Archive for January, 2012

Everyday People & A Nightmare

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

Imagine going back to your parked car and finding someone had broken into it, stealing not just your camera and lens, but also your laptop and two external hard drives containing the raw files from your last six months of work. It must be one of the worst nightmares for a photographer (though mine is slightly different as I don’t have a car.)

It was Theron Humphrey‘s New Year present when he returned to his pick-up parked in Jackson, Mississippi, where he was half-way through a Kickstarter crowd-sourced project travelling across the USA making portraits of ordinary people, as Pete Brook recounts on his Rawfile blog.

Humphrey had got backers to put up over $15,000 for his project, promising them postcards, signed prints t-shirts and more depending on the amount they contributed, and at the higher end you could camp with him, nominate a person to be photographed as a part of the project or he would tattoo your name on his leg!

While he travels across the USA – and is able to continue with the project thanks to some more generous support when people heard about his loss, with loans from friends and $4000 from a donations page – his web developer Chris Barnes is putting up the work on his web site. There are certainly some interesting portraits in his cross-section of everyday Americans on This Wild Idea.

It’s also a reminder to us never to rely on a single backup of our raw files. Unlike negatives you can easily make a copy, and by storing it in a different location, keep your work safe against catastrophe.  Humphrey is now using cloud storage for his files as well as presumably still saving them to hard drives.

1978 Protest

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

Among the old negatives I’ve been scanning over the past week or two are a few from protests, which may perhaps be the first pictures that I took of protests, back in April 1978. Ten years earlier I had been taking part in a great many of the events of that year, mainly in Manchester where I was studying at the time, but had been far too busy marching and occupying to think about taking pictures, and had no money for film.  It didn’t help that my camera, a 35mm Halina, had never quite recovered from twenty minutes or so spent on the bed of the lake at Versailles a couple of years earlier, followed by my amateur attempts to clean it. The bladed shutter would sometimes stick open and the shutter speed was in the hands of the rust god.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

I’d continued going to protests, though rather less frequently, in the 1970s, but although I’d bought working cameras by then I can find no pictures, either because I took none, or perhaps because I wasn’t pleased enough with them to keep the results. By then I was keeping down costs by bulk-loading black and white film from 100ft cans and doing in all my processing, mixing up developers from large bottles of hydroquinone, metol and other ingredients, and printing in my kitchen with a cheap folding Russian enlarger. It was a good learning experience, but much of that early work ended in the bin for various reasons.

Things really are much easier with digital, and rather cheaper. Learning the old way wasn’t any better for being harder, and those old-timers who think it is somehow better to learn photography using black and white film in manual cameras are clearly deluding themselves. Learning with digital is cheaper and faster, though which is better is a matter of how and what you learn from it rather than if you use digital or film. But I certainly did it the hard way.

In 1978 the equipment I took the the protests with me would have included a buggy with a son approaching two and a wife, along with Olympus OM1 (and possibly an OM2 body.) Unless I meant to take colour as well as black and white I probably left the OM2 at home, so the OM1 could hang around my neck, with a couple of spare lenses in jacket pockets or a small ex-army shoulder bag, along with a Weston Master 5 exposure meter. Then, no serious photographer would ever leave the house without an exposure meter, and particularly if you used transparency film, you needed the Weston with it’s weird white plastic Invacone to take incident light readings, waving it in the air like a wizard’s magic wand before every exposure. The Weston was a great piece of kit, workmanlike and with no battery to run out, but with an Achilles heel, its meter needle going over a large and highly legible scale visible through the thinnest and most fragile glass window imaginable. After I’d paid good money to have this replaced half a dozen times I saw sense, removed the broken fragments and glued a suitably cut thin sheet of perspex in its place.

