Cyclists Die In London

There are some surprisingly dark places on the streets of London, despite the huge output of light which makes the sky starless there. The area of street actually below the offices of Transport for London (TfL) is well lit, but police had taped that area off, and although people were still walking through as usual, cutting off the corner on their route towards the station on their way home, the protest there was kept on the pavement outside, where it was several stops darker.

We were there because of the number of cyclists who are being killed on London’s streets, mainly by lorries and buses – six in the previous few weeks – and TfL are seen to have failed to properly consider cycle (and pedestrians) in their transport plans, which have largely been directed to getting faster movement of cars and lorries.

I have the feeling that these changes in lighting have become greater in recent years. Certainly this is true on the suburban street were I live, where a couple of years back the council ripped up all the old lampposts with their mercury vapour lamps and replaced them with new posts carrying much more directional LED lighting on the grounds of economy. It is brighter in places (and light enough inside my house to go down the stairs with reasonable safety in the middle of the night) but midway between the lights the road is rather darker. And perhaps less makes its way into the night sky, though we still seldom see more than a handful of stars.

I set the sensitivity on both Nikons to ISO 3200, generally a practical limit for decent quality at full size, but it was still only giving me exposures of between 1/10 and 1/50s at full aperture as I moved around. Which wouldn’t have been too bad, but often the people I was photographing were moving too and were blurred on the images.

Lenses for digital SLRs are large and heavy things, and apertures of anything affordable and luggable tend to be rather limited, The 18-35mm is a nice lens, but only f4. In the old days I’d instead have been working with the Leica or Konica body and an old 35mm f1.4 Summilux in low light (I had wider lenses too but they were slow, only f4 or even f4.5 so stayed in the bag when it got dark, though I might have occasionally used the 50 f2.) The whole set of lenses was of course lighter and less bulky than the Nikkor.

In colour I’d probably have been using ISO 400 film, while in black and white it would have been Tri-X, pushed to perhaps ISO 1600. But that F1.4 lens (it had cost me around a month’s wages) gave me a 3 stop advantage in terms of exposure – making the ISO 400 equivalent to ISO 3200, and the black and white like working at ISO 12,800. So perhaps things haven’t changed as much in practice as I sometimes think.

Of course with the f1.4 lens wide open, there wasn’t a great depth of field, particularly at close quarters. And of course I could buy fast primes to use on the digital cameras, and perhaps I will, though I think not for the Nikons.

With the right adapter that 35mm f1.4 does work on the Fuji-X cameras (it won’t work with the official Fuji adapter for M mounts lenses, but does with a much cheaper Kipon) but the 1.5x multiplier makes it a standard rather than a wideangle lens.)  But the newly announced 23mm f1.4 (35mm equiv) is tempting, and I’ve recently bought the 14mm f2.8 (21mm equiv.)


D700. No flash. 16-35mm at 18mm, 1/30 f4

Back with the cyclists, for most of the evening event I worked with the 18-35mnm at f4 on the D700, and with the 18-105mm DX lens (27-157mm equiv) on the D800E, working with flash with the longer lens. It has a variable max aperture from f/3.5-5.6 and I was using it at full aperture, mainly at the wider end, where its focal length overlaps with the wider zoom. I was still using ISO 3200 to get as much exposure as possible from the ambient light, and had the shutter speed set at 1/25th with the camera on shutter priority, so rather curiously the exposures were sometimes greater with the flash than without it! I was using flash more for the different lighting effect it gave, as well as the ability to get sharp images in some of the darker zones.

There were several videographers present at the event, and some of the time putting their video lighting into all or parts of the scene. Sometimes this can be useful for still photographers, and I stole some of their light for my pictures! But it isn’t always helpful, sometimes decidedly unflattering and can put colour balance out, and using flash does help reduce its effect.


D800E. With flash. 18-105mm at 21mm (35mm equiv) 1/30 f5
The climax of the event was the die-in, when over a thousand cyclists put their bikes on the ground and got down there with them. The street was covered with bikes and bodies, making it virtually impossible to move around. One or two photographers were in the middle of it, either by accident or design, and they did spoil the pictures a little. I’d decided that it was best to work more or less from the edge, getting more cyclists in view, and had chosen to be where I thought they would be most crowded. The background with Southwark Underground station also seemed to be the best.


