The Line

I’ve written before about ‘The Line’. Back in February 2014, when the idea was part of a crowd-funding project I wrote Marking the Meridian – The Line, which looked at my own work on the Meridian in the 1990s and my unsuccessful bid to get a walk established as a Millennium project, which failed even to be short-listed. It was a fairly obvious proposal and others had similar ideas, and a few of these did get some kind of local support, with more markers appearing along the line.

The Line was finally opened in May 2015, though on a rather smaller scale than the up to 30 sculptures in the original plan, and I was at Cody Dock on 23 May to witness the ribbon being cut and to photograph a couple of the sculptures.  It was a busy day for me and I didn’t have time to walk the whole of the line, but you can see more at Cody Dock Opening for ‘The Line’.

I still haven’t found an occasion to walk the whole of The Line – though you can’t actually walk it all but need to take the ‘dangleway’ across the Thames from North Greenwich to Royal Victoria Dock, and then the DLR to Star Lane.

The web site is rather confusing, and I’ve yet to find the link which is supposed to give a print version which might be rather easier to understand. There are as yet two sculptures I’ve failed to locate, and the House Mill at Three Mills which is supposedly open daily from 11am-4pm was closed on the day I tried.  But the walk – or the bits you can walk – is perhaps more interesting than some of the sculptures.

Some of it was there before the line – including I think all of the works at North Greenwich – and I’ve visited and photographed them on previous occasions. The cable car across the river should be one of London’s major tourist attractions, but is thankfully still uncrowded, and doesn’t cost a huge amount – with a reduction for travel card holders. It’s worth deviating at the Royal Victoria Dock to cross the high level bridge – and you can then walk back along the other side. The walk by Bow Creek from Cody Dock has its fascinations – and to my mind the most fitting of sculptures.

I’m not quite sure how The Line is meant to go at Twelvetrees Crescent, but I like the path over the Bow Locks, although not the detour needed to access it, with a building site probably illegally blocking the path from the Tunnel Northern Approach. Three Mills is always worth a visit too.

There are actually more sculptures, both found and official along or close to The Line but not a part of it. I expect someone will provide a suitably annotated and illustrated walk before long, though I’ve yet to see one.

See The Line – Sculpture Trail for some more pictures.

Continue reading The Line

Ultrawide images

I don’t often use images taken with a fisheye lens without a partial ‘de-fishing’, but this is one case where I think it works. You can see some curvature in the image, but it isn’t excessive and I think helps draw the eye in towards the centre of the image.

Had that clock tower been further off centre its curve would have been more disturbing, and the same is true for the lamp post at the left.  The clouds wrap around rather nicely and even the people close to the edge seem rather less distorted than is often the case. When I took it I was probably thinking that the figure a bottom left would move more into the corner and I would perhaps lose all or most of the two photographers cut off by the edge, as well as most of the empty space behind the white t-shirt at the right.

Most people who haven’t used fish-eye lenses think of rectilinear perspective as being somehow natural. It’s how we ‘see’ things, constructing images in our mind in which lines we know to be straight are straight. But it doesn’t work with making images with a very wide angle of view. The image above shows the result using the ‘distortion’ slider in Lightroom at 100%.

It crops the image a little at both left and right edges, and while it does straighten the lines, it makes their divergence much more apparent. That Canon lens at the left has roughly doubled in length and the head at bottom right is a rather more curious shape. What you can’t see in this small reproduction is the softness towards the corners where there just are not enough pixels to be stretched out like this. To be usable this image would need fairly drastic cropping.

If you must have a rectilinear view, stick to a rectilinear lens and avoid really extreme focal lengths. I have a 12-24mm full-frame Sigma lens, and anything below around 16mm I find seldom makes a usable image. It’s a better lens on DX, where the full zoom range can be used. A 16mm rectilinear image on full frame has a horizontal view of around 97 degrees, while the 16mm Nikon fisheye gives around half as much again, roughly 146 degrees.

The best we can do is to keep some straight lines straight, though we can also at the same time improve on the way that rectilinear perspective renders shapes across the frame, stretching them as they get away from the centre of the image.

The image above is the result of using the Fisheye-Hemi plugin for Photoshop, which is my normal ‘de-fishing’ tool. There are other things out there that do the same job, but the plugin is the most convenient I’ve found. It retains the image across the full width and height at the centre of the sides while losing some at the four corners, producing what I think is called a cylindrical perspective, like the rotating lens panoramic cameras I’ve also used.