The images on these early sheets in my negative files come from two protests in 1978, but unlike now when we have EXIF data, including dates and times, I can’t tell you a great deal about them that isn’t actually recorded in the images. Probably I had a few more details in a diary at the time, though I never felt it necessary to record things like exposure times and aperture – like most other photographers at the time I took a rough guess when photography magazines asked for such things.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

Most of these early images are from one of several rallies in Trafalgar Square organised by Friends of the Earth (FoE) and supported by other groups against the re-processing of nuclear waste at Windscale. Estimates for the number who marched from Marble Arch to the rally on 29 April 1978 vary from around 12,000 to 30,000; it was an entirely peaceful event and the protesters dispersed without incident. A little earlier I had also take a few pictures at a Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF) rally in Hyde Park.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

While now we are used to seeing results immediately, it would often take me several weeks at that time to actually get around to developing the films and then to contact print them. I was working full-time as a teacher and few of my images got published, and then only in magazines some time after the events. Sometimes one film contained images from several events if I had not used one of my cameras much – and I would seldom take more than 30 or 40 pictures at any event.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

© 2012, Peter Marshall

Placards are vital to make clear the object of the protest, though some are clearer than others.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

Signing petitions, then as now was an important part of many protests.  I think the hand with the pencil and the white forms in front of the dark coat on the top edge of the frame was a deliberate framing decision and not just chance:

© 2012, Peter Marshall

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

OM Rebirth?

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

Almost 40 years ago, Olympus made a great leap forward in SLR camera design with the introduction of the OM-1 camera (initially they called it the M-1, but Leica didn’t like that and threatened to sue.)  It wasn’t a camera for everyone, with many pros complaining it was too small and too light to be serious, and certainly it didn’t have the tank-like qualities of some of the rival models. It was relatively small and light and came with a superbly bright viewfinder and a pretty decent set of lenses, some of which made the big guns look pretty sick.

The OM1 had its faults. It didn’t show the aperture in the viewfinder. Photographers used to having the shutter speed dial on top of the camera didn’t like the far better placement around the lens mount which meant you didn’t have to lose your grip on the camera to alter the shutter speed. It’s a shame it didn’t catch on.  Probably its weakest point was just a slight ‘iffiness’ at times about the shutter release, which could sometimes mean nothing happened when you pressed it the first time (something we are rather more used to when cameras have autofocus, but there was no reason for it in the manual days.)

By the time it had developed into the OM4 it was a real classic, and I had two of them together with a pretty comprehensive lens set in a very much smaller and lighter bag than I now need for the two Nikons. The OM4 had what was certainly the best metering system ever made for any film SLR, and was great for those who liked to think about exposure, allowing you to place an area on a particular zone with ease. Or you could just leave it on automatic, and it seemed to do better than the rather more complex electronic systems manage now.

Now Olympus are sending out teasers about a new OM series camera, the OM-D, supposedly a digital successor to the OM series. I think it has come around 10 years too late, but I hope I won’t be too disappointed.  You can read more about the likely spec at 43 Rumours.

I’m afraid the similarity will largely be cosmetic, an attempt to trade on the old reputation. Of course it won’t have anything like such a good viewfinder – it will be electronic. I suspect too that the dial we see a little of on the top plate is a shutter speed dial.

We already know more about another new camera, the Fuji  X-Pro1, also with a 16Mp sensor, though the slightly larger APS-C format, and one that promises to produce sharper images with a different sensor layout which cuts down the effect of moire. That looks rather more interesting as a camera, and is obviously aping Leica – just as the Fuji X-100 was. The X-Pro1 with its interchangeable lenses looks very much like the camera the Leica M9 should have been, so I’m waiting with rather more interest the first detailed reviews. So far the various ‘hands-on’ pieces although interesting really tell us only a little more than the press release.

But I’m already getting the feeling that this might just be the year I jump ship from Nikon to something smaller and lighter, at least for much of my work.

History Recoloured

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

It has always been accepted wisdom in writing about photography that black and white was somehow more gritty, more realistic, more serious in presenting news and reality, and I’ve never been entirely convinced. With almost all the news appearing in colour for some years now, it has long been clear that this particular cultural conditioning is losing, perhaps has completely lost it’s grip on us.

