Women March

It was certainly an event where I occasionally felt I was the odd man out, though there were not a million women on the Million Women Rise March, but it was a women-only event. Or at least almost so, as later as it went along Oxford St I did spot one very bearded young man among the marchers. But a the stewards did make it very clear to a small mixed group wanting to join the march in support of mothers in Syria that they were not welcome.

It’s an event I’ve photographed annually since it started a few years ago, and even supplied a few pictures in the past at the organiser’s request for use on their web site. Most of the women were pleased to have their pictures taken (and some fairly insistent that I do so), and generally my presence before the march started was welcome, though I was pounced on at one point by a woman (not someone I was photographing) who objected to me taking pictures.

If women feel they want to march in an all-women march it isn’t a problem so far as I’m concerned (not that my opinion matters, only that if it was I probably wouldn’t bother to cover the event.) But the slogan on their banner and placards is ‘Together We Can End Male Violence Against Women’ and I think it will take both men and women together to really tackle it (and for that matter other personal and domestic violence.)

Photographically the main problem was in lighting contrast; it was a bright clear day and there were areas of bright sun and others of deep shadow. Working in the shadows  wasn’t a problem, but in the sun things were a little harder, and I should have used fill flash on some of the images, but I think I was just feeling too lazy.  So there was quite a lot of post-processing needed to burn down sunlit areas and bring up shadows in some images. But at least with digital you can rescue these things, and work far better in situations with both sun and shade than was possible on film.

I left the march as it made its way along Oxford St to rush off to another event in the north of London.  More about it and many more pictures at Million Women Rise March.
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Legals Protest

It was perhaps appropriately a rather grey day when lawyers came to Old Palace Yard opposite Parliament to show their outrage at the response by Justice Minister Chris Grayling to his Transforming Legal Aid consultation on criminal legal aid.  They describe it as ‘A shameful day in legal history’ and it was hard to pick a fault in their case, though it was perhaps naive to expect anything positive to emerge from any ‘consultation’.  Governments have never been strong on consultation, and for present ministers they are certainly just an opportunity for people to talk to deaf ears before they do exactly what they had previously decided.

They are almost completely discredited exercises by a government that prefers its own dogmatic and largely unthinking solutions. The only kind of logic behind its proposals appears to be that people who get brought to court are criminals and we shouldn’t waste much public money giving them a proper defence.

Lawyers as a whole are generally rather unexciting visually, and looking at the crowd as a whole it seemed a dark mass. There was something a little surreal seeing barristers and solicitors many in legal dress of black gown and horsehair wig holding up placards and shouting slogans in a political protest on what was their first every full day’s strike.

Legal dress is worn far less now in courts, and for some of those attending it was a fairly rare outing for their ridiculously expensive horse-hair.

Our legal system is ridiculously expensive, and in need of extensive reform to make better use of the time of everyone concerned. There are occasional abuses of legal aid, with some taking advantage of it who should not be and others who need it not being eligible. But while some reforms are needed, the government proposals seem simply to be about saving money at the expense of those on trial, making them far less likely to get justice.

Certainly the most impressive and powerful speech at the event came from a man who had been wrongfully convicted for an offence he did not convict. Better legal aid at his initial trail might have made the initial miscarriage of justice and the life sentence less likely, but it was legal aid that enabled Paddy Hill and the others of the Birmingham Six to eventually get justice. Had Grayling’s proposal already been in force they would still be in jail for a bombing they did not commit.

It was an electric and rabble-rousing call for revolution, if in the situation only theatrical. By contrast most of the other speeches seemed a little dull and pedestrian. Hill too was more interesting to photograph, with a strong face and a full range of expressions, while some of the lawyers were about as interesting as a blancmange. There were exceptions – including most if not all of the women who spoke, but by the end of the speeches (I think around two hours of them) I’d had enough.

