ASX Eikoh Hosoe

A  video on ASX of Eikoh Hosoe, a leading figure in Japanese photography talking about his work and inspirations at the launch of the exhibition ‘Eikoh Hosoe: theatre of memory’ at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2011 brought back some fond memories from meeting him in 2005.

We both had shows as a part of the first FotoArtFestival in Bielsko-Biala in Poland, which brought together work by 25 photographers from 25 countries around the world along with a group show of Polish  photoreportage of the 1970s and 80s.  It was I think a deliberately eclectic selection, including different types of photography and photographers of all ages, including a few no longer living – Inge Morath, Russian war photographer Robert Diament and Mario Giacomelli, and a mixture of well-known names and relatively unknown photographers including me.

Many of those still living had come in person to the festival to talk about their own work, and in addition I’d offered to give a couple of lectures – one on the work two rather different British photographers who had influenced me, Tony Ray Jones and Raymond Moore, both of whom were more or less unknown in Poland at the time (and Moore still is, largely because his work is still inaccessible, but Ray Jones was featured in a festival at nearby Krakow a couple of years later), and the other on the work of some of my photographer friends in London. It was something of a disappointment that neither Boris Mikhajlov and Malick Sidibe were able to attend, but great to meet the others – including Eikoh Hosoe, certainly the best known of those present.

Here’s what ASX says about him:

“Eikoh Hosoe was born in Yonezawa, Yamagata in 1933 and graduated from Tokyo College of Photography in 1951. He exhibited in his first solo show in 1956 and has since established himself as an internationally acclaimed photographer. Hosoe’s figures have a Surrealist quality that is startlingly intimate, yet also render the flesh abstract and strange.”

I don’t think he was present for the initial press conference, an interesting event for me when I found myself under attack for Britain’s colonial past by one of the other photographers who had been liberally enjoying the local hospitality – I’d decided myself that the only way to survive was never to drink vodka, a resolution I think I almost managed to keep. In an exchange (which I don’t think was entirely followed by the local press) I told him that those very same people who had screwed his ancestors had liberally screwed mine too, and after a little argument we became good friends – and afterwards I helped him down the street to another bar along with some of the other photographers.


Eikoh Hosoe, Jutka Kovacs and Stefan Bremer at the reception in the castle

It was later after a grand opening ceremony with projections of the our images to a fantastic live piano accompaniment by Janusz Kohut that I first met Eikoh as we both made our way out into the foyer on the way to a party at the castle. I went up to him and told him how much I liked his work and that I’d been an admirer of his work and had written about it – it must have been a rather embarrassing moment but he remained charming and extremely courteous.


Eikoh Hosoe, Ami Vitale and me at the meeting: photo by Jutka Kovacs

Being 72 at the time (born in 1933) he didn’t join the group of photographers who went to a local bar when the wine ran out (there was still vodka, but I expect he needed some rest.) But probably his head was rather clearer than most of us the following morning for the start of the ‘author sessions’ where the photographers talked about their work, and clearly took a great interest.

The next day the sessions all overran, and everyone decided a break was needed before my rather long performance, talking about my own work as well as the two short lectures, though I’d rather have got on with it. A group of the photographers went together for a pizza, and took him along with us. A beer or two helped to steady my nerves too, and we all indulged in taking silly pictures of each other as we waited for the food to come.

The pink phone was the only camera Eikoh Hosoe had with him, and I think it was a new toy, Fortunately someone was able to show him how to see the pictures he had been taking (which he hadn’t found how to do) and above you can see his reaction.

Later, after my talk, and another by Stefan Bremer, it was his turn to present work as the finale of the event. The light in the large hall came from the computer projector, and Hosoe moved into it on various occasions to talk about the work. I tried hard to catch him at just the right moment, and I think the image below was my best attempt before the battery on the small compact Canon Ixus ran out.


Eikoe Hosoe makes a point about one of his pictures

You can see a good selection of Hosoe’s work at the Howard Greenberg Gallery site. There are some more pictures with him in – as well as many others – in the FotoArtFestival Diary I wrote when I was in Poland, and I’m pleased to see that at least some of the links to the Wayback Machine with the posts I wrote at the time for About.com are now working again.

Continue reading ASX Eikoh Hosoe

Police Watch

I try not to get obsessive about the police. We need a police force of some kind, and some of the things that they do I’m thankful for, even though there are other things that I condemn. I’ve been rather glad that they were there when people have threatened to smash my cameras as I photographed them, or when a right wing crowd moved rather menacingly towards me. And there have been many other occasions when they’ve acted sensibly and professionally, as well as those others where their actions seem arbitrary and senseless. And at times downright criminal.

