DPAC at DWP over ILF

I was on my knees in the doorway – locked and guarded by security – of the Department of Work and Pensions, where protesters from disablement activists group DPAC had brought a letter for the Minister for Disabled People, Mike Penning.  There wasn’t a great deal of room, even though I was the only photographer in front of the protesters, and I was using the 16-35mm, so was very close to the guy holding the envelope. Even at the time I was wishing they had written his name rather more clearly on the envelope, though I’ve brought it out a little in post-processing.

The lighting was tricky, with a little bright sunlight leaking into the scene in various areas, but all the significant subject matter in shade. Those near-white buildings opposite were very bright – and have been brought down quite a bit in Lightroom, where I’ve also brought up the shadows considerably. As taken the envelope was reflecting quite a lot of light and looked rather lighter than a manilla envelope should. But Nikon’s pattern metering worked well, though I doubt if this picture would have worked if I had not been using RAW.

Although I was only working at f5.6 (1/125, ISO 640) at 17mm there was considerable depth of field and the figures in the foreground – with the slight exception of the moving tiger – are pin sharp. Those at the back and the background are a little soft, just enough to add a little depth to the image, and the slowish shutter speed adds just a slight blur to those moving, particularly one hand of the figure holding the poster ‘Stop Killing Us’.

I’ve not bothered to correct the slight barrel distortion at 17mm, because I think it actually – if fairly subliminally – improves the image. You can see it in the lines of the background building and I think it has a slight effect of keeping the eye drawn in to the centre.  It is actually more than you think – that tiger’s heel at bottom left just touches the edge of the frame after correction.

Of course I didn’t have time to think about everything when I was making the image – things were changing quite rapidly as usual, but I was certainly very conscious of the framing – and the images before and after this and its partner were both made at 16mm and from slightly different positions.  This was the sixth of three seven frames where I was concentrating on the letter (the next differs only in having the tiger stationary a foot or so to the right), and after it I moved to the left as I wanted a clearer view of the placard with the scissors and the message ‘ILF Cruelist Cut’. But this picture stood out.

The next frame was good too, and appealed to me because the tiger holds in his left hand a grey bag with my name, MARSHALL, clearly visible – making this a pre-signed image. But it seemed just a little static compared to the above. Perhaps I should get one of those bags and take it to all protests!

This was another picture I liked, and I had to look at the original RAW file to confirm that this was exactly how I framed it when making the picture. It’s another good example of why I like working close with the wide-angle – in this picture at 21mm. Here I had more time to work and took around 20 frames – this has the best framing and fortunately the best expression on the speaker’s face too. And it shows up those tattoos well.


When it became clear security would not let the protesters in to deliver the letter, Mary Glindon, the Labour MP for North Tyneside took it in for them

Of course I don’t always get what I want, but at this protest I made a number of images I was pleased with. Although it was quite crowded on the pavement – and wheelchairs take up quite a lot of space, there were not very many other photographers present – and those present cooperated with each other. The DPAC protesters are always nice people to work with and of course they have great reason to protest, with disabled people having suffered the most from the government’s cuts. You can read more about their protest  at Save Independent Living Fund where there are also quite a few more of my pictures from the event.

Continue reading DPAC at DWP over ILF

Bin British Gas

Back before the Thatcher era the idea of private companies making profits out of supplying gas seemed ridiculous. It was an industry with a single network of pipes across the country. Of course in the distant past we had over a thousand gas companies, each with its own area, some private and some municipal, all merged into the nationalised area ‘gas boards’ under Clement Atlee in the Gas Act 1948, and into the single British Gas in 1972.

It was an industry where nationalisation made sense, and I think delivered a better deal than the privatised British Gas created by the Thatcher government in 1986. For the next 10 years, domestic users had no choice of supplier, and it was only in 1998 that the market was fully open to competition.

It’s hard to see any real benefit for the consumer that privatisation has brought, and after recent price hikes few still believe there was any financial advantage – except to the shareholders of the privatised British Gas and other big energy companies and those who bought shares cheap and sold quickly at a large gain.

