Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

US Embassy Egypt Protest

Tariq Ali is really a gift for photographers:

And I could have chosen a dozen or more other frames from the many I took as he spoke with great passion outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, a place which brings back many memories for those of us involved with protest since the sixties.

One of the problems of photographing speakers is always the microphone, making its presence felt in many shots, often getting in the way of the picture you would like to take. There are relatively few occasions on which it really improves an image to have it in front of someone’s face, but sometimes it can’t be avoided.

The hardest people to photograph speaking are those who get really close to the microphone, speaking quietly into it and always looking in the same direction. Most of them never open their eye too! Tariq Ali speaks with great force, making full use of dynamics, and although he took the loudspeakers rather beyond their rated limits, most of the times there was at least a small gap between him and the microphone. And as you can see he has quite a range of gesture and expression, looking around the crowd. Actually rather more than my pictures here show, as probably around four fifths 0f the time he had moved so that the microphone was obscuring too much of his face for my liking.

There was also space for me to move around, though I had to take care doing so to avoid getting in shot too much for the several video cameras and other still photographers also taking pictures. But I’d started by choosing the position from which I’d taken these shots – usually around my favourite angle for such pictures, and after trying from a few other angles, came back to it, just moving slightly.

These pictures were taken with the D300 and the Nikon18-105mm, and most of the time I was working at its full stretch, equivalent to 157mm. It is a little long for portraits, but a decent compromise, as I’m looking up at quite an angle to the speakers on a small stage. I’d set ISO 1000 to give me shutter speeds and apertures around 1/250 f8, though with the camera on P setting they were changing a little frame to frame. But you do need a fairly fast shutter speed both to avoid camera shake with the long lens and also to avoid too much blur with those highly controlled ‘wild’ gestures. And of course they all use flash, which really helps to bring the face out of the shadows.

I tried to keep the focus on the eyes – and to make sure they were open, and generally succeeded. It’s great having the preview button set up to zoom right in during image playback so you can check that these things are right.

Backgrounds are often a problem, and sometimes – as in this case – there was not a great deal I could do about it. I did take a few pictures from a different angle with just a white sky as a background, but again it wasn’t a great background. It would have been nice if the stage had been set to have the embassy US flag and that big eagle hovering above him as he spoke, but it was actually directly behind me as I too the pictures

Of course I photographed others as well, the protesters as well as most of the other speakers.

And of course I had to have at least one picture showing that embassy, eagle & flag.

More at US Embassy Rally For Egypt on My London Diary.

Islington on the March

One of many protests against the cuts in public services was a local march on Saturday in Islington. As local marches go, there was pretty strong support, but not as strong as one web report suggested in its headline One thousand march in Islington against cuts.

I often complain that the figures given by police and particularly the BBC (who shouldn’t have an axe to grind) are ridiculously low, though the BBC often play safe, with phrases like ‘Hundreds marched’, which is still rather misleading if – as sometimes – it was really around 25 hundreds. But this time I’d written a report before I read that on the web, and I’d used the actual figure in it.

Unless another 600 snuck in over the last half-mile after I had left to go elsewhere the actual figure was around 400. Just before Highbury and Islington station I stopped and counted as the whole march went past me, and I got to 397. Of course there is a small margin of error in such counts, however carefull you are. But I would be reasonably confident that there were between say 380 and 420 people marching (including a few very young children who were actually being carried.)

It is fairly easy to count a smallish march like this with some accuracy by actually counting individuals as they go past, though just a little tedious. It is easy to miss the odd one or two, and equally easy to count a few twice, but the errors tend to cancel out. Larger marches I count as batches of roughly twenty people, and above a couple of thousand I usually give up and rely on a rough estimation. Years ago I used to stand two or three mornings a week looking down at around 1200 students in a morning assembly, which still gives me a rough idea of what that kind of number looks like, though protests are sometimes rather more spread out.

It may not be vital, but numbers are a fact which is often commented on and reported, and part of the job of a journalist is to get the facts right.

It wasn’t the most interesting of events to photograph, but people are always interesting, and I found some that I hope express something of the spirit of the event.

You can read my report and see more pictures at Islington Strikes Back. Like many of the posts on My London Diary it was first published on Demotix, where I managed to upload the image above in a rather dim and dark version, having somehow failed to correct it in Lightroom. All my images get corrected on import using a standard preset which I have set up and this includes having Lightroom automatically adjust ‘tone’ – exposure, recovery (highlights), fill light, blacks, brightness and contrast. But this ‘auto tone’, which is the same as the button in the Basic section of the Develop module, is one area where Lightroom definitely needs some improvement.

