>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

2012 – My Own Favourites – May

May always starts with something of a bang, with various events marking May Day, including the annual march which has celebrated the day in London for around 40 years, but also with other groups organising their own events to mark the day. This year after the march I went to a protest by Campaign4Justice and Merlin Emmanuel outside the offices of the IPCC calling for its abolition for its failure to investigate police actions and then caught up with a group who were roaming central London protesting against shops using free labour with unemployed people given the ‘choice’ of working for nothing or losing their benefits.

Among those taking part in this ‘workfare’ protest were a group from Occupy London, and in the early evening after the police who had been following them all apparently went off shift walked up into the City and finally reached their original objective back in October 2011, the London Stock Exchange. I’d been there back in October 2011 when a general meeting at Westminster at the end of the Block the Bridge NHS Protest had voted to occupy the Stock Exchange, and outside with them the following Saturday when police blocked their access to the private Paternoster Square where is is situated, and on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral when they came to the decision to camp there instead.

So I was pleased to be one of the small handful of photographers who was actually with them when a small group finally made their objective and set up tents in the doorway of the London Stock Exchange, even if we all knew it was only a token gesture. After a few minutes they were made to move a few yards away, and by the time the word got out and more police, photographers and press arrived the moment had gone, although the protesters were kettled in the square for some hours, long after I’d filed my story and gone to bed.

Again I needed the 16mm, and perhaps something even a little wider would have done the job even better – it could have been better with the whole of the design at top left and more of the second tent and person holding the banner at right. There were too many people milling around to work from further away. The light was pretty dim and I had to use flash. The banner was only in position for a fairly short time and I was pleased to have managed to get its message and the sign for the London Stock Exchange in the picture above the line of seated protesters and the two tents. More pictures from the event at Stock Exchange Occupied.

On 10 May there was a one-day strike by public sector workers over the raising of the retirement age and worsening of pension provisions as well as cuts in services. Many workers feel the trade unions have been slow to take action against the cuts and the austerity programme, including the attacks on the NHS, and the strength of feeling was shown in votes such as the 94% of Unite’s NHS members who voted for this day of action. This was a picture that I hope shows some of that strength of feeling and unity, with three of those holding the union banner shouting in unison, and the Unite flags flying behind them as they came over Westminster Bridge at the head of the march from St Thomas’s Hospital behind them at right of the picture.

On the same day the police were also protesting, both against the affect of the 20% cuts in police budgets and the proposed restructuring which will result in a partial privatisation of policing. But although impressively large, the police protest was visually a little on the dull side, and for me the main interest was in the various groups which took advantage of the event to show a little solidarity with them or raise some of the serious issues about policing which the Police Federation would prefer not to have explored or exposed. So near the front of the march, Ian Puddick, who was intimidated, attacked and prosecuted by City of London Terrorism Police and Counter Terrorism Directorate in an operation costing millions carried out on behalf of a giant US security corporation after he discovered his wife had been having an affair with one of her bosses was marching with a placard reading ‘Police Corruption’ and Occupy London were marching with them calling for “fully, Publicly funded, democratically accountable Police force who’s aims and objectives enshrine the right to peaceful Protest in some sort of People’s Charter!”

But my favourite among the fringe demonstrators was a ‘professional protest stall’ manned by the Space Hijackers, with advice on suitable placards and chants for the protest. I wanted to show some of these, along with the police march. Many of the police were obviously amused as they marched past, but the display did offend others, and I was present when police not taking part in the march threatened the Hijackers with arrest, particularly if they displayed a poster with the acronym ACAB on it, which you can also see on the peak of the cap being worn by the masked protester. Shortly after I took this image, a line of police came and stood between the stall and the march in an attempt to hide it from view.

On 10 of May I photographed a very different kind of event. From 2005 to 2010 I made a series of pictures at various events involving May Queens in London, in particular of the Merrie England and London May Queen Festival. 2012 saw the crowning of the 100th London May Queen and although I felt I had finished the project in 2010 this was something I didn’t want to miss. I also wanted to show some of the people I had photographed the book I had produced (there is an earlier version with a preview and an i-pad version also available.)

I spent quite a lot of time talking to people and perhaps didn’t concentrate on taking pictures as much as in earlier years, but you can see the other pictures in London Crowns 100th May Queen.