D700, 18-35mm at 28mm, 1/40 f4

I took a few working with the D700, mainly at 16mm, then switched to the D800E; after a few not very successful attempts with the longer focal lengths I wwitched to the 10.5mm fisheye. It’s the fastest lens for the Nikons that I own at f2.8, but I was using it around f4 for these pictures as I still had the ISO at 3200 and slowish shutter speeds. It was this lens that produced the best images of the event.


D800E, 10.5mm, 1/40 f4.5
Continue reading Cyclists Die In London

November is Over

Even for My London Diary, November is Over, and has been for a few days – I’m well into December already in putting my work on-line. There have been so many other things happening that I’ve got rather behind in posting about my work here on >Re:PHOTO.

There are still a few events I have yet to write about covering – such as the die-in by cyclists outside the HQ of Transport for London in the picture above, but it’s well past time to post the complete list of work on My London Diary for last month.

I was away from home for nine days in Germany because of a family event, so missed a few things. I think like many photographers I take considerably fewer pictures when I’m on holiday, unlike most other people. Though things have changed dramatically over the years with now so many non-photographers taking random images all day every day and posting them on Instagram or Facebook… Back when I was young, if you saw a cat you just stroked it. I don’t think I’ve taken a cat picture yet this year, but in Germany I did photograph a dog, though this is the only place I’ve so far published the picture:

But few of my family images make it to the web – there are just a handful among the other pictures from Germany which were more about the places we visited.

my london diary
November 2013


Left Unity’s instigator Ken Loach ponders his vote at the founding conference

Left Unity Founding Conference
Cyclists ‘Die in’ at TfL HQ


Islamists Protest Angolan Ban on Muslims


Cultural Workers against Zero Hours


4:1 legal minimum NHS staffing
Justice Not Jumpers at NPower HQ


Rocks where I climbed happily as a child
Virginia Water


End Drone Attacks in Pakistan


Remember Ricky Bishop – Jail his Killers
Free Shaker Aamer March in Battersea
German Holiday
Bonfire of Austerity Blocks Westminster Bridge
Anonymous March on Parliament in London
City Link & Cleaners at John Lewis
LoNdOn ZoMbIE WaLk VII


Gurkha Veterans Hunger Strike
Free Kieron & Arctic 30

 

Continue reading November is Over

Spare Rib and Derivatives

I’m not entirely sure what to make of the British Library’s attempt to put Spare Rib online and make it freely available. In principle I think its a great idea, and would generally love to see more good free content of all kinds on the web, and many would certainly find this an interesting read and a useful resource. But the proposal fails to consider the rights of those whose content it is.

It would certainly be a better solution than what has happened to many periodicals, which are put on-line behind a subscription paywall – it was certainly galling to find myself being asked to pay a fee to access an article that I wrote years ago for an academic publication. Less of a problem for those who work in academia or at other institutions that subscribe to such services. But I’d much rather that content – which I’d actually supplied without recompense – had been made available freely to all.

Of course the rights of the creators of the material deserve consideration, although the commercial service in question had never asked me in any way, and I think the same is true of many other such paid content. I’d provided the material for publication in print, but not in any way signed away my copyright, but along with all the other contributors find that other people are now charging for my content. I think the companies concerned probably defend their actions by saying there is no charge for the actual content and that payment is for the supplying of content. Legally I doubt they have the right to supply my copyright content free of charge unless I grant that, though it is possibly a grey area.

I don’t think I ever supplied material to Spare Rib over its 21 years of publication (1972-93), so I’m not directly involved, but at least the British Library, who want to put it on the web, is trying to get clearance from those who hold copyrights in all the material. There is a curious statement in The Guardian feature about it, “Copyright laws demand the British Library locate and gain permission from the majority of them“.

Under current law they surely need permission from every person whose material they publish, though in the case of those who cannot be found they might well go ahead, inserting a notice requesting anyone who has not been located to contact them – with the clear statement that they will remove any content if requested by the copyright holder.

