Nat Geo World

When I first saw the reports of a Photoshop cloning error on a Steve McCurry print widely reported after having been spotted by Italian photographer Paolo Viglione I decided there really wasn’t a lot more to say.

It seemed a careless error, and one that surprisingly hadn’t been spotted, but such errors aren’t difficult to make, and don’t necessarily result from any attempt to mislead. Years ago, when making a black and white print for sale, I’d done something similar, while cloning out a scratch from the negative late at night, my stylus had inadvertently dropped onto the tablet, probably as I briefly dozed, and added an extra piece to a shoreline. Fortunately I’d noticed it later, but only as I was taking a last look at the print before sending it to the customer, and was able to make a replacement print without the glitch.

It is something that probably wouldn’t happen now, even though I probably fall asleep at the computer more often, because I very seldom feel a need to use the clone tool now, as Photoshop’s other spotting tools have improved immensely over recent years. But it used to be the only real way to do the job back in the early days. I think the worst that has happened recently when I’ve nodded off has been to spill a glass of a rather good red wine across my keyboard. Doing so woke me with a start and I immediately tipped the keyboard upside down and there were no lasting effects, but I deeply regretted the loss of the wine, the last of the bottle, which I’d been keeping as a special treat for when I finished processing.

One of several prints on display in my bathroom is a large panoramic image of a house and garden, unsold after an exhibition where it was on public display for over a month. I can’t go in there without noticing a small error in the stitching process – it was made from three exposures – which means one of the windows in the house has a small part missing from its central white-painted vertical. I didn’t notice it in my careful inspection of the file, nor when it was on display, and if any who saw it at the show did, they said nothing. It hung on my own wall for several weeks before I noticed it, but now, although small and unimportant in the image, it seems glaringly obvious every time I use the bathroom.

Most of the time we see what we want to see, and not necessarily what is there, and I think that is perhaps one of the points behind photographer Peter van Agtmael‘s view on the McCurry controversy, ‘Why Facts Aren’t Always Truths in Photography‘. It’s an article I find rather disturbing, though entirely in agreement with his “very important qualifier” that “Any photographer working predominantly in a photojournalistic context needs to be rigidly transparent about digital manipulation“, and it is hard to dispute his statement that the best we can hope for in the intensely subjective craft of photojournalism is “a coherent personal truth.”

But in the piece he does seem to be acting as an apologist for a fellow Magnum member, even if one he says he hardly knows. Because it isn’t the silly and unintentional slip in that street photograph from Cuba that is at the heart of the controversy but the other examples of intentional deception that have emerged. And it is hard to believe that what we have seen is not just the tip of an iceberg.

The National Geographic Magazine formed an important part of my early life, much of it spent, at least on rainy days, leafing through a large pile of the magazines covering the 1930s which had come to us after the death of a more affluent relative, along with his splendid stamp collection – he had worked for the General Post Office and made the most of his connections. The articles were at times rather tedious, but the black and white photographs spoke more directly, showing us how people around the world lived – and dressed, or not.

Coming back to ‘Nat Geo‘ years later was something of a surprise, with Kodachrome bursting out all over, but while presenting its rather over-enthusiastic view of the world, the emulsion was at least not susceptible to manipulation by photographers, though one could hide a great deal in its black shadows. But it would appear that with digital things have changed. Perhaps the revelations now being made will result in rather more editorial control.

I don’t warm to Nat Geo, which just somehow now seems far too American and politically not at all to my taste. That the National Geographic Channel is owned by the Fox Cable Networks division of 21st Century Fox, and the magazine since 2015 is part of a new partnership, National Geographic Partners, controlled by 21st Century Fox, perhaps says it all. But read ‘A Trip Around Steve McCurry’s Photoshopped World‘ by Paroma Mukherjee to see an Indian view of the photographers take on India.

Finally I’d like to mention an article in The Online Photographer, ‘C-E-R: Why we shouldn’t say “post” or “Photoshopping” any more‘. It’s not I think a very useful contribution, but one that reflects the anxiety some photographers feel about their own practices with images.

Post-processing or ‘post’ is just a useful term to cover everything that happens between when the file – raw or jpeg – emerges from the camera to when it appears on paper or screen. It isn’t really ‘after processing‘ as the article suggests, but ‘after exposure‘ processing’ If you want a more accurate term you could expand it to ‘post-exposure processing‘, but I’m all for keeping things short.

