>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

JPEG or RAW

While I was having computer problems recently I had to work in ‘Raw+Jpeg’ mode, and I chose the highest possible jpeg quality from the Nikon, ‘Fine’. And they are certainly pretty good files. But I was also having problems working with them on an uncalibrated screen and using Photoshop rather than Lightroom.

I tried to calibrate the screen visually, using one of the sites on the web that offers suitable graphics, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. I decided that my best approach was to rely mainly on Photoshop to make the judgements, keeping my own tweaks down to a minimum.

This also speeded up processing. I suppose I could have automated the process, but soon a set series of keystrokes became wired into my brain. ‘Alt+E, V, Enter’ to change from Adobe RGB to sRGB, then ‘Alt+I, A, U’ on the outdated version of Photoshop on the laptop for Auto-contrast. Next came Ctrl+M, which took me into the curves dialogue, where I used the mid-tone dropper to set the colour balance on a neutral in the image. Though it isn’t always possible to find a neutral, and sometimes it was a matter of trying a few different patches of the image until the result looked about right. And a little tweak of the curve produced a result with what looked like appropriate brightness and contrast.

Having OK’d this, then came the rather riskier business of trying to guess whether I’d got things about right, and sometimes fiddling a little with Brightness and Contrast, adjustments I normally try to avoid. It was hard not to try and alter the colour balance a little, and although I knew I wasn’t seeing it correctly. But I also know that having things a little on the warm side is always more acceptable than the opposite.

Here’s one of the results:

It isn’t too bad, though it does have something of a colour cast – I obviously added a little too much yellow. Perhaps most obvious in the sunlight grass.

It was a difficult day for lighting, photographing the Green Party Photocall What Are You Afraid of Boys? in a shady corner of College Green, next to the Houses of Parliament, sunlit in the background at right. And at the left, the building has completely lost detail in the jpeg.

I’ve now been able to process the raw file, and to make it a little easier to compare I’ve adjusted it to a similar colour balance, though I would normally have left it more neutral.

Overall the image from Raw is a little less contrasty and less saturated colour, and the shadow areas are lighter, but part of the difference is also because I’ve made some use of the Lightroom local adjustment brush. That could have improved the jpeg too, but would not have restored the missing detail in the blown-out highlights.

Looking at the full-size images, there does seem to be just a little more detail in the raw file. Although I think the jpeg version of the jacket that Green Party leader Natalie Bennett is wearing actually looks better for being a little darker, I think the raw version is probably more accurate.

As I stood there taking a whole series of photographs of her, I was hoping that she would make the same expression as her portrait on the poster behind her, but she didn’t quite do so, keeping her head more upright. But I was worried by that picture of her, as it didn’t quite look like her. What it lacks is the determination that I think shows in her jaw when she talks.

I stood there taking pictures wondering whether it was digital retouching or just careful lighting and choice of view that had caused the difference and made her and Caroline Lucas look rather more like a toothpaste advert than real people. But somehow it was a look that shouted PR and advertising and didn’t at all fit with my vision of the Green Party. More like the old politics we need to get away from.
Continue reading JPEG or RAW

Roll Over Photoshop?

Mac users may now have a serious alternative to Photoshop as an image editor for photographers in Affinity Photo, according to a report in Creative Bloq. Available now as a free beta version, the full version is likely to cost £39.99.

Its part of an intended suite of three products, with Affinity Designer (an alternative to Adobe Illustrator) already available at the same price getting some very good reviews. Also planned is an InDesign alternative called Affinity Publisher due for release later this year.

The programmes come from Serif, who have in the past produced some interesting products aimed at the non–professional market in similar areas. Like products from other developers that I’ve tried in the past, and Adobe’s own Elements these have lacked a few essential features and lacked the ease of of use that – once learnt – makes Photoshop so straightforward, at least for most of the things photographers really need to do.

But Serif aren’t simply trying to match Photoshop, but to outdo it, and have obviously learnt something from other software too. There is a nice promotional video and it does look good, promising greater speed and the big advantage – like Lightroom – of non-destructive editing. And “CMYK, 16-bits per channel editing, LAB colour, RAW processing, ICC colour management, and Photoshop PSD and 64-bit plug-in compatibility.”

It certainly looks promising. The only bad news is that it is Mac only, although there are plans in the longer term for a Windows version.