Likewise, if there are former contributors who are not prepared to have their content presented, then the BL needs to block out those sections of the issues. It would be a simple matter and almost cost-free to simply blank out parts of the issues from the files for use on-line. There isn’t so far as I’m aware any provision in copyright law that says if 91% of contributors are prepared for their work to be used, the other 9% will just have to lump it.

Apparently, a sample of those concerned have already been contacted (and if that includes you, particularly if you are a photographer, I’d advise you to read the advice from the NUJ London Photographers’ branch), with a request for them to give (or withhold) permission within a week of receiving the request, though this contradicts the date of the end of January given by the Guardian. The end of January might be reasonable, but I don’t consider ‘a week’ to be so. There is a long blog post, Beware the Spare Rib Digitisation Project, which gives one well-informed view from a contributor.

Photographers are I think in a slightly different position from writers, in that many are far more reliant than writers on the reproduction of older work as a significant source of income. For many, their archive is their pension. So photographers as a group are more worried about unauthorised usage of their work.

The BL would also appear to have selected an unsuitable form of licensing to apply to contributions, the ‘Creative Commons Attribution Non- Commercial 3.0 Licence, and any successor version as published by Creative Commons.’ Apart from the open-ended nature of the statement, this allows any non-commercial user to ‘copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format’ and to ‘remix, transform, and build upon the material‘, so long as they give an appropriate credit and indication of any changes from the original. This is a ‘Free Culture Licence‘ which is probably not what many content creators would want.

I’m not entirely happy about Creative Commons Licensing, which although it has some very positive aspects seems to be widely regarded as giving a right to do what you like with material covered by it. Few read or understand the small print. I think many photographers would be unhappy with having their work remixed, transformed or built upon, at least without knowledge of how and why this was to be done. And, where appropriate, the payment of a licence fee.

There is a more restrictive non-commercial Creative Commons licence, Attribution No-Derivatives 4.0 International with no adaptions allowed that could be applied to allow copying and redistribution but not remixing etc, which might be more acceptable to some. But copyright law gives content creators – including photographers – important rights, and perhaps we should rely on that rather than CC. The UK Copyright Service has useful fact sheets on Fair Use and Fair Dealing, the latter of which represents UK legal thinking on the issue and allows considerable private and other use. It’s perhaps a position we and the BL should note and rely on rather than going along the CC route.

Personally I think derivative work can be rather fun, though it can also get people into legal trouble, with expensive court proceedings – particularly in the USA, which often end up with some fairly unpredictable results.  Mr Brainwash seems to lose because his work is judged mediocre (also see here) and it’s hard to disagree, but it’s worth reading Andy Baio’s Kind of Screwed for some other examples, though I think his conclusion about his own case is wrong – the ‘Kind of Bloop‘ album cover looks more like a poor copy of Jay Maisel’s photo than a ‘transformative work‘ to me.

I’ve allowed my own work to be used in a derivative fashion on a number of occasions, sometimes without payment, mainly for purely non-commercial use. But I think artists should request permission and where they intend to see the work should offer me a fee – as most have when approaching me for permission.

But there is yet more to the story over the BL and Spare Rib. BL make much of wanting to preserve the valuable magazine (as the Guardian article quoted above shows. But it has already been preserved on microfiche – and is available as such through the B. And as the Register make clear, no permission is needed to preserve the material, and the request isn’t about this, but about making it freely available on the web.  There is more about this in The Register who also tried to get some clarification over BL’s intentions, so far without success.

The Power of Photography – Marcus Bleasdale

Watch National Geographic Live!‘s short film of Marcus Bleasdale talking about the D R Congo and how he hopes his pictures will improve things in The Power of Photography to Witness. As it says on the page:

Photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale wants to make people angry; as angry as he is about Africa’s first world war and the surprising way in which we are funding this violence.

On his own web site you can hear him talking at more length about one of these images at the start of another short film, Avoiding Photographic Dangers.

His work in the Congo is in ‘The Rape of a Nation‘, which is one of a number of stories on his VII page.

I’ve written a number of stories on the war in the Congo, seen from the considerably safer viewpoint of London’s streets and the protests by Congolese on them to try to focus public attention on the conflicts there, and the links between this and our mobile phones, computers and other electronic devices. But Bleasdale’s images bring home powerfully what happens there and its effect on the people.

