Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

A Bad Few Days for Lenses

I’ve just put on line at My London Diary the pictures that I took on May 22 at the EDL/Patriot March through Westminster. It wasn’t an event I felt particularly happy about covering, with several groups on the political right involved that I’ve photographed before. But though I may not agree with their politics and certainly not with the way that they express them, I think they have a right to honest coverage. And in the longer term I think photographing and writing about them clearly and as accurately as I can is better at exposing them than the kind of diatribe that I sometimes see elsewhere.

They complain about the coverage they get from the media generally, but although occasionally I think they have a point, generally they get the coverage they do because of how they behave both generally and in particular how they behave towards the press.

If you want accurate reporting, then it helps to have a clear press release rather than none at all, and it isn’t enough to keep repeating you are not racist, you need to stop supporters chanting racist slogans or insulting people.

Although things started off in a fairly friendly manner, towards the end of the event many of the demonstrators were threatening press photographers, pushing them away, grabbing their cameras and holding hands over lenses. It doesn’t make a positive impression!

© 2010, Peter Marshall
I wanted a higher viewpoint so…
However I have only myself to blame for an incident as the march started. While photographers were crowding around photographing the guys at the front of the march I decided I needed to lift a camera above my head for a ‘Hail Mary‘ to get a higher viewpoint. I had two cameras around my neck and as I lifted one, somehow the second, which I thought I was holding by its strap, crashed to the ground.

It was a D300, with a Nikon 18-200mm and an SB800 flash, making quite a heavy package and it landed on the tarmac road lens first, smashing the filter, with the batteries from the flash spilling out. Other photographers helped me to scrabble to pick up the pieces as the marchers moved forward, and one helped to remove most of the broken filter with a small knife.

Stupidly I cut my thumb rather deeply on the broken glass and spent the next twenty minutes or so dripping blood as I continued to photograph with the other camera having dumped the broken bits into my camera bag.

I put another lens – the 10.5mm fisheye on the D300 and was very relieved to find that it at least was still apparently working. Looking at it later there didn’t seem to be any obvious damage, though I perhaps still need to check the autofocus more carefully.

There was some minor damage to the SB800, breaking the hinges of the flash diffuser, but otherwise that too seems to be in working order – and I’ve been using it since with few problems. Perhaps when I have a moment I’ll take it in for repair, but it hardly seems worth the bother.

The 18-200mm was a different story. The filter thread had been damaged making it impossible to remove the remains of the broken filter, and although the lens looked physically sound, once I tried to zoom it became clear that there were some very serious problems. On closer inspection I’d broken quite a lot of the mechanism inside the lens and there were some bits of broken glass – lens elements – in the middle of the lens. It was fairly clearly beyond economic repair.

The Nikon 18-200 isn’t the cheapest of lenses, but I’d had it since it came out a few years back and it had already needed several repairs. The photographer who was standing next to me when I dropped it told me he was on his fourth of them! It really is an amateur lens, both in terms of performance and also lack of robustness, and one we only put up with because it is just so versatile with the huge zoom ratio. You can go out with it anywhere as your only lens and, so long as it isn’t raining and there is a reasonable amount of light it will be the only lens you will need.

So I wasn’t too upset over it. It was a lens I expected to have to replace in the near future, and one that I’d had considerable use from. And at least at home if not with me I had a replacement for it, making use of the Sigma 24-70 f2.8 and 50-200 f5.6 lenses to cover more or less the same range.

The following Monday I went out for a walk with a few of the family to Richmond Park, taking just this combination. Not quite as convenient as the 18-200, but better quality. Towards the end of the walk, disaster struck again, and the 24-70 refused to zoom past around 28mm. It was an almost new lens, hardly used since I’d received it as a replacement from Sigma for an earlier one that I’d had problems with.

The following day I packed it up and sent it back to Sigma for servicing. A few days later I got a phone call from them asking why I’d sent it as it seemed to be working properly. Whatever had caused the jam had been cured by the shaking as it went through the post! I told them in greater detail than in my letter and they went away to work on it, getting the lens back to me a few days ago.

But when I sent off the 24-80 I didn’t have a lens to cover between 35mm and 75mm which is a pretty important range, so I needed to find a replacement quickly. After a little research I ordered a Nikon 18-105mm rather than a new 18-200mm. Although it doesn’t have quite the range, most of what I take is at the lower end, and it is after all a 27-157mm equivalent, so a respectable telephoto.