In the days of the gas boards things were simple. Anything to do with gas and you knew where to go. There was a ‘gas showroom’ in every town of any size where you could go and look at new gas appliances, and to pay your bill, and if you smelt a leak or needed maintenance or anything else, the board (and from 1972-86 British Gas) was the place to go. Things were simple and they worked pretty well.  Much the same was true of electricity, again nationalised by the Atlee government – by the 1947 Electricity Act, and privatised in 1990.

Most people would prefer a simple national system for energy in the UK again, with a YouGov poll in November 2013 showing over two thirds of people backing the energy companies being brought back into the public sector and only 21% saying they should be private. Even among Conservative party voters over half – 52% – thought they should be re-nationalised. It is a pretty clear indictment of the current system, so it is perhaps surprising that none of the major political parties seems to be even considering renationalisation. I think it says something about how our democracy works -or rather fails, protecting some private interests rather than the public good.

Few of us can be bothered to change our energy suppliers to get a better deal – and many who have done so have found themselves actually paying more with an incredible level of misleading selling. In the 18 years it has been possible to switch suppliers I’ve only done so twice; once to get the small benefit of a ‘dual fuel discount’ from buying gas and electricity from the same supplier, and more recently for ecological reasons to a green energy company, Ecotricity, which has no shareholders but uses all its profits to develop new renewable energy services. As a bonus, it also seems to be saving me a little money.

So I was very much in sympathy with the protesters outside the AGM of Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, a protest organised by Fuel Poverty Action, with their slogan ‘Bin British Gas’. You can read more about their aims and the protest, along with many more pictures in Bin British Gas on My London Diary.

Another picture taken with the same lens, the Nikon 16-35mm f4 from more or less exactly the same position, but at a slightly wider focal length has a big difference. The name of the conference centre is straight on the upper image (at 22mm) but rather definitely curved in the lower 16mm version.

There is more distortion at the wider focal length, but the real reason for the difference in these pictures is that I have used the lens profile in Lightroom to correct the 22mm version. I could have done so for the lower image but chose not to. I have changed my default setting for the profile in Lightroom to use 0% distortion correction, because for most subjects the distortion actually gives a slightly less distorted looking effect at the edges of the pictures, avoiding a little of the problems of rectilinear correction on extreme wide angles. It also gives a slightly wider field of view, with any correction of distortion always resulting in a little loss at the edges.

The distortion is only generally a problem with architectural subjects and other things with obvious straight lines – as in this case. But correcting it would have lost more than I was willing to lose of the hair of the woman at the left of the image.

Pensioners are among those hardest hit by high fuel prices – many now find themselves having to chose between keeping warm or eating. I took several pictures of one of them holding a hand-made placard. I think this was the best, though probably it would be improved by a little crop at top and right, but you can see another version on My London Diary. Obviously the face and placard were both important, but less obviously I think his hand gripping the placard adds to the picture. As (almost) always the images are un-posed.

I rather like the picture of a giant gas bill being torn up, though it proved a little difficult for them to tear. I was surrounded by other photographers when taking this and the other pictures and unable to move much, but I’d chosen a fairly good position – thinking in advance what was likely to happen and where and getting there before the others.

They did eventually tear it to pieces and then Terry who was right next to me threw them into the air. It was a picture with no second chances and I would have liked more of the pieces to have been the other way round – ideally to show the British Gas logo.  But you have to take what you can.

The finale of the protest was the planting of windmills made from folded gas bills in the grass in front of the centre. They had been planning to do so on Parliament Square in front of the House of Commons which might have made a better picture, though the ‘Heritage Wardens’ there would certainly have objected.  There were supposed to have been 100 of them, but quite a few didn’t get planted

Along with the other photographers present (and we did get in each other’s way a little) I had a few minutes to think about how to take this, and to try different ideas, with focal lengths from 16mm fisheye to 70-300mm telephoto. There are four different views at Bin British Gas but this is my favourite.

Continue reading Bin British Gas

Protest Photographers Arrested

Human Rights Watch report that “Authorities in Bahrain are arbitrarily detaining photographers who have covered protests and convicting them in unfair trials. Four award-winning Bahraini photographers are either in jail or facing criminal charges in what appears to be part of a policy that violates photographers’ right to freedom of expression.”