One of the hardest things to photograph is the procession of the May Queen around the arena near the end of the event, when she scatters flowers to the children in the various May Queen realms seated around the outside. The picture captures this, with a rather large bunch of them in mid-air having just left her hand. I was fairly close – again with the lens at 16mm – but of course having to keep out of the way of the flowers and the children seated on the ground who they were being thrown towards. This was taken at 1/800s, fast enough to freeze the action, although the flowers are not quite sharp probably because they are out of focus. I wanted to get all of the procession sharp, and depth of field even on a well stopped-down 16mm has its limits. I’d decided not to use flash even though it would have helped with the nearer figures – as you can see I was working more or less directly into the sun – but to use a little post-processing to lighten these shadow areas. Any useful amount of flash would almost certainly had burnt out the very close flowers.

I’ve chosen two pictures from No To NATO, Troops Out Of Afghanistan in front of the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square on May 19. One shows a left-wing newspaper seller talking with one of the protesters in the crowd holding placards in front of the embassy. The newspaper looks like the ‘Workers Hammer’ published by the Trotskyist Spartacist League. I don’t know if anyone ever does buy it, and though I’ve on occasion been given a free issue I’ve seldom found much of it worth reading.

Like most of my work, this was taken with the 16-35mm, but this at the long end of the zoom. It is I think all about gesture and expression, and about the kind of things that go on in the crowd at demonstrations, although I’m not sure it is all about selling newspapers.

My final selection from May was of one of the speakers at the same event. There were an interminable number of them, and after an hour or so my attention had rather drained away. But this speaker was different, because he came accompanied with flags.

The flag at bottom left was fairly static but the one behind the speaker was being waved fairly vigorously on a long pole. There was no wind to make a flag fly, but photographing this speaker and the flag was something of a challenge and I think the result is reasonably striking. Certainly it stands out against the probably 30 or so attempts I made, most of which where more or less immediately deleted .

Continue reading 2012 – My Own Favourites – May

2012 – My Own Favourites – April

Roma Nation Day is April 8, the date of the first World Roma Congress, held here in London in 1971, and Grattan Puxon was one of its organisers. At least 500,000 Roma are thought to have been killed in the holocaust, and the German government formally recognised the Roma genocide in 1982. As well as holding a short ceremony at the memorial in Hyde Park, the group also went to protest outside the embassies or cultural centres of some other European nations where the Roma are still being discriminated against, including France, Bulgaria, Italy and Hungary, and ending after I left them, at the offices of our own Department for Communities and Local Government. The Dale Farm evictions were, as Grattan Puxon said, “very much the tip of the iceberg” here.

There was quite a crowd of photographers and videographers at the event, but I’d got to the scene before most and had carefully chosen my position, with the memorial stone at the centre of the image. I couldn’t know exactly how people and things would arrange themselves around it, but things worked out well. Using the zoom at 16mm Grattan almost exactly filled the frame vertically. It was a dull day and the memorial garden is surrounded by trees, and I used a little flash to make him stand out from the surroundings, and the low viewpoint gives him something of a heroic aspect.

Disabled Activists Block Trafalgar Square was the headline for my story, and this was a picture than for me encapsulated the determination and frustration of disabled people who are suffering so badly from the cuts in benefits and cruelly dismissive target-led tests by Atos, and also the dilemma of the police in dealing with their protests. Again it shows how the wide view of the 16mm is really needed in the kind of media scrum that happens around these events.

It wasn’t easy to take pictures which really showed the chain that locked the wheelchairs in position across the roadway well, but what really makes this picture for me are the expressions, particularly that of Andy Greene in his wheelchair holding up the chain. Less obvious in the small reproduction is the look of concern on the face of the police officer, also holding up the chain, and the concentration of my colleague holding the video camera. The two still cameras at top left and right also help to add a feeling of urgency; usually I try to avoid other photographers in my pictures, but here it was unavoidable anyway and they have become important parts of the scene.

The protests over the imprisonment of members of Pussy Riot have produced some interesting pictures, and there are several in my Protest Supports ‘Pussy Riot’ that I might perhaps have chosen. What makes this one stand out for me is of course the face that this woman is making over me taking her picture – again from a close viewpoint although the 16-35mm was racked out to 30mm. Hers is also a very stylish mask, with its gold edging – rather a contrast to the roughly cut balaclava at the left, and she is also wearing some very stylish knitwear and a fine large black ring. It was a dull day, and even at ISO 1000 and full aperture of f4 the shutter speed was only 1/30 second, and the only truly sharp part of the image are her eyelashes, but I think the slight blur of her lips as she puckers them adds to the image.

