Archive for April, 2011

Climate Rush

Friday, April 29th, 2011

Last Wednesday was a beautiful day for a picnic, warm for the time of year but not too hot, and with just a little breeze and a clear blue sky, though in the middle of London there was just a little haze of something nastily photochemical cutting down the clarity of the distant view as I walked over the Thames across Vauxhall Bridge on my way to the Tate Gallery, or as we now have to call it, Tate Britain.
I’d arrived a few minutes early and took a rest on of the seats overlooking one of the lawns, as a few people, mainly women in their twenties, arrived to take part in the protest.

Climate Rush were protesting on the first anniversary of the BP Gulf Oil disaster in what they called ‘Oil In A Teapot – Picnic, Exhibition & Auction‘, “in mourning for all those who suffer because of the destruction of BP’s global industry“, and so most of them were dressed in black, and some very much in the style of the age of the suffragettes who they take as their inspiration for direct action, adopting their slogan “Deeds Not Words” but on red rather than purple sashes, along with others such as “Well-behaved women rarely make history“.

I’ve photographed a number of their events since they began with a rush on Parliament on the 100th anniversary of the 1908 ‘Suffragete Rush’ in which  more than 40 women were arrested as they tried to enter the Houses of Parliament.

© 2008 Peter Marshall
Tamsin Omond pushes behind a thin line of police in the 2008 Climate Rush

Today’s protest was a part of week-long series of protests against BP organised by various groups including Climate Camp, Rising Tide, Art not Oil and Climate Rush. BP use the sponsorship of art exhibitions at major galleries – including Tate Britain – as “greenwash“, using the events to put over an image as a socially and environmentally responsible company while they are damaging the environment on a huge scale in exploiting the tar sands in Alberta and through disasters such as Deepwater Horizon, as well as more generally promoting and fuelling a high-energy high pollution society.
© 2011, Peter Marshall
The Climate Rush logo at the bottom is a 4″ tall flier held in my left hand – 16mm at f20 for depth of field

For the gallery protest, Climate Rush had produced their own version of one of the Turners on show inside, a picture of boats on the Thames estuary, to which they had added an oil rig in flames.  It was a nice though possibly fortuitous touch than t the original had actually been painted more or less on the site that later became one of BP’s largest refinery and storage sites at Coryton (which they sold just a few years ago.)

They also had panels showing pictures from a painting workshop after the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, produced as an entry (and protest) into the BP sponsored portrait competition, an annual fixture at the National Portrait Gallery.

One of the other photographers present set up some pictures with one of the Climate Rushers pretending to eat a sandwich covered with ‘crude oil’. Not the kind of thing I would do, but I did take advantage of it and take my own pictures. It wasn’t actually crude oil, but a thick meat gravy, which as most of those at the picnic seemed to be vegetarian, they found equally disgusting.

© 2011, Peter Marshall

Photographically there were few problems, with good light I was working at ISO 320 and mostly at around f8 or f11 with fairly fast shutter speeds even in the shade. For most of the pictures in direct sun  I added some flash fill, and where I didn’t it took quite a bit of extra work in Lightroom

I couldn’t really work out a good way to capture the scene when one of the Rushers climbed up the outside of the building to display the ‘Turner’.
© 2011, Peter Marshall
Showing the height she was at made her and the painting rather small, while using a longer focal length there was no way of knowing she wasn’t close to the ground. I don’t think there was a solution as single picture – sometimes you need more than one.

© 2011, Peter Marshall

As too I did when the ‘Turner’ was thrown down for another Rusher to catch. It span around as it came down and I was pleased to have caught it facing the right way in mid air – and also later exactly as it was caught.  But it was really something that would have been better on video than the sequence of 7 images I took.

Different Cultures

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

One of the great things about London is that you can turn a corner and be in different worlds. The two events I covered ten days or so ago were rather an illustration of this.

