More Germany – Neumünster

We (myself and Linda who you can see if you look hard in the picture above) were in Germany over the period including Remembrance Day, when for at least for couple of weeks beforehand it seems to be increasingly obligatory to wear a poppy in the UK.

I’ve seen over the years a change in the way we treat annual remembrance and I think it has become far more celebratory and militaristic than in my youth, when “at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month” the traffic still pulled to the side of the road for two minutes of national silence. The silence and the thoughts surrounding it was then the main event, while now it seems to be more an occasion for military parades.

I think the changes are linked to there being fewer and fewer people remaining who actually fought in the two world wars. Certainly many of those who survived the ‘Great War’ (in which my own father took a very minor role) had a huge sense of its futility and a longing for peace. But they are no longer with us. Television  has also played its part – while back then people took part, both in the silence and in local events on the Sunday, now more just watch the major parade in Whitehall, complete with its BBC commentary.

Back when I was standing shivering in my Boy Scout shorts at the local war memorial at least we sometimes got to hear first-hand what some of those who had actually been Desert Rats or taken part in the D-Day landings really thought and felt, often in terms that the BBC  would still not deem suitable for broadcast. Sacrifice was remembered, celebrated but not glorified.

The silence on the anniversary of the Armistice which ended the ‘Great War’ in 1981 is a Commonwealth event which began in 1919 when King George V took up the suggestion of an Australian journalist and made a proclamation calling for perfect stillness so that “thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this particular anniversary isn’t observed in Germany, but the Sunday closest to November 16 is observed as a national day of mourning, with church services and the laying of wreaths on monuments to those who died in the two world wars, like that above. But we saw no parades or signs of militarism. Perhaps it’s healthier for nations to lose wars than win them, though I think we needed fight to defeat the fascists.

We arrived at the town hall in Neumünster a little after 11am on the 11th November and were surprised to find we had just missed the start of an event outside. We’d heard a band before we’d seen anything and I’d rushed around the corner, but they were marching off by the time I came close. They stopped in the yard outside the entrance to the main hall and I quickly took a few pictures of the carnival fools on their way inside for an important event in their annual carnival. I read about it later in the local newspaper, but didn’t entirely understand, but I think it was the crowning of the carnival king and queen for the year.

It was here I came across one of the limitations of the Fuji X-E1 for covering such events. I’d smiled at the two ladies dressed as witches and raised the camera and framed the picture, then found I couldn’t take a picture, but had to wait for what seemed like ages until the camera had finished writing to the card. Fortunately they waited long enough before going inside for me to quickly make a couple of exposures.

But apart from this, the Fuji worked well, and the technical quality of the images is outstanding.  It’s a great camera and easy on the shoulder.

Neumünster is an interesting town, and one which became an important centre for textile manufacture in the late nineteenth century. From the tourist information centre we picked up the free booklet with a trail around the town. We followed it around though not necessarily in the right order and with some detours, but you can find pictures of most of the sights it points on in German Holiday, as well as others more interesting to me on its route.

It seems a good example of a town guide (though I had to rely on Linda to translate it from German), or at least it reflects my interests in the former industries and the flowering of architecture the wealth from them produced in the twenty or so years before that Great War. And you can mention the wars in Germany now, though probably its best to keep quiet about that World Cup. And football in general given England’s performances in recent years.


One of Neumünster’s ‘Historic Buildings’, N0. 9 on the town trail
Among the 40 or so sites of which Neumünster is proud is its only remaining cast iron urinal, painted in an attractive green; now closed for business (or rather replaced by a nearby public toilet.) It was surrounded by temporary fencing, and I took the picture poking my lens through this. Presumably it will soon be renovated and opened for public viewing if not use. There is a little flare at the top as the only possible viewpoint was with the sun shining more or less directly into the lens. I’ve reduced it in the image above, but at the expense of getting the upper parts too dark, too dull and with a slight shift towards blue.  If I ever need to print the image I’ll re-work it more carefully.

Given the textile history of the place (and it now has a fine new building to house its textile museum – which we didn’t visit this time), surely some guerilla knitting was inevitable, and we found some, as you’ll find if you look through the whole set. The old textile museum was certainly worth a visit and I remember particularly enjoyed the section on the Jacquard looms, though modern museum displays can often be rather disappointing, often sacrificing information and artifacts in favour of impact. Like everyone who visits a museum is a bored twelve-year old.  I hope not.

It was particularly interested to see again the scenes of some of my favourite colour images from past visits – and to find out what colour they really are, not always too obvious from the transparencies I took at the time or the prints from them. It was a reminder again of how much truer to life digital colour is than film ever was.