It wasn’t the picture I chose to head the story, either on My London Diary or on Demotix, as there were others that were more recognisably part of the Pussy Riot stereotype, but this was my favourite image, and one that somehow seems rather more Russian.

The final picture of my April choice was taken in some of my least favourite working conditions, with many of my pictures being spoilt by rain on the lens filter despite my obsessive wiping. It’s also one of the few pictures that I’ve used significantly cropped – not just the little bits that sometimes need tidying where things have crept in unnoticed or invisible around the edges.

My favourite version of this image – seen above in full frame – crops off a little at the top and bottom and around a fifth of the image at the right -just removing that raised hand. Getting dogs to look the right way for a picture isn’t easy and I couldn’t get the framing right too.

Far too many cyclists get killed on London’s roads, and the Big Ride for Safe Cycling was an attempt to get the mayoral candidates to promise to improve things. And all the main candidates – including the winner – made promises, though so far little has happened. There are many ways in which the infrastructure could be improved, but what is really needed is a change in attitudes particularly by car and other vehicle drivers. But it was perhaps unfortunate that the ride didn’t strongly make the point that helmets are not an answer. Most of those who have been killed in London were wearing them and they offer very little if any protection while encouraging drivers not to give cyclists the room they need.

Continue reading 2012 – My Own Favourites – April

2012 – My Own Favourites – More from March

March 17th was a good day for me, although the weather wasn’t good, and I started taking pictures at Paddington Green in light rain with a heavy grey sky, rather darker than it appears in the image above. It had perhaps brightened a little as the Free Syria march to the embassy finally started, and I took this picture shortly before I left just after they went under the Marylebone flyover which you can see in this image. The building in the background is Paddington Green Police station, where suspected terrorists, now particularly Muslim fundamentalists, are held for questioning in a specially designed custody suite. Perhaps it was in this picture by accident, or just because I wanted to fill in a little of the rather blank sky, but it also matches the black white and green of the other main elements of the image, though lacking on its exterior any red stars. Later in the day I rejoined them at the rally outside the embassy, and took more pictures.

But March 17th is of course St Patrick’s Day, though the main organised London celebrations now take place on the nearest Sunday, and I think have become steadily less interesting. So from the Syrian march I rushed to get the Bakerloo line to Willesden Green, because in Brent they keep to the traditional day.

Brent has a tradition of celebrating the festivals of many of its ethnic populations, although this is now under threat from the government’s cuts in local authority spending, and a year earlier it seemed likely we were watching their last St Pat’s Day parade. But somehow it managed to continue. though perhaps on a slightly reduced scale than in some previous years. The Brent St Patrick’s Day still has very much the feel of a community event, both in terms of the Irish community in Brent (and in particular around Kilburn) and also with the wider community joining in.

I’d photographed the young Irish dancers before the parade started, and several times on the route of the parade, and this was one of the last pictures I took of them, going in close with the 16-35mm at 16mm and getting rather different reactions from the three closer girls. The one on the right was continuing to dance, and after I took the picture al lof them were laughing – even the one who has shyly covered her face. It is the different reactions, show in in gestures and expressions that appealed to me, and the Irishness of it all.

Sometimes being a photographer is hard, and although I would have liked to stay and enjoy a pint or two of the black stuff and the atmosphere, I rushed off to Belgrave Square, where the Syrian protests were continuing.

There were two protests separated by a few yards and rather more police. The larger was by the Free Syrians, calling for Asad to go – and one man was carrying a gallows with an effigy of him hanging from it. The crowd was noisy and thickly packed, making it hard to take pictures, and there was a real feeling of a popular movement for freedom.

The pro-Asad protest had a very different feel. Very much more of a PR campaign than a political protest, and plenty of space. Although there was no doubting the sincerity of the Iranians taking part and the strength of their feelings it felt more like people who had done very well out of his regime wanting to keep their comfortable superior position. With all the portraits of Asad it seemed very much a personality cult, and although they made for some interesting pictures, they made me feel uneasy. This picture is all about eyes, and there are too many of them.

