July, 2010 | >Re-PHOTO

Economist Blunders

Thanks to the New York Times Media Decoder blog you can read the story of how The Economist doctored a cover picture to make it show Obama all alone gazing apparently down at his feet on a Louisiana beach with a handy oil rig in the distance.

The problem is that this isn’t at all what the original photograph showed. Firstly Obama was in a group of three people, one of whom was cropped out and the second, closer to him, retouched away. Almost as significantly, the hazard tape in front of the three and the material in front of them on the beach – which in the original appears to hold his attention – has also been cropped away. For copyright reasons you will have to click on the link above to see the two pictures.

I don’t know what caption the photographer put to his original image, but it could have gone something like “Obama looks at pollution evidence on the beach and consults with US coastguard Admiral Thad W. Allen and local parish president Charlotte Randolph.” The picture used in on the cover would suit a quite different caption, suggesting a lonely and desperate man looking down in despair.

The most depressing and rather frightening aspect of the story is that the deputy editor concerned seems to have no idea of the gross distortion that her decision to change this photograph has caused. She writes “the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers.” It seems to show a very low opinion of Economist readers and in fact it was not an “unknown woman” (surely a gratuitously offensive description when we have both her name and photograph), but one with a peculiar relevance to the scene which the image showed, the president of the particular parish in which Obama is standing and on whose beach the oil has landed.

Emma Duncan, deputy editor of The Economist goes on in her e-mail to state “We dont edit photos in order to mislead” when clearly the evidence shows the opposite is true. Either she doesn’t take at all pictures seriously or fails to understand them.

The difference between the two pictures is just like the difference between writing “President Obama was alone on the beach racked by worry about the pollution” and “President Obama visited the beach with the local parish president and a US Coastguard Admiral to see the damage for himself“. I’m sure Duncan would see that those statements were different and that to substitute one for the other was misleading – and it really makes no difference if you do it with pictures rather than words.

The Economist needs to quickly apologise to its readers for misleading them – and also needs to make sure that it leaves the editing of pictures to someone who understand them. They wouldn’t do this kind of thing with words and doing it with images is equally corrosive to their credibility.

Section 44 Victory

Photographers in London yesterday celebrated the final nail in the coffin of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 nailed in the previous week by the European Court of Human Rights. It wasn’t just used against photographers, though I think we suffered disproportionately, and all that now remains is for the government to give it a decent burial.

There is some hope that some of the anti-photography laws such as Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 (and I think its section 56a of the 2000 Act) which makes photography of the police and military that might be of aid to terrorists an offence will go with it.

We held a small victory celebration at New Scotland Yard at noon on Sunday and stood around taking pictures of each other. On David Hoffman‘s sousveillance blog (that’s him above) you can see me gazing up to heaven holding a Mamiya Press, though it wasn’t actually mine but its owner felt my beard went better with it. Although I used to use medium and large format (when I had to) I never got around to buying one of these although I did rather lust after the 6×9 format (you could also fit 6×7 backs) and the rather splendid Mamiya 50mm on the model here, I think roughly equivalent to a 20mm on a 35mm camera. The widest lens I ever afforded for medium format was a superb but not particularly wide 65mm for a Mamiya 7 on the 6×7 format.

Things have changed so far as lenses and focal lengths are concerned. Forty years ago, 28mm was thought of as being exceptionally wide, although there were a few wider lenses they were really specialist items and few photographers used them. Come to that unless you were in a specialist field such as sports the longest telephoto in your kit was probably a 135mm, and my first 200mm was really something special. I didn’t find a use for the 300mm equivalent in my bag at this event, but it was worth fishing out the fisheye!

And the photographer at the centre of all this attention is none other than Jules Mattson who performed so well when wrongly arrested by police at Romford the previous weekend, also in the picture below.

More about the flashmob and more pictures from my set on Demotix – and I’ll put them with a few more on My London Diary shortly.

South Korea Lose

Coming home on the train I met a whole group of friends of my wife and they saw my camera bag and asked me what I had been photographing. “The World Cup” I replied, and it was true, although I hadn’t actually been to South Africa. Had I just flown back into Heathrow I might have come on that same train, as there is a local bus service rather ridiculously called by the rail company a ‘Rail-Air bus link’ which takes you to one of the local stations we had just passed through, though being rather more sensible I would have simply caught a different local bus that would take me (rather slowly) to ten minutes walk from my home.

Actually I’d been in south-west London, at the Fountain, a pub in New Malden in the centre of Britain’s South Korean community, watching the match between South Korea and Uruguay on a series of large screens surrounded by hundreds of excited South Koreans.

They had every reason to be excited because their team – many of whom play for English league sides from Manchester United down – had put up a pretty good show, dominating play for much of the game, and with a little luck the game would have been down to penalties or even gone in their favour.

