>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

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.

_____________________________________________________________

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.

__________________________________________________________

* 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.

Odd Images

There are often pictures that I take that don’t fit into the stories on My London Diary. Nothing really odd about them (that might be more interesting.) Sometimes I tag them on at the end of a story, but that hardly makes sense, and almost certainly means that I won’t ever be able to find them again.

Here are three I took kind of on my way home on October 31. I’d decided to take a little look around the West End to see if anyone was out celebrating Halloween on the streets, but at around 7pm wasn’t surprised not to find anyone. But as I went around, both walking and from the bus I took a few pictures. Here’s one of a shop getting into the spirit of the evening.

Its a place where during the day you will see guys standing in front dressed in union jacks and tourists posing with them for photos as well as going in and buying tourist stuff. Probably not the kind of thing I would normally take a picture of, but standing there I wondered if it might serve as a statement not about what night it was, but about the state of the UK economy.

I was really hanging around until I could use my ‘Super Off Peak’ rail ticket after 7pm, and it was time to get on a bus to the station. (‘Super Off Peak’ was a super wheeze thought up by the rail companies to make loads of money, by keeping the Super Off Peak only slightly more than the previous excessive Off Peak fares and then putting time restrictions on them so you have to buy an more expensive Off Peak ticket to travel out of London between 4pm and 7pm.)

I couldn’t resist taking a couple of pictures on the way from the top deck of the bus. The first was in Trafalgar Square, where a bus gives quite a good view of our National Gallery, but what really attracted me was the red man hovering in front of its dome.

The bus wasn’t stopped long at the lights and controlling the reflections in the window is always a problem, especially if you want some of them, as I did. I wondered for just a few seconds about whether to Photoshop out those bits at top right, but decided it was against my principles, although perhaps I might just make them a little less obvious…

The way to avoid reflections completely when working from buses (or through windows of any type you can approach closely) is to use a rubber lens hood, though it might be hard to find one except in a 49mm filter size. Back in the days of film, using an Olympus OM camera this wasn’t a problem, as almost all of the fairly wide range of lenses I owned took 49mm filters – the odd one out was 52mm. This lets you form a light seal even at a bit of a slight angle to the window, without pressing the solid bit of the lens against the window – which would pick up nasty vibes from the bus. Without it I’m left using my dark coat sleeve to do the best I can.

The other problem is dirty windows. It adds another aspect to choosing where to sit on a bus, assuming you have a choice. Fortunately you only need a fairly small patch of cleanish glass to work through. But some buses don’t have one.

I was on a nearly empty bus as we went over Waterloo Bridge, and as I’ve photographed the National Theatre at night quite a few times both from the bus and from the bridge, I moved over to a seat on the other side. Nothing very special about this picture that I can think of, other than some slightly unusual lighting.

2006 – Hot From The Press

Today I just got my first batch of copies of 2006: My London Diary, my latest Blurb book, and the my first book to be based on relatively recent work other than the rather private ‘Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood‘, still available exclusively from the Queen’s Terrace Café where the work was shown earlier this year.

I was pleased with it when I saw the proof copy a couple of weeks ago, though I found around 20 pictures that I thought I could improve a little, and completely rewrote portions of the thankfully short text. There are just a couple of pages of introduction, then the pictures, in chronological order (extreme pedants may note that on the few occasions where I’ve included more than one picture from a single day, they are not necessarily shown in the order they were taken.)

All of the pictures came from digital cameras, but in making the book I went back to the original RAW files and reworked them using Lightroom 3.5. I then compared these files with those that I’d produced back in 2006 using the much lamented Pixmantec Raw Shooter Premium (RSP), which Adobe bought up because it was too strong a competitor to ignore. Lightroom had several huge advantages, firstly that of several more years of development, but mainly that it allows large amounts of local control, burning and dodging of specific areas of print. We were also told that Lightroom would make use of the technology and programmers from RSP and improve on them.