I’d forgotten from the earlier visits that Neumünster got its name from the new church that was built there – now a rather old church. We hadn’t gone inside it on our previous visits, but it is beautifully kept and has a simple rather austere beauty that I admire. It’s a picture that breaks one of my normal guides – get away from the middle – in favour of one of Minor White’s ‘Three Canons’, “Let the subject generate its own composition.” Rules are of course made to be broken when it suits.

But it’s perhaps the rather odd things you come across that are more interesting – like this oddly painted swan locked away behind the glass doors to an empty shop. Or indeed the image at the top of this post.

I’ll post some more pictures from Germany in another post or two, but you can already see all that were fit to post in German Holiday.

Continue reading More Germany – Neumünster

Fuji in Germany


Moving on to the runway at Heathrow Fuji-X 18-55mm

For my trip to Germany last month I took just one camera – the Fuji X-E1 – and three lenses, the Fuji-X 18-55mm (27-83mm equiv), the Voigtlander 15mm (22.5mm eq) and the full-area fisheye Samyang 8mm. Along with a few 16Gb cards and four spare batteries and the charger.

Mostly I wanted to use a camera to photograph some family events, and the X-E1 is not a bad camera for discrete use; fairly small and quiet enough in quiet mode not to be noticeable in a room with a normal level of conversation.

The 8mm and 15mm don’t have image stabilisation, but I didn’t miss it. Possibly camera shake was lessened by the liberal application of the local beer to the photographer, along with the odd glass of Hugo, a drink I find just a little too sweet, combining prosecco, lime, mint and elderflower syrup. And there was also a rather powerful vodka-based concoction containing yoghurt. Together in moderate quantities I think these give about a two-stop advantage! But the 18-55mm has optical image stabilisation, and perhaps a few images at the longer end were sharper for it.


8mm Samyang

The Samyang is a remarkable lens, and the fact that it is a manual lens hardly matters at all on the X-E1, where there is seldom any need to focus. In fact I’d prefer to have a lock that stopped me focussing, as although for nearly everything  you can leave the lens set to infinity it is possible to focus down to 1 ft, at which point things more distant can get slightly unsharp.

One very small problem with the lens is that the camera doesn’t know the aperture in use, though of course it gives the correct exposure despite this. It’s just a little of a shock to look at the EXIF data and find you were apparently taking pictures at f1!

Most of the images with the Samyang – such as that above – were interiors in normal room lighting and I was working at its full aperture of f2.8. Even wide open it is already pretty sharp across the frame. Any lack of sharpness in these images was either from accidental shifting of the focus, subject or camera movement. And with exposures sometimes down to around 1/20s, subject movement was a real problem.

And as you can see the Samyang does give a different view. Although there is some of the normal curvature you expect from a fisheye – perhaps most obvious in the lines between walls and ceiling, the Samyang employs a different mapping to the usual equisolid projection in fisheyes.  This is the stereographic projection, which results in less distortion of objects at the edges and corners of the frame, giving the images a far more natural look. The figure at bottom left would have been noticeable distorted in a normal fisheye image, but looks almost normal here.

With other fisheyes, such as the 10.5 Nikon I’m rather fond of, its often essential to use software such as Fisheye-Hemi to give a more usable result, but correction is far less necessary with the Samyang. So you get the extreme angle without the extreme distortion. A small down-side to this is that if you do want to ‘correct’, Fish-Eye Hemi doesn’t quite get it right, though it does still generally do better than most other software I’ve tried*.


15mm Voigtlander

The Voigtlander 15mm is a great lens, but not great in poor light with its maximum aperture of f4.5 but it is relatively cheap and beautifully small. One problem is that it has a bulging front element that makes fitting a filter for protection impossible. Mine is in the old screw thread Leica mount, but you can now get the same lens in a Leica M mount, and for under £400 if you look around, a real snip compared with Leica prices. I have it fitted with a Leica M adapter and that then goes into a Fuji X adapter.  The 15mm also seldom needs focussing and the scale is generally accurate enough. I used this lens for years on Leica M and compatible bodies and its performance is fine. If there is any distortion it is never noticeable. Again for the EXIF everything appears as f1.

The 18-55mm is an f2.8 lens at the wide end, but by the time you zoom out to 55mm it is only f4, which rather reduces its utility in low light. Otherwise there was really nothing to complain about.


18-55mm Fuji-X and some laser lighting

The camera itself performed pretty adequately, particularly in low light, where most of the time I was working at ISO 3200. Increasing the Luminance noise reduction in Lightroom from my normal 27 to around 50 made the results much smoother (keeping the detail setting around my normal 20 and contrast 2.) There was significantly more colour noise than at ISO 640, but it disappeared with a ‘color’ noise reduction setting of 25.

I had no problems with the digital viewfinder in low light, but in bright conditions it was sometimes impossible to see detail. It was good enough to see which way you were pointing the camera and the limits of the frame, but hardly to see what the pictures would look like.

