Category: Political Issues

The next day was a busy one where I was able to put the 20mm to rather more use. It was also a day with some very contrasty lighting with low sun and a fairly clear sky, which gave me some problems, both with the 20mm and the 18-105mm. I started at Shepherd Bush, working in the small crowd waiting for the start of a protest against the downgrading of services at hospitals in West London. I was using the 20mm to work in close to groups of people and didn’t want to use flash to fill in the shadow areas. The smaller size of the 20mm compared to the large 16-35mm seemed to work better in this situation.

From there I went to Whitehall, where a fairly new group, Britain First were protesting against the grooming and abuse of young girls by Muslim gangs and the failure of police and the authorities to take some of the complaints made by these girls seriously. The 20mm worked pretty well here too, and it was only when they marched to Parliament Square and started to burn an Islamic flag that I found I had a problem. (The protesters also had a problem in that they had chosen a flag made from a material that didn’t burn at all well – eventually after it had smouldered a little they gave up an waved a shoe at it instead.)  It isn’t obvious from the pictures, but I was hemmed in at left and right by other photographers as I took these pictures, and was unable to move further back (or closer) to the subject. For some of the pictures I really wanted a slightly wider view, and this would not have been a problem with the 16-35mm zoom. Again, although I had the 18-105mm DX, its 27mm equivalent widest view didn’t cover the range down to the 20mm. At times like this, when you are more or less stuck in one place, the zoom really comes into its own.

A couple of hundred yards down the road from the small group of Britain First was a large assembly of Muslims protesting about the internet video which has led to violent reactions around the Muslim world. Here there was certainly plenty of anger, but it was a peaceful event. Most of the time I needed a longer lens, but the more interesting pictures perhaps came when I went into the fairly densely packed crowd to photograph, mainly with the 20mm. Although I was fairly happy with what I managed, I did miss the slightly wider view of the 16-35mm, and again with the very restricted movement imposed by the crowd around me, the ability to zoom would certainly have helped.

My final set of pictures came from a rally and march in Kilburn over the failure of Brent Council to deal fairly with a large family and their housing needs. Here there was plenty of room to work, and I really began to appreciate the advantages of a fixed 20mm lens. When you’ve had a couple of cameras around your neck most of the day, its light weight is also a great advantage, but there is a kind of discipline it imposes on you. One of the vital things about photography is that you need to be standing in the right place to make good pictures, and there is more definitively a right place with a fixed angle of view than with a zoom.

You can see and read more about these four events as always on My London Diary:

Rehouse the Counihans
Muslims against Anti-Muslim Film
Britain First – Muslim Grooming
Save Our Hospitals – Shepherds Bush

Continue reading More With the 20mm

October seems very much to have been a month when I’ve been concerned with justice, though it’s something at the base of much of my work in any month.

Ekta Parishad is inspired by Ghandi, here getting very wet

It started with pouring rain in London where a small group met in front of the memorial to Ghandi in Tavistock Square to show solidarity with the 100,000 people marching for land rights in India, where it was doubtless considerably hotter and drier. You can read more about the Gandhi-inspired grassroots land-rights movement Ekta Parishad and their 30 day Jan Satyagraha – March for Justice 2012 from Gwalior to Delh, which should be finishing about now in Support for March for Justice 2012 on My London Diary.

I’m not a fan of group photographs, but it was all there was to photograph

Even with an underwater camera I would have had problems. The D800E is normally quite well weather-sealed, but I’ve managed to crack the protection over the top place LCD; when I took it in to my usual repairer they told me they hadn’t yet been trained on these cameras and so it would have to go back to Nikon for repair, something I’ve not yet found time for, so I didn’t want to expose it much in this kind of weather, though I did take a few frames. The D700 too is pretty good in the wet, but the real problem is with lenses.

I thought the 16-35mm was good in the wet, and this was the lens I was mainly using, but I’d been having a problem with it for some time, with autofocus sometimes simply refusing to work. Back in the old days this would not have been a problem. I probably wrote that autofocus was unnecessary with wide-angle lenses, just something that slowed you down most of the time, and manual focus was to be preferred – if you needed to focus at all, given the depth of field.

But true as that was with older cameras such as the Olympus OM4 I was then using, it just isn’t so with modern Nikons (or I think other modern DSLRs.) The focussing screens on these modern beasts are near to useless, and if you have to use them in the near darkness of a rain storm you can more or less forget it. With the OM and other systems you could choose a focus screen that best matched the lenses you used, and with the focus aid of your choice at its centre – and usually I preferred a split image circle with a diagonal boundary with which you could focus on horizontal or vertical lines.

Modern lenses tend to have a loose focussing movement so that the motor can drive it, very different from the silky and precise action of the best older lenses – such as the Zuiko or Leica range.  Unlike modern lenses they generally stayed where you put them.

Then I worked mainly with fixed focal length lenses. They all had precise and clearly marked focus scales – complete with at least some depth of field markings. With wide-angles, scale focus was often the best choice, faster than adjusting the image to be sharp on the focus screen.  Zoom lenses made these trickier to implement, and coupled with the shift to autofocus cameras, focus scales have generally become, at least in the eyes of lens designers, purely vestigial.

In rain, I work with a microfibre cloth (or sometimes simply a handkerchief when I’ve mislaid the cloth) balled up in my left hand, held inside the lens hood to cover the front lens filter, wiping the filter before every image, then removing it for a brief second to zoom, frame, focus and make the exposure, hoping that no raindrops will take advantage of the time to land on the lens. Sometimes they do, though it’s usually hard to tell on the small back of the camera image, so I take several pictures to stand a good chance of getting one without areas of bleary diffusion.

But the real problem was that there really wasn’t a great deal to photograph, and we were all feeling a bit miserable in the cold rain. Several people had come ready to speak about what was happening but we all decided just to pose for a few pictures and then go to the café in the nearby Friends Meeting House for a discussion and coffee. By then both I and my cameras were too wet for me to want to take pictures.

London being as it often is, two hours later I was sweating in the sun as I walked to the bus carrying five 20×16″ framed pictures from our group show in the Hox Gallery at the Hoxton Hotel.  We hope to put on A Landscape In Motion at another gallery later in the year. The 16-35 had by that time decided to come back to life though with my hands full I wasn’t taking pictures. But it didn’t have long to live.

Continue reading October Rain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EDL supporter argues with police

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading Walthamstow Wins