A week ago, Swedish artist Sanna Dullaway posted a message (as MyGrapeFruit) on Reddit  “For my second cakeday I thought I’d show my best colourizations and some restorations that I’ve been doing for fun. Hope you enjoy!” which linked (and still does) to a photo album on photo-sharing site Imgur, although since then her pairs of vintage black and white images – including such truly iconic photographs such as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother and Timothy O’Sullivan’s Harvest of Death, as well as others clearly still copyright – have been copied to more blogs than I knew existed.

On her web site and her DeviantArt page you can read a statement from her about the copyright problems involved in some of the pictures. In part she says

“Ignorance is not an excuse and I (now) know some of the photos are not public domain but copyrighted. Please note I do not take credit for the iconic photos I colourized, only the actual colouring.”

Later she makes clear:

‘I did not want to “improve” nor “replace” the photos I DID colourize as some of you may think. I just wanted to show you a new perspective of the black & white old world, it used to be in colour, too. I thought famous photos would touch most hearts. Focus on the photos, not me.’

Of course copyright is important, and I try carefully to respect it here both for words and pictures. Her ignorance is not unusual for internet users or bloggers, but perhaps surprising for someone who is setting up in business as a restorer and colouriser of black and white images. That she is using other people’s copyright images and gaining publicity for a business she is setting up makes her offence more serious.  I don’t agree with those who suggest it is “sacrilege” to colour photographs such as Eddie Adams’s 1968 Saigon Execution picture, but it does certainly offend against his moral rights and copyright.  As Adams himself died in 2004 we can’t know what he would have thought of it.

Personally I think it is sensitively done and don’t find it offensive, but it isn’t my picture. But on several occasions artists have asked  to use my images in various ways as a basis for their work. The vital difference is of course that they asked – and paid.

What do I think about them? Some perhaps don’t quite ring true; that Migrant Mother for example perhaps looks just a little too healthy and well-fed in colour, but many I think are improvements on the black and white original.  Of course we can’t know how true they were to the actual scene that was photographed, and one problem with working with colour is that there are often very distracting elements in a scene.

Margaret Bourke-White’s 1937 ‘The American Way’ (see it at Life too, where it is shown more dramatically)  completely changes its dynamics. In the original, the dark and sombre line of flood victims  dominate the light greys of the background billboard, reality against dream, while in the coloured version the bright tones of the poster overpower the dull line. And in reality, someone might just have been wearing a bright red jacket or tie, which would have rather changed the picture.

Now we have colour, and most of the time it makes sense to use it. But a few things perhaps still look better in black and white, and it can certainly simplify some images.  What I find rather silly and sometimes very annoying are some photographers who have never learnt to use black and white who shoot in colour and then routinely (and usually poorly) convert the pictures to black and white thinking that it makes their work more serious as photojournalism.

Nurses Get Militant?

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

One of this morning’s news headlines was that the Royal College of Nursing, the professional body that represents qualified nurses, along with the Royal College of Midwives, have finally joined all the other professional healthcare organisations representing doctors, physiotherapists etc and come out against the government’s Health Care Bill.

Two days ago, I was photographing an event opposite the Houses of Parliament against another controversial government bill which the House of Lords were to be debating later that afternoon, the Welfare Reform Bill, which will remove funding and support from many of the disabled and least well off, adversely affecting, among others, many with terminal cancer.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

It wasn’t a large protest, but had representatives of single mothers, disabled activists and others including the Rev Paul Nicolson, chairman of the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, a London-based charity which addresses poverty issues caused by unfairness in the law, legal and benefits system, which had organised the event together with Single Mothers Self-Defence and WinVisible, a grassroots group for women with visible as well as invisible disabilities. At the front of the group of protesters was a woman holding a placard ‘Nurses vs Welfare Reform Bill!‘ being photographed for publication in a nursing magazine.

One other and possibly older profession was also mentioned in the placards.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

See more at Welfare Reform Bill Lobby at Parliament on My London Diary.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Arbaeen

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Sunday saw the 31st Arbaeen procession in central London, which is said to be the oldest Arbaeen/Chelum Procession of Imam Husain in the west, and is one of the larger annual Muslim processions in the UK, with around 5000 people taking part.

