>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Gilles Perrin

I’ve several times written about the work of Gilles Perrin, which impressed me when I first saw it in Birmingham in 2007, so I’m sorry I won’t be able to go to Paris on November 30th to celebrate both his 65th birthday and his new web site.

It’s a site that shows an impressive range of work, and as well as the many projects on people that I’ve often admired I was particularly interested in the section of panoramic urban landscapes in Urbanisme 2006-12 and also there are some fine black and white panoramics in the ‘Paysage’ section. I’ve worked with my own panoramic images for over 20 years and of course run the Urban Landscapes site with Mike Seaborne so it’s a genre that has fascinated me for years, although most of my current work is with people and events.

GMT

We are now in my least favourite time of the year, with the nights drawing in and yesterday it was getting dark in London at 4pm, when I decided to come home. I actually quite like working in the dark or in twilight, but I hadn’t really got anything to do as the protest I turned up to photograph had failed to materialise at the time set for it. But this early darkness I find depressing, and wish we stayed all the year on our ‘Summer Time’. Things were of course better in Paris, where they enjoy around an hour more light in the evenings.

One of the things I always forget when the clocks go back or forward is to change the time setting on my cameras. This year at least it had the advantage that the times on my pictures taken in Paris had the correct local time, but those taken in the two weeks before I went and the day or two after I came back are an hour out.

Although the key clocks in my home all adjust themselves automatically, my cameras don’t, although at least it is only a matter of going into the Settings menu, selecting ‘World Time’ and – in this case – turning ‘Summer Time’ to off. Which I’ve just done.

But time-keeping is a rather weak point on the Nikons. I don’t think there is any simple way to synchronise the time between two camera bodies, and its tricky to get them right to the nearest second either with each other or with the time signal. For me it’s trying to keep the two bodies in synch which is the larger headache, and although I set them more or less spot on a few months ago, the D700 and D800E are now over a minute apart, so when I’m working with both and look at the pictures “in date order” they often are not quite so, and it can be a pain. I don’t really understand why this should be, as I’m sure the chips inside the cameras are capable of much more accurate time-keeping. And it would be nice to be able to easily connect up the two bodies in some way to synchronise them to a fraction of a second.

To save battery power I usually have the menu display set to automatically turn off after a short period, so to synchronise the two bodies I first need to set that to a longer value. Then you have to remember that the time stops when you are changing the date time setting. So I start by going into ‘Date and Time’ and logging on to 24TimeZones.com which despite transmission delays will give me the time accurately enough for my purposes – and anywhere around the world. I set the time on the camera a little in advance of the actual time and then press OK when the time on the screen reaches that setting. Repeat the process on the second body and the two are within a second of each other.

Then I put the cameras away, sit a while and remember I’ve forgotten to change back the setting to turn off the menus to save battery power, curse gently and get them out again to finish the process. I’ll do it immediately I’ve posted this.

We have to suffer in darkness until 31 March 2012. While I’m writing this I’m going to put the next few dates to change the clocks into my online diary – you can easily do this for the UK by using the link on this page of the GOV.UK site.

Paris – Wednesday Morning

Fortunately I’d been able to pick up one of the Mois de la Photo OFF booklets at the Speos Gallery the previous evening, as this morning although I could log on to the hotel’s wifi it wouldn’t give me Internet access. Linda had also bought a copy of the Paris listing magazines which also had most of the major shows, so we were able to make some plans for the day.

While on line the previous day I’d noticed that this was the last day for one of the shows in the Mois de la Photo, and as it was, like our hotel, in the 18th arrondissement and open from 9am we decided to start there (though a little later in the day.) It would have been a longish walk so we took the Metro, and then sat for a while in the park next door to the lab enjoying the atmosphere (with a sound track of screaming infants playing on the swings) and eating a croissant or two before going in to see the show at the Espace Central Dupon, one of Paris’s best pro labs.