Today (22 June 2014) Hussain Hubail is appealing a five-year sentence for taking part in an ‘llegal gathering‘ and inciting hatred of the government for photographing a protest, and on June 25, Ahmed Humaidan appeals against a ten-year sentence. You can see some of his work on 500 pix. (I’ve just heard that Hubail’s appeal has been postponed until August 20th.)

Photographers say that they are targeted by police because their pictures show the reality that the Bahrain government wants to hide, and are subjected to mistreatment when arrested. Ahmed al-Fardan was arrested in the early hours of December 26, 2013 and his cameras, hard drives and flash drives taken. He was blindfolded, handcuffed a kept in a freezing cell for interrogations – and comes to trial on September 14th.

al-Farden like me submits work to Demotix, and it is distributed by Corbis. Among the events he has covered was a Demonstration in support of arrested photographers in Bahrain on 25 October 2013. An earlier group of pictures, Political Participation and Toxic Gas won him first prize in Freedom House’s 2013 Images of Repression and Freedom. You can see many of his pictures from protests on Demotix.

Although I’ve occasionally been pushed, hit and threatened by police covering protests in London, the situation is clearly very different here and usually at least our authorities are much more subtle. Photographers may sometimes be taken to court to get them to produce their pictures as evidence, and I have friends who have got settlements after being assaulted by police, but we simply don’t face the same problems here as in Bahrain.

Protesters here don’t get shot by police, though occasionally a criminal suspect or innocent person has been, as well as some people detained in police stations. We can all remember cases like that of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson who died after being assaulted by a police officer at a protest – or Alfie Meadows, very nearly killed and prosecuted for assaulting a a police officer, but these are exceptional.

The UK establishment mainly simply ignores protests. I’m writing this on the day after a protest on the streets of London by anywhere from 15-50,000 people. It started outside the BBC so they could not miss it, but they only reported it – in a short and vague fashion – after many, many protests to them by phone, e-mail and tweets. To get the story in any detail meant going to foreign-based news channels or left-leaning news sheets. Even Demotix, although it publishes the pictures, no longer publishes the stories that go with them.

Derbyshire & Sheffield

It was good to get away from London for a weekend, although it was a bit rushed and not entirely relaxing.  But I was able to spend a little time using the Fuji XE1 and both the 14mm and 18-55mm and 8mm Samyang lenses.

The 14mm was great for some group pictures (not included on My London Diary) at the conference weekend I was taking part in, and also a good lens for some landscape pictures. But I did have one problem with it. It’s largely a matter of getting familiar with the system and I haven’t yet used it enough to spot the things that are likely to go wrong.

The focus ring on the lens has a nice feature which switches from manual to autofocus by a short push towards or away from the camera body, which also hides and displays the distance scale. It works very well and needs just enough of a push that you are unlikely to change it accidentally. It’s also very clear in the viewfinder when you are using autofocus, with a green rectangle or cross (depending on whether you are using single or continuous autofocus) appearing, But I still managed to make quite a few exposures with the lens in the manual position while I thought I was using autofocus.  I’ve now set it to make a beep as well – something I really find annoying, but perhaps I need it.

It’s particularly annoying, because one of the things I really like about the Fuji-X cameras is how quiet they are compared to the Nikons. The other great thing is of course their light weight and small size.

On the Saturday afternoon we had a free couple of hours and left hoping to get to the top of Mam Tor, which was not a huge distance from the conference centre. I took the XE1, three lenses and several spare batteries, the camera on a strap around my neck, a lens in each of the large pockets on left and right of my waterproof and one on the camera, the plastic bag of batteries in an inside pocket. No need for a camera bag.

It was raining on and off, and it was no problem to tuck the XE1 inside my jacket to keep it dry, unlike the Nikon with the 16-35mm which is just a little bulky to fit comfortably. I could easily have fitted in a second Fuji body and lens too.

There were a few times when I would have liked something longer than the 18-55mm (27-83mm equivalent); the extra reach of the Nikon DX 18-105mm is really a big advantage. But it does weigh 35% more and takes a 67mm filter compared to 58mm for the Fuji – despite the Fuji being almost a stop faster. Optically I don’t think there is much to choose between the two; despite the Nikon being one of the cheapest Nikon lenses it is a better performer than many in their range, though the build quality is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that I’m now on my third example. The Fuji certainly seems better built and is more expensive when bought alone.

