Re-photo

The published timetable for the day of action against the DSEi arms fair had ended with the protest outside BAE Systems, and I’d really spent long enough on my feet and was looking forward to going home and having dinner – as well as working on the many pictures I’d already taken.  So I wasn’t too pleased when I was given the information that there would be another protest outside the National Gallery, and if it hadn’t been on my route home I might have decided enough was enough.

Although we were told to keep it quiet, I got the impression that the police already knew about it, and there were quite a few around as the protesters tried to enter the gallery. I was just behind the first group to go in the main entrance but hesitated about whether to go in.  It is often a tricky decision, and I have no right to enter premises just because I’m carrying a camera and a press card when the staff are clearly trying to keep people out, although some photographers just rush in.

The gallery was just closing to the public, and I would have had to have joined the protesters in trying to push past the security staff to follow them. I think a few may have made it, but were fairly rapidly ejected. I decided instead to try to photograph the larger number of protesters who were still on the steps, ignoring the security men telling them to go down.

They were trying to put up banners, and so were right against the balustrade at the front, making it difficult to get a suitable angle. I took a few pictures, leaning out and even holding my camera further out, then decided to go down and photograph from in front of the building on the North Terrace of Trafalgar Square.

The protest developed, with a struggle going on with police to clear the steps, for some minutes by persuasion and then, after reinforcements had arrived, by force, which was more effective. There were some angry scenes as one or two protesters were dragged away to police vans from the steps, while others staged another die-in on the pavement and I ran back and forth trying to record both.

Then more officers still arrived, and one or two of them, including a senior officer, started to get very physical.

It is the kind of situation where to see anything you have to be very close (or very tall, which I’m not.) And very close in a crowd the 10.5mm can work well. Here I’m holding it up in the air at arms length to get pictures; with experience and checking on the rear screen it is possible to frame things with some accuracy, although there is still an element of chance. I wanted to put Nelson in the top right corner, and in this frame at least I more or less got him there. But the 10.5mm is a rather vulnerable lens, as it cannot take a filter, so does need a little care.

Most of the time I was photographing this fracas I was working with the 16-35mm, a nicely solid (but over-large) professional lens, which can take quite a bit of rough handling (and I’ve been through several filters on it.) It’s main weak point is the lens hood, and frankly the Nikon lens hoods are all pretty useless, flimsily made with an under-engineered bayonet mounting.  One small tap and they either fall off completely or move around, producing vignetting at the corners. So of course it happened in that crowd, and I didn’t notice it until too late, working very much in the heat of the moment. I’ve cropped most of the pictures to remove as much of the vignette as I can, but you can still see it on some of the images.

If you should lose or break your Nikon lens hood, don’t pay the arm and a leg Nikon ask for these few pence worth of plastic. The cheap replacements available on eBay are in my experience slightly better made and look as good. Of course they still suffer from the same Nikon fixing problem.

More on the event and more pictures at Arms Fair Fracas At National Gallery.

The 10.5mm again came to my aid at the next protest venue in the continuing ‘day of action’ against the DSEi arms fair organised by the  ‘Stop the Arms Fair Coalition‘,  outside the offices of BAE Systems in Carlton House Terrace, a very posh street tucked away above the Mall, and generally rather deserted, with just the odd French tourist coming to view or possibly deface the statue of De Gaulle who had his reduced empire in a large house here during WW2.

After a little fairly disorganised chanting and a few short addresses, the main event here was a mass die-in, with most of the protesters prone on the roadway. There were a few small points of interest:

and earlier I’d photographed some of the placards, banners and protesters who stood out a little from the rest, such as this guy in rather striking glasses:

but getting good overall pictures of the event was a little tricky. My two favourites are these:

As you can see I’ve chosen not to correct the curvature of the fisheye in either, because it seemed to me to work well and not overpower the images as sometimes happens. In the upper image it enhances the sprawl of the dominant figure at the right. When I was taking it I liked the contrast in shapes with the almost straight yellow road-mark line a little to the left of centre splitting the near-circle the lens produces from the banner and target sheet of the UK Drone protesters.