Of course there is always some room for interpretation, but a good starting point for most images is to set shadows and highlights at the two ends of the histogram, and ‘auto-tone’ sometimes simply fails to do so. This image was such a case; Lightroom inexplicably made an exposure adjustment of -0.15 to leave a large gap at the highlight end of the histogram – and the corrected version above has an exposure adjustment of +0.57 – a difference of 0.72. Normally I improve on the auto settings before sending pictures out, but somehow I missed this one in my late-night rush.

Demotix does a certain small amount of editing on the reports sent with pictures, though the changes made to mine are usually minimal. This time an editor had noticed that I had said that the march started at the Nags Head, and thought it would help to add the words “public house” after it. Unfortunately it’s some years since the Nags Head has been a public house, but it has bequeathed its name to a road junction and the area around it. Fortunately I was able to log in and add my own correction, but it was a little annoying to have to do it in all the picture captions as well.

Demotix itself is in the news, having struck a deal with the Press Association (PA) which will now distribute some at least of its images. It is really rather misleading of the report to say that Demotix “receives contributions from amateurs across the globe“, as although it does, it receives contributions from professionals around the world too, as well as some based here in the UK. But it certainly draws on photography from a wider base than existing agencies such as the PA, and often shows the strength of work from people with local knowledge rather than those flying in for short periods from abroad to cover stories. The best work on Demotix is as professional as that from any other agency.

Downing St Art Direction

Saturday at noon I was at Downing St to photograph a vigil. It marked 9 years than an innocent London resident has been tortured and kept, for most of the time in solitary confinement, at Guantanamo. Everyone who has looked at the case seems to come to the conclusion that despite what they may say, both US and UK governments do not want Shaker Aamer to be released where he could talk to the press and solicitors, give the evidence he has about how he was tortured – by Americans but with British secret service assistance – both at Bagram Air Base and in Guantanamo, and also how others there were treated. His evidence would certainly be extremely embarrassing to both governments, but that cannot be an acceptable reason for keeping him incarcerated, and the governments need to be shamed into letting him free.

It wasn’t a big demonstration, and we had to wait until enough people arrived to take the picture that the event organisers wanted. It looked like this:

The message is clear enough, and it wasn’t too difficult to take, but it just isn’t very interesting visually, often a problem when organisations think up what they think will be great ideas for a photograph. Still at least this was easy to take, and with the 16-35mm I could even stay on the pavement to get it all in, although the other couple of people taking pictures had to dodge the buses in the middle of the road. Sometimes the ideas that certainly untrained art directors (are there any other sort) have involve that curious camera that is able to point in two directions at the same time or somehow levitates at 20 metres above the ground.

It looked a little better from one side, for example like this:

At least now the interest in the picture isn’t confined to a narrow strip across it – less than a quarter of the image area in the upper picture. Or I could put it into a better overall picture like this:

though I should have compromised my principles and moved the woman with the placard closer to the slogan, enabling me also to get rid of that foreground post by moving up to it to take the picture.

But my favourite image from the fairly small number I took didn’t use that long long line of text at all.

Although it doesn’t mention the 9 years, the rest of the message is pretty clear, and it shows the two figures at the vigil who might be recognisable to a wider public, Kate Hudson of CND amd London’s Green MP Jean Lambert, along with one of the organisers.

You can read more about the event and see the few other pictures that I took on My London Diary in Shaker Aamer – 9 Years in Guantanamo.

Photography a Soft Subject?

The advice to prospective students given in the Russell Group’s booklet Informed Choices which came out last week is of course a clear and excellent guide to making sensible decisions for those who want to study at one of Britain’s most prestigious 21 universities, and it naturally reflects their particular view of Higher Education – which is also reflected in the government’s funding of UK education.

Perhaps because I have a couple of degrees from one of them and spent around 30 years teaching in secondary and further education I don’t have a particularly high opinion of our education system as a whole, and particularly not of certain aspects of our higher education system. Of course I have a great admiration and respect for many who work in them – and certainly parts of the system are only kept running by a great deal of largely selfless dedication, particularly by the classroom teachers, despite a great campaign largely orchestrated by OFSTED to denigrate them over the years.

I started my teaching career as a science teacher, and science subjects rank highly for the Russell Group, hard, ‘facilitating’ subjects that will get you onto their courses, along with others that involve writing lots of essays (our education system still seems largely geared to produce civil servants.) One thing that characterises all these ‘hard’ subjects is that they reward the student who can summarise and regurgitate a large body of information and theories – and that they all discourage any original thinking and experiment.

This is actually a very successful strategy for a small minority of those who go on to study at university and finally perhaps get to do some truly original work, usually now well after their second or third degree, but I think fairly disastrous or at best stultifying in terms of personal development for the great majority who take these courses.

