>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Stop The War Oct 2002-March 2005

Continuing from the previous post, here are more of my pictures that made the final edit of ‘Stop The War: A Graphic History‘ and some of which are in the book (I think 4, though not always too easy to spot.)

I’m not sure whether the fewer pictures selected after 2002 represents a greater number of photographers taking (and submitting) images or just that most of us do find work we shot on film rather harder to fined than digital images. I took rather less in the first few months for health reasons, missing the major event in February completely. The black and white Halloween image was taken using flash and I suspect I probably used an Olympus OM4 which had better metering than any of the rangefinder cameras. At the time I was also probably using a flash meter, though there just isn’t time to do this when things begin to happen.

All of the colour here is digital, and I started working with a Nikon D100 in December 2002. At first my choice of Nikon lenses was very limited – just a Nikon 24-85mm zoom. Back then too, sensors seemed to pick up dust with ridiculous ease, and we didn’t like to change lenses. By 2004 I also had a Sigma 12-24, for the D100 which I was used for the two pictures above from that year, both at 12mm. The 2005 images were both taken with a Nikon D70 and the 18-210 Nikon, with the ‘coffin’ picture using its 18mm (27mm equiv.)

I think that the rangefinder cameras were better for my coverage of events such as this, and it took me a while to get used to the difference. But being able to see clearly the area surrounding the frame in the optical viewfinder is really a great advantage. It also took me quite a while to build up the set of equipment that let me really bring out the potential of the Nikons.

I still have the D100, though in recent years I’ve only ever used it as a pinhole camera. The viewfinder was really small, dim and poky compared to film cameras. The D200 was a great deal better but still poor. Although I don’t think you need ‘full-frame’ to actually take decent pictures, the larger sensor also results in a much better viewfinder in the D700.

Although the D100 was only a 6Mp camera, the files it gave with a good lens at low or moderate ISO were good, and with good software to increase the file size can give some pretty impressive big prints. One of mine has gone to 2.3 metres wide, and doesn’t look bad, though probably the D700 would have done a better job with its 12Mp. Above that size I have a feeling that unless you can get better glass there probably isn’t much to be gained.

Stop The War – Nov 2001-Sept 2002

I think I have around a dozen images in the published version of the ‘Stop The War‘ graphic history (see previous post), around half of those that I was asked to send in as high-res for the final edit. I’d covered many if not most of the events that took place in London over the years, though I had to miss the huge event in February 2003 as I only came out of hospital in a very weak state the day before and could hardly walk.

A crop of the image above, taken in November 2011 is at the start of the section of photographs, although for me it still works better as the full image. When we were first asked to send in small versions of our files, we were told to limit it to at most 3 pictures from each event, and this was sometimes difficult, though there were other events I’d photographed for which I didn’t feel it worth sending in any. There were also some events, particularly local ones – for a time a small group of us protested every Friday evening rush-hour on a busy local road with slow-moving traffic – that I don’t think I took any pictures of. There I was more useful holding a placard.

I thought I would post my own pictures that are in the book here in their original state -without cropping and in colour where they were taken in colour. I’m also thinking of putting together a Blurb publication showing rather more of my work over the ten years of Stop The War, a kind of personal companion to the official publication. I thought first of using the selection of pictures that I made initially for Stop the War – around 75 images – but on reflection I think I should go through my files again using my own criteria for choosing the images rather than theirs, though I’m sure most of the pictures will be the same.

In this and the next couple of posts I’ll use the set of pictures that made it to the final edit, and of which around half were used. If you buy the book you can see which of them made it there, and also how they were used. There are a couple I didn’t recognise as mine when I first saw them.

I think most of these black and white pictures will have been taken using either Konica Hexar F, though for some I might have used a Leica M2 or Minolta CLE or the Konica Hexar RF. They were all taken on Ilford XP2 (by then it might have been ‘Plus’ or ‘Super’ or something), about the only black and white film I used for quite a few years, usually developed in normal C41 colour neg chemistry along with my colour film.

The Hexar F had a fine fixed 35mm f2 lens and had a virtually silent shutter mode. My only problem was knowing if I had taken a photo or not! If you were happy with the 35mm lens, it was an ideal street photography camera, and had virtually zero shutter lag if used (as I normally did) with manual focus at around 2 metres and a sensible aperture and shutter speed. If time allowed the autofocus was reasonably fast and accurate. One thing that had me fooled for years is that it was only too easy to hold it so that a finger obscured the exposure sensor. I had it serviced by Konica three or four times because of incorrect auto exposure before I realised what was happening.

