Category: Political Issues

It’s a free country (at least in New York)

New rules from the New York Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting (MOFTB) about photographing on the streets of that city will I think be welcomed by photographers who work there. They make it clear that you don’t need a permit unless you want to use extensive equipment or vehicles or want to block a significant part of a street for your work.

If you only use a hand-held camera (still or video) – even if it is on a tripod, you don’t need a permit, as it makes clear: “Standing on a street, walkway of a bridge, sidewalk, or other pedestrian passageway while using a hand-held device and not otherwise asserting exclusive use of City property is not an activity that requires a permit.” Tripods can still land you in trouble if you block road lanes or use them on narrow pavements, but do not in themselves need a permit – they too are generally regarded as “hand-held equipment.”

Similarly it states ” the filming of a parade, rally, protest or demonstration does not require a permit” and you don’t need a permit if you are a press photographer with a NYPD pass.

To photograph in city parks and inside public buildings will still require authorisation from those in charge of them and permits will continue to be required for the certain activities “including but not limited to animals, firearms (actual or simulated), special effects, pyrotechnics, police uniforms, police vehicles” etc.

The new rules came only after several rounds of public consultation and seem a useful clarification of the right to photograph on public streets (and the activities that, largely reasonably, require a permit.)

Although we have a similar freedom to photograph in public places in the UK without need of permits, it might perhaps be nice to have a similar statement clarifying this in our country and in our major cities in particular, where increasing photographers are finding their right to photograph while on the public street without permission challenged, particularly by the growing armies of heritage wardens, community support officers, security employees and others who police our streets.

One site worth looking at for UK photographers is UK Photographers Rights
by Linda Macpherson LL.B, Dip.L.P., LL.M, a lecturer in law at Heriot Watt University, and I’m glad to read from one of the comments that she is working on a revised version of her “short UK guide to the main legal restrictions on the right to take photographs and the right to publish photographs that have been taken” which you can download there.
The comments on the page, and in particular Linda’s replies to them make some interesting reading, although they are occasionally debatable (as are so many things in law.)

Trafalgar Square - without a licence
Trafalgar Square – without written permission to photograph
(Seventh Day Adventist Youth march against gun & knife crime)

One particular instance concerns the by-laws which apply to Trafalgar Square which thousands of photographers – myself included – regularly break which require written permission for “photographs or any other recordings of visual images for the purpose of or in connection with a business, trade, profession or employment or any activity carried on by a person or body of persons, whether corporate or unincorporate“.

This is exactly the kind of nonsense that the New York MOFTB rules clarify and largely dispense with – making clear exactly what kind of photographic activity needs a licence, and provides a very good example of why would benefit from a similar document in London.

Editors Don’t Look at Pictures?

When a picture of Iran’s recent missile tests hit the front pages of major US newspapers and made news services including the BBC, one thing was obvious at a glance. It was a fake, as a blog on the NY Times clearly shows (thanks to State of the Art where I first saw the story, although there is rather more about it and how it broke on PDN Newswire, as well as a later update on the story on PDN Pulse.)

An Irani Photoshop user had cloned in an extra missile, and it wasn’t a convincing job. One missile doesn’t look a lot different to another, but when several clouds of dust from the right hand missile appear identically and rather distinctively underneath the missile to its left it is a bit of an instant give-away.

(When I looked there were over 600 comments on the post, although I’ve not read them all. Some suggest there may have been further doctoring of the image.)

Yet though it was an obvious fake, not only did the picture fool Agence France Press, who picked it up from an Iranian Revolutionary Guard web site who picked it up and distributed it (and I rather doubt will be sending the licensing fees back to Iran), but editors at leading newspapers and web news sites.

If anyone in the media was seriously looking at photographs, the cloning would have been spotted immediately – it really is rather an amateur job as surely there must have been other images with the dust clouds at a different state from which they could have been borrowed – or a little intelligent reworking could have made them a less than perfect match. Of course it isn’t the only case of bad photo-manipulation – and State of the Art have also reported Fox News being caught badly uglifying a NY Times reporter recently, I think using one of the tools available for making a mess of your mates to post on your social networking site.