One of the more disappointing aspects of the education system for me has been the increasing tendency over the years of art courses, particularly photography, to jump on that same academic treadmill, neatly characterised by one of the comments to the BJP’s feature, which read (in totality):

Outrageous

Barths
Foucault
Sontag
Lacan

All fairly soft eh?

(sic, though I’m in no position to comment on typos)

Later I went on to set up and teach several photographic courses in the school and later college where I worked, and later still taught in a part of what I think is still on the leading edge of vocational courses worldwide, the Cisco Networking Academy programme.

Down in the lower depths of the chalk face, the great liberation for me (and my students) came not by the incorporation of tedious academia (with the pointless reproduction of tedious essays) but with art and design based photography syllabi which encouraged and rewarded experimental background work and projects which allowed students to research and develop their own ideas at an appropriate level in both level 2 and level 3 courses.

Many like myself and my colleagues developed new materials and methods – some of which have since in part been published (and notably by a former colleague of mine, Mark Galer.) Our students benefited both from the exploration of their own ideas and thoughts, and also from the CSE and A level grades their work – both photographic projects and research presentations gained.

Among our students were some who had never previously passed an examination, working alongside some academic high-flyers, often out-achieving them, and most responded to our encouragement and the stimulation of following their own ideas. Photography became for a few years the most popular subject at our college and the subject in which students gained the highest average grades.

The high level of awards wasn’t a result of photography being a ‘soft’ subject, but of it being something that interested and challenged students. Challenged them intellectually in ways that many ‘hard’ subjects never do to think both for themselves and about themselves. And challenged them in a way that was apparently rare in those who went on to study photography further.

Our particular work in photography largely came to an end more than ten years ago with an increased emphasis on specialisation and the encouragement of students to concentrate on a core course leading either to university entrance or employment, very much the kind of thing that the Russell Group advice is not urging on students.

We were also hit by the changes in the curriculum, particularly from a two year A level to A1 and A2; previously we had run GSCE as a one year course which also served as the first year of A level, and we just did not fit into the new pattern well. And to introduce what was meant to encourage a broader curriculum, the college responded with a reduction in the number of timetable blocks that students were required to work, very much a cost-cutting measure.

Photographic education generally in the UK – with some rare exceptions (David Hurn’s Newport course springs immediately to mind – but it couldn’t survive) has never impressed. In the old days it was formulaic and largely technical, and after a brief period when things seemed to be looking up then became saddled with a largely irrelevant academic burden in an attempt to justify degree status.

Photography education now has an academic content largely unrelated to its practice, and produces many graduates who appear to have only a very hazy view of the history of the medium. From some courses they emerge with no great appreciation of its practice, while others insist on perpetuating the kind of craft skills (though usually at a fairly basic level) that are no longer relevant to current practice.

The academic study seems to do little to expand the horizons of those who undertake it, and fits them only to teach the same dull dry materials to others. But photographic education is curiously schizoid and at the same time pretends to be vocational, while we know that there is only work for a very small percentage of its output, who in most cases would have been better prepared for what work there is by actually going and doing the job rather than going to university.

Part of the tragedy is that there are many good people involved in photographic education, even some good photographers. Over the years I’ve met quite a few of them and often heard some bemoan exactly the kind of things that I mention.

Of course I used to talk to students and try to get them to study photography. At the start I told them that I thought they would find our courses interesting and rewarding, and they would learn skills that would continue to be useful in later life, and enrich their experience, whatever they went on to be or to do. And I think I was right. But I also told them that the chances that they would ever earn a living with a camera were extremely small.

Of course we should have abandoned A levels years ago and gone over to a system of education not based on filtering people for university courses but on broadening the person. A system that perhaps might end with a portfolio rather than a certificate with a few letters on it, something showing what people have produced and are able to do. Not unlike some of those courses I taught, where the real result wasn’t the A or B on the exam certificate but the the work – studies and projects – that the students took with them in their portfolios.

Boots Uncut

Last Sunday saw another nationwide demonstration by UK Uncut, this time targeting Boots stores across the country. Boots have relocated their corporate HQ to a PO Box in Switzerland, and according to UK Uncut this tax loophole has reduced their annual tax bill from £100 million to just £14 million.

The money that isn’t now coming in as UK tax would, according to UK Uncut, pay the salaries of over 4,000 NHS nurses, now under threat from government changes in the way hospitals are funded. UK Uncut, in their role as the ‘Big Society Revenue & Customs’ dressed up as doctors and nurses for a protest to make their point that the government are making savage cuts in public services to reduce the deficit while making no attempt to close the tax loopholes through which the super-rich and large corporations dodge £25 billion in taxes every year.

The protest started inside Boots main shop in the middle of Oxford St, but I didn’t arrive early enough to enter unnoticed and was carrying two cameras and a large bag, having been covering another event half a mile down the road, so failed to sneak in past the security guards. Some other photographers had got inside, but were soon escorted out by security and police when they started taking pictures, although the protesters and some shoppers were taking pictures on their mobile phones without being stopped.

