>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Shirley Baker

I’m surprised to find that I never seem to have mentioned the work of Shirley Baker (1932-2014) on this site. A post on Facebook today reminded me of her work, and linked to a gallery of pictures on The Guardian, which also carried a good obituary of her last October.

I never – so far as I know – met her, though we walked many of the same streets in Manchester. Some of her finest work came from Hulme, through which I walked every day in my first year at university – and where, a few years later, after it had all been demolished, I learnt to drive along empty streets lined with rubble and just the odd pub and church still standing, the community destroyed by redevelopment.

On my way I walked past scenes like those she photographed, though at the time I could not afford to take pictures. I lived too in streets like these for the first three years of my married life, on the top floor of a house like those in her pictures – a few years ago I could have gone back and bought it for less than the price of a good digital camera.

I went back to Hulme too, after the redevelopment, as a volunteer interviewer for a sociology project; going into the new system-built flats which were instant slums, already damp and leaking at the seams due to poor assembly. Before long they too were demolished and replaced. Streets of houses like those demolished in 1974 or 5, well over a hundred years old, still stand, and many have now been renovated and improved. Again The Guardian had a good article about a fairly similar area in Liverpool recently.

Much of the time I was in Manchester I didn’t really have a working camera, having dropped my Halina 35X into the lake when visiting Versailles in the summer of 1966. Eventually a boatman managed to fish it out, but it was never the same again. The shutter would work sometimes, but the speeds it gave were random, though generally on the slow side. The few black and white pictures I took have heavily over-exposed negatives, generally with camera shake.

It wasn’t until around 5 years later that I could afford to replace it, and in the whole seven years I spent in Manchester I only took and handful of films. I was busy with other things, and simply could not afford films or processing – and had no idea of how to develop or print my own.

Baker studied photography at the Manchester college where I took my second degree (by that time it was a university and a part of the ‘white heat of technology’) and when she took the pictures of Hulme was a lecturer in photography in neighbouring Salford. She worked too for newspapers, but felt that she was only given the jobs that were thought to be suitable for women and not worthwhile for her male colleagues. According to the newspaper article there is to be a show of her work at the Photographers Gallery in 2015.

Looking at her pictures is for me in part looking at those memories of my own I failed to photograph, an exercise in nostalgia. But I’m sure her work also has meaning for those who don’t have that shared experience, and is also an important record of how people lived and played and of social attitudes and a community which has disappeared in so many places. You can see much more of her work – around 340 pictures including some from London and abroad – by searching on her name at the Mary Evans picture library.

Breach of Copyright

You may have seen this picture recently, as it has appeared over 80 times on the web, many in the last week, at times clearly with a Demotix watermark – indicating it is unlicensed. A few of the instances were probably taken from my own web site, with my discreet watermark cropped off the bottom.

I took this picture in London in July 2011, at a protest organised by Anjem Choudry, apparently MI5’s favourite Muslim honeypot, Muslim Extremists March For Sharia Zones.

Here is the context from my web site:

Around 70 men from Muslims Against Crusades marched from Leyton to Walthamstow calling for the setting up of Sharia Controlled Zones in the UK which ‘Islamic rules’ would be enforced by Muslims.

and the caption on Demotix is:

“Muslim man holds up ‘Sharia Controlled Zone’ poster at protest calling for Britain’s first Islamic Emirate”

and on my own web site: ‘

The controversial ‘Sharia Controlled Zone’ poster that has gone up in several East London boroughs’

I’ve not looked at all of the uses made of it on the web, but those I have seem to be using the image as evidence of ‘no go areas’ in the UK, which clearly it was not. Most also seem to be Islamophobic in tone, some rather rabidly so.

It may be that a few of those sites have licensed the image from Demotix (or Corbis etc) and I will in a few months time get a few pounds for my work – the fees Demotix charge for web use are derisory. I’ll look through the sites and decide if there are any that might be worth chasing up for payment, though I doubt it as few seem to be UK based.

I may also report it to Demotix, but I doubt they will be of any help, and the time I would have to spend on chasing up all these instances would be enormous. Its vital that we have copyright laws, and sometimes photographers can benefit from them (as I’ve done on a few occasions) but much of the time they only benefit the large multinational agencies who have the time and resources to pursue infringers around the world.
Continue reading Breach of Copyright

‘Page 3’ on the way out?

Five months ago, in August 2014, I photographed the second anniversary party of the ‘No More Page 3‘ campaign, held on the courtyard outside the new offices of News International facing London Bridge Station. A few weeks later I wrote about it on this blog, in the post ‘No More Page 3‘.

