April, 2010 | >Re-PHOTO

Invisible Lenses

Its nice to know, thanks to the review article on ultra wide-angles in the April issue of British Journal of Photography, that “Nikon’s newly announced 16-35mm f4 VR (will be) available later in the year” when I’ve been using it for well over a month. The first shipment to the UK arrived shortly before the end of February, and mine was on my camera the following working day.

It was the lens I’d been waiting for since I bought a Nikon FX body. I’d tried the Nikon 14-24 f2.8 (described in the BJP as setting a new standard for the class) but had not been impressed; the few test shots I took with one were fine, but convinced me that this was an impractical lens to work with, largely because of its bulging and unprotectable front element, but in any case it just did not feel right on the camera. In any case I already had a Sigma 12-24 that covered full frame, and although it wasn’t as fast or quite as sharp as the Nikon, did a reasonable job, but too often I was finding that I had to switch lenses as 24mm wasn’t quite long enough. Looking at the various focal lengths that I took pictures at when using this lens I could also see that there were relatively few good images made at wider than 16mm – and usually images that I tried just looked too wide.

I’d looked long and hard at the older 16-35mm but wasn’t too happy with the performance, particularly at the price, of a lens that was really designed for film. So when the new 16-35mm was announced I wanted one. Unlike a loud chorus on the web I wasn’t worried by a maximum aperture of “only” f4 – with the kind of high ISO performance available on the D700 (or D3) the loss of one stop over f2.8 seemed a minor detail. And although I’d have preferred a smaller, lighter lens it was within the limits I was prepared to go to for improved performance. My only sticking point was the price, but in the end I decided it was worth the £999 which was the cheapest I could find it at at UK dealer, a decent saving on the recommended price.

I don’t review lenses, I use them. I’ve been using the 16-35mm for 5 weeks, quite a few thousand exposures, and haven’t been able to fault it. Focus is fast (so fast and quiet I’ve sometimes been reluctant to believe it has focussed.) VR would not be high on my list of priorities for any wide-angle, and I’m frankly unsure whether or not it has helped at all in any of my images, though I’ve left it switched on all the time. When I’ve made unsharp images, its either because I’ve focussed in the wrong place or someone has moved too fast for the shutter speed I’ve been using, neither the fault of the lens.

I’ve had a lot of chances to use it in the rain. It’s coped without problems and seems well protected at least if you don’t leave it out in the rain too long and keep wiping it. The lens hood is as you might expect not a lot of use for anything, other than a little protection. I do wish Nikon would make lens hoods rather stronger and with a better bayonet fitting – like all the other Nikon ones I’ve used this one falls off occasionally. I’m tempted to glue it in place, but it is occasionally handy to reverse it for storage.

Unlike many lenses it is truly an f4 lens, usable wide open. f4 is wide enough to give a reasonably bright viewfinder image too. I’m sure lens tests would show it improves on stopping down, but I don’t think it is noticeable in the pictures.

As for the image quality, generally I’ve been impressed. Relatively low distortion for the focal length – I don’t think I’ve felt moved to correct anything I’ve taken with it. It would be a problem with architectural subjects at around 20mm and less. In a standard “brick wall” image at 16mm focal length I have 23 courses visible in the centre of the image and between 24.5 and 25 at the edges. At 20mm I think there is probably very slight barrel still, but it really is hard to decide, and it seems distortion free at longer focal lengths.

Here are my comments on sharpness in some simple photographic tests photographing the house across the road:

16mm At f4 sharp centre, slightly soft at corners, small amount CA largely removed by R/C-18 B/Y+13 in Lightroom. At f5.6 corners were sharp too. Viewed at normal size (300 dpi) results at f4 were acceptable across the frame

24mm At f4 corners more or less as sharp as centre, very slight CA red green and blue yellow, largely removed by R/C-13 B/Y+8 in Lightroom.