The Hexar RF I more usually had loaded with colour neg film, typically Fuji 200 or 400. It was in most respects the camera the Leica ought too have made as the M7, with better film loading, much improved exposure metering, motor wind on (you could even shoot at 2 fps) and a more modern shutter with faster speeds and flash synch. The shutter was however noisier than a Leica, and although it was solid, the build wasn’t quite up to the old M series (more like the M8 in that respect.) It also didn’t match the huge price of the Leica, though it wasn’t cheap. But I think it was more responsive than a Leica and the viewfinder seemed more accurate. Despite rumours spread among the Leica forums at the time, it worked perfectly with every Leica and Leica-fitting lenses I tried on it.

Stop The War – 10 Years

Stop The War held a launch party for their new book, a profusely illustrated graphic history of their 10 year campaign, at Housemans radical bookshop last night. The event was attended by many of the leading figures in the campaign, including Tony Benn who contributed the foreword to the book ‘Stop The War: A Graphic History‘ and made a short speech at the event. The book should be available now at all good bookshops, as well as direct from Stop the War.

In time I’ll put a few more pictures on line from this event on My London Diary – the site is currently running about a month behind GMT. Perhaps too I’ll post here my own contributions to the book, as well as possibly some of those that in the end didn’t get used.

Housemans is a fairly small shop with some narrow areas and at the start it was far too crowded to be worth making pictures, although I found myself standing next to Tony Benn when he made his speech and took a few frames. But most of the rest are from later in the event when numbers had thinned out considerably, apart from some of us photographers making the most of the free wine. I think the wine had slightly affected the D700 too (I had it with me from an earlier event I’d been covering) as rather fewer of the pictures that I took – all with the 16-35mm f4 – were as sharp as usual and the framing lacked the kind of precision that I usually aim for.

Many artists and photographers have contributed to the campaign through their work over the years, and have continued that in making their work available for this volume. A central section, ‘The Art of Politics’ includes images by such well-known figures as Banksy and Ralph Steadman, and throughout the book both as illustrations and in many of the photographs we see the work of David Gentleman, whose graphic posters have inspired the movement.

The book, produced under the editorial direction of Andrew Burgin, with Marie Gollentz as editor and design by Peter Palasthy is a fine piece of work and should win prizes.

There are photographs by around a couple of dozen photographers, including Guy Smallman who responsible for photography research (Ruth Boswell for the art research) with most of the pictures coming from from half a dozen of us, including some fine work by Paul Mattsson and Brian David Stevens as well as Guy himself. Many of the photographers and some of the artists were present at the launch, and several of us took pictures.

Fittingly the first section of the book is given over to photography, and after the art section the final part of the work is a ‘Graphic Timeline’ which attempts to list all of the many actions organised by the national movement (of course there were many more local events), illustrating many by posters and photographs, as well as thumbnails giving page numbers of photographs in the initial section.

Of course no photographer is ever entirely happy about how their pictures are published, although I was very pleased to have a few of mine included. But editors often prefer the wrong images, insist on cropping them, even take colour images and convert them (sometimes not particularly well) to black and white. The only way that photographers can get work treated exactly as they want it is to publish their own work – which is why I’m so keen on Blurb!

And after all I’ve been producing my own ‘graphic history’ of Stop the War, along with other protest movements for over ten years on My London Diary. I was amused when one of the other major photographers told me that he had used my site to identify the particular events where he took some of his pictures in the book.

Michelle Sank & Mary Turner

Yesterday evening’s Photo-forum, a monthly meeting “for working photographers across the spectrum to bring images, ideas, photo stories, approaches and work in progress for supportive debate and criticism” was a very special event, although not as well attended as most.

Of course we are coming up to Christmas, and there are many parties and other Christmas events taking place – there seem to be even more than usual this year, perhaps in some kind of reaction against the financial austerity. The weather wasn’t too great either, though London was nothing like Scotland, where people were being advised to stay home. Perhaps if I hadn’t have been coming up to London for a meeting earlier in the day and hadn’t known who was speaking I might have stayed home. There certainly was a powerful wind, and as I walked past the Occupy London camp at St Paul’s in mid-afternoon some tents were getting blown away and people were struggling to keep some of the structures up. And term had probably ended for some of the students who boost the audience whenever well-known speakers appear.