Somewhat to my surprise, probably around half of the images I used came from RSP, which still seemed to do a better job of the basic conversion than Lightroom has yet to manage. With those that were better from Lightroom, I think it was mainly down to the ability to use the selective tools, particularly to lower highlight areas without changing the rest of the image. It also was able to do a better job at controlling noise and correcting lens distortion.

The book does contain one image that isn’t on the My London Diary web site, from June’s World Naked Bike Ride. This one is on the web site:

but I’ve included another which I thought was perhaps unsuitable to post on the web. You can see a preview showing around 15 pages (though rather fewer pictures) on Blurb.

It is great being able to design and edit my own books using Blurb, and the only real drawback is cost. (Though of course there may be better designers and editors than me around.) This is an 80 page paperback and would be decent value at a tenner, but from Blurb it costs £24.99 a copy. Worse still, Blurb seems usually to charge another fiver to deliver a single copy bringing the total to around £30.

Still perhaps not bad value at only around 44p for each of those photographs, and part of the cost is for the slightly better than standard lustre paper which I think works a lot better. The printing is I think pretty good – far better than many print on demand publishers get – but certainly not up to the standard of the best photographic books. And with some photographic books now being published in limited editions for hundreds of pounds it perhaps begins to look more reasonable.

Of course the real place to see My London Diary is on the web, where you can enjoy almost all of these pictures (though on a rather smaller scale and less carefully developed from the raw files) along with several thousand others from the year. Blurb has a preview which also shows some of the book pages.

_________________________________________

I’ve decided to make a special offer. I can get a small discount by ordering books in small batches rather than singly, and am prepared to add postage at actual cost. Taken together that means I can supply copies at £25.00 to any UK address and still make a smallish amount on the deal. It is possibly an advantage that these copies will also (unless you request otherwise) will be signed. The only downside is that it may take a week or so longer for you to get the book than ordering direct from Blurb, depending on whether I have stock or not. If I don’t it may take around two weeks to get your book. Orders I get in the next few days should arrive in time for Christmas unless demand greatly exceeds my expectations.

Orders will need to be paid in advance, and if you e-mail me – its just petermarshall followed by the at symbol and then cix.co.uk – asking for details I’ll send you a message telling you where to send the cheque and your address.

I’m also prepared to supply any of the other books on my Blurb bookstore in the same way.

Until further notice, prices direct from me as as follows:

2006: My London Diary: £25

In Search of Atget: £25

Photo Paris (1988) £25

Still Occupied – A View Of Hull: £30

Before The Olympics: £25

1989: £18

The links on the titles are to Blurb where you can see a preview of all or most of all the books.

I’m also prepared to supply Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood which is not available on Blurb, again at £25 a copy post paid. Alternatively you can collect a copy from the Queen’s Terrace Café for £20 while stocks last.

A Small Tech Tip

Yesterday I was standing in a crowd waiting for an as then unspecified protest to occur, and having taken a few pictures was passing the time of day with one of my most experienced (and talented) colleagues. Who was saying that he didn’t know what was wrong with his Nikon, it just seemed to be all over the place with exposures, and he showed me a few. I’ve been there and done that and was able to tell him that somehow he had managed to turn the camera’s auto-bracketing feature on. Fortunately it was only giving plus or minus one stop, so the results were at least largely salvageable.

Life is generally too short for bracketing, and much of the stuff I take there isn’t a chance of a second or third shot. I can just about think of situations where I’ve found bracketing useful – long ago when I was shooting Christmas illuminations for example, and it was really very necessary to combine separate exposures of the same scene because of the extreme dynamic range in making images like the one above (which would have been a lot easier if HDR software had been around.) But mostly ‘HDR’ in photography seems just a way to mess up the tonal range and sometimes I think is only needed for people who don’t know how to use Lightroom on their RAW files. I very rarely find a scene that the D700 can’t cope with with a little help in post.

So just in case the elves in my camera decide to switch on bracketing when my back is turned (usually they just think it’s fun to set silly shutter speeds) I use the Custom Setting – its e5 on the D700 – to put bracketing on white balance. When you take RAW images, white balance makes no difference other than recording the value somewhere in the file, and it’s simple to put right in Lightroom.