Of course I’ll try to photograph them when they behave badly, but equally I do my best to photograph when others attack them. But mostly I’m not at events to photograph the police except as they get themselves involved with those taking part.

But I was photographing a protest Against Undercover Police in Protests which was about police behaving badly. Police posing as protesters, living a life undercover infiltrating groups involved in legal protest. At times trying to persuade other protesters to engage in illegal acts, or starting and encouraging trouble at otherwise peaceful protests. Pretending to fall in love with other protesters – and some fathering children by them. Taking the names of dead children to produce fake identities.

Other operations like deliberately setting out to try and discredit witnesses such as Duwayne Brooks; beating up people who they claim are resisting arrest; ‘restraining’ people to death; shooting unarmed people and claiming they pulled a gun when the evidence shows otherwise; lying to protect colleagues and otherwise frustrating the attempts to investigate other officers; taking bribes and illegal payments for information and so on. It is a very long list.

Of course, not all coppers are bent and despite the song, not all are bastards, but too many are and too many get away with it despite their colleagues knowing. Just as there was (and to some extent still is) institutional racism there are other institutionalised faults in the police. But at least here in the UK we expect our police to behave properly and legally – in some countries it would be virtually unthinkable. Many of us do still feel a little surprise when we find our police behaving badly.

So I didn’t feel too bad about a little photographic exaggeration when I was photographing one of the speakers at the event, talking about police surveillance and harassment. Perhaps 20 yards behind her were two police standing and watching the protest, and it seemed a good idea to use a very long  lens to make them seem rather closer.  The picture above was taken at an equivalent focal length of 45mm – a standard lens.

Changing to 168mm gives a rather different impression, of the officers being much closer and I’ve also used a lower viewpoint so the male officer seems to be looking down on the speaker – Zita Holbourne of BARAC (Black Activists Rising Against Cuts) and the PCS union.

It is perhaps a little unfair, as I don’t think these two officers were actually taking a great interest in what was happening – I didn’t see either making a single note – though they had obviously been posted there to keep an eye on things.

The protest was taking place in front of a wall of blue glass at Scotland Yard. I don’t think the police can see out through this, but I don’t know. It did reflect the protesters and it also had the police coat of arms at intervals, which I’ve brought out a little in the pictures, increasing the contrast a little.  The blue colour is significant too – the colour of the lamp which marked all police stations.

I couldn’t resist making use of that blue glass to suggest a solution to the problem of lack of police manpower. Again I’ve used a longish focal length, and have cheated a little in the post-processing, removing much but not all of the blue from the glass in the reflection at left and adjusting the contrast and brightness to almost match. It’s just a pity that I didn’t quite get the image pin-sharp – I think the focus was a little out. I needed to take it in a hurry before they noticed me and moved.

Continue reading Police Watch

Brixton Blues


A few years ago these properties were mainly in a poor state, many squatted and near derelict. Now each block is worth millions.

Nothing is what it used to be, and certainly Brixton isn’t.  First developed with large middle-class housing along the main roads out of London to the south and south-west at an easy distance from work in Westminster or the city, by the start of the 20th century it had become a largely working-class inner London area, with many of the larger houses converted to boarding houses or flats and streets of working class housing. In the 1930s it was the best shopping centre in South London, and it still has one of the best markets in London.

The London County Council and the local council built social housing in large estates around the area in the 1930s, and more followed bomb damage and slum clearance after the war. The first postwar Caribbean migrants came from Jamaica on the Empire Windrush in 1948, and were given temporary housing just up the road in the Clapham deep air-raid shelter, and they found local jobs at the nearby Labour Exchange in Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, moving out into the local boarding houses and flats, forming the nucleus of a new community in the area.

By the 1980s as well as being a centre of London’s Afro-Caribbean community, it was also a haven for white squatters, often unemployed. The area had a huge waiting list for social housing and much of the housing stock was substandard; there was very high unemployment, particularly among the black community and the crime rate was double that of any other area of London. One area was known as the ‘Frontline’,  an area the police could neither understand or control, limiting themselves to occasional skirmishes which largely served to further antagonise the local mainly black population.


Preparing for the protest. The council removed the seats that used to surround this tree because they didn’t like the kind of people who sat on them.

