protesters opposite the Egyptian embassy in early October for this blog post, there are a dozen or so of my images I might never have seen again. It perhaps would not have been a great loss, because none of them are great images, not even among my own best images, but it reminded me of how easy it is to lose digital images.

They wouldn’t have been entirely lost. At the moment I still keep (and try to back up) all of the raw files I shoot, except for those which are really technically hopeless or terminally unseen. I don’t keep those I take by accident when I grab hold of the camera carelessly and hit the shutter release or stick my elbow on it when I sit down (well, I might if that random process ever produced an interesting image.)  Or where for some reason I completely missed what I was trying to photograph. But I still keep the near misses, the images I make when I’m working my way to what I want and all the rest that are decent. A few years back I was asked for pictures of an incident in connection with a court case, and those that were most relevant were just those kind of images, which had I only kept the most successful would have been deleted.

But that full set is a dead or at least dormant, something I’m unlikely to look through again unless something special like that request for evidence comes up.  Active is the selected work that I put on My London Diary and other web sites and which I keep as full-size jpegs on my internal and external hard disks.  Some of it is also stored externally, in the archives of the several libraries that occasionally sell my work, and a much, much smaller amount in digital or print form in other collections.

I select my work in Lightroom, giving a 2 star rating to those that will end up in that active collection. Some other images – including near duplicates of those images – get a single star. Then the images that I send to Demotix or elsewhere, all of which should be ‘2 star’ images, get an additional colour rating, using a different colour for each story on a particular day. LR has 5 available colour labels, yellow, green, blue and red. And purple, but purple is a pain as there is no hot key for it (Adobe uses 0-5 for stars and 6-9 for colours – and apparently couldn’t think of another hot key – perhaps Ctrl+7 would be useful – and why not let us have 3 more colours on Ctrl+6, 8 and 9.) Fortunately I seldom have more than 4 stories for a single day.

When I want to write out a set of images for My London Diary and for the jpeg collection, I select them by the 2* rating. Which is usually fine, but just occasionally – as for this protest – I’d managed to give the best images a blue rating but to not assign them to 2* (or more likely to somehow remove the 2* rating from them all, though I can’t find any way to do this on a whole batch in LR.) So when I selected the pictures to write, I got only the three that hadn’t been selected to send to the agency rather than the whole 15.

It was a fairly long and slightly confusing day for me, and at the Egyptian embassy I found not one protest but two. Opposite the embassy were the supporters of the deposed President Morsi, and a few yards down the road a smaller group who had come out in support of the army who had deposed him.  So it perhaps isn’t surprising that I didn’t notice a fairly small group of images was missing. But coming back to write about the protest for >Re:PHOTO it was obvious.

There were interesting differences between the two protests, and of course the posters and placards were very different as you can see. I felt rather more welcome at the protest supporting the removal of Morsi. It was a smaller protest and easier to move around and take pictures.

More in Egypt For & Against Muslim Brotherhood which must be one of the longest web pages I’ve written, with the newly added images making a total of 35 on the page, roughly twice the normal number I aim for. Thank goodness for broadband.
Continue reading Oh, So Easy to Lose

Although it felt rather like a demonstration, ‘10,000 Cuts & Counting‘ was described as ‘a ceremony of remembrance and solidarity’ with the many sick and disabled people who in the last few months of their lives were called in for Work Capability Assessments carried out by Atos on behalf of the Department of Work and Pensions.

Most knew they had only weeks or months to live, and doctors were well aware, but still they were called in for tests to see if they were ‘fit to work.’ Imagine the stress of having to attend the tests – and for many the real physical difficulty too. But even worse, many were judged fit to work on the basis of a computer-based questioning based on capabilities such as being able to sit in a chair, walk a few yards, press a button, lift a book… Those administering the tests for Atos are trained to catch people out and to reach their targets for cutting down the number of people who qualify for benefit. Many of those 10,000 will have lost their benefits – including some who will have lost them at the previous test and successfully appealed against the result. The system is inhumane and administered by a company that gets paid more the more people it fails. Neither the Government nor Atos appear to have any concern about the effect the tests have on those who undergo them.