You can find out more about what is happening on the Raise Hope for Congo website. Many organisations are working in the Congo, and in 2008 the BBC Radio 4 Today programme published a list of charities who work in Congo and deal with survivors of sexual violence, including Merlin, part of Save the Children. Others include War Child and Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

 

Free Shaker


Nikon D800 in DX mode, 10.5mm, Fisheye-Hemi plugin
The Free Shaker Aamer march in Battersea wasn’t a particularly easy event to photograph, and I had to work hard to get decent pictures. There were around thirty people taking part, many of them dressed up in the orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuits, some with black hoods covering their faces. The black hoods can be dramatic, but they are very much a cliché, and I do like to see people’s faces in my pictures. Fortunately as you can see here some people wore hoods and others didn’t.

Battersea is where Shaker Aamer’s family lives, and hopefully where he will come back to when he is eventually released from Guantanamo, though the US and British authorities would like to send him back to the country of his birth, where he would be locked away and unable to testify about his torture since he was captured 12 years ago in Afghanistan. His evidence will certainly embarrass both US and UK intelligence agencies.

Probably most people know this part of Battersea better as Clapham Junction, one of the world’s busiest and best-known railway stations. Clapham was a more up-market place when the station was built (and probably the influential folk of Clapham didn’t want a nasty smelly railway through their backyards) so although the station was built among the slums of Battersea, the railway company opted for a more prestigious name. It was after all only a short ride in your horse and carriage from Clapham, though now the 37 bus probably takes a little longer through London traffic.

When I first went there, Northcote Road, a quarter-mile south of the station, was a fairly typical inner London street market, lots of fruit and veg, cheap clothing and the rest. Good transport connections have meant it has come up rapidly in the past twenty or thirty years and it’s now extremely gentrified, with stalls selling a dozen varieties of olives and olive oil, artisanal bread and the rest, most of the old pubs now replaced by rather trendier establishments.

The protesters were handing out leaflets on the street, just south of the street stalls, where the pavement widens out slightly in front of a Baptist church but is still rather constricted by some bicycle parking stands, and the march was to start from the corner there.

It wasn’t easy to take an overview showing all the banners and a reasonable number of protesters, partly because half of them were standing behind me on the roadside edge of the pavement and the rest – in picture – up close to the church so that people could still walk along the pavement. And there were enough people walking along it to mean I spent a lot of time waiting for a clear view.

I could only stand rather close, partly to avoid the clutter of the bike stands, but also because if I moved further back I would have had the other half of the protesters in the way too, not to mention having to spend most of my time jumping out of the way of traffic on the fairly busy road. This was another occasion where the extreme wide angle of view of the 10.5mm full-area fisheye proved its worth.

This particular frame – corrected as usual with Fisheye-Hemi – stood out from the rest because of the figure holding the ‘Bring Home Shaker Aamer‘ poster at the extreme right. The woman is Joy Hurcombe, the Chair of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, and she has her hood pulled back from her face to better see where she is going as she walks towards me. She had been standing at the far end of the row, next to the man just to the left of her head, and rather small in the pictures, but I saw the possibility as she walked towards me and quickly took a couple of pictures. As well as adding a little dynamism to the image – and the slight angle she is at adds to the impression of movement- I like having a similar figure at both edges. I would have liked another couple of inches at the left to show the edge of the poster held there. Were I to develop this image again I would add a little brightness and contrast to that sign on brown corrugated card.

I usually try to keep the fisheye level when taking pictures, which avoids the splaying out of the verticals. But this was a picture I had to take very quickly, and I think it actually helps here. I’d chosen to work from this side of the scene because of the group of three people around the blue banner which makes a nice contrast to the orange suits. I seldom like to work from the centre with groups as I find it makes for less interesting pictures.


D700, 16-35mm at 16mm
Joy was walking across in front of me when I made the first picture, to take the microphone and speak at the street corner, and I followed her to photograph her speaking.

There was a woman a metre or so to her left as she spoke dressed in an orange jumpsuit and black hood, and I moved close to her, filling the left of the frame, with Joy speaking in the centre. It wasn’t bad, but in the background between the two figures there were a couple of people talking who were rather a distraction.