Even more expensive at around £750 is the new Fuji XF18-135mmF3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR which is roughly the same size as the Nikon, but looks pretty impressive – and is weather resistant with a claim that it offers the equivalent of 5 stops of image stabilization to partly make up for its rather low maximum aperture.

But for most purposes you can use a bit of ‘digital magnification’, cropping the 4896 x 3264 pixels (16.3 Mp) to say 3264 x 2176 – still 7Mp – and enough for most purposes. That makes the 55mm into a respectable 127mm telephoto. I think I’ll stick with the 18-55mm, though possibly getting a longer zoom for those few occasions where length is vital. Of course it’s actually the wider end that interests me more, and the Fuji 10-24mm f4 R OIS is a rather lighter alternative to the Nikon 16-35mm, so may well be my next lens purchase.

Unfortunately we ran out of time and had to turn back before the final climb to the top of Mam Tor, but at least is wasn’t because of exhaustion at carrying a heavy camera bag. But it does still take longer to take photographs on Fuji than on Nikon, and there were still some of those frustrating moments where the quickest way to bring the camera into life was to turn it off and then on again. If only Fuji could follow Nikon’s example, where the lightest touch on the release instantly brings the camera back into picture-making mode.


There is still some steel in Sheffield

I had a second chance to use the camera on the way home, where I was able to take a more leisurely walk around a little of central Sheffield as we had an hour to two to wait for a train. With a little more time to take care over what I (and the Fuji EX1) was doing there were no problems with the photographs.

More pictures from Derbyshire and Sheffield.

Continue reading Derbyshire & Sheffield

Adobe Upgrades

Today was I think a good day for photographers so far as Adobe products are concerned. I don’t know if the upgrade to Lightroom 5.5 really changes a great deal, but like most such upgrades, it does feel just a little snappier, which is no bad thing. And I’ve yet to try the updated Bridge and to do anything substantial with  Photoshop CC 2014, though I don’t think any of the enhancements that Julieanne Kost enthuses about will have any great impact on my work – or that of any other real photographer. If I want motion blur etc I’ll take photographs of things that are moving.

Perhaps the improved content-aware fill tool will help improve retouching my scans but most of the other things – like most Photoshop features – are ways to destroy the photographic nature and content of your images rather than tools to enhance. At least 90% of Photoshop should be irrelevant to photographers, but we use it because it does the 10% better than anything else, though it sometimes needs a little help from plugins.

It’s taken a bit of fiddling around to get my favourite plugins working with 64bit Photoshop CC and with Photoshop CC 2014. There are strict instructions to use the plugin providers install software rather than trying to install by hand, but this didn’t work for me for some. Fortunately finding the correct ‘64.8bf’ files and copying them to the plugins directory does work. But having four versions of Photoshop on my system is probably confusing. Perhaps I can cut it down to two now.

But the good news (or at least slightly good news) is that the $9.99 per month photographers package is now a standard one rather than a special offer (with VAT that’s £8.78 in the UK – or you can save 50p a year with a pre-paid annual sub.) It isn’t quite the same, with less cloud storage and no ‘Behance’ portfolio for new subscribers (I haven’t used either) but seems to me to be reasonable value, costing not very much more than the regular upgrades to Lightroom used to. And if, as most photographers seem to nowadays you buy new cameras fairly often, you do need to keep Lightroom up to date. I’d want to in any case, as so far each new full version upgrade – the ones I had to pay for – has added welcome improvements.

It would be even better value if I had an iPad and iPhone now that Lightroom works on these too, something I can see many photographers making use of, though you are only able to work on ‘smart previews’ rather than the actual files.

I’d rather that Adobe had not gone the CC route, but I can see why they have elected to do so. So many photographers I know use somewhat less than legal versions of their software. And I can see why they do as well, given the cost of the old standalone versions – it was really just too expensive for many photographers. Until the announcement yesterday I was a little worried that Adobe had not got the message and might ramp up the price again, but it looks as if they now realise the different market.