The speakers were on a scaffolding platform, standing with their feet around head height with the main event banner in front of them. Some stood a little back and were too much obscured by the banner. Mostly for the speakers I was using the 70-300mm Nikon on the D800E. It’s a full-frame lens and I didn’t think to set the camera to use it in DX mode, so they are 32Mb files, much larger than I need. At ISO800 most a typical exposure was 1/400 f10, and I was working at focal lengths from around 100 to 300mm. The lens isn’t at its best above around 200mm and it would probably have been better to use it in DX mode for these tighter views.

A big problem when photographing speakers at events is the microphone. Different speakers use them in different ways, some staying very close, others standing back more – almost always better for the photographer.

At many events there is a crowd of photographers that make it hard to change position, particularly when celebrities are speaking. Here there were no real celebrities, and there was quite a lot of relatively empty space in front of the platform so I was able to move around and pick my angles. I live to work from one or other side, at least so the speaker’s mouth is not obscured (though that’s hard with the mike-huggers.) Here I was able to move closer or further away, with one of two images from quite a close position looking up as well as those with a long lens from a distance.

Changing position also varies the background, with some pictures against almost entirely empty sky, and others with parts of the Houses of Parliament visible – with different degrees of blur.

The came the march to the Ministry of Justice, via the Liberal Party HQ, where Paddy Hill led those going into the offices with their letters – and I’d taken up position to photograph him doing so, and a minute or so later photographed him inside after letting some of the others follow him.

When a small group went inside the Ministry of Justice led again by Hill carrying a scroll to present for the minister I was with them, and walked past the rather surprised-looking security guards to photograph the scroll being presented to an official. When I saw him rolling it after looking at it with its back towards me, I asked him if he could show it to us too, and he did. I think it made a better picture. I don’t really think it counts as setting it up.

As we turned away to leave the ministry, more protesters and photographers pushed in, and things got a little more interesting, though everyone eventually left after the security had requested us to do so.

Story and pictures: Outraged Lawyers Legal Aid Protest

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NOT For Sale

London is not for sale was the first protest I’d attended organised by the Radical Housing Network, and London certainly needs some radical new thinking on housing, or at least a complete change in the direction so far as housing policy is concerned. The way to solve its housing problem is actually pretty simple to state, and, given a complete change in the mind of government would not be impossible to acheive. Build more social housing and make it available at sensible rents – rather less than the currently largely unaffordable ‘affordable’ rents.

Unfortunately such a change in mind seems unlikely. About as likely as the Green Party coming to power. Both major parties want to sell off London, whether it is the national parties at Westminster or the local parties in boroughs such as Southwark and Newham. The protest took place a few days before London Mayor Boris Johnson was to fly off to the MILIM world property market festival in Cannes, France to try and sell off more London property to foreign investors and make our housing situation worse. There’s money in it.

The Radical Housing Network was also launching its two case studies, one of which particularly interested me as it was on one of London’s great scandals that I’ve previously written about, the “murky tale of developer Lend Lease’s relationship with Southwark, which gave birth to one of the most appalling instances of community displacement, coupled with financial mismanagement and barefaced lies.”  The other, about the South Kilburn estate

in Brent linked to another housing story I’ve covered, that of the Counihan family, now fortunately resettled a little further from the centre of London.

Photographically the main problem was that I’d forgotten to pack a helicopter. Difficult to get one into my camera bag, though I suppose a drone might be possible. As you may be able to guess from the image above, one of the organisers is trying to set out the modified estate agent signs on the paving outside City Hall in the shape of a house -or rather in it’s frontal elevation. So it would look like a picture of a house drawn rather badly by a child if seen from directly above – and so my need for a helicopter.

This was about the best I could manage – and you can see that as well as a rather tall door it has 3 windows and a chimney. This was taken with the 16mm fisheye held as high as I could reach – I didn’t have my monopod with me which would have given just a little more height.  It wasn’t easy to get this, mainly because every time the house was clear of people another photographer – either amateur or professional – would walk on top of it.

The sun was inside the frame at top left when I took the picture and so there was chance of using a lens hood or a hand as a flag. I had to add some exposure to stop the image being underexposed. Using the Fisheye-Hemi plug-in has moved the sun just over the edge, but that area still needed quite a bit of burning in. It’s surprising – that the image was still virtually flare-free (I think I have done a tiny bit of retouching) but there were some annoying surface reflections from the boards at the right of the picture which I’ve attended to a little. I’ve also cropped the image a little to tidy it up.