I don’t like to set up pictures or direct events, but after trying 14 frames and not getting an image I felt was quite strong enough I asked the woman to move closer to Joy, then moved across in front of the two of them and knelt down, partly to more or less hide the figures behind these two. I moved in close and went down on my knees and edged a little closer – I was using the 16-35mm on the D700 at 16mm – and tried to fill the frame as much as possible with the two women and the posters they were holding and in the background.

There were two figures at the left – a child and father that I was watching too, and wasn’t sure how to cope with; I took a series of 8 frames watching them and the speaker’s face, which much of the time was turned a little too much away from me. But in this frame she turned towards me and the man was behind the other woman’s arm, with the boy looking towards the speaker.

This is a picture I don’t think I would have got on film, firstly because I would not have been so sure that the previous 14 frames weren’t quite what I wanted, and second because I would not have gone on working for 22 frames – and quite likely would have had to stop and change films with only 36 exposures to play with if I had tried.


D700, 16-35mm at 16mm
After a couple of short speeches the march formed up to make its way to a longer rally inside Battersea Arts Centre, which I didn’t go to as I was due at another event. I photographed the two large banners at the front and those holding them, then walked behind them inside the main body of the march, again working with the 16-35mm. There I took another picture with Joy in it, almost the only face visible, though there are ten orange jumpsuits visible in a nicely chaotic grouping.

I walked up towards Clapham Junction with the march, still taking pictures, trying without great success to show the kind of area it was and the people watching the march as it went by. But as with most marches and processions the most interesting things usually happen before they move off (or sometimes after they finish.)


D700, 16-35mm at 19mm

D700, 16-35mm at 18mm
I was feeling that my pictures so far were far too orange. It’s a striking colour, though one that digital sensors have something of a problem with, particularly with bright fluorescent dyes, tending to lose highlight detail. But not everyone was wearing orange, and the posters were black and white.

Several of the marchers attracted my attention and I tried to make pictures with them as the main figure, moving in close with the 16-35mm lens, using it at the wider end. Walking backwards and just to one side of her, I took three frames of this woman holding a poster. The second of the three was unusable because she had closed her eyes. The upper one which was the first frame, with the lens at 19mm was in some ways ways the better picture, with a more dynamic tilt to the poster a slightly closer viewpoint and less of those distracting yellow lines, but in the end I chose to use the lower one (made three seconds later – I’d zoomed out very slightly to 18mm and we’d walked a few yards down the road), mainly because her eyes are wider open and I prefer her expression, but also I like having both of her black gloves.

It isn’t just the pale blue of her jacket, although it was a change from all that orange, but I think there is a determination in her stance and expression that attracted me. It seemed very much a picture of protest.

Continue reading Free Shaker

Germany – More in the Country

More pictures from the Fuji X-E1 taken in Germany. We cycled along the main road east from Neumunster to the next place of any size – a large village approximately 15 km east of Neumünster called Bornhöved.

There was a cycle track alongside the road almost all the way. When it disappeared we took an unmarked side road which fortunately led into the village over a motorway. Almost all cyclists use the cycle paths, which most major roads have beside them. Few cyclists seem to wear helmets, except children (for whom I think it may be compulsory, though not all do.)  Outside of the towns we saw very few cyclists.


Bornhöved

Bornhöved is a largish village and unusually hilly after the very flat area we had cycled to.  It didn’t seem a place where there was a lot to do, though it had some pretty detailed boards about its history on the edge of the car park. We cycled around it then back to Husberg, where we were staying, making a small detour on the route. It wasn’t the most exciting ride I’ve ever done, and German bikes are not like mine at home.  It did have a lot of gears, but I think I just found the right one and stayed in it almost all of the time.  But the back-pedal braking is extremely annoying, particularly in making it difficult to get a pedal in the right position for a good start. There would have been more pictures, but I’d decided to travel light and forgot to transfer a spare battery from the bag I left in our bedroom to my pocket.

The EX-1 eats batteries fast, especially if you spend much time reviewing pictures, and tend to leave the camera switched on. I had five with me in Germany, and certainly got through three some days despite not taking a huge number of pictures.  The batteries are fairly slow to charge too, I think a couple of hours. The one I’m looking at is 1250 mAH and I think supposed to last around 300 pictures. It’s not a huge problem, as non-Fuji replacements are less than a tenner on e-Bay (and seem every bit as good as the genuine Fuji item which costs a ridiculous £59.99).