35mm At f4 sharp across entire frame, very slight CA largely removed by R/C-13 B/Y-10 in Lightroom.

Another point I like about this lens is that it doesn’t change at all in size as you zoom or focus – all movement is internal. I’m not sure why this seems such a good thing – though of course it makes the weather-sealing much more practicable, and it somehow seems less fuss. It gives the lens quite a different feel from say the DX Nikon 18-200mm which of course has a much larger zoom range, but does sometimes make me feel more like I’m playing a trombone that taking photographs.

So I can recommend the Nikon 16-35 without hesitation if you are shooting on FX format. I’ve not tried it on the D300, but imagine it would be fine, giving the equivalent of a 24-52mm zoom, a high quality general purpose lens. I’m hoping soon to be able to pair the 16-35 on FX with the 24-70mm Sigma f2.8 on the DX D300, where it would be the equivalent of a 36-105mm, the two together covering most of my needs. Add the lightweight Sigma 55-200mm I have for when I need something really long and it would be a pretty comprehensive outfit.

Unfortunately I don’t yet have the 24-70 back from Sigma where I sent it for repair almost 2 months ago. When I first got it I thought it was another great lens (at least when stopped down to f4; wide open at f2.8 it could look a little soft) but after a few months it started to give problems and something inside was obviously loose, so I sent it back to Sigma for service under warranty. They stopped it making the nasty grinding sounds but optically something was still very wrong so it quickly went back to them. Today I phoned them again to hear that they had to send it back to Japan as they couldn’t get it working properly (and apparently I should have been sent a letter to tell me this.) The good news is that as Japan can’t repair it either they are sending me a replacement lens – which should arrive in a week or so. I hope that this will be a happy ending to a rather long story.

Here’s a picture I took with the Sigma when it was working properly last July. The pigeon was released by the priest at the right and flew directly at me and much to my surprise the camera and lens had kept it in focus, although it was extremely close to me and the flash, which gave a sharp image as well as the slight blur of the ambient exposure.

Chocolate Box?

I was surprised to see on the cover of April’s British Journal of Photography (not yet updated on line) the text “Forget the chocolate box aesthetic and tune in to the new landscape photography with a message to tell“, because I thought that anyone with a serious interest in photography (rather than producing coffee table landscape books that sell rather well) had abandoned that kind of thing a few generations back. And in any case those few well-known guys who make a good living from schmaltz are hardly likely to throw their meal ticket away.

Is this I mused, a sign that BJP are now marketing themselves at the hopeless and helpless amateurs who are still immersed in the kind of pictorialism that went out of style with the rise of modernism now almost a hundred years ago? (Something I date in photography from the publication of Paul Strand’s work in the two final issues of Camera Work in 1916-7, though it took a while to spread from that point.) Even Ansel Adams, arch-priest of large-format mountain worship, was seldom choc-box though perhaps more often pop-corn. And some of those later Edward Weston landscape’s were almost chillingly classical.

But turning to the article, it seems the “new landscape photography” they were referring to was really something very old by now, brought to public attention in 1975 by the ‘New Topographics‘ show and widely discussed here at the time by photographers with articles appearing in the US magazines that many of us read as well as ‘Creative Camera‘ and doubtless even the BJP.

I don’t find Eugenie Shinkle‘s article reflects the situation and the thinking among photographers, at least not those I knew at the time. The British landscape photographers most admired were people including P H Emerson, Paul Nash, John Piper, Edwin Smith and – rather different in his style – Bill Brandt, none of whom was in any way affected by Minor White and at least two who were certainly in part under the spell of Eugene Atget, perhaps a forerunner of the “neutral stance” of the New Topographics. To suggest that this was in any way “a moribund European landscape tradition” seems ridiculous.