But the Nikkor AF-S DX 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED VR (to give it its full mouthful) has several other points in its favour. It is a smaller, lighter lens and a better optical performer in almost every respect than the 18-200, and seems considerably more robust – though still not a pro lens. And at less than half the price of its bigger brother it was irresistible. By noon the following day I had it on my camera and was back in business. When I know I’m going to need something longer I’ll take the Sigma 50-200mm as well.

David Hurn

I came into photography in the 1970s, and completely missed the great input that David Hurn made into creative photography in the UK in the 1960s, meeting him for the first time in the early 1980s, when I had a short argument with him in the questions following a talk he gave on one of his shows.

The show wasn’t one of his better efforts, and his reply to my question appeared to me to be entirely based on commercial rather than artistic criteria, so I’ve perhaps never warmed to the man as I should, though I do have his Wales: Land of My Father (2000) on the main bookshelf in my living room (along with a volume by one of the many photographers whose career was intimately bound to his, Josef Koudelka.)

Had I started in photography ten years earlier I might have got to know him better, and if I had been ten years younger I would certainly have yearned to attend the course that he ran from 1973-90, the School of Documentary Photography at the Gwent College of Higher Education in Newport, Wales.

David Hurn is now 74, and his latest book, Writing The Picture with poet John Fuller was published by Seren on June 5th 2010. You can read more about his remarkable life in a feature by Graham Harrison on Photo Histories, where there is also a link to the book, as well as to the title sequence from Barbarella in which a space-suited Jane Fonda weightlessly disrobes.

Harrison attributes former student Dillon Bryden as stating that Davids course engendered the work ethic and a very particular code of understanding, and although in many ways a strength, particularly in giving its students a way of making a living, it was perhaps also a weakness, pushing them down a particular route. But it was certainly a great shame when this vocationally oriented course was lost in the scramble for university and degree status.

In his piece, Harrison writes “David Hurn says the art establishment in Britain remains staggeringly snobby about photography, and is particularly resistant to photojournalism and documentary photography.” Despite the work of Hurn and others this remains only too true. Although he and other photographers did serve on the Arts Council in various ways, photography has never really got a serious look-in, though for a year or so in the 1970s it seemed it just might.

I’ve always felt it summed up the situation pretty well that, until 2001, the only money I had ever got from the Arts Council had been a couple of small payments from the Poetry budget. And in 2001 the money came from ‘The Year of the Artist‘ and again was not specifically for photography.

You can see some of David Hurn’s pictures on his Magnum page, and also worth reading is a piece on Hurn by the late Bill Jay, another vital figure in British photography in the late 1960s through Creative Camera and Album magazines. This starts:

While still in my 20s, I showed David Hurn my photographs, the results of more than seven years of struggle to be a photographer. It took him about 30 seconds to look through the lot and deliver his judgment: boring. Derivative, he said. You wont make it.

We have been friends ever since.

British photography might have had a rather different story had Jay not, as Harrison relates, been turned down for a post at the National Portrait Gallery.

Save 6 Music

I’m getting rather behind with putting work on My London Diary, and so far I’m only somewhere in the middle of May and its June already. Yesterday I did manage to finish putting up pictures of a demo outside Broadcasting House to stop the BBC cutting a couple of stations, 6 Music and the Asian Network – more pictures here.

Broadcasting House is truly an ‘iconic building’, a phrase that seems to have come into the constabulary vocabulary here to mean almost any large building in London, but at least I had no problems in photographing it. But the building as a whole is perhaps a little difficult to integrate into pictures taken more or less next to it, though I did try once or twice. But really it worked better when I concentrated on the significant detail of the Eric Gill statue above the main doorway. Here’s another:

And of course, as so often with demonstrations it helps to get the message in the picture.

6 Music isn’t a station I listen to – it just doesn’t appear on my radio as it doesn’t broadcast on FM, though I could of course listen on-line. But what little I have heard of it seems to me admirable, very British and very quirky, and this showed in the slogans, placards, banners, dress and performances at the event, and I hope too in my pictures.

Although I took some straightforward portraits of the station’s presenters – who were of course appearing in their capacity as licence fee payers rather than presenters, it was a couple of pictures of Liz Kershaw bounding up onto the stage that interested me more; the first image unfortunately I didn’t get quite right, but the second (and there wasn’t time for more) I think catches her well.