It was quite a contrast from the previous day, when I’d been photographing the English Defence League protesting against ‘Muslim extremists’ and it was certainly a much friendlier and more interesting event, if perhaps less newsworthy. As on previous occasions, I felt very much welcomed for taking an interest in this religious event, commemorating the end of an intense annual period of 40 days of mourning the massacre of Imam Hussain in 680AD.

It’s an event that has changed to some extent as I’ve photographed it over the past six or seven years, but even so, like all events that I’ve been to a number of times it gets harder to find something different to say in the pictures, rather than just to repeat myself.

I was held up slightly by Sunday morning rail problems, with engineering works as usual, but these had caused some signalling problems, so the prayers had already started when I arrived.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

I played around a little, with framing them through the decorated cradle (Imam Hussain’s 6 month old son was also killed) or past the sides of the decorated replica shrines, but wasn’t really too happy with any of the images.

The paved area at Marble Arch was fairly crowded around the outside of all those at prayer, and as I walked around it I found relatively few opportunities for pictures. Two things that struck me were the many large flags this year, and also that most of the women seemed to have placards.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

There seemed to be less taking place at Marble Arch than in previous years, where there have sometime been various activities before the procession. This time there seemed only to be a few speeches after the prayers before it began.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

Photographically I was having problems with contrast. It was a beautiful sunny day with a clear blue sky and a strong low winter sun which seemed to send my camera metering haywire.  It doesn’t help that my normal reaction to tricky light is to work into it, probably because my first camera came with the advice something like “only take pictures on sunny days, and make sure that the sun is behind you” which Kodak used to give to Box Brownies, and I was ever contrary.

I wasn’t the only photographer having such problems, and another came up to me and told me all his pictures were getting ‘washed out’ and asked me what he should do. I told him to try some exposure compensation and got on with trying to sort out my own problems with rather less success.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

I should have used flash fill, but there are some times when I think flash is just too obtrusive. Looking back I don’t think this was one of them, but for some reason I was reluctant to start using flash. And the pictures that I took suffered from it, some to the extent of being unusable.

Once the march turned into Park Lane, things got easier, as the sun was now coming over my left shoulder. I did manage to slip and fall slightly painfully getting down from the fairly low barrier at the edge of the roadway, but otherwise things were pretty straightforward. Then I found a nice solid block of concrete holding a traffic light which took me up around 4 feet and was stable enough even for a balance-challenged person like me. Once you’ve found a spot like this, it is hard to leave it, even if there might be better pictures if you got down on the ground again and got stuck in.  Because if you get down, you are certain to see another opportunity for a picture from up there, but equally certainly someone will have climbed up and now be where you need to be.

I decided to stay there until more or less the whole of the march had passed by – and it was pretty slow moving, so I was stuck there for around 25 minutes. Probably the best pictures were those with lots of flags and standards, such as this:

© 2012, Peter Marshall

or this of the women’s section:

© 2012, Peter Marshall

but certainly I was pleased to get down and photograph from somewhere where I could move around and select my viewpoint.

In some ways the most important aspect of the event in the beating of breasts in an expression of mourning, certainly in the more vigourous manner it is carried out by some of the groups of mainly younger men, who had by now stripped to the waist.

Most of the pictures I took where in an area where the central grass reservation is a couple of feet higher than the roadway, so I was able to look down on the men. But this wasn’t quite high enough, and also not quite close enough, so most of these images were taken holding the camera high andstretched out in front of me at arm’s length, using either the 16-35mm on the D700 or the 10.5mm semi-fisheye on the D300.

Sometimes the 16mm view worked quite well:

© 2012, Peter Marshall

but generally I prefer the images from the 10.5 mm, some of which are slightly corrected and some also cropped.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

The story and more pictures are on My London Dairy: Arbaeen Procession in London

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

EDL Again

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

© 2012, Peter Marshall
EDL supporters outside the pub before the march in Barking

I didn’t have any great problems photographing the EDL march and rally in Barking on Saturday, although at times the atmosphere was a little tense. There were a number of people who I’ve met and photographed before at the event, including at least one who often reads My London Dairy, and thanked me for my reports of events.  The EDL and right-wing (or as they prefer to be called ‘patriotic’ groups are very suspicious of the press, and while I was taking pictures several people did ask me who I was working for and what happened to the pictures, including the woman in the picture above.