The show there was by a collective called Transit, celebrating their ten years of existence since they were founded in 2002 by Nanda Gonzague and David Richard – who were later joined by Bastien Defives, Alexandra Frankewitz and finally Alexa Brunet, and the text suggested that such loose collectives as this might be particular to French photography. I wasn’t sure about this, but it was an interesting thought, and some years ago I’d written a couple of pieces about a similar grouping, ‘Tendance Floue‘ (and last year here) which was referred to in the wall text as setting the pattern for such groups.

The show itself had some interesting work, some dealing with issues that I’ve also been involved with such as anti-capitalist protests and staged events, but with a truly annoying lack of captions. After some minutes I discovered a single double-side sheet on a table to the side of the show which had thumbnails and brief captions, and photographed it. Even this was defective, in particular that it didn’t tell you which of the photographers had taken the picture. It would have been rather better to have had captions on the wall next to the pictures as they were essential to appreciating the work. There are pictures that don’t need captions – but these certainly did.

From there the Metro took us to a show where I was confident of being able to pick up the printed brochure about the Mois de la Photo, at the Maison de l’Architecture en Ile-de-France, which was showing Jean-Pierre Porcher‘s ‘Le Corbusier, Une Promenade Picturale‘.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
Jean-Pierre Porcher’s Le Corbusier, Une Promenade Picturale at the Maison de l’Architecture en Ile-de-France

The images were large colour semi-abstract works made in some of Le Corbusier’s buildings, and it was possible in some at least to see the connection between the images and the buildings in which they were made, with some recognisable elements. Some were hung on the walls, but most were displayed in frames laid horizontally or at a slight tilt on top of a number of tables in the middle of the space.

The high quality inkjet prints certainly had a powerful presence, and were notable for the purity of their colours, though for me the effects, perhaps produced through multiple exposures and other tricks of photography were somewhat at odds with the clarity and precision of modernist architecture. The colour too in some images perhaps reminded me more of Mondrian than Le Corbusier. Again the captions were separated from the works, which were numbered but apparently displayed in fairly random order, making it a little difficult to find the several images based on the building with which I was most familiar, the Villa Savoye at Poissy, having photographed it myself a few years ago.

And as expected, I was able to pick up a printed copy of the programme for the Mois, an essential document for the rest of my visit. Of course the Mois has a good web site, but the logistics of going to see shows is complicated by dates and is opening days and times. Most smaller galleries only open in the afternoons, and are generally closed on Sundays and Mondays. Most places are closed on Mondays but shows that take place in business premises are generally open from Mondays to Fridays from some time in the morning until around 6pm. Lots of places are open on Saturdays, rather more on Saturday afternoons and rather fewer on Sundays – mainly in the afternoon. I think the well-prepared visitor would set up a spreadsheet or data base and spend several weeks planning their visit, but I use more primitive methods – like going through the booklets about the Mois and scrawling M for morning, SM for Saturday and D for Sunday at the side of appropriate entries. In previous years I’ve downloaded and printed out a PDF version to plan in advance, but this year I’d been too busy.

A second reason for going to the show at the Maison de l’Architecture was that it was on the way to the bistrot where I wanted to eat lunch, somewhere in the 20e, though it gets crowded enough without me giving it a free advert. Another thing I’d forgotten to do before I came to Paris was to check exactly where it was, but fortunately it didn’t take too long to find.

Afterwards we took a short walk to our favourite Paris park (full or larger screaming kids taking part in some sort of race), looking rather good in Autumn colours, before I decided it was time to make my way to Paris Photo.

Continue reading Paris – Wednesday Morning

Paris Openings – 13 Nov

We arrived at our hotel in Paris a little after 4pm, having left home around 5 hours earlier. The first thing we did when we arrived at Paris was to recharge our Navigo cards; rather like an Oyster card in London, but the 7 day fare is only available to cover Monday-Sunday, so we lost out slightly by buying it on a Tuesday. But since it costs roughly half the price of a similar Travelcard in London we weren’t too bothered.