I tried using Photoshop’s Adaptive Wide-Angle filter (I’d just upgraded to Photoshop CC from Photoshop 7) and the results were interesting but I couldn’t  get anything better. You can twist your image in all sorts of ways, but it’s very easy to make a mess of things by trying to correct too much. The image above ws the best I could manage without obvious faults. By forcing the bottom edge to a straight line it gives a better idea of the ‘house’. I’ve made the image as large as possible, resulting in it being a little wider than the normal 1.5:1 format.

It would have been better to stand further back, but clearing enough people and photographers to do so and make it possible to get everything in frame with the 16-35mm just wasn’t possible.

I found another problem when updating My London Diary, which is that somehow I’ve managed to alter either the way I export files from Lightroom or how Explorer sorts them so that they no longer sort in correct order in Explorer. Usually I put images on the web site in more or less the order I took them, but somehow it didn’t happen for this story.

London is not for sale

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Time Change

For once I’ve remembered to change the clock on the four digital cameras – two Nikons and two Fujis – that I use regularly before taking pictures with them. Most years after we have either put the clocks on or back it has been a month or so before I’ve got all of them sorted out, which has occasionally given some odd results, particularly when I seem to have taken things before they happened.

I had to make another time change around a week ago, as the clocks on the two Nikons – D700 and D800E – don’t keep good time. Both had gone a minute or two out, though not by the same amount, which was beginning to get annoying when editing work taken when using both of them.  It’s useful when you use ‘Sort by date’ in Lightroom to have the times more or less the same.

Back in the old days, we didn’t have to worry about such things. Cameras didn’t even have batteries let alone clocks. And when cameras did start having batteries, all they powered were exposure meters. Then you had to remember to change these at least on an annual basis – I used to make my birthday a day to do this. Then came cameras that had auto-focus and power wind and you needed to pack spare batteries in your camera bag, though they were small and took up little space. Now with the Fujis you need to change the batteries every hour or two.

The Nikons are rather better, and I can only remember having to change a battery while out taking pictures once in the past year. When I get home I look at the battery level and if it is below 80% it gets recharged. With the third party batteries (cheap replacements) if I’ve not taken much they can still be at 100%, as they have higher capacity than the genuine Nikon ones.

Batteries are one thing that puts me off changing entirely to Fuji-X. Not just their low capacity but also the lack of a proper battery level indicator. A warning when at best you have one or two exposures remaining isn’t enough.

Of course it is useful to have cameras that know the time, at least when you have it set correctly. Once after I’d had to do a complete reset of a camera I got the year wrong, which rather upset the  agency I sent the pictures to who rejected the work. Fortunately Lightroom or other software can change the date.

But looking back at some old work on film, particularly on colour transparency, it can be hard to know which year it was taken, let alone which month, day or hour. Some transparencies are in mounts with a date stamp showing when they were processed, but many are not.

With colour neg or black and white I’ve usually put at least a year and month on the negative filing sheets – indeed it is the basis of my filing system. Occasionally I’ve added a date and a place, either there or more often on the contact prints. Where I thought it appropriate I’ve added more details, sometimes including street names and grid references, but geotagging would have saved me many hours of work and probably have been more reliable.

Ash Wednesday

After Pancake Day follows Ash Wednesday,  the first day of Lent, 40 days of penance, repentance, reflection and fasting in the Church calendar leading up to Easter, 46 days later (Sundays don’t count.)  The 40 days reflected the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness being tempted by the devil, according to the Gospels.

Every year since 1982, Christian peace organisations including Pax Christi, Christian CND and London Catholic Worker have observed the day with an act of prayer and witness at the Ministry of Defence in London, calling on them to repent from their deployment of weapons of mass destruction, and making use of the traditional symbols of sackcloth and ashes, though this year I think there was no sackcloth, though there were ribbons, being tied to a cross “in memory of a place/people in need of peace“.