But the news is dominated by people whose business is words.

Paper Planes for Ruth Kelly

Flash mobs can be rather tricky things to photograph, particularly for those of us who find it difficult to be at the right place at the right time. According to the FAQ on the UK Flash Mob web site, a flash mob is “a sudden gathering of people into a crowd that do something unusual for a few minutes in unison and then disperse.” I photographed one of their events – the London start of a Flash Mob Global Pillow Fight in Leicester Square – earlier this year.

‘Stop Airport Expansion‘ was both the name of the group who had organised the event (and an earlier one to celebrate the opening of Hedatrow T5 that I missed) and the message they wanted to send to the elusive Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly, who has refused to visit local authorities or meet with local people who will be affected by airport expansion, particularly by a third runway at Heathrow. The ‘Stop Heathrow Airport Expansion Flashmob‘ took place outside the offices of the Department for Transport in Marsham St, though where she was at the time nobody seemed to know.

I’ve been opposed to the expansion of Heathrow as a local resident since I used to watch the aircraft low over the garden from my pram. The airport began with deception before my birth, pushed through in wartime (and diverting resources from the war effort) and has continued to grow and grow, repeatedly breaking promises that each new development will be the last. I photographed marches against the building of the third runway at Heathrow in 2003 as well as earlier this year.

People did appear fairly dramatically just before 11 am, although there were perhaps not quite enough of them to make a real mob.

The whistle came early
And when someone (at right above) blew a whistle just before 11.02 (their clock was wrong) everyone took it as a signal to throw their planes, though they did pick them up and throw them again at around the correct moment. They had to pick up the planes in any case, as police had warned them they might otherwise be charged with littering.

Planes in flight

Catching good pictures of paper planes in flight turned out to be surprisingly tricky. I’d fortunately realised there might be a problem in advance, and turned the D300 on to the high speed mode. Usually I leave the camera on the low speed continuous setting, which I’ve set using the custom setting d4 to be 3 frames per second. I find this is the fastest speed I can leave it on and reliably take a single exposure by a short shutter press that doesn’t jab and cause camera shake, while allowing me to take a sequence of images by holding my finger down.

Up till now I’ve also been using the 14 bit RAW setting, which restricts the maximum frame rate to slightly slower than this, at 2.5 fps. I’ve seen reports that there is very little advantage in using this compared to the 12 bit setting, but hadn’t found the time to test it out for myself. (I’ve continued to use RAW compression which I tested on the D200 and found made no discernible difference in my kind of pictures.) But waiting for the mob to flash, I’d remembered to set the bit depth down to 12 bit so I could shoot 12 bit RAW bursts at 8 frames per second.

You can see more of my efforts at photographing the Stop Heathrow Airport Expansion Flashmob on My London Diary as usual.

I didn’t notice any drop in quality in these files compared to the 14 bit ones, but the extra number of pictures on a card was significant (the manual suggests around 1.3 times as many.) I found I got almost exactly 100 files per gigabyte compared to around 79 using 14 bit, a very slightly smaller difference. I’ll perhaps get round to making some more careful comparisons of image quality for myslef shortly – and when I do will write more.

Even in 1/8th of a second, a paper plane moves a considerable distance, and catching them flying low with the added milliseconds of reaction time and shutter lag was a lottery in which I had no outstanding success. Of course I could have set something up, but I’m not that sort of photographer.

Time Running Out

Time seems to be passing very quickly for me at the moment, and I could hardly believe it when I had to start a new month on My London Diary. So it was perhaps fitting that several of the events I’ve photographed recently have been about time running out for our planet.

June 30 was the last day of a government consultation about what started off as a potentially good idea – eco-towns – but has ended up as an unpopular mistake. Eco-towns were promised to be zero-carbon new developments using brown-field sites and acting as exemplars of ecological development in various ways. But the thinking behind them was never properly explored, and murky compromises with the building industry muddied the original concept, and we ended up with proposals that really looked very little different from other new town developments, largely to be sited on prime agricultural land. Brown-field sites are harder to find and generally give developers more problems.