Lightroom Develop Primer

By now I think most of the photographers I know – or at least those who can care more about image quality than speed – have become Lightroom users. There are of course alternatives, and in the past I’ve used several of them, including Capture One and the software from Nikon and Fuji for their own cameras, as well as other independent alternatives.

For sheer speed, important to many press photographers, I’m told that nothing beats Photo Mechanic, and if I were wanting to file images from location I’d probably install this on my Ultrabook.

There are minor differences between the results from different raw conversion software, but all of them do a very acceptable job, and the differences between their renderings seem unimportant except to pixel peepers.

Lightroom appeals to me because of its workflow and versatility, and it also helps that it comes together with Photoshop on a reasonably priced subscription. Like many others I was worried about the Adobe scheme when it was introduced, but I am now converted, especially since Adobe seems to be keeping its promises and also continuing to develop both products.

For me Lightroom does have one weak link, in that it is very slow for the initial editing of the large number of images I usually take in a day’s work. The review of images within the Import dialogue works for a small number of pictures, but slows to almost a complete halt when applied to sensible numbers.

My workaround for this is FastPictureViewer Pro, software that does exactly what it promises. It reads the images from my USB 3 card reader at least as fast as I can view them on screen; after an initial load time of perhaps 10 seconds there is no waiting as I go through the pictures, pressing K for those I want to keep which it copies immediately to my ‘input’ folder.

On the web page they suggest that using Lightroom on a batch of 1000 images with a fast computer takes around 1 hr 10 minutes, while doing the initial edit with FPV and then only importing the selected images cuts this to around 20 minutes. On my system I think the time-saving is perhaps a little greater.

But although many friends have Lightroom, I don’t think many of them have really appreciated or explored what it could really do for them. It has grown into a fairly complex programme, though basically still much simpler and more intuitive than Photoshop.

I spent a long time going through the various excellent tutorials available on the Adobe site – and a long time searching for answers to various problems in the online resources there, which I feel are not well presented. You can of course buy books telling you how to use it, and I have one, but these become out of date almost as soon as published as a new and improved version appears. Mine had some useful tips for Lightroom 2, but five years or so on, Lightroom is now at version 5, with 6 surely not long away. But there were some good tips, particularly about workflow which still apply.

Thanks to PetaPixel for alerting me to the video 10 Tips for Optimizing Your Photos with Lightroom: A Primer on Basic Techniques, a lengthy presentation by photography instructor Tim Grey.

And it is lengthy, and I would have preferred a much more business-like presentation which would have cut the length by at least an hour, but it does give a good introduction to the basics of working with an image in the Develop module at the heart of the software. As someone who started at the beginning with version 1 (then somewhat of a disappointment compared to the software Adobe bought out) there wasn’t a great deal that was new to me, and perhaps Gray’s approach may be better for those coming across the programme for the first time. But there were a few little things that I learnt. Though what seemed like ten minutes to tell us it was a good idea to check the ‘Remove chromatic aberration’ box seemed excessive. And is there any reason ever to leave that box unchecked?

Of course, we all work slightly differently as photographers, and there was some advice that wouldn’t work for me. Perhaps because I often have to work rapidly, unlike him I often have a need to adjust the exposure slider, and I have a more aggressive approach to luminance noise reduction than him. But he does make the effect of some of the many sliders in the develop module clear, and in particular things like the difference between ‘saturation‘ and ‘vibrance‘. Though I was sorry when talking about that luminance module he failed to mention at all the functions of the contrast and detail sliders.

Perhaps more significant was the lack of any discussion about sharpening (unless I went to sleep at some point?) Other people tell me that Fuji X-Trans files render better with a 100% detail setting in sharpening. I think a similar high detail setting in the luminance noise dialogue also helps.

If you watch the video, use the link supplied by PetaPixel to the B&H site for whom the video was made, and make it full screen so you can see fairly clearly the quite detailed settings on the right of the Lightroom screen.

I’ve never been to B&H, but have often referred to its on-line catalogue for information and did once buy a camera from them, a long time ago. It arrived quickly and well packed with all the documentation in order, and at some saving to me because of the dollar/pound rate at the time, and because US prices for the Konica Hexar were rather lower. In the UK it was overpriced by the importer and was very hard to find in the shops, and what was perhaps the truly iconic ‘street’ camera was a rare beast indeed here.