A few days later it was Budget Day, and various protesters took advantage of the media interest in the event to protest in Westminster. After a protest outside Downing St many went down for a Budget Media Village Protest on the patch of grass opposite the House of Lords where TV stations set up their temporary outside broadcast studios to interview – often live on TV – politicians about the budget.

Since most of these interviews are entirely predictable, turgid and a complete turn-off for at least 90% of their audience, you might think the TV news crews would welcome almost anything else happening. But they didn’t like the protests and seemed determined to avoid giving them any publicity – for them they were just not news. It isn’t a point of view I share.

This picture was one of several I took both with the 16-35mm (at 18mm in this) and also with the 10.5mm working with several shouting heads, the placards and the Victoria Tower of the Palace of Westminster. Although not as recognisable as ‘Big Ben’ it is actually the tallest of Parliament’s 3 towers, 98.5 metres, 2.2 metres taller than the Clock Tower.

Another gesture, this fist of the speaker close to the front of my zoom at 16mm on the D700 in a protest on Kensington High St opposite the Israeli embassy on Palestine Land Day in a show of solidarity with the Global March to Jerusalem against the destruction of Palestinian life and culture there by Israeli expansion.

From Kensington I went on to Bedford Square for a protest against the Harassment At Abortion Clinics by the group ’40 Days for Life’, which had been holding a 40 day picket outside the central London Clinic of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) praying and handing leaflets to women entering and leaving the clinic. The protest was timed to coincide with a an evening prayer vigil by around a hundred Catholic supporters of the anti-abortion campaign led by Bishop Alan Hopes, who kept himself well hidden in the crowd as he led the service, with a considerably larger crowd calling for an end to harassment.

There were a few protesters separate from the main group, and the man above was one of these. He told me that he was a ‘Pro-Love’ protester, and wanted to see people showing more love for each other – and for the harassment of women going to clinics to stop. This picture is a little unusual for me in that it was taken with a ‘standard’ focal length, using the D300 with the 18-105mm at 34mm, 51mm equivalent.

I’m not quite sure why I chose this last picture as one of my March favourites. I think because the expressions somehow sum up the mood of the people outside the US embassy at the Protest for Trayvon Martin, a a US teenager shot on his way back home from buying sweets at his local shop simply because he was black and wearing a hoodie. Anger, frustration, sorrow, shock, disbelief; black and white united in condemnation of racist violence. And determined that something must be done.

November 2012

As usual, My London Diary is running well behind the calendar but all of my work from November 2012 is now on line. It wasn’t all Paris, though that took up a lot of time. Here are the permalinks to the rest:

© 2012, Peter Marshall
Save A&E at Lewisham Hospital
Solidarity With Gaza, End the Seige Now
Protest against Night Flights

© 2012, Peter Marshall
Students March on Parliament
Save Walthamstow Stadium Fight Continues
Stop Fossil Fuel Dirty Money takeover of US
Truth, Justice and the American way?
Noisy Demo after Immigration Death
Anonymous March to Parliament
Cleaners Protest at Tower

Continue reading November 2012

2012 – My Own Favourites – March

I have a problem with March, though it’s a welcome one, with just too many pictures that I like to put in a single post. It was a busy month, with lots of events and more varied than most, and so I’ve decided to split the month into two – and here are the pictures from the first half of March.

A good example of why I sometimes like the 16mm end of the 16-35mm, working as I was absolutely jammed into a crowd in front of McDonalds. Perhaps even a millimetre or so wider would have been even better, though I like the tight framing with the hand at top left and another at bottom right cut off – perhaps just a little too dark in the web version, with the arm and the hand holding the microphone at the edge of the frame. The ‘rogue’s gallery’ in the newspaper along with its captions really sums up what the protest is about – and there’s a placard too, with the message ‘This shop is a scrounger’. The only thing really missing – or rather not prominent enough – is the yellow M on the very recognisable dark green of the shop front – it is there dead centre in the image but rather small, and has lost a little saturation thanks to surface reflections.

I think this woman on the march did have a child in the buggy, but I’ve chosen to concentrate on the Unison poster which again says what the event is about, along with the placards held by the women in the background. But it’s the dress, makeup, posture and gaze of the woman leaning on the push-chair that really make the image. Looking at the full size image the others behind her – from the 8th March Women’s Organisation (Iran/Afghanistan) very much add to the interest of the image.