I told her I was freelance and that the pictures would appear on Demotix and My London Diary, and possibly also in other newspapers, magazines and books. And as I always do, I said that I thought it was important to try and report such events accurately, trying to faithfully represent the views of the groups concerned (in this case both the English Defence League and Unite Against Fascism who were holding a counter-protest) but that also I would state my own opinions, and that I had different views to the EDL. She agreed with me that this was a free country and that we were entitled to have different views.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
EDL marcher shouts and gestures at UAF counter-demonstration
I think that the EDL (and other groups) deserve a fair and accurate press, although that certainly does not mean glossing over their activities. Those who don’t like what they say and do need I think to start by trying to understand what has led to their appeal to certain groups in our society.

Friends on the left sometimes tell me that I’m “too easy” on the EDL, while shortly after publishing my article about this event I received, not for the first time, a threatening e-mail.   Rather more pleasing are the various positive comments that I’ve also received about both pictures and text. But I think it says a lot about the kind of way the EDL thinks that one of their supporters writes to me “you better hope you dont get noticed next time ur at a demo….

Of course it isn’t the first time I’ve received such threats after covering their events of right-wing groups, or even during them. And many organisations do have their lunatic fringe, but it does seem rather more than a fringe with the EDL, although there are also others in the organisation who do believe in such English values as tolerance and fair play – and who I’ve at times been grateful for protecting me from harm.

I did get just a few very negative comments while taking the pictures, and there were a few people who obviously tried to avoid being photographed, something I find strange behaviour at a protest, which is surely all about getting publicity. Of course some people – both on the right and anarchists – wear masks to hide their identity, particularly if they intend to break the law. The police FIT teams (and there were a couple photographing at Barking) may object, and sometimes police force protesters to unmask, but most photographers actually find people with masks make more interesting pictures!

My pictures and the text show the EDL as they are and how they appear to other people. If they don’t like that, they should change how they behave rather than blame the photographer.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
EDL wave at the UAF and call them racists

It was certainly very much easier to photograph the UAF who had come to protest against the EDL.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
UAF protesters react as EDL march draws close
One of the other photographers present did get rather more trouble than me, and at one point late in the day EDL stewards and police had to restrain one of the other EDL stewards who was attacking him.

Photographically things were fairly straightforward, and it was a fine day with good light. I’d thought a little about the event beforehand and had taken the 10.5mm out of may bag and replaced it with a Sigma 28-300mm (42-450mm equivalent on the D300), suspecting – as turned out the be the case – that I might some of the time have to work from further away than I like. I did use it for quite a few pictures, but the auto-focus is just a little slow compared with the Nikon 18-105mm which is usually the longest lens I carry, and the images aren’t quite as sharp. It doesn’t have image stabilisation either, but that wasn’t a great problem; in good light you can shoot at some very high speeds on digital as the D300 is fine at ISO800.

My account of the event and more pictures are on My London DiaryEDL March in Barking

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Homai Vyarawalla

Monday, January 16th, 2012

I have to admit not knowing the name Homai Vyarawalla before I read today of her death at the age of 98.  She  had the distinction of being India’s first woman photojournalist, though most of her pictures were published under the name “Dalda 13”, according to Wikipedia chosen because she was born in 1913, married at the age of 13  and her first card had the number plate ‘DLD 13.

However in an interview for the Indian Frontline magazine she says that she first met her husband,  Manekshaw Vyarawalla, when she was 13, but they were not married until 15 years later (There is another good interview with her in The Hindu.) He was interested in photography, and she studied painting but became interested in the pictures he was taking and sending to the press. She began working with him, both in taking pictures and in the darkroom, and  when she was 25 or 26 took some pictures of the girls from her art school on an outing which were the first pictures taken on her own that were published. But many of her early pictures were taken when out with her husband when he was working on his stories, and she would grab his Rolleiflex to take pictures, which were then published under his name.

