Re-photo

I’m not a great fan of organised photo-calls for several reasons, not least that they are usually rather boring. Of course it’s always useful when people have material that visually represents their protest in some way – so the Murdoch face masks produced by Avaaz were welcome (and for once quite nicely produced, although rather over-saturated, tending to photograph rather too beetroot.)

The people who devise such things, doubtless well trained in PR, seldom seem to have a great visual sensitivity. Their idea of a good  photograph would appear to be something like this one.

For me it’s the weakest of all those I took, and the challenge is to try and find something just a little different in these occasions.

The banner was a problem, with so much empty monochrome blue space, and it was difficult to crop it and still retain anything of use. So the obvious thing was to avoid it, and I more or less did so throughout the pictures I took.

The sameness imposed on the image by the identical faces and t-shirts was also a problem, and one I tried to lessen in several ways; it was made easier when a rather different and larger Murdoch puppet headed figure joined the protest. But before that I’d tried various other things, such as finding an actual face among the masks:

adding some wonderful curly blonde hair (and in the background the curly red interloper poster of Rebekah, but I didn’t quite get enough depth of field:)

and I think most successfully finding a viewpoint and grouping that had a clear caption on a placard at the left of the image and a lively grouping of those Murdochs at different scales.

A couple of hundred yards away a real protest was taking place, and I followed the man with the Rebekah poster (who had not been at all welcome with Avaaz) to this, hoping perhaps to see an opporturnity of a picture on the way, but it didn’t happen.

But as you possibly see form the pictures, I was rather happier in the middle of a real protest,

and made use of that Rebekah poster a little more legibly there.

Though there too it seemed that the rather more political protesters didn’t much like the sense of humour it showed.

Coalition of Resistance Picket Murdoch
Avaaz Protest Murdoch At Parliament

One of the performances of the year was surely the exorcism of BP in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall by the Reverend Billy and his Church of Earthalujah, and I was pleased to be able to photograph and write about it.

There was quite a lot of light inside the Turbine Hall, and I could have chosen to use a higher shutter speed, but as usual I wanted to work a little on the edge, and most of the pictures were taken at 1/30 to 1/60 despite there being considerable movement. Combining flash with ambient meant that there was a reasonable chance of people closest to the camera getting a sharp flash image, and I used an aperture  around f8 to give me reasonable depth of field.

This image of Rev Billy advancing on the BP sponsorship logo  is a good example, taken with a very wide angle and tightly framed (it is more or less uncropped)  was one that worked, although as always there were plenty that were just too blurred because of the slow shutter speed. But although it was the image that I selected for the ‘front page’ of my piece on Demotix it was the picture two frames earlier that I actually like most, and is on the front page for Rev Billy’s Tate BP Exorcism on My London Diary. The hands are not quite as good, but I like the radial blur in the background.

Again this is more or less uncropped, and the only thing I’ve done in post-processing is a certain amount of burning in, mainly on the hands and windows, and I think a little ‘dodging’ on those white trousers. The rest of the effect was in camera, where the 16-35mm has a zoom ring that can be conveniently spun during exposure, with not entirely predictable results.  The flash exposure is short, so hardly if at all affected by the zoom.

They are more or less uncropped, but quite a few of the images I took I did crop, because there was another camera which often moved into my frame, and I didn’t want it.  You can see it in quite a few of the rather too many images from this event I’ve put on line.  Usually video cameras don’t come with very wide lenses, but this was someone using a still camera with a very wide lens and shooting video.  I’ve seen a clip of the film that he shot, which also includes some footage from a second camera on the balcony, and it is really very good and I feature rather prominently in it.

The problem with using wide-angles for video is that you need to get really close to the action and to stay there, and that means you are likely to get in the way not just of photographers, but also of the performers and the audience. Ultra-wides are much less of a problem with still photography as you move in, take a few frames and then move out.  Even with just one guy doing it, I felt he was too obtrusive, and if others take it up then we are in danger of never actually seeing an event again except on film. Everything will get to look like those walls of players lining up in front of the guy taking the free kick.

I’d had problems with the D300 taking pictures of swans earlier in the day, and hadn’t sorted out what was going wrong, so I’d left it at home and was working with only one camera, and very much feeling the limitations. Changing lenses is really too slow, and there were points when I would have loved to have had a second camera with the 10.5 fisheye, and others where I just didn’t have time to change to something longer than the 16-35mm.  Here’s an example:

I think it’s a good picture but I found myself reaching down for the D300 which wasn’t there. If it had been I would have made another picture as well, something like this:

Reproduced small it has a big advantage in letting you clearly read the banner on the balcony. Of course you can crop, but I’d much rather have taken what I wanted in camera.

