Islington on the March

One of many protests against the cuts in public services was a local march on Saturday in Islington. As local marches go, there was pretty strong support, but not as strong as one web report suggested in its headline One thousand march in Islington against cuts.

I often complain that the figures given by police and particularly the BBC (who shouldn’t have an axe to grind) are ridiculously low, though the BBC often play safe, with phrases like ‘Hundreds marched’, which is still rather misleading if – as sometimes – it was really around 25 hundreds. But this time I’d written a report before I read that on the web, and I’d used the actual figure in it.

Unless another 600 snuck in over the last half-mile after I had left to go elsewhere the actual figure was around 400. Just before Highbury and Islington station I stopped and counted as the whole march went past me, and I got to 397. Of course there is a small margin of error in such counts, however carefull you are. But I would be reasonably confident that there were between say 380 and 420 people marching (including a few very young children who were actually being carried.)

It is fairly easy to count a smallish march like this with some accuracy by actually counting individuals as they go past, though just a little tedious. It is easy to miss the odd one or two, and equally easy to count a few twice, but the errors tend to cancel out. Larger marches I count as batches of roughly twenty people, and above a couple of thousand I usually give up and rely on a rough estimation.  Years ago I used to stand two or three mornings a week looking down at around 1200 students in a morning assembly, which still gives me a rough idea of what that kind of number looks like, though protests are sometimes rather more spread out.

It may not be vital, but numbers are a fact which is often commented on and reported, and part of the job of a journalist is to get the facts right.

It wasn’t the most interesting of events to photograph, but people are always interesting, and I found some that  I hope express something of the spirit of the event.

You can read my report and see more pictures at Islington Strikes Back. Like many of the posts on My London Diary it was first published on Demotix, where I managed to upload the image above in a rather dim and dark version, having somehow failed to correct it in Lightroom. All my images get corrected on import using a standard preset which I have set up and this includes having Lightroom automatically adjust ‘tone’ – exposure, recovery (highlights), fill light, blacks, brightness and contrast. But this ‘auto tone’, which is the same as the button in the Basic section of the Develop module, is one area where Lightroom definitely needs some improvement.

Of course there is always some room for interpretation, but a good starting point for most images is to set shadows and highlights at the two ends of the histogram, and ‘auto-tone’ sometimes simply fails to do so. This image was such a case; Lightroom inexplicably made an exposure adjustment of -0.15 to leave a large gap at the highlight end of the histogram – and the corrected version above has an exposure adjustment of +0.57 – a difference of 0.72.  Normally I improve on the auto settings before sending pictures out, but somehow I missed this one in my late-night rush.

Demotix does a certain small amount of editing on the reports sent with pictures, though the changes made to mine are usually minimal. This time an editor had noticed that I had said that the march started at the Nags Head, and thought it would help to add the words “public house” after it. Unfortunately it’s some years since the Nags Head has been a public house, but it has bequeathed its name to a road junction and the area around it.  Fortunately I was able to log in and add my own correction, but it was a little annoying to have to do it in all the picture captions as well.

Demotix itself is in the news, having struck a deal with the Press Association (PA) which will now distribute some at least of its images.  It is really rather misleading of the report to say that Demotix “receives contributions from amateurs across the globe“, as although it does, it receives contributions from professionals around the world too, as well as some based here in the UK. But it certainly draws on photography from a wider base than existing agencies such as the PA, and often shows the strength of work from people with local knowledge rather than those flying in for short periods from abroad to cover stories. The best work on Demotix is as professional as that from any other agency.