I’m not sure it is useful or possible to separate ‘correction‘ and ‘enhancement‘ as the article suggests, or to set clear limits as to what is allowable in photojournalism or documentary work (while in some other areas of photography clearly there are no limits on this or on the final category, ‘reworking‘.)

But what does seem clear to me is that this third element is simply something that should always be avoided by photojournalists and documentary photographers. And if Nat Geo aims to be anything more than a glossy travel-porn mag it certainly needs to give the photographers who work for it very strong guidance to that effect.

Stoke Newington

There’s an article on Flashbak to a set of images that interested me with the title ‘A Faded Suburb with a Jaunty Air’ – Photos of Dalston 1979-1984, with pictures by Alan Denney, a teacher who became a mental health social worker, and who photographed the area he was living in.

They interest me in part because I was photographing at times in the same area as Denney at around the same time, though as a local his work has a far greater focus on the local people and events. To me Dalston was just one small part of London and my projects ranged across the whole of the greater city. His work is also far more politically engaged than mine at that time, though I think we share some of our views.

We both also share an interest and claim some inspiration from the work of Tony Ray-Jones, a photographer I’ve written about on many occasions, and who before his early death in 1972, as I wrote “gave the whole of British photographic culture a much-needed boot up the backside.”

Of course, Denney isn’t a great photographer like Ray-Jones was (or might have become), but does show how interesting a clearly focussed body of work can be, and can become with the passage of time. It’s interesting to go and look at the wider selection of his work on his Flikr site, where you will ifnd that he is now photographing many of the same events and people as I do, and also to read and listen to interviews and articles about him, for example on East London Lines and The Eel.

Epson Scans

Today I’d doing some serous scanning despite it being a lovely day to go out and perhaps take some pictures. But I’ve a busy few days over the weekend and don’t want to get tired before this. I’m trying hard to finish a whole month of black and white work – July 1986. The pictures here are just a small sample from those I took that month, all in London.


Free Trade Wharf, Limehouse, London. July 1986

But before I started did something I should have done several years ago but always put off – something I’m definitely Grade A* at.

I’m scanning today with the Epson V750 flatbed; it’s much faster than the Minolta Dimage Multiscan Pro, and with care the results are virtually as good. I’ve been having problems with the Minolta – the Firewire interface has become unreliable, working for a few scans then giving up halfway, and it had become very difficult to use. It’s the way most of these scanners eventually fail.

The scanner also has a SCSI interface, but getting the SCSI card I have to work in my current computer might be difficult – though I mean one day to try. But SCSI is really now a thing of the past.

For some time I’ve been photographing negatives instead of scanning them, and I had everything set up using the D800E – and then that decided to internally destruct. Again another thing I mean to try is to get it working sufficiently to use for this, but that’s another job I’m putting off. And although the images were sharp and detailed I also had problems with getting even illumination across the frame.

So I decided to use the Epson V750 flatbed that I have on my desk and have mainly used for making scanned ‘contact sheets’ and as a photocopier, or a quick method of getting web-size images from slides or negatives. It is a capable scanner, and the only real reason for not using it before is that I had other ways of scanning negs that were just marginally superior. I’ve used the V750 both at home and elsewhere to produce scans for books by a couple of other photographers, and they have been very happy with the results.

A new Neg carrier

One of the problems that I think Epson themselves acknowledge is that the 35mm filmstrip negative holder just isn’t quite up to the job. They’ve never I think said so, but when they came out with the V800 it had a new holder. Unlike that provided with the V700 and V750 it was not glassless but incorporated anti-Newton’s rings glass as well as more flexible height adjustment to ensure correct focus.


Columbia Market, London. July 1986

Looking at the pictures in the reviews, some of which commented on the improved design, it looked as if it would fit the D750, and I checked this was so before ordering one – rather expensively – from eBay. As well as the A-N glass, it also has better height adjustment than the D700/750 holder. Overall it does seem possible to get flatter negatives and better overall sharpness – though before things were already fairly good

Having the glass does of course make dust more of a problem. But with care and a powerful blower brush, along with the Pro Co Statbrush 2000* conductive brush I used in the darkroom and a lint-free cloth or two it isn’t too bad – and Photoshop sees off much of it very quickly. I seem to get slightly less dust spots than with the Minolta, and so far none of the problems with Newton’s Rings that sometimes plague my Minolta scans. It was an effect I hardly saw in the first year I used the scanner, then told another photographer I hadn’t seen them, after which they became a real problem.