Minor White was not particularly well-known at the time in the UK, and although parts of the USA were full to the gunwales of his disciples, I think had relatively little impact here. One reflection of this was the problem that I had in getting to see a copy of his “Mirrors, Manifestations and Messages“. The only copy that could be located in a library in the UK was in the British Library Lending collection itself and I had to sign away my soul to the devil before being allowed to take it home.

Raymond Moore certainly appreciated White’s work, along with that of others such as Callahan and Siskind, and made the pilgrimage their with his work – which was recognised, seized upon and shown in the USA. I think he had a more profound and open vision than the better known Americans, particularly in his late work, and had he moved to the States would by now be considerably better known and respected.

I had the pleasure of going in a group with Moore and other photographers to the show ‘23 Photographers / 23 Directions’ at the Walker Art Gallery in 1978. The work which interested us all – Moore included – was largely that by Lee Friedlander, Lewis Baltz, William Eggleston, Steven Shore and Robert Adams (3 of them in the New Topographics show and the other two sharing some of what was described as their neutral stance) and we had very little time for some of the others (the Bechers were also in both shows, but perhaps we found their work less interesting.) We had all seen the work of all these photographers in reproduction, but for some of us it was the first chance to see the actual prints.

A year or two later I had the experience of sitting at the feet of Lewis Baltz (absolutely literally if not entirely metaphorically) as he looked through the page proofs of his Park City. Along again with a group of photographers. Most interesting to me was the work he showed us by other contemporary American photographers working in both black and white and colour, most now well-known. Several were later in Sally Eauclaire’s New Color Photography (1981) and other books.

The New Topographics are now part of the tradition rather than news. It’s still an interesting show, and one of several in that era that changed the face of photography. But perhaps the article and the cover tease might more accurately have said “Show that shook up British photography thirty years ago.”

George S Zimbel v The New York Times

George Zimbel is a photographer who has already stamped his mark on the history of photography both through his own pictures – you can see his work on his web site – and also through his association with Garry Winogrand, which I’ve written about on several occasions, most recently here on >Re:PHOTO. When he was a student at Columbia, and already working as a freelance for PIX Inc and on other assignments, he teamed up with Winogrand in the “Midnight to Dawn” club making use of the university Camera Club darkroom.

Zimbel took on the NYT and won over an important question of photographer’s rights, the ownership of press prints supplied to newspapers. When in 2000 he saw one of his prints on sale through the NYT for $4,000 US, he was surprised, as he knew they did not own any of his work, as he had always worked for them as a freelance, selling only single reproduction rights.

He wrote to the paper, and while at first their legal team stated it was their property, after a while they agreed to return it, while still claiming it was their property. He had supplied the print to the paper in 1960 for reproduction and they had failed to return it.

Even though they eventually returned this print, the counsel for The New York Times Company still claimed it was their property. I’m unclear on what legal basis that opinion was based, and it seems to me – as it did to Zimbel – to be a shameful and mean-spirited misuse of legal muscle to deprive freelances of their rights. You can read the full correspondence on his site.

Thanks to one of my favourite photographers, Ami Vitale, for posting about this on Facebook – and she got the story from Paul Melcher who has played an important role in technology for image licensing and other hi-tech aspects of photography on line.

Fair Trade Photography

Chris Barton, a photographer based in Vancouver, Canada, the managing director of a professional photography portal who describes himself as a ‘Fair Trade Photography’ pioneer has put together a rather nice example on the dangers of using cheap stock photography rather than paying a photographer to make a unique image for your use. (thanks to EPUK for this.)

Microstock: why would a reputable company do this to themselves? gives a dozen example web pages using the same picture – and one of the comments points out he did a search using TinEye and found 86. Thanks also to Mr Barton for his “Entire Known World a Royalty-Free in Perpetuity All-You-Can-Eat License to link to this blog article. “

Radio 6

In a way it’s good news that I’m rather getting behind with writing about my own work here, and also in putting it on My London Diary. Good because I often write about the problems that I’ve had or silly mistakes I’ve made, and there has perhaps been less than usual to write about, but also good because it means I’ve been busy.