© 2011, Peter Marshall

I wasn’t a fan of Smiley Culture, hardly even aware of the existence of this British reggae star who died in highly suspicious circumstances when police came to his Surrey home and arrested him, but his case is just one of many deaths in police custody, far too many over the years.  I’ve met and photographed many of the bereaved families, all wanting to know exactly what happened and calling for justice,  all apparently being met with obfuscation, lies and cover-up from the police, the so-called Independent Police Complaints Commision, and sometimes coroners and then courts. I’ve written more about various individual cases over the years (and a little more about this one in Who Killed Smiley Culture? on My London Diary.) And, as I wrote in that piece:

Of course not every one of those 930 deaths (since 1990) was suspicious, although a great many were, but we have yet to see even a single officer convicted of any offence concerning them (or earlier cases) – with the sole exception of the death of David Oluwale in 1969. It is more than hard to beleive that justice is being done. And as the protesters chanted on the march, ‘No Justice, No Peace.’ 

I left the couple of thousand protesters as their rally outside New Scotland Yard where they had marched from the Wandsworth Rd to photograph a very different event, the annual parade through of the London City of London District Loyal Orange Lodge, along with bands and visiting lodges from around England, Glasgow and Northern Ireland.

© 2011, Peter Marshall

It was a very different scene as they walked along some of the same streets, on their way to lay wreaths at the Cenotaph and elsewhere, remembering the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and celebrating the Protestant religion and traditions of Northern Ireland.

© 2011, Peter Marshall

I was born and grew up in the Protestant tradition (and with aunts and cousins whose pastor was a colleague of Ian Paisley) but I felt rather more at home and closer to the people marching to the reggae beat than to the drum and flute, and I think it’s reflected in the pictures in a rather more detached view of the Orange march. More about the second event at Orange Parade in London.

In The Black Country

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

© 2007, Peter Marshall
The New Art Gallery, Walsall, 2007
My previous post reminds me that not far up the road from Birmingham – you could indeed take the Soho Road and head for the M5 to get there – is Walsall with its fine New Art Gallery (I visited it in 2007)  and showing there until 19 June 2011 is a show I wrote about when I attended its Paris opening last November, in a very different building.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Brian Griffin, The Black Country, in the 13th century College des Bernadins, Paris

Brian Griffin is giving a tour of his show and will undoubtedly “share his passion for the Black Country” as well as illuminate his photography on 4 June at 2pm – places are free but you need to book at the gallery on 01922 654400. It should be popular.

Birmingham Under Gods

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

A new issue of then online magazine lensculture is always worth reading, even if at times I don’t  appreciate everything in it. For me the outstanding feature in the current issue is
Under Gods: Stories from Soho Road by Liz Hingley, the result of a two year project on the many religious communities -Thai, Sri Lankan and Vietnamese Buddhists, Rastafarians, the Jesus Army evangelical Christians, Sikhs, Catholic nuns, Hare Krishnas and others along a two mile stretch of a main road in inner city Birmingham.

It’s a project that obviously results from an in-depth approach, getting to know and be accepted by the various groups, and the images have a quiet strength, a spirituality that very much befits the subject matter, along with a fine use of colour.  There are 40 images in the feature and every one was freshly seen, and the whole set work together beautifully.

Other features that interested me include Face to Face:Georgian Photography (you can see more work from the show here) and The Social Networ and Gazi Nafis Ahmed’s pictures of same-sex couples and tough kids on the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh. You can see more of his photography on his own site.

Stokes Croft

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

Looking at the pictures, I’m rather glad I was a long way from Stokes Croft in Bristol last night.  I saw a few posts on Facebook and Twitter last night and heard the news on BBC radio this morning. But I have to say their report did not seem to make a lot of sense.

It’s always difficult to know from a distance what actually happened, but the account on Neurobonkers.com in The Battle of #StokesCroft certainly has the ring of truth, and as the phone pictures show was written by someone who was very much there.

In the introduction written for the News Networks it includes the following:

Please note the following facts in your reporting:

  • There was no evidence of violence before the police arrived.
  • Tesco was NOT petrol bombed as Sky news and The independent are now reporting.
  • It is extremely unlikely that the police claim that petrol bombs were found is true. The protesters were liberal pacifists (prior to the police onslaught) as evidenced by the links provided and in 4 hours of sustained full scale rioting in which the police were forced out of the area NO petrol bombs were thrown.

It would appear that the police acted on a rumour, and then embroidered that to present to the media as fact.  We know of course that this isn’t unusual – and has been well established in several high-profile cases, not least that of Jean Charles Menezes, when police issued an incredible amount of lies to reporters about him acting as a terrorist, which they lapped up and published before the truth – that he was an innocent man, going normally about his daily life – came out.