Incidentally, writing RAW in capitals distinctly annoys some pedants, who a) have nothing better to do, and b) suffer from the delusion that only TLAs should be capitalised and RAW is not an acronym. No, it isn’t, just a name that is conventionally in capitals, and the rule is simply one some nerd thought was how things ought to be. And I think it’s always a good thing to annoy pedants, especially those who tell me I shouldn’t begin sentences with ‘And’. Or ‘But’! Or ‘Or’.

October Stories

I’m still slowly catching up on my work following extensive computer problems in October and early November (still not quite sorted, but things are now usable if not perfect.) At least I think I’m catching up, though I’m now exactly a month behind in adding work to My London Diary, having just completed the stories for October.

It was of course a busy month, although for various reasons I’ve been trying to take things a little easier, and its been followed by a busy November. We may not yet have seen much of a winter, but there is a remarkable amount of dissent around, and no signs of it abating.

So here is the full list for October 2011:

Halloween Protest Over Dictator Debt
Zombies Halloween Pub Crawl
United Families & Friends Annual March
More from OccupyLSX
Occupy Finsbury Square
Rail Unions Protest McNulty Cuts
Vienna From a Different Angle
Staines Moor, Staines, Middx!
OccupyLSX Continues At St Paul’s
Tibetans March Against Chinese Repression
Environmentalists Protest Against Biofuels
Hardest Hit Protest At City Hall
Occupy London Kept Out Of Stock Exchange
Block the Bridge NHS Protest
Ten Years On – Stop The War Coalition
EDL & UAF Women At Downing St
East Of The City Opening
Fish Island, Olympic Views & Hackney Wick
Battle of Cable St – 75 Years
Lea Navigation & Olympic Site

I don’t know whether it was a good month for my photography. There are a few events I didn’t really seem to really get to grips with, but some events present less opportunities than others. I had a few camera problems, made a few silly mistakes, missed some pictures just like I always do!

Leveson

The basic problem that the Leveson inquiry seems to be concentrating on in the last few days seems not to be about news and photography but about the non-news aspect of the media and its obsession with so-called celebrities. That photographers seem to be cast as the villains in this piece seems both unfair and also dangerous for our freedom to report the real news.

In my view it isn’t any part of the job of the press as such to report on the inconsequential activities of the various nonentities that occupy much of the tabloid space, along with the various scandal magazines. It is not what the freedom of the press is about, and the concept of a free press should not be used to defend it. Were it possible I’d personally be very happy to see legislation that put an end both to ‘celebrity culture’ and the reporting of it; both are I think aspects of enslavement rather than freedom.

Over the years we have seen an increasing trivialisation of ‘news’ with an increasing failure to report on the real issues in a cultural devaluation fuelled in particular by television. It’s a canker that has wormed its way deep into even the most respected of our media – so many of are angered that institutions such as the BBC and newspapers including the Guardian think that stories such as the recent trial of the doctor who let a singer take an overdose deserve to be headline news.

When the colour supplements first came out they often covered real stories; I read the reports by guys like Don McCullin from Biafra and elsewher and many other fine photographers and writers. Now, even from the most serious of newspapers there is seldom much serious journalism or photojournalism, and the magazines are stuffed with silly fashions at silly prices, recipes with 37 ingredients that nobody ever really cooks, reviews of restuarants that only people on bankers bonuses can eat at and all kinds of tat at ridiculous prices, trivia upon trivia upon trivia. Frankly the odd ‘celeb’ getting a bit annoyed at someone poking a lens in their face seems of little consequence when we have a whole culture that is disintegrating and it is just a relatively minor manifestation of this.

Of course the guys who hang around outside homes and pester people on the streets, the ‘paparazzi’, are seldom real photographers, and most of the pictures that they take prove the point. As images they are poorly composed, badly lit and tedious to the extreme, but still the newspapers and magazines fall over themselves to pay big money for them. And it can be really big money, with some photographers making more from a single picture than I make from a year’s work. Take away this financial incentive and there would be no problems.

Unfortunately it is very hard to see how it would be possible to frame laws that would restrict the undesirable activities of the paparazzi without restricting the freedom of the press and of photographers in particular.