Fortunately the shop has large glass windows, and although these are rather blocked with showcases, there were gaps through which we could take pictures – though each had a crowd of photographers around it. Reflections in the glass were a problem, and where possible we worked with the lens as close as possible to the glass to avoid them. If possible right up on the glass, but that does limit you to photographing at right angles to it. Back in the old days when I took a lot of pictures on film through windows I used to use wide-angle lenses with rubber lens hoods which gave a little more flexibility, but I no longer have these.

Here is one of the pictures I took through one of the side windows:

and you can see some reflections but they don’t really cause a problem.

Out of interest, I also exported a jpeg from the same image after automatic processing in Lightroom 3 and before I had done any of my usual post-processing on it – perhaps you can see some differences:

The differences are perhaps a little subtle at this scale, though rather more obvious on the high res versions. At a pinch I could live with the lower version – on which Lightroom has applied both my default curve settings and its auto exposure – but to me at least there are clear improvements in the processed version.

I started thinking a bit more about Lightroom and raw processing again last week, after I’d had a request for a few pictures from 2005. I had the jpegs on my hard disk, but thought I would go back and reprocess them from the raw files; surely six years later I could do a better job.

So I worked away as I now normally do on these .NEF raw files in Lightroom until I was happy with them and then exported the files and compared them with those I had produced in 2005. The differences were not that huge but were noticeable, and in every case the 2005 images I had produced using Pixmantec RawShooter, the software that was bought up and closed down by Adobe were the ones I chose in a ‘blind’ test.

Lightroom is a great programme, and it does more than RawShooter ever did, and it may be that these results are not typical. It might be the particular subject matter or the lighting, or (and very likely) the user having a bad day.

After around half an hour protesting inside Boots, the UK Uncut protesters decided it was time to leave and made their way to the front of the shop – where the security men promptly closed and locked the doors, so again I was shooting through glass. This time I was kneeling on the ground very close to the glass with a mass of photographers behind and above me blocking most of the reflections, so technically at least things were easier.

Some of the time I was having to take pictures between the legs of the security men though the policeman outside had kindly moved out of our way. When the protesters were finally let out of the shop they continued their protest on the pavement and I stayed until shortly before they were due to leave.

The protesters had thanked the police for the way they had behaved during the protest – and everything seemed very calm and orderly and there seemed little point in staying until the bitter end, and I wanted to return to the other event I was covering. You can read more about the protest and see my pictures in UK Uncut Protest Boots Tax Scam on My London Diary.

But the end turned out to be very bitter, and provided the main story from the event – which I missed. As UK Uncut were getting up to leave, one of the women protesters pushed a leaflet through the gap between the glass doors of the shop, and was promptly arrested for alleged “criminal damage.” An argument between police and protesters ensued, in the course of which one officer used a CS spray on twelve of the demonstrators (and himself.) Boots staff apparently rushed to give first aid to those who had been sprayed using eye wash bottles from their shelves, but three required hospital treatment.

I was shocked when I heard about this later in the day. It seemed completely out of keeping with the atmosphere of the event. The arrest seemed ridiculous, and the use of CS spray totally inappropriate.

No Fees! No Cuts! No Kettles!

Last Saturday’s student demonstration against the fees increases, the ending of educational maintenance allowance and cuts in public services was a rather tame affair, despite attracting between five and ten thousand marchers, mainly students, with a sprinkling of parents, trade unionists and others.

Perhaps the main reason for this was the discussion that had taken place beforehand between the organisers and police, and the leaflet that the police again handed out to protesters detailing both the route and the way that it would be policed. This kind of preparation is important to the police as well, as their briefing will doubtless have dealt with the same matters. It begins by stating that police service is committed to upholding the right to protest, something which has not appeared to be at the top of police priorities in some past events.

Of course there was plenty for me to take pictures of, but the lack of confrontation means that the chances of the media using these pictures is greatly reduced; peaceful demonstrations seldom make the news. But my work isn’t mainly for the instant news media, but more about recording events and trends for a future audience. Though making the news would pay some of the bills.

You can read my account of the march (first published on Demotix) on My London Diary at No Fees, No Cuts! Student March, accompanied by the usual large selection of images.

By the time I’d walked all the way along with the marchers – probably covering twice the distance they did, including quite a lot walking backwards – I was tired and in pain (I’ve been suffering from plantar fasciitis in my left foot for the past five months and it hurts if I walk any real distance – and unfortunately I mustn’t take Ibuprofen) and decided to call it a day. Most of the marchers were however game for more and a large group – probably between 500 and a thousand – made it to the Egyptian embassy and on to Oxford St.

