I don’t often get to photograph pigs. Still less often have I photographed toy pigs being pushed along the street on a plastic roller skate by a man on his hands and knees. But that was what performance artist taxi-driver Mark McGowan was doing when I went to photograph him at work.
Much to my annoyance I’d missed an earlier opportunity when he had pushed ‘Daddy’s Pig‘ from Kings College Hospital where he is being treated for cancer to Downing St. I’d planned to photograph his personal protest against the privatisation of the NHS on that occasion, but was misled by a totally inaccurate tweet about his progress which led me to believe he had ended the journey, when I could have walked a couple of hundred yards to meet him still at it. Twitter certainly does provide a platform for some complete twits.
So this time I didn’t rely on Twitter but simply took a bus along his route and jumped off it at the next stop after I’d spotted him from the top deck. Unfortunately I saw him just after passing one stop and the next one was an unusually long distance on for London and I had almost a quarter mile to trot back, but that apart from that the method worked.
Of course I wasn’t going to take a posed picture. It had to be an action image of the pig, and there were a few minor problems. It would have been easier with a camera with a live view screen that folds out, enabling me to work from a low level and see what I was taking, but Nikons don’t offer this. But particularly if I wanted to show McGowan’s face as on hands and knees he pushed the pig along, I had to work from a low level.
I also needed to keep out of the way of pig and pusher (and there were two pushers, with the pig having been joined by a fire engine, mainly travelling side by side.) Usually covering protests I can get in close and walk backwards at the same speed as the people are coming towards me, but that wasn’t really possible with the camera at more or less ground level, and with other people in the way on the street, some of them also taking photographs.
In the end I found two approaches that I think worked. One was to use the 70-300 telephoto and work from a distance, kneeling on the pavement and taking pictures in those brief moments when I had a clear view with nobody walking between me and the pig. The second was to work very close holding the camera with the 10.5mm lens close to the ground and to the pig, but without being able to see through the viewfinder, trying to keep the camera roughly level and an eye on the subject to decide when to press the shutter. I think this produced the best results, some of them after processing the images with the FishEye Hemi plug-in.
I’ve included rather more than usual of the better results in Daddy’s Pig heads for the Trough on My London Diary, so you can get a good idea of how well both methods worked. But of course I didn’t just photograph McGowan and his pig as you can see.
I’d been late getting to Daddy’s Pig, covering a very different protest earlier outside the Houses of Parliament, stuffed with lawyers, protesting over changes to the legal aid system which they quite rightly feel mean the end of justice for all except the very rich. Our current system can do a good job for the poor as well, though not for those in the middle, but if the changes go ahead those without wealth can expect justice on the cheap, with their defence by people with little interest or experience working for Eddie Stobart or Tesco Law who offer the lowest tender.
More pictures and text at Lawyers Funeral for Legal Aid.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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