The relationship between photographers and celebrities is of course more complex than the media reports of the Leveson hearings suggest – they are after all brought into being by the lens. But I can’t help thinking that Leveson would have been far more likely to reach sensible conclusions if it had concentrated far more on the problems of ‘ordinary’ members of the public who get caught up and trampled by the tabloid circus (some of whom have made the headlines by their testimony too) and much less on giving more publicity to the sometimes relatively minor moans of some celebrities.

There are a couple of things I’ve read about this which started me thinking about the problem. One is a lengthy piece by Edmond Terakopian, Im A Press Photographer & Very Proud Of It, who describes Leverson rather accurately as ‘turning into a witch-hunt against photographers‘ and the other an open letter by Christopher Pledger that he quotes in full in his piece. Pledger makes a very good point about the way that TV news disparages photographers in many reports for their intrusive nature, when many photographers would feel that the TV reporters making these reports are part of the same media operation and in my experience usually more intrusive than their still counterparts.

Another issue raised is that of press cards and of ‘fake’ press cards. Although we do have a nationally recognised scheme under the UK Press Card Authority that is recognised by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), that does not make those issued outside of this scheme ‘fakes’. The UK Press Card is however backed by a verification scheme and is only issued by a limited number of media organisations (the so-called ‘gatekeepers’) and so has a status that other cards do not. But journalism is changing and news and news media is a wider concept than when the Press Card scheme was established; many who are now increasingly contributing to the news media work through organisations that are not part of and don’t fit the recognised scheme.

Nikon Worries

My Nikon D300 gave up on Saturday, while I was photographing a march by Egyptians in London. It happened when the camera got a little knock as I was climbing down from a box on the street. Nothing significant, but it fell around six inches and bumped the side of it.

There was no obvious extra external damage, and I thought if anything I had damaged the lens, as when I tried to focus the 18-105 which was on the camera it hunted around a bit before coming to a halt decidedly out of focus. I put the camera back in my bag and continued working with the D700 and 16-35mm, and hardly noticed the lack of anything longer the rest of the day. If it had been working there would of course have been pictures I would have made with it, but I’m not sure my photography really suffered. I suppose I could have continued working on it in manual focus, but really the viewfinder just isn’t good enough for that.

The next day I put another lens on the D300 body and found it too failed to focus, while the 18-105 seemed to be working fine on the D700. It was the body and not the lens that had a problem, and it was one that made it more or less unusable.

I spent a couple of days wondering what to do. The D300 has seen better days, and has been knocked around quite a bit. I did a check on the shutter count (on-line by loading one of the .NEF files I did make with it on Saturday to My Shutter Count.com as I automatically strip some less essential Exif data from my jpegs, and the software I have currently installed on my new computer doesn’t read it from raw files) and found it was at around 158500, more than the rated life of 150000. The screen on the top plate has been broken since early summer and much of the rubber on the body is peeling. The top speeds no longer work properly, as I found when photographing swans in July, and I’ve been suffering more recently from the occasional exposure with half the picture covered in nasty coloured lines and the odd image that has an ‘unexpected end of file‘ or gives the annoyling vague Lightroom message ‘there was an error working with this photo.’* All in all it’s in rather a mess, and I shudder to think how much it might cost to get it fixed.

The D300 cost me £969 in April 2008, so it is coming up to 4 years old and it has seen reasonably intense use in that time. That works out at around 0.61p per exposure for the body, which has not been repaired or serviced in that time, so I wouldn’t feel bad about ditching it now. The sensible thing would probably be to get an estimate for repair and then sell it secondhand, but so far I’ve just wasted a lot of time thinking about its replacement.

Everyone on the web seems to have been expecting Nikon to announce a replacement for the D700 for some time – with very strong rumours in recent weeks that the D800 might emerge from under wraps at the end of this month, although these are now being discounted. New products have been held up and the supply of cameras and lenses seriously affected by the flooding at Nikon’s factory in Ayutthaya, Thailand, where all DX SLRs have been made since 2009, along with most of the DX zoom lenses, although the FX D800 will presumably be made elsewhere, probably at the Sendai Japan factory which earlier this year was closed until the end of March following the 11th March earthquake and tsunami. But in any case it seems likely that it will be very expensive – I’ve seen a figure of $3600 mentioned. And if the strong rumour of it being 36Mp turn out to be true, I’m not sure I need it.