The Nikon batteries are a little larger and higher capacity – 1620 mAH – but though I carry a spare in my camera bag, I’ve yet to have to change one when I’m out working. Every day when I get home I do a check, and if they are under 80% they go in the charger and are replaced by the spare from the back. Some of the cheap replacements have higher capacity and can still be at 100% after I’ve taken a few hundred pictures.

It isn’t just the electronic viewfinder that makes the difference. The Fuji X-Pro 1 which I use mainly with the optical viewfinder eats up batters as well, though perhaps not quite as fast.

A couple of days later we took a walk closer to where we were staying. Bönebüttel and Husberg are really more or less the same place. But Bönebüttel seems to have more older farms and a lot of agricultural land around it, and we were able to make  nice circular walk that took us two or three hours.  This time I took my bag with the spare batteries and lenses, though I think most if not all of the pictures were made with the 18-55mm zoom, probably because I was feeling lazy!

There were plenty of wide open spaces and somehow out in the country I feel less of a need for an extreme wide-angle than in the town, where the 15mm Voigtlander was often nice to use.


Bönebüttel


Brammerweg, Bönebüttel

and for something completely different: Designer Outlet


‘Designer Outlet’ in Oderstraße, on the edge of Neumünster “Designed for those who love to shop”

This is a kind of fake-old German town composed entirely of shops. We went in a few of them, but I didn’t see anything I wanted to buy.  All the pictures I took here were with the 15mm Voigtlander (22 mm equiv) and sometimes it wasn’t quite wide enough. But it is a nice lens on the camera, small and light. I don’t have any complaints about its sharpness, nor can I see any trace of distortion. It is a manual only lens, but that isn’t any problem on the Fuji X-E1. There were very few pictures where I needed to focus, having initially set the lens to a sensible setting by scale. Depth of field at f5,6 or f8 is pretty excessive.

Although it was ideal for this location in decent light, the maximum aperture of f4 was a little limiting for interior use, where the f2.8 of the Samyang made a noticeable difference. And it would be nice to have a lens that does autofocus for use at near distances.  So though I was very pleased with how this lens worked, I still ended up wanting the 14mm Fuji, which would have been even better.

The Fuji did a pretty good job in Germany, despite a few problems, mainly caused by the photographer. What I’ve not dwelt on in these posts is its performance shooting movies, where I think it did pretty well. It isn’t a camera of choice for fast-moving action, and it doesn’t have the flash capabilities of the Nikons, but apart from that it could replace them for much of what I do.

Continue reading Germany – More in the Country

Kiel

Kiel is best known for its canal. Which I went to see, though not at Kiel but at Rendsburg. Had a nice day out there, went across the canal on a splendid ‘ferry’, suspended on cables below the high-level mainline rail bridge there,  walked underneath the canal through the newish foot-tunnel with its seriously long escalators, walked though a part of the port and past a site scattered with huge bits of giant wind-turbines, ate currywurst and chips (our German hosts laughed at me) and ice cream, along with a beer. And took not a single photograph, as I’d rushed out without checking that I had a spare battery.

I’d plucked the battery from the charger where I’d left it overnight and put it into the camera as we left in a hurry, assuming we’d be coming back shortly before the main trip out later. We weren’t, and although I’d left the battery in the charger all night, somehow it hadn’t charged. Perhaps I hadn’t plugged the charger in, or hadn’t put the battery in properly. So I had a camera, but without a working battery it was just a dead weight to carry around all day.

Its a while since I’ve been out, at least further than a quick trip to the local shops, without a working camera. I might not always actually take pictures, but the potential is always there. So it did feel odd being without one, as if I was not properly dressed. I enjoyed the day, but think I saw far more opportunities for making pictures than I would have done had I been walking around with a working camera!

Earlier in the week we had visited Kiel itself – which isn’t really quite on the canal which starts a few kilometres north of the city centre. It was a grey, cold, windy day with occasional rain, and there were few others around as we walked along beside the Kieler Förde.  Unlike most British former ports, it still seems to be keeping busy.