We actually walked to the hotel, which I’d chosen because it was cheap and close both to the Gare du Nord where our Eurostar arrived and to a very useful Metro station. It was in an area I knew well, and one which has a fairly unsavoury reputation, but we’d stayed around there before and it hadn’t been a problem. And the hotel turned out to be reasonably comfortable and very quiet, despite being only a short distance from a couple of main roads and the Metro line.

Having taken my usual 2 minutes to unpack, out came my notebook computer, and after finding the hotel’s wifi password I was able to get online and on to the site for the Mois de Paris Photo OFF to check up on the events that I knew were taking place that evening. Fortunately on this occasion I managed to get a connection, as stupidly although I’d looked up the events a couple of days before I hadn’t noted down the details, and I had no printed documentation.

The Photo-OFF has a great web site, though only one page of it is in English, which tells you what it is: ‘The Mois de la Photo-OFF is organized by Paris Photographique, a non-profit structure specialized in the organisation of fine art exhibitions that showcase the work of emerging and established, independent, contemporary photographers. Organised by photographers for photographers, the aim of our exhibitions is to encourage emerging photographers to exhibit and sell their work‘ and just a little more, including the fact that there is “no other documentation available in English.” But you hardly need it as the rest is pretty obvious, although the translation feature of Chrome came in handy for the statements about the shows. As well as listings of all the 100 shows in the festival with pictures, details and maps it has a great calendar of events day by day, from which it was easy to find the four openings that were taking place that evening. Three of them were in roughly the same direction and we decided to go to these before finding a restaurant for some dinner.

Görkem Ünal‘s Mythologies was showing at the Speos Gallery in rue Jules Vallés in the 11e, opposite the Spéos Photographic Institute where she teaches studio photography. Born in Instabul she spent some time in the USA before settling in Paris ten years ago.

I found her work difficult to relate to, and the text that accompanied it, with sentences such as “Just like mythologies working in silence, the images of Görkem Ünal allow emptiness to exist as energy; energy of anticipation, of a secret foreseen which renders the mystery active” didn’t help me. Although I found some of the individual images interesting, and there were some links both graphic and in terms of subject matter between some images to create a sequence the photographs for me didn’t become “the mirror of the soul.” But perhaps I lack the kind of soul necessary for this work. Ünal has a blog on which you can see some more work, as well as a website.

Our next call was at the Galerie OFR for ‘Insight Paris‘ by Gianluca Tamorri, born in Rome, who came to Paris in 2005 and began this project, self-publishing a limited edition book ‘75003‘ with 48 photographs in 2011. Although I found the show with only 13 images rather disappointing, it looks a lot better on-line on his web site where there are 115 photographs, many of them rather intriguing, taken on his daily walking around the city. I think the prints on the gallery wall were too large and perhaps in most cases lacked the intensity of the smaller on-line versions. You can also read more about him and the project on his blog – where you will find an interview with him by Kai Berhmann for ‘Top Photography Films’.

OFR in rue Dupetit Thouars in the 3e looks to be a very good photography bookshop as well as a gallery space, but really I just don’t have the room for more books, and would have found it hard to carry them home so I forced myself not to buy one or two that I’d not seen before that looked interesting.

It was then a shortish walk through one of our favourite parts of Paris by the Canal St Martin to the third opening at Galerie B&B in the rue des Récollets, where Elise Prudhomme, one of the gallery managers there, was showing self-portraits examining questions about self-representation and self-awareness which she took in 1992-3. Like the two other photographers whose work I saw tonight she grew up elsewhere and settled in Paris.