It was hardly surprising that local protest groups emerged to oppose most of the proposals, nor that most of their opposition was on environmental grounds although probably very few of us welcome development in our own backyards. (I certainly hated it when the council built rather plain flats on the unregistered common land at the end of my garden.)

BARD against Middle Quinton

Certainly I think the strength of the opposition which was demonstrated outside the Houses of Parliament on June 30 will at least worry the government – as should the comments of prominent architects and environmentalists.

More on the story – and of course many more pictures –
in Eco-Towns Scam – Parliament Lobby on My London Diary.

Drop the Debt in London

Thursday I spent a day out in London, but my idea of a day out is perhaps different to most people. It started badly, when I forgot where I was supposed to be going and went to Trafalgar Square rather than Parliament Square!

I’ve changed from using my ancient and rather inconvenient diary software that produced nice neat printouts of my schedule to a rather more up-to-date piece of software, but haven’t so far managed to get it to give me such nice lists. Thursday I was in a rush and just glanced at the screen, scribbled a few notes and ran for the train. And got it wrong.

So I was late, and missed the start of the event I’d gone to photograph. Really organisation is vital, and I wasn’t the only one who had messed up, as the organisers hadn’t realised they needed permission from Westminster City Council for what they wanted to do.

The two mistakes didn’t quite cancel each other out, but it did mean I’d missed rather less than I would otherwise have done. I was able to catch up and photograph the rest of the event.

Birmingham May 2008
Paper chains in Birmingham

Which had started several weeks ago in Birmingham, where at the ‘Journey for Justice’ we had celebrated the 10th anniversary of the human chain which had been perhaps the most effective demonstration ever at a G8 Heads of Government meeting. Without any violence by demonstrators or police it put the cancellation of the overseas debts of the world’s poorest countries firmly on the political agenda.

There is still a very long way to go for the ‘Drop the Debt’ campaign – with only 20% of such debt yet dealt with. But that 20%, as the director of Christian Aid noted, has meant as much as the contributions collected in a thousand years of the annual fund-raising in Christian Aid week, one of this country’s major charity collections.

The paper links in the chains made this year in Birmingham were to take the ‘Drop the Debt’ message to the G8 meeting in Japan in July, and last week a small group of London activists carried them to the the Department for International Development in Palace St where they were met by Development Minister Gareth Thomas.

Drop the Debt, London

Photographically things were a little tricky. As you can see, the meeting took place outside on the pavement, at the entrance of the building. There was a fairly huge difference in light levels in the bright sun on the pavement and the deep shade of the entrance.

Photographers sometimes tell me that digital doesn’t have the dynamic range of film, but generally that simply means they haven’t learnt to use digital. It can really deal with much the same range as colour neg, though to do so in this kind of situation does require that you shoot RAW rather than jpeg, and also make use of some flash fill where you can.

The big plus is that with digital you can see immediately whether you have things right, not mainly from the picture display, but from the histogram, and if necessary adjust exposure and flash intensity. Here I was also moving the flash (with the plastic diffuser head that came with it) to point in the direction that needed flash and as far as possible away from the parts of the subject in bright sun.

Apart from a few pictures with my new ultra wide-angle – which I discovered was stuck wide-open and had to give up with, most of the pictures came out fine, at least so far as exposure was concerned.

On the tube to my next location I played with the stop-down lever on the back of the ultra-wide, and fortunately was able to sort out the problem. Obviously I’d changed lenses in a hurry and banged the small lever against the mount, bending it enough to prevent it moving smoothly. After straightening it out carefully the lens worked perfectly.

Having spent around thirty years working with what seem to be the best camera mounts ever designed – from Leica and Olympus – the Nikon mount does seem a little crude.

Another Clapham Celebration

The SS Empire Windrush, which brought the first major group of Caribbean settlers from Jamaica to England in 1948 sank in the Med near Algiers around six years later, but a major monument of those times that have changed our country so greatly over the last 60 years remains.

Many of the 492 who arrived on the Windrush came with a suitcase and their hopes but little more. Many had served Britain in the armed forces, sometimes based in this country, and some few had places they could go to, but most were urgently in need of somewhere to stay while they sorted out jobs and a place to live.

