Re-photo

Almost the only area where I still wish I was taking film is panoramic photography. Really because it is just so simple to taken with film and a panoramic camera – just compose and press the button.  Digital is more flexible and powerful but considerably more fuss, even for the kind of simple panoramas I prefer.

The 35mm panoramic film cameras I used had lenses around 26-30mm focal length which gives a decent vertical angle of view without usually encompassing huge areas of sky. The horizontal angle of view depended on how the camera worked, but with the swing lens versions was dictated by the angle the lens swung through, typically around 120 degrees.

So to get similar results with digital I want to use a lens with a similar vertical field, so either the same range of focal length or a slightly longer length used with the camera  in portrait format.  At or around the 30mm end I find I need a set of 3 exposures to stitch (perhaps 4  if I’m shooting portrait format)  while at the wider end, 2 frames will do.

One small complication is that I mainly shoot with zoom lenses, and if you are going to stitch images it is fairly important that the lens focal length remains constant. It really is only easy to be sure of this shooting at one or other end of the lens focal length range, although I suppose it would be possible to use masking tape to hold the lens at a fixed focal length.

Most zooms also alter focal length slightly as they focus, so at least in theory you need to hold the same focus throughout the series of exposures. This isn’t usually a problem as most panoramas can be taken with the lens focussed at infinity.

It’s also easier to get good stitching if all the pictures are taken at the same exposure – and under the same lighting conditions. The British climate is fickle and rather sneaky in this respect, rather too good at brightening up a little without telling you (or the reverse.)  Of course there is often considerable variation in lighting as you swing through that 120 degrees or so, and it’s something that film, with its gradual response to excessive highlights copes with rather better than digital, which has a pretty sharp cut-off on over-exposure.

Film wasn’t of course without its problems. You could (and I did) expose it wrongly and development had its hazards too. I’ve had film returned from a pro lab absolutely blank that I know was properly exposed and made countless errors over the years when processing my own which have resulted in damaged, uneven, dense or very thin negatives. But at least out there in the field it was simple.

Anyway, here is a very small version of one of the results which I was reasonably pleased with. The file is actually twice the size it displays at on the blog,  and you can see it and the others at 900pixels wide on My London Diary.

The actual image I produced from PTGui, stitched from two 12Mp images (4288×2848 pixels each) is 8028×2917 pixels, an aspect ratio of 2.75:1,  and the horizontal angle of view is a little under 100 degrees.  It would print nicely at perhaps 30 inches wide if I had a sheet of suitable paper that large!

It uses a equirectangular projection which works well if – as here – the vertical angle isn’t too large, and gives a very natural effect. The image is too wide to look good in normal rectilinear perspective. One advantage of the equirectangular is that it more of less keeps the full width of the image, allowing me to retain the yellow skips at the extreme right of the image, which were for me a vital part of the composition.

Talking to a doctor friend as I was working on the pictures that I took at the ‘Reclaiming Birth‘ march in London at the start of the week of International Women’s Day, he reminded me that one of the major aims of campaigners around this year’s events was to provide increased medical care for women while they gave birth, in order to cut down the number of women and children who die during childbirth. The call is for increasing medicalisation – and in  particular more doctors, more hospitals.

But here in the UK, the emphasis is rather different, because we have come to see the limits of the purely medical approach and campaigners are seeking to again give the women who are obviously at the centre of things a greater say in how they give birth and to centre the services provided around them, providing information, advice and support through the whole period of pregnancy, birth and baby care. Independent units such as the Albany Midwifery Practice based in Peckham, whose contract with Kings College Hospital was recently terminated, have provided models of best practice, achieving significantly better outcomes and highly satisfied mothers, many of whom were on the march, together with their children.

You can see the pictures and read more about the event  in Mums and Midwives Reclaim Birth  on My London Diary.

Photographically the real problems were that almost everything about the march was the wrong way round. At the start of the march as people moved from Geraldine Mary Harmsworth park where they had gathered out on to the road the sun was shining strongly more or less directly into my lens as I tried to take pictures, and the same was true at the end of the march as it came up Whitehall for the rally. And when I photographed the march going over Westminster bridge with the Houses of Parliament in the background, all the marchers had their backs to me.

The sun, still low in the sky although we are approaching the Spring equinox, was a big problem. The lens hoods on wide-angle zooms are never very effective, and as usual I was doing the usual trick of trying to hold my left hand in the appropriate place to  cast a shadow on the lens. Tricky to do and impossible to avoid getting the odd frame with fingers in the top that need to be cropped out. Of course where possible I look for something in the scene that will act as a shade – perhaps a handy sign or even a placard or banner.

People walking towards you with the sun behind them will of course have their faces in shade, and you seldom have the luck to find a natural reflector that will put light into those shadows. The SB800, set to auto-fill at -2/3 or -1  stop is  a great help, though it risks over-exposure when subjects get close to the camera, and if I remember I’ll dial in a matching -2/3 stop to the ambient exposure set on the camera, which doesn’t seem to compensate itself for the extra light from the flash.