It’s exactly as I saw and framed it – I seldom crop, though it’s not a religion, just usually things are stronger if I get it right when I take the picture. And this is 100% of the frame.

I Didn’t Get Up Early on Tuesday

I couldn’t be bothered to get up early on Tuesday morning, although I expected something interesting would happen when police came to search the ‘Democracy Camp’ in Parliament Square before the State Opening of Parliament.

The flashpoint came when the police moved on from there to also search the tents of the two long-term full-time residents of the square, Brian Haw and Barbara Tucker. Brian has been there – except for a night or two locked up in the nearest police station- since early June 2001, and has witnessed a few state openings in that time, so there seemed little reason for police to want to search their tents too. You can see the altercation with the police on a You Tube video taken by one of the campers, and pictures of him being handled rather roughly by police were in the evening paper.

I missed being there because I like to sleep at home which is around 20 miles away and don’t like to pay the high fares for travel in the early hours unless I’m actually being paid to be there.

I called in later in the day to find out what had happened, and to talk to people who had seen the events. So I was able to put a story on Demotix, but it rather lacked the drama it would have had where I there at the right time. You don’t get stories by lying in bed.

(There was actually another reason that I’ll mention in a later post why I needed to be at home that morning, but I probably would not have been there anyway.)

Earlier in the month I’d written another story about what was happening in the square which did attract quite a lot of interest – also on Demotix, as well as My London Diary (with more pictures) and Indymedia.

Time For Fair Votes?

The UK Elections came and we voted – or at least many of us did, though one of the big stories was that many people in many places came to vote an hour or more before the polling stations closed but were unable to get in to do so. Because the local recording officers had failed to make sufficient provision they were denied their right to vote, and almost certainly at least one Labour MP lost his seat as a result. Unfortunately, perhaps because things seldom go wrong, we have a system where it is prohibitively expensive to challenge the results.

And of course, while usually I can turn on the radio the following morning and hear who will form the new government, this year it was different, with days of discussion and horse-trading. As virtually the only justification for our present system is that it delivers clear results, it perhaps is not surprising that it has now very much been called into question, and there are probably relatively few people who are not sitting MPs who support it.

What has been more surprising are the demonstrations that have taken place in favour of electoral reform, and although I missed the first on the Saturday following election day as I had a prior engagement, I’ve covered a couple of these in Westminster since, and more are happening in cities around the country this weekend.

The coalition has promised some kind of referendum on the matter, although it seems likely it will be on a very half-hearted change – and that even then many of the majority party will campaign for a vote against it.

When the furore broke over MPs expenses, I was extremely dismissive. Frankly it seemed to me a lot of fuss over very little, and at least in some respects the fact that the body now set up to supervise the system will cost a great deal more than the relatively minor sums involved in the disputed claims in some respects confirms my attitude. But it wasn’t about money at all but about trust, and it was an issue that raised great forest fires among the public. I wonder if voting reform is another issue whose time has come and will resonate in a similar manner, so that eventually even the most dogged of politicians will have to bow.

On the Monday evening following the elections, the Lib Dems were holding a meeting to discuss the coalition offers from both Conservative and Labour parties (though Labour didn’t really have anything to offer and certainly weren’t prepared to offer it, many of them relishing the idea of the Tories having to struggle with their legacy for the next session.) There was a noisy but peaceful protest outside the building where they were meeting and I went along to photograph it.

Police had ensured that the protesters left a clear path through the crowd to the door of the building, and the media – including me – lined up for some time along its edge to photograph the people coming to the meeting. But for some reason most of them decided not to face the crowd and walk in this way, but to barge their way rudely through the protesters. The media were disappointed and the Lib Dems rather went down in my opinion.

Among those protesting were quite a few members of the Lib Dems, some waving party membership cards, which was one obvious thing to photograph. Slightly more dramatically, one had a party rosette and had presumably stood as a candidate for the party and was holding that out. The ‘Take Back Parliament’ movement has also adopted the colour purple, a reference to a hundred years ago when the suffragettes wore purple sashes in their fight for votes for women, and supporters were urged to wear purple clothing, purple armbands and to have purple painted fingers; some too had purple face paint and there was a purple cow too at the protest.