My Panoramic Adventures

For those who missed my speech at the opening of City Streets and River Paths, here is the complete text – less only the few words of introduction and thanks and with a few minor corrections and some stage directions and explanations.  None of the illustrations to this post are included in the show, except for the image on the cover of Thamesgate Panoramas.

My Adventures in Panoramic Photography

My adventures in panoramic photography began close to the River Thames, the subject of my pictures in this show. Aged 16 I piled into the back of a battered van with nine other senior sea scouts and we took off for a tour of Scotland. On Skye, four of us were sent to walk across the Cuillins; in exact opposition to Baden Powell’s motto ‘Be Prepared’ we had little suitable equipment and only the sketchiest of maps.

We waded through bogs and streams, up hills and valleys, got soaked by torrential rain and exhausted.  We had a long detour as our expected crossing point of a major river was under feet of flood water, but finally on the second day when the sun had come out I climbed a ridge and saw in front of me a magnificent wide vista, across some lower peaks and down into a hidden valley were the sun was glinting on a lake.

I reached for my camera – there were still a few pictures remaining on the roll of 20 I’d bought for the fortnight holiday – raised it to my eye and immediately was hit by a deep frustration. The scene was this wide but the picture could only show this. (You will have to imagine my wide flung arms narrowing to a ‘standard’ lens view.)

The next day, coming down what are perhaps Britain’s most impressive mountains to our rendezvous I had another unforgettable panoramic experience. Losing my footing I found myself taking a vertical route through the air, the splendid view whirling upside-down for a second or two – and then – oblivion! (My right fist slammed into my left palm. In the event I came round to the anxious face of one of my companions who had climbed down more slowly to the small patch of grass on which I had landed, the large rucksack on my back cushioning the fall – but on the opening night I left my cliff hanging.)

The history of panoramic photography is virtually as old as photography itself; in the Daguerreotype era two approaches emerged that are still with us. The first was simply to take several pictures and display them side by side, and the second – patented in Austria in 1843 – involved some ingenious clockwork rotating a lens to scan the image onto a curved plate behind.

Around 20 years later I made my first successful panorama by the first method, once again close to the Thames, on Bow Creek – the final few tidal miles of the River Lea, where the river turns through around 360 degrees in the first of two great bends – squeezing through a gap in fencing on Orchard Place and taking a careful series of five overlapping images as I rotated the camera on the tripod. Back home I printed these, trimmed them carefully and mounted them in a line. They almost fitted together (and the sixth on the right or the set I had to discard.)


Years later I combined them digitally with this result for an article on making panoramas

Ten years later still I read the book on Panoramic Photography, with its rules on making panoramas most of which I still regularly break today, but it did inspire me to save for a Japanese clockwork swing lens camera.  Soon after I bought it I went back to Bow Creek, now a building site, and left sunny central London to find the area covered in dense fog. I could hardly see the viaduct of the Dockland Light Railway being constructed that I’d come to photograph.

Shivering with cold I almost went home without taking a picture, but I’d made a long journey so thought I’d take one or two. You can see a little more in the pictures than I remember and one of them became one of my best-known pictures – and the first of mine to somehow mysteriously enter the Museum of London collection.


Docklands Light Railway crosses the River Lea, 1992

My earlier pictures on the wall from around 2000 came partly as a result of the breakup of the Russian Empire. This and the digital revolution that created the World Wide Web enabled me to order a Russian-made miniature swing-lens camera through the Ukrainian black market. It arrived as a ‘gift’ in plain brown-paper wrapping for £170 – probably the only camera I’ve ever bought that I’ve dared to tell my wife how much it cost.

Its big advantage was that – unlike the expensive Japanese model which made do with two arrows marked on its top to define its view – it had a viewfinder. During exposure the lens swings round through around a third of a circle, recording a roughly 120 degree view onto normal 35mm film, though the frames are the same width as a medium format camera.  Some of the pictures from the show are in this book

(At this point in my speech I should have held up Thamesgate Panoramas, but realised I’d left it in my bag on the other side of the room. But I did go and get the next exhibit below.)