As you can see, it also shows up the diverging verticals that result from my pointing the camera slightly down when making the image.  But it does avoid the stretching at the corners and the softness which made the conversion to rectilinear a problem.

However I find that divergence annoying – and I didn’t see it in my viewfinder when I made the image. So I’d probably want to use Lightroom to remove at least most of this. Doing so means cropping the image (there is still a small amount of divergence, but not enough to be a nuisance.

It’s a usable alternative to the top image, but I still prefer that; the figure standing on the middle of the banner is a little more prominent, and for me at least seems more to be floating, almost as if she is being tossed up by those holding the banner.

I don’t know what Reuters and those other upholders of the unaltered image would think of all this. Would images whose perspective had been altered in the ways shown here still be accepted for World Press Photo? And I don’t greatly care.  The uppermost image is what I saw in the viewfinder when I made the picture, but I think the bottom image is also a perfectly good record of the scene and my view of it. Probably a truer record of what I saw out of my left eye when I had the viewfinder pressed to the right.

The protest was to point out to Parliament that collecting taxes which are being avoided would bring in enough money to make cuts in public services unnecessary. You can see more pictures from it, including others taken with the 16mm Nikon fisheye as well as the 16-35mm rectilinear zoom and longer lenses at UK Uncut Art Protest.

Barbican

Without doubt the greatest opportunity for the planning of London in the last century came from the destruction of large areas of the city during the war, and one of the areas where the results are most obvious is the Barbican.  It provided an opportunity to develop new approaches with pedestrian walkways high above the city streets separated from their traffic, and put homes back into the city.

It wasn’t an entirely successful experiment, although the recent demolition of parts of the ‘highwalk’ is I think a great loss for the city (and doubtless huge profits for the developers) and while many have found the Barbican an exciting place to live prices now for its over 2,000 properties and those on the adjoining and perhaps rather nicer Golden Lane Estate are pretty astronomical.

For non-residents, finding the way around the Barbican has always presented something of a challenge, with yellow lines needed to guide people to the Barbican Arts centre from the surrounding Underground stations. Inside the Arts centre too, I’ve always found the layout totally confusing, though over the years I’ve learnt easy routes to find my way to the places I’ve used, including the main art gallery and the Library, in which I’ve organised and taken part in several group shows over the years.

But on May 16th I had no problems in finding my way, simply having to follow the crowd of cleaners and supporters as the United Voices of the World rushed in to hold a protest inside the building.

The UVW are a grass roots union that is standing up for the rights of some of London’s lowest paid and worst treated workers, particularly cleaners who are employed by contracting firms to clean inside London’s many prestige buildings, including the Barbican Arts Centre, owned by the City of London.

The only reason for outsourcing services like cleaning is to cut costs, and the only way that the outsourcing companies cut costs compared to direct employment is by employing workers on conditions that would be unacceptable to companies and organisations that are concerned about their public profile.

The Barbican Arts Centre would feel it had to pay at least the London living Wage, provide proper pension arrangements, sick pay and holiday pay, as well as managing its employees properly, providing proper equipment and materials to do the job and not imposing excessive workloads. I’ve never worked for them, but I imagine that they aim to be a responsible and highly respectable employer.

The cleaners complain that the contracting companies treat them like dirt. Low pay, bullying management, impossible demands, and the statutory minimum conditions. Workers come into work sick because they cannot afford to take time off with only statutory sick pay. And of course an attempt to prevent union organisation and protests. As my summary reported:

Cleaners at the Barbican Centre employed by MITIE have been threatend with sacking if they protest for a living wage and proper sick pay. They say a disabled worker has been assaulted by a manager and that he was accused of terrorism for posting a video of himself at work.

This protest was unannounced, and the cleaners and supporters met up well away from the Barbican. I met with most of them at a union meeting beforehand. UVW is a small and entirely voluntary movement with no paid officials, and as well as negotiations and protests at workplaces also provides representation and support for its members at tribunals and disciplinary hearings, and classes in English, as many of its members are from Latin America or Spain.

I travelled with them on the bus, then walked with them to a rendezvous with other supporters before they marched quietly to the Barbican, regrouping on a corner close to the main entrance, which they then rushed through at a suitable moment, with me following a short distance behind the leaders, making their way noisily through the building to a suitable area for the protest.