The news media are far too cosy in their relationships with the police and far too trusting about their statements. Or perhaps the journalists concerned just don’t care about the truth – if it makes a good story they will run it. Journalists often get pretty snooty about bloggers – even though some of the best blogs are written by journos frustrated that they can’t get what they want to say into more conventional media. But increasingly if you want to find out what really is happening you need to go the the blogs and social media – and of course to look at more than one source and use your judgement.

But though I’m appalled at the actions of some of my fellow journalists over this case and others like it, I mention it here because the piece includes photography and video of both professional and highly amateur quality, and I find the contrast of interest.

To see the phone pictures by the author of the piece properly, you need to zoom out a couple of times on your browser – assuming that like Firefox it enables you to do so, as they are too large otherwise to fit the browser window.

There are also some pretty silly comments,  and a few are photographic. “Dude, invest in a tripod!” is about the silliest thing I’ve read this month.

Hull Published

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

Yesterday I finished the proof-reading of my latest book, ‘Still Occupied – A View of Hull’ and made it available on line, as well as buying a few copies myself. As before, it’s a Blurb book, and you can view it all in a preview on Blurb, along with my three previous books.

When I began the work on Hull, my main preoccupation was with the large swathes of the city that were being razed to the ground and re-built in huge clearance areas. It reminded me very much of Hulme and Moss Side in Manchester, through which I had walked ten or more years earlier, and where I had taken part in getting the people who were going to be rehoused to take a more active role in the planning process. Although we had lost the fight there – and the council went ahead with their instant slums, now mainly demolished – the kind of ideas and methods of involvement we were a part of did largely win the battle in the longer term. But Hull it seemed had yet to get the message.

© 1980, Peter Marshall

The title for the exhibition – in the excellent Ferens Art Gallery in the centre of Hull in 1983 – came from a shop front with the two words ‘Still Occupied’ painted across its two front windows and again on its door. No longer in use as a shop, on the name board above the shop was its name – in inverted commas it read “Vogue” with a very large V. I liked the sense of humour and showed it on the corner of a grey street, short rows of terrace housing with gaps for terraces behind at right angles to the street typical of Hull, empty except for an elderly woman pulling her shopping trolley and a dog watching her, though these figures are probably too small to make out here.

I photographed the same shop in the Argyle St clearance area two years later, and if anything it had looked up slightly. There was a new lampost, a metal security gate across the doorway and a car parked in the street, and I’d stepped back slightly to show the whole of the front of the shop and its upstairs windows, but also to show the house to its right, empty and its windows covered with corrugated iron. You can also see this image, if rather small in the book and in the book preview, in which I’ve now decided to make the whole book viewable.

I think I’ve learnt a little from my earlier books in terms of design, although I’ve also run up against some of the limitations of the BookSmart software provided by Blurb. Having taken the decision to keep the pages looking cleaner by putting the list of locations at the back of the book, I found setting out the table of text for this was a lottery. Simply closing and opening the file could move text from one line to the next or from the bottom of one column to the top of the next. I came up against a few other minor limitations too, although its a simple program to use and works just fine for simpler books.

And although I can understand why Blurb decided not to let people produce PDF output from this software (though I imagine this is what it sends to Blurb) I find it frustrating to put the amount of effort that goes into making a book and not to have it available as a PDF.  It also seems an unnecessary limitation to allow you to print out the book on your own printer but to then put a watermark stating ‘FOR PROOFING ONLY. PRINTED VIA BLURB.CO’ across each page.

To produce a printout of this book on my own printer in similar quality to Blurb would cost me between just over 40p and £1.50 per page for paper and inks, depending on my choice of paper. This is a 120 page book, so that adds up to somewhere between  £50 and £180,  surely enough to make the watermark unnecessary.

© 1980, Peter Marshall

Still Occupied has around 275 pictures and I’ve tried to design the layouts so that almost all of the better pictures are printed to a decent size – between 6-8 inches longer dimension. The book itself is nominally 10×8″ landscape, which in practice works out at around 9.5 x 8″,  and I like to keep the full image for all my pictures so the largest possible landscape image on a single page is around 9″ and for a portrait format around 7.5″, but I like a little more white space.  I actually saw these images – most of which are uncropped – very much as small prints, and in the original show they were mainly much the same size as in the book, although framed in larger frames in groups of two or four.