Born in Philadelphia in 1970, Prudhomme started working with a medium format camera while studying Art History at Smith College, and she attended the Maine Photographic Workshops in 1991. Perhaps because of her training in the USA, the work in her show Auto-conscience stood out for the quality of the printing – perhaps not as highly regarded in France as in the USA. It also impressed for its coherence, although the question that came to my mind looking at some of the images was not the ‘Who Am I?’ of the photographer’s statement but ‘Where are you?’, with the surroundings sometimes seeming more interesting than the body, with a rather fine bath and more. Perhaps having an architect for a father gave her the fascination with space that some of these images display.

It’s worth clicking on the images on her web site to see the larger views, and I also enjoyed seeing the work ‘Le Jardin‘ and the colour images of Albert Kahn Garden in Boulogne-Billancourt.

Unfortunately I’d rushed out to catch these openings and while on the Metro realised I wasn’t carrying a camera, so there are none of my pictures from these three openings. I hoped I’d left it back at the hotel rather than on a train, and was very relieved to find it was there when we called back to look for it before going out for a meal. So here are a couple of picture taken after that to show we really were in Paris.

Continue reading Paris Openings – 13 Nov

Photograph as Commodity – Paris 2012

I’d hoped to blog from Paris, but it didn’t work out – the WiFi at my hotel spent most of the week failing to connect and really I was just too busy to post anyway. Apart from the last 36 hours or so when I was considerably indisposed following a rather violent disagreement between a curry and my stomach which left me living on sips of water alone, spoiling my plans for a couple of really good meals with a decent amount of alcohol before my journey on Eurostar back to England I had a pretty good time there.

I have to say Paris Photo itself was perhaps a little of a disappointment, even though I had no great expectations. It’s certainly still somewhere where you can see an enormous amount of great photography from the past, including work by most of the real innovators and masters of the medium, but perhaps more than ever this year it showed its bias. It’s an obvious one, in that this is largely a dealer show, and dealers can only show the work that is available for sale. So, for example, a photographer like Atget was almost invisible at Paris Photo, despite his fairly huge output of work, as the great majority of his pictures were either sold by him direct to museums or became a part of museum collections – such as those bought after his death by Berenice Abbott. Other photographers, working before photography dealers and galleries really existed, seldom made more that a half dozen or so copies of any prints, and often their negatives have not survived for later prints to be made, or their estates have not allowed this to be done.

What dominated some of the stalls was work from many relatively minor figures from the post-war years who are still alive (or whose negatives are still available) being promoted because their work is available, whereas relatively little by photographers of much greater interest is still around outside of museum and other collections.

Contemporary work suffers – perhaps as always – from the quest for novelty by both photographers and in particular contemporary galleries. All too often this seems to be a turning against the peculiar link with reality which to me is at the root of interest in our medium. After a few minutes walking around the great hall containing the photo fair I never wanted again to see work in which people had painted on their photographs, punched holes in them, cut them up, processed them deliberately badly and so on. I’ve never thought showing contempt for the photograph a likely way to produce worthwhile results, but there were rather too many photographers and galleries at Paris Photo who seem to think so.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
There was a lot of good work by Japanese photographers on show – and some of the photographers were there

Despite the 37 new galleries and 91 that had been in previous editions, there did seem to be a dearth of exciting or even interesting new work on show. There was also a surprising lack of work by UK photographers from after the Victorian period, and several of the more interesting London galleries were not here – there were only 8 from London (including one I’d never heard of, and seeing the work they had brought I wasn’t surprised.) I met a friend from one of those missing and was told that their application to show this year had been refused. I was more than surprised given the poor quality of work on some of those who had been given space, and the large spaces allocated to some galleries with apparently fairly limited work to show.