As usual with such incursions, I’m careful to avoid confrontation with security, who made some attempt to stop the first few people who entered, but then had simply to stand back and watch as the rest streamed in following them.  Theoretically I would stop taking pictures and leave if requested by a suitably authorised person, unless I felt there was an overwhelming public interest in the events being recorded, when I would attempt to do so. I would have felt so in this case, but it’s better not to have to make such a decision.

Photographically the main problem in taking pictures was the light. Rather the lack of it, and its unevenness.  The centre always reminds me of a cave, and it has lots of fairly small lights in a very large space.

I didn’t want to use flash. Partly because I didn’t want to attract attention to myself, and experience tells me that security are far more likely to tell you to stop taking pictures if you use flash, but also because it’s difficult when working close to avoid huge differences in lighting between people very close and those a few feet further away. But the light was pretty low in some areas, and when people were moving a lot there was really little alternative. But I think the picture I liked best was taken without, working at ISO 3200.

I was also working at ISO 3200 with flash, but with the aperture a couple of stops down (and sometimes about a stop faster shutter speed too) trying to retain a more even result with some exposure from the ambient light. As a consequence there is some double-imaging on these frames, which often but not always enhances the image – it adds a feeling of movement and immediacy to the speaker above.

Colour temperature is also sometimes an issue. Later the protesters moved to an area with both artificial light and large windows letting in some daylight. Using flash might have helped in the lower image, but unfortunately the D700 which I was using seems now to be very unreliable with flash and I’ve been avoiding using it. All the flash pictures I’ve made for some time have been with the D800E.

Shortly after the protesters left the building and continued to protest, marching around a little of the Barbican estate and then continuing outside the main entrance, which enabled me to take some pictures including the Barbican signage, including one of Albeiro, the cleaner being victimised and UVW general secretary Petros Elia, the man with his hands up in the image above.

Many more pictures and more about the protest at Cleaners invade Barbican Centre.

Continue reading Barbican

Larry Towell

Canadian photographer Aaron Vincent Elkaim interviews Larry Towell on Vice in a piece entitled You Will Change: Magnum Photographer Larry Towell Has Advice for Young Photojournalists.  Its an interesting post about one of today’s more interesting Magnum photographers, though probably the advice, good though it is, is unlikely to improve the financial condition of those taking it.

Somewhere else on the web I took a quick look at a piece 19 Signs You Are Treating Your Photography as a Hobby and Not a Business by Bradford (Bradford Rowley), who describes himself as “one the most expensive portrait photographer in the world with an impressive list of prominent clientele.  He operates studios in New York, California and on world famous Worth Avenue in Palm Beach.  He has made over 20 million dollars from selling portraits. He has taught photographers from more than 70 countries.“

Its a rather different approach. Having met some of the best photographers in the world and read about rather more of them, I think most would count at hobbyists to Bradford. Few have been in it just as a business.

As Larry Towell says:

The main thing is to be on the right side, and if you’re not on the right side… then you’re probably going to make a lot of money.

PS. Don’t miss looking at the work by Aaron Vincent Elkaim either. The Vice article has links to Larry Towell’s work.

Evolution of Photography

You’ve probably seen a graphic* that was reproduced a couple of months ago on PetaPixel under the title  Evolution of Photography: Exposures Versus Keepers, showing a 120 film roll, an aluminium can for a 35mm cassette and a SD card with the captions ‘12 exposures – 6 are awesome; 36 exposures – 6 are awesome; 2,000+ exposures – 6 are awesome.’

Amusing perhaps, but is it true?

Firstly, obviously not. No one ever got 6 awesome exposures on a 120 roll, certainly not consistently. If you were lucky you got one or two that would do the job (and using 6×7 as I mainly did you only got 10 exposures and with 6×9 even fewer. Not to mention my panoramic camera that took 6×12 images.) ‘Awesome’ was very rare then as now. And moving on to 35mm, if Henri Cartier-Bresson could only manage a dozen a year, us lesser mortals certainly weren’t hitting one in six.

Of course it does depend on your subject matter. The types of thing you take and where you are. There is certainly rather more likelihood of an awesome image if you are standing on the moon with a Hasselblad than if you are in my back yard with a digital point and shoot. Or a Hasselblad.