There are two stories about what happened at the embassy. A photographer who made it there with them told me that the Egyptians were not very happy with the many placards from the SWP (Socialist Workers Party) and told them to go away, and the second, from a Guardian story, that this was a great result on its first outing from ‘Sukey‘, an anti-kettling system, which uses text messages (and now a smartphone application) to give phone and smartphone users information about which routes are open to them, and which are obstructed or closed by police. The new app, not available for this demonstration, uses green to show open directions, yellow for obstructed but passable and red for those that are completely blocked.

Sukey gets its information by Tweets with the hashtag #sukey and other messaging from people on the spot, uses a team in their control room to analyse it and then displays the results on its web site and relays it back as text based warnings to protesters; it now also has a compass-like smart phone application to show protesters the status of routes from their current position – green for open, though this wasn’t ready for last Saturday. But apparently protesters close to the Egyptian Embassy who had signed up to the system received a text message from the Sukey control room telling them that there were a lot of reports coming in that the police were about to form a kettle – and so they quickly left.

Although police have kettled protesters on numerous occasions (in recent student demonstrations in Whitehall, Parliament Square, Trafalgar Square and on Westminster Bridge), the fact that there are a lot of police in a particular place doesn’t necessarily mean that they intend to kettle protesters.

Before Christmas I was with students as they took off on a ten mile fast march around London because every time they saw police at a junction someone shouted ‘kettle’ and the march took off in another direction. Police denied that day that they had any intention of kettling, and apart from one brief incident in Parliament Square and later in Trafalgar Square, they seemed to me to make no attempt to do so. Despite this, some student and left-wing web accounts wrote it up as some kind of victory of the student movement over the police.

Since then we’ve seen two student marches where the police have issued a leaflet to try and counter what I called ‘kettle paranoia’ by students. There has been no obstruction or kettling of students during either of them on the agreed route.

Though attempts such as ‘Sukey’, named from the nursery rhyme ‘Polly put the kettle on’ in which Sukey (Susan) takes if off again are welcome as attempts to share information (along with the police leaflet and police Tweets) I do rather worry that it may well simply provide greater positive feedback to the kind of wild rumours about police behaviour that drove that out of control ten mile student route march.

Police like to keep order. It’s their job after all, but they do take it too far. They like everything cut and dried and going to plan. The police understand static demonstrations and marches that keep to a prescribed route but characterize the kind of freely moving protests that some groups have been making recently – sometimes called ‘civic swarms’ – as disorder, and have so far not found an effective and proportional way of dealing with them.

Information about the whereabouts of protesters will be of great interest to them, and I am sure they will both be monitoring the reports provided by Sukey as well as perhaps producing their own applications to track the locations of tweets with the #sukey tag, and possibly making use of location data from mobile phone companies.

If you are going to mask up to protect your identity, should you take the battery out of your mobile phone too?

No Fees, No Cuts! Student March.

Egyptian Embassy

Several of my friends are working in Egypt at the moment, producing some great work, but having seen what is happening on the streets there, I’m feeling rather glad that I’m sitting safely at home. Jason N Parkinson’s video Day of Rage – Cairo gives a great idea of what is happening.

Of course back in London there have been various demonstrations of solidarity with the Egyptians on the streets of Cairo calling for democracy and last Saturday I photographed two of them. Egyptians have been demonstrating outside the embassy more or less non-stop, and had called a larger demonstration for noon on Saturday, and it was this that I went to photograph, arriving around 11.45.

Rather to my surprise, when I arrived at the Embassy I could hear another demonstration taking place out of sight in the next street – all I could see from in front of the Embassy were a few women in Muslim dress, standing around and doing nothing. I walked the 70 or so yards to the corner and looked down the street to find the pavement on the opposite side filled by people from Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain. I wasn’t that surprised as I had been expecting to see them later for a protest at the Hilton Hotel over Bangladesh. They were there not to express solidarity with the people on the streets in Cairo who are calling for a democratic and secular Egypt, but to urge that the solution to the problem there – as everywhere else – is a Muslim Khalifah.

In Cairo, men and women protest together, and Muslims and Christian, and none of them want the kind of Islamic state than Hizb ut-Tahrir stands for. The Egyptian revolution isn’t an Islamic one but a secular protest, and the Egyptian protesters at the Embassy told me they had made that clear to Hizb ut-Tahrir, and were not prepared to have them join their protest outside the Embassy. (Much later in the day they made a similar point telling members of the Socialist Workers Party that they were not welcome either.)

I knew that Hizb ut-Tahrir would not like the report that I wrote about what happened, but it was an honest and accurate account of what I saw and what I was told. Within an hour or so of posting it on Demotix there was a hostile comment which appeared to have been written by someone who was not there, attacking me. So I almost certainly got it right. You can read about the event and see the pictures at Hizb ut-Tahrir Turned Away on My London Diary.