I’d decided to take the 16-35mm on the D700 along with the 24-70mm for the D300 (36-105 equiv) as my two main lenses, although at least for the first half I found myself shooting mainly with the 55-200mm on the D300 (80-300 equiv) as I stood between the screens along one side of the large pub garden facing the spectators. There were certainly plenty of interesting faces and expressions as the game ebbed and flowed.

After the interval (time for a decent pint as my colleague had rushed to the bar just before the half ended) I decided to make use of the wide angle and mingle with the crowd, which involved quite a lot of crouching down so as not to interfere with their sight lines as they watched. Fortunately the seating was on a slight slope which made things easier.

We’d got permission from the pub manager to photograph, and very few people seemed at all worried by me getting close to take pictures with the wide angle. It’s perhaps a little odd as it is physically rather a long lens – and I sometimes get confused and pick it up when I want my telephoto – which is a little shorter. The long design is to make the rays incident on the sensor closer to perpendicular which causes problems as the sites on the sensor are at the bottom of small pits, leading to cut-off with oblique rays. Sometimes it’s an advantage as people to one side think you are shooting things further away, but it’s big enough to be a little intimidating when pointed straight at you.

Probably it’s easier to photograph Korean supporters than English and I think they are less obsessed with ideas of privacy and more sociable and less suspicious than typical English groups. And although most were enjoying a drink, I think they were considerably more sober than I would expect from English fans. At the end of the match, most left immediately. Obviously they had nothing to stay and celebrate, but few felt a need to drown their sorrows. I’d gone inside the pub to take pictures there a few minutes before the match ended. My colleague had stayed inside, working with flash (and I’m sure his results were fine) but I found I could get usable results in the fairly dim interior at ISO 2000 and above.

More pictures.

Watermarks

I don’t like visible watermarks on photographs. It so often spoils the enjoyment of photographs particularly where they are repeated at intervals across an image or are particularly large. Even where they are added in a reasonably sensitive way – as on the Demotix site which I contribute pictures to – for example this recent story about the Sharia Law related demonstrations in Whitehall or on other commercial sites, they sometimes just interfere too much with appreciating the pictures.

But increasingly I’m finding my work being used without permission or attribution on blogs and web sites, though unfortunately so far seldom on the kind of site it would be profitable to take legal action against. Usually when I point out the problem I get an apology and a timely and appropriate response – removing the image or adding a link if it is the kind of non-profit acceptable use I’m happy to allow.

Most of the people who misuse images seem to do so out of ignorance. They search on Google Images, come up with a suitable picture and assume that because Google can use it so can they (despite what the site actually says.) We do have a lot of education to do about intellectual property rights.

Until fairly recently we didn’t realise the importance of image metadata and many web sites and web tools for preparing images simply stripped out any present to slim down image files as much as possible. In the days of dial-up connections, it paid to keep your sites clean and mean. Now it’s long past time to get rid of such systems – still around on some major sites – and everyone should now realise that removal of such information from files is an offence.

As a photographer I didn’t realise how important metadata was to me until relatively recently – perhaps around five years ago. Naively I assumed it was enough to just put a copyright statement on every web page, and metadata was then pretty obscure technology and time-consuming to add, even if you had software that could handle it.

Things have changed. Lightroom now adds my copyright data automatically from a preset to every digital image I take and import (its also there from the camera, but hard to find software that understands those notes.) My Epson scanner software currently doesn’t have this capability, which I think is a major failing that they need to address.

The threat of orphan works legislation still looms over us here in the UK, despite the valiant efforts of some photographers (see New Thinking on Copyright) and our problem is that it does not only affect photographers. Some of the other groups with an interest in the matter were quite content with the proposals that were defeated, and I’m at all not convinced that we will get a satisfactory end result.

So one of the things that I’ve changed as I moved to Lightroom 3 is to update my output settings for files to include a copyright watermark for all images I will put on the web. I’ve made it small, not very noticeable and in the bottom left corner of every picture. Although it isn’t always very readable, I think it is always fairly definitely present and hard to entirely miss.

It could easily be cropped off, although I think most people would realise they were doing something wrong if they did so. And I hope few of my pictures work quite as well with the bottom missing.

Actually, certainly when looking at a number of amateur sites, there does seem to be some kind of rule which applies, stating that the more prominent the watermarking the less the pictures are worth looking at (or stealing.) So I’m happier than mine are not too intrusive, though it might perhaps be nice to use one that automatically inverts the tone of the surrounding pixels in some way to produce dark print in light areas. I can’t at the moment see how to achieve this in Lightroom – unless someone has produced a plugin for it.