Iused to go there occasionally, particularly to buy surplus photographic materials from a shop just a few yards away. I’d occasionally wander down the Railton Road, perhaps go into a shop and buy a drink or snack. I even took a few pictures. Occasionally I politely refused an offer to buy what could have been (and probably was) weed as I passed a small crowd of youths.

Few were surprised when there were riots in 1981 – known by some as the ‘Brixton Uprising’.  More surprising that it hadn’t happened before and didn’t happen more often.  What was perhaps surprising were some of the stories of the solidarity between black and white people involved in defending their area, and some of the more lurid lies in the media about what was happening.

Brixton is now rather a different place, though its history gives if a certain chic for some, and it’s not too long since I looked out of a window and saw a man in the street with a gun, and even shorter that I was last offered drugs on the street.  Good transport links and its nearness to the city make it a very desirable place for young professionals. House and flat prices have soared, estate agents have taken over many of the once useful shops, and many of the once-squatted buildings – often converted into short-term lets – are now being renovated. The tenants who have little or no rights are evicted, the flats modernised and then sold or let at ridiculous prices.

There is little new social housing, and nothing affordable for those who are evicted. Even squatting is less of an option now, with recent law making squatting in residential properties a criminal offence.

Whether you choose to describe the changes as regeneration or gentrification, the consequences for many of the poorer residents of the area is the same – there is nowhere for them to live in the area once they are evicted. It is a process that is difficult to fight or even to know how to fight, as the discussion at the protest against the evictions on Rushcroft Road demonstrated. It demonstrates a lack of any concern for people involved that seems shocking in a civilised society, but we seem no longer to live in a civilised society, or at least one which is only civilised for the wealthy. As the recent report Human Development Report from the The United Nations Development Programme indicates, the UK is the most unequal society in the western world, on a par with Nigeria. Of industrialised countries only Russia is more unequal. In the UK, the poorest fifth have incomes on average one tenth of the richest fifth, and have incomes per head a third less in the US and 44% less than in the Netherlands.


This woman and child stopped for a while at the protest

And in the UK the gap is growing rapidly – twenty years ago the gap between rich and poor was only 6.7 times – it has increase by around 50% over the last 20 years. It isn’t surprising that there are problems in the poorer areas of the country, only that in general the poor are so passive about it most of the time.  Of course the circuses are being trowled on thick – Olympics, Royal Wedding, Royal Jubilee, Royal Birth, a new Dr Who… – but the bread is getting thin.


People listened intently to the discussion once it got going

It wasn’t an easy event to photograph for various reasons. There was an awful lot of frustration in the air, and a certain negativity towards photographers, and really not very much happening.

There were disturbances in Brixton following the events in Tottenham over the shooting of Mark Duggan a couple of years ago, but our ‘riots’ then were relatively mild and didn’t spread a great deal. But events like these evictions do make me feel that a spring is slowly being wound up that at some point may lead to truly major insurrection. It didn’t seem likely in the former Soviet Union before it happened, nor in Libya or Egypt, but perhaps one day we will have a truly British (or, post-devolution an English and Welsh) Spring. Though I sincerely hope it won’t be another Syria.

I felt depressed as I left Windrush Square, with such rather gloomy thoughts in my mind, and was even more depressed on crossing Coldharbour Lane as I stopped to read the posters of a group of Black Hebrew Israelites or Black Jews. As I stood there the preacher started to attack a black woman passing by – her sin according to him that she was with a white man. She stood her ground and argued against this nonsense, and I felt like congratulating her. But I moved away, not wanting to get involved, and I felt bad about it.

More pictures from Brixton at Brixton Protests Gentrification & Evictions.  Earlier in the day I photographed the annual International Brigade Commemoration in Waterloo, a reminder of the commitment and sacrifice of many in the 1930s.
Continue reading Brixton Blues

Frederick Sommer

I meant to write earlier about a show that closes today, though since it was showing at the US National Gallery of Art, Washington, probably few of us would have gone to see it had I posted in time. Though of course I’m sure all of my readers within easy distance of the NGA will already have seen it.

The NGA has a long history of fine big shows of photography (and another on Charles Marville coming up at the end of September 2013, followed in March 2014 by the Winogrand show from San Francisco) but A World of Bonds: Frederick Sommer’s Photography and Friendships was one of its smaller offerings, a mere “twenty-seven photographs, prints, collages, and drawings” in one room and

Frederick Sommer (1905-1999) had some interesting friends, including Edward Weston, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Charles Sheeler and Aaron Siskind and had a philosophy that very much valued the sharing of ideas, and you can see something of the influences of his friends in some of his work, and of his ideas in theirs, in particular in some  works by Weston and Siskind.