I spend a lot of time at the moment going through stuff I took in the 1980s on film, mainly 35mm, though also some 120 and 4×5. Most of the pictures that are worth preserving are so because of the subject matter, and I often find myself cursing that I only took one or two frames of a particular subject. Cursing too because looking at what I did take brings back to memory things or situations I failed to photograph.

Film then for me was expensive – even though I mainly bought it in 100ft reels and then loaded it in total darkness – 100ft would give me 19 cassettes with 36 exposures. I’d started using a bulk film loader which was more comfortable but meant that the last few frames of every film were fogged. You lost images by working to the very end of the film – and like fishing the ones that got away were always the best. Loading in total darkness – two nails on the wall to mark the length to cut – enabled me to get the most from that bulk film.

Later I got a little wealthier and could afford to take more pictures, and even eventually could give up bulk loading. And I learnt from looking at the contacts of a well-known Magnum photographer who showed me how he usually only took two or three images on a 36x film, working with each subject until he was sure he had got what he wanted – or until the situation dissolved. He taught me that working around a subject in this way was something that made professional work stand out from amateur efforts. I began to use more film too, some days perhaps ten or a dozen cassettes. And my work I think improved for it.

Comparing what I took back then on 35mm and what I take now on digital, the one thing that almost always hits me is how technical standards have improved. Colour is cleaner and more accurate, images are generally sharper (especially in the corners) with reduced aberrations, and we can work in conditions of darkness that would have defeated us with film. It isn’t just the change to digital sensors in camera, but also the processing in programmes such as Lightroom and the developments in cameras and flash systems. (Better focus and exposure systems of course also help with film – and are perhaps even more important when using film.)

I certainly make more exposures with digital than I used to with film. It’s a great relief too never to have to worry about running out of film and being caught in mid-change when the vital moment occurs. I think Winogrand when asked if he ever missed pictures while changing film said there were no pictures when he was changing film, which may be true at several levels, but I know I’ve missed opportunities. Now if I ever run out of space on a card it’s either because I forgot to format it after the previous day’s work or I need to go and buy a larger card.

I also take a rather higher proportion of usable pictures. But the number of ‘awesome’ exposures I make hasn’t I think changed very much, though perhaps there is some slight improvement. It really isn’t anything to do with the camera or storage medium but about opportunities and ideas. And if anything digital gives me a rather better chance of turning those ideas into images.

*(Originally it came from photographer Mason Resnick and was published on his blog in January 2014. His Mason Resnick’s Photography Journal is certainly worth keeping an eye on.)

The Ovahimba Years – Rina Sherman

After Rina Sherman was exiled from her native South Africa in 1984 she settled in Paris, acting in independent theatre and working in television. She studied at the Sorbonne under the celebrated ethnographer and film-maker Jean Rouch, completing her doctorate with distinction in 1990.

Like Rouch she is a writer, filmmaker and ethnographer and in 1997 was awarded a Lavoisier Research Bursary by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs which enabled her to live for  seven years with an Omuhimba community in Namibia and Angola, filming and photographing their every day and ritual lives.

In 2014 she donated her multimedia Ovahimba archive to the French National Library, where there will be an exhibition of the work from 29 Sept 2015 to 15 Nov 2015.

You can see some photographs and films from this project on her web site, where there is also a link to a crowd-funding project to publish a book of some of her photographs, The Ovahimba Years – Rina Sherman.  As rewards for contributing you are offered your choice of archival inkjet prints from three galleries of work, in sizes from A5 to A2 depending on your contribution – the smallest print goes for a mere $25 plus shipping, with $1200 getting you three A2 prints, all unframed. If the project fails to reach the goal of $17,800 USD needed for a high quality photographic publication you will still receive the prints and the monies contributed will be used to cover some of the publication costs of a text only print-on-demand book and an eBook.

There are only 11 days left to contribute to what seems an interesting work and to get quality signed prints at a reasonable price.

 

 

 

June 2015 Summary


View from Robin Hood Gardens

I’m still trying to take things easy, but with no great success, but I did manage to get out a few times in June to continue my work away from protests, making panoramas at Barking, Swanscombe and Robin Hood Gardens. Most of these don’t immediately look like panoramas, as the images are presented in the same 3:2 format that I use for the rest of my work, but they do have a very wide – over 140 degree – angle of view.  It does show that sometimes we have clear blue skies, but usually they have been more interesting.