In the lower picture I used the lens to concentrate on the peace flag and Christian peace banner, but to put them in the overall view. It was tricky to get the exact framing that I wanted as I couldn’t stand on people and wouldn’t on principle ask them to move, but I was fairly happy with the result.

More pictures at DSEi Protest at BAE Systems.

From Parliament I went to St Paul’s and walked across the footbridge towards Tate Modern to see the next anti-DSEi protest, a ‘bubble-mob’ by Dr Zig and his gang from Wales. The bubbles were truly amazing, and a squally wind drove them at speed once they were released. Made from a suitably magic and secret formula, they seemed to be tougher than the average soap bubble and took on some intense interference colours, particularly against the slate black clouds which were advancing.

Capturing the colours in a photograph doesn’t always seem to be easy and they seem usually to record less intensely than we see them, but I was reasonably happy with a few.

I’d arrived shortly before the end of a  bubble session, and while the bubble-makers took a break had time to sit and eat my sandwiches before  the heavens opened.  Perhaps making bubbles is an effective rain-making ceremony. Fortunately there was shelter at hand under the Millennium Bridge, and we all stood it out there until it eased off enough to make more bubbles.

What was more difficult was making some kind of visual connection between the bubbles and the Arms Fair. The protesters had brought a couple of banners, but neither was particularly easy to include with bubbles in the pictures. Here’s a picture where you can just about make out that the banner says ‘Kids need human rights not cluster bombs‘ but most of the time there were too many people in front of it.

Add kids playing with the bubbles and it gets trickier; here are two of my better attempts.

Eventually I gave up – you can see some more of my attempts at Dr Zig’s ‘Bubbles Not Bombs’ Protest.

I took a bus across Southwark Bridge into the City for the next protest on my list, arriving to find only a small group there wondering why nobody else had turned up. After a quarter of an hour I thought to check the times on my printout from the web site and discovered that we were still 45 minutes early – the time we had read was when people were going to leave from Parliament and the protest was due for an hour later.

I took the chance to rush away to see my Gardens show in St John’s Wood which I had last left with the walls being painted and my prints piled on a table, but had been hung at the weekend, and I needed to get some decent installation views. I didn’t quite have time to get there and back and take the pictures, but thought it wouldn’t matter being just a few minutes late. Then on the way back I just missed a train, and the gap until the next one was several times longer than normal, and the interchange at Kings Cross had me walking at least half a mile underground. Fortunately the protest was still going on when I arrived after running from the station.

It was a very tight location, a narrow pavement with traffic on the road behind me, and I was glad of the 10.5mm which enabled me to include the pavement and the London offices of General Atomics, makers of Predator and Reaper drones.  Things got tighter still when UK Drone set up their tableaux photo-opportunity, with ‘dead bodies’ on a target in front of their banner and a woman with a Playstation controller standing in for the remote RAF and USAF pilots in Nevada killing people in Afghanistan.

Again taken with the fisheye, but you can see that the verticals of the buildings, although at an angle have been straightened. Without this partial correction using the Image Trends Fish-Eye Hemi filter plugin for Photoshop, the woman at the left of the image appears too distorted for my taste.

More pictures at Down the Drones City Arms Fair Protest.

Every two years since 2001 arms dealers and traders from around the world have descended on London’s Docklands for the world’s largest arms fair, DSEi, the euphemistically titled ‘Defence & Security Equipment International’ sponsored by our government where people around the world – including many from dictatorial regimes – come to buy the weapons and systems they will use to kill and repress people around the world.

Of course there are a few concessions made to give it a more positive image, with a few countries being excluded (though others may make deals on their behalf) and some universally banned weapons – such as cluster bombs – usually being kept under the counters rather than on display.