Photographing a religious event taking place in public like this I feel requires a certain reverence of approach, which sometimes makes it difficult to get exactly what you want. I think you have to be non-intrusive so far as the actual worship is concerned (not that photographers should get in the way at other events,) As a documentary photographer I try to alter things as little as possible, although of course there is always some interaction and our presence always makes some difference. But my heart always sinks when other photographers start arranging people and setting up pictures and getting in the way of an event.

There are occasions when this may be appropriate. Press calls are events set up just to be photographed, although even at these I’d prefer to see how those taking part want to organise themselves rather than how photographers would like to take pictures. I can see why photographers do this, and much of the blame is down to picture editors who seem to have a peculiar attraction to the clichéd boring group shots that are too often the result.

Occasionally during an event – though more often before or after – it may be appropriate to take portraits of some of those involved, directing them for your camera, but to try and do so during an event I think is disruptive to the event and those taking part and rude to other photographers.  The streets are not a personal studio.

It is sometimes a thin line between what is acceptable and what is not, but one which at events like this it is important to try and draw. A few years ago, photographing this same event, I perhaps stepped over it, and received a complaint from one of the organisers. Since then perhaps I’ve been a little more careful – or perhaps they have become more used to me.

As I walked down the street after the service had finished with a couple of those who had taken part, they asked me about another photographer, complaining strongly about her getting in the way.  I didn’t say much to them, but I was pleased when they also commented that I had been almost completely unobtrusive.  It’s how I think it should be, and makes it easier for me – and other photographers – to work with these people another year.

Fortunately for much of the event I had been the only photographer present, and was able to sit on the ground in the middle of things when the word ‘REPENT’ was traced out first in water, and then in ashes on the pavement in front of the Ministry of Defence.  It isn’t easy to photograph, and I was glad of the 8mm fisheye to give me a very wide view (later converted to cylindrical perspective), as well as using the wide end of the 16-35mm.

As a part of their witness, a number of those taking part try to mark the Ministry of Defence and War Office in charcoal with crosses and messages against war, and police are stationed all around both buildings to try and prevent this. It is a long perimeter, and people try from early in the day to well after the end of the service, making it hard for the police and for the photographer to catch them at it.

Even when an attempt was most predictable, when the roughly 100 people present were lined up at roughly arm’s length all along the long low fence between the ministry and the gardens, it was hard to know which of them would jump over to try and make a mark as they ended saying the Lord’s Prayer together. I was some distance away when I saw one man jump over, and the police had caught him short of the wall by the time I was close enough to take pictures, but seconds later I was in the right place as he managed to pull away from the officer holding him and make a cross before the police again overpowered him. Fr Martin Newell was released a few minutes later, but ten days later was sentenced at Westminster Magistrates Court for refusing to pay fines of £565 imposed for a number of similar acts of witness.

Later I saw another man being put into a police van, after having managed to write ‘REPENT’ inside the doorway of the War Ministry.  I couldn’t see the whole word from the street, and was told by a police officer that I couldn’t take photographs as it was a “restricted place.”

It seems fairly clear that even if the old War Office is a prohibited place (and it seems unlikely as it is no longer owned by the government thanks to a PFI leasing scheme) this does not ban photography by the public for non-espionage purposes.  Tourists in their droves photograph this and the Ministry of Defence building on a daily basis. But certainly the police were rather upset at having been caught napping, and were probably expecting to get a ticking off later.

But I’d taken my picture already, and wasn’t going to bother to stop and argue the point.

More pictures from the event at Ash Wednesday Act of Resistance

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Come to the Party

31 Contemporary Photographers

I’ve often mentioned LensCulture here; it now styles itself as a ‘Global photography network and online magazine celebrating current trends of contemporary photography in art, media, politics, commerce and popular cultures worldwide’ though I still think of it mainly as one of the best on-line photography magazines. But its Editor & Publisher Jim Casper clearly thinks in a larger context, and it has organised portfolio reviews and and has a very wide range of photographer’s portfolios on the site – including a few of my May Queen pictures.

