Re-photo

A photographer friend had suggested I cover the demonstration outside the Hendon Hall Hotel on Sunday morning before going on to the event in Harrow, which we – and the police – had expected to be much bigger and possibly rather more exciting. “Both in North London” he’d said, and they are, but still around 6 miles apart by the shortest route – London is a fairly spread out place. If I was making a lot of money from photography the obvious answer would have been to take a taxi, but things being as they are I’d worked out how to travel between the two with a five minute walk, half an hour on a bus and a short tube journey.  Using my folding bike would have been a better solution, but I don’t like leaving it locked in the open anywhere as Bromptons are such tempting targets for bike thieves.

It wasn’t a bad journey in the end, though the bus was running around five minutes late, and we made it in plenty of time because there wasn’t a lot happening when we arrived at Harrow. The counter-demonstration  had been called for two hours before the right-wing demo was due to begin and there was little to do except stand around and talk – mainly to the many other photographers who were also covering the event.

One thing that was a little disconcerting was the police, who were obviously putting on a charm offensive towards the press. One greeted me with a smile and a handshake as I walked out of the station and asked me what I thought was going to happen.  There really were police everywhere – according to one local paper, 800 of them, because last time the English Defence League had visited Harrow in the Summer there was a certain amount of trouble and fighting by them with both police and young Muslims who forced them to retreat.

This time the police had erected a pretty effective dividing line between where the two sides were meeting, with a two rows of barriers linked  and large bags of sand to hold them in place, though it did occur to me that these would allow determined and reasonably athletic protesters to easily leap over.

We chose to start opposite the mosque, as the car park where the EDL and the SIOE (Stop Islamisation of Europe) were to have their rally at 2pm was empty. There wasn’t actually a lot to photograph with the counter-demonstrators, organised by Brent and Harrow Unite Against Fascism, but at least there were a couple of hundred people milling around and after a while a few speeches.

A little before 2pm photographers wandered over to look at the car park it was still virtually empty, with a group of six forlorn-looking youths and men.  Police told us we could walk round along the main road to get to the other side of the barrier but there seemed to be little point, although there were several TV crews there. Much more was happening on the side where we were, particularly as the several hundred UAF supporters moved closer and started to chant.

Eventually they charged right up to the double barrier, which was defended by a line of police as well as half a dozen rather menacing looking dogs straining on their leashes. But now we were obviously on the wrong side to take pictures. Much to my surprise, the police allowed those of us who could show a valid press card to climb over the barrier at a point away from the demonstrators. It was a degree of cooperation that I’ve seldom experienced. I’m just sorry I was in so much of a rush to get to the other side that I didn’t photograph us climbing over.

We were now able both to photograph the noisy demonstration across the barriers and also to wander a few yards and photograph the EDL/SIOE handful – now almost up to double figures. Some of them were clearly trying to hide from photographers, but others were posing and showing an England flag and a poorly drawn anti-burkha sign.

You can read about what happened after this on My London Diary (or Demotix) where the two stories are more or less the same. But on Demotix there is an edited selection of just under 20 pictures, while on My London Diary there are considerably more – and they are not watermarked.

I’m often asked why I put so many images on that site (or rather told that I put too many on it).  In part it’s because I want to use pictures to tell a story, rather than, as in newspapers and magazines to spice up the text with an illustration or two. And although I do edit quite considerably – and typically only about 1 in 8 or 1 in 10 of the pictures I take makes it to the site – it has always been my intention to make My London Diary a site for the people without whom I could not have taken the pictures. When people I photograph ask me “Can I have a copy?” I give them my card with the web site address on it, and tell them I’ll put it on there – and the pictures are also there for those who haven’t asked me. It’s a site that I see as very much being for the people I photograph as well as my own diary of events.

Throughout the afternoon until I left just before 3.30pm, people seemed to keep arriving to defend the mosque. My rough estimate, made shortly before I left, was that there were more than 500 present, and I think 23 in the right-wing demonstration.  One account in a local paper gives rather lower numbers for both, perhaps suggesting they counted rather earlier than I did.

