Re-photo

Here is another picture of the ring of candles at the protest against the Delhi Gang Rape outside the Indian High Commission in London.

Its always difficult to know how bright to make night images; I think visually the impression was of a darker scene than this, and I’ve perhaps taken too much care to get separation in the shadow areas. It would be more dramatic a little darker, especially at the bottom of the frame.

Automatic exposure tends to make night scenes too bright, but this was a little underexposed even though I was using +1/3 stop of extra exposure. Possibly the light sources – the 8 candles – actually in the picture were to blame, and working at 16mm focal length I was quite close to them. I was at the centre of a fairly tightly packed crowd and couldn’t move back at all. This was one of the first pictures I took of the ring of candles and I started by trying to work closer still and low, but the the candles didn’t really look like a circle, and the picture in my previous post, taken from around waist level, shows that better.

Either might have been a better picture with the 10.5mm semi-fisheye, which would also have let me take the scene in landscape format, but although using this would have given more of the circle of the crowd around the candles, it would also have included several other photographers and cameras. There really were far too many people trying to take pictures. I had to ask another photographer to pull back his camera strap to make these pictures.

Using flash would have ruined the effect of the candles, and people were moving quite a lot as they shouted slogans, so to try and avoid subject movement I was working using Shutter priority with a shutter speed of around 1/100s. The ISO was set at 3200 and I probably needed an aperture of around f2 but the lens has a full aperture of only f4. So the camera can’t do it, and I got a couple of stops of underexposure – despite the EXIF data telling me I actually had exposure compensation of +.3 stops. Of course the viewfinder display does indicate the underexposure, but in these situations the best thing to do is to actually take the picture and look at it (and the histogram) on the rear screen.

I don’t do a lot of chimping – it disturbs the flow of my work – but it really is essential to check on things like this that the histogram comes down more or less to zero in the shadow areas – and also that you are not getting significant highlight clipping. Then you know that you can adjust things as necessary in Lightroom. I think I have lost a tiny bit of insignificant detail in the candle flames – which could not be recovered with burning in as it wasn’t recorded.

These two pictures, taken within a few seconds of each other from an almost identical position show the advantages and disadvantages of using flash. The upper image was with the 16-35mm on the D700 and the lower with the DX 18-105mm on the D800. I only take a single flash unit and it was on the D800 at the time.

The flash does make this woman and her two signs reading ‘Never Again‘ stand out more, but I much prefer the image using available light.

But there is a problem with working with available light at events like this with a lot of photographers present, and one that ruined quite a few pictures (you can just see it on a couple of others in the set on My London Diary.)  Here’s one that shows it but where I thought the effect was interesting.

That red light on the closer woman’s face, a little spilling on to her t-shirt – is another photographer focussing. You seldom notice this if using flash, as the intensity of the flash overpowers the focus light pattern. But it really is a problem at busy events such as these, and there must be better ways to improve focus in low light that camera designers could think up rather than this.

There were areas where the available light just wasn’t enough to work with, and I’ve been experimenting with ways around this – but that’s something I’ll look at in a later post.

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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

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I thought this was probably the best image that I took last Monday at the Gang Rape Protest at Indian High Commission in London, or possibly one of the other two variations on it that are on My London Dairy.  But I knew when I took it that is was less likely to be used than some of the other pictures, simply because it it portrait rather than landscape format.

Although portrait images often fit the printed page best, and actually fit better into this blog, the move towards viewing images on screen has meant that landscape format has really become a norm and images in portrait format are less viable. I even get the feeling that many picture editors would prefer landscape format and even if they want to use an image in portrait format would prefer to do their own savage cropping on a landscape original.

It’s all to do with screen formats. Almost all normal screens are landscape format, and the trend over recent years has been away from the normal to the wide-screen – such as the 16:9 format screen I’m writing this post on.

It’s projection of images that shows up portrait format worst, and the use of computer for this. Back in the old days of slide projection, vertical and horizontal formats could usually be projected at the same size – so long as the screen was square. Computer projectors now often use a 16:9 format, allowing a 35mm format landscape image to be be projected to occupy most – around 85% – of the screen,  while a portrait image fills just over half of it – around 56%.  The longer dimension of the landscape image will be around 1.5 times that of the portrait.

When I got home and uploaded my images to Demotix as usual, I couldn’t use what I thought was my best image as the lead image to the post – because Demotix call for that too be your best landscape image. It fits the web page design better.

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I’ve been busy over the past month or two working on a new book, which a couple of days ago I decided to give the title ‘Thamesgate Panoramas: South of the River‘. It includes 38 panoramas that I took in a number of visits to the area between Woolwich and Gravesend (and a little further at each end) on the River Thames and its estuary between May 2000 and February 2001.

The area is part of the huge area out to the east of London which makes up the Thames Gateway, the regeneration of which has been a national priority since 1994.  Of course I didn’t know that when I first started going there to take photographs in the early 1980s attracted by several things, but it was clear then that things would change.