Seeing only people’s backs as they walk towards Westminster is a harder to fix. Occasionally I ask people to turn round  or look back over their shoulders, although I don’t really like posing them at all. Sometimes people decide themselves to pose and I’ll take advantage of this – as I did with the two women with their banner from Swansea.  But I also had another idea which was to make use of the more than 140 degree horizontal coverage of the 10.5mm full-frame fisheye.

From exactly the right place above and slightly in front of someone’s head, this lens should make it possible to see their face (though from a rather odd angle ) and also the view in front of them. Although it should work in theory, in practice it is a little trickier to perform. My ideal camera position would have me floating horizontally face down in mid air above them around 2 metres or slightly more above the ground, but I couldn’t see an easy way to do this.

The approach I tried – not entirely successful – was to walk just a few inches behind the person I was trying to photograph and a few inches to one side, holding the camera up at arm’s length and slightly forward.  Since the 10.5mm is a digital format only lens, I had it on the D300 and one of the annoying small things missing from that body is an eyepiece blind. So while one hand is holding the camera to press the shutter, the other has to be on the camera back covering the eyepiece otherwise the light entering there will mess up the exposure reading and give severely underexposed results. (Had I thought a little more carefully I would have put the camera on to manual exposure, when this particular contortion would not have been needed.)

As you can see I couldn’t quite get the camera in the place I wanted – it isn’t far enough forward to show the woman’s face, although it does just manage the child in the push chair. I’d really need to mount the camera on a monopod and use a wireless release, and getting the orientation right would be extremely tricky.

I took quite a few frames (probably resulting in a rather worried woman) using both portrait and landscape orientation and the pictures are at least a little different. As often with a lens with such a wide angle of view the sun was also a little of a problem – and in this frame it was only just outside the picture where you can see the light area.  In the vertical version it is actually in the frame, which as you can guess made processing this image near impossible – and there is an interesting piece of colour on the pavement.

I always enjoy photographing the annual Tibet Freedom March, although of course I would prefer it to be an event celebrating the achievement of freedom rather than bemoaning its loss. Although the spirit of Tibet is kept alive, China’s rise as to become the major world power seems to make any  attempts to put pressure on it to ease conditions in Tibet likely to be ineffectual; but perhaps China will develop as a more democratic nation as it gains in wealth.

Coming in a generally wintry month here, the colour it brings makes a welcome change, and I think most years recently the sun has been out. Certainly this year London felt a little warmer than it has for some months as we gathered outside RIBA, opposite the Chinese embassy.

RIBA of course houses one of the largest collections of architectural photographs anywhere- between 700,000 and 1.5 million pictures – and more than 40,000 – not all photographs –  are available on-line at RIBApix. That makes it almost as large an on-line collection as My London Diary, where you can see my pictures from this year’s Tibet Freedom March!

If you are  “an up-and-coming architectural photographer” then you could consider the opportunity of putting your work on RIBApix

But back to Tibet and the march.  As well as being very colourful (often rather too colourful for my taste, with those strong primaries of the Tibetan flag)  the march tends to be fairly densely packed and also full of  interest. It’s also relatively slow-moving.  Taken together these things provide an ideal situation for the kind of close wide-angle work work in crowds that appeals to me.

So it was a good day to work with the 16-35mm, and I took quite a few frames at the wider end. But I could go even wider, putting the 10.5mm fisheye on the D300.

The 10.5mm is a full-frame fisheye, filling the whole sensor on the D300 and giving a diagonal field of view of 180 degrees (horizontally it is “only” a little over 140 degrees.) Its also a lens that lends itself to the use of various software tools to alter the perspective of the image. You can process the files to give a rectilinear panorama for example, though few subjects survive this treatment unscathed – rectilinear perspective seldom works above a roughly 100 degree angle of view.

So here is the march at Piccadilly Circus taken with the 10.5mm

and its a picture I quite like, but a click in Photoshop applies the Image Trends Inc ‘Fisheye-Hemi 2‘ filter to give a slightly different effect.

It produces a result that I think is more ‘natural’ looking, in particular reducing the distortion of the figure at the extreme left of the picture and eliminating the curvature on the placard. Probably a little over 50% of the pictures I take with the 10.5mm look better treated to this realignment, though I’m not sure that Reuters or the World Press Photo would approve.

It hasn’t actually eliminated all curvature, and it actually looks less distorted than a rectilinear version would.  There are other alternatives to the Fisheye-Hemi plugin (some of which have the advantage of being free) but this is the one that most often works for me. It makes use of almost all the pixels in the image (losing a few in the corners) retaining the full width of the frame that I shot and almost all of the subject matter – the face that I placed at the left edge of the frame is still at the edge.

It works well in this case, particularly because I had the camera level when I took the picture, and so the lamp post and buildings at right of the frame become both straight and upright.