Cleaning under the scanner glass

For several years I’ve been looking at the V750 and seeing smears and dust on the underside of the platen glass; I could clean the top easily, but these remained. The manual didn’t help, and on several occasions I’ve done a quick search on the web and read dire warnings from various people and decided perhaps it didn’t really matter.


Bridge over Regent’s Canal, Bridport Place, Islington, London. July 1986

This time I was a little more assiduous in my search, and found a few people who said it was a quick and easy job. A link to Epson’s exploded drawings of the scanner on the ‘Better Scanning’ site which has a page about dismantling various Epson models confirmed it was a matter of lifting the lighting module off from the scanner bed and then revealing and removing 4 screws and the top would lift off. And so it did.

The hardest part was removing the four plastic plugs which hide the screws, which I did by kind of digging at their edges with a craft knife and easing them up. They have a V on their top and are easy to spot, one fairly near each corner of the glass bed. Once the screws are removed the top can be pulled off – mine caught a bit at the front a needed a little persuasion. Fortunately fitting it back on again after cleaning turned out to be as simple.

Using Epson Scan

The Epson scanner software isn’t bad when used in ‘Professonal’ mode, though some features – like the ‘Thumbnails‘ which always seem to crop your images are best avoided. I do a Preview scan, click the Normal tab if thumbnails have appeared, then drag a marquee roughly around the first neg I want to scan, and click to ‘zoom’ in. It’s best then to adjust the marquee to be entirely inside the image area to avoid any black and white areas outside the frame which might affect exposure before clicking on the auto-exposure icon.

Auto-exposure will always give a less than optimal result, but does get in you the ballpark. It’s best to keep the Histogram panel open all the time you are scanning and click on the ‘show output’ button to check if there is any black or white clipping. Adjust the input values to get rid of all or almost all of this, then move the midpoint slider to get the image looking roughly how you want it.

I can’t see any real point in not having the output as the default visible in this panel as it is what you really need to see, although sometimes you might want to be able to view the input. It’s one of several minor annoyances about the software, but otherwise it works well. I could instead use Vuescan, which I’ve used with the other scanners, but somehow never bothered with the Epson. Perhaps I’ll download the latest version and give it a try, certainly when I start to scan some colour negs.

It’s best to scan in 16 bit grey for black and white (48 bit RGB for colour) as then you can make final adjustments to brightness and contrast in Photoshop (or other image editor.) You are going to have to open the images in Photoshop anyway to retouch the dust etc. So concentrate on getting all you can from the neg by avoiding clipping.

Re-adjust the marquee boundaries to the edge of the image, and then you are ready to scan. Of course you will have already set the directory for the image to save in and for it to be saved as 16 bit tiff, as well as a suitable stem for the name – to which Epson Scan with add 001, 002…


Closed Turf Accountants, Micawber St, Islington, London. July 1986

When the scan has saved, click on ‘Full’ in the preview pane, shift the marquee to the next image on the page you want to scan, and then ‘Zoom’ to view it and adjust exposure. Only use the auto-expose icon if it comes up way out, otherwise it is generally quicker to adjust from the previous values. And ‘unsharp mask’ has a habit of sneaking itself on. You don’t need it – if you want sharpening, Photoshop can do it better.

One further hint. Always go through the negs and decide exactly which are worth scanning – I mark the contact sheets, but if you don’t have these, you can write down the negative numbers. Otherwise if you are like me you will end up scanning twice as many.

* Not quite as effective as those Polonium 210 based StaticMaster brushes we used to use, but which now appear unobtainable in the UK. Quite safe so long as you remembered not to stir your tea with them!

Continue reading Epson Scans

Don’t Bomb Syria

Don’t Bomb Syria was a big protest, attended by several thousand people, and obviously rather larger than the police had planned for, and it soon became obvious that their attempts to keep traffic flowing had been a mistake. It’s hard to think of any road in London which is a vital route – there are always other ways to drive from A to B, and there are often closures for various ceremonial or sporting events, but sometimes the whole purpose of policing protests appears to be to keep traffic moving.