And rather to my surprise I find that the new Lensculture exhibition which is coming to London is the 5th annual LensCulture Exposure Awards show. You can see work by the Award winners and finalists in 31 Contemporary Photographers at the London College of Communication, Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SB from April 1 – April 5, 2014, 10 am – 5 pm.

The work on show was from thousands of submissions by photographers from 62 countries and was selected by a nine-person international jury. Between them the six winners and 25 finalists represent 20 countries. Photography is indeed an international medium.

Jim also asks me to share the invitation to the Opening Party for the show on Thursday 3 April, 2014 from 6 pm – 9 pm with all of you. I hope to see some of you there.

Gang of Two – Only In England

Around 45 years ago, two young men, both with a mission about photography bumped into each other in the offices of the British Journal of Photography and got talking. Despite their very different backgrounds they recognised each other as kindred spirits and became good friends.

One was the son of a respected English artist, who died only months after his birth, leaving his mother to bring up a family on a very restricted income; aided by support from various bodies including the Artists Orphans Fund she was able to send him to one of England’s oddest and most antiquated minor public schools, from where he went on to study to be a graphic designer. The other came from a large Irish Catholic family in the Bronx, where public schools were something rather different.

But both had studied at separate times with the same man, Alexey Brodovitch, a legendary graphic designer and art director, and had experienced the vibrant photographic culture in New York in the early 1960s where they found both had many common friends. Both too had very little regard for the small clique that made up the British photographic establishment of those times, and then and later both made themselves unpopular by saying what they thought about them and their limited perspective on the medium. There is a considerable contrast between what some well-known names now say about Tony Ray-Jones and their relationship with him compared with their views expressed at least in private while he was still alive.  John Benton-Harris continues to challenge with his widely-informed and forthright opinions on the medium.

The two men photographed together very occasionally, with most of Ray-Jones’s pictures being made outside London and most of Benton-Harris’s in and around the capital – John says they agreed to split the photographic country between them along these lines. But they worked together in other ways, educating the editors of Creative Camera and introducing them to many of the American photographers whose work they published, and John printed much of Tony’s work, both before and after his death. The show did contain at least 5 prints he had previously owned for many years, and probably other prints in the first section were among those he had printed for Tony Ray-Jones; certainly the majority were from negatives from which he has printed.

So I was very interested to hear John’s opinion on the show ‘Only in England‘ which featured both work that was printed by (or probably mainly for) Ray-Jones during his lifetime and also new prints made from work that the photographer had rejected as not being good enough.  After its showing at the new Media Space in London’s Science Museum, this opens today (March 28) at the National Media Museum in Bradford and continues until 29 June 2014.

After I’d written my own review of the show (and earlier I’d posted a short note based on the promotional video),  I had some lengthy conversations with John, and was pleased to hear that he was busy writing his own review. Since then I’ve asked him quite a few times how he was getting on with it and finally yesterday he was satisfied that it was complete and ready to be seen.

Finally, with a little computer assistance from me, the review is now up on John’s blog with a couple of pictures, at last completed to his satisfaction.  It is a long piece with the title ‘Only Baloney‘, a title which relates to one of Ray-Jones’s favourite phrases (I think borrowed from Brodovitch), as John mentions in his piece:

‘Instead we were given a lot of phoney baloney (Tony’s polite way of saying bullshit) about how a friendship that never was, and a methodology that has nothing to do with Tony’s way of approaching and commentating on existence by a photographer who claims so much respect and appreciation for Tony and his seeing, yet deliberately ignores the information and other evidence he left us and that is also clearly present in Tony’s prints.’

The review reads very much in John’s own voice and expresses his views about both the show and some of the aspects of the rewriting of photographic history it represents. John did give me permission to put the whole of his review on this site, and I may do so later, but for the moment you can read it on his The Photo Pundit blog.

I was pleased to find that his view is largely similar to what I had previously written about the show, though his close knowledge of both the man and his work gives his view a much greater weight. There is quite simply no one who can speak about Tony Ray-Jones and his photography with greater personal knowledge and authority, although many still seem to want to ignore his views.