Budget Day Blues

We had an ’emergency’ budget ten days ago in the UK, though like most such things I don’t think it is going to make great changes. Perhaps the biggest thing for us is that from next January most things will cost more as VAT, our sales tax, is going to go up by 2.5%. So a camera or computer system now costing £1000 will cost another £25. Not a great change, and currency fluctuations before then are quite likely to make a greater change in either direction, so it isn’t even necessarily a great incentive to go out and buy now.

There are traditional budget day pictures of politicians that I’m more than happy to leave to the staff and agency photographers who get paid to take such normally terminally boring stuff (which the papers etc keep on using) and just occasionally one of them will take something a little out of the ordinary that gets used. Too often I’ve heard them show their work to other photographers and comment on the one good picture from such an event “of course they didn’t use it.”

But outside of this, it was pretty certain that more interesting things would be happening around Westminster throughout the day, though it was unfortunate I didn’t get there early enough for some of them, having business elsewhere to attend to. Parliament Square itself has been a more interesting place to be in over the last couple of months with the tents of the Democracy Camp set up on May Day adding to the long-term presence of the Parliament Square Peace Campaign that has brightened what was previously surely the most boring public square in London for over 9 years. It’s changed from being a grassed area almost impossible to reach, surrounded by traffic with no crossing places, to a lively area.

Last Tuesday, the High Court granted Mayor of London Boris Johnson an eviction order against the Democracy Camp, and they have been given until 4pm today to leave or face forcible eviction. It is likely that many of them will fail to leave by the deadline, although I am not sure that the clearance will start then.

Although immediate eviction of the separate Parliament Square Peace Campaign is not expected, with the judge stating that Brian Haw had been camping legally in the square since 2001, this is only a temporary reprieve. The BBC reports the judge stating “As the terms of the injunction make it clear that he can continue to use a tent or similar structure provided he has the permission of the mayor, I would expect the mayor not to enforce the injunction against him until his application for permission has been considered.”

But back to Budget Day as well as the two groups living in Parliament Square there were also protests by trade unionists against government cuts, a protest over the housing problem, a funeral procession by a new group calling themselves ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay‘. The police made asses of themselves by searching a man under terrorist legislation for waving a brass and clearly decorative antique pistol, the Democracy Villagers attempted and came close to making a couple of ‘citizen’s arrests‘ on former Labour ministers for their backing of the war in Iraq (which curiously some are now backing away from) and various politicians walked around in grey suits trying to look important and be interviewed by TV crews in the media village. And the final event (at least for me) was an early evening demonstration by CND and Stop the War.

The real problem was knowing where to be at the right time, and I did miss some of the action (including those citizen’s arrests and the main trade union and climate change demonstration.) It was also one of the few hot sunny days and at times I just went and sat down in the shade for a few minutes. Must add a sun hat to my camera bag!

More about what went on, and more pictures as usual in Budget Day in Westminster on My London Diary.

The Romford Incident

The arrest by police in Romford of young photojournalist Jules Mattson was a serious assault by police on the freedom of the press in this country. I suspect they initially picked on him thinking he was an easy target, but his behaviour was an example to us all, keeping calm, continuing to state clearly what he was doing and his right to do so, showing a far greater appreciation of the law than the officers. Throughout the confrontation in which he was eventually arrested by an Inspector Fish, he managed to continue to record the events, both on his i-Phone and also for much of the time continuing to take pictures with his camera which was on a strap around his neck, all despite having one arm twisted behind his back. Of course when police illegally took his camera away from him he protested – and couldn’t take pictures.

You can read his own account, hear the recording and see some of his pictures on his blog. Even though at one point police pushed him down some steps (producing the single expletive in the recording) he continued to argue his case politely. As you can hear, it is an altogether remarkable performance, and one that few, if any, more experienced photographers could have managed under the circumstances.

You can also read about the story elsewhere, for example in the Amateur Photographer, Boing-Boing, The Independent, The Register, Police Specials, Jack of Kent …

You can also see some of his pictures in Police, photographers and the Law, a feature on EPUK in which Civil Rights lawyer Shamik Dutta answers fifteen key questions on police powers and photography in Britain today.

I first met Jules a year ago taking pictures at an event I was photographing, and was particularly impressed that he managed to sell his work to one of the organisations taking part. Since then I’ve met him regularly at events and occasionally seen his pictures on his blog and elsewhere – he has managed a remarkable amount of work considering he has also been working for his GCSEs. As well as putting images into various libraries he has also signed with one of the more active agencies around. As a full-time student not studying journalism he probably does not at the moment qualify to be a member of the NUJ, but certainly will have the support of many in the union, particularly in the London Photographers Branch where many of us know him, and his father is a member.

Legal action against the police is bound to follow, and I understand that he has the legal advice of the very same solicitor whose work last week resulted in Marc Vallee and Jason Parkinson each getting £3,500 compensation for being pushed around and forced to stop working outside the Greek Embassy in London in December 2008.