Re-photo

The march calling for a ‘People’s Vote’ now that the issues around Brexit are clearer was one of London’s largest, although the actual numbers present are disputed. But while the rally was going on in a packed Parliament Square there were still people waiting to leave Park Lane, around 3km away, with others in Green Park, and the march still sttretching along the entire route.

Noticeable as well as the sheer numbers was the huge range of posters and placards that people had made for the event, some short and direct, others considerably more creative, but overwhelmingly individual, father than the uniformity of some political protests.

In this post are a few of my favourites, which I’ll let speak for themselves.

You can find many more in my pictures on My London Diary at:
People’s Vote March – Start

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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People came to the Daily Mail to protest against papers in the Mail group, including the Metro, Daily Mail and others publishing articles demonising trans people, particularly trans women, and in particular the publication of an advertising campaign by campaigning group ‘Fair Play for Women’, which they see as a hate group.

A small group of mainly older feminists have come out violently against the right of trans women to be considered as women; they have been labelled as ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists’ and have published articles, picketed and protested at events against the inclusion of trans women as women, and of the right of trans women to identify themselves as women.

Many other feminists and those in sympathy with the feminist movement view them as extremists who are denying trans people their human and civil rights. They accuse the ‘TERFs’ of hate speech, while the anti-trans group say that the term TERF is itself hate speech.

Having several trans friends, I find the prejudice against them and the denial of thir problems and rights hard to understand and impossible to tolerate.  As the poster says, ‘Some People Are Trans. Get Over It‘. And while I might not share the language of the other poster below, I rather endorse its sentiment.

As the posters at this protest illustrate, feelings over the issue run high, and there have been some violent clashes between the two groups, disrupting some events.

Photographing the setting off of flares by the protesters as usual presented some propblems. At first I was too close to the protesters, at the right of the picture above, in the direction the coloured smoke was blowing. Everything went blue and it was had to see anything. I quickly rushed around and moved slightly further away from the protesters to take the picture above, and several others, moving in slightly closer to concentrate on particular women.

Smoke flares soon burn out, and I didn’t quite manage to do all I wanted to, but I was fairly pleased with a couple of the images.

Mail group end your transphobic hate

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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My walk from Stratford to Old Ford was not planned but rather on the spur of the moment, realising that I had several hours to fill between photographing BEIS refuse International Rescue help at lunchtime in Westminster and going on to my next  event outside the Daily Mail, and that the weather was fine, with sun and a clear blue sky. I set of knowing which way I would start but with no particular destination in mind.

I’ve been interested in the Lower Lea Valley since I first walked there in around 1980, that led to my web site ‘The River Lea’ and later the book ‘Before the Olympics’ which I think first came out in 2011 and is still available.

At first I was very much attracted  by its mixture of industry and post-industrial wilderness, particularly around the Bow Back Rivers between Stratford and Hackney, the very area that later became the Olympic site, and much of which is now a huge park. On earlier walks I’ve found this empty and alienating, but on this walk I was exploring one of the wilder areas, which was a welcome relief after walking through the urban hell of Westfield.

Coming out from these wetlands you still have to cross the arid desert that occupies much of the new park, before crossing the Lea Navigation into Hackney Wick, which is a far more lively place.

Tidied up for the Olympics, with much of the more vibrant graffiti removed, Hackney Wick is now in a rather curious balance between artistic ferment, peak hipster and gentrification.

As you can see from the full set of pictures and text on My London Diary, I wandered rather, and found myself having to rush to get to my next event.

You can see more pictures and text at Olympic Park walk.

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Every few months I go out with a few photographer friends for a few drinks and a meal, and sometimes we take a few pictures too, though it is really more of a social event. But in October our walk was rather different, partly because it was a prelude to attending a book launch by another of our group of friends, Mike Seaborne, taking place that evening in the Isle of Dogs.

I’ve a long relationship with the riverside path at Greenwich, one of my favourite walks over the years, beginning back around 1980 when the area was highly industrial. In recent years there have been closures of parts of the path where riverside flats were being built, but the last part re-opened just a few weeks before we walked it, and with this in mind I proposed we meet at North Greenwich station and walk into Greenwich.