Fingers Crossed

Ken Loach, Jasmin Stone of Focus E15 and Lisa Mackenzie, author of ‘Getting By’
D700, ISO 3200, 16-35mm at 16mm, 1/40s f4

For the moment at least, though I hesitate to commit this to print, I appear to have regained control of my computer systems here, and am back at work on a nice, largish and calibrated screen, with a proper keyboard after spending over two weeks on my very portable notebook.

To my right, the Drobo 5N has a reassuring row of green and blue lights as I type, and on the desk in front of me is the external hard drive that caused my problem. It took my desktop computer around 20 days to run a disk check, outputting error messages every few seconds on 450,000 files telling me it had insufficient disk space to fix the problem for each in turn, leaving me swearing at the sloppy programmer who wrote those routines.

It could even have been Mr Gates himself, for underneath Windows, even fairly recent versions such as Windows 7 which this computer is running, is a residue from the days of MS-DOS. But what was perhaps acceptable when a large hard drive was only 20Mb doesn’t scale up well to 3Tb. Though so far, when I’ve cautiously connected the rogue disk to a running Windows system it has served up the few files I’ve requested with no demur, so perhaps these slow routines somehow managed to solve some problems, though it will be some time before I examine the whole disk.

At the moment I’m slowly transferring work from about 10 days taking pictures from the Drobo into my Lightroom catalogue. It’s a slightly more complicated process than it might be as Lightroom doesn’t currently appear to be able to see the network attached drive, so I have first to copy the files across to a directly attached disk. At least this transfer is reasonably rapid, at around 40Mb per second. Once in Lightroom I’ll need to spend the usual amount of time making a final selection of images and developing them for my web site and archive. And of course updating my web pages.

Perhaps the biggest problem I’ve had over the 20 days is having to work with jpegs. When the lighting is easy, both Nikon and Fuji do a reasonable job, but whenever things get tricky, jpegs just can’t cope. And well Photoshop is a great programme (I think I’ve used it since version 2), Lightroom is just so much faster and I think better for most editing and adjusting. Of course I was taking RAW + jpeg, but wasn’t able to edit the jpegs as I only have an old version of Photoshop on the notebook. Probably I should have updated it and installed Lightroom (as I think my licence wold allow) but I kept thinking it wouldn’t be long before I was back on a real computer.

I doubt if sending out files based on the jpegs rather than raw will greatly have affected my sales, but I certainly noticed the difference in quality. As I slowly work through the backlog I’ll try and find some good examples and write a post or two here.

Friday was my first day back processing with Lightroom, and as well as the work from that day I also had some pictures from a friend’s book launch the previous evening. Thursday had been a long day; I’d covered two protests, then gone on to a third story, where I’d taken some pictures but didn’t really have enough to be worth submitting and then taken some urban landscape panoramas before the launch. By the time I’d come home, had some food and processed and submitted pictures from the first two events it was early morning and I needed to be in bed. But before I went out the next morning to take pictures in an icy windtunnel (aka Croydon) in South London I’d started to process the party images, taken in lighting that bordered on the impossible, thankful that I could resuscitate them in Lightroom. The landscapes will wait until I have more time.

Continue reading Fingers Crossed

Morris Strikes Back

The Capa D Day saga continue with the first of a series of responses by A D Coleman to a remarkable statement The A. D. Coleman Attack by John G Morris, which he concludes with the words ‘We may never know the entire truth‘. Reading it through I get the feeling of a man who has rather lost touch with reality and is unable to understand much of the research that Coleman and others have put into this and very much wants to make sure the truth remains hidden.

Morris, who was 98 in December, claims to have remembered facts that he had clearly forgotten back in 1944 when he first gave the now disproved legend of the films ruined in processing by ‘the young darkroom assistant‘ Dennis Banks. He now claims that these ‘ruined’ rolls, which seem almost certain to have been pre-invasion images by Capa, were actually blank rolls of film, and, if I understand him, that Capa in his agitated state had been unable to remember which of the films he was carrying he had actually put into his Contax and exposed.

Morris’s newly remembered story also includes a mysterious mid-channel rendezvous between Capa and another Life photographer, Dave Scherman, which had brought Capa’s earlier films to London with him before the D-Day pictures. It’s an element of the story that Coleman demolishes with a sledgehammer in his first response, most of which is employed in pointing out places where Morris misrepresents (or completely misunderstands) aspects of what Coleman and others have written.