The Art Blart review perhaps best gives a flavour of the show, with some comments by a photographer who visited Sommer as well as the author’s own comments, as well as some fine reproductions of images courtesy of the NGA. For something of a different opinion you can read a review of the show in the Washington City Paper. You can also see thumbnails of 59 of his works on the NGA site, though clicking to see a larger version of any seems to return an ‘image not available’ page. To see more of his work on the web the Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation is the obvious place to go, and although the Catalogue Raisonne is still under construction it has many of his photographs already in place.

Many years ago, it was one of Sommer’s 1943 Arizona landscapes that came as a revelation to me (was it perhaps in the 1975 show at the Victoria and Albert Museum curated by Bill Brandt with Mark Haworth-Booth, ‘The Land’ – if not it surely should have been, though it was much later that Sommer gave them some images for their collection.) It made me aware of new possibilities in the photographic print and in creating a powerful image from seemingly highly detailed nothing much spread from corner to corner across the picture. It seemed to me a work that transcended conventional ideas about subject, foreground, background in favour of the whole field of view. I didn’t rush out and buy an 8×10 (or make much if any more use of the two 4×5 cameras I owned) but I think it did change the way I felt both about composition and about printing.

Later I read in Darkroom 2 (published by Lustrum Press  in 1978) about Sommer’s printing method using a ‘contour printing pack‘ , with a fine example by Emmet Gowin, Siena, Italy, 1975 Dedicated to Frederick Sommer: The Hint That is a Garden.’ Fortunately it was a book that sold fairly well at the time and is still available (along with the first volume Darkroom) second-hand at a sensible price for anyone who wants to know more about what is now largely a historic practice.

Sommer’s other work perhaps interests me less, though when I see so much of the more recent constructed art photography in galleries and publications I do so often think Sommer did it so much better years ago.

NHS 65th Birthday

I was one of the fortunate generation who grew up in the Welfare State, some of my earliest memories are of the path which led under a large Cedar of Lebanon to the clinic, where my mother took me to be weighed, measured and checked and to collect the free orange juice and (less welcome) cod liver oil.

The tree is still there, doubtless protected by a preservation order, but everything else has gone, and the NHS is rapidly being transformed into a service run for the private profit of large health companies rather than its only aim being to improve the health and welfare  of the people.

Ten years ago, after years of reasonable health, I desperately needed the NHS, and it was there for me. Nobody asked for my insurance plan or credit card details and I got the treatment I needed from dedicated and skilled professionals.

I can’t say everything was perfect – the hospital cleaning had been outsourced and two of the three hospitals in which I spent the best part of a month were filthy; there were obvious staff shortages at various levels; a glaring waste of money through the use of agency nurses and obvious inefficiencies due to poor management practices which, among other things doubled the length of my own stay in hospital – but I felt that I was in the hands of people who knew their job and were getting on with it as best they could despite some unfortunate interference from politicians (mainly but not just Tories) with no love for the system and shares in various aspects of private health care.  I’ve often felt we would get better health and education systems in this country if a condition of being in Parliament was that members and their families were obliged to make use of our national systems rather than pay as so many do for privileged treatment.

The current coalition government seems determined to undermine the NHS in any way possible and the 65th birthday seemed more of an occasion for a wake rather than celebration. So I had great sympathy with the National Health Action Party’s mock funeral procession, though I’m less convinced that the party has much hope of electoral success – except in a very few areas.

Photographically I wasn’t too happy with the results I got, partly because many of the images taken with the 16-35mm were ruined by an area of softness and flare. I think it was down to the weather, the hot afternoon sun on the black lens barrel vapourising some residual water left in the lens from our month of rain which then condensed on the less rapidly warming large chunks of glass in this heavy optic and was very slow to clear. Mostly it was hardly noticeable in the small viewfinder image, and I took quite a few pictures before realising there was a problem – and that it was inside the lens.

The above image shows it clearly because of the flare – the late afternoon sun was only just out of frame – and lens hoods are not very effective with wide-angle zooms. It also shows a second problem (even after quite a lot of post-processing) which was that the SB-800 flash was misbehaving.  It sometimes just seems to ignore all signals from the camera and fire at full power whatever, but always behaves itself when I test it! Cleaning the contacts on the flash and camera sometimes seems to help, but I think it’s something more basic.