The numbers present forced them to  close the southbound carriageway a few minutes before the rally started, but they continued to keep traffic flowing northbound, having to keep clearing off groups of protesters who kept coming onto it from the pavement to get closer to the speakers. Finally enough people decided they had had enough of the police action and a large crowd moved on to the road and after a while sat down and blocked it.

London has been very slow to take the obvious move of pedestrianising some of its central areas; while many suburban high streets are now traffic-free, Oxford St is still full of traffic and Parliament Square remains a large traffic island. Almost everyone feels that Trafalgar Square is so much improved after the North Terrace was finally pedestrianised in 2003 – except for the National Gallery, which is upset by the buskers and ‘living statues’ who lower the tone by performing there. Much as I hate ‘living statues’,  and would certainly welcome some form of cull, it is far more pleasant now than when the area was full of buses, lorries and diesel fumes.

I wasn’t happy with some of the speakers at the protest, although I agreed that a military intervention by the UK at this time was unlikely to have any positive effect. We should have acted much earlier, though not directly, rather than speaking in support the Syrian opposition and against the dictator Assad but refusing to give those who opposed him any material support.

While the Russian position perhaps made it impossible to act directly it would have been possible to find ways for the Syrian rebels to have much more effective defence against the air attacks of the Syrian regime, and to stop the huge oil exports, mainly smuggled through our ally Turkey which have largely financed ISIS.

What I waited for in vain as I photographed the speakers at the event was for anyone giving a view from the Syrian opposition – instead we got many of the same speakers who get paraded at every Stop the War protest. Some of them are worth listening to, others too predictable to be really worth the effort. And several did stress the need to take effective action about the Turkish oil smuggling that is funding ISIS – something the Russian bombing and press releases have made us all aware of.

From a purely technical point of view it is always a pleasure to watch and listen to speakers such as George Galloway and Tariq Ali, whether or not what they are talking makes sense (and usually at least some of it does.)  Some of the others can reliably be expected to speak good sense, but  as I say in Speakers at Don’t Bomb Syria

” I was left waiting and wanting. There with notebook poised ready to write down the names of the speakers representing the Syrians and the Syrian Kurds, who should surely have been at the forefront of this protest rather than so many old ‘Stop the War’ war-horses. None came, not because none were available or willing to speak, but because the politics of those most closely involved don’t accord with those of Stop the War.”

Eventually I lost interest in the speeches and concentrated on the large group by now blocking the road, as you can see in the third part of my report:  Don’t Bomb Syria Blocks Whitehall.

After around an hour, people were beginning to leave, and the arrival of more police who then went around telling people they would be arrested if they continued to sit in the roadway fairly quickly persuaded the others it was time to end their protest.

Continue reading Don’t Bomb Syria

Cyclists Die in London

It was on my sixth birthday that I got my first two-wheeler. Before that I’d had a pedal car and then a basic trike, both of which I rode along the pavements of our street, and just occasionally on the road. There wasn’t a lot of traffic then. It wasn’t a main road, a side road in what is now one of London’s outer boroughs, then a part of Middlesex. On the stretch of a few hundred yards on which we played, there were a handful of shops and perhaps 50 houses. Usually only one car was ever parked there, owned by the parents of one of my boyhood friends, often playing around our house or on the street. He and his parents lived in his gran’s small house; they could afford a car because both his parents went out to work – something my mother definitely didn’t approve of. A few years later they moved out to a council flat a couple of miles away. Times have very much changed.

Of course it wasn’t a new bike. Like the trikes and the pedal car it had been handed down. It wouldn’t have been new when my elder brothers had ridden it, but probably my father had cleaned it up and given it a new coat of paint, keeping it hidden in a corner of his workshop so it came as a surprise.

For a few hours I was on it, riding up and down the pavement with an older brother’s hand on the saddle running with me, until eventually I realised I was on my own and had travelled a few yards before putting my feet down. Then I had it, and could ride, and after a little more practice could both start off and stop without falling off. It was freedom.

It wasn’t long before I was riding to visit friends from my class who lived half a mile away, and when they too got bikes we would ride around the local heath, and to parks and woods to play. And to get chased by park keepers, as cycling there certainly was not allowed.


