Re-photo

Another image with the 10.5mm DX semi-fisheye, which was always a good lens and has really become a great lens to use with the recent versions of Lightroom, which remove its main defect, a fairly hefty dose of chromatic aberration. I rather unusually entered an image taken with this lens in 2005 into a competition organised by one of the printer companies, I think just to be shown in an exhibition somewhere in central Europe, one of the pictures I’d taken in what must be one of the most stylish photo galleries around, Contretype, and it took hours of work in Photoshop to get rid of the nasty effects in the file I sent for the large exhibition print to be made. You can see that image and how well Lightroom deals with the problem in an early post here, End Colour Fringing. By default, Lightroom now also tries to change the perspective to rectilinear, which is almost always disastrous for the images, though sometimes a small amount of ‘distortion’ correction – perhaps 30% – can help. Of course it isn’t really a distortion, just a different way of representing the world, and sometimes the effect can be improved by changing to another view, cylindrical perspective. But the picture above is one that works well and is actually strengthened by the original spherical view, which brings the eye into the centre of the image.

Importantly it is from one of the trade union campaigns I most admire, the fight by the cleaners to get a living wage and to be treated with respect, a fight they have carried out with a determination that should be a model and an inspiration for all workers in all trade unions. The cleaners have stood up for their rights, have refused to be bullied and have won, with many more now getting the London Living Wage, although the struggle continues. One of the main and important points they make – and one that should be an important call made by the whole trade union movement – is that companies may outsource the contracts but they cannot outsource responsibility for the workers on their premises.

It is a sad reflection on the state of our trade union movement that the cleaners have only really made progress by going outside of the established unions and forming their own union, at first as a branch of the IWW, and more recently as the IWGB. Although many individual trade unionists have come to the protests and supported the cleaners, the cleaners found the union officials  in too cosy a relationship with the employers, and unwilling to fight for workers’ rights.

The leading figure in the fight is Alberto Durango, who was just out of picture behind me as I took this image, and IWW Cleaners Demand Reinstate Alberto was part of the fight the cleaners have to get proper recognition for their union.

One of the events I’ve photographed for a number of years is the annual party around Eros at Piccadilly Circus, organised by Venus, which is an antidote to the commercialisation of love which reaches its annual peak on St Valentine’s day. Reclaim Love – Occupy Your Heart! has quite a few images from this year’s event, although as you can see from the umbrella the weather wasn’t too kind. But this was my favourite, from the warmth of that smile and the symmetry of the face and the hat dead centre in this image but with very different elements around – those in the know will recognise the free Reclaim Love t-shirt in pink at right as well as of course the advertising display of Piccadilly Circus at top left.

My third image from February comes from a very different part of London, Guildhall Yard  and shows members of one of the City livery companies, the Furniture Makers’ guild. Although many of the guilds are truly ancient, the annual Pancake Race is a recent foundation, and one in which  the members enjoy letting their hair down just a little, wearing silly hats and taking part in the races. Although it is a fun day, it does often illustrate the kind of cut-throat competition that lies under the gentlemanly surface of much City business.

It wasn’t a day when I made many good pictures – as you can see in Pancakes in the City – Guildhall as these people are generally far too aware of themselves and their image. The Nikon D700 with the bulky 16-35mm f4 that I used (at 16mm) isn’t the most discreet tool, and I had expected to have more success with the Fuji X100 that I also used at the event. But although I got some pictures that I probably couldn’t have made with the Nikon, its 35mm fixed lens was just not wide enough.

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A couple of weeks ago I responded to a request to sort out up to a dozen of my best pictures from the last year, and spent quite a time going through my work, and picking out the pictures I most liked from the many thousands I’ve taken.

It was a difficult job, not least because there were so many to chose from – though of course not all of them are at all memorable. I’m never really happy with the idea of ‘best pictures’ either; pictures that would be good for some purposes may be hopeless for others.  Much that I take is in any case not really intended as individual pictures, but to work with others to tell a particular story or describe a particular event. But there are some pictures which stand out for various reasons.

I’ve probably made between 100,000 and 150,000 exposures so far in 2012. Of these perhaps 5% get deleted on camera, mainly while I’m travelling home after taking pictures, and mainly for technical reasons. The screen on the back of the camera is too small to really do more than sort out the really useless images.

Back home I let Lightroom copy and rename all the images, and quickly go through them on screen with just the automatic processing applied. There will be quite a lot of near-duplication as I’ve worked at a particular idea, and I’ll try to pick the best, giving it two stars. Occasionally there might be a couple I’m not sure about which is best, and I’ll decide I need to process both. Quite a few things I’ve tried don’t work out at all, but typically I end up with around 1 in 10 of the pictures I think worth pursuing.

I’ll then go through these tagged pictures again, and give a colour rating to a smaller group that will tell the story effectively for Demotix. Lightroom has four colour ratings that can be applied with a number key – yellow, green, blue and red – and I use a different colour for each story I’ve taken on a particular day. A story on Demotix can have a maximum of 25 pictures, but often will only need a dozen or fifteen. Those images are then manually processed, with appropriate adjustments of contrast, brightness etc and dodging and burning and so on before keywording, captioning and then outputting them with my Lightroom Demotix preset and submitting.

Agencies would like the news sent them before it happens, and for ‘breaking news’ you need to get your pictures to them within minutes. I decided not to try and compete, but instead to concentrate on quality, on telling stories both in pictures and text, though often now I send the pictures first before writing the often lengthy stories that go with them.