Capa was a professional photographer, and I think Morris is questioning his professionalism. I can’t believe he will not have had a foolproof system to distinguish exposed and unexposed film, probably involving either tearing off the film end on unloading or rewinding inside the cassette and then storing it in a different container. I wasn’t taking pictures in the 1940s, so I’m not sure exactly how they would have done it then, but some method was surely a part of every film photographers basic training?

Then the mysterious ‘young darkroom technician’, presumably either working under the supervision of someone more senior or else someone experienced in film developing despite his youth. You don’t just pull any guy off the street to work in the Life darkroom. I can’t believe that any darkroom technician, even the greenest, would not recognise a completely unexposed film when he pulled it out of the fixer and put it to wash. Morris perhaps would not; he appears to be proud of his lack of knowledge in this area, claiming ‘I have never developed a roll of film in my entire life.’ It’s one statement in his piece I find entirely believable.

It is mysterious too that Dennis Banks appears to be unknown to anyone (and there does still appear to be some confusion about his name.) Inventing another story about him doesn’t help. Morris adds yet another with the suggestion he makes about the younger man “I presume he is long gone.” Why so, when at the time he – if he existed – was said to be 17 and Morris was ten years older?

And had Capa’s preparations for D-Day rolls arrived along with Scherman’s, who can believe that none of his pictures would have been considered for publication, not even have been edited as Morris suggests. Would any editor presented with pictures by two of his small team of photographers take a look at only one of them, find a few pictures he could use and not even bother to edit those taken by a rather better-known photographer?

We may well never know the entire truth – and I think Morris is determined to try and stop us doing so. We can only speculate on why this is, but we do now have a much better idea about what actually happened on Omaha beach – and afterwards than we did before the work of J Ross Baughman and A D Coleman.

I don’t think having a more truthful account in the slightest detracts from the pictures or from my respect for Capa as a photographer, though it perhaps makes him a little more human. His reaction to the situation is entirely understandable and probably saved his life, and the underexposure and camera shake gave his images an added drama. Capa was a gambler and we are richer because he had a bit of luck and knew when it was time to leave the game – even though he had only taken perhaps ten pictures.

My 1980 Colour (Part 2)

The pictures I’ve selected from my colour work in 1980 are probably a fairly random cross-section of those I took, simply the pictures that I’ve scanned for some reason or other in the dozen or so years that I’ve owned a colour scanner.

It’s easy to forget that being able to easily put colour images on the web is something fairly recent. The main reason I bought my first digital camera in 1999 was to enable me to do so. I probably still have it in a drawer somewhere, a Fujifilm MX2700 which was a 2.2Mp camera, one of the leading non-professional models of the time, which gave reasonable results for web use (and with great difficulty and lengthy retouching a 6″x9″ print which was the only digital print in a large group photography show a few months later.)

Before then, I could get colour files by taking a print or slide into work and using the large flatbed scanner I had specified for the art department. It was a tricky beast to work, and while it did a reasonable job with prints, it pretty well failed with slides. I seldom bothered, and mostly used my home scanner – black and white only – to scan colour prints. Later I bought film scanners. The first, an early Canon, was pretty hopeless, but later I had a Microtek and a Minolta Multipro that gave high quality scans – but took a long time over each one.

You could of course also get high quality scans made commercially, but this was and is an expensive business. The Minolta could be coaxed to produce ‘drum scan’ quality at a file size one of London’s leading pro labs now charges £55 or more a time. Though cheaper and possibly better services are available elsewhere.

The My London Diary web site largely came about because of my switch to digital, although the early years have mainly scanned black and white images. But from the end of 2002 I had begun to work with a Nikon D100 alongside film, although it took another couple of years before I stopped using film and everything could easily be posted on my diary.

Here then is a small gallery from those colour transparencies that I have scanned from 1980 (or at least I think they are from 1980.) I think most or all of these were taken on Group 6 outings, though what was probably the only one I arranged that year was unusual in that I was the only person to turn up! My lone walk took me around Battersea and Wandsworth, including a number of views of the Thames and to the ‘Royal Laundry’. I’ve done just a little correction and removing dust etc on the scans, but most could be improved by more work – or by making new scans, but some of the originals may have deteriorated beyond redemption.