Another small link with the suffragettes was Tamsin Omond, one of the Climate Rush protesters who model their actions on those women who a hundred years earlier called for ‘Deeds Not Words’, and was more recently involved as an independent candidate for Parliament, attracting some support but unfortunately few votes. Given our system it is very hard for parties outside the major two and a half to persuade anyone there is any point in voting for them, even if voters support their ideas. I’ve photographed her at quite a few of the protests that she had been involved in, and it seemed a good idea to take a picture of her with a purple finger.

I’m not a great lover of celebrities, but Billy Bragg is someone who I admire, and who got himself stuck into this election, working against the BNP, and I was happy to take his picture too, speaking at this event. I’m not sure about the blur – the light was fading a bit by the time he spoke and perhaps I should have increased the ISO to get a higher shutter speed.

Of course there were the usual staples of demonstrations, placards and banners and people, and you can see these and other pictures from the event in Take Back Parliament – Fair Votes on My London Diary.

Saturday saw another London demonstration organised by the same group, with perhaps a thousand people on Old Palace Yard opposite the Houses of Parliament. This was a more organised event with a number of speakers and a little bit of theatre – including two guys in morph suits with a bar chart and a bright red dinosaur, as well as an MEP, a former Labour MP and radical comedian Mark Thomas. Both these events were pretty packed with photographers, and one of my favourite images from the day showed one of these:

I particularly like the de-luxe fur-covered camera bag held by her assistant standing behind her.

Later there was a chance for yet a few more pictures of Big Ben (just in case anyone had missed that this was London.)

But perhaps the image I was happiest with, although I’m not quite sure why, was one of the petition that the protest was delivering to Downing St.

You can see more pictures from the day in Purple Protest Demands Fair Votes.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

I read on Facebook today about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, named after Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University, although the idea behind it is rather older. The link pointed to a radio programme, the Science Show on ABC Radio National, where on 8 May, presenter Robyn Williams talked to Daniel Keogh about it, though I read the transcript there rather than listen to the programme. For most things when you want to think about the details its a better way to consume radio, as I’m finding with the current BBC Radio 4 series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects‘, where both the transcript and there, even more importantly the images of the objects make it almost essential to follow the series on-line. The broadcasts themselves make good listening, more as entertainment, with the text and images being so much more informative.

The D-K effect is all about how people who know nothing about a subject are the most confident of their ability, or, as Keogh quotes Darwin ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge’ and it’s something we are probably all pretty familiar with.

And Keogh rubs it in for photographers “If you’ve ever fancied yourself as a photographer, you might know just how this feels. It only takes a weekend workshop for you to suddenly realise that the poorly lit snaps of your cat in the backyard aren’t quite the masterpieces you’d once imagined.”

I never felt I was a great cat photographer, but certainly recognise something it what he says, though I was fortunate at the first workshop I attended not only to have a few pictures among the dross that were more promising, but also to have a photographer running the workshop who recognised this and set me off in a more productive direction.

But it’s sometimes hard to convince people that they need to work at it, thanks to the D-K Effect, as I often found with students. Those who did best were those who were prepared to listen and learn, and usually those who showed rather less confidence in their own abilities.

Except, as he points out, life often rewards the self-confident, even if this self-confidence has no basis in ability. Some of the ignorant incompetents manage to convince enough other people through their charm and charisma that they rise to the top and become in charge of things that they really know nothing about. They become politicians or managers because of their ‘overconfident incompetence‘. The arts in general and photography in particular have more than their share of such people ‘fully controlled by the Dunning-Kruger effect‘ and it perhaps explains many things that are otherwise incomprehensible.

It is partly this kind of effect that has made it important to me throughout my time as a photographer to belong to formal or informal groups of photographers who have been able and willing to say what they thought about each others work. At times I’ve had things pulled to pieces (and performed a similar service for others) but it really helps. Of course sometimes I’ve gone away thinking that the others were wrong, or just didn’t understand what I was trying to do, but it’s always something that makes me think again, even if I sometimes end up with the same conclusion.

The show I’m part of that’s opening tonight in Croydon is not the greatest show the world has ever seen, but is something that comes in part out of that kind of critical process, by eight photographers who regularly meet and show each other their work in progress. I like some of the work more than other pictures, but I think most of it is interesting to look at.

May Day

May Day seems rather a long time ago now, but its been a busy couple of weeks since then (we had an general election here among other things) and it took me quite a while to get around to sorting out my pictures from the various events to put onto My London Diary.