Sometimes of course it’s been hard to get away from demonstrations where there is a large police presence, but today as I walked past a number of lines and groups of police it was all smiles. One asked me if I had got any good pictures – a judgement I really leave to others. Well, I think a few aren’t bad, but perhaps the image above is my favourite.

The demonstrators outside the Hendon Hall Hotel on Sunday morning didn’t know that the person they had come to demonstrate against was over 2000 miles away in Israel.

Tzipi Livni was Foreign Minister of Israel when they launched their attack on Gaza a year ago, but is no longer in office. This means she has lost her immunity against prosecution under international law, and lawyers supporting the Palestinian cause had apparently obtained a warrant for her arrest on international war crimes charges in a London court.  Acting on advice from the Israeli authorities that it would be possible for her to be arrested should she visit Britain (or Spain, Belgium or Norway)  she had decided not to travel here and delivered a speech to a largely elderly Jewish audience at the Jewish National Fund conference by video link some time on Sunday afternooon.

Photographically the demonstration with a little less than a hundred people inside a pen outside the hotel complex was not particularly of interest. There were some few banners and flags and a certain amount of animation whenever a car pulled up to enter the gateway next to the pen after being checked by the security guards, but really not a lot was happening.

So it was a little of a challenge to produce interesting pictures – but of course I wasn’t going to set anything up – it goes against my principles. I did what I think you always have to do, watched the people taking part carefully and picked out scenes that struck me as visually more interesting, framing carefully. There were only one or two other actual photographers present which made it a little easier, not having to bother much about getting in the way of other people.

This man attracted me because I saw him as a man holding not a placard but a gun, its barrel the the stem of the key with its text “thE RIGHT Of return”, his right forefinger on the trigger and the orange scarf a part of the stock. I took a series of pictures, but couldn’t quite get the expression I wanted.

The there were images like this, where the placard stands out and tells a story:

and of course I wrote about the story for Demotix and also on My London Diary.  Normally I might have framed more tightly, perhaps as a vertical eliminating the man on the phone at the left, although I liked having the ‘Free Palestine’ placard above his head. But there were other reasons to frame it like this (or rather to use the frame like this), partly that I wanted to use a closer image of this demonstrator with the other side of his placard (which there is also a story about that in the piece on My London Diary/Demotix.)

Altogether I spent over an hour taking pictures, and used around a dozen of them with the story on Demotix.  As usual you can see a looser edit  – around 20 pictures from the roughly 200 exposures I made – on My London Diary, along with a similar but slightly updated version of the story.

I made life a little harder for myself on Thursday by forgetting to check my camera settings before taking pictures. No excuse, I just forgot.

Normally I have a roughly 35 minute train journey to London and often either a bus or an underground ride to the location when I’m photographing demonstrations, although quite are few that take place in Central London are in easy walking distance from the mainline station I arrive at.

When I get on the train I usually sit down and take out my camera and check everything is ok. If I’m not taking the train I do this at home before setting out.  All the basic stuff like spare batteries for camera and flash, spare CF cards, cleaning cloth, lens cleaning kit live in my bag along with my camera and my normal set of lenses, so when as usual I find I’m in a rush and have to pick up my bag and run for the train I can be fairly sure I’ll have what I need.

On the train I usually check the lens surfaces and clean if necessary,  get the camera to clean the sensor, format the CF card in the camera and restore the camera settings to my defaults. The Nikon lets you store sets of custom settings – and I almost always use the same set.

Then I’ll think about where I’m going and what I’ll be taking (so far as I know),  the weather and anything else and decide what would be suitable initial settings for the job. I decide on the appropriate ISO and whether or not to use auto-ISO and if so, on the highest setting, and make  appropriate settings for the aperture and shutter speed for aperture priority,m shutter priority and manual modes so that should I switch to them from P (either accidentally or on purpose) I don’t have too much fiddling to do or get exposure horribly wrong.  I make sure I haven’t left the metering on spot – which I use at times, but if you use it when you think you are in centr-weighted mode can be embarrasing.  And a few other little things like that, so that when I arrive somewhere if things are already happening I can just pick up the camera and start taking pictures.