Nikon’s direct replacement of the D300, the D300s, offered few advantages. Better to get my old D300 fixed than go for that. Its replacement is also overdue and was once expected about now. At the moment the most attractive of the available Nikons to me seems to be the D7000, with slightly better image quality in low light than the D300 and some other minor advantages. As usual, the review I found most worth reading comes from Thom Hogan. It’s also just a bit smaller, lighter and cheaper. I came close to spending around £830 on one yesterday.

But today, while thinking about writing this piece, I had another play around with the ailing D300, trying it out on manual focus and in the two autofocus modes, verifying the lens still made the right noises for VR and so on. And suddenly it just started working again, as if something had somehow fallen back into place, and I was looking at a sharp image in the viewfinder (though a rather boring one.) I took a few images with brick walls in them and things seem to be pretty sharp. So perhaps I’ll give the D300 another chance until the next time it falls to pieces. By then Nikon might have their new models out.

_______________________________________________

© 2011, Peter Marshall
Lightroom refused to work with this D300 raw file, but Irfanview had no problems and Photoshop finished the job.
Halloween in London, 2011.

* ‘There was an error working with this file’ and other error messages may simply be Adobe software being very picky about the files that it will open – and perhaps might be replaced at least in some cases by the message ‘Lightroom couldn’t be arsed to open this file.’

You may still be able to get a usable image from the file – as with the picture above – using other software, such as Irfanview, free for non-commercial use to extract to a high quality jpeg and then adjusting that in Photoshop. And even if you can’t extract the image from the RAW data, the included jpeg (used for displaying the image on the camera screen) may still be ok, although these are usually ‘basic’ quality and sometimes smaller than full size. You can download the free IJFR – Instant JPEG From RAW Free Utility from Michael Tapes’s RawWorkflow site – register there to be sent the download link. It’s a handy way to very quickly generate a whole set of jpegs from any set of RAW files.

Not For My Xmas Present!

I won’t be rushing out to buy a copy of Vivian Maier: Street Photographer which, according to Amazon will be available from 8 Dec, published by Powerhouse Books as a 128 page hardcover (ISBN-10: 1576875776 ISBN-13: 978-1576875773) at the pre-order price of £24.64. It’s cheaper in the US, and the Amazon page includes a one minute video which exposes the book and around twenty of her pictures, and makes very clear why I think the hype around her is unjustified.

Make no mistake, Maier was a good photographer. A very good eye who picked up stuff from all sorts of guys and made her own take of it. You can see in the video and the half a dozen images on the web site that she has learnt well from Walker Evans, from Lisette Model, from Lee Friedlander, from Henri Cartier-Bresson from Harry Callaghan and from others. What you don’t see, despite the several self-portraits, is any clue as to who Maier herself was as an artist.

It says in the text that she took over 100,000 photographs in a period from the 1950s to the 1990s, though overwhelmingly I think her work shows its 1930s roots. 100,000 over 40 years is a relatively modest output and not unusual for the keen amateur that she was, at 2,500 pictures a year, it works out at around 50 a week. It’s hard also to know how much of the back-story is true. Did she show her work to no-one, or was it that the people in Chicago she did show her work to didn’t find it of particular interest.

Mike Johnston on The Online Photographer seems considerably more convinced of the book’s worth than me. It seems a pleasant enough volume, but certainly nothing to get excited about, and I sincerely hope nobody buys me it for Christmas, though I’m sure there will be considerable media hype and many photographers are likely to find a copy jammed in their stocking. Please, please not for me.

There are obviously others who disagree with my verdict on her, and the featured comment by Sherwood McLernon says “I think of it as the book that I had hoped The Americans by Robert Frank would have been, but wasn’t.” which must deserve some kind of award.

