I have to admit that we shop at Sainsbury’s though I can’t remember when I last actually went there. But the stuff we eat that you can’t buy from Tradecraft (my wife sells their stuff on a weekly stall), our superb local butcher (just a shame the fishmonger was forced out of business by our local council) and the local market and a few little things from Waitrose (Sainsbury’s doesn’t have a decent mature cheddar) we get the rest mainly from Sainsbury’s mainly because it is the most convenient local supermarket – ten minutes away on a bike, and Linda fills her panniers there once a week. Though they won’t get that rich on the little we spend.
So I was just a little disturbed to find myself photographing a protest outside a Sainsbury’s Localjust off Holborn Circus as the launch event of a new national campaign, Pay Up!, aimed at making poverty a political issue. Before I’ve photographed protests at Tescos, at Marks and Spencer’s and even at Waitrose, but this was a first for Sainsbury’s.
But it turns out that they are a low pay employer, actually paying 50p and hour less to its lowest paid staff than Tesco, and certainly not enough to live on in London.
I reached the store with the leading protesters, and wondered whether to follow them in. The police weren’t far behind and I decided to stop and photograph them blocking the entrance to the mass of the protesters instead.
The pictures – more of course on My London Diary in Pay Up! Launches At Sainsbury’s
– weren’t great, but probably more interesting than what was happening inside, and I was able to go along the the exit and photograph the half a dozen or so who had got inside as they were fairly politely ushered out by the shop staff and police.
Of course I had to make sure that at least some of the pictures explained what the protest was about, and the banner outside the shop was an easy way to show this, with its use of their advertising slogan ‘Try Something New Today?’ and the protesters’ suggestion ‘Pay A Living Wage.’ You’ll see on My London Diary that I took a few more pictures making use of these slogans.
After a while when the protest moved around the corner to the Sainsbury’s offices on Holborn Circus I got another of my favourite images from the day, although this time the banner was held with its message away from me. It was certainly better to work from the side with the bodies of the people holding it visible, and the text would have perhaps taken something from the visual impact of the image.
The lighting was quite tricky during the protest, with low evening sun and some areas in pretty deep gloom. Much of the time the fill from the SB800 was needed and did a good job, but there were just a couple of pictures where something went wrong. Here’s one of them, with perhaps a couple of stops more flash than I wanted (I had it set for -2/3 stop.)
It needed a little flash (I took a couple of frames without) but this was way too much, and the fingers of that hand close to the lens were completely burnt out. Even with a lot of work in Lightroom I couldn’t quite rescue the image. Of course I am too close to her – the minimum distance shown on the back of the flash is I think 1.2metres, and had I been thinking I would have tried to cut down the flash in some way, but there wasn’t time to do much. I did see the problem and tried to take a couple of images with the flash off, but it did need some extra light.
1.2 metres (at ISO 1600) does seem rather a long way and the minimum distance increases as you put up the ISO. It’s something that makes flash a lot harder for me to use in low light where I want high ISO to avoid excessively dark backgrounds. Perhaps Nikon could improve the flash circuitry in some way to make life easier?