Mostly I was interested in taking panoramic images and all of those shown here have a horizontal angle of view of over 140 degrees and a vertical field of view of just over 90 degrees and are in the normal 35mm 1.5:1 aspect ratio. Occasionally (usually by accident) I take them in 16:9 widescreen ratio which my Nikon D810 defaults to if you go into Live View in movie mode even if you are taking still images. Often I crop them to more panoramic format, typically 1.9:1, which is equivalent to using a rising or falling front on the camera. For landscape images it is generally vital to keep the camera level to avoid a curved horizon, and the D810 can display both up-down and left-right level indicators.

Lightroom by default corrects fisheye images to rectilinear perspective if you use the lens profile, which is frankly nonsensical. Fortunately it is possible to edit the profile to give no correction. In converting to rectilinear it throws away most of the image and gives you a fairly normal wide-angle view. Rectilinear perspective can’t really handle angles of view greater than around 90 degrees as I found using a 12-24mm lens. For most subject matter anything shorter than 16mm (97 degrees horizontal) was hardly usable, and I was very seldom happy with pictures I took at 12mm (113 degrees.) The 147 degrees of these images is simply out of range.

Very occasionally I’ll take a picture with this 16mm lens (or its 10.5mm DX equivalent) which looks fine exactly as taken, but for most scenes I’m thinking as I take it of a rectangle not quite as it appears in the frame, but defined by the centre of each of the four sides of the frame, knowing that I will lose the four corner areas. This is I think a ‘cylindrical’ perspective, exactly like I made for around fifteen years with a succession of ‘swing-lens’ cameras, where the lens rotates around the centre of a part circle of curved film, typically giving images with around a 130 degree angle of view.

There are quite a few software programmes that can perform this conversion, including both freeware and hugely expensive panoramic imaging software (which can of course also combine a number of images.) When I wrote for money on the web I was able to test a wide range of these, money no object as they came free (though sometimes time-limited.) They all did simple jobs like this well.

I’ve ended up using Fisheye-Hemi, now sold by Imadio simply because of its convenience as a Photoshop plugin (it also works with other software which can use Photoshop plugins.) Recently I’ve upgraded to the latest version which is a Lightroom plugin, even more convenient for my workflow. I now don’t get offered free software, but this isn’t hugely expensive, though a weak pound doesn’t help.

You can see these pictures (a little larger) and more – both panoramic and normal rectilinear – on My London Diary at Greenwich Walk.

Our walk ended at the Pelton Arms which has a good range of real ales and is less of a tourist attraction than the riverside pubs. If you are readling this on the day it is posted, unless the weather is really foul, I’ll be out and walking off a little of that extra Christmas food today.
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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________

There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Wishing you all a happy Christmas

And this is the picture on the Christmas card I physically gave to just a few of my close friends. It looks a little better on-line as I was having printer problems when I had to produce it.

I’m not actually writing this on Christmas Day, as I’ll be too busy, but I’ll schedule this to be published. It’s one of the few days in the year I usually go to church – for years Sunday was always a day for taking photographs, and it still is at times. But we’ll have something of a family day and I’ll be helping getting dinner ready for it and then relaxing afterwards.

The advantage of an online greeting is that you can see a few more of the pictures I took when I chanced to come across this year’s Santacon in London.

Of course I knew that Santacon was taking place, but hadn’t bothered to find the places and times, and just happened to walk down one of the right streets at the right time, intending to get on a bus on my journey home.

There were elves as well as Santas, and the occasional reindeer.

and music and dancing. We do the music at home at Christmas, but I don’t think our rooms are large enough for much dancing.

Although I don’t much like using flash it adds something to the interaction with people in pictures like this, though it also needs quite a lot of work – burning and dodging – to even out the light, particularly when scenes includ people very clost and at a distance from the flash.

I stayed working with the santas as they made their way from High Holborn down to Trafalgar Square, with rather a lot of stops for dancing and crowding around cars and other harmless fun.  You can see many more pictures on My London Diary at London flooded with Santas.

Again I’ll wish you all Happy Christmas!

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________