And there were some fish too, along with sea-monsters (you can see them on My London Diary) but it was too cold to hang around and we walked as quickly as possible into the city centre for coffee and cake. Although Kiel was founded in the 13th century, little remains of the old city,  thanks to the visits by the RAF and USAF who between them destroyed over 80% of the old town, and little of the post-war development appears memorable.

It boasts one of the longest shopping streets in Germany, but given the weather we were glad to get off it and into one of the larger shopping centres, where we soon warmed up enough for some rather delicious ice creams – with a bewildering choice of flavours. Giovanni L has over a 100 flavours and has won various ‘world championship’s as a master ice-cream maker and is now widely franchised across Germany and branches elsewhere, but despite that I can recommend ‘Mozart Praline‘, which comes ‘mit Marzipan‘, though I’m sure many of the others are delicious too. The ‘L’ stands for Lasagna, which seems confusing.


Kiel’s leaning Schwedenkai cruise and ferry terminal – 22mm (33mm eq) 1/30s f 3.2 ISO 2500

But the more interesting pictures to me were those I took in the dark on the way back to the car park. Of course these were hand-held, although some I was able to rest on a rail. Those here were taken with an exposure bias of -2/3 stop, and all with the 18-55mm zoom on the Fuji X-E1. Its a lens where the maximum aperture changes with focal length, and these were all wide-open. The corners are reasonably sharp despite this. The light sources in the images needed some considerable burning in.


53mm (79mm eq), 1/5 f4 ISO 2500 – and the rain was getting heavier

There are a few more on My London Diary – you can go direct to the Kiel pictures here. It was still raining, and we were hurrying back to the car, so I had to take pictures quickly and then run to catch up with the others.


Continue reading Kiel

Lauren Henkin

David Vestal whose passing I mentioned yesterday, was a man whose work very much reflected the interaction between craft and vision that is at the heart of photography, and the same is certainly true of the landscape photography of Lauren Henkin, as you can see from the interview with her published recently on Petapixel.

This starts by looking at what made her become a photographer, and she picks as a key moment a visit with her parents to a Harry Callahan retrospective at the US National Gallery of Art in 1996, when she was in her early twenties, around the end of her BA in Architecture, where she says “Callahan’s prints (in particular the photographs of Cape Cod), I had a visceral reaction to them.”

She goes on to describe taking a master printing workshop with George Tice, certainly one of the finest printers around both in platinum and silver  I think I probably first registered his name when he was one of the photographers featured in the ground-breaking volume ‘Darkroom‘, published by Lustrum Press in 1977 – on the verso of the title page under the usual details of the colophon the statement ‘PHYSICAL FACT/PSYCHIC EFFECT‘. A series of prints Tice had made from the same negative “opened up the path for me to develop a vocabulary for my prints.”

Henkin goes on to mention two other even more familiar names to me, Tyler Boley and Jon Cone, pioneers in fine art digital printing, whose helpful comments on-line in groups such as Digital Black and White the Print and Piezography 3000 have been a part of my daily life for a dozen or more years. You can read an intersting article written in 2012 by Cone, The State of the State of the Arts in Black & White, which is illustrated by the work of Henkin and Boley among others.

It was Jon Cone who, following on from his experience with Iris printers pioneered high quality black and white printing on Epson desktop inkjet printers.  I started printing with his PiezographyBW Quad ink system in 2000, producing black and white images on matte papers that startled me by their quality, matching or surpassing those I’d made some years earlier with platinum, platinum/palladium and kallitype (albeit with less control over image colour.) I went on to be a beta tester for the next generation of PiezoTone inks.

Cone’s work led printer manufacturers to up their game, and although I’m convinced that Piezography’s latest generation is still the ultimate in black and white printing quality (now on both glossy and matte papers – and yes, capable of more than silver) I no longer use them. Most of my printing is now in colour and I don’t print enough for it to seem worth changing to the cheaper ConeColor system that gives results identical to the Epson inks. If I ever get around to printing serious black and white portfolios I’ll start by investing in a new printer and the latest Cone inks.

But back to Lauren Henkin, who goes on to talk about her inspirations, mentioning photographer Robert Adams as well as painters, sculptors, architects and poets and then moving on to discuss her latest project. The Park, taken in that highly photographed space, Central Park in New York over three years, and her earlier work. Visually, even on screen, it is delightful and her website has an admirable and classical simplicity that complements the fine imagery.