Event organiser Donnachadh McCarthy (left) taking part in the die-in

A couple of years later I graduated to a larger model – again ten or twelth-hand – but with hub gears, and there was no holding us back. Soon we were cycling out to Box Hill or Virginia Water and other places around the south-west edges of London, often making our way along major roads such as the A3, A4, A30. A few sections built in the 1930s had cycle paths, but most didn’t, and we made our way in often heavy traffic.

Even so, it was safer than today. Traffic speeds on the open road were generally slower and lorries were smaller. Now my parents would probably have their children taken away by social services if they allowed them the freedom we enjoyed. But then they made sure we knew the rules of the road, taught us to keep our bikes in good order and left us to it.

Many reasons have combined to make our roads now less safe for cyclists – and some of the changes have been deliberate. Traffic engineering for many years only considered how to allow cars and lorries go faster, realigning junctions, roundabouts and one way systems, designing them with this in mind. It’s still happening with many local authority transport departments, increasing the danger to cyclists and pedestrians at many junctions.

In recent years, things have begun to change. Cycling in London got a boost from the 2005 bombings, which made some people reluctant to use the tube, and numbers of cyclists continue to increase. Folding bikes like the Brompton I sometimes now use have increased many people’s choices, making bikes easy to store in small flats or at the office and allowing commuters to combine cycling with tube or rail. And those misnamed ‘Boris Bikes’ that Ken set in motion have encouraged many more to get on a bike.

Safety is a major reason many people give for not cycling in London, and there is good reason behind this. At last November’s protest there was a row of 21 mock coffins, one for each of the cyclists killed on London’s roads in the previous 2 years. The great majority of them killed by heavy goods vehicles, particularly skip lorries, designed with very limited vision to the rear and along their sides.

The protest was organised by ‘Stop Killing Cyclists’, a pressure group calling for a much greater emphasis on cycle safety. In Stop Killing Cyclists Die-in you can see and outline of the list of demands for safer cycling they presented to London’s then prospective Mayoral candidates. The response from Sadiq Khan, now elected to the post was not too encouraging (though a little more positive than than of his main rival, the allegedly green Conservative Zac Goldsmith, both probably deciding that there were few votes for cyclists and promising more might upset motorists) but we can expect to see some progress under his reign. And outgoing mayor Boris’s last official engagement was to open the latest part of a cycle superhighway, a segregated bike path across Blackfriars Bridge.


Green Party Mayoral candidate Sian Berry (centre left) at the protest

Photographing the cyclists’ die-in just a quarter of a mile down the Blackfriars Rd from that bridge Bridge in front of the Transport for London offices presented some problems. Of course there wasn’t a great deal of light almost two hour after sunset, but it was more a matter of both giving an idea of the sheer number of bikes involved and of also of getting some strong foreground interest – and of avoiding other photographers, a few of whom were something of a nuisance wandering into the centre of the die-in.

I made use of the 16mm fisheye, as well as the 20mm f2.8 and the 28.0-200 mm  to try and make effective images, and felt I’d done a reasonable job. There are examples from each of these lenses above (the fisheye images converted using FisheyeHemi as usual.)  Of course I photographed other things than the die-in and Sian Berry, though you will find more pictures of both as well as more about the event at Stop Killing Cyclists Die-in.
Continue reading Cyclists Die in London

April 2016

My work from last month is now on-line. It seemed a busy month and I think there are 42 stories, including a family wedding and a walk. There are some of the pictures I took while travelling around London at the bottom of the list. as well as an entry showing a little of the incredible development going on at Vauxhall and Nine Elms, which I’m afraid will probably offer little to Londoners.