Digital photography now means everyone has a camera or phone that can take panoramas, though for seamless high quality results you still need to take a series of images and stitch them together with specialised software. With Mireille Galinou’s help I was able to gain entry to a number of gardens behind those high private walls of St John’s Wood and make a series of images for this book and a show at the arts café she then ran. The image on the back of the book (and now 36 inches wide on my stairs) was produced from around a dozen separate exposures, which between them contained one full dog and around half a dozen dog parts as the animal rushed around the garden.

Since then I’ve been working on a method of making high quality digital panoramas with a single digital exposure, and the second half dozen of my images, from the Thames path in Battersea and Wandsworth were produced in this way.

Of course, in the end the techniques are just a means to an end, and it is the pictures that matter. I hope you enjoy them – and thanks for coming.

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I wrote a little about the methods I was trying to make digital panoramas in January’s post New Panoramas, which included the above image. Unfortunately I got the maths slightly wrong and failed to display it correctly in the post. Here is how it should have looked (and it now does, as I’ve just corrected the original.)

The recent images in the current show are all roughly 42 x 22 cm, giving them an aspect ratio of 1.9 which I’m now using as a standard. It would have been good to print them larger – and at 300 dpi they would print around 75cm wide and would still look good larger still. But the costs of printing and framing dictated a smaller size for this show. Perhaps in the future I’ll be able to show more images and larger images, but for the moment you can see more more or less as I make them in various posts on My London Diary.

Continue reading My Panoramic Adventures

Singing about Vanessa

Great to see a fine article by Sean O’Hagan, Vanessa Winship: the great, unsung chronicler of the world’s outsiders in The Guardian.  I’ve been telling people for quite a while about her photography  – back in 2008 I wrote in a piece about not going to Arles that – judging from the previews,

the outstanding pictures were by Vanessa Winship, whose work has deservedly done well in several competitions in recent years (and her ‘Albanian Landscapes‘ was screened at Arles in 2003)

and not long after, looking at a photo diary about the festival I also noted that so far “only Vanessa Winship’s exhibition seems worth more than a cursory glance.”

There are quite a few more mentions of her over the years on this site, particularly Sweet Nothings – Vanessa Winship (2009) and (2013) which are perhaps still worth reading. This piece seems to be the 14th time I’ve written about her here and I think I had mentioned her when I wrote elsewhere. Also worth reading is Michael Grieve’s review of ‘she dances on Jackson’ in 1000 Words, which I also linked to in an earlier post.

So I can only echo the sentiment under the headline of O’Hagan’s Guardian blog:

“From Mississippi to the Black Sea, Winship’s poetic, masterful photographs show how hard it is for people to belong … so why don’t British galleries acknowledge her as this large Madrid retrospective does? She deserves it”

Though I’m afraid the explanation is unfortunately rather simple. She is a real photographer, and there is no major British gallery with a real interest in photography.

Opening Night

Last night’s opening of ‘City Streets and River Paths‘ went well, and I didn’t get much time to take photographs, though there were quite a few others doing so, with a number of great photographers and artists present.  The picture above of Hilary Rosen speaking at the show was made while I was waiting to make my own speech, and perhaps isn’t one of my best efforts, and only shows the fringe of the audience listening to her.

I went a quarter of an hour before the opening began, meaning to take some installation pictures, but hadn’t quite finished the job when I was interrupted by people arriving. But they do give a reasonable impression of the hanging, though not really showing the space.

The Street Gallery is a very wide corridor along the street front of University College Hospital at pavement level, its north-facing front being almost entirely glass. The whole length is visible from the street, though you would need binoculars to get a good view of the pictures.  During most of the day it is a busy corridor, with people going along it to a canteen, the hospital pharmacy and other areas from the reception area, but it is wide enough for people to stop and look at the work on the wall without creating an obstruction. It really is a nice area for an exhibition, and I think the work looks good on the wall.

The gallery area is three separate lengths of wall, which I’ve shown in the 3 installation views. We could have chosen to hang our work separately, but tried to mix it together in a way that emphasized some of the commonalities between our work while preserving our identities  with clear blocks of work – so my 12 images are in two groups of three and one of six pictures.