There were some harrowing stories from many of the speakers about their own experiences and those of other disabled people under the system, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was preaching to the converted. Most of those who attended were already actively involved in campaigning and protesting over the issues involved. On a Saturday morning there were relatively few others in Parliament Square, and the four great institutions surrounding it, to each of which at one point we faced and made a plea – the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the Supreme Court and the Treasury – were all largely empty, other than for the tourists queuing for the Abbey.

I thought a little about how I could make the most of the carpet of white flowers covering the grass of Parliament Square in front of the platform, and working from close to the front with a wide angle seemed to be the answer. I got down on my knees – you can tell photographers by the worn and dirty patches on their knees – and tried the 16-35mm, but it wasn’t really as wide as I wanted. The answer – yet again – was the 10.5mm fisheye, being very careful to keep the horizon level on the dead centre of the image. And afterwards it is just another plug for that Fisheye Hemi plugin.

The 16mm covers around two thirds of the view of the fisheye, but even if cropped to the same stretch of the buildings on the horizon, there is a subtle difference, and the flowers in the version from the fisheye don’t have the slightly disturbing elliptical aspect that a rectilinear ultra-wide produces at the edges. Despite the curvature of the straight gantry above the platform with the ‘Scrap Atos’ banner, and of the roof of the Houses of Parliament behind, the fisheye view actually appears more natural.

One problem with using the fisheye is flare and ghosts, and with a lens with such an extreme angle of view it isn’t possible to use a lenshood. There is a little lip around the lens, but that serves more to protest the glass than to shade it. Sometimes the effect adds to images, but more often it is a distraction. Probably it would be possible to retouch the lighter area at the upper right of the banner completely, but I simply darkened it a little. The sun was I think just outside the frame at top right, and you can see the effect of flare in the Victoria Tower and the trees at right of picture. The whole area needed darkening and also some increase in contrast.

Otherwise, the flowers made it rather difficult to cover the event, and kept the audience at rather a distance from the speakers, though it was actually much closer than the top image makes it seem. Photographers couldn’t easily photograph them either, as the flowers went right up to the platform.

This isn’t a great picture, taken with the 16-35mm at 22mm, but it perhaps gives a more accurate idea of the area covered by the flowers (though perhaps making it look a little smaller than it was) and clearly shows how they made a ‘no go’ area for photographers at the centre of the event. It accounts for me taking a third of the photographs that morning with the 70-300mm, usually a lens I use rarely if at all.

I wouldn’t have chosen to take Michael Meacher MP – one of a small number of MPs who have consistently stood up for disabled rights (two others, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were also present) – at 300mm (450mm equiv), the kind of focal length best reserved for bird spotters, and it would have been good to have been able to get a tighter image. I was able to photograph him – and the others involved, such as David Ison, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral who chaired the event , from a much closer distance talking to people.

Most of the pictures in ‘10,000 Cuts – Deaths After Atos Tests‘ were taken either before the event started, when the audience were spaced out more widely and it was possible to walk up to them, or around and behind the stage.

Continue reading 10,000 Cuts & Counting

It would be hard not to be moved by the tragedy of Syria, with horrific images of massacres, mainly by the Syrian military or others backing President Bashar al-Assad, and some of the most tragic images are those of the cloth-wrapped bodies of small children. These ‘rows upon rows of dead children in their burial shrounds’ deeply affected the women of Hizb ut-Tahrir, prompting them to organise a march in London “ in solidarity with your sisters in Syria” and to “speak out against the shedding of their blood and that of their families and children.”

And at the front of the march was a small coffin carried by four young men, followed by a group of young girls carrying white bundles representing those small children in their burial shrounds.

This was another occasion when a little extra height was really needed, and fortunately there was a park seat in almost the right place at the start of the march. because that small coffin really needed to be seen from above. I was standing right at the edge of the seat, and ideally it might have been just a little more in front of the coffin.

I’d felt just a little awkward earlier, photographing the women at their pre-march rally. Although none of them objected to being photographed (a few did turn their heads away) I didn’t feel able to go into the crowd as I would have done had I been photographing most other protests. Though in my experience it is has almost always been men who have objected to me photographing Muslim women, and not the women themselves, who have often obviously welcomed it.