I really do wish Fuji could find a solution to the deep sleep mode which this camera descends into after switching itself off to save the battery. The quickest way to wake it up seems to be to switch the camera off and on again and wait the second or two for it to come back to life. By which time the picture has often flown.

Battery life is a problem too. The day we went on the most interesting visit I’d rushed out thinking we would be coming back before setting out on the main trip and I would pick up my camera bag before going out for the day. We didn’t and although I’d taken the camera, the battery was dead after the first picture or two. The camera needs a better battery level indicator too, as you only get the warning when it’s already virtually dead. Its generally necessary to take at least 3 batteries to be sure of a day’s work, and four if you are going to be busy. The batteries are supposed to last around 300 pictures, but its easy to run them down faster if you are showing people pictures etc.

Photographing at family parties as I was doing quite a lot of the while, the more interesting moments  are  often when people are moving.  I hadn’t bothered to take a separate flash, and it would have destroyed the mood at times to have used one. I did make a few images with the small unit built into the camera at a more public event when people were dancing, but wasn’t too happy with it. Its really something for emergency use only, though better than many built in flashes. Of course the flash isn’t much use with the fisheye, putting hardly any light into the corners, but it covers the 15mm surprisingly well. There is a brighter central area, but it is relatively easy to even out in Lightroom if you don’t want something of a spotlit effect.

A few minor niggles aside, I was impressed by the quality of the results, and was glad to have only a fairly light weight to carry around. The 18-55 zoom feels a little large on the camera, and for general use I think I might prefer to have perhaps a couple of prime lenses, perhaps the two pancakes (18mm and 27mm ), possibly adding the longer 55-200 zoom when a long lens was essential. Most days I’d prefer a second body too. If you are used to carting Nikons they are pretty light.

In further posts I’ll look more at the other pictures I took in Germany, and perhaps also about making use of the video mode on the Fuji X-E1.

*I think you could possibly use the free Panorama Tools if you could work out how to do it. I’ve got the best results by taking the image into PtGui and converting it to Mercator projection, trimming the output to give a rectangle and then resizing that to 3:2 aspect ratio, but that seems a lot of work and the difference is really quite small.

Continue reading Fuji in Germany

Zombie Time

I rather like the zombies. Not that they are cuddly, but there are nice contradictions inherent in the idea and execution and I think it’s a pretty harmless bit of fun that adds colour to the season.

Zombies are of course with us all year, but they come out onto the streets mainly around Halloween, though it has none of the religious significance of the Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations which I’d love to see. If only we had these in London. Well, being the most multicultural city in the world, probably we do, and perhaps writing this will get me an invitation for next year!

I first met the Zombies in 2006, when their meeting place was the Ben Crouch pub, named and gothically themed after the infamous London bodysnatcher who ran a very effectively enforced monopoly of illegal supply of corpses to the surgeons of Barts and other London hospitals almost 200 years ago. It was a curious place I’d visited a few times before, though best avoided on the 2nd Thursday of each month when it was the haunt of the London Vampire group. Though it looked like a cheap plastic horror-movie set and served cocktails in steaming test-tubes it also had a couple of reasonably priced (for the area) real beers on the hand pumps, and was a handy from the even faker and more hellish commerce of Oxford St.


It was here that London’s third annual ‘Crawl Of The Dead’ was due to start, though not before we had time for a little (or in some cases rather a lot) of refreshment. They staggered out and made their way to Oxford St, where the zombies were considerably more lifelike than the shoppers, so intent on consuming that the staggering bloodstained group screaming for brains hardly caused a single head to turn.

In 2009, the Ben Crouch was converted to an entirely unmemorable ‘gastro pub’, and after a single visit I was clear I would never darken its doors again. I doubt the vampires would still be welcome, perhaps preferring the ‘London Stone’ at Cannon St. Though in  2007 the zombies had chosen to start at Ye Olde London, not a place to linger (and not that old as a pub, but until 1867 it was more famous as the ‘London Coffee House’) and wandered across the Millenium Bridge to Southwark, south of the river, and were never heard of again.

In more recent years, the Zombies have returned to the West End, and in 2011 I photographed them close to Piccadilly Circus and in Leicester Square. Last year they started near Waterloo, but soon made for the Jubilee Bridge, and I left them on the Embankment heading towards Trafalgar Square.

This year they were back in Soho, with the LoNdOn ZoMbIE WaLk VII starting at Waxy O’Connors, another curiously themed pub, though one I’d usually avoid, if only for its confusing layout. This year I’d gone early and had time to take quite a few photos in the pub (and during the zombie fag breaks outside the Wardour St back entrance.)

The pub doesn’t have suitable ceilings for bounce flash, and the lighting varies from dim to non-existent. I did manage a few pictures without flash at ISO 3200, but it was only really viable in a small area lit by a large TV screen, where a few were watching football.