Too busy in fact to put my recent work on My London Diary, though some of it at least has gone on to Demotix, which gets it to a larger audience with the slight hope that it might sell. Although I’ve always been determined not to let money determine my priorities, it does come in handy at times, and this is one time of year that I’m reminded about it, as today is the start of a new tax year. I’m afraid the Chancellor can’t expect too much from me, and I for one won’t be at all worried about the coming in of a new 50% tax rate for high earners. Though as I’ve said before, “the poor pay taxes, the rich pay accountants.”

It’s over a week ago – last month even – that I was outside Broadcasting House in London to photograph a “protest party” against the closure of BBC 6 Music, a digital-only station that is hidden away somewhere hard to find on my DAB radio but can be listened to world-wide on the Internet. It plays a rather wider range of music than the chart-orientated stations and has access to a huge BBC archive including the sessions by the late John Peel, who I sometimes used to listen to despite the music he played (it wasn’t all bad.) Six isn’t a station I listen to, but much more at the core of public service broadcasting than say Radio 1 or 2 (or BBC 1 TV) which aim at exactly the same audience as most commercial broadcasters.

Cutting it – as the BBC intend – doesn’t really seem to be a case of saving money. It actually costs less overall than one or two of the popular presenters elsewhere in the BBC (who would be no great loss) each earn. It’s a pin-prick in the budget, but along with the Asian Network fits untidily with the BBC’s marketing plans. Frankly they should sack the marketers, which would also save them more.

You can see the pictures from the event and read more about it on my London Diary.

The only real problem in taking pictures was the rain, with several heavy showers. Another advantage of the new Nikon 16-35mm (which this month’s British Journal of Photography expects to come out later this year – and I’ve been using for around 5 weeks) is that it is fairly well waterproofed. Of course I have a UV filter on the front. With long lenses the lens hood offers useful rain protection, but on a wide-angle this is very limited, and you get in the habit of wiping the filter with a cloth very regularly and before virtually every shot. Even then you lose a few, though sometimes the drops fall on areas that don’t really affect the picture. The kind of diffused blur a raindrop gives isn’t a great problem on clouds for example.

After this outing, my two Nikons have now each acquired a small piece of black tape across the small lever that switches from matrix to centre-weighted to spot metering. Although spot metering can be very useful (and I used to use it all the time with black and white film in the Olympus OM4, though it was a rather large spot) if you select it unknowingly it can give rather unpredictable results. With the Nikon D300 and D700 there are also some easily forgotten interactions with other areas of the camera and flash operation. Useful though spot metering can be, it isn’t something you ever want to use by accident.

I’m also finding it far too easy to change exposure mode by accident – and to forget to return it to my normal P setting when I’ve deliberately altered it for a particular series of shots, and can see no easy solution to this. It is surprising how long it can take me to realised in the viewfinder that I’m taking everything at 1/2000s or with the lens wide open.

Waiting around with a couple of other photographers at an event the other day, one of them admitted to almost always using his Nikon on ‘P’ setting (as I do) saying he told people that ‘P’ stood for ‘professional’, and ‘A’ for amateur. ‘M’ of course is for ‘mental’ and there were several suggestions for ‘S’, all slightly rude. But with occasional use of the thumb-wheel over-ride, P (or rather then P*) really does provide the easiest and quickest way to get things right.

I’ve mentioned before my “cockpit drill” which – in theory at least – I carry out every time before taking pictures, usually on the way to an event. Checking the ISO, Quality and White Balance settings, thinking about any adjustments I might need to my basic custom settings, and then making sure that shutter speed in S mode, aperture in A mode and both in M mode are set to useful values (usually around 1/200 and f5.6 or f8 though if I know I may suddenly need a fast shutter speed or extreme depth of field I’ll set them for this) so that if I want to switch to them in a hurry I don’t have to waste time fiddling around. Setting sensible values also helps if you switch modes accidentally. Which I do.