My London Diary is an archive of much my work over the last ten or so years, added to regularly, but it isn’t meant as an instant news site, more a reference. Getting pictures on it right away is not a priority, though it’s important to me to put them there in time. But first of all I want to get them on news sites and if possible into publications. Sites that I regularly put my work on close to the event include Demotix and Indymedia.

May Day started for me with a fairly relaxed journey to arrive at Clerkenwell Green for noon, when the annual trade union and socialist march to celebrate International Workers Day gathers to march through London to Trafalgar Square.

One of the many minor failures of our labour governments have been not to make May Day a public holiday. Jim Callaghan in 1978 gave us instead a bank holiday on the first Monday in May, which is really more of a nuisance than a cause for celebration. Of course every few years coincides with May Day (as in 2000, 2006, and unless we get a changes before then, in 2017) and there are years such as this when May Day falls at the weekend. But most years when I was still in full-time employment, May Day was a normal working day for me.

May Day this year started bright and sunny, and Clerkenwell Green – long since covered by paving and asphalt with just a few trees to add a touch of green – was pretty full with hundreds of people in mainly red uniforms from the various communist parties, as well as many more variedly dressed trade unionists and socialists and a smallish group of anarchists in black.

The Communist Youth Organisation (KGÖ) is the youth wing of the Turkish Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP)

The sun shines directly into most of the square, giving bright highlights and areas of deep shadow, so flash fill becomes essential for most pictures. Red isn’t my favourite colour photographically, although possibly digital copes a little better than film, but still it seems to lose detail far too readily and give large blocks of featureless colour, even though the highlights aren’t blocked. At least with digital images it’s fairly easy to do something about it, and “burning in” the over-bright reds usually solves or reduces the issues.

With the large areas of red (and yellow in some places) you do get a lot of red light as you can see in the faces in the picture above. But it’s part of the picture and usually adds to it.

Although photographically the problems are those I’ve coped with many times before, this May Day I faced another and fortunately less usual picture. When I had to visit my doctor a few years ago with a knee problem, one of the things he commented on was how flexible my knees were, and I think it’s something that comes from being a photographer. All of the time when I’m taking pictures I’m busy trying to get the camera in exactly the right position, flexing my knees, going just a little lower or higher and occasionally dropping down on them to the ground. Generally it must be pretty healthy exercise for the knees, though I do sometimes end up with a few bruises, and virtually every pair of trousers I own suffers from ‘photographers knee‘ with a worn area halfway up both legs.

A short while after starting taking pictures at Clerkenwell I dropped down on my knees to photograph a group of kids, and there was a loud splitting sound. When I got up it was to find a split down the front of my trousers from close to my waist halfway down to my knees.

It was an embarrassing moment and for a while I was at a loss what to do about it. Fortunately I had a fairly respectable pair of boxer shorts on underneath, but I still felt rather naked. I solved the problem by taking off the lightweight waterproof jacket I was wearing and tying the sleeves around my waist so that the jacket hung down my front to just above my knees and continued working.

George Brown is beheaded

It’s the only day that I’ve spent photographing wearing a skirt, and it was a busy one, covering the march and then going on to a May Day election carnival in front of the Houses of Parliament where effigies of David Cameron and Nick Clegg were hung, George Brown beheaded and then disembowelled and Nick Griffin thrown to be torn to pieces by the London mob (all good clean fun) as well as dancing around the maypole and more.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about my state of dress was that nobody seemed to notice, even people who know me well enough to comment, at least until I pointed it out to them. Of course there was quite a lot going on, including at one point a couple of naked male protesters in the trees next to the statue of Churchill.

I was busy photographing the maypole, where I’d almost got myself tied to the pole by the dancers, just ducking out under the ribbons as they closed in when I noticed a few people moving towards the corner of the square, where the Space-Hijackers ‘Spoil Your Ballot Bus’ had just appeared, and quickly joined a group of photographers taking pictures of it. But almost immediately I decided we weren’t in the right place, and ran round to the other side of the bus so I could get pictures with Big Ben behind it.

To my surprise the other photographers didn’t follow me.

The sky was getting a very dark gray, almost black, and I was a little worried it might rain, as my waterproof jacket was already in use. Fortunately by the time I needed it I was already in the dry, in a street that runs underneath all of Waterloo station’s 22 platforms, photographing the start of the ‘Rave Against the Machine‘ there, and after I’d taken some pictures I could make my way to the station and take the train home. It was quite a relief to be able to change my trousers when I eventually got home.

