>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

A Soggy Meringue

If you’ve not yet read the article by Simon Crofts on the Hargreaves Copyright Review it is worth reading. A freelance photographer based in Edinburgh, Scotland, he studied law at Oxford, so ‘The Hargreaves Copyright Review. Its a soggy meringue‘, unlike the Hargreaves Review itself, is written by someone who knows what he is talking about.

Worth sending to your MP too, so that they know what is happening, along of course with your own views. You can read more about the likely effects of adopting the Hargreaves proposals on the Stop43 site.

It was pressure from photographers led by Stop43, but also aided by the many of us who got our MPs to ask some of the right questions about the proposal that prevented it being bumped into law before. E-mail is easy, but paper still gets a lot more attention. Check their name on the e-mail site if you are not sure, then send your letter to them at:

House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA

Many MPs, including my own former MP (one of those who got their fingers – and seat – singed in the expenses scandal) have been keen photographers and last time I wrote I got a surprisingly detailed and interested response, with my MP contacting the minister and shadow minister and putting my (and his) concerns to them.

Protests For Obama

When Obama came to London, there were plenty of people who wanted to protest against him and US policies, and unlike some previous occasions, the Met decided to keep within the law and allow protests to take place, while making sure it was fairly unlikely that the president actually got to see or hear them.

Security was high around Buck Palace, which was surrounded on all sides by police, with a ring of officers standing generally every 10 or 20 yards around the whole of its high perimeter wall – which is topped by a fairly impressive fence. You do get a few glimpses of lawns and trees over the top of the wall from the top deck of buses going past, and there is a rather better view from the top floors of the London Hilton, although there are too many trees for a decent view of the extensive lawns beneath.

Police stopped me walking across the front of the palace, where they were out in force, insisting a take a longer route around – a quarter of a mile to get around a hundred yards, but other than that they were reasonably helpful, allowing those with press passes out between the barriers holding the protesters back and the police lines between these and the roadway to photograph the demonstrations.

The protesters were perhaps 50 metres away from the large motorcade – around 20 vehicles, many with dark glass windows – that drove up the mall and into the palace. I imagine Obama was in one of them, but the windows were tightly shut and I didn’t see him as they drove quickly by and into the palace.

There were quite a few different groups of protesters, along with a few individual protests, including both supporters of the Syrian government and the Syrian protesters, but I saw no trouble, with all the groups shouting in the direction of the palace and apparently ignoring each other.

Photographically the call to Obama to shut down the Guantanamo Bay camp and release Londoner Shaker Aamer presented me with most problems, firstly because the standard Adobe Nikon profile does take issue with bright fluorescent orange suits and for the pictures I was sending in to a picture library I needed to use the Camera Neutral v3 dcpTool Untwist profile I’ve mentioned in a previous post.

More tricky was the long message spelt out on the posters, which were laid out on the ground in front of the row of protesters for the press to photograph, with buck palace in the background. If you move back to take the whole message in even with the 16mm then they are hard to read as you only see them obliquely. The solution is to get in closer with the 10.5mm, though you have to work quickly as this gets you in everyone else’s shot – and I had to shout back to the guys I’d only be a second. Well, perhaps ten seconds.

It still isn’t a great image, but they had obviously put in some effort to make the sheets carrying the message and I felt I should take a little trouble to photograph it as best I could.

Later I had an interesting time trying to photograph the Syrian opposition, who were getting pretty excited, with one man getting up on the shoulders of another and a great deal of jumping around and shouting. It was tricky getting to the right place and the crowd was surging back and forth, and it gave me little or no time to think. In the end there were a couple of images I was reasonably happy with, including this one:

This was taken with the 16-35 lens wide open, when f4 gives you all the depth of field you are likely to need, though the light at this point was pretty good, and I didn’t really need the 1/8000s shutter speed that ISO500 gave me, though it did avoid camera shake. I was getting pushed around quite a bit as people jumped up in the crowd, so a fast shutter speed was certainly called for, but this was perhaps a little overkill.

I wasn’t in sympathy with all of the protests, and in particular the pro-government Syrians looked rather more like an officially sponsored PR outing than a protest, but their huge images of their president did make for some interesting pictures.

I liked the hands here, but it doesn’t quite fit the format, and this is one of the few of my images that I think looks better for a much squarer crop:

Photographically I think I had a better day than usual and there were a few pictures I was pleased with – you can see them on Obama Told Release Shaker Aamer Now! and Other Protests Against Obama.

Sochi Project

Catching up with the various blogs I like to look at through their RSS feeds I came across a link on Joerg Colberg’s Conscientious to a video on Rob Hornstra which looks at his practice of ‘slow journalism’ and the Sochi Project with writer Arnold van Bruggen in particular.