The format of Photo-forum is a simple one, with two photographers showing their work on the screen and talking about it, one before the interval and one after, often with some interesting questions and debate. It’s also a great opportunity to meet and talk with other photographers, both before the meeting, in the interval and especially afterwards in the pub, where we eat the free food paid for by a raffle drawn at the end of the evening for prints of the speakers’ work.

I’ve long been aware of the work of Michelle Sank, and have written about it here and elsewhere on several occasions, but it was good both to see a wider range of her work, as well as to hear her talking about it and her passion for photography. She also has a very fine web site, which again I’ve mentioned before, on which you can seem almost all of the work she showed last night, and which shows her various projects in depth. The site is a model of simplicity, clean, elegant and generous in making her work available.

Her practice is perhaps rather different from most of those in the audience, with art institution and gallery commissions enabling her to pursue what remain her very personal projects, but its social documentary aspect certainly makes it far more accessible and worthwhile to most working photographers than some things that appear on photography gallery walls, and I think those who had come to the event with little if any knowledge of her work were very impressed by it.

When I first saw her work around ten years ago, it stood out from what at the time was a host of new portraiture often with similar subject matter, including some by already well-known and much touted art-world photographers, because of the strong empathy between the photographer and the subjects. Clearly these were social documents as well as portraits and were made with a concern for the wider issues involved, and this was something that came out clearly in her comments as she showed the work.

Mary Turner‘s pictures often appear in ‘The Times’, but what she showed at Photo-forum was clearly something in which she had a strong personal involvement and interest. Unlike the typical news photographer (and many of our best press photographers are unlike the typical news photographer) she did not ‘jet in’ to Dale Farm for the highlights, but worked with the people living there from 2009 on, and is still following them now.

Although I only visited Dale Farm briefly on one occasion (and was very aware that I was not covering the story there in any depth), Turner’s pictures of the travellers in their vans reminded me very much of my earlier experiences, before I started taking pictures, of working as a student to defend travellers in Manchester against evictions and harassment by the local council.

Turner got to know some of the travellers extremely well, so that she and her camera became accepted as a part of their normal life, and her pictures display a great intimacy, as well as the lack of illusions about their lifestyle which she also made apparent in her sometimes laconic commentary. Her mainly wide-angle views of them both inside the trailers and outside on the site appealed strongly to me.

As well as the roughly 60 pictures from 2009-2011 which include some from weddings and other events off-site, she was also there for the ‘Last Days at Dale Farm’ shown in another set of images, where again her relationships with the travellers and the access that this gave her to their private lives makes her work stand out from that of other photographers, particularly in showing the reactions of the travellers to the eviction.

Like the others present on the morning of the invasion by riot police, she too has a picture of ‘Minty Challis, an activist and supporter of the Travellers protests against their eviction, October 19th 2011‘ holding up a crucifix in front the the blazing wreckage, and it is one of the better images from this ‘photocall’ for showing more of the scene, although probably much of the tighter cropping in the other images published was made by editors rather than photographers. But it was the next picture in the sequence, a darkened silhouette of people on a roof looking down towards the fire, the sun breaking through under dark cloud and a menacing row of gateposts at the left, like robots advancing inexorably on the site that I found more dramatic.

Turner’s pictures are a fine record of a way of life, and also of the destruction and the lawlessness of Basildon Council, bailiffs and police, ignoring the legal niceties and protections laid down by the courts in carrying out this eviction at huge public expense. They also make clear the nature of the site, laying bare any of the arguments that the long campaign made any sense in terms of planning law.

Although media interest largely disappeared after the dramatic events of October 19, the story is not yet over, and Turner is continuing to visit the travellers and record what is going on, and there are likely to be further developments after Christmas. Perhaps at some point a determined investigative reporter (unless Leveson outlaws them) may uncover the true back-story behind what seems to be Basildon Council’s determined long-term racist vendetta against Dale Farm which would provide an ideal text to accompany a book of these pictures.

If you are a working photographer based around London and don’t know about Photo-Forum it really is worth finding out more – and you can eamil the address on the web site to be put on the mailing list to be sent a couple of emails every month reminding you of the meetings, which take place on the second Thursday of each month in Jacobs Pro Lounge in New Oxford St.

My only regret about the evening was that I wasn’t one of the winners of the raffle.