And, also on John’s blog there is a great bonus. On March 7, artist Edward Mackenzie, another English former Brodovitch student (he recently moved back to this country and set up his studio in Stoke-on-Trent)  gave a talk at the Media Space, about  Tony Ray-Jones who he met in New York in 1966 him along with Tony’s brother, Philip Ray-Jones.  You can see the two of them in a photograph at the top of another post I helped John put on-line yesterday which is the text of Mackenzie’s talk. It’s an interesting and slightly different perspective of both the man and his work.

Ridgers on Slate

It’s great to see an old friend of mine getting some of the recognition he deserves and the article on the US Slate magazine Portraits of the London Punk Movement of the 1970s and ’80s by Sophie Butcher, published yesterday when Derek Ridgers was signing copies of his latest book at a New York book shop, has some large images of his work.

In the piece Derek says “I’ve documented clubs for five decades. I’ve got a 240-page book in the making (about that period titled The Dark Carnival). You could say I don’t need any more photos, so I’ll stop when I get a publisher for the next book”. Though I’m not sure I believe him about stopping.

He has amassed a huge body of work over the years – and as he says the two books so far cover less than 2% of what he took in that period. In a Facebook comment he says “I’m still scanning stuff from that time and, who knows, there may be more books.”

Picket Line Dance

I’d really gone up to London not just to photograph the City pancake event and meet up with a couple of other photographers but to visit SOAS where the cleaners were on the first day of a two day strike to gain equal treatment to other staff working there.  The picket line had formed at 4 am and apparently by 6 am, the normal shift start time, almost the full normal morning shift were there taking part.

It’s too far from where I live to get there for the early morning – I’d have to stay up in London overnight to cover events that early, so instead I went to the lunchtime rally that they were organising.

I left the pancake race  early, arranged to meet my friends in a couple of hours time in a pub in Holborn and got to SOAS just as the rally was about to start.  The cleaners at SOAS belong to Unison, and the SOAS branch has there has actively pursued their fight first for a living wage and now to be brought back in-house and to get decent pensions, holidays and sick pay – with the slogan ‘One Workplace, One Workforce’.

The cleaners at many other places have not  been supported by the traditional unions and have chosen to leave these and form their own union, the IWGB, and some IWGB members were there in support of the SOAS campaign. The two groups have have worked together with others in the ‘3Cosas’ campaign in the University of London for proper conditions of employment (a campaign which the Senate House Unison branch seem to have worked with the management to try and subvert, as well as apparently fiddling branch elections to prevent cleaners being elected.)

Of course at a rally you photograph the speakers and the people listening, looking for ways to connect both with the event – easy in this case because so many were wearing ‘Justice for Cleaners’ t-shirts or Unison tabards or holding posters. There were some large banners too, though not always easy to photograph – it was quite hard to see the red text on the one in the picture below, and harder still in photographs.

But perhaps what you don’t expect to find on a picket line is a band (or perhaps I should call it an orchestra) playing Latin American music and people dancing.

And it was the people dancing who created problems for the Fuji X-Pro1, with well over half the images showing them slightly out of focus. The 14mm focuses pretty rapidly most of the time – fast enough for the delay to be hardly noticeable for static subjects – but was totally unable to keep up with dancers at close distances.

The really stupid thing was that I did not need to focus at all. Back in the old days working with the equivalent 21mm on a range-finder body, I’d simply have set the focus at my usual 1.8 metres and with a aperture of say f8 and everything would have been sharp. We called it zone focus – depth of field on 35mm meant anything more that around 3 ft away was sharp (they ‘hyperfocal’ distance was around 1.8 metres at f8, and could easily be set from the nice depth of field scales all decent lenses had.)