Hornstra is a photographer whose work I’ve liked since I saw work he produced for his degree around 8 years ago. His photography is straightforward but avoids the obvious and has a quirkiness that appeals. Talking about a picture he was taking of a singer in a restaurant in Sochi (the venue in Russia for the 2014 Winter Olympics) he says that there was a little fan at the side of the stage and a prominent notice for the toilet, so he knew it would be a good picture. The piece starts by him saying that he’s a photographer – or at least that’s what people say about him, but he thinks of himself more as a storyteller.

After graduating Hornstra was working as a bartender, and couldn’t find anyone to publish his book so he thought about self-publishing, but found that to print 250 copies would cost him 7,500 – far more than he could afford. But a work colleague said he would like a copy of the book and would pay in advance and handed him 30 dollars, and that led to a book that was financed by advanced sales – it took just a few weeks to sell enough advance copies to be able to print.The next book sold out in advance in 3 days, and the one after than in hours.

It’s a rather more radical approach than publishing on demand, and one which also gets your work out to more people. Making a book on Blurb only demands that you sell one copy, and I suspect the majority of works produced in that way only ‘sell’ a handful of copies, all or nearly all bought by the person who made the book, although some of us do manage to sell a number to personal friends and others at exhibition openings etc.

250 copies isn’t a sensible print run for a photographic book, and I imagine that Hornstra produced the later works in larger numbers, and the clip shows him sending off around five orders for his self-published works on what is supposed to be a typical day.

Sochi, a five year or more year project on the city that is hosting the winter Olympics with writer van Bruggen, takes the idea further, asking for subscriptions to fund the project as a whole. For a small donation – 10 per year – you will get access to documentation about the project on areas of the web site unavailable to the public, but as ‘Silver’ donor of “100 per year you will not only receive access to the website. You will also receive all the publications produced by The Sochi Project, including an annual report, exclusively designed by Kummer & Herrman. We will inform you personally of exhibitions, readings and presentations related to The Sochi Project and you are welcome to attend any of these for free.” ‘Gold’ donors – at 1000 per year or more – also get signed prints and articles, and “After five years you could be the owner of a unique collectors item.”

I don’t think I have enough spare cash to invest in the offer, although I suspect that it could well be a good investment at either silver or gold level, given the rapid increase in prices that some very ordinary photographic publications have seen over recent years.

Personally too, I don’t see myself finding it easy to attract enough advance orders to publish my next book other than on Blurb, but you never know. Perhaps I should be thinking about taking subscriptions for my planned extensive series on the ‘Buildings of London’, a small sample of which are on one of my early (and badly written) web sites, on-line since 1996, with additions and minor changes in 1998.

Currently I’m still thinking about how to proceed in publishing this work, but I think there will be two series, one for the black and white images and the second on the colour work I took at the same time. It would be hard to organise the work any other way than by when I took the pictures, and I’m thinking, at least for the b/w that this might mean around 30 volumes selected from the several hundred thousand images I took over around 20 years. It’s a daunting task – as was my decision in the early 1980s that I would photograph “the whole of London”. I can’t claim to have finished it, but I made a pretty good stab.

Earth Now

‘Earth Now‘ opened at the New Mexico Museum of Art on April 8 and remains on show until October 9, 2011. Looking at the response of American (US) photographers to the environment, it starts with the classic work of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter and goes on to look mainly at work created since 2000 by around 30 other US photographers. As well as familiar names including Robert Adams, Mark Klett and Bill Owens, there are many new to me and the show includes a wide range of approaches.

One that interested me more than most was the work by Chicago-based photographer Brad Temkin who has made series on residential backyards and gardens, including one on rooftop gardens. My particular interest comes because I’ve spent several days recently photographing gardens for a project in London, including one on a rooftop with a spectacular view.

I was reminded of the show by a post by Paul Raphaelson in his ‘Contemporary Landscape‘ group on Yahoo, who thanks Kirk Gittings for pointing the show out to him. Raphaelson is one of the photographers whose work is on the Urban Landscapes site, which has a number of his pictures from his Wilderness project.

It’s some time since Mike Seaborne and myself had time to update the Urban Landscapes site, and we often get requests from photographers wanting to add their work, although relatively few of them present suitable projects. But perhaps before long we will get down to running it more actively.

Red Hands for Uribe Vélez

If you are a Colombian, what you think of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010, may depend very much on how his policies affected you personally. Many, particularly among the middle class and wealthy extremes of Colombian society have prospered from his polices, while more than 2.5 million poor farmers and others have lost their land, and around 1,400 indigenous people and more than 500 trade unionists have been murdered by paramilitary groups and others encouraged by his government.

For those taking part in this protest, there were no doubts. Uribe was a murderer, a man with blood on his hands, and halfway through the protest, many of them covered their hands in red paint as a symbol of this.