One of the deep shelters, built for government use in the early 1940s and later opened for use as a public air-raid shelter in 1944 was pressed into service, quickly being adapted to provide basic living accomodation. This shelter still survives (along with the other London deep shelters) and the surface buildings are on the edge of Clapham Common near to Clapham South station.

The nearest labour exchange to the shelter was in Brixton, about a mile walk, and led to the area becoming the home of the Caribbean community in England. So it seemed an appropriate place to be celebrating the arrival of the Windrush, 60 years ago on Sunday.

Windrush celebration
Children listen to Four Kornerz and the Churchboyz at Clapham Windrush celebration

Although a small group walked from the deep shelter, the actual celebration took place a quarter of a mile away at the bandstand in the middle of Clapham Common, and was organised by Christian Aid, together with the Windrush Foundation and local churches. With speeches and gospel music it was more an aural than a visual event, although the children taking part in their own way made it rather more interesting.

One local church, Holy Trinity Clapham, played a major part in the event, as it had done in the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the Act abolishing the slave trade.

A commemoration walk last March started there, where worshippers in the ‘Clapham Sect‘ at the centre of the movement had included William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, John and Henry Thornton, John Venn, Zachary Macaulay and others, and went around the area stopping at notable sites associated with them, including the probable site of the ‘African Academy‘ in the picture above.

World Naked Bike Ride

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to photograph Saturday’s World Naked Bike Ride in London again. I wrote at some length last year about its ‘photography’ policy and my objections to it – it seems to be a blatant attack on the freedom of the press in particular and on individual freedoms at a time when both are under considerable fire from the law and order fascists. I won’t repeat myself – it’s still on line. But if you take part in a public event and want to hide your identity or blushes, as  I’ve said before, the answer is simple:

don’t shoot the photographer; wear a mask.

I also wrote a shorter piece about news values and nakedness after last year’s ride. There is a paragraph I rather like in it, so here it is – though you can of course use the link to read the rest.

10,000 marching for Palestine. Perhaps 3,000 Orangemen and women. A thousand or so naked or near naked cyclists. No contest, not even for the BBC. When I switched on Radio 4 for the 10 o’clock news there was only one London event. And there was no one there wearing a burkha.

Definitely not a burkha, but she made me think of both of my comments from last year.

But the World Naked Bike Ride is in several ways an interesting event, although as in previous years while bodies are very much on display environmental messages seemed at times to be rather well-hidden, leaving many of the public along the route bemused.

The two young women standing next to me at the start weren’t commenting on the state of the planet or the strangulating grip of car culture but that they had never seen so many penises before, and they were certainly glorious in their diversity. We speculated together briefly on whether the ride showed a greater proportion of circumcision than among the general public and if so why that should be and other major penis-related issues.

Later I was in the middle of a group of young men who loudly expressed the view that the whole event was “f**king out of order, innit” and that it should not be allowed, but most of the people standing around me as I photographed seemed startled but generally amused by the ride, even if few realised what it was about.

According to the web site, it is a “peaceful, imaginative and fun protest against oil dependency and car culture. A celebration of the bicycle and also a celebration of the power and individuality of the human body. A symbol of the vulnerability of the cyclist in traffic.”

I don’t know how many cyclists took part – it seemed roughly the same size as in previous years, and my guess would be a thousand or two. Of course it wasn’t just cyclists, there were some skateboards and roller blades, and some odd sort of curved metal thing. Surprisingly only two unicyclists – you have to be an exhibitionist to ride a unicycle, so I’d expect rather more. (Perhaps they are all away in Nova Scotia keeping most of their clothes on and ‘Riding the Lobster‘ along with one of my sons?) One of them was riding with the slogan “One Love, One Wheel” on his chest.

Cyclists take up quite a bit of road space compared to marchers, so it is certainly more impressive than a march with the same number of people, and of course the bared flesh greatly adds to the impact.

More pictures on My London Diary, though as always only a fairly small fraction of those I took. If you were on the ride and would like your picture (if I took one) email me and I’ll send one if I can.