At the opening, after an introduction by Guy Noble of UCLH Arts and Heritage, Hilary talked mainly about how we had come to collaborate together, which was followed by a rather longer speech by me on “my adventures with panoramas” – which will in new course appear, with some illustrations, as a post here.  I’d written it in my head lying awake in the early hours of the day, but as so often had forgotten some of the more striking phrases by the time I scribbled it down after breakfast. I should really have jumped out of bed and written it down in the middle of the night. It was mainly stories of some of the things that have happened to me, but did have a little about the history and different ways of working to create panoramas, including the impact of the digital revolution.

It was great to meet again so many old friends –  including several I’d not seen for a few years – and to meet a few new people. One of the advantages of showing with another artist for both of you is that you each attract your own group of friends and contacts. Of course many of those invited were unable to come – with quite a few out of the country as well as those with prior engagements, who sent messages promising to come and see the show at a later date. They have plenty of time, as the show doesn’t close until 30 July and is open at all hours.

Panoramas & Excalibur

First, a final reminder that if you are in London tonight, Monday 16 June, you are welcome to come to the opening of my show with Hilary Rosen at the gallery in University College Hospital (details here.)

The show continues until the 30th July and I have two sets of six pictures, all panoramas. The first set were mainly made when I was working with two panoramic film cameras, the Hasselblad XPan and a considerably cheaper Russian Horizon 202.

The Hasselblad (actually a Fuji camera) received rave reviews, but at first I’d been a little disappointed. It came with a 45mm lens, which really didn’t give a very wide view. What really transformed it for me (though at high cost) was the 30mm, which with an angle of view of around 94 degrees stretched rectilinear perspective to its limits.  Vignetting was absurd, and the already slow F5.6 lens needed always to be used with a centre spot filter, reducing the exposure in the middle of the frame, making the light transmission more like an f10 or fll lens. But as with most Fuji lenses it was superb, and the lens the widest rectilinear lens available for any ‘medium format’ camera – which the XPan essentially was despite using 35mm film, with its 24 x 65mm frame.

But although that kit probably cost something approaching 20 times as much as the Horizon 202 (by then I was onto my second one of these, I think £170 sent in a plain brown-paper parcel from a private address in the Ukraine)  I think most of my best pictures were taken with this clockwork Russian swing-lens model.

It wasn’t just the wider angle of view – around 120 degrees – but the different perspective with the lens rotating about its centre to produce the image on film with the same centre of curvature (so keeping a constant lens centre to film distance and zero vignetting) that made it more interesting and more demanding to use. Stopped down to f5.6 or f8 the quality was similar to that of the Hasselblad too, and the negatives were quite similar in size. All except one of the six earlier pictures in the show was I think taken with the Horizon – and that sixth was made with a Nikon.


Not from the show, but a recent digital panorama from the Excalibur Estate in Catford

It’s taken me some time to really work out how best to work with a DSLR to make panoramic images. I did one project I like using Pt Gui and stitching multiple negatives. Its fine, but time-consuming and tricky with moving subjects, and needs fairly precise rotation around the nodal point if there are any really close objects in the scene – which is why many panoramas avoid any foreground. Images from a high viewpoint make life easy. But seldom makes for pictures that interest me.


Two road that meet at roughly a right angle. Excalibur Estate, Catford, 2014

The pictures from the Excalibur Estate in Catford that illustrate this post are my latest effort at producing digital panoramas. They have a horizontal angle of view of around 145 degrees and an aspect ration of 1.9:1, and almost all of them have plenty of foreground. None of these images have any moving objects in them, but that would cause no problem. And yes, I used PT Gui to make them.


Close objects are no problem. Excalibur Estate, Catford, 2014

I’m still working on the details – the images in the UCH show were made in a different way, and I keep having different ideas about how best to work, so it would perhaps be premature to give the details of how these were made, though it shouldn’t be difficult for anyone with a particular interest to work it out.