Another picture of a woman on a protest, but very different. Taken in low light, with the 16-35mm at 29mm and full f4 aperture, ISO 1250, 1/30s. The close working distance and fairly wide aperture make her stand out, almost sharp (a little movement blur) against the out of focus background. There’s a great energy in her shouting and gesture, holding a placard up out of picture, and although her placard isn’t in the image, others tell clearly what she is protesting about. The slight lack of critical sharpness isn’t apparent on the web, but helps in the full size image, and the picture is really ridiculously sharp given that she is shouting and walking forwards and I’m walking backwards a short distance in front of her during the 1/30 of a second.

The man in robes holding the picture of another man in robes with a rather similar hairline and both wearing glasses made a fairly obvious image and one I had several attempts at. This (at least for me) stand out partly because of the framing but also the background, with another framed image held up just to the left. My Tibetan protest photographs do rather tend to be overwhelmed by the yellow, red and blue of the Free Tibet flag, and it’s good to have a picture with it present but not dominating. This was on the D300 at 70mm – equivalent to 105mm on full frame.

Another different image of a man’s head which for me caputured some of the colour and confusion of this paint-throwing event. The head stands out well from the background, and again this was with the D300 and at 58 (87m). F7.1 according to the EXIF, which has done a great job in giving just enough depth of field.

And finally from the first half of the month, another protester shouting, taken fairly close with the 16-35mm at its long end. Perhaps surprisingly this is the only picture in these half-dozen where I used flash, working very much into the sunlight that was coming past the edge of the building (giving a little flare and ghosting at top left) and giving the strong rim lighting on the main figure – with some very sharp whiskers along the edge of his face. It’s that wide stretched mouth that is the main feature, head thrown back to give that hair, and the beady eye towards the photographer. Flash has lifted his face just a little, and I suspect I’ve had to burn down a little, particularly inside his mouth, though it’s still perhaps a slightly too detailed dental view of his upper set. The red along the bottom of the picture and in the placards.
Continue reading 2012 – My Own Favourites – March

Christmas Wishes

This year I’m just not coping with Christmas. Just a few days ago it seemed to be a long way away, and now its almost upon us. It possibly doesn’t help that I’ve still got November’s calendar up on the wall to the left of my screen, there’s a picture I rather like on it and I’ve not got around to changing it before now, though December’s isn’t bad either.

But I’ve just not managed to send out cards, and it’s probably too late. Fortunately Linda deals with those for relatives and some of our common friends, and on several nights in recent weeks I’ve dragged myself from the computer after falling asleep and gone downstairs to get ready for bed and found her hard at work writing and adressing cards, but I’ve just not had the energy to join her. I managed to make a few badly printed cards for a few friends I met on Monday, but other than that my only contribution to the Christmas effort has been to buy a sheet of Christmas stamps. And that only happened more or less by accident, when I was taking a parcel of my books to the post and the man before me in the queue bought some. As Linda points out, the price of a second class stamp is what she paid for her lunches for a whole week when she was a student, and my pint of bitter and a pork pie or a cheese roll in the union bar would only have added up to a few old pence more for the five days.

So today I decided I’ve have to send something digital to many of my photographic friends, many of whom have in the past received something on paper. My apologies if you get this message both by e-mail and here on >RE:Photo. I don’t have the time or skill to produce the kind of clever collage that at least one of my friends delights us with, but I have photographed quite a few Santas over the years, and when I put that word into the search on My London Diary and it came up with 141 results. Here are just a few of my vintage santas from 2003-8.

© 2004, Peter Marshall
2004
© 2005, Peter Marshall
2005
© 2006, Peter Marshall
2006
© 2007, Peter Marshall
2007
© 2008, Peter Marshall
2008

‘Bells Not Bombs’ is a good message any time of the year!

My best wishes for the season to you all.

2012 – My Own Favourites – February

Another image with the 10.5mm DX semi-fisheye, which was always a good lens and has really become a great lens to use with the recent versions of Lightroom, which remove its main defect, a fairly hefty dose of chromatic aberration. I rather unusually entered an image taken with this lens in 2005 into a competition organised by one of the printer companies, I think just to be shown in an exhibition somewhere in central Europe, one of the pictures I’d taken in what must be one of the most stylish photo galleries around, Contretype, and it took hours of work in Photoshop to get rid of the nasty effects in the file I sent for the large exhibition print to be made. You can see that image and how well Lightroom deals with the problem in an early post here, End Colour Fringing. By default, Lightroom now also tries to change the perspective to rectilinear, which is almost always disastrous for the images, though sometimes a small amount of ‘distortion’ correction – perhaps 30% – can help. Of course it isn’t really a distortion, just a different way of representing the world, and sometimes the effect can be improved by changing to another view, cylindrical perspective. But the picture above is one that works well and is actually strengthened by the original spherical view, which brings the eye into the centre of the image.