In the news today, there were reports that The Sun has abandoned its practice of publishing these ‘topless’ images daily on the page, and in today’s issue the spot was occupied first by a couple of women in bikinis running along a beach in Dubai, though later editions apparently displaced them with the story of the death of a long-running Coronation Street soap star. Something which is news, if not news that I have any particular interest in, having last seen the programme before she joined it 43 years ago.

What was interesting this morning was to hear the BBC’s tame media commentator talk about this without mention of the campaign which was undoubtedly what prompted newspaper owner Rupert Murdoch to consider dropping the daily feature and to finally order its demise. It was left to a woman MP also taking part, Stella Creasy to mention them, after which he rather grudgingly admitted that ‘No More Page 3’ might have played a small part. ‘Like’, I thought, ‘it wouldn’t have happened without them.’

Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow speaks at an anti-racist event in 2012

It’s hard not to conclude that there is a conspiracy to play down the role of protests in promoting change. People often tell me it changes nothing, but it is perhaps the only way most ‘ordinary people’ can influence events. I do believe that it is important to vote (and vital to vote for the right people) but it’s even more important to get out there on the street with banners and placards, and to organise and sign petitions.

Of course, protest does often become respectable in long retrospect, and its importance can even become overstated. Slavery still continues despite the valiant efforts of Wilberforce and the abolitionists, and the racism that underlay it is perhaps now on the increase.

So far, the ‘Page 3’ success – not yet confirmed by The Sun, but reported by another Murdoch mouthpiece – seems a very partial one. A step in the right direction to a newspaper which publishes pictures of women simply because they are making news.

Continue reading ‘Page 3’ on the way out?

Leica M – 60 Years

I still have the Leica M2 that I bought around 1977 when it was already over 20 years old. It’s a while since I used it, but I think it is still in perfect working order. Of course it’s been serviced a few times – though not that many. Apparently it is now 60 years since the Leica M series was introduced.

While others preferred the M3, for me the M2 was the perfect camera – within its limitations. If you were happy always to use a 35mm or 50mm lens and work by available light it could become an almost natural extension of your eye and brain.

Leica made a few minor changes over the years – some improvements, others perhaps less so. I had to buy a specially engineered third party rewind handle as the M2 just had a knob, and later models were faster to load film, though the slightly fiddly system with the M2 was perhaps more reliable. But there was nothing from Leica that made me think it worth the expense of upgrading, at least not until they went digital. But then my experiences with the M8 were pretty horrendous, and although they have perhaps recovered now, I’m not sure I have, and I’ve decided that Fuji are perhaps more my style.

Even while I was still using film, it was other manufacturers who took the basic Leica formula and innovated. Minolta with the CLE and Konica with the Hexars, which led to that M2 spending much of its life in my cupboard rather than my camera bag or hands. But while others made better cameras, Leica continued to be more conservative, tougher and more reliable.

Like most photographers I moved to SLRs for most of my work, largely for their versatility, working with a wider range of focal lengths as well as more accurate viewfinders. In particular to the Olympus OM system, ending with a couple of OM4 bodies, again great cameras to use. Digital led me to abandon these for Nikon, and by my fifth body, the D700, there too was a camera I liked to use. Now its the Fuji XT-1 with its splendid electronic viewfinder that makes me recall at least something of the old experience of working with that Leica M2 back in the 1970s.

Back to Leica M, Leica UK have been celebrating with a series of videos celebrating the 60th anniversary, in which photographers talk about their favourite pictures taken with a Leica M – and their thoughts about Leica. As I write you can see those by Peter Marlow, Sarah Lee, Ian Llewellyn, Matt Stuart, Paul Fuller, Olaf Willoughby, Tom Stoddart, Matt Humphrey, Kelly Preedy, Stuart Franklin (with links to their web sites) and a film of Bill Amberg who was asked to design a new camera bag to celebrate 100 years of Leica.

I certainly can’t see myself buying this bag – or indeed any other of the special Leica camera bags, partly because they are all ridiculously expensive, but also because it doesn’t seem to me very practical, despite the obvious thought that went into its design. I don’t think it would accommodate what are for me the two essentials for any photo bag, a bottle of water and a paperback book.