While I was photographing Hizb ut-Tahrir, the protest outside the Egyptian Embassy was growing and it had well over a hundred people present when I had to leave to cover another event, with more still turning up.

It had a very different atmosphere from the other event, with those present taking a more active role and everyone being offered the chance to speak. There wasn’t a set party line and the people were much more mixed in every way, not least with men and women both actively participating and standing together. Apart from the Egyptians, others had also come to show their support.

You can see more of this story at Solidarity with the Egyptian Revolution on My London Diary. Interestingly, although both stories were posted at about the same time and I noted both on Facebook and Twitter together, and the Solidarity feature certainly has the better pictures, the Hizb ut Tahrir story has attracted almost six times as many views. A little controversy perhaps helps.

While writing this I heard that four photographers who also contribute to Demotix are among those who have been attacked in Cairo in the last 24 hours. Two were beaten and arrested but later released, and another was rescued by the vigilantes he had been photographing, while the fourth managed to escape after being attacked.

India in London

I’ve never been to India. As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m not a great traveller, at least not outside the M25, though I do occasionally take a train elsewhere, and I’ve photographed in a few other cities. Perhaps if I’d started young as a full-time photographer I would have got to travel rather more, but for almost 30 years my main job was teaching, and I had no great urge to travel in my holidays – I had work to get on with here.

London is truly a fascinating city, and one to which the world comes – even if those who want to stay for more than a couple of weeks holiday are considerably less welcome officially than they once were. Walking around the city you run into blue plaques commemorating the stays here of those who went on to liberate and lead nations around the world.

Perhaps this is still happening today, and one day there will be plaques commemorating the future leaders of Khalistan and Kashmir, who may well have been among those I photographed outside the Indian High Commission last week on the Indian Republic Day, which they celebrated with demonstrations calling for freedom from Indian rule for their nations. More about this and of course more pictures in Free Kashmir & Khalistan on My London Diary.

After they left, another protest took their place, calling for the release of an Indian doctor and civil rights activist, Dr Binayak Sen, whose crime has been to spend his life working for the poor. Release Binayak Sen Now on My London Diary.

Quite by coincidence, on the train up to London that day I’d been reading Jaspreet Singh‘s novel ‘Chef’, a story about a Sikh man making a journey back from India to Kashmir and retelling the story of his life in his younger years there as chef to an Indian Army General. I read more between photographing the two events, sitting with a pint of Samuel Smith’s in the Lyceum, a short walk from the High Commission (though I actually walked there by a very long detour to the British Museum which had been closed because of a ‘chemical attack’ which turned out to be a false alarm.) ‘Chef’ is a novel that had some resonance to both events.

It felt rather strange to be working with just one camera, and that the D300, as I’d taken my rather stuttering D700 in to Fixation for servicing the previous afternoon. Although I normally use both, somehow I’d forgotten the difference the smaller viewfinder image makes, though the having less weight to carry was welcome. Instead of the 16-35mm, I’d taken the Sigma 10-20mm out of the cupboard – equivalent to 15-30mm, and I really did miss that 35mm end while taking pictures. Possibly I would have been happier with the 12-24mm Sigma (18-36 eq), though then I would have missed the wide end. Along with the 10-20mm I was also using the Nikon 18-105mm (27-157 eq) so I did have a lens that covered 35mm, but often I found myself making do rather than bother to change the lens.

It was also a pretty dull day, and I did miss the extra stop or so I would have allowed in setting the ISO on the D700. I don’t much like working about ISO 1250 on the D300. So I was pleased the following day to get a call from Fixation to tell me the D700 was waiting for collection. The two-year guarantee runs out next week and I am renewing it, as the camera does get pretty heavy use – the frame counter was at 116,150. Normally I wouldn’t bother, as it’s almost always cheaper to pay for repairs when necessary rather than take out insurance. As well as replacing the faulty unit, Fixation also replaced much of the rubber bits on the outside of the body, carried out a general service and recalibration and checked and cleaned it – including the sensor – and finished the job in two days.

I do rather like the ‘Release Dr Binayak Sen’ image, and I think the picture above is the best frame of several rather similar. There is a kind of rhythm across the frame, which the picture fits rather well, and the text too clearly conveys the message without being too obvious, a built in caption scattered around the image, including the nicely placed “people’s doctor & civil rights activist‘ on the apron at bottom right. The yellow Amnesty balloon reads ‘Demand Justice’ though perhaps a little to small the read at the scale it is here. There is a difference in expressions in the faces across the picture which I like too, and just a little of the building behind to indicate where it was taken.