It was so dark that neither the D800E or the D700 would focus reliably without the focus assist light, and for some reason that wasn’t working on either camera. It’s a mystery that is dealt with on page 286 of the D800 manual, which surprisingly I wasn’t carrying at the time and would not have been able to read in the dark could I have found it. Helpfully it is listed in the index not under ‘F’, ‘A’ or ‘L’ but ‘B’.

To get it to work you need to select autofocus mode AF-S, AND either choose the area mode ‘Auto Area AF’ OR select the centre focus point.

Though it isn’t quite as simple as this. You also need to read and digest page 377, which I think tells you it doesn’t work for focal lengths less than 24mm, and at various close distances depending on the lens. When using an ‘optional flash unit’ such as the SB800 I had in the hot shoe, you need also to look at the diagrams and text on page 385, which I’m not sure I entirely understand.

The manual does helpfully tells you that when focus assist is off, ‘The camera may not be able to focus using autofocus when lighting is poor’. Too true, but I didn’t need the manual to tell me that.

I’ve previously ranted about the inscrutable nature of setting the various focus modes of the D800E and won’t repeat that. Working as I had to much of the time on manual focus in near darkness isn’t ideal, though with the flash and working at close distances I could use a small aperture to give me the depth of field I needed – most of the interior pictures were at around f10. I didn’t want to add motion blur, so the shutter speed was 1/60 or 1/80. There was enough light bouncing around together with the ambient to avoid black backgrounds.

Of course outside every pub now you’ll find a small group of smokers, banished from the interior while they soothe their addiction, and zombies are no exception. Here there was a little more light, though it wasn’t a bright day, and I could work happily at ISO 1600. The zombie police arrived too.

By the time the crowd of zombies staggered up the steps and on to the street to make their unsteady way to the next pub on the circuit it was time for me to leave to photograph elsewhere.  But I’d already taken my pictures.

LoNdOn ZoMbIE WaLk VII
Continue reading Zombie Time

L’Oeil de la Photographie

I was very pleased when L’Oeil de la Photographie was announced in October, produced by the former editors of Le Journal de la Photographie, a daily blog of short articles on photographers and photography which was closed by its proprietor a month before, presumably because this free resource wasn’t making enough money.  You can view the site in English or French as you prefer.

I’d looked forward to having a quick look through their free mailing every day, even though there were often days when nothing really caught my interest, and two months ago these postings resumed.

Yesterday’s was one I particularly enjoyed and spent some time looking at the splendid collection of pictures by Anders Petersen, along with some perhaps too brief comments on each of the sections of work, put together for L’Oeil  by Anne Biroleau, the curator of the show of his work at the Site Richelieu of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in the rue Vivienne in Paris,  Anders Petersen [photographies], which continues until February 2nd 2014.

Other commitments meant I was unable to get to Paris Photo this year, and in the past there has always been less happening in the ‘odd’ years, but for 2013 there does seem to have been rather more than before, and I’m sorry to have missed it.

Also currently on show in Paris at Galerie Vu until January 11 2014 is a more recent project by Petersen, To Belong, made at a village near Modena in Italy called Finale Emilia, in the aftermath of the earthquakes in the region in 2012.

I can’t at the moment find a way to subscribe to the daily e-mails from ‘The Eye of Photography‘, nor can my RSS reader find a feed on the site.

 

 

 

 

 

The Cost of Coal

More fine work by Ami Vitale in slide shows for the Sierra Club multimedia web site ‘The Cost of Coal‘, with sections on West Virginia, Michigan and Nevada.

Its a presentation that brings home the real cost of coal in terms of the health of the people who live in these areas. Sierra‘s executive editor Steve Hawk and photographer Ami Vitale

“spent about a month on the road, talking to people on porches in West Virginia, at playgrounds near Detroit, and in darkened single-wides in the Nevada desert. Our concept was to show how coal damages lives in all three phases of its energy-generating cycle: when it’s extracted, when it’s burned, and when the leftover waste is discarded. DIG, BURN, DUMP. That was the title we’d envisioned.

But we kept hearing a different phrase, from all quarters. First, from defiant Donna Branham in Appalachia, whose once tight-knit family atomized after a mountaintop-removal mine shuttered her hometown: “They always talk about the cost of coal. I can tell you the true cost of that lump of coal. It cost my family.”

Coal as the web site says is truly “a dirty industry” and one that is supported in the US by massive lobbying. Companies like those owned by the Koch brothers put massive amounts into lobbying (though they make more from oil, another polluting fossil fuel)  They are reported as putting “more than $20 million on lobbying in 2008 and $12.3 million in 2009” and were named as the US’s “most prominent funders of efforts to prevent curbs on fossil-fuel burning” by Los Angeles Times reporter Margot Roosevelt.