Slow Recovery

I’m sitting typing at my notebook, and using it to copying my files from 2007-8 from an old external hard disk onto my new Drobo 5N NAS. And rethinking how I intend to backup my work. This is a slow process, as the hard disk is only USB2, and at around 15Mb/s the 500Gb will take around 8 hours.(Later I found the speed roughly doubled if I actually plugged the Ethernet cable into the router, rather than just assuming it was connected and transferring over the wireless link.) I’ve another 9 disks to go through, some larger, though I’ll not transfer everything to the new system.

To my right, my desktop computer is still chuntering through Chkdsk on my drive G:, all 3TB of it. It’s now got on to telling me that there are around 450,000 files that need fixing and is looking at each in turn to tell me it can’t fix them. It says that it is 10% through, but I don’t believe the figures. Probably it will finish some time early next week. Meanwhile I’m doing the best I can with the notebook.

I got all ready to take pictures yesterday when I got a message telling me the event had been cancelled. There was a suggestion I might cover something else, but unfortunately by the time I read the message it seemed to late to get there. I don’t have Lightroom installed on my notebook – I decided the screen was too small and the keyboard and pad wouldn’t make it worth having. I could install it now – or put it on my smartphone as the licence allows, but instead I’ve decided to work in RAW + Fine jpeg mode until I get back onto the desktop machine. I do have an old copy of Photoshop I can use to do some adjustments.

The Drobo has advantages and disadvantages. It should protect against a hard drive failure, enabling me to replace a failing disk without losing work, and it should also allow me to increase the capacity of the system by installing disks of higher capacity. It also means that should my computer go down I will be able to easily access all my files from any other computer I attach to the network. And it is certainly convenient to have access to so much work in the one place.

Its big disadvantages seem to me to be that it is a proprietary system, and that it is also a single point of failure. So while I’m backing up my files to it, I’m also looking at keeping at least one other copy of all important files elsewhere.

I’ll store the old external hard drives carefully – and hope they remain in working order unused. And I’ll keep another attached to my main computer to store current work, replacing that as it gets full. I suspect that they will remain usuable if stored well – at least so long as we still have hardware with USB ports.
I still have boxes full of CDs and DVDs with most of my digital work (and some scans) on them, going back now in some cases around 20 years. Despite the health warnings many have given over the years, so far these have remained readable – I did always look for disks which were supposedly of good quality. I gave up writing work to these around a year ago when with 32Mp files things really got out of hand. And some of the scans and panoramas come to around 250Mb a time, which makes DVD at 4.7Gb look rather small.

I’m thinking now of going back to them, though only for storing a copy of the jpegs that I develop from Lightroom – a much more manageable proposition. An alternative would be to use USB memory sticks, given the low prices of 64Gb USB3 sticks; again people say these are not suitable for long term storage, but those I wrote when they first came out remain readable. I’ll also consider getting a Blu-Ray – perhaps external – writer which are now available at a reasonable price, and 25Gb media at around a quid a piece, but I’m less sure about them.

Of course I should be using cloud storage, but I trust that less than I do optical media. Who can say which companies will still be in business next year – or whether the promises they make will be kept? And cloud storage for all of my work would be prohibitive in cost. It does provide a valuable safeguard against theft, flood or fire etc, but perhaps I’ll ask a friend to keep a small bag of memory sticks or box of disks instead.

Computer Problems

Today I’m having computer problems. Yesterday while I was working we had a little power glitch; the light and my printer went off for a fraction of a second and then restarted; I don’t have a proper inyterruptible power supply, but the mickey-mouse protection on my fancy socket kept the computer working. People not far away had a power cut that lasted some hours, so we were fortunate. Unfortunately one of my external hard disks although it seemed to keep on working appears to have suffered some damage.

I turned on the computer it’s connected to today and went away to leave it to boot up, returning a minute of so later to find that it was running CHKSDK on my drive G:, with white figures about unreadable files flashing across the screen. Seven hours later it is still doing it, with a message telling me “10% complete”. It isn’t a good idea to interrupt CHKDSK (and I think the only way to do so is to turn off the power), so I’m working today on my notebook.

It isn’t a bad notebook, but the screen is around a third the area of my desktop, and the keyboard isn’t great for typing. But perhaps the main problem is that I can’t easily access the files stored on the desktop machine and its attached external drives.

For years I’ve been meaning to go over to network attached storage, but haven’t managed to persuade myself to pay out the cash for a decent system. Instead I’ve just added more external drives, though not all permanently connected.

I don’t know how much of the data on the disk currently being checked I will be able to recover. I think most or all of it will in any case be stored elsewhere, either on other hard disks or on CD or DVD. So I’m hoping little will be completely lost, though I anticipate it will take me quite a while to sort everything out.