Jane Nicholl of Class War stretches out ‘Crime Scene Do Not Enter’ incident tape in front of the police in a protest against victimisation of cleaners

Apr 2016

Save Aleppo, Stop Airstrikes
Save Upper Norwood and all Lambeth Libraries
Stop Air Pollution Killing Cyclists
Downing St rally for Junior Doctors


Doctors & Teachers march together
Windsor Great Park Walk
St George in Southwark Procession
Peace Garden at War Museum


St Georges Day in London
Sierra Leone Blood Diamonds at Tiffany
Sierra Leone Blood Diamonds at Selfridges
Stop Refugees Drowning


Drax AGM Biomass opposition
Cleaners in-house now, not later
Family Wedding
UVW Topshop & John Lewis Protest


UVW Topshop 2 protest – Strand
Palestine Prisoners Parade
Dancing for Homes, Health, Jobs, Education
Homes, Health, Jobs, Education Rally
Ahwazi protest against Iranian repression
March for Homes, Health, Jobs, Education


Streets Kitchen March with Homeless


Vauxhall and Nine Elms
Make Tips Fair
End Killings in Colombia
Party against Cameron
Don’t Criminalise Abortion in Poland
Stop Grand National horse slaughter
Cameron must go!


March to Save Lambeth’s Libraries
Carnegie Library Occupation Ends
Bursary or Bust Die-In & Rally
Bursary or Bust march to Dept of Health
Support for Junior Doctor’s Picket
Immigration Bill – racist attack on human rights
International Pillow Fight Day
Butterfields Won’t Budge
Ban Canned Hunting of Lions
Christians protest Lahore bombing


Act Up protests Gilead’s naked greed

London Images

Continue reading April 2016

Pyramids & Postscript

Find yourself 10 minutes, get sitting comfortably, click on the Vimeo link to In the Shadow of the Pyramids and then the icon to make it full screen, sit back and enjoy.

I’ve written before about Laura El-Tantaway and her book and web site In the Shadow of the Pyramids, and I think advised you all to buy a copy of the book while the edition of 500 was still available.

Published at around £50, copies are now selling second-hand for £300, though I think will soon be more. But you can still get a copy of her ‘Postscript‘, with images from the same project produced to coincide with the exhibition of her work as one of those shortlisted for the Photographers Gallery Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2016. It’s a rather shorter work, a 32 page double-sided fold-out postcard book featuring 15 images in an edition of 750 signed and numbered copies and a video on the link shows it off. Currently it is still available at £15. I don’t think it will appreciate in value at the same rate, but is still worth considering.

Tickets appear to be still available for Laura El-Tantawy in Conversation with Max Houghton at the Photographers Gallery on May 25th, but I’d book soon if you want to be sure of a place.

Osborned?

I was relieved when I checked in our slang dictionary to find that there was as yet no definition for the term ‘osborne‘ or ‘osborned‘; otherwise it might have been confusing for me to propose a new usage.

An osborne is clearly a kind of fraud or confidence trick, based on the use of dodgy statistics, false assumptions and long-winded speeches, and aimed at benefiting the wealthy at the expense of the poor. And on Nov 25th last year we were clearly ‘osborned‘. The letters at the protest on the previous night spelt out clearly (at times) that it was a N I G H T M A R E.

It was also something of a nightmare to photograph, as the area where the figures were standing was probably the darkest point in Trafalgar Square, with most of what light there was falling on the back of the figures – as you can see from the shadows they are casting on the paving in front of them. I’d taken the 20mm f2.8 and it was only wide enough to encompass the group when used from one side – had I moved back you would have seen a pack of around 20 people with cameras and phones all trying to photograph the same group. The few pros possibly had lenses wide enough to encompass the whole group, but on most of the phone images it probably said GHTMA.

I didn’t need to use flash, as there were several people with lights on video cameras – who could pan across the group to reveal the whole word, though I did see one who appeared to be reading it as ERAMTHGIN.  Annoyingly sometimes their lights went off or turned away just when I wanted to make an exposure. With their lights I was able to work with the D700 set at 1/60s, f/4 and ISO 3,200; as usual to get things looking like night I needed to dial in an exposure adjustment – this time -0.7Ev.

Then someone had the idea it would better fit a still image if the word was split into two and the two put one above the other. I think it made a better picture, but now there was someone shining their video light at me from the edge of the frame. As normal I preferred an oblique view, and for this image I did use flash, working with the 28-200mm on the D810 at 42mm in DX mode – equivalent to 63mm.

Later the protesters marched down to Downing St for a rally opposite and  there isn’t a great deal of light, so most pictures needed flash, particularly for the speakers, where you need a relatively fast shutter speed to capture gestures and avoid subject movement. It didn’t really need the 1/640s that I appear to have used for this image – I was working in S mode and my random wandering finger appears to have shifted the main control dial backwards and forwards rather a lot.