Fracking and oil from tar sands are other examples of fossil fuel extraction that is causing massive environmental damage, and of course while the extraction has terrible local effects, the use of these fuels which generate large amounts of carbon dioxide is a global disaster. The results seem increasingly likely to be catastrophic, perhaps terminally so for our civilisation.

The Beyond Coal campaign by the Sierra Club states clearly:

Coal is an outdated, backward, and dirty 19th-century technology.

Not only is coal burning responsible for one third of US carbon emissions—the main contributor to climate disruption—but it is also making us sick, leading to as many as 13,000 premature deaths every year and more than $100 billion in annual health costs.

The Beyond Coal campaign’s main objective is to replace dirty coal with clean energy by mobilizing grassroots activists in local communities to advocate for the retirement of old and outdated coal plants and to prevent new coal plants from being built.

It aims to close a third of the US’s 500 coal fired power stations by 2020, replacing them “by clean energy solutions such as wind, solar, and geothermal” and wants to keep  “coal in the ground in places like Appalachia and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.” It’s literally vital that we cut carbon emissions drastically.

I’ve not photographed the environmental destruction caused by opencast mining in the UK at sites such as Ffos-y-Fran in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, though long ago I did photograph some of the disused deep mines there, closed not because of the pollution but because we could get cheaper coal from overseas. And more recently I’ve photographed a number of protests in London related to dirty coal, and mining and power generation using coal.

This was a protest on April 1 2008, dubbed ‘Fossil Fools Day’ against the company that owns the open cast mine at Merthyr.

And in 2011 there was a protest against the activities of the Koch Brothers outside their London offices, though it was too windy that day to put up the giant banner – which was used a couple of months later at the US embassy.

and it was used again for another protest outside their offices the following year:

when the Koch brothers were also with the protesters for a very cold open-top bus tour across the city to the US embassy.

Continue reading The Cost of Coal

October Buses

My last two stories for October came along together – in best London bus tradition – on a Thursday evening on the last day of the month.

Probably I should have stayed at the first event, where a small crowd was picketing London University’s Senate House against the invitation to speak at a meeting there given to former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, a man described as a para-military drug gang leader responsible for a ‘dirty war’ against the people of Colombia, responsible for the deaths of thousands and the internal displacement of millions of Colombians. The BBC call him a ‘tough conservative’ whose ‘ political life has been dominated by the desire to rid the country of the rebels who killed his father 20 years ago.’ The opposition in Colombia call Uribe the ‘Vulture of Death‘. He has condemned the efforts by his more reasonable successor to negotiate with the FARC rebels which currently look likely to reach a successful conclusion.

I photographed the protesters moving in to the area in front of the main entrance under Senate House. It’s fairly well lit and for most of the pictures I was able to work at ISO3200 without flash, resorting to flash only when I wanted to be sure of stopping a little action – you can see the pictures at Protest Against Colombian ‘Vulture of Death. Mostly I used aperture priority on the 16-35mm, stopping it down around half a stop from wide open – though that really isn’t necessary with this lens.

But I thought it unlikely that they would actually enter Senate House itself, and that almost certainly Uribe would be brought in, probably with a considerable entourage of bodyguards, by one of several other entrances, and I felt that little more would happen.

I decided I could leave Senate House and catch a bus to Kensington, where a protest calling for the release of the Greenpeace Arctic 30 was taking place close to the Russian embassy. This is one of several embassies in a private road close to Kensington Palace where protests (and photography) are forbidden, and the protests take place a short distance away across the busy Notting Hill Gate, opposite one of the embassy outposts.

Travelling by bus in London in the rush hour is seldom a good idea. My journey started well as the 390 arrived just as I reached the stop and I jumped on, but it was soon caught in the Oxford St traffic jam, moving in fits and stops at around walking pace. Around Bond St the announcement came that the bus would terminate at Marble Arch, and I jumped up and ran down the stairs to get off at the stop before and wait for the next service in the right direction.

This was a good move, as when my bus got to Marble Arch there was a large crowd waiting for it, and room for only a few. The bus crawled along the Bayswater Road and eventually brought me to the stop opposite the protest. The 3 mile journey had taken roughly the same time as I could have walked it. I should have taken the tube – even with a longer walk to the station at each end I would have saved 20 minutes. But fortunately (as I’d guessed) it didn’t really matter – this was a static protest and still in full swing when I arrived.

The protest pen here is perhaps one of the darkest places on a main road in central London. I took a few pictures without flash at ISO 3200, but it was clear that I was going to need flash.

