The demonstrators outside the Hendon Hall Hotel on Sunday morning didn’t know that the person they had come to demonstrate against was over 2000 miles away in Israel.
Tzipi Livni was Foreign Minister of Israel when they launched their attack on Gaza a year ago, but is no longer in office. This means she has lost her immunity against prosecution under international law, and lawyers supporting the Palestinian cause had apparently obtained a warrant for her arrest on international war crimes charges in a London court. Acting on advice from the Israeli authorities that it would be possible for her to be arrested should she visit Britain (or Spain, Belgium or Norway) she had decided not to travel here and delivered a speech to a largely elderly Jewish audience at the Jewish National Fund conference by video link some time on Sunday afternooon.
Photographically the demonstration with a little less than a hundred people inside a pen outside the hotel complex was not particularly of interest. There were some few banners and flags and a certain amount of animation whenever a car pulled up to enter the gateway next to the pen after being checked by the security guards, but really not a lot was happening.
So it was a little of a challenge to produce interesting pictures – but of course I wasn’t going to set anything up – it goes against my principles. I did what I think you always have to do, watched the people taking part carefully and picked out scenes that struck me as visually more interesting, framing carefully. There were only one or two other actual photographers present which made it a little easier, not having to bother much about getting in the way of other people.
This man attracted me because I saw him as a man holding not a placard but a gun, its barrel the the stem of the key with its text “thE RIGHT Of return”, his right forefinger on the trigger and the orange scarf a part of the stock. I took a series of pictures, but couldn’t quite get the expression I wanted.
The there were images like this, where the placard stands out and tells a story:
and of course I wrote about the story for Demotix and also on My London Diary. Normally I might have framed more tightly, perhaps as a vertical eliminating the man on the phone at the left, although I liked having the ‘Free Palestine’ placard above his head. But there were other reasons to frame it like this (or rather to use the frame like this), partly that I wanted to use a closer image of this demonstrator with the other side of his placard (which there is also a story about that in the piece on My London Diary/Demotix.)
Altogether I spent over an hour taking pictures, and used around a dozen of them with the story on Demotix. As usual you can see a looser edit – around 20 pictures from the roughly 200 exposures I made – on My London Diary, along with a similar but slightly updated version of the story.
Just wondering, and first a declaration of what this is not: not a call for back to film not digital v analog as a principle etc : if you had been shooting film what would you estimate you would have shot and what would have been your edit ? This was 20 from 200. Forgetting the immediacy and photoshop possibilities has digital affected the way you shoot, I suppose it must have, but are you happier with the end result, the print on the paper (substitute screen ) ?
Did the availability of decent zooms have a greater effect/affect on your work than digital, forgetting the ability to post/make available the shots straight away ?
t this event I don’t think the difference would have been so great as in many other cases. Probably I’d have taken 3 or 4 36x films – around half as many pictures, and possibly ended up with a few fewer that I felt worked.
I like to think that whenever I press the shutter there is an idea I’m trying to put into an image. I don’t think digital has much changed the number of things I see and try to photograph, but it has increased my rate of success in converting ideas into images, mainly because – if possible – I’ll keep working on a motif more, and can also check.
Technically it also gives you greater control, and many situations where film would have failed to deliver (or I would have got the exposure wrong) I now get pictures. The whole system is so much more reliable – so more ideas work out.
All the Hendon pictures were taken on the Sigma f2.8 24-70, (though I also had the Sigma 12-24, 55-200 and Nikon 10.5mm in the bag.) Shooting either with the Leica or Olympus system I would have had a wider range of fixed focal lengths than 24-70 with me, and probably used them. My bag would have been rather smaller and lighter too. I think lens changing was very slightly more convenient on both these systems than with Nikon and there is more worry about dust with digital. Where zooms have changed my habits is probably most at the long end, practically impossible with rangefinders of course, though both the OM f4 and f5 200mm were nice lenses.
Of course it is very nice to have the kind of quality and convenience that modern zooms provide. Rather better than the zoom lens I owned in the 1970s. The lens I miss most now is the OM 35mm shift and the one that has provided most new opportunities the Nikon 10.5mm, which I’m still using on the D700 though it only gives around 6Mp files
hanks for taking time out to share the tech. details. I know you prefer to talk about the message and not the medium but to those of us with some hands on experience it does help to inform the pictures you post.
That 10.5 does give a lot of value for its cost as does Sigma.
Seasons Greetings: keep posting next year it is appreciated and I promise to try and reduce MY carbon footprint, but out in the sticks the public transport situation is arranged to minimise convenience and maximise frustration. ie It costs me more to park now to take the train into Manchester than the rail fare but a bus would add an extra hour to the journey time.
I’ve been trying to share some of the problems/decisions on the blog, but frankly I normally now2 rely on the electronics to look after the technical stuff, as usually they do a better job than me!
Thanks for your comments, much appreciated. The railways are certainly in a mess some of which can be based on the ridiculous decisions taken in the haste to privatise, but other aspects that date back to a lack of necessary investment in the previous 30 or so years. When I bought the house I live in the fact it was 5 minutes walk from a station was a major attraction (though it now I have to allow at least another 10 minutes to get a ticket thanks to modernisation.) But I think the real problem was the switch to market-based pricing which I think came in the 1960s. I’d like to see a return to distance based pricing with a single ticketing company covering the whole railway network to get away from the many anomalies we have at present. In the meantime I’m working hard to get good value out of the present system – and have just booked a return journey up to one of my sons in Derbyshire for less than it costs me to go a third of the distance at normal prices.
And still – just about – managing to keep the bike I got for my 13th birthday on the road.
This year was the first for quite a while that I actually managed to post out my physical Christmas cards before the last day for posting second class mail. Still a few days for the electronic version!
Peter