But the 70-300mm proved useful in getting images of the speakers, though I was less good at getting down everyone’s name. Whenever I think to myself ‘I’ll remember that’ it is disastrous, and even if I record sound, names are so often not pronounced clearly and can be impossible to spell. In the absence of a decent press release I should always use a notebook and ask to check. But I didn’t.

One speaker I didn’t need to ask about, as I’d photographed her earlier in the day at Lewisham, and should Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign‘s Chair Louise Irvine chose to stand for election for the National Health Action Party I think she would have a good chance of election. The campaign held a 65th birthday party opposite the hospital at lunchtime, where I enjoyed both some chicken curry and a small slice of the impressive Lewisham Hospital cake, though again I had reason to curse that misbehaving SB800 – and this image was one of its better efforts. In the picture she is holding a blue card with a picture of Nye Bevan and the message “65 Years of the NHS – Happy Birthday – Celebrate! Organise! and Defend!’ and we need to do all three.

________________________________________________________

My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Dead End Bum Wiping

Two articles among many that relate to the future of photojournalism and documentary photography that I’ve come across in the past couple of weeks are David Hoffman‘s Dead End Streets: Photography, Protest and Social Control  and a series of questions by Charlie Campbell to the legendary Vietnam photographer Tim Page for Time World.

Tim Page’s Wikipedia entry makes interesting reading, and most of the legends about him appear to be true. His own web site contains some interesting work and together with Horst Faas he edited REQUIEM, a book and exhibition which is a memorial to the photographers who died covering conflict in Vietnam and Indochina.

Page, born in Tunbridge Wells in 1944, left England at the age of 18 to drive overland through Europe the Middle East and Asia, running out of money in Laos. He got a job with USAID and taught himself photography, becoming a stringer for  UPI and AFP.  In the Time feature, Campbell says to him

“I’ve heard you comparing a degree in photography with a degree in “bum wiping.” Any advice for budding snappers out there?

Page’s answer is typically to the point:

Don’t. Being a photojournalist now is the most fraught way of making a living. I’m no longer involved in the news, but I do other type of work. To make a living as a photographer these days is impossible. I was there the other day, and there were 100 people with cameras, video cameras and iPhones. And where are you going to sell the pictures?

Hoffman‘s essay is closely thought out and more difficult to read, looking at how the changes in media have both reduced the impact of still photographs and the ability of photographers to make a living from photographing social issues.  As he says

When I began working as a photographer a single publication fee would keep me for a week.  Now it keeps me for perhaps three hours.

Photographers now have to make several saleable images a day to make a living (I think the number is rather higher than he suggests) and no longer have time to study issues seriously and work in depth.  What perhaps he doesn’t stress enough is the influence on the nature of images that ‘saleable’ implies.

He looks briefly at the promise of democratic access of Indymedia and Demotix, two very different organisations which enable at least a limited publication of work but he says fail to allow “contributors a role in shaping the audience and the context in which the work is presented.”  While agreeing with much of his criticisms, they are surely even more true of the traditional media, with both Indymedia and Demotix allowing contributors considerably more creative freedom – the only reason I still contribute through Demotix. And, as he says “open access agencies such as these that are providing the last remaining life support for independent street photographers.” Though it’s not much of a support.

Demotix is part of Corbis, which gives some of the pictures from it a wider circulation, but in general he is correct that “neither has much of an audience.”  Work posted to my own web site or on this blog generally gets seen by perhaps five or ten times as many people as on Demotix. Some pictures from Demotix get published around the world in traditional media, and I think it has had a rather more important role for many photographers around the world who don’t have even the rather slim opportunities that remain here.

The final section of the essay is about “the forces of the state subverting and hijacking the reportage photographer with a variety of tools and techniques” and is his usual penetrating analysis of the situation, particularly as regards the police.  He also talks about the mistrust of photographers by protesters, including examples from both Climate Camp and the 2010 student protests, though surprising omitting mention of the right-wing ‘fatwas’ and violence directed at us (and I’ve been attacked at protests by people who thought I was David Hoffman, as well as others who know who I am, and been with David when we have both been subjected to threats and abuse.) But I imagine he takes that for read. It isn’t a new phenomenon for someone who was a photographer for Searchlight.

His is a piece that ends with a gloomy conclusion, and one it is difficult not to share. He writes:

Whether or not the kind of documentary photography in which I have been involved will still exist in the future is not clear…  The ecosystem that once maintained those creating socially relevant work is all but gone and it’s far from clear what, if any, new support mechanisms might take its place.  