Again I was working with Aperture priority, setting the aperture at f5.0, though since I’d also set the minimum shutter speed to 1/80 I might just as well have used manual, and I think all the images are at f5.0, 1/80s. At ISO 3200 there was generally just enough ambient to show the background, leaving it looking like it was night and avoiding burn out in a bright doorway and the lighting on a nearby pub. The actual level of the ambient light did change a little with the light from the passing traffic.


I particularly wanted pictures of the two journalists – Keiron Bryan from the UK

In front of the protest was a display of black and white photographs of around half of the Arctic 30, all with wide black borders, and pictures of the others were held up by the protesters. All that white did upset the metering a little, and I was working with an exposure bias of -1 EV. For the wide-angle you need to use the built-in diffuser to get fairly even coverage, and I often use the small built-in white reflector with the flash head angled up at 45 degrees too.  For those pictures where I was much closer to some of the photographs than the others I tried to even out the lighting a little by twisting the flash head off-centre away from them, making use of the fall-off, though even so some compensation was needed in post-processing.


and Russian freelance photographer Denis Sinyakov, who I’d just written about.

I’ve seen some other pictures taken of the event that show all the things about direct flash that I don’t like, the flatness and black backgrounds. It doesn’t have to be like this, and while I like to keep flash simple – one flash in the hotshoe – it isn’t hard to do considerably better. I’m sure I could improve on what I do by taking flash off the camera, using multiple flashes and so on (like the Strobist) but I’m reasonably happy with these results – more at Russia, Free Greenpeace Arctic 30.

My decision to leave Senate House was probably a bad one. The protesters did manage to get inside, and protested in the lecture theatre where Aribe was speaking. If I’d stayed I might have got some better pictures. But then I wouldn’t have covered the Arctic 30 protest. I’ve not yet worked out how to be in two places at once, or mastered time travel, though I was accused of being ‘Dr Who’ the other day when friends I’d been with earlier turned up at a protest to find I’d beaten them there.

And yes, there were two cows on the top deck of the bus on my way home.

Continue reading October Buses

Koudelka Cop-out?

Can you photograph something as contentious as the Israeli “separation wall” in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and refuse to discuss the politics?  It’s a question that has aroused debate following the publication of a two-part interview with Josef Koudelka on the New York Times Lens blog on the publication of his new book “Wall: Israeli and Palestinian Landscapes“, images made in 2008-2012.

There is a fine introduction to the controversy by Henry Norr on Mondoweiss, which also looks at the slowness of the NY Times to correct an error of fact about the wall which Norr pointed out on pubication, but took much prodding and nine days for the paper to admit and correct. Norr asks why it should take so long and require a  “great deal of consultation” to correct a simple fact. If the NY Times can’t get facts right, who can? And what business does it have publishing a newspaper?

Norr gives the links to the Lens posts, but it is worth reading his piece before you go to them, so I won’t post them here. But the problems in the interview – at least as printed by the NY Times – are discussed in some detail in another post he refers to, The Moral And Intellectual Cowardice Of Josef Koudelka, written by photographer Asim Rafiqui (you can see his Idea of India online.)  He also links to a post by a Nazareth based prize-winning journalist, Jonathan Cook, A photographer who obscures the victims, who takes up Rafiqui’s complaint.

Cook makes the point :

By all accounts the photographs are an unequivocal indictment of Israel’s imprisonment of the Palestinians. If only the same could be said of his interview.

and Norr too makes the point that much of the details of the situation are given in the book (if in very small print) along with the photographs (though he doubts if many will read them.)

Like Rafiqui I’m an admirer of Koudelka’s work (his Magnum portfolio has a good selection up to 2004) and I also find the evasive NY Times interview rather shocking.

Addition:

I wrote this yesterday, here is another post on the issue I’ve just seen:
http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/koudelka-interview-follow-up-2.html

It seems fairly clear to me that the interview reflects a lack of integrity at the New York Times rather than the “cowardice of Josef Koudelka”.  As Jim Johnson writes:

‘Although I would need to inquire further, the problems seem to lie primarily with editorial decisions at The Times rather than with Koudelka.’

I won’t be Xmas Shopping at John Lewis

It was kind of by accident that I found myself photographing a protest by the IWGB cleaners and RMT drivers actually inside John Lewis’s flagship store in London’s Oxford St. I’d had a phone call earlier in the week telling me there was going to be a protest, but there were few details, and I’d expected it to be on the pavement outside.

I wasn’t surprised when I turned up on time and there was no sign of anything happening. Some  protests seldom start on time and I’ve often been the first to arrive, so I hung around on the corner outside the store where I thought I’d be likely to see them and waited, keeping my eyes open.