It’s a habit I’ve got out of using cameras with fast autofocus, and also slightly less useful. Using manual focus on the Nikons isn’t always easy, as the viewing screen isn’t really designed to make it easy to judge sharpness, and with zoom lenses the depth of field scales if present are only rudimentary.  Lenses too are designed with a different ‘feel’ to the distance ring; in the old days although they moved smoothly a little more effort was required to start them, while with most modern lenses the slightest accidental touch may shift focus. When I set the lens at 1.8m in the old days, it would still be at 1.8m until I deliberately moved it to a different distance, but most lenses just work like this now.

With the 14mm at f8, the hyperfocal distance is  1.24 m, and setting the lens around that distance would have meant everything from 0.62m (2 feet) to infinity would be acceptably sharp.  I’d probably have chosen to focus a just little closer as I didn’t need the background sharp. Adjust the ISO to give a sensible shutter speed and everything would have been fine. I felt very stupid when I saw the images on the computer (most looked sharp enough on the back of the camera while I was making them.)

The 14mm is a very nicely built lens, and it does have a depth of field scale, although it is rather more conservative than the figures I give above (the actual figures depend on an assumption about how sharp things need to be to seem sharp – the value of the ‘circle of confusion’.)  Optically too, it is virtually perfect. But I’d like just a bit more feel on the focus ring.

All equipment has its limitations, and automation isn’t always the best answer.  I got enough pictures with the Fujis, but its always annoying to lose things, and as usual it was some of the best that were not usable.

On the plus side, I really appreciated having a much lighter bag –  with the much of the weight being essentials like a book to read on the train and a bottle of water. Two Fuji bodies and three lenses – including the Samyang 8mm which I used in the pub later – hardly seemed to weigh anything. Even with neck straps and the several spare batteries you need to carry the whole kit weighed only just over 4lbs.

More pictures at SOAS Cleaners Picket Line.

Continue reading Picket Line Dance

City Pancakes

I only really went to the City of London Pancake Races this year to meet up with other photographers. It’s an event I’ve photographed a number of times in previous years and I don’t really feel I had anything new to say about it.  It does have a certain surreal quality that I find amusing, and those taking part also obviously find it a day to at least metaphorically let down their hair a little, though this doesn’t stop the competition being rather cut-throat – as one might expect from the City.

It is of course all in a good cause, or rather good causes, with monies raised going to the four charities chosen by this years Lord Mayor – who this year was for the second time in the City’s history a woman, Fiona Woolf, a lawyer specialising in electricity industry reforms.  Beating Bowel Cancer, the Princess Alice Hospice, Raleigh International and Working Chance perhaps were rather harder to interpret for the fancy dress competition than some in previous years.

There was a small series of images of one of those taking part having his hat put on that had the quality of some ancient crowning ritual that rather amused me – this is the first of four on the web page. It’s partly those hands stretched down, but the robes give it something of a masonic or even druidic feel.

One of the photographers I had gone there to meet was John Benton-Harris, and it was an event that reminded me of his work from his early years in this country in the late 60s and 70s, a series of ‘Mad Hatters’ which forms a part of his commentary on the English class system.

Also present and taking pictures was another well-known photographer, Martin Parr, currently working on a project in the City of London. I’d not expected to see him, and found on talking to him that this was the first time he had photographed the event. I’ll be interested to see what he made of it – and the rest of the City.

It was one of the first events I’d deliberately decided to photograph using Fuji X cameras, with the 14mm f2.8 Fuji lens on the X-Pro1 doing most of the work but with the 18-55mm on the EX1 body.

I didn’t attempt to photograph the actual races and the rest of the event is relatively static, and the 14mm (21mm equivalent) was great working in the sometimes quite restricted places in the crowd.  Although it is a relatively large lens, the camera is still pretty unobtrusive compared to the Nikon – especially with the huge 16-35mm f4 wide-angle. Had I brought the Nikon I might well have chosen to work with the 20mm f2.8 Nikon lens rather than the zoom on this occasion.

But the really important difference is in the noise. Working at close range in a generally fairly quiet event (except for the starter’s cannon and the shouts of support during the actual races) the Nikon’s shutter is unmissable, while the Fuji was a whisper by comparison – even I could hardly hear it. Far less obtrusive than a Leica!

City of London Pancake Races

Continue reading City Pancakes