Once the march had started it was easier, though again I largely kept a greater distance than at most events, as I think you can see in Hizb ut-Tahrir Women March for Syria. But it could just have been that after replacing the 16-35mm on the D700 with the 70-300mm for pictures like that above I just couldn’t be bothered to change the lens again. I’d decided by then that it was time for me to go home, and only kept taking pictures as I was walking towards Edgware Road station along the same route as the marchers.

Continue reading Muslim Women on the March

It wasn’t the best of weather as I made my way across London to Whipps Cross in the north-east of the capital. It’s on the edge where Walthamstow and Leytonstone meet Epping Forest, and around 500 years ago or more, the family of John Phyppe set up a cross to him at a lonely meeting of roads. It still feels a rather lonely place, but has a large and busy roundabout, and a hospital. It still has a cross, but a rather more modern one, a war memorial erected a mile or so away after the ‘Great War’ for the Essex Regiment of the Territorial Army, moved here when a large Victorian house became a TA centre.

The Hospital also started – just – in the Victorian era, building starting in 1900, though it wasn’t finished until 1903 – it was a large hospital for the era, and a lot has been added since. Its now part of Barts Health NHS Trust and threatened with huge cuts not because of its own problems (largely solved by previous efficiencies) but because of the huge PFI repayments for the new Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel.

It was drizzling when I got off the bus and walked up the drive to take a look (and photograph) the old main entrance before joining the few hundred protesters who were gathering on the green next to the roundabout. Not hard enough to really get you wet, but enough to put the odd spot of rain on your lens when you least expected it, and I was keeping my microfibre cloth out and covering the lens as I walked around.

18-105mm at 75mm (112mm eq), D800E DX format

Once the speeches started it was easy to take photographs, with a nice amount of space for photographers between the audience and the small platform. There weren’t too many photographers, and better still not many videographers and it was easy to move around without getting in anyone else’s way. Working with people who are taking video is often difficult, as still photographers generally want to move around and movie photographers usually prefer to stay still, and still photographers often want to go in much closer to take pictures.  It can cause friction and often does.

I was using both the 18-105mm and the 70-300mm on the D800E, working with both on the DX format, although the 70-100 is a full-frame lens. I like being able to see the area outside the frame, and the 16Mp DX images are plenty big enough. The 70-300 was a better lens for head and shoulders or tightly frames heads of the speakers, while the 18-105mm was good for picking out individuals or small groups in the crowd. There is a useful amount of overlap between the two lenses which saves a little lens changing. The image above could have been taken with either.

16-35mm at 31mm, D700

As well as being useful for picturing larger groups, the 16-35mm also lets me get in close. Again there is a useful overlape between this lens and the 18-105mm DX (27-157mm equiv) and I could have used either for this image.

16-35m at 16mm, D700

I don’t much like climbing up on walls etc these days, and unless I’ve got something pretty good to hold on to I tend to start shaking rather a lot, and sometimes have to get down pretty quickly or I would fall off.  But there was a very handily placed seat in the right place that I could stand on and feel pretty safe while still getting to look down a little on the march

16-35m at 16mm, D700

The wide angle also came in useful as I was walking (backwards) with the march, letting me include the Unison shop steward quite close to the camera at right and the whole of the rather wide banner. It was reasonably bright and at ISO 640 the exposure was 1/400 at f10, and with a 16mm lens at those settings there is plenty of depth of field and little risk of camera shake even though I’m walking.

I think photographers somehow develop a smoother movement with practice. Back when I taught photography I had to spend a lot of time telling students how to avoid camera shake. You have to stand still, tuck those elbows in to your side, press the camera against your head and make yourself and the camera a solid block, then squeeze not jab on the the release. Yet many still managed to get camera shake. Of course they were mainly working with standard focal length lenses, and using film at ISO 125 or 400; wider lenses and higher ISO make life easier, (and so does image stabilisation) but in part I think it’s in the mind, thinking steady helps.