Easter Morning Musing

This Good Friday I photographed the first Passion Play to be performed in Trafalgar Square for 45 years, and it was in many ways an interesting event.

It was also one that I’ve heard many rather silly things being said about. Some people have been heard making complaints that Christians aren’t allowed to tell their stories any more, that children don’t learn about Jesus in schools and that while Muslim or Sikh or Hindu festivals are encouraged by councils and celebrated in public places, Christians are not allowed to do the same.

It just is not true. There may be a few isolated cases where schools have decided not to celebrate Christmas in the traditional way, or where councils have banned Christmas greetings, but mostly they go on doing so. Christian groups who provide school assemblies may not get into every school, but the services they offer are still very much in demand and certainly not just in faith schools, and there are plenty of public celebrations of Christianity, with pilgrimages, Good Friday walks of witness, and various other processions. In London we have several annual Orange parades and Catholic processions, the annual blessings of the river, the Jesus Army all taking to the streets and more.

There are probably more of these events now than there were twenty years ago. It is certainly true that many lack the colour and excitement (and numbers taking part) of festivals such as Vaisakhi, Milad un Nabi, Arbaeen or Diwali celebrations but you can hardly blame the other religions for that. It’s also true that as a photographer I generally find myself made rather more welcome at the events of other religions than at some Christian events I’ve attended.

I very much welcomed ‘The Passion of Jesus‘ as an attempt to put some spectacle into public Christian events, and was pleased I was able to photograph it. I did so alongside a couple of agency photographers, and it was perhaps an event that brought out the differences between the way you have to think to be successful at that job and the way I prefer to work.

Newspapers generally want a single picture of anything. Often they don’t seem too worried about exactly what it shows, although it helps to be visually dramatic and preferably very straightforwardly linked to the subject. Rather too often the pages are actually produced by the journalists with blank spaces to be filled by whatever the designer/art editor/picture editor happens to find at the agency where they have a bulk contract so individual images come basically for free.

Photographs are generally seen as something that simply adds to the text, which is the basis of the story. Perhaps images are a necessary evil to brighten up the page and break up the text, but the approach is still almost entirely logo-centric, even in most sections of the tabloid press.

Agency photographers tend to think of events in terms of two or three very specific images. “Jesus on a donkey, a crown of thorns and Christ on the cross.” Because they know that this will be what the papers will see and want. There is also a market for some generic type of picture, such as “weather images” and at least one of the guys was praying for rain to get some good shots with lots of umbrellas in the background, though fortunately it stayed dry for the performance.

Photographing for the agencies is a specialist and skilled job, and I would not want to detract in any way from the professionalism and results people doing it produce often taking pictures I would have very much liked to have made myself. But while the kind of pictures they were seeking were things that I too wanted to photograph (and I got two out of the three on their list to my satisfaction) I don’t really see any story in terms of single pictures. I want to use pictures to tell the story – and of course good pictures do help in that.

I’m also not up with the working methods and technology to be an agency photographer. I’d certainly have to rethink my procedures and equipment to get pictures in on time. I seldom carry a computer when out taking pictures and like to carry out quite a bit of post-processing before uploading pictures. For me its often a rush job to get pictures out by the following day, let alone the few minutes which agencies now expect. (It can be seconds in the case of important events such as the Olympics, but photographers have a backup team to help there.)

I could probably learn to do it if I had to. It would mean buying a new notebook computer that was up to the job and carrying that around in a new, slightly larger bag. And shooting combined jpeg plus RAW rather than RAW alone as I do now, editing rapidly on the spot and letting images I know I could improve on being sent for publication with little or no post-processing.

It would also mean rushing away from events to file pictures. Both my colleagues from the agencies I think left after the crucifixion scene, as they had the pictures they needed. I didn’t, because I knew that the story hadn’t ended. In fact if that had been all there would be no story to photograph.