Later, often a week or too later, when I have time I’ll go through all the tagged pictures, processing them, and using my Lightroom presets for web images and for full size jpegs to output copies. The web images go on My London Diary (and a few here) and full size jpegs are my reference images. So far for 2012 I have just over 12,000, all stored in a folder for the day they were taken. Usually when I’m asked to supply an image I work from these jpegs, though for special purposes I’ll go back and re-process from the raw files – which I keep backed up with one copy on DVD and another on an external hard drives.

Looking through 12,000 takes quite a while, but is quicker and easier with dedicated file viewing software than with Lightroom or Photoshop. The free FastStone Image Viewer which was recommended to me here a few weeks back enables you to view whole screens of thumbnails rapidly at a reasonable size – and is almost as good as ACDSee which I used to use.

I wanted a dozen, but on my first trawl through I found around 65 that I copied into a folder for a final selection – and these included a few similar images. I’ll perhaps take a few more this month that will qualify, and over the next couple of weeks I’ll do a review of my own year in photography, with some of these pictures and a few comments on them.

Shia Muslims on Park Lane in their 31st Arbaeen procession in London, the culmination of 40 days of mourning the martyrdom of the grandson of Mohammed, Imam Husain, killed with his family and companions at Kerbala in 680AD. More at Arbaeen Procession in London.

Taken with the 10.5mm DC format full-frame fisheye, it illustrates some of the strengths and weaknesses of using lenses of this type. The curved horizon helps in this image, as too does the flare and ghosting – and this is more effective in a larger image than this. But with a 180 degree diagonal angle of view its often hard to avoid having the sun in an image.

It was difficult to take because I had to be really very close to people who were very energetically raising their arms and thumping their chests to get the kind of image I wanted, and keeping out of their way was tricky. What makes this picture better than the many others I’ve taken of this and similar events is the framing and the two prominent arms in the foreground, with the tattooed arm behind them in the centre of the picture. The line of flare ghosts seem to point to that tattoo also. The mix of black and white tops along with the bare flesh also adds something, and there is even a little touch of red at the top left that some people think indispensable to a picture!

Some of this was planning, working to try and get the image, but there is too a bit of luck, a little bit of magic, involved – as in most of my favourite images.

A couple of weeks later disabled activists chained their wheelchairs together in a protest “calling for the dropping of Welfare Reform Bill, urging savings cutting tax evasion by the rich rather than penalising the poor and disabled”. Disabled Welfare Reform Road Block.

The picture above for me encapsulates much of the event – the chain, the wheelchairs, the placards and the people involved (one of them himself a photographer.)  Taken with the 16-35mm, the leaning speaker adds a force to the image.

Both of these were in the final selection of a dozen I made, and the lower one is I think being used on a calendar. Last year I made my own personal calendar from 2011 pictures, and I may get round to doing the same from this year’s images.

Film has been pretty well dead for some years now, or at least reserved for a few very special niches. There is a movement to keep it alive, I think largely the reserve of those opposed to change on emotional grounds. Real ale I can understand, but real film? We really are better off without all its problems and defects, and with the many advantages of good digital cameras.

I last took pictures on film around 5 years ago now,  but I actually gave up developing film slightly earlier, and was left with around a 100 cassettes (and a couple of rolls) that I exposed in around 2007, left on a shelf in my darkroom. I kept meaning to get out my film processor and develop them – they are all C41 though some are chromogenic black and white, but somehow it hasn’t happened. I did a couple of batches of the b/w around 18 months ago – 7 films at a time, but that still leaves quite a few.

Finally I’ve got around sending some of the colour neg to a pro lab for processing. The local lab I used to use occasionally went out of business some years ago with the switch to digital, so I decided to post these off to a company that offered a reasonably priced service at £2.99 per film, process only. I knew that they were probably all exposed in panoramic cameras –  one of the few niches referred to above, so couldn’t just send them to a budget processor.

Getting the films back in the post was a little like reliving the thrill (and often disappointment) of taking the films out of the final rinse and hanging them to dry, though this time I had little idea what I was going to see. Here’s one of the images that I found.

Some of you will recognise this view, and I also photographed digitally from the same viewpoint in 2007 and on other occasions. I was actually more or less in the same place last week, though a very tall fence prevents me getting to the exact same spot. But here’s a picture from just a few  yards away of how the scene looks now.

Probably the only thing that is still more or less the same is the bit of the bridge at the left of the top image – and you can just see it under the fence at centre left of the lower image.

The digital image is a detail from a wider view – the film image covers roughly 120 degrees and I’ve cropped the digital to a similar angle – I made it as roughly twice the horizontal angle and vertical angle of the film camera. They use a similar perspective but the wider vertical view of the digital makes the curvature more obvious.

What you can’t perhaps see clearly is the difference in colour quality and detail, where digital scores heavily. And at the left of the film image I’ve left on one of the little accidents we often got with film, a lighter area where I think there was a little overlap with the next frame. It was taken with one of my favourite cameras, a Horizon, which I think cost well under £200 in a brown paper package from the Ukraine.

Keeping the film for 5 years between exposure and development doesn’t seem to have greatly altered the image, taken on an ISO400 Fuji film, though of course this is not a scientific test, but it seems fairly similar in most respects to films I did develop at the time.

I’ve just sent off another batch to finish the undeveloped colour film, but am still thinking I might process the 50 or so cassettes of T400CN myself, perhaps giving them a little extra development to compensate for any loss in contrast that may have occurred.

I’m also wondering whether to take out the Horizon or my X-Pan again. They are fun to use and better for panoramas with moving things in them as the exposure is made more or less at a point. And I do have a little supply of film still in the cupboard with expiry dates around 2002 or 2004 it would be a shame to waste.