But as I note on My London Diary:

The UK Government’s Human Rights Annual Report for 2010 listed 26 countries where there was considerable concern over human rights violations, and in the same year it approved arms exports to 16 of these including as well as Libya, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Protests against DSEi take place regularly through the year, both outside the ExCel Centre and at the offices and outside other events organised by the owners and organisers of DSEi, Clarion Events, and are led by groups such as East London Against the Arms Fair and CAAT (Campaign Against the Arms Trade.)

During the actual arms fair, police seal off a large area around it, closing off everything between the DLR line and the whole north side of the Royal Victoria Dock, as well as maintaining a strong police presence in the surrounding area. Opportunities for protests within sight or hearing of the event are very limited, and most of the protests this year took place elsewhere in London.

Although protests took place throughout the week of the arms fair, Tuesday 13th September when it opened was the main day of action called by the  ‘Stop the Arms Fair Coalition‘ and I came up to the Houses of Parliament at 10 am for the first event, a mock arms fair in Old Palace Yard.

It was easy to get some pictures as people queued with supermarket baskets full of arms, and certainly some entered very much into the spirit of the event.

Our Houses of Parliament are fairly recognisable even without Big Ben which is hardly visible from Old Palace Yard where the event was set up. Parliament Square is a better venue for protests, both because that large clock is more visible and also because far more people see the protest, with a far more traffic passing through than at Old Palace Yard. Unfortunately although the permanent peace protest continues on the pavement there, the rest of the square remains fenced off and unavailable either for tourists or protesters. It is a ridiculous and entirely political decision.

Of course the truly iconic view of the Houses of Parliament – which I learnt from the dinner table bottle of HP Sauce – was from across the river, showing in detail its full length from the Victoria Tower at the left to Big Ben at the right. Along with the French text “Cette sauce de haute qualité est un mélange de fruits, d’épices, et de vinaigre pur. Elle ne contient aucune matière colorante ni preservatif ...” it has long been dropped, at first in favour of a vignetted view and now by more of a caricature (and has even disappeared completely on some containers.) The sauce remains only in name, and perhaps typically for something invented in Britain was sold to a French company and then Heinz and is now made to a different recipe (catering for US taste and healthier eating) in Holland.

There was of course no sauce at the SAFC arms fair, but lots of canisters of CS gas to deal with riots as well as some bombs and a few rockets. One of our best-known peace campaigners, Bruce Kent, grinned delightedly as he wore a necklace of bullets while queuing with his full basket of lethal goods.

Bruce Kent stocks up with a good supply of CS Gas

Of course it was a staged event, as my pictures show clearly. Where things go wrong is not when others stage things but when photographers stage things for their pictures and they are used as if this was what was happening spontaneously. So far as  possible I try not to interfere with things, although pointing a camera at them almost always alters what happens, and at this event there were many people with cameras – and it was organised for them.

Photographically there were few problems, except in avoiding other photographers, who I don’t like in my pictures and in return whose way I like to keep out of as much as possible. As usual I worked mainly with the wide angle 16-35mm which means getting in close, but there was plenty of time and opportunity so that this didn’t really get in the way of those who like to stand further back.

I go in, take my pictures and then move back. What really annoys me at some events is when a photographer goes in close, takes some pictures and then continues to stand there in everyone else’s way, often while ‘chimping’.

I took a few pictures with the 10.5mm fisheye, but this really came into its own later in the day.

The 10.5 was the only way I could get the whole of the text ‘THIS IS NOT OK’ that people were holding up, as they were standing close behind the arms queue. I also took a few pictures using the 18-105 (27-157 equivalent on the D300) but there were relatively few images where I wanted to work above 50mm.  Though for Caroline Lucas speaking, a ‘portrait’ focal length worked well.

Green MP Caroline Lucas speaking. 50(75eq)mm – a typical portrait lens focal length

More text and pictures at: Arms Fair Protest At Parliament.

The arms fair day of protest continues in the next post.