Of course there were highlights for me – some of which I’ll mention in later posts and it was still worth attending, though certainly I’d not go to Paris for Paris Photo alone. If you have any interest in photography Paris in November is a pretty magic place, with around 80 exhibitions in the Mois de la Photo, another 100 or so in the fringe festival, the Photo Off, over 50 in the Saint-Germain-des-Pres Photo Festival, and what seemed to be countless other shows outside of these events, as well as shows of work for the Prix Pictet, the Prix de Photographie Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière – Académie des beaux–arts, the Prix Arcimboldo for creation of digital images, the Prix Carmignac Gestion for photojournalism. In six days there, most of which were spent going from show to show, I hardly scratched the surface, although apart from Paris Photo I attended seven openings, went to presentations on seven other shows, went to the Nofound Photo Fair, went into and walked around about 50 exhibitions and probably looked at almost as many through the windows and either decided it wasn’t worth wasting my time, or was unable to go in as they were closed. But there were quite a few areas of Paris I didn’t manage to get to, concentrating my time on the shows I particularly wanted to see and others in the same areas.

This was the second year Paris Photo had been in its new premises at the Grand Palais, and in most respects this was a better venue than the old underground site in the bowels of the Louvre, handy though that was for cafes and shops – and for the very pleasant gardens of the Palais Royal. It was less crowded, got less overheated and I had no problems of claustrophobia – if anything it favoured the opposite. On the downside it seemed less intimate, and certainly I bumped into far fewer people I knew as I made my way round. But perhaps with there being far less representation of living photographers from the UK and central Europe in this year’s event fewer of those I know bothered to make the journey.

I’ll write more about Paris Photo and a few of the things that excited me there and elsewhere in Paris in the coming days, and as a part of a ‘Paris Diary‘ that I’ll eventually put up on ‘My London Diary.’

Continue reading Photograph as Commodity – Paris 2012

PDF Publishing

Blurb now offers the choice of selling books as PDF versions, and I’ve now made six of mine available in that format. The obvious advantage is cost, and you can now get any of my books for a fiver (£4.99 to be exact) for the 8×10 volumes and a bit cheaper for the one smaller volume I’ve produced. They really are better bargains than paying the £26.99 plus carriage from Blurb for a printed copy, or even the £25 including carriage that I charge for direct orders to UK addresses.

Although I can’t deny there is something about the physical object, being able to hold it in the hand, leaf through the pages, open it at random etc, if you have a good quality screen the images probably look better on it than in print, and it’s certainly good to be able to see them a little larger, particularly the smaller ones.

As well as the cost of the actual book there are other advantages – virtually immediate delivery and no carriage costs, and also although the cost is much less, I get a far larger proportion of it. Buying the books as PDFs means you are supporting the photographer, while the printed book supports the printers and all the others involved. Blurb of course takes its share in both versions, and I don’t begrudge that as they make it possible and handle the sales.

1989: 20 photographs ISBN 9781909363014 PDF £3.99

Before the Olympics: The Lea Valley 1981-2010 ISBN 9781909363007 PDF £4.99

Photo Paris: 1988 ISBN 9781909363021 PDF £4.99

In Search Of Atget: Paris 1984 ISBN 9781909363045 PDF £4.99

2006: My London Diary ISBN 9781909363052 PDF £4.99

London’s May Queens. ISBN 9781909363069 PDF £4.99

If these sell I’ll think about making other volumes available as PDFs and also it gives new opportunities for publishing. With one exception I’ve limited my books so far to 80 pages simply to keep costs down to reasonable levels. It’s sometimes meant that I’ve had to use some pictures rather smaller than I would have wished and publishing as PDF removes most of the cost limitations. So perhaps some of my future volumes will have more pages.

Of course I don’t need Blurb to produce or sell PDFs. I can make them directly in InDesign (which I can also use to give greater freedom of design with Blurb) and could fairly easily set up a system using PayPal to sell them myself. But Blurb has some advantages and saves me a little hassle, and their charges for PDFs are at the moment reasonable. It’s useful to be able to produce print copies, and it is these print copies that I’m now currently assigning ISBNs to and depositing with the National Library.