And stories, in pictures and in words are important to me. I’m happiest to see my pictures used with my text telling the story I want to tell. For some years I was fortunate enough to get paid for almost everything I wrote, but now mostly I publish for free and scrape a small income around the edges. Fortunately I don’t need a great deal to live on, so I can get by doing what I do.

Often when I’m taking pictures and mention My London Diary to people they tell me that they know the site and look at it. My own sites do get the stories out to a reasonable -but not huge – readership around the world, the kind of readership figures that some magazines would be happy with and that could generate some useful income if I put advertising on the site, but I prefer it without. Stories on Demotix get a lot of views too, especially if as mine often do they make the front page.

The resurrection isn’t an easy story to tell either in a play or in photographs. Artists over the years have found the crucifixion a much more dramatic event to work with. But had death been the end of it, there would have been no Christian religion, nothing to remember two thousand years later, no history of millions of people over the years inspired and energised by whatever it was that happened.

It was something I thought about again this morning as I stood with around 20 or so others not too long after dawn outdoors in light rain facing the River Thames and celebrating Easter (I did take a couple of photographs, but they aren’t very interesting so I won’t post them.)

At its heart what happened after the crucifixion remains a mystery. The Gospel writers differ considerably about it, and perhaps it is impossible to represent with an actor playing the role of Jesus, whose presence is necessarily so physical. It was the part of the performance I was least impressed by, and also where I was least impressed by what I made of it in my pictures. But when I uploaded the text and pictures to go on line at Demotix, I knew this was the most important part to show. Death without resurrection is no story, whatever the papers think.

Anniversary of a Death

Today is exactly a year since a 47 year old newspaper seller, trapped by police in a “kettle” around the Bank area in the centre of the City of London while trying to make his way home from work, was assaulted by a police officer and collapsed and died a few yards away on the street from his injuries.

Most of us feel that if the assault had been carried out by anyone other than a police officer, the person concerned would by now be convicted and serving his sentence. Of course the police are in a different position to the rest of us, licensed to use reasonable force where necessary but in this and in many other cases, including the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes in a tube train at Stockwell Station and the almost 200 a year poorly investigated deaths in custody highlighted by the United Families and Friends campaign raise important concerns over their actions and accountability.

The situation in the UK is less extreme than that exposed to the world by the censored Crossfire exhibition in Bangladesh, and we do things more subtly in this country where essentially our class system, land inequality, constitution and laws date from the Norman conquest in 1066 – with of course many later amendments and adjustments.

I left Bank on April 1, 2009 before the situation became violent to photograph elsewhere and so only know about the events later through the published accounts and also personal conversations with many of those who were there, including several photographers who were also injured by police attacks.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Sisters of Sean Rigg, killed in Brixton Police station, march in memory of Ian Tomlinson, April 2009
I didn’t go to this morning’s anniversary laying of flowers by the family and others on the pavement where Ian Tomlinson died, partly because of pressure of work, but also because I thought it would be an event suffering from media overcrush, with photographers and videographers elbowing for limited room. Although I usually manage to hold my own in such scrums (anticipation and getting there first fairly often is a great help, though not when some TV crews simply barge rudely in front of you) I seldom enjoy it and often, particularly with events such as this feel it is too much of an intrusion.

I felt that particularly strongly at the last event commemorating Ian Tomlinson and in particular about the laying of flowers by the family. And I was as intrusive as most of the others, though I was appalled by the apparent lack of any sensitivity of one TV crew on the spot.

I’m pleased that – for once – the mass media are taking an interest in the kind of issues that many of us have worked on for years and met with a blank wall from editors. But that means there will be more than plenty of people there to take pictures. There are still many events of some importance that few of us cover.

So despite my sympathies for the Tomlinson family and interest in the issues around Mr Tomlinson’s killing I decided this was one event I would not make the journey to cover.