BBC’s World to Shrink?

I suppose it was inevitable that there would be considerable media interest in a story about our major broadcaster planning sweeping cuts to what many of us feel is one of the most vital and nationally important aspects of its services – though to the people that run the BBC it seems to be regarded as a loss-making nuisance.

I’ve long felt that the BBC wastes most of the licence fees it collects and making TV programmes that may have high audience figures but that basically are little different to the offerings from commercial stations, including some which seem little more than thinly disguised promotionals for some industries. And we don’t even have a car manufacturing industry to speak of.

You can read more about it and see more pictures from the demonstration in Save the BBC World Service on My London Diary.

Photographically the biggest problem was that there were too many of us trying to take pictures and film in too small a space. I was lucky to be in the right place at least some of the time, although of course you largely make your luck by reading the situation and spotting opportunities that others have yet to see. So when Jeremy Dear, the NUJ’s General Secretary came to make his speech, I’d moved into what I thought would be a good position around half a minute earlier when I noticed it looked as if this was about to happen.

I’d chosen to stand where I could get Jeremy in a crowd with NUJ placards, and at the right of frame, Michelle with the flowers. Fortunately she was holding the caption ‘RIP BBC World Service’ so I could read it, and this particular frame appealed to me because of the expressions of those in it. In the picture it looks like a pretty decent little crowd (though most of it was out of frame) and there is enough of Bush House in the background to be recognisable to those who know it.

As I took my pictures, there were cameras to the left of me, cameras to the right of me, on top of me and I think shooting through my legs, and I was having to lean back with a little weight to stop myself being pushed forward by the crush. Of course I don’t complain about this, we all need to get pictures, and if I hadn’t been at the front I’d be doing exactly what these guys were doing in order to do so.

Most of us stick by the unwritten rules that come from having to work together, not deliberately getting in each other’s shot and if at times it happens and we point it out, mostly people apologise and try to move away. Because I normally shoot with a very wide angle, a lot of people do wander into my pictures unintentionally, and there are often other lenses poking into the corners or bottom of my images. Occasionally it improves the picture, but more often I just zoom to a longer focal length.

While we were there taking pictures, we were all rather astonished to see a reporter with a compact camera just walk in front of us all so that she could take some pictures. I was slightly less amazed, as this particular person had walked in front of me when I was photographing at an earlier event, and when I politely told her that I was taking pictures and she had just stood in my way she told me that she needed to get her pictures and refused to budge. If you read of a journalist being lynched by photographers it will be her.

Another rather annoying habit that is growing among photographers is that you suddenly see a camera in your viewfinder, held out in front of you at arm’s length by someone leaning over your shoulder. If this habit continues to increase perhaps we will all have to switch to ‘live view’ and photograph in this way to keep ahead of the people behind. It used to be just camera phones that appeared like this, but lately it has been pro DSLRs as well.

Before Jeremy had finished speaking, I decided I had more than enough pictures of him and the other protesters from that viewpoint, and made my way out (it wasn’t easy) to give other photographers a better view.

I would have liked to have photographed MP John McDonnell speaking a couple of minutes later, but this time I hadn’t got in the right place, and could find no way to get a decent view. Of course I’ve photographed him on many occasions and it would not have been a problem getting him to pose later, but I don’t like posed pictures.

At times like this there would be a definite advantage in being a foot – or even six inches – taller. Sometimes you can make up for it by holding the camera up above your head for a ‘Hail Mary’ shot, and some photographers now carry a monopod or tripod to enable rather more height. If I could fit one in my bag I probably would, but so far I’ve only done this for one or two panoramas where it enabled me to take pictures over fences such as that fortified Olympic fence.

The missing link in making this a more usable technique with pro cameras is a rear view screen that folds out and swivels. But such a device might well be rather fragile in the day to day knockabout our equipment gets.

You can actually buy wireless transmitters or plug in monitors for DSLRs with an A/V output, though they tend to be rather large and rather pricey (though photographer Robert Benson makes one – almost certainly illegal to use in the UK – in his garage for around $200), though good for those who want to use the video possibilities of the more recent DSLRs, though not those I use. But a fairly basic device of this type using a cable from the camera on top of the monopod would make such overhead pictures controllable.

Back to Bush House, here’s an image that shows more of the building:

I took it first with the 10.5mm fisheye, but those pillars don’t work quite as well with a curve in them, even partly corrected:

The Lightroom profile for this lens makes the mistake of trying to correct all of the distortion, resulting in a totally unusable image. Just for fun, I tried looking at this image in the Panini Viewer, which implements a rediscovered long forgotten projection used by Italian painters long ago, sometimes called Vedutismo, which has been available for some while for panoramas. The viewer software uses a low quality jpeg, but gives a better idea of the building.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
Fisheye mage saved from Panini Viewer and cropped in Photoshop
Later I’ll download other software that will let me do a better job, as the projection, which I’ve been using for around a year for panoramas, really does look to be a promising approach to “de-fishing” images.