Photojournalists are an endangered species, their numbers shrinking, and once extinct they cannot be replaced.

It’s hard in a fairly short post to give a fair summary of a long and detailed presentation such as this, and I hope not to have greatly misrepresented his opinions. It is a piece worth reading and thinking about, illustrated with some of his fine images. You can see more on his web site.

 

Independence Day

July has finally arrived for My London Diary, after some delays due to computer problems and pressure of work. I’ve already posted a couple of times about my visit to Hackney for a book launch, so the first new event in the month was SOAS Cleaners’ Independence Day at the University of London.  It was a fairly large protest for what is a relatively small institution, with a good crowd around the steps leading to the main entrance, but there wasn’t really a great deal to photograph, simply a crowd with various speakers, banners and placards.

The cleaners at SOAS get support from the students and academic and non-academic staff, with a long-running campaign for them to be directly employed by SOAS. There seems to be a very clear conflict between the principles and ethos of SOAS as an institution and the dubious employment practices involved in outsourcing work which is vital to the running of the place.

The slogan at SOAS is ‘One Workplace – One Workforce’, and the principle is that those who work there should all be treated with dignity and respect – not cheated over sick pay, pensions and holiday pay by employing them through a contractor.

My pictures are mainly about the people taking part and their placards, and there were plenty of both to add some interest. The one above had an interesting message, but a slight difference in viewpoint presented a visually more interesting picture, but one that provided me with a dilemma. Here are the two versions of it that I produced within seconds of each other:


Right face sharp


Left face sharp

Both images were taken using an equivalent focal length of 147mm in DX mode on the D800E, and at ISO800 the exposure was 1/200 f7.1. With a long telephoto like this there was insufficient depth of field to get both faces sharp – I had to choose one or the other (though with these rather small images the difference is less obvious.) At the time I couldn’t decide which was better, so I took both. But I still can’t decide.

I could perhaps have tried increasing the ISO, giving myself a couple of stops more at ISO 3200, but even then I don’t think both could have been sharp. The image with the sharp face at left ends up probably as my choice, both because it somehow reads better from left to right going from sharp to unsharp and because the gesture with the hand makes that face more interesting. In favour of the other image, having the ‘Unison’ on the poster sharp (and more complete) is a plus.

Of course it would not be too difficult to combine the two images in Photoshop (despite a small difference in viewpoint and framing) and get both men sharp, but I think that would certainly be cheating if I did it as an afterthought. But perhaps if it was implemented in camera it would feel acceptable, but having done a quick job with a quick select, copy and paste, the result is actually less powerful without the differential focus.


Composite image to get both faces sharp – which I wouldn’t use

Focus stacking (or focus bracketing) at the moment for Nikons is so far as I’m aware limited to using specialised software with the camera tethered to a computer, and its obvious applications are for macro work. Canon DSLRs can use the cracked ‘Magic Lantern’ firmware. Getting it to work with the camera off-tripod even for relatively static subjects such as this would be tricky, and perhaps the occasions where it would be of use would not justify the effort.

You can see the rest of the pictures from the protest at SOAS Cleaners’ Independence Day.

________________________________________________________

My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Deserted Royals for Sale

The last ships to be loaded and unloaded in London’s Royal Docks were still chalked on a board in one of the dock offices when I photographed it in the summer of 1984, although they had all left by October 1981, almost 3 years earlier.

The docks themselves were virtually deserted, though there were still a few ships tied up, some stranded there due to financial problems with their owners, and a few smaller boats apparently awaiting repair or rusting to pieces.

One or two small businesses were still operating within the dock estate, but essentially the huge area of water and dockside was deserted, and in two days of photographing inside the fences that still guarded it I saw only two people.

One was a single rower practising on the 1.4 miles of open water of the Royal Albert Dock, who I’m not sure even noticed me as I took his photograph as he sculled up and back, the second a man working for a fork-lift truck company with whom I stopped to talk, and who posed for a picture. There were a couple of security guards for the whole site – roughly a mile and a half long and a third of a mile wide – and we talked briefly as they read my letter permitting entry – but they stayed in their office by the gate.

I wrote just a few weeks ago about photographing there in Royal Docks – 1984, and won’t repeat all that again, though I see I’ve chosen some of the same pictures to illustrate this post. The image above has a certain interest for me other than in the wallpaper with its ship design and the view of the docks with the curtain blowing in the wind, from a technical viewpoint. As you are probably aware from the shadow of the curtain it was taken with the aid of flash, something rare for me at the time.