Oxford St is pretty busy on a Saturday afternoon even two months before Christmas (the decorations were up in the shops), and a lot of people walked past, but still no protest. But finally I saw a familiar figure approaching and walked up behind him. “Fifth floor” he told me out of the side of his mouth and I followed, a few paces behind, up the series of elevators, as he made his way to the restaurant area. It did rather feel like something out of a spy movie. I lost him again there, looking away for a couple of seconds as a group of people came between us, and spent a rather frantic half minute or so searching the whole eating area until I came upon him again, now with a group of cleaners, and getting out flags and banners for the protest.

Until now I’d been trying hard to look inconspicuous, as if that large black bag on my shoulder wasn’t a camera bag and I wasn’t a photographer, but now it was time to get out a camera. I decided that working inside the store I would only need the wide-angle 16-35mm on the D700, and set that to ISO 3200. There would be quite a lot of movement and the light levels in parts are quite low – the first pictures I made were around 1/60 f4, but the lighting got better when we moved out into the main part of the store, and there exposures around 1/125 at f5.6 were typical.

Apart from their lack of support for the cleaners and the victimisation of staff who have supported them, the John Lewis Partnership are in many ways an admirable organisation, generally treating their direct employees – or rather ‘partners’ – well, and they get a share of the profits as a considerable annual bonus. But the low paid workers in the store such as the cleaners are not employed by JLP, but come in on a contract from another employer who cuts costs by low pay and poor conditions. Somehow the JLP management think it isn’t appropriate for them to insist that people who work for them in the same shop – or in the lorries that make their deliveries are treated fairly. ‘Never knowingly undersold‘ is the JLP slogan but they can add to that ‘Never caring about how the low paid workers we depend on are treated.’

But JLP staff handled the protest very professionally and simply stood back and let it take its course, applying a little persuasion to the protesters to leave, encouraging them to make their way down the escalators. One person who tried to physically object to the protesters was quickly moved away by security. I wasn’t hassled in any way, and my main problem was avoiding knocking into any of the shop displays as I took pictures. At times I did think of myself as an elephant in a china store.

It was on the escalators that I took some of my favourite images, including one of the protesters making their way down and the people looking up at them, in the foreground a woman blowing a red vuvuzela. At first I was a little disappointed that this horn wasn’t in focus, but I don’t think it matters, and may even be preferable – and at 1/100 f4 it wasn’t possible in any case. Even at 16mm focal length depth of field has its limits. The ‘hyperfocal distance’ is around 7 ft, so to get the figures on the ground floor sharp it was impossible to have anything less than 3’6″ sharp too. Of course I didn’t have time to look it up on the spot, things were moving far too fast. That I got it about right can probably be put down to the camera’s autofocus system and a bit of luck. But I was pleased I was using the D700.

Nikon changed the way you control focus between the D700 and the D800, and I think rather for the worse. With the D700 you have a three-position switch at the left of the lens for focus mode – C, S, M (continuous, single and manual) and another 3 position switch on the camera back for autofocus area mode – single point, dynamic area and auto area.

For fast changing situations like this I generally use S mode and auto area. On shutter half-press, this puts little red rectangles briefly on the areas chosen for focus, allowing you to decide if the camera has got it right. If not I try again, possibly with a slight movement of the camera. Usually it works, though it can sometimes get too fixated on near objects in the frame. Its easy and fast then to use to rear of camera switch to change to dynamic area or single point (which both work the same in S mode.) You don’t need to think about it and can do it pretty well without looking. And change back equally easily.

On the D800/D800E, forget about changing focus mode in a hurry. The switch on the front of the camera only switches between auto and manual. There is no switch on the back of the camera. To change from C to S or between area modes you have to press the little button in the centre of the AF/M switch, look at the LCD screen and use the control dials. Probably you will need to read the manual too! Why, Nikon, Why?  I think the change was to enable Nikon to give the user more control over exactly how the autofocus works, but it does so at the expense of usability. Surely the most important thing in a camera. Stick the more fancy focus bits on a menu – we don’t really need them when we are working.

I don’t think the protesters actually intended to go down into the basement, but its always hard to know which floor you have got to.  I think some stores deliberately hide the ground floor to stop shoppers escaping. We wandered around there, eventually finding the up escalator and make our way to the ground floor, where there was time for a short rally before the police arrived around 20 minutes after the protest started and told the protesters that the management had requested them to leave and they would be committing an offence unless they did so. And so, rather slowly, they did, and I photographed them coming out of the store and continuing their protest on the crowded pavement outside.

By now it was around 5.30pm and getting dark, and in most areas darker than inside the store (it looks lighter in the photographs than it actually was.) I took a few pictures using flash, but wasn’t happy with them, and went back to working by available light, still at ISO 3200.

A couple of weeks later I met some of the protesters again, this time in a protest outside John Lewis on Oxford St. One of them had earlier gone inside with a small child, intent on buying a toy for them and had been recognised and asked to leave. It seemed rather petty.