London, 1980

Wandsworth, 1980

Battersea, London, 1980

Margate, 1980

Margate 1980

Margate, 1980

Wandsworth Rail Bridge and Fulham B Power Station, London, 1980

From Chelsea Bridge, London, 1980

Royal Laundry, Battersea, London, 1980

Continue reading My 1980 Colour (Part 2)

My 1980 Colour (part 1)

80-slide032srgb600 Clapham, London. 1980

In 1980 I was usually carrying two cameras when I went out to take photographs, one loaded with black and white film, usually ASA 125 Plus X Pan in the Leica M2. In my jacket pocket, even when I wasn’t going out to take pictures I always had a small camera, a Minox 35EL with a fixed 35mm lens, one of the smallest 35mm full frame cameras. I had both 50mm f2.8 and a 35mm f1.4 for the Leica. In the middle of the year I switched to Ilford FP4, probably only because I found a cheaper source of film.

But in November there was a significant changes. Ilford had brought out the first black and white chromogenic film, XP1-400. According to Wikipedia it went on sale in January 1981, but the first roll of it I took has a few pictures of our Guy Fawkes night celebrations on November 5th, 1980 (and Christmas 1980 comes a couple of rolls later.) I had a Leicameter MR4 on my Leica M2, and it was usually good enough for conventional black and white film, but exposure became (at least for me) more critical with XP1, and I soon switched most of my black and white work to the much more accurate metering of the Olympus OM1.

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London, 1980

I’d started off using the OM1 for colour transparencies, where exposure was always very critical, and had kept the camera when I upgraded to the Olympus OM2, which had an even better metering system. I think all of the colour slides from 1980 will have been taken with the OM2.

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Brick Lane, London, 1980

I’d bought the OM1 with the standard 50mm f1.8 lens (there were two faster alternatives, but it didn’t seem worth paying a lot more for a bulkier and heavier lens with only a relatively small speed advantage.) I’d started too with the latest thing in lenses, one of the first popular zoom lenses, a rather bulky 70-210mm or thereabouts. It wasn’t a bad lens, but after a year or two I sold it and bought a much smaller, lighter and faster 105mm Tamron.

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East End, London. 1980

Later I found a Zuiko 35mm f2.8 shift lens secondhand at a sensible price in Hull – around a hundred pounds less than in London – and added that to my kit, and later still I found a 28mm f2.8 bargain. I had to buy the 21mm f3.5 new, but the 200mm lenses (eventually both the f4 and f5 – I could never decide which I liked best) also came secondhand. But I think all of the pictures in 1980 will have been made with the 50mm or 105mm.

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London, 1980

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Canal, London. 1980. This may have been from a Group Six walk

In 1980 I was working in three different ways. When at home I was making regular trips to London and walking around various areas, mainly taking pictures in black and white, some of which are in my book http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/4048897-london-derives?class=book-title London Derives. One Sunday a month I would go out with a bunch of other photographers -usually between 4 and ten our us – on a photographic outing. We were enfants terrible in a photographic club who refused to take the club restrictions and conventions seriously – or perhaps we were just serious about photography in ways the club didn’t understand. At first we were a group of the club (the sixth group formed, which had, for want of a better idea called itself Group Six, though by the time I joined there were only four others.) We took it in turns to organise where to go, and these often took me to places I wouldn’t otherwise visit, including rural Wiltshire and Margate in the pictures here. Some of those along the Thames may also be from one of these outings. Any I suggested tended to be in London, while most others preferred more obviously picturesque locations.

A rather wet Wiltshire on a Group Six trip

Terry King on a Group Six outing in Pewsey, Wiltshire. 1980

The final area of my work was in Hull, where we went several times a year to stay with my parents-in-law. Much of the black and white work from there is in my book Still Occupied, but my show there also included roughly 40 colour images as well as the around 100 black and white works.

I’ve done some rough corrections on the scans that I found, some made a few years ago, but haven’t removed every blemish. It’s hard to know exactly what colour some of them should be, and I still am having to use an uncalibrated screen. Where possible I’ve tried to balance on a neutral gray with Photoshop.

My Seventies Colour

I took quite a lot of colour images in the 1970s, though relatively little of it is of much interest to me now. I’d taken some in the 1960s too, before I became a photographer, though I had some aspirations, if no idea about how to do it. A girl friend when I was sweet seventeen and had no idea much about anything was beginning a career as a model and I took most of a 36 exposure Agfa transparency film of her in one on the cherry trees in my back garden. It wasn’t the reason why our relationship went nowhere – our tastes were very different and she was attracted to older men with money.