One day a year I allow myself to photograph swans.

“Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach.  Walker Evans“

Had Evans lived in the UK, I’m sure swans would have featured in his list of no-nos (even if, for the moment I can’t remember an Edward Weston picture featuring one.) Back in the years when I used sometimes to have to look at photography displays in schools my heart would sink when I saw a wall heavily laden with these birds. Another staple, cemeteries and gravestones, was somehow far less dispiriting.

But once a year I give myself special licence and go out and shoot the Queen’s birds (and those she graciously allows to the Dyers and Vintners.)  Not literally shoot them of course, it’s probably still a hanging offence and even they don’t shoot them any more. They don’t even eat them or even make nicks in their beaks to mark them. Upping is now more a kind of roving clinic that gives the cygnets a quick MOT and snaps a ring around a leg so they can be identified in later years.

I’m not in favour of royal privilege, and find it ridiculous that the Queen or anyone else should claim rights on these wild birds, but there are some positive aspects to the upping as it is today, both for the health of the birds and also as a more general measure of the health of the environment. On our stretch of the river, despite apparent increases in water quality and banning anglers using lead weights (the latter prompted in part by evidence from the upping) swans are not doing well. They swarm on the river in great herds, but don’t breed, or certainly very much less than they used to only a few years ago.

I’ve photographed the uppers most years since I stopped teaching on Mondays – the day they come more or less past where I live – in 1999. It’s not as good as it used to be, partly because we have less breeding swans now, but also because they no longer have a man on a bike going ahead of the crews and attracting the swan families to handy spots by feeding them biscuits. I got to know Eric who did this, and for a few years rode along with him and could occasionally give him the benefit of a little local knowledge. He was a great help as he almost always managed to get the swans to a good place to photograph on the same side of the river as the towpath – and his and my bicycle. Now the Swan Warden’s outboard dinghy goes ahead, but not very far ahead, and the swans are upped wherever they happen to be.

I wasn’t going to bother with the swans this year, as I’ve got to the point where I have good pictures of almost everything, enough for a decent book, and really the only thing that would add to it would be some pictures from further up the river. One year when I’m less busy I’ll ask to go on the official press boat again and follow it further, as further upstream a bicycle becomes less useful. Though I may need to borrow a long lens to make it really worthwhile.

But it turned out to be a nice day, and I thought I could spare a couple of hours in the morning, so I decided to go after all. By the time I’d followed it for a couple of hours and the only cygnets that had been found were up a backwater and on the opposite bank where even after I’d waded through chest high stinging nettles I could only get the poorest of views, I was thinking I should have stayed at home.

Finally they came across a swan with six cygnets just a hundred yards or so short of their lunchtime stop at the Swan Inn in Staines, and there was a decent opportunity to see them at work. Unfortunately the bank where they boats surrounded the swans was a little overgrown, and there wasn’t time to do some gardening, so what would have been the best pictures are seen through rather too many weeds in the foreground, but I made a few that were not too bad. There are just a few parts of the event that are difficult – and usually impossible – to photograph well, for example when the birds are being returned to the water, as you would need to be in the river and in the way to be in the right place.

The upppers didn’t catch the male swan, who had been on the other side of the river, and he swum around a few yards away watching while his mate and offspring were being processed on the bank. There was a touching scene when the female swan was put back into the water and swam out to meet him, and despite my feelings about pictures of swans I had to take some pictures.

I grabbed the D300 which had the Sigma 28-300 attached and took a series of pictures without stopping to check exposure – having previously been using it I knew they wouldn’t be far out.

When I looked at the images after the swans had moved apart, I found that they were all very dark towards one edge. Eventually I worked out that the camera wasn’t working properly at speeds faster than around 1/1500 s. Testing showed the image darkened and blacked out from one edge progressively at speeds above this, unitl the entire image had gone at 1/4000 s, even wide open where it should have been fully exposed.

Fortunately Lightroom with its graduated filter came to my rescue (though I still find it very tricky to use) and the defect it fairly hard to spot in the final result.

It isn’t a fault that will worry me in normal use, where I seldom use fast shutter speeds, and the camera is long out of warranty, so I’ve decided to live with the problem until something really important goes wrong. Perhaps before that happens Nikon will announce a new model that I’ll want to get rather than repairing the D300.

See more pictures (and text) at Swan Upping on My London Diary