Importantly it is from one of the trade union campaigns I most admire, the fight by the cleaners to get a living wage and to be treated with respect, a fight they have carried out with a determination that should be a model and an inspiration for all workers in all trade unions. The cleaners have stood up for their rights, have refused to be bullied and have won, with many more now getting the London Living Wage, although the struggle continues. One of the main and important points they make – and one that should be an important call made by the whole trade union movement – is that companies may outsource the contracts but they cannot outsource responsibility for the workers on their premises.

It is a sad reflection on the state of our trade union movement that the cleaners have only really made progress by going outside of the established unions and forming their own union, at first as a branch of the IWW, and more recently as the IWGB. Although many individual trade unionists have come to the protests and supported the cleaners, the cleaners found the union officials in too cosy a relationship with the employers, and unwilling to fight for workers’ rights.

The leading figure in the fight is Alberto Durango, who was just out of picture behind me as I took this image, and IWW Cleaners Demand Reinstate Alberto was part of the fight the cleaners have to get proper recognition for their union.

One of the events I’ve photographed for a number of years is the annual party around Eros at Piccadilly Circus, organised by Venus, which is an antidote to the commercialisation of love which reaches its annual peak on St Valentine’s day. Reclaim Love – Occupy Your Heart! has quite a few images from this year’s event, although as you can see from the umbrella the weather wasn’t too kind. But this was my favourite, from the warmth of that smile and the symmetry of the face and the hat dead centre in this image but with very different elements around – those in the know will recognise the free Reclaim Love t-shirt in pink at right as well as of course the advertising display of Piccadilly Circus at top left.

My third image from February comes from a very different part of London, Guildhall Yard and shows members of one of the City livery companies, the Furniture Makers’ guild. Although many of the guilds are truly ancient, the annual Pancake Race is a recent foundation, and one in which the members enjoy letting their hair down just a little, wearing silly hats and taking part in the races. Although it is a fun day, it does often illustrate the kind of cut-throat competition that lies under the gentlemanly surface of much City business.

It wasn’t a day when I made many good pictures – as you can see in Pancakes in the City – Guildhall as these people are generally far too aware of themselves and their image. The Nikon D700 with the bulky 16-35mm f4 that I used (at 16mm) isn’t the most discreet tool, and I had expected to have more success with the Fuji X100 that I also used at the event. But although I got some pictures that I probably couldn’t have made with the Nikon, its 35mm fixed lens was just not wide enough.

Continue reading 2012 – My Own Favourites – February

Gideon Mendel on Instagram

If you’ve been online at all in the last few days you will be aware of the controversy that new terms and conditions announced by Instagram have caused, with photographers leaving the site.

Instagram have reacted and issued a statement on their blog, which in part reads:

Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that wed like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram. Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.

which is perhaps itself clear but confusing as there seemed to be little other way to take their original statement. Those who use Instagram will doubtless be waiting to see the ‘updated language’, and I think we may have a new term to add to our language. When next you realise you really made a mistake and have to change your intended actions you will no longer be making a U turn or changing your mind, it will just be ‘updating your language.’

But I’ve not messed with Instagram myself as it seems to require a smart phone, and my phone now past its tenth birthday is decidedly stupid. All it does is make and receive phone calls and it doesn’t even include a camera. Perhaps one day I’ll feel it necessary to join the modern world, but not yet. And certainly the Instagram images that appear on my Facebook feed – some of them from very good photographers – don’t I think do them any favours.

But Pete Brook on Wired’s Raw File blog has a set of fine images from Instagram of the Nigerian floods by Gideon Mendel which prompted me to write this. There is an interesting discussion about how this work – which has reached a wide audience – relates to his more conventional work on the subject, and also about its marketing as art. What makes his work stand out from much of Instagram is of course his photographic eye, and his use of “either #nofilter or with the lo-fi filter just to tweak the contrast.” #nofilter seems to be something few Instagram users have discovered and it really makes a difference!