Still Occupied is on sale from Blurb at £24.99, though carriage adds to that. Blurb is unfortunately too expensive for me to hope for good sales of this book, or to make it available through bookshops or galleries. They do offer some discounts for quantities, but still not enough to sell the book at any reasonable price.  If I wanted to do so I would need to be thinking in terms of printing several thousand copies at a time, and spending thousands of pounds, and probably ending up with boxes of unsold books in my loft, which is already too full of junk.

Some people have called this book or the earlier show ‘gloomy’ but I don’t really think that is fair. Some of the pictures are gloomy, and back in the late 70s and early 80s many of us printed rather dark, making use of the lustrous blacks that were achievable with the old Record Rapid, and although Blurb can’t match that, some of the printed images still reflect that kind of mood.

© 1980, Peter Marshall

As well as Hull itself there are a few pictures taken around, with a chapter on the Humber, including images on and from the old Humber Ferry and a few from the ‘other side’, New Holland.  I’ve also included a final chapter on pictures taken on my first visit to Goole, a short train ride away from Hull.

I haven’t yet taken the plunge and bought an ISBN batch to put on the books, but I still intend to at some time. And I’m still hoping that Blurb will start to support the open source Scribus DTP package as well as the expensive Adobe InDesign. People have managed to use Scribus with Blurb, but it does appear at the moment to be a slightly tricky business.

The advantage of using a DTP package compared to BookSmart, apart from proper control over text, is that it generates a PDF file, and apart from being able to use this in presentation, it would be possible to make the work available to people in this format (and possibly even to charge for it.) Some online print services do actually sell PDFs by download but unfortunately Blurb doesn’t offer this option. But with the book market increasingly moving over to reading on electronic devices perhaps this will change.

Deaths in Libya

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

The news that photojournalist Tim Hetherington has been killed and three other photographers injured in Misrata after being hit by a RPG is shocking but hardly suprising. In the confused situation there, any photographer is clearly risking his or her life.

Although I heard it first elsewhere, probably the most reliable source for up to date information is the British Journal of Photography,  which as I write has been unable to confirm the stories that Chris Hondros has also died from his injuries, but many other sources seem to be reporting his death too. Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown were also injured, but they are said to be ‘wounded but fine.’

Hetherington worked for Vanity Fair and you can read more about him there.  I wrote about him briefly when he won one of his three World Press Photo awards, and mentioned his own web site, though it may currently be hard to access.

You can read more about Hondros on the New York Times Lens blog,  as well as on his own web site. There are more links for both photographers and more information on the BJP site.

Yesterday I reported for Demotix on the protests in London for and against the UN intervention in Libya, and I think today’s news makes me a little more convinced that action was necessary, although for various reasons it has not gone far enough.

Thursday Niggles

Monday, April 18th, 2011

There are some days now when there seem to be protests at various places all over London. Last Saturday I would have liked to have been photographing in Vauxhall, and meeting different groups of protesters at London Bridge Station and in the City of London all at noon – and there were several other things all happening at exactly the same time. Of course I can only be at one place at a time, so I had to choose.

But for once, last Thursday, things seemed to be arranged so that I could cover four separate events one after another, and go on to a choice of two meetings in the evening, without too much standing around waiting for things. But things didn’t quite work out as I had hoped.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
NUJ Gen Sec Jeremy Dear – and his successor Michelle Stanistreet at right

The first event, a protest at the Libyan embassy – or rather on the other side of a very wide road with an underpass running through its centre opposite the embassy close to Hyde Park corner – was billed to be from 12-2pm. Experience suggested to me that this would probably mean that people were still arriving up until 12.30 and would be drifting away by 1 o’clock, which was fine. I could even get the earliest train that I can use a cheap day return on, the 11.29, and be at Victoria by around noon to get a bus for the short ride to the event. Despite the trains running a little late, it worked fine, and I was there and taking pictures  by 12.20.  It wasn’t the most exciting of events, but it was organised by my union, and both the current and next general secretary were there holding placards, along with a few other members I knew.