Because I know if things are happening, that’s what I will do, and if the camera isn’t set up sensibly it may well be some time before I notice. I’m not very good at noticing the information in the viewfinder, rather single-minded about looking at the picture and solving the visual problems. I do occasionally glance at the image on the back of the camera, but ‘chimping’ disturbs the flow, and in any case quite a few problems don’t show up obviously there.

I’ve also got the problem that I can’t actually see the display on the camera back at all clearly (or the top plate display) when I’m working. I need glasses to read, but have never used to wearing them when using a camera. My Nikons have just enough eyesight correction available so I can see the viewfinder image clearly (though its rather blurred for most other people if I ask them to take a picture with it.) One day I’ll have to have an expensive talk with my optician and start working with glasses on, but I don’t look forward to it.

On Thursday I was distracted and forgot my usual routine, missing one very important point when I took out the camera. I’d left the ISO at 3200 from when I’d been taking pictures in a very dimly lit pub a couple of days earlier.

Of course I should have noticed the ISO and rather unusual settings for me such as 1/500 fll displayed very clearly below the image in the viewfinder,  but I actually managed to shoot several hundred images without doing so!

Fortunately, the D700 does a pretty marvellous job at ISO3200 (if it didn’t I would have noticed earlier as I do occasionally zoom right into images on the screen and put my glasses on to check, particularly that eyes are sharp in portraits.)  So back in Lightroom, with just a touch more noise reduction and sharpening than normal I had more or less perfect results.

3200 is just a little extreme, and viewed at actual size on screen I could see just a little more noise and a little less detail than normal, but an actual size image would be 31 inches (79cm) wide if my screen was that wide.

But looking on the positive side, I think this image wouldn’t have worked so well at the ISO 400 I would probably have been working at had I got my act together.

And perhaps the extra depth of field does help in a picture like this:

so perhaps I ought to work at ISO 3200 more often. Although it might make sense to edit the EXIF data before trying to smuggle it past Alamy quality control.

The event was a demonstration by Trident Ploughshares at the UK HQ of the leading company involved in making nuclear bombs in Britain, at the AWE at Aldermaston. Of course Lockheed Martin is a US company, and there are allegations that it is also producing warheads for US use at their Aldermaston bomb factory, probably in breach of international war.

Given the Cold War ended 20 years ago and we are supposed to support an international treaty aimed at stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons, we might ask why we are paying a US company billions of pounds to make more. Any government that is serious about making savings and repaying our huge national debt should be ditching our nuclear programme rather than expanding it.More pictures and more about it on My London Diary.

Saturday’s main event was organised by the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, made up of over a hundred organisations whose only common feature is their concern over climate change and which have a combined membership of around 11 million – about 1 in 6 of the UK population.

I first came across them a few months back when they organised a demonstration outside the Department of Energy and Climate Change and minister Ed Miliband came out in person to speak to them.

A real Minister (with a worried aide) and a false cardinal with other demonstrators outside the DECC in September.

Although they didn’t succeed in getting all 11 million to come to ‘The Wave’ there were roughly 50,000 marching though London (so many that some were still at Trafalgar Square or in Whitehall at 3pm and missed the actual wave when Parliament was surrounded) making this the largest demonstration on climate change in the UK to date.

If the main event lacked the political bite of the Campaign Against Climate Change (who were taking part as one member of the coalition) there was certainly plenty of enthusiasm, fancy dress and blue face paint to make for some visually striking images.  The ‘Wave’ itself was perhaps something of an anti-climax, and the crush of photographers close to Big Ben at the head of the demonstration made photography difficult.

Especially those photographers who hold their large DSLRs out at arms length in front of other photographers.  Photographic etiquette generally stops other still photographers from actually walking in front of you as you are taking pictures (nothing stops some guys taking video), but somehow a growing number seem to think its OK if you just hold your camera in front of others.

More pictures from the march and the final wave on My London Diary.