There are some times where I perhaps err over the necessary boundary between being a protester and being a journalist covering a protest. You need to keep a certain distance so that you retain a certain objectivity, though of course your photographs are always subjective, from a particular personal point of view.
Perhaps by choosing to wear a surgical mask like the protesters while I was taking most of these pictures did overstep that line; certainly at many events I decline the badges and stickers that I’m offered which would show my support for the cause.
But of course I do support the junior doctors, and I support the NHS and am against its ongoing privatisation, of which the attempt by Jeremy Hunt to impose a new contract on them is part. I was born just before the NHS, grew up with its free orange and cod-liver oil, with regular visits to the clinic in pram and push-chair for health checkups, contributed to it through my National Insurance since I started work and, in the past thirteen years it has kept me going through treatment free at the point of need. Like most people in Britain I value it highly, even if we sometimes have our complaints.
But when you are surrounded by people in surgical masks, many with slogans written on them it would perhaps simply be polite to wear one yourself. Like putting on a rumal when covering Vaisakhi, or removing one’s shoes when entering a temple.
Of course I needed to take a picture showing Whitehall jam-packed with people wearing masks, but it was hard to do so and also make a satisfying composition. Obviously a high viewpoint was needed for the overall picture, and I took a number of frames holding the camera up above my head. It would be a lot easier with cameras such as the Fuji X-T1 where you can fold out the rear screen and see what you are actually taking, than with the Nikon D700 that I used.
You can use ‘Live View’ to put an image on the rear screen, but it becomes invisible when the camera is at full reach above your head – all you can do is try hard to keep the camera level and pointing slightly down to avoid an excessive amount of sky.
I think I didn’t do too badly, centering the image around the woman in a fluoresecent yellow tabard, though I would have preferred not to have cut the inch or two from her hands at the bottom of the frame
And of course I took quite a few more moving in closer – some of which you can see at Junior Doctors Rally & March; I like the one above with its row of heads and the intense gaze of the woman in the foreground whose mask bears the message ‘#NHS YOURS’.
The light was fairly dim, and even at EI 1600, the exposure was only 1/250 f6.3. With the 28-200mm in DX mode on the D810, the equivalent focal length was 188mm – so I needed the 1/250s – and focussing on the woman’s eye closer to the middle of the picture her other eye is just about sharp, but her hair at right is slightly soft.
Though I try to avoid the cult of celebrity, I had to photograph Vivienne Westwood and Vanessa Redgrave who came to speak in support of the junior doctors. The photographs of them speaking were of course those most likely to be used by newspapers. Though the same papers seldom report what they say. The two are also in the background in my top picture of some of the real stars at the event, the National Health Singers.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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