It’s perhaps better to keep moving than to stand still, because even in 1/400s, a person walking will move perhaps 1/8″, and if you are moving at the same speed and in the same direction  the distance won’t change. The effect of movement would in any case be less for someone walking towards you, while people walking across the field of view will show the effect of their motion more, and the effect will be greater the closer they are to the camera. Arms and legs in particular are also moving at greater speed than the actual movement, so more likely to suffer motion blur. But a little blur, particularly if the eyes and face remain sharp, is usually a good thing.

The main reason to keep moving when photographing marches is that if you stand still, people are more likely to stop. And the last thing you want people to do when you are photographing them moving is for them to stop.

The march ended at Town Square in Walthamstow with more speeches, and again both the 70-300mm and the 18-105mm were useful, the longer lens mainly for the speakers, and the shorter for people in the crowd – though again the picture above, taken at 105mm (157mm), could have been made with either. If I know I’m unlikely to need an extreme wide angle (or a very long lens), I often put the 70-300mm on the D700 and use it full frame, though I didn’t think to do so here.

More pictures (and of course more about the protest and background) at Save Whipps Cross Hospital

Continue reading Save Whipps Cross

Fortunately the weather began to clear up soon after I left Lewisham, catching the train back to London Bridge and then the tube to Westminster. And although I was too late to photograph the 6th annual Secular Europe Campaign march, I was there in time for the rally opposite Downing St.

Visually the most noticeable thing were the paper hats worn by some of those taking part, in the shape of a bishop’s mitre with the number 26 on them. The point was perhaps made more clearly in a placard.

Though my favourite poster, as a regular morning listener to the ‘Today’ programme on my radio alarm, was one saying ‘Thought for the day; can we have one?’.

Although my alarm is set for much earlier, it’s nearly always ‘Thought for the Day’ which actually drives me out of bed, and I seldom hear all of this three minute interlude in the programme, though there are just a few that make me stop and listen before I rush to the bathroom. Some of them – or what I hear – strike me as pretty secular in any case, as is most of the rest of the programme, and if what I’m hearing from the speakers as I take some pictures is representative of what their ‘Thoughts for the Day’ might be, I’d be in real danger of going back to sleep.

I left the Secular Europe Protest sooner than I needed, as there seemed little chance of good pictures and a certainty of getting rather bored. I’ve no love of the established church, and certainly in favour of secularism so far as our laws are concerned, but can’t get worked up about Bishops in the House of Lords, who generally seem to do at least as good a job as the rest of that unelected body. Tackling class and elitism and the entrenched power of a small minority seem far more important issues and being anti-religious as those I heard seemed to be seems rather a matter of ‘bashing the bishop’. An activity that of course has its place.

I wandered slowly to my next appointment, arriving early, and having to wait a very long time outside Westminster Cathedral as the web page for the event had misled me about the time that the Maltese would emerge from their celebratory mass for the Malta Day Procession procession to make their way carrying the rather hefty statue of the Bambina  to the Sacred Heart Chapel of Ease in Horseferry Road.

I’m not a fan of the Catholic Church, though it is a very mixed organisation, parts of which seem not to have move on since the Spanish Inquisition, while others are organising some of the more radical movements in South America. Perhaps too I still bear a personal grudge against the Maltese branch of the church, since my earliest girl friend was Maltese, her uncle a bishop. When he heard she was going out with a non-Catholic she was immediately shipped back from England to Gozo. It was a very long time ago, and I think I’ve got over it!

But while I don’t share their religion, visually the event was far more interesting. I particularly liked the view of the statue being carried out of the cathedral door.

And in its peculiar way, Westminster Cathedral is a quite splendid building which makes a good background.

I had a few technical problems, partly I think because I got a little distracted with someone talking to me. I’m generally not very sociable and need to concentrate on the job when I’m making pictures and being interrupted a lot really does put me off my stride. So a few exposures were way out – probably because of all the black cloaks and those strange hoods worn by the girls. Possibly I had the camera on ‘spot’ metering, which is fine and precise so long as you pick the right spot, but can be disastrous if you are not thinking.

Image before crop and manual processing

And for the final few frames I managed to knock the lens hood on the 16-35mm slightly out of position, getting a little total vignetting at top right and bottom left. Small enough to be easily missed in the viewfinder, but annoying, though in this case fairly easily dealt with.