Nowadays with the Nikon this would be so simple to do that about the only thing I would have to do would be to put the SB700 flash unit into the flash shoe, turn it on and press the button. i- TTL BL balanced fill flash would sort everything out automatically, and I would see the result immediately and perhaps tweak my standard -2/3 stop setting on the flash if I felt it necessary and retake the picture.

Back then, things were different. The Olympus SLR  camera I was using had a flash sync speed of 1/60 second. It was I think taken on ISO 125 film, so the first step was to take an exposure reading through the window for the outside scene and determine the aperture that was needed.  At least by this time I had an electronic flash  (an advance that has gone unnoticed by popular journalism which still thinks that celebrities are photographed with the aid of flash bulbs) but you had to work out the aperture required for a given subject distance from the guide number.

This left me with the impossibility of using two different apertures for the same exposure. One standard way to get over this was to reduce the power of the flash by holding a handkerchief in front of it, but handkerchiefs don’t come well calibrated. And you only knew if you had got it right when the film came out of the developer.  I think this image was my first success.

Later I bought a meter that could record both flash and ambient light, and flashes too became more controllable, and using flash became very much easier and more dependable, although it was really only with my first Nikon DSLR that fill flash became a simple routine.


Silvertown By-Pass  bow-string bridge opened in 1935,  demolished 1990s


Ship’s names were written on the dockside for Lascar workers


A jacket left hanging on a peg when the workers left the docks in 1981

The Deserted Royals is now available for download as a PDF from Blurb, who seem also to insist that a print version is on sale. The PDF is £3.99 as a download, the soft-cover version is £30 and postage will add another five or six pounds.  I hope later to be able to supply it for UK customers direct from me at a lower cost.

There is a preview available on Blurb which shows around half of the 90 black and white images in the book.

________________________________________________________

My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

More on Traveller Children

It seems a very long time ago that I wrote about the book launch of Colin O’Brien’s Traveller Children, and I’m rather surprised to find it was only 3 weeks ago. I’d just got a new lens for my Fuji X cameras, and had taken taken out the Fuji XE-1 with the Samyang 8mm f2.8 (along with the Fuji 18-55mm) to try out the Samyang.


The people close to the image edge are noticeably less distorted than with the Nikon 10.5mm

Like the 10.5mm Nikon I’ve loved to use, the Samyang is a DX format lens that gives a ‘diagonal fisheye’ view, producing an image that fills the frame with a 180 degree view across the diagonal of the image. Of course I can use the Nikon lens on the Fuji X cameras with a suitable adapter, but the Samyang is smaller, lighter and altogether more convenient to use. It also has a different – though similar – perspective,  its ‘stereographic’ projection giving less distortion of objects at the edges of the image. Like the Nikon, it also suffers from a fairly distinct degree of chromatic aberration,  which can be largely corrected in Lightroom or other software, but otherwise is optically pretty impressive.

It also, like the Nikon,  has a bulbous front element which precludes the normal use of front of the lens filters, but with a lens that cost me around £230 I’m rather less worried than with more expensive glass  It fits nicely on the Fuji XE1, and is also available for Sony E and Samsung NX mounts. It comes in both black and silver finish, so of course I choose the black.

The first – and so far only – minor disappointment is that at the back of the black finish lens barrel is a half an inch of shiny silver lens, cosmetically something of a disaster. Apart from this the build quality seems impressive for the price (actually better than many expensive lenses.)  This is a manual lens, but this isn’t really a problem. You seldom need to focus an 8mm lens, and with the shutter speed on Auto, the digital viewfinder automatically adjusts (if sometimes just a little slowly) to give a properly adjusted viewfinder image.

With the different projection, software such as my favourite Fisheye-Hemi dpn’t quite work properly, and need a little tweaking in Lightroom to get things more or less right – as in the example above. I was pretty pleased with this lens and look forward to using it more. Some of my favourite images on the Fuji-X cameras to date have been taken with the Nikon 10.5mm, and this looks to be a more convenient replacement. You don’t get any information on aperture or distance setting in the Exif data, but the scales on the lens are very clear and seem accurate.

What I didn’t say in the previous piece was that all of the images at the book launch, including the exterior images such as these were taken at ISO 6400, a full stop faster than I usually like to work, even with the Nikon D800E. I’d set the camera at this speed inside the gallery space, where the light was rather dim, and simply forgot to alter it when I came outside.