2012 – My Own Favourites – January

A couple of weeks ago I responded to a request to sort out up to a dozen of my best pictures from the last year, and spent quite a time going through my work, and picking out the pictures I most liked from the many thousands I’ve taken.

It was a difficult job, not least because there were so many to chose from – though of course not all of them are at all memorable. I’m never really happy with the idea of ‘best pictures’ either; pictures that would be good for some purposes may be hopeless for others. Much that I take is in any case not really intended as individual pictures, but to work with others to tell a particular story or describe a particular event. But there are some pictures which stand out for various reasons.

I’ve probably made between 100,000 and 150,000 exposures so far in 2012. Of these perhaps 5% get deleted on camera, mainly while I’m travelling home after taking pictures, and mainly for technical reasons. The screen on the back of the camera is too small to really do more than sort out the really useless images.

Back home I let Lightroom copy and rename all the images, and quickly go through them on screen with just the automatic processing applied. There will be quite a lot of near-duplication as I’ve worked at a particular idea, and I’ll try to pick the best, giving it two stars. Occasionally there might be a couple I’m not sure about which is best, and I’ll decide I need to process both. Quite a few things I’ve tried don’t work out at all, but typically I end up with around 1 in 10 of the pictures I think worth pursuing.

I’ll then go through these tagged pictures again, and give a colour rating to a smaller group that will tell the story effectively for Demotix. Lightroom has four colour ratings that can be applied with a number key – yellow, green, blue and red – and I use a different colour for each story I’ve taken on a particular day. A story on Demotix can have a maximum of 25 pictures, but often will only need a dozen or fifteen. Those images are then manually processed, with appropriate adjustments of contrast, brightness etc and dodging and burning and so on before keywording, captioning and then outputting them with my Lightroom Demotix preset and submitting.

Agencies would like the news sent them before it happens, and for ‘breaking news’ you need to get your pictures to them within minutes. I decided not to try and compete, but instead to concentrate on quality, on telling stories both in pictures and text, though often now I send the pictures first before writing the often lengthy stories that go with them.

Later, often a week or too later, when I have time I’ll go through all the tagged pictures, processing them, and using my Lightroom presets for web images and for full size jpegs to output copies. The web images go on My London Diary (and a few here) and full size jpegs are my reference images. So far for 2012 I have just over 12,000, all stored in a folder for the day they were taken. Usually when I’m asked to supply an image I work from these jpegs, though for special purposes I’ll go back and re-process from the raw files – which I keep backed up with one copy on DVD and another on an external hard drives.

Looking through 12,000 takes quite a while, but is quicker and easier with dedicated file viewing software than with Lightroom or Photoshop. The free FastStone Image Viewer which was recommended to me here a few weeks back enables you to view whole screens of thumbnails rapidly at a reasonable size – and is almost as good as ACDSee which I used to use.

I wanted a dozen, but on my first trawl through I found around 65 that I copied into a folder for a final selection – and these included a few similar images. I’ll perhaps take a few more this month that will qualify, and over the next couple of weeks I’ll do a review of my own year in photography, with some of these pictures and a few comments on them.

Shia Muslims on Park Lane in their 31st Arbaeen procession in London, the culmination of 40 days of mourning the martyrdom of the grandson of Mohammed, Imam Husain, killed with his family and companions at Kerbala in 680AD. More at Arbaeen Procession in London.

Taken with the 10.5mm DC format full-frame fisheye, it illustrates some of the strengths and weaknesses of using lenses of this type. The curved horizon helps in this image, as too does the flare and ghosting – and this is more effective in a larger image than this. But with a 180 degree diagonal angle of view its often hard to avoid having the sun in an image.

It was difficult to take because I had to be really very close to people who were very energetically raising their arms and thumping their chests to get the kind of image I wanted, and keeping out of their way was tricky. What makes this picture better than the many others I’ve taken of this and similar events is the framing and the two prominent arms in the foreground, with the tattooed arm behind them in the centre of the picture. The line of flare ghosts seem to point to that tattoo also. The mix of black and white tops along with the bare flesh also adds something, and there is even a little touch of red at the top left that some people think indispensable to a picture!

Some of this was planning, working to try and get the image, but there is too a bit of luck, a little bit of magic, involved – as in most of my favourite images.