Image after crop and manual processing

But its a shame that Nikon didn’t design a better bayonet fitting for their lens hoods and make them slightly more rigid. Most days when I’m out taking pictures I find myself bending down at some point to retrieve a lens hood that has self-detached.

Continue reading Secular and Sacred

It was a shame that it was such a damp and rather chilly day for the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign‘s Victory March. Perhaps rather more would have come on a nice day, and it would certainly have been more pleasant both to take part in and to photograph.

Fortunately the rain slackened off a little, and people could march without umbrellas, but the atmosphere was still a little dampened.

Though the umbrellas were up again for the fair at the end of the march, and it wasn’t really the weather to be dancing on the grass in Ladywell Fields.

Or even like these people, standing watching others dance.  It really was a shame, because the Lewisham campaign – which brought a huge crowd out onto the street on another rather cold and damp day last November – see Save A&E at Lewisham -Hospital and had us all wading in the mud at Mountsfield Park in January – Save Lewisham Hospital  may not always have had the weather on its side but has been very successful.

Although the minister decided to appeal when he lost the case in court (and will probably decide if he loses to pass legislation to change the rules) the strength of the local opposition has meant significant gains for the local community – and will mean fewer unnecessary deaths in the area.

I was standing on the low wall around a roadside flowerbed, and the bright green coat being worn by one man really stood out in the sea of people in largely rather drab rain wear and carrying uniformly red placards. This was the first of four frames – with the 218-105mm at 50mm (75mm equiv) and clearly the best, partly because he is looking at me, but also because it is the one with the clearest link between the two placards in the foreground, and also because of the fairly precise framing of the placards at the top left. As usual this image is full frame.

More pictures: Lewisham Hospital Victory Parade.

Continue reading Lewisham Victory Parade

Pictures with flags blowing in the wind are always something of a challenge, and it took a little patience and luck to get this Bahraini flag blowing how I wanted it.  The picture was made during a photo-op at the Houses of Parliament organised by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) as a part of its week of actions against the DSEI arms fair that was taking place in East London.

I don’t much like such ‘photo-opportunites’ as they usually end up with a large group of photographers, often with some kneeling and others standing behind them taking a rather boring group photograph. Most of the pictures of course look rather similar, and it’s depressing that newspapers seem to like these predictable images. So I take at least one of them, but try to provide something more interesting, though too often it will be the posed one that sells.

But I’d gone to this one partly because I think about the last thing we want in London is an arms fair, but also because I expected CAAT to provide a more varied event than most to be photographed, and I was right.

Someone did suggest that I was either holding the flag or got someone else to hold it, but that wasn’t the case, though I have to admit I have occasionally done so in the past. But this was the second of five frames I made, and they show convincingly that it was blowing free.

I was using the Bahraini flag for several reasons. First for the same reason that it and the Bahraini protester on the ground at my feet and just out of the picture had brought it – that arms from deals made at earlier DSEi arms fairs sold to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain had been used against peaceful protesters in Bahrain. But it was also for its graphic effect, and not least in an attempt to simplify the rather messy scene in front of me – which you can see in another image taken just a few seconds later.

Both images were with the 16-35mm on the D700 at 16mm, and at ISO 400 and exposures around 1/320 f8.

The red banner with the message ‘exporting conflict and repression’ is more or less at the centre or the top picture (though you can’t read the ‘UK’ at the start), with the red continuing into the jumper around the waist of the woman holding it and to the fake bloodstains in the ‘victim’ on the ground and also on the stripes on the ‘tear gas’ canisters.

I think it’s an image that would benefit from just a slight crop at right – not every image quite fits the 3:2 format, and I find the figure on the extreme right in a white shirt pulls my eye away a little. I suppose too that I would have rather have had a slightly more recognisable view of the Houses of Parliament as the backdrop, but you can’t see Big Ben from this part of Old Palace Yard.

Of course I took more pictures, and after the ‘photo-op’ there was also something more of a protest and a short rally, with Jeremy Corbyn coming out to talk to the protesters., and pose with them for a few pictures.

You can see more pictures at Arms Trade Die-In at Parliament.

Continue reading Arms Fair Die-In at Parliament