I don’t know where McLernon was sitting waiting for the publication of ‘The Americans’ in 1958. Maier had hardly started in photography when Frank took 2 years and around 28,000 images to make the work in 1955-7. Published first in France, where Robert Delpire put his future with the family firm on the line to get it in print, it shocked the photography world, or at least those who saw it, as most of the reviews were extremely negative. Wikipedia quotes Popular Photography as deriding his images as “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.”

The Americans is in no way a perfect book, but it became a seminal book, although it remains in some respects a difficult book. Maier’s work (both in the show and on the various web sites) is safe and easy to assimilate. If I wanted one word to describe it, I think “anodyne” would do nicely, whereas for Frank it would be “iconoclastic.” The mention of Frank is however interesting, as looking at her work in the gallery this summer, one thought that came to me was that despite her obvious talent and facility, she had never really got to grips with his work.

If you are looking for a present for a photographer with any interest in street photography and you find they haven’t got a copy of ‘The Americans’ then I suggest you buy that rather than this book. Maier’s work is easy listening while Frank’s remains challenging, even after I’ve known it since the 1970s when I was getting into the medium.

You might also want to look at Martin Parr’s pick of the best books of the decade, made for the PhotoIreland Festival in the Summer. Perhaps among a few of his choices I might endorse is John Gossage’s Berlin in the Time of the Wall – you can see a selection of the pictures at the Stephen Daiter Gallery, but even at the reduced price of $132 it’s a little expensive for my relatives.

Perhaps at some time I’ll try and write more seriously about my own picks of recent photography books, and I have another of my own Blurb publications arriving shortly.

Ten Years On

Stop the War, along with CND and MAB marked the 10th anniversary of the Invasion of Afghanistan with a protest in Trafalgar Square followed my a march to Downing Street, which was led by that redoubtable woman whose picture ended my previous post, Hetty Bower.

I rather like the feeling in this image that the man on her right is not helping her to walk but holding her back.

It was, as the picture shows, a rather dull day, but for much of the press the big news was the appearance at the event of Julian Assange. There was a huge scrum when he arrived into the enclosure around the platform in Trafalgar Square, but I decided it wasn’t worth trying to join it as there would be a much better opportunity later.

Fortunately I was right, and in just about the right place for it, and took far too many pictures of him. This is the one I like best, though perhaps I could improve it a little with some more work in Lightroom, I think it is just a little too dark at the moment.

I didn’t quite get the picture of him that I wanted, something that had a little more character, but it’s certainly better than many I’ve seen. There were far too many speakers (and I missed quite a few while away elsewhere) but I did take a few pictures of them that at least I like.

I spent quite a while trying to get exactly what I wanted with Jemima Khan, and I think I came close, but had to work in a split second with John Pilger.

I’ve photographed Tony Benn so many times that I wasn’t going to bother yet again, but then I saw him and thought the lighting wasn’t bad as he took out his pipe to relax for a minute or two before being interviewed for TV.

George Galloway always has a good line in theatrical gestures, and I thought this was one of his better attempts, though I’m not sure I would really call him an ‘artist’ as the caption on the screen above him seems to.

There is something I really like about that little bit of movement in the far hand.

Some people are much more difficult to photograph. Jeremy Corbyn MP, the newly appointed National Chair of Stop the War Coalition, often seems to speak with his eyes closed or near closed and it seldom makes for a good picture. I photographed him waiting to speak standing in front of the Landseer lions, and can’t decide which of the two frames on My London Diary that I prefer.

You can see the other one, and my other pictures from the event on My London Diary in Ten Years On – Stop The War Coalition. Things got a little hectic for a while at Downing St, and there were so many photographers that I kept getting pushed forward, too close to the action. It might have been a good time to use the 10.5mm, but the crush was so tight there was no way I could change a lens.

I could only work with the 16-35, mainly at the wider end, and do the best I could.

I’ve photographed many Stop The War events over the ten years it has been in existence, and at the moment am eagerly awaiting the launch of a publication celebrating those ten years, which includes quite a few of my pictures. But this event came several months too late to be included.