The Prefab Museum. Excalibur Estate, Catford, 2014

One of the empty pre-fabs on the Excalibur Estate has been transformed into a Prefab Museum, now open to the general public only on Saturdays (11am-5pm) and closing at the end of September. More details about this as well as a full set of 64 pictures from the historic estate, already part-demolished and most of the rest due to follow soon in Excalibur Estate on My London Diary

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Prison Visit

Technically Harmondsworth Immigration Detention Centre isn’t a prison, but people are still locked up there, some for many months on a stretch, though under different conditions to prison. They are locked up without trial and often get little recourse to justice. ‘Fast Track’ procedures were introduced because asylum seekers were making use of our justice system to appeal when refused asylum, and the Home Office decided that it would be better to deny them the chance to put their cases properly and whenever possible to get rid of them without proper consideration.

Handing the running of these immigration prisons to private companies has resulted in various corners being cut to increase profits. Conditions inside them have been strongly criticised by various reports, and led to hunger strikes. People are treated in a way that simply should not happen in any civilised society. We should all as a nation be ashamed of what happens inside them.

When I walked on to the site there were few protesters around and I and a couple of other photographers wandered up the drive to photograph the outside of the buildings. Workers coming out of the Colnbrook Detention Centre called out to one of the photographers, telling him that photography was not allowed there. They would like us to know nothing about these places or what goes in in them.

When the protest actually started, there were no problems with taking pictures, and the police had come to ask the protesters what they intended to do. The officer failed to get much of an answer, as nobody was in charge, but he told them that so long as they behaved sensibly the police would give them no problems.

Three police officers followed the protesters onto the road through the centre of the site –  with Harmondsworth Detention Centre on the left and Colnbrook on the right. It is a private road, though the barrier on it was raised and we walked past it. It leads at the end to a site belonging to BT, and the whole area was until 1966 the home of the Road Research Laboratory which I visited while in the sixth form.

The officers – and the two men in Serco jackets who joined them – kept their distance and watched the protesters, but didn’t interfere with the protest, even when there was a complaint that it was disturbing the airport security dogs in their kennels just to the north of the prison.  Last time I photographed a protest here, in November 2012,  when the protesters kept drumming on the tall prison fence they were told that they would be arrested if they continued, and then issued a warning that they were committing an aggravated trespass and would be arrested if they returned to the site within 3 months, but today the police just stood and watched.

Most of the drumming today came from a drum, and I didn’t see anyone kicking the fence, though it was attacked rather firmly by a frying pan, though even more effective was thumping it with palms, which made the whole structure resonate.

Those inside the prison responded to the protest, waving out of the windows. Phone calls to and from some of those inside told the protesters how pleased the inmates were to know that some people at least in the UK cared what was happening to them.

Few of the windows are visible except through a tall – roughly 12 ft  – fence, with fairly narrow gaps between the parallel wires that run along it. Auto-focus has no problems with focussing on the wire, but it is almost impossible to get it to auto-focus on the windows some distance behind.  I was using the 70-300mm at or close to the longer end on either the D700 or the D800E, and the images are cropped down, and depth of field was minimal.

Auto-focus is great, but one of the small problems with cameras that rely on it is that manual focus becomes rather more tricky. Focussing screens just aren’t made to work as well as they did when we relied on manual focus. But manual was the only way to get the hands at the window anything like sharp. I don’t think they clean the windows, and inside them I think there is also a rather dirty and sometimes scratched plastic pane. So people and hands were hard to see. But they certainly wanted to be seen.

I couldn’t really tell on the camera read screen if there was anything sharp on these frames. The raw files opened in Lightroom gave flat and rather indistinct images, and there were problems too with colour balance, as well as with the whole image being seen between those well out of focus wires.  Considerable post-processing was needed to get anything as distinct as you see here, and the horizontal wires and thicker vertical supports are still clearly visible over most of the image. What is rather surprising is the clarity of the designs on the shirts of two of the three men in the picture, although their hands and faces are still impressionistic.

On the west side of the prison, the car park stretches some way back, to a low bank covered with trees. Standing a little up this gave a clear view over the top of the fence of the top of the top floor windows. Reflections of the sky in the glass still made the  view far from clear, and quite a bit of post-processing, using the adjustment brush with various settings on different areas was needed.

You probably aren’t allowed to photograph here, but I’m sure there is an overriding public interest in making what is happening at places like this known.
Continue reading Prison Visit