New Breed

London-based Italian born photographer Mimi Mollica is the latest photographer to be featured on Verve Photo: The New Breed of Documentary Photographer, which highlights a fine series of pictures ‘En Route to Dakar’, taken along the 34 km internationally funded motorway under construction that links Dakar to the rest of Senegal.

Verve Photo is is a web site that every time I visit I find many things that are worth seeing. Among the highlights of my most recent visit was a link to A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan which examines thirty years of Afghan history. The multi-media presentation is based on 14 trips to Afghanistan between 1994 and 2010 by photojournalist Seamus Murphy (b.1959. Ireland).

On the right side of the blog page is a long list of all the photographers whose work has been featured. It’s an impressive and very long list and every one is worth exploring further.

Digital Etiquette

Photo-Attorney Carolyn E. Wright is someone whose advice on her blog I’ve often referred to in the past, both here and elsewhere, but I can’t remember hearing her voice before. Recently on her blog she posted a link to Don’t Post Pictures of My Kid on the Internet, Part 2, a programme in the Digital Manners podcast series on Slate, where she tells the two presenters what the legal position is about photographing people – including children – and posting pictures of them on the web.

As she says, there are minor differences in the law from state to state, but the advice that she goes on to give is clear and I think also would apply in this country. The key test is a “reasonable expectation of privacy”, and if this is absent, then you are free to make use of images for ‘editorial purposes’, which would cover posting to Facebook or on your web site etc, in fact more or less anything outside of advertising or product endorsement.

From what she says, I think UK courts have sometimes shown a slightly less wide interpretation of the “reasonable expectation”, but at the moment the position here is similar.

Some of those giving evidence to Leveson or commenting on it have called for the kind of aggressively restrictive privacy laws that would effectively end our right to photograph people without express permission, and there are certainly people who think that is already the case particularly so far as children are concerned, but it isn’t so.

The Slate site also has a poll, and if it is still open you will need to vote to be be shown the results. Although I was pleased to find that my own view was in the majority, the size of those voting ‘No’ to the question “According to the law in most states, anyone is free to photograph you in public and post it onlineall without your permission and over your objections. Are these laws correct?” was a little worrying.

This was the programme’s second discussion on the issue, and took place because there were complaints from some listeners about the answers they gave in the first, which was backed up by Wright’s exposition of the law.

Photomonth’s Photo Open

Finally I’ve got around to putting the some of the pictures I took on November 3 at Rich Mix in Bethnal Green, where the East London Photomonth was holding its open exhibition, the Photo Open, and also having a party, though I left before that got started.

The Photo Open is a completely open show, “open to all kinds of photographers and exhibits a wide range of subjects and approaches” with a small fee (£10 / £5 for concessions) for each image submitted. All of the images sent in are projected as a part of the show, with a relatively small number – around 20 or 30 – selected to be printed and put on the wall. The show is sponsored by theprintspace, who make these prints.

I’d taken both the Fuji X100 and also the D700 with me, as I was calling in at St Paul’s Cathedral to photograph OccupyLSX there on the way to Bethnal Green. Unfortunately it had started to rain just as I arrived there and I’d only taken a few pictures, not actually getting out the Nikon which I had intended to use while I was there.

I’d thought the Fuji would be ideal if I wanted to take a few pictures at the opening of the Photo Open, mainly with the idea of posting some here – as I did here in Photomonth Photo-Open 2011 on November 4th.

At the time my computer was broken and away for repair, and I was relying on a fairly ancient notebook with very limited software, and in particular not enough memory to either run Lightroom or Photoshop. I’d set the Nikon to produce jpegs as well as RAW files, and relied on an ancient copy of ACDSee and image editor FotoCanvas to process the Fuji RAW files.

Now that computer is back, though it’s just died again, but I have a new one, and have just processed the RAW files and put a larger set of the images from the evening on My London Diary. Its perhaps interesting to compare a few of the images:

Of course there are choices that I’ve made to present the images differently, and in particular to make the images rather brighter and cooler, but the upper images of each pair more or less reflect the jpeg that the D700 produced.

The last images I’ll post are from the Fuji.

This is an image processed by Lightroom, and I didn’t use any from the Fuji in my original post here on Re:PHOTO. But what I can show you is the difference between a file saved from the RAW image in Irfanview and below it one processed in Lightroom. The Irfanview file was quite a bit darker, so I’ve adjusted the levels in Photoshop to be similar. By mistake these are adjacent files, but very similar, taken within seconds at the same camera settings.