An Invitation to Croydon

The short version of a post with this title might well be “You’re welcome to Croydon” but there is more too it (and that might be misconstrued.)

So I’ll spell it out. I’m taking part in a show of a small group of photographers that is taking place at the Croydon Clocktower. Here’s my version of the poster:

If you are within reach of Croydon, you are welcome to join us on Wednesday evening 19 May at 6.30pm for the opening. There isn’t a theme to the show, and I think some very different work from each of us. The show continues until July 12 and is open Monday to Saturday 9.30am – 5.30pm.

My six pictures are – like the one above – all about police and policing and I hope reflect my questions about who if anyone polices the police.

I’m not anti-police, but I do think we have to be very clear about their role in protecting democratic freedoms and over the past few years have perhaps been drifting rather dangerously towards a police state.

I’ve included one picture from Croydon, which for me revolves about an area a couple of millimetres square in the 24x36cm print, too small to see on line, so you will need to come to the gallery!

Croydon isn’t a bad place in some ways, and I’ve photographed quite a bit there over the years. One piece you can see on line looked at ‘Line 1’ of the new tramway system that opened there a few years ago. I think this is probably the nearest stop to the show:

This was one of the relatively few times I’ve worked with medium format – taken on a Mamiya 7.

Workers Memorial Day – Stratford

This was the first year that the UK government had recognised International Workers Memorial Day, which has been marked here for a number of years, largely due to the efforts of the Construction Safety Campaign. I’ve photographed it because it highlights a very important issue, workplace safety. Despite a much greater emphasis on Health and Safety (and it’s too often used as an excuse for organisations not doing things they don’t really want to do, which brings it into disrepute) we still have far too many workplace injuries and deaths. We shouldn’t really call them accidents, since most are not really that, but the predictable consequences of management not taking proper precautions or insisting that workers do tasks without proper training or equipment or supervision. Accidents at work generally don’t happen, most are caused, and the people causing them almost always escape prosecution.

There are over a thousand building sites in London and only 28 HSE inspectors to cover them. 90% of reported accidents are not even investigated because there just isn’t the staff to do so. And when people are actually taken to court and convicted for offences that have led to the death and injury of workers, sentences are often derisory.

Management know that they can get away with it, and when they face fines over completion dates or costs are running high, safety is something that can be compromised.

I found this event with its large crowd of workers standing unusually quiet in memory of their two dead colleagues a moving one, and at times it was hard to photograph. Fortunately technically it was mainly straightforward, but there were pictures that I didn’t quite see as clearly as I might have.

One that I tried for but didn’t quite make was on the march earlier, which started close to the London 2012 Olympic stadium. I wanted to show the march and this together, but there was no really suitable viewpoint. Perhaps this was my best attempt:

which does have the advantage of having the stadium twice, once on the banner of the London Construction Branch of Unite. It’s a pity this was some way back in the march, and I would have liked to have got a rather more clever image of it with the stadium.

So far, this is the only picture that has got used, other than in my postings to Demotix and elsewhere, but you can see the set of them on My London Diary.

City of London Needs A Flash Flashmob

Security guards and police in the City of London have been at it again. Blatantly disregarding the official advice to police from the Home Office, they are continuing to misuse the powers under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act to harass photographers.

The NUJ Photographers Branch has Grant Smith’s account of what happened to him yesterday, 10th May, and clearly the police acted wrongly. They should have protected his right to photograph on the street but instead acted in an aggressive manner and forcibly searched him despite his cooperation with them. They also took away his mobile phone, although a later comment states it was later returned to him.

I think photographers need to educate both the City of London Police and security guards around the city, and a good way to do that would be a flash mob. My suggestion would be for it to start outside the police HQ in Wood St, and from their to go on a tour around every site in the city where we know of incidents of photographers being stopped. I’d like it to be a Flash flashmob, because firing a few hundred flashes would be a way of making sure we were noticed.

For maximum impact I think we should do it at lunchtime on a weekday when there are plenty of people in the City to see it – and perhaps some city workers who are also amateur photographers might be encouraged to join in.

Of course others may come up with better ideas – and I’ll be happy to join in with whatever is suggested.