I’d read about the area before I went there. In a slim geography booklet I’d picked up remaindered somewhere for 10p, Lower Thameside by Roy Millward & Adrian Robinson, a part of  their ‘South East England: Thameside and the Weald’, published in the Landscapes of Britain series in 1971. And in a much older work I’d found in our local library, where the over-enthusiastic author of ‘A Pilgrimage of the Thames‘ (1932), Donald Maxwell says that when the cement industry has left the quarry-scarred landscape ‘will be called the Switzerland of England.’

A page from the PDF version of the book

The main feature of the landscape is of course the River Thames and it features in many of the pictures, all of which are double-page spreads on the 10×8″ landscape format book.

I’ve made it available both as a print version and as a PDF. The PDF is better and considerably cheaper at £4.49 rather than the £26.99 for the printed book, the image quality is slightly better and you get a download link straight away rather than having to pay Blurb’s exorbitant postage rates and wait around 10 days. A slightly different version of the PDF is also available direct from me at the same price.

All the images in the book are double-page spreads, and Blurb doesn’t handle these too well, though I think they all look pretty good. But they are almost perfect if you set up your Adobe reader to read the double pages – only almost because Blurb does put a dotted line in to show the join of the pages.*

With the books being printed on demand, printing takes place on different printers and there seem to be slight alignment differences – so even if you adjust things correct to the nearest pixel from a proof copy, they won’t be quite spot on in the next copy printed. There is also the problem that if you get it right for the print version it will be wrong for the PDF, and I would have to have two versions of the book, one for print and one for PDF.

This is the first Blurb book that I’ve produced using InDesign rather than Blurb’s BookSmart, and it was some time (and several software versions) since I’d used it. BookSmart does a great job and is free, but there are advantages to InDesign, and the Blurb templates available for it make it fairly simple to use, if not as straightforward as BookSmart.

Northfleet, 2000

Northfleet, 2013

The two pictures above were taken from almost exactly the same point, but around twelve and a half years apart. The upper one was made with a swing lens panoramic camera and the lower – which I took on New Year’s Day – by stitching 3 digital images with the 16-35mm on the D800. They have roughly the same horizontal angle of view, but the swing lens camera has a focal length of around 26mm and gives less vertical coverage.

People have asked me about the title ‘Thamesgate’. It seemed an obvious contraction for ‘Thames Gateway’ as well as one that reflected a certain ambivalence I felt about the area and what has happened there over the years. And although there is a shopping centre of the same name in Gravesend and a few other things, it is unusual and should make the book easier to find in searches on Blurb and elsewhere.

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*I supply my own PDF without the dividing line.
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I started 2013 with a walk. Come to that I finished 2012 with a walk too, and although neither of them was primarily a photographic exercise, of course I took a camera, and made a few pictures on route.

But the kind of walks that other people – or at least my wife and elder son who I was walking with – do are very different from the way that I walk when I’m on my own and out to take pictures. In the past for some walks where I know the paths are good for cycling I’ve even taken my Brompton with me so that instead of always finding myself running to catch up with them I can easily do so with a few flicks of the pedals.

Photography really isn’t a very sociable activity, even when you are taking pictures of people you have to think and interact with them differently than if you were not taking pictures; you become an observer rather than a participant, though I’ve often worked hard to blur that distinction. But photographing a landscape often seems really to be a very different activity from walking through it.

I learnt a lot about photography – particularly the technical stuff –  from the old Ansel Adams Basic Photo series, written in the early 1950s and already rather out of date when I read them around 20 years later. One of the things I learnt was how Ansel could look at a landscape, perhaps a few tree trunks, and see something that was really completely different, a picture that he could make from them by a particular exposure and development, along with some localised dodging and burning, and perhaps using filters etc. It was an approach to making pictures that I felt uneasy with, a kind of bravura performance with the elements of the landscape. What I wanted was to show it how it was rather than to show what I could do with it.

But over Christmas and the New Year, I was more going out for walks with the family than going out to take pictures, though I did occasionally find myself running after them (it was far too muddy to think of taking my bike) having stopped to make a photo or two.

I particularly liked the picture above of Staines Moor, not least for some of the details which you probably can’t make out at this scale. Along the horizon at the left are two of the boundary features of the moor, the M25 and a reservoir, and in the sky near the centre of the image that isn’t a bird or a nasty spot of gunk on the sensor but a plane taking off from Heathrow, less than a mile away.

You can see more of the pictures in Around Staines, and from our New Year’s Day walk in Kent in Northfleet & Southfleet.

Channel tunnel rail link construction site, 2003

We had several reasons for going to Northfleet, not least that I’ve just been working on a new book of photographs including the area taken in 2000-2001, but the idea was actually my wife’s as I’d just given her a book, ‘A Pilgrimage of the Thames’ by Donald Maxwell, published in 1932 since she and my son have for some years he and my wife have been walking parts of the Thames Path, and it made the area sound fascinating. It was a book I’d first found when I was first photographing the area in the early 1980s, when much of what Maxwell wrote, allowing for his imaginative perception, was still recognisable. Things in the area have changed rather more since then, something I’ll perhaps write more about when I get that book sorted. Meanwhile you might like to take a virtual walk (or rather cycle ride) with me from 2003, three pages starting here.

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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

________________________________________________________