One of the three journalists still held by Libyans had been released the previous day, and the placards show two ticks for those who were released. Another was freed the following day, though I suspect it had little to do with our protest.  But as you can see from the pictures in NUJ/Al Jazeera – Release the Journalists on My London Diary it was hard work to produce a great deal, and by around 12.45 I had lost any desire to keep taking pictures.

Of course I could have held up a placard myself, but I was feeling rather hungry, and decided for some reason a kebab or something similar would be great. Unfortunately, neither Knightsbridge where I was, or my next stop in Kensington are the right places to find this, and I arrived at Young Street where the next protest was supposed to be happening still hungry.

Not only no kebab, but there was no demonstration.  But I wandered around the area for a bit and was then greeted by another photographer on the corner of Derry St, and looking down there could see some police and barriers and a small group of people, among whom I recognised a few who would be in the protest.

© 2011, Peter Marshall

By 2.10pm the protesters had put up a few banners and I started taking pictures again, and visually – as you can see at Claimants to Daily Mail: “Stop the lies!” things were rather more interesting. The people were more varied and there were banners and a number of placards to make use of.  Behind the protesters was a fashion shop, GAP, with giant-size photographs of fashion models which rather contrasted with the protesters. I did vaguely wonder about possible copyright problems with both these pictures and the GAP logo, but decided that since ‘incidental inclusion’ was inevitable in the situation I might as well make the most of it!

By around 2.50pm the protest seemed to have peaked and begun to loose its momentum; many of those present had already spoken , some a couple of times, and I decided it was time to leave in search of food in more promising areas.  (Unlike many other photographers  I generally boycott places like MacDonalds or Starbucks,  which they often find the only places around from which they can file their work – but I always wait until I get home and spend hours sorting the pictures out and writing stories.)

© 2011, Peter Marshall

The bus from Kensington to Victoria must be one of the slowest journeys on earth; certainly if I wasn’t still suffering slightly from a bad foot it would have been much quicker to walk. The main hold-up is at the junction with Brompton Road, where traffic coming along Knightsbridge from the west gets a ridiculously short and badly sequenced chance to proceed, with preference being given to traffic from the Brompton Road. I think the bus waited for almost ten full sequences of the lights before it was able to get across.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
Dancing on Gaddafi – and a well-placed foot

I wasn’t worried, as I had been told that the next protest, opposite Downing St, would be from 4-5 pm, and so I had plenty of time. So I arrived, having picked up a snack at Victoria while walking from one bus stop to the next and eating it on the bus, at around 3.50pm to find everyone getting ready to leave at 4 pm, having started their protest at 3 pm. I did have a few minutes to take pictures, but not enough to do justice to the event, which would otherwise have been interesting – and in the end decided I didn’t have enough to file a story later on Demotix. You can however see it on My London Diary at Libyans Keep Up Their Protests.

They were walking to join other protesters at the Libyan embassy, so along with another photographer I decided to go there. Rather than walk with the women and children from the protest (that foot again!)  we went by bus, and got there rather faster, only to find just a handful of people opposite the embassy – and really nothing to photograph. I stood and talked with some of the people there for around 15 minutes, then decided I would need to leave if I wanted to get to the next event on time.  As my bus went around the large roundabout of Hyde Park Corner, I saw the women and children finally arriving.  It would have been something that I could have photographed, but not from the bus.

It was just a little galling that when I reached Westminster City Hall at the advertised time for the protest there, there were quite a few photographers standing round and talking but nothing much else going on.  It was really only around 25 minutes later that there was anything at all to take pictures of, so I could have waited at the embassy and got more pictures.  And although the protest there was supposed to end by 7 pm, later we were told that one of the larger groups who would be coming to hand out hot food, didn’t expect to arrive until 8 pm.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
Providing food free on the streets will get you a £500 fine in Westminster

By the time I had taken some pictures, it was too late to get to the photographers meeting I would have liked to attend, which started at 6 pm. Apart from seeing some good pictures and meeting old and new friends, there are usually brownies to die for and a free drink for those who arrive early, and afterwards free food at a nearby pub funded by a raffle – and the raffle prizes are generally prints provided by the photographers showing work – often very desirable, and I’ve won a couple in the past. So I was unhappy to have missed this.