Zombie Time

As usual zombies were thick on the ground in London in October, although the group who were putting in an early pre-Halloween appearance for charity on October 13 were a very much more organised group than most, on a charity pub crawl raising funds for St Mungo’s, a charity that really does help the homeless to help themselves. Despite the name it isn’t a religious organisation, but took its name from the patron saint of Glasgow, the home town of its founder, although it began with a house open for rough sleepers in Battersea, and it seems a very good cause which people can get involved with in different ways – giving money, fund-raising event such as this and volunteering to help in some of the over a hundred projects it runs.

So perhaps this event attracted a better class of zombie, as the undead aren’t generally noted for their charity, which perhaps just doesn’t usually go with eating flesh and brains, although most zombies I’ve actually photographed in past years have seemed to have a greater interest in drinking alcohol. And I was photographing them at the start of a day-long pub crawl around London, a fun event with a serious purpose.

There may well be a special connection between zombies and Glasgow, certainly my first experience arriving in the city centre there around closing time in the early 1960s was interesting, as was a week staying on Sauchiehall Street in the European City of Culture in 1990. Seriously it is a city I liked and we went back to stay there for a few days in 2008.

But probably the start of their day, around lunchtime, wasn’t the best time to photograph them, and things would have got a little livelier (perhaps not the right word with zombies in mind) after a couple of pub visits. Zombies are after all really creatures of the night, and despite the horror costumes (or because of them) some were still just a little shy.

The bright low winter sun gave me a few problems, and at one point I found myself needing fill flash but having the SB700 on the wrong camera, and no time to swtich it over in the fast-changing situation I made the wrong decision to keep on working without flash, forgetting completely the built-in flash on the Nikon D700, which would have helped at the flick of a finger. Stupid. I’ve just got out of the habit of using it, as the accessory flash units usually do a better job.

Of course it was possible to more or less rescue the images in post-processing thanks to Lightroom, but certainly some of the better pictures I took would have been improved with some fill flash. By the time I’d paused long enough to change the flash around the situation had disappeared.

The other reason it was probably a bad time was quite simply the huge number of other people around taking pictures. Perhaps later in the day they would have thinned out a little. This was an event that seemed to attract a real crowd of photographers, perhaps the kind of event that gets listed in amateur magazines as a photo-opportunity.

I had other things to photograph, and so wasn’t able to spend more time with them. I knew too that I would be photographing zombies again in a couple of weeks time.

More pictures on My London Diary: Zombies Invade London.

Continue reading Zombie Time

Perspective

I wanted to photograph the first anniversary of the unsuccessful attempt by Occupy London to go to the Stock Exchange which led to their camping outside St Paul’s Cathedral both because of an interest in the Occupy movement (see Occupy London Kept Out Of Stock Exchange), but also because I had been there last year, as well as seven and a half months later when they finally achieved – if only for a couple of hours – their objective.

I wrote more about the anniversary event almost a month ago in
Occupy London, and you can now see more pictures from the day on My London Diary in Occupy Global Noise Street Party.

One of the pictures I took early on that day, taken with the 20mm, was of a small boy kneeling in front of the very tall Cathedral door.

second version of the image. I actually prefer the original, which to me gives a greater sense of the looking up that you have to do when you are standing there under the portico, although the lower version gives me a greater impression of the huge scale of the door compared to the child. The ‘corrections’ also means that most of the tiles on the floor have to be cropped, which I think is also a great loss, giving a picture of a flat vertical surface rather than the three-dimensional quality of the original. And simply graphically the expanse of tiles is more interesting, whereas the narrow strip left of the lower image simply distracts. Somehow too, the lines and diagonals seem to direct my eye towards the child, an effect that is lost when they are reduced to the narrow band.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with correcting verticals, and it is something we all learnt to do in the darkroom days, though digital makes it considerably easier and more powerful. [You can also use horizontal correction and make the doorway rectangular, but this simply would look unnatural as you see the inside of the door frame at left, but not at right, so the image is clearly taken from that side.] We are seldom aware of the vertical convergence when we view a seen, and in some respects correcting it better fits out visual experience – as too does the kind of correct I often make from fisheye to cylindrical perspective. Sometimes it works, and other times, as I think in this case, the image is better left more or less untouched.