It was perhaps a little fortunate – because as a slower speed – such as the 1/125 I probably intended, that pointing hand might have shown more blur, and the windows behind in the Ministry of Defence would have bee more of a distraction.

Back in the old days of course, flash sync at 1/640th with a focal plane shutter was simply impossible; most cameras were limited to 1/50 or 1/60s, and setting a higher speed resulted in only a part of the frame being exposed. Now with the Nikon D810 if you have custom setting e1 set to Auto FP High-Speed Sync you can use flash at any shutter speed.

I took some more pictures of people in the blackness of the crowd without flash, including some I felt were perhaps just a little to noisy – like the one above. Taken with the camera set at ISO3200, it had a ‘grainy’ effect, which wasn’t unpleasant, but was very noticeable in larger versions of the image than web size. Writing this, I thought this was a good example to try out using the noise reduction of the now free Dfine in the Google Nik Collection

I applied the filter in automatic mode on the full size file, and the difference was pretty remarkable, with the noise virtually entirely removed, and Photoshop’s ‘Despeckle‘ filter cleared it a little more. I can only just see the difference even in the two reduced size jpegs in this post, but on larger images the difference is very apparent.

There very little apparent loss of image detail in the treatment, and removing the noise makes what detail there is clearer. After I made the small jpeg to use in this post, I did clean up the larger file using Photoshop’s ‘Dust and Scratches‘ filter, with a radius of 2px and a threshold of 5px. The resulting image is remarkable for an image in such poor light.

It’s a shame that the Polaroid ‘Dust and Scratches’ filter which often worked rather better than the Photoshop equivalent is no longer available and doesn’t seem to work in Photoshop CC. It will still run as stand-alone software under Windows 7 and can be used to produce even smoother images when applied to the results from Dfine2. But it does so at the expense of a little detail

A double pass can remove both white and black specks, but you need to convert images to sRGB before using it, and it does lose some detail, so need to be used with caution. And of course such processing is time-consuming and largely unnecessary. The Polaroid filter is best kept for use with scanned images where the dust is usually rather larger.

More about the event and more pictures at Osborne’s Nightmare Cuts.

The following day as George Osborne got to his feet in Parliament to deliver his speech I was outside his family interior decoration business on the King’s Road in Chelsea with Class War – as you can see and read at Class War at Osborne & Little.

Continue reading Osborned?

Gear Sense

One post I’ve read on Petapixel sums up many of the things I’ve often said or thought about photographers and gear. The 11 Stupidest Things Photographers Say About Gear is worth a read, as is a series it refers to on fstoppers.

They compared the same scene photographed on leading Canon, Sony and Nikon cameras and asked people to rate the 3 images and say which camera they came from. And the results showed that there was very little difference between whether they photographed the studio scene on a Canon 5DsR, Sony A7RII, or Nikon D810.

Not only was there no real difference in detail, resolution etc, there was an almost identical colour to the three images. I still think there are differences in colour between the images produced by the three cameras, but these are down to differences in how the auto white balance works rather than anything inherent to the camera. And the differences are easily corrected in post-processing.

But the main differences between the three marques are in handling. How convenient is the control layout, and the menus. Which way do zooms zoom? and where do you have to line up the dots when changing lenses, and which way do you turn them. I’ve used Nikon for over 12 years now, and I still find it much easier and faster to change lenses on a camera that works the same way as Leica does. But the buttons etc on Nikon seem so much better than the interface on Canon. And so on. My ideal SLR camera would still be the Olympus OM4, but no one has ever made a digital version of that – and of course I’d like some updates such as auto-focus and high speed flash sync.

Of course the publication of their results was greeted with controversy, and some valid points were made, in particular about the lens used for testing with the Sony, So this led to ‘We Tested the Sony A7RII AGAIN for All the Sony Fanboys‘ and the results were more or less the same: Most People Cannot Tell The Difference Between Nikon, Sony, and Canon High Res Files. And most of those who tried and mainly got it wrong were photographers.

Perhaps I should be pleased that one of the cameras I use came out marginally top on the test, but quite frankly I could not tell the difference and suspect it was probably not statistically significant. But at least it does reinforce my own feeling that the extra pixels in the 50Mp Canon EOS 5DS R are of no significance.