I couldn’t afford film and processing then (or girl friends) and mostly I took just a few pictures on a holiday. Things changed when I began teaching when I was around 26, as not only did I have a little money, but I’d also got a largish flat in a New Town, but had learnt the rudiments of black and white processing and could take over the kitchen after dinner to process films and make prints.

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‘Photography’ at Kew

With my first few months salary I’d bought a Russian SLR camera, a Zenith B, to replace the old Japanese Halina that had never really worked since I’d dropped it in the lake at Versailles five or six years earlier, and some black plastic sheeting to cover the windows and the other basic requirements – three trays, a developing tank, measures, thermometer etc. Getting equipped was made easier by mail order, and the previous year living in Leicester I’d got to know the small photographic Aladdin’s cave of Jessops, with the catalogue on a large sheet of very small type – they sold a 10p magnifier with it. Another mail order company was Polysales of Goldalming, with a catalogue which had some useful advice in it as well as the goods.

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River Thames near Kew

Colour became a sideline, and of course most professional work was then in black and white. My first work was for a local theatre company, and the pictures they wanted were b/w also. Colour was still something largely for family pictures and holiday snaps.

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Sam in bluebells at Kew

Soon after I entered a competition in one of the amateur photographic magazines, and as a prize won 20 rolls of Kodachrome to make an entry into a tape-slide contest. I decided to base my entry on a cycle tour along the Loire Valley, and some of the pictures weren’t bad, but I had no experience and pretty poor equipment to make the sound-track. That was a competition I didn’t win.

But I did begin to use colour as well as black and white film, carrying two Olympus OM bodies (or a Leica and an OM) one with b/w and the other with colour slide film. I soon switched to E4 and then E6 films and cut costs dramatically by processing those myself. But black and white remained the serious side of photography, with colour only being a minor side of my work.

Cherry Gardens Pier and view to Wapping

Rotherhithe

Gas Holders at Kings Cross

Bethnal Green

I studied colour too, both with the Bauhaus book ‘The Art of Colour‘ by Johannes Itten and also works by photographers including Andreas Feininger, though I found these less interesting. Much of my colour photograph was just about colour, with the subject matter being immaterial, and most of this I now find of little interest.

Colour really only began to work for me when I began to use it for documentary subjects, at first along with black and white in my work on Hull, Germany and the Royal Docks. It was really only when I changed from colour transparency to colour negative in the mid 1980s that I started on projects that were only in colour; before then I’d found the technical deficiencies of colour transparency too limiting.

The images here were I think all taken in 1979, and these reproductions are all from scans made in 2002 which I came across on an old hard disk from a computer I’d getting ready to throw out as it will no longer start up, probably because of damage caused by overheating when a fan got blocked by dust. But the hard disks are still readable and I’ve removed those on to my backup shelf.

The slides had aged a bit when I scanned them, and some were rather dirty. I’ve tidied them up a little and adjusted contrast and colour balance roughly before posting.
Continue reading My Seventies Colour

After the March

After the March for Homes on Saturday, which ended in a rally outside City Hall, next to Tower Bridge, I was cold, wet and tired and wasn’t feeling at my best. So I got on a bus and made my way home, despite it being obvious that quite a large group of the protesters were clearly intent on other actions. I missed an opportunity for some interesting pictures, but there are times when I feel I just have to stop. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of other photographers around to take pictures.

When I started photographing at protests, it was partly because so few others were doing so, outside of the really big events. Even now there are some where I’m the only photographer present – and my presence there and getting their story out becomes more important. But of course even if there are no photographers, almost every protester now has a phone and is taking pictures. Sometimes its hard to photograph events because so many of those taking part are either themselves taking photographs or looking at the photographs they have already taken rather than taking an active part in the protest.

The March for Homes was against the current redevelopments taking place in London, building expensive flats which are mainly sold abroad to overseas investors, many of whom leave them empty most or all of the year. Buying for investment pushes up the price of properties across London, and is making it impossible for most Londoners to buy or increasingly even to rent a place to live.

Councils across London, many Labour run, are selling off estates with realtively low rent accomodation, particulary the large council estates built shortly after the second World War to meet the housing needs of Londoners. One of the larger schemes so far was the Heygate Estate, a well-planned award-winning estate at Elephant & Castle. Over the years the estate had been neglected and needed repairs, and had deliberately been used to house anti-social tenants, many with drug and mental health problems. ut most who lived there liked the area; they would have liked to council to do more for the estate, but the council decided the site was an asset they could realise.