She became well known as a photographer during the war years, when both she and her husband worked in Delhi for the Far Eastern Bureau of the British Information Service and were also allowed to freelance for magazines. 

She took her last photograph – of Indira Ghandi – in 1970, around a year after her husband’s death. She left the profession partly because of the changing attitudes of photographers, who she felt no longer behaved with dignity and followed the rules, but also because of the increasing security that was making it difficult for photographers to work freely in the way she had been used to.

Not only was she the first woman to work in this field in India, she seems for many years to have been the only woman to do so, and it was only in the 1980s, a decade after Vyarawalla had laid down her camera, that a second generation of Indian woman photojournalists emerged.

A retrospective of her work was shown in 2010 , curated by Sabeena Gadihoke, and there have been numerous articles following her death, including in City Journal, The Hindu, and The Times of India.  You can watch a lengthy documentary about in which this remarkable woman talks at length, but is perhaps rather disappointing in showing little of her actual work.  Perhaps the best way to get a good idea of this is Google’s Image Search, where most of the black and white images on the first few pages are by her.

State of the Art B/W

Monday, January 16th, 2012

I first came across the work of Jon Cone when he was making inks for Iris printers in the 1990s, although $150,000 price tag put me off using the system that he developed towards the end of that decade as ‘Digital Platinum’. When in 2000 he came out with his Piezography®BW software and inks for cheap desktop EPSON printers I immediately imported it from the USA and used it with an Epson 1160 fitted out with a continous inking system.

Prior to using it, I’d been reasonably happy with the colour prints I could make from this and other Epson printers using Epson’s own inks, but hadn’t felt that the black and white results were suitable for anything other than quick proofs.  Piezography was different, and I was (and still am) stunned by the subtlety of the results. In the 1980s and 90s I had worked with various methods of hand-coating to make photographic prints on watercolour papers, including kallitype, palladium and platinum prints. Now I could get the same qualities as these more or less at the push of a button, with perhaps just a little more richness and depth if I used some of the more expensive coated papers such Hahnemuhle’s German Etching (and later, Photorag.)

I was lucky to have few problems with Piezography inks, while some other users had frequent blockages of the printer heads. I’d recouped some of the costs by reviewing the system for the British Journal of Photography, so felt a little remorse when those who had taken up the inks on my recommendation had problems. Some were caused by a failure to properly close down the Epson printers, but I think there was also something of a matter of luck with Epson quality control. Good Epson printers parked their heads so they were sealed off, but Friday afternoon models didn’t and I think Epson had more than its share of Fridays.

The 1160 was a four ink printer, and Piezography replaced the cyan, magenta, yellow and black with a black and three shades of grey, as well as supplying a much improved printer driver (a Photoshop plugin) for black and white printing which used those grey tones to eliminate any visible “dottiness” in the prints, and I think improve detail. For ultimate results I think you needed to produce files at 720 dpi, while there was no point in going above 36o dpi with the normal Epson driver.

A couple of years later, Jon Cone produced some improved inks under the name Piezotone, and these were available in different grey tones. I went over to using the ‘warm neutral’ set, and when Cone was beta testing these for use with the Epson driver rather than proprietary software I was one of the beta testers. So prints made with my printer were pretty good, as the profiles had been fine-tuned to work with it.  Again some other users, thanks to Epson manufacturing tolerances, had slightly less good results.

Having been designed for my printer, the four ink Piezotones worked so well that I lost interest in the various improved systems being developed by Cone. Incredible though the K7 inks were, they would not work in my 4-ink hardware, and the gain in print quality seemed relatively small.

All my inkjet prints were matt, and I was quite happy with them. They had a quality that could not be matched on matt silver gelatin papers, which always had an inherent dullness to them, and matched that of the best non-silver prints (except for some carbon prints) but I still sometimes went into the darkroom when I wanted the different look of air-dried glossy silver gelatin, although once framed behind glass there was relatively little difference.