What is does lose is a little of the kind of outwards thrust and dynamic of the original image, where the woman in the centre really almost bursts out of the frame towards you. I was indeed very close to her when I took the picture; one of the problems of using this lens effectively is that you sometimes  have to really invade people’s personal space. In marches where they are moving forwards and you are walking backwards as you take your pictures it can be difficult to avoid collisions!

Holloway Prison, the best-known women’s prison* in England, is not a fun place for anyone to be, either inside or outside, where it always seems somehow isolated and bleak even though it is in inner London. It’s next to a road junction which is part of a largish one-way system, and set a few yards back from the road behind some ill-kept grass and shrubs. Across the wide street of east-bound traffic is a defunct petrol station, and every time I’ve visited there has been an icy wind from the east blowing across the largely open space.

Thursday night it was cold, just a few degrees above freezing and the wind chill soon got into my bones. It’s a place with no shelter.

Virtually all the light for this picture came from a Nikon SB800 on camera

Outside the prison were a small group of demonstrators with banners. Inside were three women held without charge or trial (we do have a justice system in England, but it doesn’t seem to work for asylum seekers and migrants without proper documents) accused of being ring-leaders in a hunger strike still continuing three weeks later without them in the immigration detention centre (a prison in all but name, where people are routinely held without trial) at Yarl’s Wood.

By the time I left to catch a bus an hour later, the numbers had swollen to around 50 and included a samba band whose music did do a little to warm us up. But although I’d dressed for the weather I had really needed an extra layer for the steppes of Holloway.

More pictures and more about Yarl’s Wood and the hunger strikers in my piece Holloway Protest for Yarl’s Wood Women on My London Diary (also published elsewhere.)

Normal street lighting is enough to give some fill when working with flash at night if you take advantage of the high ISOs that are now perfectly usable. But the short driveway into the prison was only lit by a few low wattage bulbs which added nothing. Essentially direct flash was the only light source for photography.

This of course has its problems. It isn’t very interesting lighting being close to the lens and gives a harsh shadow because of its small size. And there is the inverse square law.

Traditionally photographers used flash brackets to take the flash further from the lens, or held the flash at arms length, but although these may make the lighting more interesting they also increase the shadow problem.

Social photographers often use weird and wonderful attachments on their flash to create a larger light source – I used to have my own favourite device made with an old translucent bottle, some aluminium foil, a couple of rubber bands and a little ingenious copying of other people’s ideas, which although it looked a touch Heath Robinson, did the job remarkably well, but these things are not too suitable for demonstrations and don’t help a lot when working a larger distances, partly because the light source still appears small, but also because they cut the light down too much.

The compromise favoured by many photojournalists was the Sto-Fen Omnibounce, a small translucent clip on diffuser, and most flash units now come with an inferior copy of this device. It actually has very little effect (a euphemistic way of saying sod all) on the light quality according to my own tests, but it does make you feel better and gives more even light with wide-angles. So I was annoyed to find that I had forgotten to put it in my camera bag. However it probably would not have made much difference to the pictures!

I do sometimes claim to have a special derogation from the inverse square law when people ask about some of my pictures, though I seldom explain this.

Extreme differences in lighting needed a little Lightroom magic

The inverse square law if you are not familiar with it states that the light from a point source – and a camera flash is more or less that – falls off with with the square of the distance from the source. So if you imagine a picture with one person at 4 feet from the camera/flash and another at 8 feet, double the distance, the further person gets 1/4 (4=2squared) of the illumination. Its perhaps easier to think as a photographer that 2x the distance means 2 stops down and so on.

So if you expose for the close person, the distant guy is 2 stops under; and if you expose for the distant one, your near neigbour is at 2 stops over and likely to be pretty much burnt out white. It’s something that photographers like Winogrand and Friedlander used to great effect, but digital is less forgiving of overexposure than film and it is not in any case an effect that will generally endear you to editors.

You need either to get everyone at more or less the same distance from your camera, or expose very carefully to put the closest person just on the edge of burning out. If you do that, then you can burn the over-bright areas down in Lightroom (or Photoshop) and brighten the more distant dark parts. Virtually everything I took at Holloway needed something of this treatment. The results aren’t great but they are a lot better than they would otherwise have been.

While taking pictures I was asked by the reporter for a small local newspaper if I would supply them with pictures. He was apologetic when I enquired about rates and could only offer a by-line and I declined.  I think events like this are a good example of why photographers are still needed, even when everyone has a digital camera.  And if people need photographers they have to be prepared to pay for them.

* Holloway prison opened in 1852 as a mixed prison but became prison for women alone in 1902, just in time for the suffragettes.  It was demolished and completely rebuilt on the same site in the 1970s and early 80s as a rather depressive red brick block, but some reports at least on the Internet still use the pictures of the rather impressive Victorian ‘castle’ that would have been a much preferable backdrop to my pictures!