I’m not quite sure what this proves, though perhaps it does show why I like to work with RAW files and use Lightroom.

Stock Gone To Pot

Perhaps time for a little amusement. I find it hard to credit the warped ingenuity shown by some photographers. Imagine the trouble some have gone to setting up some of the most unlikely stock photography imaginable. Or perhaps beyond the imagination.

60 Completely Unusable Stock Photos is a good introduction, and for more there is a site devoted to the genre, AwkwardStockPhotos. But having looked at all 60 I wasn’t sure whether to comment WTF or OMG, though WTF seems the most popular response.

Surely some of the photographers involved must sit around making up silly pictures just to try and get featured there. Surely they cannot be serious! Though if you read some of the comments made in the 8 months or so this page has been around, some of them have actually been used.

Stock is a strange world, and some of the pictures that seem to sell best are truly boring images that no photographer with any sense would dream of making, rather than some of the bizarre concepts here. If you contribute to stock and it doesn’t sell well, I think you can always console yourself as I do with the thought that it’s because your pictures are too good!

John Pilger on War and Journalism

John Pilger‘s feature Once again, war is prime time and journalism’s role is taboo makes some very good points about journalism and in particular the role of Leveson, which he suggests is simply a ‘media theatre‘ to deflect us from the real issues.

As Pilger says, “Blame Rupert Murdoch and the tabloids for everything and business can continue as usual.”

While phone hacking may have caused a few celebs some inconvenience or minor distress, and has unpardonably caused some innocent victims considerable grief as well as possibly interfering with police investigations (and rather more will have been interfered with by those brown envelopes), the ‘business as usual’ of the press, and in particular embedded journalists in covering up the activities of British forces – including, according to lawyer Phil Shiner who Pilger quotes. the killing of “hundreds of civilians” and “ the most extraordinary, brutal things, involving sexual acts” are far more serious.

This is of course only half the story, and Pilger also quotes from a Ministry of Defence document from WiliLeaks in which the Ministry “describes investigative journalists -journalists who do their job – as a ‘threat’ greater than terrorism.”

At a time when there is so much bad press for journalists, it’s good to be able to quote such a glowing testimonial to at least some of our profession. But do read Pilger.

Medyan Dairieh and Park Royal

I didn’t go out specially to take these pictures in an area of London I’ve hardly visited since I photographed it around twenty years ago and got to know fairly well. One friend who I often meet photographing events in London, Medyan Dairieh, was showing his prize-winning work from Libya. Working for Al-Jazeera, he covered the Libyan revolution very much from the front line, entering Tripoli with the anti-Gaddafi forces and being wounded for a second time in the siege of the final stronghold of Abu Saleem.

Medyan has already talked about his work in Brighton and there are plans for further showings of his photographs and video in other cities. Al-Jazeera has built up a reputation over the year for its reporting of events in the Arab world that has made the BBC and others look hopelessly out of touch and sometimes biased, and Medyan’s photography has played its part in their success.

Unfortunately I couldn’t attend the main event yesterday evening, but took a rather lengthy route home after photographing yesterday’s Climate Justice march to call in, look at the work and meet Medyan again, looking quite different in a smart suit than when we meet on the street, fairly late in the afternoon. It was more or less dark when I arrived at the show, and certainly night as I left at around 4.45pm, almost an hour after sunset.

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The event took place in Park Royal in north-west London, developed as London’s largest industrial estate in the 1930s. I think I first went there when Prime Minister Thatcher had just turned her back on British manufacturing industry in favour of banking, the city and services, photographing a bleak factory for sale on a snowy day as a part of a project on de-industrialisation, returning in later months to photograph some of the more interesting industrial buildings that I thought might soon be demolished.

I’d hurried past a small group of buildings as I came to the Islamic centre hosting the event that I had thought might be interesting to photograph, but hadn’t wanted to stop. As I walked from North Acton station I’d been thinking it would be interesting to visit the area again and photograph in better light. But when I came out, the light, mainly from the street lights, with a little still from the dark blue sky wih a few clouds, and also from the passing traffic, was creating a rather interesting and somewhat unearthly effect, so this time I stopped to take a few pictures.