Jun 2015

Robin Hood Gardens
DPAC’s ILF Closing Ceremony
Staines Day
Victims & Survivors call for Justice


Class War protest ‘corporate pinkwashing’


Pride Parade
UN Day for Victims of Torture
National Gallery Strike Day 41
Government threaten Mental Health sufferers


Change Europe, Solidarity with Greece
Greece protesters join Pride Flagbearers
Class War in Whitehall
Class War at the Savoy
Class War and End Austerity Now
End Austerity Now at Bank
‘3 Cosas’ at Royal College of Music
Climate Coalition Rally
Climate Coalition Mass Lobby
Support Saudi blogger Raif Badawi
New MPs Stand with Shaker
Magna Carta justice for Shaker Aamer
Close Yarls Wood, End Detention!
Cleaners International Justice Day
Voice for Justice UK Magna Carta Protest
Truth & Justice Magna Carta Day Protest
Staines celebrates Magna Carta


Police threaten Runnymede Magna Carta festival
Day Of Action For Candy Udwin
Dorney Walk


Ukrainian Vyshyvanka Embroidery march
Sikh freedom rally for Khalistan
Sikhs march for justice and freedom


Swanscombe
Barking Creek
The Line – Sculpture Trail
G4S AGM Torture Protest
‘Mock the Opera’ protest at Kensington cuts
Virgin Health hide behind NHS Logo
Stop Closure of Aboriginal Communities

June Stats

 I don’t look at the stats for my web sites every month, but this is the first month that I’ve noticed an average of over 10,000 page views per day for >Re:PHOTO, which now accounts for 64% of traffic to my web sites. Next largest is My London Diary, which can be reached on at least 3 URLs, mylondondiary.co.uk, mylondondiary.uk and mylondondiary.com with a total for all three of 18%.
Most of the rest is for smaller sites with my work and a few which also have work by other photographers including the Urban Landscapes site.

 >Re:PHOTO blog
Visits in June 2015:         138,835
Page views June 2015:    324,731
Average views per day:     10,824

Continue reading June 2015 Summary

CLASS WAR: Rich Door, Poor Door

CLASS WAR – Rich Door, Poor Door is a relatively cheap 48 page magazine style publication of my coverage of the protests by Class War at One Commercial St, a large block on the corner of Commercial St and Whitechapel High Street in Tower Hamlets on the eastern edge of the City of London.

The building ‘One Commercial St’ is a tall block which includes shops, a hotel, an entrance to Aldgate East Underground station, parking and expensive flats as well as other flats which are social housing. While the occupiers of the expensive flats enter through a large, well lit lobby with a manned concierge desk and comfortable seating through a door on the main road, social housing tenants have a separate entrance some way down a narrow alley.

When I first visited it, this alley was strewn with rubbish and dog mess, with a strong smell of stale urine, and was virtually unlit, the kind of alley that drunks stumble down to relieve themselves after the pubs have closed. The ‘poor door’ had a card entry system, but for some weeks it was broken and the door left unlocked. It led onto a long narrow corridor, empty except for some post boxes for the residents.

The building manager told us that the social housing was completely physically separated from the privately owned flats, though we soon realised this was a lie. There are links between to two areas both at ground floor level and on at least one of the upper floors which both sets of flats occupy. Inside the building, when I later was taken around by a resident, the corridors and lifts were very similar, with identical signage. We went in the ‘rich door’ and came out after the tour through the ‘poor door’, having during the tour seen two locked doors between the two sides as well as walking through at ground level between them.

Having separate doors for rich and poor living in the same building is something many find unacceptable, and the protests by Class War served to publicise this ‘social apartheid’ and to put the issue on the national agenda, one of a number of direct action campaigns that have brought housing issues increased public attention. Some of those other campaigns supported Class War, with visits by supporters of Focus E15 and New Era, and Class War also supported others including the Aylesbury Estate Occupiers, with supporters also joining other housing campaigns.

During the roughly nine months covered by this magazine, from July 30, 2014 to May 1, 2015, Class War were also running a campaign to stand candidates in the May General Election. Eventually there were Class War candidates in seven seats, three in the Greater London area. Their first policy pledge was for a 50% mansion tax. Although I covered several events connected with their election campaign, including the manifesto launch at the gates of Buckingham Palace, I’ve not included these in the magazine, which includes pictures from 29 of the 31 protests at One Commercial St.