More pictures – and more about the protest – at Cleaners Invade John Lewis Oxford Street.

Continue reading I won’t be Xmas Shopping at John Lewis

Friends & Families

There are some events where I become more emotionally involved than others, and the annual United Families and Friends Campaign procession to remember all those who have died in the custody of police or prison officers, in immigration detention or psychiatric hospitals, held on the last Saturday in October, is one of them.

The first of these marches I photographed was in 2000, but it was in 2003 that I remember finding tears streaming down my face as I took pictures as I photographed Pauline Campbell speaking about her daughter Sarah who had died died in Styal prison
because the prison authorities and staff simply would not recognise her condition. It hit me hard partly because she was an impressive speaker, but perhaps more because she came from a not dissimilar background, around my age and working (as I was still part-time) in FE. Her daughter was just a few years younger than my sons.


Pauline Campbell speaking in 2003

She became a full-time campaigner for the cause of women in prison, working with organisations including the Howard League for Penal Reform (she became a trustee) and in 2005 was awarded the individual award of the Emma Humphreys memorial prize organisation, for “highlighting the distressing reality of women’s lives and deaths in prison”. Later I got to know her better, particularly after I photographed her trying to throw herself in front of prison vans at Holloway on a cold winter night, and received many e-mails from her encouraging me in my work. But a few months later she became another victim, found dead beside her daughter’s grave.

I’ve come to know others who have lost sons or brothers or other friends and relatives over the years, and have photographed some of them on many occasions as well as this annual march. It is still a very emotional event for me as well as for them. I’m not sure how this affects my photography, but perhaps it makes me try harder to capture their emotions.


Stephanie Lightfoot-Bennet talks about the killing of her twin brother Leon Patterson by Manchester police in 1992


His sister Jo holds a picture of Thomas Orchard, killed by police in Exeter in 2012


Ricky Bishop was killed in Brixton Police Station in 2001 – his sister speaks about the failure to prosecute the 12 officers involved


Ajibola Lewis, whose son Olaseni Lewis died after being restrained by police at Bethlem Royal Hospital in 2010


Marcia Rigg holds a leaflet about her brother Sean Rigg, killed by police in Brixton Police Station in 2008


Carole Duggan, Mark Duggan’s aunt with two of his children.

I’ve written in the past about a number of these cases, and you can find more about them on the 4WardEver UK  web site.

Relatively few of these custody deaths are properly investigated, and it was only the consistent and determined campaigning by the Rigg family that led to an inquest jury coming to the conclusion that the police had used “unsuitable and unnecessary force” on him, that officers failed to uphold his basic rights and that the failings of the police “more than minimally” contributed to his death.  The inquest on Mark Duggan currently taking place has already revealed many inconsistencies in the police evidence, which together with that from other eye-witnesses make it hard to avoid the conclusion that his death was the kind of extra-judicial execution that we would condemn if it happened in other countries.

More pictures at United Families & Friends Remember Killed.

Continue reading Friends & Families

Film Night

I’ve not watched all the 16 films that are listed in 16 Photography Documentaries every Street Photographer should watch on the Street View Photography site, though there are some that I have seen. Most of the 16 can be found on YouTube, although a few are only available on DVD.

Perhaps I’ll find myself some spare time over Christmas to watch some of the others, although I usually keep pretty busy, and I find it hard to just sit and watch, especially for the longer films.  Daido Moriyama: Near Equal is 1hr 24 minutes, and  so far I’ve just dipped into it at a few points, so I can’t tell you if it is worth watching as a whole. Picking up his ‘Shinjuku 19XX-20-XX‘ from my bookshelves and looking through a few pages is rather more satisfying if I only have a few minutes to spare. But if you don’t have the book (or others with his work – and there are some available more cheaply), YouTube is considerably cheaper.

And while film is seldom a good medium for looking at photography, it can be good at talking about it, and the film features the photographer and  a number of other people (fortunately with subtitles for people like me whose Japanese is non-existent.)

I’ve never considered myself a ‘street photographer’, a term which always seems to me to lack any real meaning, though usually I work on the streets, and certainly see my own work as being a part of that great body of photography that was celebrated in ‘Bystander: A History of Street Photography‘, a book that annexed at least half the history of photography to its presumed genre (as you can appreciate from this speed-reading video.)  I don’t think any of those included in the original publication in 1994 – Atget, Stieglitz, Strand, Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Kertesz, Lartigue, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and more –  called themselves street photographers either.

I don’t have the Eggleston DVD mentioned in this feature. but I did put another one on my Christmas list a couple of years ago, William Eggleston Photographer, a Reiner Holzemer film (extended trailer here) made in cooperation with the William Eggleston Trust, and I might watch that again.  And since people never know what to get me for Christmas, I might just search for a few more films I could add to put on a list for this year.