Continue reading Perspective

Controversial Landscapes

Many years ago now, I went to an exhibition of landscape photographs on the South Bank, perhaps in the National Theatre and was saddened at what I saw there. This was a show by a photographer who was then being widely published and referred to in the press as Britain’s leading landscape photographer and these were colour images and almost every one seemed to be more about using what were then the fairly recently introduced graduated colour filters from Cokin and other manufacturers than about the landscapes that were depicted.

Things of course have changed since then, with the advent of Photoshop, effects filters, cloning, HDR and all the rest of the techniques now available to mess up photographs. Of course I’m not averse to a little correction of images, cleaning off the dust, adjusting the contrast, dodging and burning etc, but I think there are fairly clear limits between things intended to enhance the vision and those which are aimed at creating fantasy.

Back in the early days of photography there was a good practical reasons why landscape (and seascape) photographers had to use separate sky negatives. Emulsions were only sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum and with exposures made for the land the sky was almost always an opaque black on the negative. Given the difficulties of photography at the time it was understandable and excusable that photographers might rely on a few good sky negatives they had made to supply what the process failed to deliver. Something, almost anything, was better than nothing. But once we moved to panchromatic film – sometimes helped a little by yellow-green, orange or – often far too much by red – filters I think there was little justification for the practice.

Probably most of those who take part in contests such as the ‘Landscape Photographer of the Year‘ will think of me as an incredible purist, and sneer at me as a ‘record photographer’, but for me the idea of the record is at the heart of photography. It isn’t of course a case of mechanical or objective process of reproduction, but a highly subjective interpretation of reality, if one whose subtleties would appear to be lost on those sneerers.

When I saw that show years ago, my favourite living British landscape photographer was probably Fay Godwin, who I’ve written about on various occasions. I knew her slightly, having first met her when we both went to study briefly with Ray Moore – another great British landscape photographer – in the 1970s and we shared similar views on photography, which I was reminded about a couple of days back by a Facebook post which linked to her work shown on the British Library site.

Fay and I stood in some of the same places, both metaphorically and literally for our photographs, at times with rather similar results taken some years apart, although she travelled our country far more widely than me. Her pictures, dramatic as some of them are, are always records of a particular time and place and her response to this. If you stood in the same spot, while the weather and the light might be different and trees and crops might have changed and you might experience the place differently you would have no doubt you were in the same place and that it was a real place. Not so with many of the landscape photographs of the year.

So the controversy over the excessive manipulation of what had been the winning photograph in that contest left me a little amused but not concerned when I read about it in a PetaPixel blog post (from which some other links here come.) Apparently there are different classes to the contest, and the kind of tidying up that had been done wouold have been perfectly acceptable in some of them but not in this. Perhaps even more amusing (or depressing) is that the picture has a virtually identical viewpoint and composition to that of another photographer – and that it was made with that image in mind. Also impressive in some ways is the kind of detailed detective work that has been applied to this and some other images in the contest, with people using Street View and going to the actual locations where some images were taken to prove their various points.

I’m always suspicious of photography competitions and of rules and of people who promote and enter them. Back in the old days of camera clubs (and yes I know they still exist) the rewards were points, a little respect in their very limited circle and possibly a cup to keep on your sideboard for a year. Now the ‘Landscape Photographer of the Year’ gets ten grand (around $16,000.)

I should end with a confession. I once owned a graduated tobacco filter, though I don’t recall ever using it to make a photograph, though I did try a few with a similar graduated neutral density before I saw the error of my ways. I may still have both at the bottom of a box of photographic oddments in my loft. Both were the result of getting a prize in a competition in a magazine in the 1970s – and I think it was the second prize which turned out to be £50 which had to be spent on filters. In my defence it was tricky then to find things that I really wanted to make up that vast amount.