Instead I went to a meeting of another group that I’ve usually enjoyed,  which takes place in different venues around town. Thursday it was in the downstairs area of a slightly trendy bar, with a poor choice of overpriced beer, and it was very noisy and crowded. Few of the people I know from the group were there, but I was happy to find a place to sit and relax after a busy day. There were two speakers promised for later in the evening, but I found the first so bad that I left after he had spent what seemed like an hour saying what he could have said in two minutes.  It hadn’t been a bad day, but a busy and at times frustrating one, and I still had work to do, sorting out pictures and sending off one of the stories before I went to bed (and a second the following morning.)

Painted Photographer

Saturday, April 16th, 2011

Milena Nova is someone I often meet while photographing protests, and when I saw her outside Westminster Council Offices on Thursday I remembered to ask her if I might use her picture of me on my blog. I have a simple policy about using other people’s pictures, partly a matter of the cautious legalism of my former employers at About.com but more a matter of my respect for copyright law – which protects my own work – and I only use other people’s images with their permission. Earlier I’d posted a link to it – and again in my opinion you never need permission to publish a proper link – but it was a link to her Facebook page and might not have worked for some. So here it is.

© 2011, Milena Nova

Taken just a minute or two after I was hit by a paintball at Oxford Circus. I’m clutching a handkerchief in my hand that I’ve used to wipe a little paint off, but to little effect.

My wife likes this picture, though I’m not quite sure how to take this. Would she like to throw paint at me?   I think it is the best that I’ve seen of me in this state, but I’d rather it hadn’t happened.  I’m smiling at Milena because she is a friend taking my picture, but I was really pretty fed up. But I wasn’t prepared to give up.

Today I didn’t get anything thrown at me, which was perhaps a bit boring, given that successive Saturdays it has been paint, feathers and flower petals I was wondering what the next member of that series would be. Along with others I did get assaulted by one young man who thought that being one of the stewards on a march gave him the right to push photographers around, but otherwise most people were very friendly. But perhaps more about that later.

Taking Tablets

Saturday, April 16th, 2011

I spent most of yesterday at a friend’s house, working on the scans of his images for a show later in the year using his computer system, and it was an experience that made me realise just how useful a graphics tablet is for photographers – because yesterday I had to make do with just a normal mouse with Photoshop.

I first used a graphics tablet while I was teaching, and it was a large and very expensive A4 model, and the experience convinced me enough to get the whole room in which I taught fitted out with smaller and cheaper models. Getting the students to use them turned out to be a problem – it does take some time to get used to the different ways of working. Mice are relative devices which move the cursor from its current position depending on the way that you move the mouse – and you can lift the mouse and put it down somewhere different without moving the cursor. The pen on a graphics tablet is an absolute device, working on a defined rectangle on the pad which is precisely mapped to your screen. Put the stylus at top right of this area and the cursor moves there, pick up the stylus and put it down on the bottom right and the cursor goes there. It takes a little time and effort to get used to this very different way of working – and few students wanted to invest this. Provided with both mouse and stylus they would continue to work with the mouse.

But if you put in that initial training then soon most people get to appreciate the tablet, particularly when working with programmes like Photoshop or Lightroom. It gets much easier to make your way around an image and retouching becomes much easier when you have the software set to make use of the pressure sensitivity – so using a light pressure retouches or paints just a small spot while heavier pressure gives you a larger area.

Before I bought a tablet for myself, I read many of the reviews, most of which suggested that you needed a large tablet for precision. It might be true if you are working with technical drawings, but working with photographs I found that a large tablet was a disadvantage, and was soon making use of the ability to map a much smaller area of our A4 tablet to the screen. The next tablets we bought at work were A5 and much better, but even that area was larger than necessary, and the one that has sat on my own desk for many years now is around A6 – and described as small.

Technology has moved on a little, with many tablets being wide-screen ratio and wireless, but my old Wacom Intuos is still working fine. It seemed expensive when I first bought it – I think for around £75 – and the current equivalent but doubtless improved version now costs more than twice as much. These aren’t the cheapest tablets around but I would certainly buy one again.

As well as getting the work done faster it is also less stressful, and using the stylus has a health benefit; switching from a mouse apparently cuts down the risks of both RSS and Carpal Tunnel syndrome.