Meanwhile, I’ve finally got around to ordering that NAS system I should have installed years ago, and once everything is up and running will be copying my work onto it. It will be a very long job, but should end up with things being better organised than before. It may mean rather less time for me to write here for a while.

Exploring Frank

Thanks to a note on the NY Times Lens blog, Finding Robert Frank, Online by Maurice Berger
for pointing me to the recently published US National Gallery of Art web pages on
The Robert Frank Collection which was put on-line in time for his 90th birthday in November.

Its an illustrated guide to their vast collection of his works, and you can see selected images and contact sheets and more. As well as the images available on line, the site enables you to search the collection, and you can then make an appointment to go to see the material you have selected at the The Robert Frank Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington. Though it would be rather a long journey for me.

Frank’s work is perhaps best seen not on-line, nor at the NGA, nor in the Pace/MacGill Gallery, but in the pages of two books. Most important is of course ‘The Americans‘ (or ‘Les Americains’) , and though a copy of the original publication might set you back over £3,000 you can find a more recent (and possibly better) edition for around £20. But of course if you have any interest in photography you will already have a well-thumbed copy on your bookshelf.

You can also view the book on a video. It’s best to download the HD version and play it with a proper viewer like VLC Media Player. Mute the sound, put your mouse cursor over the time line and you are ready to look at it, page by page.

Pegida Problems

It was a dark, damp night, with fluctuating rain, occasionally slackening to a standstill and at other times almost filling the air with fine drops, so fine it was deceptive, hardly appearing to be raining, but soaking everything and looking down I saw streams of water flowing across the barrel of my lens as it stuck out from my coat.

Any sensible person would have taken one look at the weather and decided they had better things to do than hanging around on a street corner as we were on the corner of Belgrave Square, in a dark area penned off by barriers, and most of those who had signed up for the event on Facebook had clearly come to that conclusion.

And it was dark. There were lights across the road, but even the bare winter trees of the square seemed to create an area of shadow. A small group of photographers chattered gloomily, one saying “they don’t tell people about this at media school”; standing in the cold, dark rain certainly is a less glamorous side of being a photographer.

I don’t like working in the dark. I don’t really have the best equipment for it, with no fast lenses for the Nikons, and good though the Nikon flash system can be, in the wide outdoors flash is seldom a good answer. Suddenly there was something to photograph, a man carrying a Union Flag walked past the Unite Against Fascism pen and started shouting insults as police came to move him on.

I rushed to the scene, framed and pressed the shutter release and absolutely nothing. It was too dark for the lens to focus. Just what focus assist is designed for, but Nikon thoughtfully disable it just for those occasions when it’s most necessary. Or at least only let you use it if you are using single-servo (S) focus mode AND you are either using auto-area AF OR have the centre focus point selected in other modes.

I fiddle with the camera in the dark, but before I’m able to solve the problem the guy has been led away to a pen 50 yards down the road where a few other right wing extremists are being looked after by police.

It isn’t the only problem I have with the D700. A few minutes later when I’ve been taking pictures using manual exposure, 1/30s at f2.8, I hear it making a rather more lengthy exposure and find it has altered the ISO to 800 from the 3200 I had set, and changed mode and set the aperture to f32. Clearly it is suffering from mad camera disease. I fiddle with it a bit more and find I do have auto-ISO set, which doesn’t account for the rest of the changes, but the camera begins to work more sensibly when I turn this off. I think it’s probably suffering from old age, I will have been using it for six years next month, and has taken over 370,000 pictures (according to the EXIF data) well over twice the minimum rating of 150,000. Probably it’s due either for an expensive service or replacement. As it has a few other peculiarities perhaps a replacement would make more sense. You can get a D700 in good working order with a reasonably low shutter count but some cosmetic damage for under £500, but probably it’s time to upgrade.

If the camera is now doing its best, with the SB800 attached the system is still playing a few tricks, with seemingly random exposures, and I more or less give up on the flash. There is occasional and rather unpredictable light from several people using video lights on their cameras, often a real nuisance as I have to keep moving as it shines direct into my lens, but at times giving me some dramatic lighting (though of course very flat for those who are supplying it.)

I have the camera set to ISO3200, but also have the exposure compensation at around -2 stops. Working without considerable compensation gives results that are just too bright – and can end up looking as if they are taken in daylight rather than at night. Despite the compensation I think the results are what you would expect at in terms of image noise from ISO3200.