Access to Life

The most recent posting on the Magnum blog, Access for Life looks at a success story about AIDS. When antiretroviral drugs first appeared in the 1990s, they made it a maneagable chronic disease for the 5% or so of sufferers who could afford the treatment. In recent years campaigns including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria launched in 2002 have cut costs and introduced new ways of using the drugs so that many more can continue to live.

The Access for Life web site features work by eight Magnum photographers in nine countries around the world, photographing peope before and four months after they began antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. So far I’ve only looked at the story from Russia by Alex Majoli which is featured on the blog, and which tells a powerful story making use of his colour and black and white pictures along with some simple snatches of video and a fine soundtrack (with sub-titles for the Russian dialogue) but I’ll go back and look at the others on the web site later. They feature some of my favourite photographers, including at least four I’ve previously written about.

Other photographers on the website along with Majoli , are Paolo Pellegrin, Jim Goldberg, Gilles Peress, Jonas Bendiksen, Steve McCurry, Eli Reed and there are two reports from Larry Towell covering Swaziland and South Africa.

Partying on the Tube

One of the downsides of living out on the edge of the city is that it can be hard to travel home very late at night. My last train leaves shortly before midnight on a Saturday and it’s then seven hours until the next. The hourly all-night bus service which used to serve us now drops me around 4 miles away.

So I tend not to photograph things that happen very late at night, and missed the Circle Line tube party on 31 May to mark Boris’s alcohol ban starting the next day.

I’m not a fan of the ban, though I would like the Underground to be safer for both passengers and staff. The ban will inconvenience tourists and others who occasionally like a cool beer as an antidote to the often stifling heat on the tube as they go from one of London’s attractions to another, or who like to relax a little on the way home from work, while I suspect that travel police will continue to largely turn a blind eye at large drunken groups of football supports and others who can be a real nuisance, whether or not they are actually drinking on the train. There are simply not enough police around to control them and adding an extra area of friction between them and the police is hardly likely to improve matters or manners.

Tube Party

I was reminded about the ban yesterday, as I was at last getting some of my pictures from another Tube party earlier this year ready to go into the stock libraries, something that tends to get on top of me (adding the captions, keywords and so on is a really tedious chore.)

Unless you are a New Zealander you will probably not know about the Treaty of Waitangi, a rather curious agreement signed by some Maori chiefs and British representatives in 1840. We used it to legitimise a takeover of the country, although in more recent years the Maoris have found it a way to claim some limited and belated reparation, and Waitangi Day is now celebrated as the New Zealand national Day.

Circle Line Pub Crawl - Waitangi Day

The main celebration in London over the past few years had been the Circle Line Pub Crawl, starting early at a pub near Paddington and leaving the train at every station along the line for another beer or two, arriving at Westminster and Parliament Square around tea-time (though little tea is in evidence.) There the square is packed with a heaving mass of Kiwis, some of whom strip to the waist and perform a noisy Haka before making for the station and the next stop and pub, although relatively few make it to the official end of the party at Temple station, having mostly by then dispersed to other pubs around Whitehall and Strand.

Despite approaching 10,000 distinctly unsober participants, it all seemed very good-natured, and although a slight inconvenience to some travellers (who might be advised to change to the District line services serving the same stations but totally ignored by the party-goers) does little or no harm while giving a little free entertainment to Londoners. Much of the inconvenience seems to be caused by official over-reaction including the temporary closing of some stations and stopping (or non-stopping) of some Circle line services, when a more intelligent response would be to put on extra trains and work the participants through the system as rapidly as possible. “We’ve got a crowd on the platform, so lets stop the trains and close the station” really doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Circle Line Pub Crawl - Waitangi Day

It’s an event that already waves a digit to numerous by-laws, including those on drinking in public places such as Parliament Square, and I wonder if Boris’s tube ban will have any impact on it, other than perhaps to add brown paper bags to the already quite impressive dress code.

Circle Line PUb Crawl

By the time you read this, you should be able to buy some of the pictures through Alamy, as well of course as directly from me – and there is a wider range of pictures on My London Diary which takes you through the day telling the whole story of the event as I saw it.