A couple of weeks later disabled activists chained their wheelchairs together in a protest “calling for the dropping of Welfare Reform Bill, urging savings cutting tax evasion by the rich rather than penalising the poor and disabled”. Disabled Welfare Reform Road Block.

The picture above for me encapsulates much of the event – the chain, the wheelchairs, the placards and the people involved (one of them himself a photographer.) Taken with the 16-35mm, the leaning speaker adds a force to the image.

Both of these were in the final selection of a dozen I made, and the lower one is I think being used on a calendar. Last year I made my own personal calendar from 2011 pictures, and I may get round to doing the same from this year’s images.

November Protests

It’s a while since I wrote much about my pictures from London on My London Diary with other things including my trip to Paris getting rather in the way. But Paris wasn’t the only thing I did in November, and before my trip there I did photograph a few events in London.

The cleaners are continuing their fight for a living wage (and unfortunately I’ve not yet managed to cover there protests at the Barbican.) But I was at the Tower of London on 3 Nov – as you can see in Cleaners Protest at Tower on My London Diary. I’d missed an earlier protest where they had actually gone inside the Tower; this time they just made a token move inside the gates of the site after beginning to protest a few yards away.

The protests certainly get noticed by the crowds of tourists who keep the building open as a tourist attraction, though I don’t think many – if any – actually decided not to visit because of the protest. The picture above appealed to me for several reason, starting with the obvious determination of the man blowing the plastic horn and the red flags in the background. But this was also a protest with very few placards, and the on in this image with the singles word ‘SHAME’ stood out. I spent some time photographing him, trying to get the crown with the EIIR logo also in the image. The cleaners don’t of course actually work for royalty, but are employed by contractors to ‘Historic Royal Palaces’, which itself is an independent charity, though the Tower is still owned by the Queen.

November 5th is of course celebrated in the UK as Guy Fawkes Day, originally a fairly rabidly anti-Catholic event, though I think we now generally are on the side of Fawkes, often referred to as “the only man ever to enter Parliament with honest intentions.” The ‘Anonymous’ movement has adopted the Guy Fawkes mask worn by the mysterious revolutionary ‘V’ in the 1980s graphic novel (and 2005 film) V for Vendetta written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd as it’s trademark (mainly they wear the Warner Bros version of the mask.) In recent days the film, previously censored there, has been shown for the first time in full on Chinese state TV.

The novel was written during the Thatcher years and set at a future date in the 1990s when the UK, after a nuclear war was a fascist police state. Things didn’t quite turn out that way, but sometimes we seem to be going in that direction, and around 2000 Anonymous supporters met in Trafalgar Square, as a part of a worldwide protest, marching to Parliament against austerity, the cuts and the increasing gap between rich and poor, warning the government they need to change. #Operation Vendetta was perhaps a little more tame event than expected, as you can see in Anonymous March to Parliament and certainly lacked the drama of the film. But I was very pleased to have the rather incredible high ISO performance of the Nikon D800E for pictures like that above, even when I was using flash. Some parts of Trafalgar Square can be remarkably dark.

The following day I was busy too, with a small protest outside one of our immigration prisons following the death of one of the men being held there after he was ‘restrained’ by staff. I was shocked to hear that there had not been any police investigation of the death under what seem to be very suspicious circumstances. The police – as you can see in Noisy Demo after Immigration Death – appear to be very much more concerned with preventing protests such as this than with protecting the civil rights of those inside detention centres.

Later in the day I was outside the US Embassy for a US election night protest, Truth, Justice and the American way? about those still held in Guantanamo. Obama had promised before his election to close down the camp, but has failed to do so, and 160 prisoners are still held there, many like British resident Shaker Aamer ‘cleared for release’ but still being held – now for around 11 years.

In parts there was enough light to work without flash (at ISO 3200) but the SB700 also did a good job when required. For once I remembered from the start that I needed to use shutter priority (or manual) setting on the camera with it.

It got plenty of use the following night too, with a chilly open-top bus ride from the City of London where Campaign against Climate Change had been protesting outside the London offices of dirty coal and tea party backers the Koch Brothers before the journey across London for another protest outside the US Embassy – see Stop Fossil Fuel Dirty Money takeover of US.

Finally, on Saturday, I went to the dogs – the fight to save Walthamstow Stadium Continues.