I’ve yet to have the opportunity to see her actual prints as her work hasn’t been exhibited in the UK (she has been in group shows in Arles and Paris, along with a long list since 2007 in the US and Canada.) But its perhaps a reflection on the kind of photography that is promoted by the relatively few spaces that show contemporary work here that London (or some of our other major cities) is not yet on that list.

Henkin is also co-editor of Tilted Arc, a web site with the strap-line ‘Art and argument, fact and fiction. And verse.’ which has recently began a series ‘Women in the Landscape, a new ongoing feature,”conversations between women photographers whose work focuses on the land”. The first conversation is between Henkin and Canadian photographer Jessica Auer, whose work is well worth exploring.

Memory & Photographs

There have been several articles in different papers about some research by Linda Henkel and her team at the Psychology department of Fairfield University in Fairfield Connecticut which shows that people who took photographs of objects remembered less about them the following day than those who simply looked at them.

Her results don’t particularly surprise me, certainly not when I look at how most people take photographs with their phones or see the results on Facebook. It’s usually clear from these images that even if people are pointing a camera in roughly the right direction, they are not thinking about what they are photographing or seeing it clearly. And photographers are not entirely immune; some of the work I see on Demotix or even published in the newspapers gives me the same feeling. Of course we all have off days, and some editors do appear to have an unerring facility for selecting the weakest image of a set (and often then cropping it to destroy whatever visual integrity it might have possessed.)

Her research only tested recall on the following day. My own memory gets regularly tested in various ways about things that happened twenty or thirty or even forty years ago, and if I can look up the photograph the chances of accurate recall without it are remote. Of course that’s a very different thing, but there is a real sense for me that photographs are a large part of my memory.

The feature on her research on Atlantic Cities mentions an important part of her research some other accounts omit. When Henkel asked people to zoom in on and photograph the details of the museum objects that were the subject of the study, this actually aided their recall the following day. In other words if people actually thought about what they were photographing, that act became and aid to recall. Good photography always involves looking and thinking.

David Vestal (1924 – December 5, 2013

When I first became seriously interested in photography and was taking pictures, back in the early 1970s (before then I’d been interested but to skint to actually buy film for the the camera I’d owned for around ten years) there was really only one magazine in the UK worth reading, Creative Camera, though that didn’t stop me buying some of the rest, mainly to drool over the equipment I still couldn’t afford.

There were also articles on technique, though mainly about taking photographs, recycling stuff about depth of field, exposure, panning and the rest, and occasionally about printing tricks, but little or nothing about making expressive images or about great photography. Photographing landscape would be illustrated by a few camera club images by the deservedly unknown author rather than the work of Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, let alone anything more modern.

For magazines with a wider interest in photography you had to go the the larger branches of Smiths which stocked the US magazines; Popular Photography, Modern Photography, Camera 35. In these magazines I learnt more about photographers and photography, though they also had technical reviews that went into far more depth than the UK mags – and made me buy the Minolta 28mm rather than the Leica to fit my Leica camera (and also to save up for the Leica 90mm f2.8 which I still occasionally use with an adaptor when I need a long lens on the Fuji-X cameras, while the Minolta, though once a fine performer has succumbed to fungus inside the lens.)

There were several regular columnists in these magazines who stood out, and foremost among them was David Vestal.  No mean photographer himself, as you can see from the set of pictures at the Robert Mann gallery, Vestal had learnt photography from one of the legendary teachers of photography, Sid Grossman of the Photo League in New York in the late 1940s, an himself became a legend.

I learnt much from his regular columns, not just about the how of photography, but also about the why and he was a man who inspired many. I don’t think there will be a better obituary for him than that by Jim Hughes in The Online Photographer; Hughes knew him well and in March 1972  began to serialise his “David Vestal’s Book of Craft—An Advanced Course in B&W Photography for Beginners and Others” in Camera 35  – and I became a regular reader. In 1978 it was published in book form as “The Craft of Photography”, and was one of the finest introductions to advanced photography ever to appear. Even if like me you never now go into a darkroom with intent it remains a book worth reading.