It wasn’t a brightly lit road and I didn’t have a tripod. But nowadays that is seldom a problem. ISO 3200 on the D700 gives a nice quality, with a slight noise which is hardly noticeable at normal scales and quite attractive at 1:1. The 16-35mm lens is only f4, but even at 20mm I would want to stop down to at least that aperture for depth of field in an image like this. Without any exposure compensation set, the shutter speed of 1/30 was hardly a problem, though I made several exposures to be sure to get one that was critically sharp. The Coca-Cola can in the foreground just to the right of the tyre may not be visible on the web, but at 1:1 it is sharp, as is the text across the front of ‘The Kiosk’, though certainly this is easier to read in the second image from closer side.

To get similar results using film would have been difficult. I would have had to stick to a relatively slow emulsion, perhaps ISO 200, making a tripod essential, made calculations and then bracketed to cope with reciprocity failure, fiddled around with correction filters and then have kept my fingers firmly crossed until the prints came back from the lab, usually requiring a reprint to get the kind of results I wanted. Even then they would have been nothing like as good a colour quality as we routinely get from digital. Though some people like the odd colour that film produced; rather like those people who prefer their oil paintings seen through discoloured ancient varnish than after restoration, or their buildings before rather than after the years of pre-Clean Air Act grime has been removed (and sometimes I do too.)

I could remove the orange cast from the images too, but the orange light was a part of what attracted me to the scene, and removing it produces an unnaturally cold effect. I have reduced it a little from Nikon’s automatic white balance that I used when taking the picture.

Earlier in the day, as I’d been photographing the march looking down on it from Waterloo Bridge, I’d been quite surprised to find a photographer next to me using a tripod. I was getting shutter speeds of around 1/400th and using the 18-105mm felt no need for a tripod, particularly as I was leaning on a very solid railing to take my pictures.

Back in the old days of film, I would only have needed a tripod had I for some reason chosen to photograph the event on a slow film, such as Pan F or Kodachrome 25. Though I can’t ever think why I would have done so when Tri-X or Fuji 400 would have done a better job. But with digital, tripods are needed so rarely that I’ve almost given up on them completely. Tripods still have their uses, but mainly no longer to hold the camera steady (they have never ensured sharpness!*) I think the only use I’ve made of one in the last year has been to mark an exact spot in space to use when rotating a lens around its nodal point to make a panorama – which I was actually taking hand-held. The main rationale of a stand or tripod in a studio is also to precisely locate a camera.

I think there is a stage in photographers’ lives where tripods seem important and seem to them to mark themselves out as a ‘proper photographer’ – and for some years I went nowhere without one. But technology has changed and in practical terms they are now seldom more useful than a dark cloth. And yes, I’ve seen a photographer with an ordinary DSLR using one of those as well. Probably the moth has got mine by now, stashed away in a cupboard with one of my 5x4s. Doubtless there are still photographic courses where students are urged to use tripods, told that you need them to get sharp pictures, just like many are still told nonsense about film being better than digital, that darkroom prints are always better than inkjet prints and doubtless much other nonsense.

Strolling a few yards further on I came to the bridge across the canal. Park Royal had a great location for industry because of its situation between two of the main rail lines out of London, the Grand Union Canal, and road links including the A40 and the North Circular Road, though now I imagine only the roads are significant. It was really dark as I looked along the canal, hard to make out the two railway bridges. This time there was hardly any light at all, and one solution would certainly have been a tripod. But I held the camera on top of the flat metal of the road bridge and gave a six-second exposure. It was so dark that I didn’t notice the group of people on the canal towpath until after I’d take the first exposure.

On the back of the camera, the picture looked far too light, so I made a second exposure for half the time. Lightroom’s auto setting produces more or less identical results from the two, simply adjusting the exposure values. Theoretically the longer exposure should be a little less noisy, but I couldn’t actually see a difference, but surprisingly it was just a tad sharper – probably a heavy vehicle had shaken the bridge a little during the shorter exposure (another thing tripods don’t control.) Using the default values actually produces a picture that looks more or less as if it was taken on a sunny evening, the orange street-light becoming warm sun. I’ve tried to get to something a little closer to what I saw and felt as I took it.

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* I may sometimes have felt it would be useful to stuff some of my subjects, sometimes not only for photographic purposes, but it has never proved practicable, and a little selective unsharpness often improves images. The second major cause of unsharpness in my images is incorrect focus. Camera shake comes a poor third except where I’ve forgotten to set an appropriate ISO. Which happens. Too often.