Much of the time, having set the ISO and compensation I actually work using manual exposure in any case, taking no notice of what the camera meter indicates but looking at the image on the camera back and in particular the histogram. I kept wishing I was using the Fuji XT-1 because I think the electronic viewfinder would be better than an optical one; the Nikons do have ‘Live View’, but it’s clunky and you only see it on the camera back, and I find unusable for taking still images of action. The faster lenses for the Fuji would also have been useful. But my XT-1 body is currently in for servicing.

The video lights of several people working with video let me work without flash when the small group of right wingers (they seem to come from the various overlapping groups I’ve photographed before – EDL, South East Alliance, NF, Casuals United, Golden Dawn… and for this occasion some at least of them have called themselves UK Pegida.

Police led them off from the embassy and took the street leading towards Victoria Station. I thought about following with them and taking more pictures, but decided I’d had enough, and walk off in a different direction to get a bus, while the UAF vigil continued.

The following afternoon a friend of mine showed me a cheap LED light – under £30 – he has bought that seems considerably more powerful than those I’ve previously tried – as the more expensive models used by the videographers clearly are too. I’ll perhaps give one a try – and report back later.

More about the event at Solidarity with German anti-Pegida – and more pictures.

Continue reading Pegida Problems

‘Je suis Charlie’ London – Clegg et Sylvie

I’d decided some months ago that on Sunday 11th January, as on too many previous January 11ths I would be covering the event to mark the anniversary of the setting up of the illegal Guantanamo Bay prison camp, and decided to stick to that decision even though the major news event in London was the ‘Je suis Charlie’ vigil in Trafalgar Square. So I only arrived there after I’d spent over an hour outside the US embassy, at just after half past three, and had expected to miss the French Ambassador.

A large crowd filled the square and the steps up to the National Gallery when I arrived but there was nothing obvious going on, so I plunged into the crowd and worked my way across the square taking pictures. I really didn’t feel I was getting a great deal, and knew that many other photographers were doing much the same as me, and had more or less decided to give up.

I’d walked around to the front of the square, in front of an empty and taped off area in front of the plinth and was looking at the crowd, wondering if I could take a good overall picture, when I noticed a commotion in the centre of the crowd, with cameras being raised above photographer’s heads to take pictures. Something was clearly happening, and I made my way in that direction, to meet with security men hustling obviously important guests away through the crowd. There were people at the front I didn’t recognise, then I saw a man being interviewed as he walked along who was vaguely familiar. Could it be Nick Clegg? I walked backwards taking pictures, and he stopped as a French woman grabbed his arm and complimented him on his French accent, asking where he had learnt it. “At school” he told her and after a second or so moved on, by which time I had seen the French Ambassador behind him. The two came together and I took a few pictures as they walked along, not easy as there were people in the way and a horde of press photographers was just catching up with us. After a few yards I decided I’d got my pictures and gave up, leaving the others to chase after them.

I don’t much like working with the kind of press pack you get around celebrities at events such as this. I don’t like being barged and pushed when taking pictures, though at times I try and stand my ground. And I find the pictures that people get in such situations are seldom of much interest to me – if apparently loved by editors.

I decided it was worth trying to take some more interesting pictures to go with the few of Clegg and Syvie and made my way on into the crowd from where they had come, finding a few things I was happier with.

There was supposed to be a projection of the French flag on the National Gallery at 4pm, but they appeared to be having some technical problems, and after 20 minutes of waiting with just one projector apparently working with a test pattern on the wall I saw a 139 bus across the square and decided to get on it.

Back home I tried to get the pictures to Demotix. Their server kept dropping the connection. It wasn’t until after 9.30pm that I managed to get the 25 pictures uploaded. Then they held it up more making a stupid change to the headline…

You can see 25 pictures from the event on Demotix now (I’ve corrected the headline again) – and shortly with the story (which Demotix no longer publishes) on My London Diary.

Continue reading ‘Je suis Charlie’ London – Clegg et Sylvie

December 2014

December was a month when I took rather fewer pictures than most. In the first couple of weeks there were several work-related Christmas celebrations, some of which took me away from covering events, then the last ten days or so were spent mainly with my family. I seldom post pictures from these and other private events on-line, partly to respect the privacy of family and friends, but also because they are probably of little interest outside of those taking part.

We do however go on a number of walks together, mainly away from cities, and some of the landscape pictures may be of wider interest, and I’ve included pictures from several of these in My London Diary.

As always, the links give more information and a link to more pictures from the event.