Save the BBC World Service on My London Diary.

Atos Don’t Give A Toss

Last Monday was a day of action against benefit cuts, and in particular targeted the company that runs the tests that people who want to claim the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) have to take (and retake at intervals.) The tests are an attempt to test their ability to work and are carried out by “trained healthcare professionals” employed by a private company, Atos Origin. As several of the placards said, ‘Atos Don’t Give A Toss.’

Although the amounts individual benefit claimants get are not generous they are essential for those concerned, and losing some or all of their benefit can be a personal catastrophe. Those who are assessed as able to work get benefit at a lower rate on the Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) and to get it have to keep showing evidence of looking for work, and may be refused all benefits if they are judged not to be doing so. Atos of course does rather better out of it, and despite a large volume of criticism about how poorly they do the job has just been awarded another £300 million contract.

Previously, doctors certified people as unfit to work, and there was occasionally a certain amount of unfairness involved – my own doctor was very loath to provide certificates while others were certainly over-generous. But the decisions were always based on a knowledge of the claimant and their circumstances and their medical conditions. Under the system used by Atos, an interview with set questions based on a computer system means that the needs and problems of the individuals are often neglected in reaching a decision.

Part of the problem has always been that there isn’t a simple division of people into those who are and those who are not fit for work, and of course that different types of work and different jobs within the same type of work place very different demands and stresses on workers. Add to that the problem of the availability of jobs in particular areas and we have a problem that is undeniably complex, and not one that the simplistic approach ofAtos’s ”work capability assessments’ can properly address. But they are happy just to take the money – and have just been given another £300 million despite a very critical report by an independent inspector appointed by the government and bodies such as Citizen’s Advice.

The first photographs that I took were of a small protest, with I think eleven people handing out leaflets to people going in and out of a local job centre, one of many where these tests are carried out. There really wasn’t a great deal of action to photograph, and doing so was made a little more complex by my own decision not to identify the users of the job centre in my picture. I don’t think anyone has an expectation of privacy when going in or out of a job centre, but do feel that I might not like to be photographed in such a situation. I was happy to photograph both the protesters and any job centre staff who might be visible, but tried hard to make images in which the clients were only shown partially or from the back. In the end there were one or two pictures where there were identifiable people, mainly in the background of pictures, and there I either darkened the whole face or drew a black bar to obscure their eyes.

At that place I was working on the public street, but in the afternoon ‘party of protest’ I knew that I would be working in a ‘private place’, one of those increasing number of areas of the city open to the public but under private ownership. I was a little worried because the security staff there – as in many places around London – enforce a fairly strict ‘no photography’ policy.

I kept my cameras under my coat or in my bag until I was in the middle of the group of demonstrators, and then took them out and started pictures. At least I would be able, I thought, to get some pictures before I was approached and asked to stop – and of course I knew that neither the security men or the police had any power to ask me to delete them.

But there were no problems, at least not about taking pictures. Neither the police nor the private security men attempted to stop me, nor as far as I am aware anyone else taking pictures. Except when one elderly man walked through the police line and was pushed to the ground and then examined and dragged away by police. Then I had two problems.

First was the deliberate obstruction of my line of sight by two police officers. It seems to be deeply ingrained in many police that if they see a photographer taking pictures of an incident they should move to stand between them and it.

This seems to be the standard police interpretation of the paragraph from the ACPO Police-Media Guidelines (introduced by the Metropolitan Police in March 2006 and by other forces in 2007 following two years of negotiations with the BPPA, the NUJ and CIJ):

Members of the media have a duty to report from the scene of many of the incidents we have to deal with. We should actively help them carry out their responsibilities provided they do not interfere with ours.

The second problem that I faced was the D700, which chose this moment to have another of its hissy fits, and refuse to take pictures. I didn’t have time to argue with it, and picked up the D300 to shoot with that. It was set to a stop or two slower ISO and there wasn’t time for me to move the SB800 from the other camera to it, so I was working at a rather slower shutter speed than I would have liked. The blur really works quite well on one or two pictures, but there were others that were just blurred.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
I’ve moved to one side of the officer in my way, while behind the incident
another officer moves to block a colleague

I’d already decided the D700 had to go in for repair, but just hadn’t had the time to take it in, but I did so the next day.

When I got back I wrote a fairly lengthy piece about the problems that disabled people are facing with ending of disability benefit and its partial replacement with the ESA to go with the pictures for Demotix. A few days later, with rather more pictures, this went onto My London Diary as Atos Tests Unfair to Disabled.