I can’t pretend the quality is the same as it would have been at say ISO 400, but it is surprisingly good and usable for many purposes. Of course it isn’t just the camera, but also the noise reduction from Lightroom. Here’s a 1:1 crop from a part of the image without any noise reduction:

and here is the more or less the same area of the image, again 1:1, after some fairly aggressive noise reduction and a little sharpening:

I probably haven’t got the settings at the optimum, but the difference is clear, with virtually all the colour noise (and some colour) removed, along with much of the luminance noice.  Very little actual detail seems to have been lost, and although at full size it seems a little low in contrast and lacking in  colour, it works pretty well at web scale, and also for reasonable size prints. And the contrast and saturation could easily be increased if necessary.

The result of the high levels of noise removal can be seen in the upper images, in particular the second image down, where the foreground figures somehow seem too smooth and lacking in detail.  But digital is certainly producing results that would have been impossible with film.
Continue reading More on Traveller Children

CMYK Struggles

I’ve spent the day battling with CMYK. It’s happened before and I’ve seldom managed to get things to work properly, despite reading all the documents, following the setting up of color preferences and all the rest.

I’m finishing off my latest Blurb publication, ‘The Deserted Royals’, which definitely has no connection at all with the Windsor family and their offspring, but about the Royal Docks, which when I photographed them in 1984 were more or less a ghost town. More details – including how to order – shortly.

Before I’ve always printed using sRGB image files – which are still the only option if you use Blurb’s free Booksmart software. But now I work with Adobe’s InDesign, and Blurb say you can get better results, particularly in the shadows, with CMYK files. Although I’ve been happy with the quality of my previous books, the black and white images were at times just a little too far from neutral for my taste, usually with a slighly green or cyan tone, with variations on different print runs. I’d like them to be neutral (or perhaps even a very slightly warm neutral) and more consistent, and I’m told CMYK is the answer to that problem also. Though it might make sense to send the files as slightly warm in the first place in case they drift a little. As we found long ago with inkjet printing, black and white is much more sensitive to these things than colour. There were of course even worse problems with printing black and white chromogenic films like Ilford XP1 and XP2 on colour paper, which few processors really managed to solve consistently, though in the darkroom the solution was simple – print them on black and white paper.

Blurb have some clear instructions on how to set up a Blurb color-managed workflow and print good black and white books (and different instructions online if you use Booksmart), with a video showing even the slowest in town how to set things up in InDesign. There are instructions too on how to prepare your files in Photoshop, converting from a neutral or toned RGB file to a suitable CYMK file, and there is a great Blurb book by Franz Huempfner “with 33 proofs of pure or toned black and white images with the Blurb ICC Profile and some other CMYK Profiles” available to view in full as a preview on Blurb. It gives full instructions on how to do it and links to some useful presets and actions for Lightroom and Photoshop.

So I try it out. I start with an sRGB file, absolutely neutral having been converted in Lightroom from the original grayscale TIFF scan. Wandering across it in Photshop with the eye-dropper confirms R=G=B at ever point.  Converting it to CMYK using the Blurb ICC profile but saving and updating the image in InDesign gave a flatter image with a slight cyan cast. I got even worse results using a custom ICC profile suggested by Huempfner and others, or some of the presets he gave a link to. I played around with it a bit, checking and double-checking I’d done everything correctly, including updating the files in InDesign.

Eventually I gave up, and started writing about my problems. I decided I needed an illustration, so tried again exactly what I’d been doing earlier. No changes, following exactly the same directions. And it seems to have worked.  Of course I’ll only know if it does give a more neutral result when I get the printed book back from Blurb in a couple of weeks.

It’s in a way possibly not that important. I’ve decided to go over to publishing in digital format in any case, assigning the ISBN for this ‘book’ to the PDF file. Two reasons, cost and quality. I can sell the PDF through Blurb at a sensible price and there are no expensive delivery costs – and I could also produce my own PDFs. Secondly, the quality of the images on a good screen is better than any printer can produce. Of course books do still have some advantages, and I’ll certainly want my own printed copy for the bookshelf. And as Huempfner points out, Wilhelm Reseach gives the HP Indigo inks used by Blurb’s printers have a dark storage life over 200 years without noticeable  fading or colour balance.

I’m still not happy about CMYK conversions, and haven’t found any of the various methods suggested by Huempfner or the presets and actions he links to give results I like the look of. Using the Blurb ICC profile without any toning is the only way I’ve managed to get results I like. Although some of the tonings look great in his book, when I tried them on my own images they seemed not to give quite the same results, mainly altering the image tone too radically for my taste.