Several of the candidates were prominent in the protests, and one of the more controversial actions by the police was the seizing of their ‘political leaders’ banner which had been produced for the 2010 General Election and displayed at many events over the years without problems. A case for displaying a similar set of posters also produced in 2010 was thrown out of court for restricting freedom of expression.  Class War responded with an updated version of the banner for 2015, which so far police have failed to seize.

Police made at least five arrests at the protests which are shown in the magazine. One case has still to come to court and another was dismissed when it did so, with the court clearly suggesting that the police were trying to restrict legitimate political protest. One other case still pending also seems to have been clearly politically motivated and will I hope be thrown out by the court if not dropped beforehand.

You can read the story of the campaign in the regular posts and pictures from it on My London Diary. In the magazine I’ve included the text from just the first of these which sets the scene along with a chronological selection of over 200 images from the protests. There are just a couple of very short comments and on the final page some biographical material.

Getting over 200 images into 48 US letter size pages involved many compromises. There are a couple of images which have a double page spread and about 45 that are roughly half page size (about 8 x 5.5 inches.) The rest are crammed in at up to 8 pictures a page with little or no white space. I wanted to keep the price down so that I could offer this publication for a fiver.

For the same reason, I chose Blurb’s cheapest paper, which they say gives magazine quality reproduction. This is not the quality of a quality magazine – they call it Economy magazine. The reproduction lacks punch, with no real black, but even the smaller images are detailed and readable.

I’ve made over half the book viewable on the preview at Blurb. If you make the preview full-screen (button at bottom right of preview) you will get a rather better view than the actual magazine – much better, brighter and more accurate colour. But I’d like people to buy the magazine, though I make only a very small margin on it, as it would be good to get copies out there and perhaps seen by more people than would look at it on screen. You can of course already look at the pictures on My London Diary (I think there may be one or two where I’ve chosen slightly different images for the magazine.)

I’ve also decided not to make this publicly available as a PDF or e-book, unlike almost all of my other books. The cost of the ‘hard copy’ – actually a rather floppy soft-cover – is more or less the same.

The magazine CLASS WAR – Rich Door, Poor Door is for sale through Blurb, where it costs £6.00 plus carriage (I haven’t checked but probably an arm and a leg.)  As with my other publications, UK readers can save by ordering direct from me – contact me here to check it is still in stock and arrange payment by cheque, bank transfer or PayPal. I can currently supply copies at £6 including UK postage. I think all my other books are also in stock here.

And for people I meet it’s a fiver if I’ve got a copy on me. The price of a pint in some London pubs these days.

Continue reading CLASS WAR: Rich Door, Poor Door

Hiroshima: 70 Years

On the 360 Cities World Panorama site you can see an incredible 360 degree panorama of the city of Hiroshima, taken around 260m from the hypocenter less than two months after the city and much of its population was destroyed by the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, seventy years ago. The series of pictures was taken by former army engineer Shigeo Hayashi, a Japanese photographer who had worked since 1943 for the magazine ‘FRONT’ and was one of two photographers (and an assistant) chosen by the Japan Film Corporation  to document the aftermath of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the Special Committee for the Investigation of A-bomb Damage organized by the Scientific Research Council of Japan (under the Ministry of Education).

In his comments on the image Hayashi states:

On October 1, 1945, I stood at the hypocenter of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and made a slow revolution. In that instant I had a difficulty grasping that this city had been felled by a single explosion. Nothing in my experience had prepared me to conceive of that magnitude of destructive force.

There is also a second panorama by Hayashi taken a little further from the hypocentre.

Other panoramic images on the site include photographs of Hiroshima again in October 1945 by Harbert F. Austin Jr, and the following month by H. J. Peterson.

You can see more of Hayashi’s images – now in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in their Shigeo Hayashi Photo Exhibition online.

I’ve written on various occasions about the photographs of Hiroshima following the dropping of the bomb and also about the annual commemoration in London which I’ll attend today. There are several posts on this site, including Hiroshima 65 Years On
and Hiroshima Day, which included the picture at the top of this post, of the remarkable peace campaigner the late Hetty Bower, 105 when the picture was taken in 2011.
Continue reading Hiroshima: 70 Years

Camera Woes


Possibly the final image from my Nikon D800E – 25/07/2015 13:44:49

It was Saturday afternoon and I was in Old Palace Yard, opposite the Houses of Parliament photographing a woman speaking on a small platform in front of a small crowd. I’d taken a fairly wide view with the 16-35mm on the Nikon D700 and then raised the D800E and took a tigher image framing her speaking in front of the Houses of Parliament using the 18-105mm. Then I zoomed in and took a second frame, or tried to, wanting a tighter head shot, but it didn’t sound right. There was no clunk of the mirror. I tried again and it still wasn’t working. All I could get was a small bright area at the top of the frame.