A New Lens

Well, actually a second-hand lens, always the best way to go if you can find what you want from a reliable source at the right price. A friend happened to mention he was about to put his Nikon ED AF Nikkor 70-300mm f4-5.6 D lens on eBay, and I told him I’d be interested.

I’m not a great fan of telephoto lenses. I’ve always thought of photography as a very tactile medium and of taking things from further away than you can touch as some kind of occasionally necessary aberration. Even with landscapes, I’ve always been happier with those that at least start more or less where I’m standing, and if possible I’ve always included foreground, particularly with the panoramas. But of course there are times when you have to work from a distance, and things that only a lens with a very narrow field of view can do.

The 18-105mm DX Nikkor I usually have sitting on my D800E body actually does most of what I need, but just occasionally I want something longer. When I started working with a DSLR I had a cheap Sigma telephoto zoom, something like a 50-210mm, though I don’t remember the details. I think it cost me under a hundred pounds new and was only a DX f5.6 lens, but it gave reasonably sharp results. But it’s real value for me was it’s small size and low weight, I think around 300g.

It’s also the only lens I’ve had stolen from my camera bag while I was working, otherwise I’d probably still be using it. I use a shoulder bag with an easy access zip across the top so I can just put my hand in and grab a lens or a flash, and while I’m working seldom bother to zip it up. One day in Trafalgar Square I was in a crowd photographing the Red Army Choir, using a wide-angle lens and towards the end of the day reached into the top of my bag for that Sigma and it wasn’t there. Of course I try to be more careful after this, but I did lose a SB800 flash the same way a few years later during a packed underground journey.

I tried to buy another lens exactly the same, but it had been discontinued. While its mediocre specification had attracted me it obviously hadn’t sold it to many others, and the replacements were larger, heavier and more expensive and didn’t appeal. After a while Nikon brought out its first Nikkor 18-200mm DX, which was twice the size and weight (and about 5 times the price) and I bought that; more versatile but not as sharp, it served me well until I dropped the D200 with it attached on the road photographing the front of an EDL march a few years later. The D200 survived but the lens was only fit to bin.

I tried and bought a few possible replacements, complicated by the change to FX format cameras with the D700 (and now the D800E) including a disappointing Sigma, but ended up with just using the cheap Nikkor 18-105mm. It isn’t a pro lens, and it shows in the build quality (I’m now on my third, though again I managed to drop one) and the price, but with Lightroom’s profile doing a little correction – as with all my lenses – it works pretty well. But just sometimes not quite long enough.

The Nikkor 70-300 is also not a pro lens, so it is reasonably small and light, a little over 500g and it fits neatly into my camera bag. It covers full frame, but I intend to also use it on the DX format, where it becomes a 105-450mm equivalent. At the near end it has excellent sharpness, but does seem a little soft towards the longer extreme.
© 2012, Peter Marshall
Nikkor 70-300 on D800 in DX mode

On my first day out with it I used it rather more than I will normally to try it out, taking 131 frames, almost half as many as I took with each of the 20mm and 18-105mm. The second event I covered, an anti-nuclear protestoutside the Japanese Embassy in Piccadilly and later outside the London offices of the Tokyo Electric Power Co who run the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, gave me plenty of time to play with the new lens, both on the D700 as an FX lens and on the D800 working in DX mode.

Later, outside the offices of G4S on the second anniversary of the killing by G4S employees of Jimmy Mubenga when they used illegal restraint techniques on the plane when he was being forcibly deported from Heathrow, I took a few more. This EXIF data shows the focal length in use for this frame, taken full frame on the D700 to be 155mm.

More about the events – and more pictures:

Solidarity with Japanese Nuclear Activists
G4S Killed Jimmy Mubenga

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