I’m actually thinking of going back to DX format for my next camera – I’ve always thought there was – as Nikon for some years maintained – no real advantage in the larger FX format. It wasn’t that the results were any better, just the larger sensor meant the cameras had a better and brighter viewfinder.

My ailing D700 is still taking good photographs – at least when I manage to point it in the right direction at the right time with the right lens. But its days are surely numbered (and a service that would address its current faults would cost more than its worth.) I’ll probably replace it by another Nikon, but can’t at the moment decide whether to buy a D750 or, when they get into the shops, a D500. Or perhaps by the time I’ve made my mind up there will be something new available to change it!

Back with the Ripper

The so-called ‘museum’ dedicated to Jack the Ripper in Cable St –  a tacky attraction for the strong-stomached tourist lacking in humanity or sense – received a couple of visits in November from protesters which I photographed.

Class War were one of the first groups outraged by the shop to get organised, and I photographed their protests outside in August (here and here) as well as one organised by Fourth Wave: London Feminist Activists in October. There have been other protests that I’ve either not been able to attend or only heard about after the event –  particularly those organised by local groups.

Class War were back again on a Saturday morning, several of them wearing masks showing the face of the museum owner, and stood outside the shop with their ‘Womens Death Brigade‘ banner.

It was a small but noisy protest, watched over by a couple of police officers who seemed quite amused by some of  Class War’s comments. He had to go inside the shop to talk with the proprietor’s partner who was  behind the counter and ask him to stop dialling 999  repeatedly as the police were already here.

He – and perhaps his assistant – were obviously unnerved by the protest, which appeared to have disturbed what otherwise would have been a rather lonely morning – the door to the shop was open until he decided to lock it, but I think there were no customers during the hour or more of protest. Clearly it doesn’t appear to be a viable business, despite quite an effort on the PR side, including some obviously false comments on online review pages, and a man who came along to complain at the protesters.

Rather more welcome was anarcho-folk singer/guitarist Cosmo, who came from Cardiff to perform some of his great songs at the event.  After which Class War decided it was time time for the pub, and for once I had the time to join them, though I didn’t stay long as I needed to get home and process and file the story.

Five days later I was back at the same place for a protest with a very different feel, a candlelit vigil organised by the local Church of England and supported by the Theology centre at St George’s and London Citizens’ Whitechapel HQ as well as various women’s groups. There were one or two people present who had been there the previous Saturday, but it was a very different group, and included the great-great-great granddaughter of Catharine Eddowes , one of the Ripper’s victims.

Photographically it was considerably more challenging, and something that would have been virtually impossible on film. Using the D700 I was working by candle light at ISO 3200. It was fine for people actually holding candles, but the light from them follows the normal inverse square rule for point light sources, and away from the candles it was dismal.


A woman holds a candle as she reads from her phone about one of the victims of Jack the Ripper outside the ‘museum’ which celebrates his vile murders.
I didn’t want to use flash, partly because it would destroy the lighting effect, but also because I felt it would be inappropriate at the vigil. The 16-35mm gave me a good angle of view working close to the circle of those taking part, but even with that wide angle I had problems with depth of field. Mostly the better pictures were made using the 20mm f2.8 – that extra stop over the f4 16-35mm was really useful. I didn’t use the D810 much, and had forgotten that I’d taken it off auto-ISO, which caused problems, though a few images were fine – like that above at 1/15s, f/4.5, ISO 800, -0.3Ev, 50mm (75mm equiv.)

A photographer working for the local paper was also present, and did use flash, but he took considerably fewer pictures than me. But when the cleaner who had been working inside the closed shop came out, and was photographed, he responded by shouting ‘Don’t take my photograph!’ and lunged at the photographer, grabbing his camera and assaulting him.

Without having flash on my camera, my pictures of this event were too blurred to be of use, but I’d had a clear view of what happened from several meters away. Police jumped out of the van where they had been sitting and threatened to arrest the photographer rather than his assailant! I and others volunteered to act as witnesses, but the photographer concerned declined to press charges.

After the vigil, when those taking part walked together to the local church I did take some flash exposures. By this time I was late for dinner and had to rush off before the service began.

More text and pictures at Class War at the Ripper ‘Museum’ and Ripper ‘Museum’ Candlelit Vigil.

Continue reading Back with the Ripper