Different Perspectives

© 2012, Peter Marshall
60mm (equiv) on 18-105mm
© 2012, Peter Marshall
24mm on 16-35mm
© 2012, Peter Marshall
15mm (equiv), 10.5mm fisheye converted to cylindrical perspective

On Father’s Day I went to a vigil, one of a number around the country held to remember men who had died while in the care of the police. Ricky Bishop was killed in Brixton Police Station 0n 21 November 2001 and Sean Rigg 0n 22 August 2008.  They are not the only people to have died in largely unexplained and suspicious circumstances in that building, but their families have both mounted long public campaigns over their deaths.

The inquest into Sean Rigg’s death is currently under way, and is seen by many as an important battle in the fight for justice for all those – almost one case every week since 1990 according to the records kept by the charity ‘Inquest’ – who die in police custody.  But of course the verdict remains to be seen, and although some similar cases have ended in verdicts of ‘unlawful killing’ (and in others inquest juries have been denied the opportunity to reach this verdict) there has not been a single successful prosecution of an officer concerned in the past  40 years.

Vigils such as this are in their nature usually quiet and decorous, with little incident to photograph. People stand with banners or sit or stand in small groups and talk quietly, with perhaps just a few short speeches.  It gives everyone, including photographers, plenty of time to think.

The three pictures above were taken from more or less the same position – within a few feet – but with different lenses. They all show the ‘memorial tree’ outside the police station, adopted by the families to put up candles and photographs and posters of their dead loved ones several years ago. All have the police station in the background.

In the top image, I’ve moved to a position where the poster on the tree more or less lines up with the Metropolitan Police noticeboards outside the police station, linking the two groups visually. The woman in black walking past the notices wasn’t a part of the vigil, but I think adds a little symbolism.  This was taken on my very ailing D300, and I only managed to take a single frame with her in before the mirror stuck and I had to take a few seconds getting it working again.

For the second picture, I moved closer to the tree and a little to the left, to show the ‘Justice for Ricky Bishop’ banner being held by one of his family. The woman on the extreme right of the image is one of Sean Rigg’s sisters. I’ve kept the Metropolitan Police headed notice boards in the picture too, but shown rather more of the tree and the posters, lanterns and flowers on it.

The memorial tree is actually fairly close to the police station, in a small paved area on the corner of the roads that meet there. Using the 10.5mm semi-fisheye lens with its almost 150 degree horizontal angle of view I could stand more or less next to the tree to keep its trunk large in the image and take in the whole frontage of the building where the two men were killed. In this particular image, chosen here to match the others more closely the tree obscures the right hand side of the police station. The fisheye lens works with a spherical perspective which curves all straight lines except those that pass through the centre of the image, and this results in the vertical lines of buildings showing a very pronounced curvature when you approach the edges of the image. In this picture it also made the tree seem to bulge out in the centre of the image, which was a little disturbing and needed correction.

By using a plug-in which converts to a cylindrical perspective the verticals are rendered more or less straight. Horizontal lines (except the line through the centre of the image) remain curved – an effect which increases as you go towards the top and bottom of the frame, but this is generally less disturbing. The tree no longer bulges out but I didn’t quite hold the lens level when I made the image, so the verticals are actually slightly diverging in the corrected image. I could have used Lightroom to correct this, but would have lost some detail .

Despite the very different angle of view, I’ve again been able to make use of a line of  things across the centre to link the posters etc on it to the background, this time including the row of people with the noticeboards and banner.  Although these three images are in some ways very different they have this in common.

Of course I took other (and better) pictures in the hour and a half I was at the vigil and you can see more of them and read more about the event and the deaths on My London Diary, in Fathers Day Vigil.

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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.

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