I took off the lens and looked inside the camera. The lever at the side for the lens moved normally when I pressed the release, but the mirror didn’t budge at all, and looked slightly askew. Something was seriously wrong.

For the rest of the day I worked with a single camera, the D700, changing lenses rather more frequently than usual – and missing a few chances while doing so. Working with two cameras does really make a huge difference.

Back home I checked the camera again, and then began to think about what to do.  Was this a sign it was time to switch to mirrorless? Unfortunately my recent experiences in using the Fuji X-T1 haven’t been entirely positive. Though the results are fine, it had let me down at critical points, simply refusing to turn on for a few vital seconds. And though the electronic viewfinder is good, even better than an optical viewfinder in dim light, in bright conditions it can’t compete. It lets you see the framing of the images, but not to really study the scene in the kind of detail provided with an optical viewfinder. The ability to zoom in on the focus area is great, but not much use when you need to work fast.

So I ruled out that possibility, except perhaps as a short-term measure while the D800E was in for repair. It seemed likely that it would require a major overhaul, and as well as the mirror there were a few other parts that needed replacement, but I could put up for a while with working with the D700 with the 18-105mm, 16mm fisheye and 70-300mm while using the Fuji with its impressive 10-24mm (15-36mm equiv.)

I bought the D800E as soon as it became available here in 2012, so it was now three years old, and the shutter according to the press release “has been tested to withstand approximately 200,000 cycles.” Three years later, mine was now a little over that, and I began to wonder if it would be worth repairing. What would the cost of repair be and how would that compare with the second-hand value of the camera?

I did a quick search on the web. One dealer was offering a D800 in almost new condition with a shutter count of only 12,000 for £1150.  All those I could see on sale, even on Ebay claimed to be in at least excellent condition and hardly used, even at a little under a thousand.

I’d been intending to replace my D700 later this year. It has a shutter count of around 400,000 and a few minor issues and is clearly living on borrowed time. Some other photographers laugh at its cosmetic condition – loose rubber bits, embedded yellow paint and scratches, but it still delivers. It can’t last for ever and I’ve been expecting to have to give it a decent burial at any time for quite a while. Cameras aren’t made to last like they were, and photographers probably don’t want them too, as we are still in a time where technology is improving, if more slowly than in the previous decade.

I can’t remember (or be bothered to look back in my accounts) the exact cost of the D800E, but I think it was around £2,400.  In those three years I’ve spent nothing on repairs on it and the cost for using it works out at just slightly over 1p per exposure, which doesn’t seem a huge amount to pay. I’ll get an estimate for repair sometime, but won’t be too upset if it turns out to be uneconomic.

Things have very much changed since the old days. The Leica M2 that I bought second-hand in 1977 – when it was around 20 years old – is still in silky-smooth working order, though a couple of repairs over the years have doubled the price I paid. It’s second-hand value now is about the total that I’ve paid, not as people often say a good investment, but still excellent value. Cameras then were equipment, but now they are largely consumables, replacing not just the camera but most of the costs that used to be born by film.  And the film I used to use in that Leica (or rather a slightly improved version of it) now costs around 11p per exposure.

I’ve solved my immediate problems by buying a new Nikon D810. It cost a little more than those second-hand D800 bodies, but there are a few minor improvements that made me feel the extra was worthwhile. If I do get the D800E repaired I’ll have a camera in reserve for when the D700 gives out, and if not it may still be possible to use it with the mirror locked up for copy work in live view mode. But for the moment it’s a large, expensive and useless paperweight on my desk (useless because the desk is always so covered with junk there is no room for papers.)

I only got it last Wednesday and so far I’ve only taken it out on three days, but I’m getting to like it. The biggest difference I’ve noticed is in the noise from a redesigned mirror mechanism and damping. Possibly the sound isn’t much quieter, but it is at a lower pitch, less crisp and far less intrusive. I showed it to a couple of photographers this Saturday, holding the camera up a foot or so in front of me and pressing the shutter, somewhere in the middle of Parliament Square. With the noise of traffic going around the square it was hard to hear it.