Of course they got it wrong. The costs of moving out tenants and leaseholders who didn’t want to move turned out to be much higher than they anticipated, and took many years longer than they had bargained, despite compensation for owners mostly at around half the market value. Individual councillors may well have benefitted from sale, and there were certainly treats from the developers, who ended up getting the site at perhaps a fifth of the true market value, but the council lost a large amount on the sale.

But the real losers were of course the people who had lived on the Heygate, some now in estates at the far-flung ends of Southwark, others in inferior private accomodation at higher rents, and leaseholders either having to take on large mortgages or move to the fringes of London. And the many thousands on the waiting list for social housing with the stock available greatly reduced by the demolition.

It isn’t correct to talk of the new Elephant Park that is now being built as a luxury development, though certainly the new properties will be expensive. But they will probably be less spacious and no more luxurious than those that they replaced, and are likely to have a shorter life-span.

Having made a shameful mess of Heygate, Southwark have now begun the same process on the neighbouring Aylesbury Estate. Its a larger estate and lacks the architectural quality of the Heygate, and again has been allowed (or encouraged) to deteriorate. Initial plans for ‘regeneration’ under the ‘New Deal for Communities’ (NDC) set up by Laboin 1998 led to a ballot across the estate in 2001 in which a 73% majority among those living there wanted to keep the whole estate as council housing. The story around Aylesbury is complex, and you can read more about it on the Southwark Notes blog.

From City Hall, protesters went on the briefly sit down on Tower Bridge and to protest inside the expensive flats currently being erected next to it. Some then marched down to the former Heygate estate and then on to the Aylesbury estate where they re-opened and occupied a part of a block, Chartridge, that had been cleared for demolition.

Although I haven’t yet made it to the occupation as I’m not yet entirely fit after my exertions on Saturday, I have been around the Heygate and Aylesbury estates several times in the past, most recently on a guided tour Walking the Rip-Off in 2012, from which the pictures here mainly come.

On that tour we went inside a few properties on the Aylesbury Estate, and the flats were well-designed and relatively spacious, rather more so than those of the new properties planned to replace them.

Cartier-Bresson and more

I’ve just been watching a BBC film from 1998, directed by Patricia Wheatley, featured on the Petapixel blog. Pen Brush & Camera has a lot of the then 90 year old photographer talking, which is interesting, and a number of people talking about their experiences with him or his work, which are rather more variable.

Like most TV programmes, at times it’s frustrating for those who know something about the subject, and there were many times when I would have like the interviewer to ask questions but she didn’t. But certainly the man’s character comes across well, as does the basic information you probably already know.

Seeing a TV film on computer is unfortunately not a good way to look at photographs, despite the efforts of the cameramen, and although Cartier-Bresson’s work is less challenging in this respect than much photography – he somewhere talks about printing and not liking deep blacks and only wanting the printer to respect the tones; the images are shown sadly lacking in both highlight and shadow detail. And even looked at in a relatively small window nothing in this YouTube version is sharp. Usually watching films I like to switch to full-screen, but in this case it was hopeless, and I soon reverted to the smaller image. There are quite a few other films on HCB also on YouTube, including a short clip in French showing him at work on a busy street.

Pen Brush & Camera, rather longer at around 50 minutes is still worth watching, though it would be a good idea to do so with a Cartier-Bresson book by your side, pausing the video occasionally to remind yourself what the pictures really look like.

Writing this today, on the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s funeral, I was reminded by a post on Facebook by David Hoffman that HCB covered the occasion for one of the UK’s major papers (possibly the Times or Sunday Times) but they didn’t like his pictures enough to use any of them. The comment was made to a post about some of the press coverage of that event, Farewell To Greatness, on Graham Harrison’s Photohistories.

It was also that occasion that brought one of my friends, then a young American photographer travelling on a military discharge at the end of his service as a photographer in Italy, to this country. Meeting a young English woman at a party led to his staying here, where he has been studying the English over the last 50 years. You can see a little of John Benton-Harris‘s work on his web site, though I hope it will not be too long before a book is available of his pictures of the English. And today he is out in London celebrating 50 years by taking more pictures of us. I won’t be celebrating Churchill myself, though perhaps he was the leader we needed in 1940 (before my time) he certainly was not at other times. Socialist Worker‘s verdict on him as ‘A vicious reactionary—racist and brutal‘ is perhaps a little one-sided, but a useful counterpoint to today’s wall-to-wall media sychophancy.