The next big change came with new fibre inkjet papers that promised to match fibre based glossy silver papers. Again I started printing on them with colour inks, using an Epson 2400, with great results.  Epson’s Ultrachrome K3 inks include 2 grays and a black, and can also produce pretty good black and white images using Epson’s own ABW (Advanced Black and White) option, which also adds a little coloured ink to make the tones neutral (or cool or warm as required.) ABW isn’t perfect, but usually produces better prints than I can in the darkroom, although some find their slight change in tone under different light  a problem.

I’ve also tried printing with the K3 inks without the colour inks using the Bowhaus RIP – and you can also do this with other RIPs including the Quad Tone RIP (QTR.)  Unfortunately this gives a slightly unattractive tone to the prints.

To get significantly better b/w prints (others have described those made using ABW as subtle and dramatic) I think I would need to invest in new hardware, at least if I want to keep the ability to make both black and white and colour prints, as 4 ink systems such as my two 1160s are no longer supported. The Piezotone inks I’m still very occasionally using (and are working long after their best-before date) are being discontinued in March 2012.

More interesting than my own experiences is Jon Cone’s The State of the State of the Arts in Black & White, in which he tells the story of his various ink developments, including  the “esoteric state of the art” system that he developed for Gregory Colbert‘s ‘Ashes and Diamonds‘ show, seen by more than ten million people.  The giant (8.5 x 14 ft) prints were produced by “a complex monochromatic methodology with twelve inks” using a Roland printer on Japanese hand-made paper sheets and each took 18 hours to print. Although this system isn’t one that could be marketed commercially, Cone used it as the starting point for his ‘Special Edition’ inks.

Even if you are not particularly interested in setting up to make your own fine black and white prints, the article is well worth reading for the insight that it does give into the work of some of those who have mastered digital printing, along with examples of their work. It comes too on a new website, ‘The Agnostic Print’ which has a number of other articles that look as if they will keep me busy reading for some time.

Time in Turkey

Sunday, January 15th, 2012

Thanks to Ami Vitale for posting on Facebook about ‘Time in Turkey‘, which includes work by some of the finest photojournalist from around the world who were invited to celebrate 25 years of publication by the daily newspaper Zaman by telling “stories in photos that reflect life and issues unique to Turkey from their particular points of view.”

The work is being put on site photographer by photographer, and at the moment Rena Effendi, Steve McCurry, Anders Petersen, Anthony Suau, Reza and Ami Vitale have their sets of pictures on line, so we  still have work by a very long list – Jane Evelyn Atwood, Bruno Barbey, Samuel Bollendorff, Eric Bouvet, Kathryn Cook, Claudine Doury, Carolyn Drake, Nikos Economopoulos, George Georgiou, Harry Gruyaert, Guillaume Herbaut, Ed Kashi, Massimo Mastrorillo, Davide Monteleone, Christopher Morris, Paolo Pellegrin, Gaël Turine, Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt and Vanessa Winship to look forward to.

The pictures from the project are also being published in the newspaper and displayed in shows around Turkey, and you can see some of the spreads and pictures of the shows on the news page of the site.

Ami’s pictures as always appeal to me for their clarity and warmth, and along with some rather amazing landscapes it is her pictures of people that I find move me most. I still have very fond memories of meeting her and hearing her talk in Poland some years ago, not to mention sharing pizzas at Alcatraz in Bielsko with her, Eikoh Hosoe and a few more photographers.

I also very much liked the set of pictures by Anders Petersen, perhaps a little more tender than some of his work. Rena Effendi has some nice pictures of people on the street and dancing, while Steve McCurry tackles whirling dervishes (a subject I’ve photographed a couple of times in Tooting!*) Anthony Suaa’s work I find more difficult to feel much empathy with, perhaps because of the kind of people and life he has photographed, dealing largely with the rich and successful, and I find it hard to see what he is saying about them although I admire some of the pictures. Reza’s long exposure blurs are perhaps just not my cup of tea, although sometimes it can be effective.

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© 2009 Peter Marshall
Whirling Dervishes from Lancashire perform in Tooting – Peter Marshall, 2009

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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