More on Metadata

Thanks to a friend for pointing me at the presentations now on-line from the 2nd annual Photo Metadata Conference, held in Malta on 5 June 2008, which included the first public presentation of the refurbished IPTC Core and a new IPTC Extension set of photo metadata.

If you feel you missed out on a jolly trip to Malta (and last year’s event was in Florence) then at least you can console yourself at having missed all of the Powerpoint presentations that are now available for download. Most of them actually seem to be saying more or less the same things and at times it seems as if the main interest during the sessions will have been in the colour of the shirts or dresses worn by the presenters.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. If you did get there it meant you could have spent your time in the bar and not missed a lot, and it’s good for all of us that there does seem to be considerable agreement over the necessity of metadata and its future direction.

Actually there are a few points of interest, especially for me in a presentation (download it from the programme page) by David Riecks that shows just the pig’s ear that major stock distributors make of it at the moment.

And that is really the root of the problem at the moment. There isn’t a great deal of point in a campaign to get photographers to put the meta-data in if libraries and others shake it all about and remove all or most of it.

Lightroom (and some other programs – but I use Lightroom) has made it relatively easy for photographers to add some essential metadata as a matter of routine when processing their raw files (or even jpegs if you have to shoot jpeg) although I’d like the process to start even earlier with camera manufacturers getting more into the act.

Every picture we shoot digitally now has EXIF data recorded, including the date and time. No photographer should ever find themselves having to enter this data into software manually (though if – as I’ve done at times – we manage to set the wrong year or the wrong time zone, we need to be able to correct it.) Software can pick it up automatically and rewrite it wherever it’s needed.

My camera also allows me to add some user-input data to every picture. It would only add a few bytes to firmware to allow the entry of some specified fields – such as copyright (what my data always contains), e-mail address and perhaps ‘Headline’ which would then be available to software. Which could then, for example copy the files to an appropriately located and named folder when you upload these to your computer, and perhaps also choose appropriate pre-sets for other purposes.

Several of the presentations address some of the real basics that make metadata useful, such as:

  • data should never need to be entered twice
  • it should be and offence to remove metadata or edit it without permission

(Some copyright lawyers claim removal is already is an offence under copyright law.)

Keywording
Perhaps the discussion that I would have found of most interest was “Keywording versus Controlled Vocabularies” which rather strikes me as a false dichotomy. To make keywording really useful you need a controlled vocabulary, and a controlled vocabulary seems to require some way to use it, which is by keywording. This was a ‘panel discussion’, and what you can download certainly throws little light on the topic.

Perhaps one of the problems is that the same keyword needs to be able to sit in several different hierarchical trees. Yesterday I was adding the keyword ‘Haka’ to some of my images to go in a library (actually I was adding it for a second time, because it was a keyword in the file I was uploading, but the system doesn’t read most of the metadata in the files – so I spend hours and hours re-keying.)

Haka in Parliament Square
Haka in Parliament Square for Waitangi Day

If I was setting up a keywording system using a controlled vocabulary I might want to include Haka in a heirachy part of which would look like this:

>Country>New Zealand>Maori>Culture>Haka

but I might also want to include it in a hierarchy that was cross-cultural and looked at various types of dance and their function, part of which would look like this:

>dance>war dance>Haka

or perhaps we might want to look at it in yet other ways.

How we make such links is important both in keywording and also even more so in developing smart methods of searching – which is really the important end of the process.

PLUS
Something that I think we will hear more about is PLUS, the Picture Licensing Universal System, which will provide a single world-wide system for describing licences and to embed licensing information as metadata in images. It won’t replace IPTC, but provides only licence-related information – including of course address and copyright details. It seems it will be free to use, although I’m not sure whether non-members of PLUS will be included in their seachable creator data-base when this is up and running. Widespread adoption of PLUS would give added protection to image creators and clarify conditions for those wanting to use images.

Of course the success of such a system depends in part on national laws. If the US does decide to do its own coach and horses over so-called “Orphan Rights” (as to some extent it has always done on copyright) it will almost certainly severely weaken the utility of PLUS. But intellectual property rights are increasingly an important part of world trade, and perhaps the age when the US can run the world is coming to an end?