I tried hard, but somehow I wasn’t quite happy with any of the pictures I had taken to show this. Everything was just a little too disorganised, and the few closer images also lacked any real impact, just losing the connection with the event.

Perhaps this was the best of the tighter images, but the fairly low (and very uneven) light doesn’t help, and I would have liked the skulls at left to be sharper.

I tried getting close to a hand and using it out of focus in the foreground, and although it isn’t a bad image, it didn’t really stand out. My favourite picture with the red hands – and there are rather a lot to chose from in Picket Against Former Colombian President is probably one of the several young girls at the event, but it really is just a picture of her with a recorder and a red hand, and doesn’t for me fit the mood of the event.

Or perhaps this one below, again more of a portrait, but the pattern of hands intrigued me, including one on the sign at right.

Again the mood of the image perhaps doesn’t really fit the demonstration, and you can see very clearly the lighting problems, with shadow and bright sun. Fortunately working with RAW format it was possible to keep the white vest of the woman at right in bright sun while also keeping the shadow tones at a reasonable level, although quite extensive use of Lightroom’s local dodging and burning and highlight control was needed. While taking the picture I was also thinking that ‘main’ (at right) means hand in French. Just a pity they speak Spanish in Colombia.

When I posted my pictures with some text on Demotix, I wasn’t at all surprised to see a comment quickly added by someone who appears to be a Colombian, praising Uribe as the best President Colombia ever had and labelling all those who oppose him as supporters of the FARC guerillas. This isn’t of course true; some at least of those present are simply human rights activists. Even if Uribe did ‘make the trains run on time’ for Colombia, that can’t justify the means.

Spanish Camp in London

I don’t usually have language problems when photographing in London, but on 21 May opposite the Spanish Embassy everyone was speaking in Spanish, and it was at times hard to know what was going on. Of course most of the young Spaniards who were taking part in the ‘Spanish Revolution’ camp in London were living and working in Britain, and most actually replied to me in English when I spoke to them, which was just as well as I’ve never learnt any Spanish at all.

This was one of the few banners and posters in English, most – as you might expect for an event very much focussed on what was taking place back in Spain – were in Spanish.

But while I was there in the evening (I’d gone first at lunchtime when the people at the camp had said there would be some media present, but found there was very little happening, so came back again later) I was able to photograph the putting up of a large banner reading ‘True Democracy’ between a tree and a Belisha Beacon.

As you can see, the sun was very low, giving long and deep shadows, including my own, partly visible in this image on that pink blouse. But it also made the figures seem rather flat. Having taken a few images from the side with the banner reading correctly, I then decided to try working directly into the sun. Having seen the sun on the banner, my idea was to place the actual sun directly behind this. The banner was rather thin, and the sun just a bit too powerful even shining through it, but I went ahead and took a few pictures.

As you can see, I decided to use the 10.5mm full-frame fisheye, and I wasn’t quite tall enough to get the sun in the centre of the ‘sun’ as I intended. I was holding the camera up above my head, so it was tricky to get the framing exactly as I wanted it, and this was the best of a number of attempts. I also had in mind when I was taking it that I would do a little correction of the fisheye effect, but I abandoned that idea when I saw the result. Partly because I hadn’t left quite enough space at the right of the image and it would have meant losing the T from ‘True’, but mainly because I liked the result as it was.

More at Spanish Revolution Camp in London. And as rather too often, I didn’t increase the ISO enough as the sun was going down, so lost too many images through camera shake and subject movement.

Syrians Ask for Support

I found the Syrians holding a protest opposite Downing St when I arrived with the NHS marchers, and took out just a few minutes photographing them before continuing with the NHS protest, returning for another few minutes as this ended.

One image I photographed was of a young woman, and I took it both as portrait format and landscape format. There are other slight differences, but I think in most respects I prefer the upright format which fits the subject and her gesture better.

More at Syrians Ask For Support.

Finepix x100 – First Thoughts

I’ve been living with the Fuji Finepix X100 for a couple of weeks now, and one of several reasons why I’ve been posting a little less frequently here has been trying to come to grips with it.

Although it’s manual, at only around 120 pages is a fraction of the weight of those for many other new cameras, it does share some of their impenetrability, but the real difference is that the FX100 is in some aspects a new concept. While with cameras like the Nikon D700, any Nikon user could pick it up and use it without even opening the 700 page tome – the camera certainly had some new features but was essentially the same as previous models – but the FX100 is breaking new ground.

But the FX100 is a deceptive camera. Pick it up, hold it and it looks and feels very much like one of my favourite all-time cameras, a classic Leica M or perhaps even more, the Minolta CLE, my own person favourite ‘Leica’ of all time. It has the same solid feel, a similar layout, a great optical viewfinder. It looks and feels very much the digital camera Leica should have produced.

Of course it lacks one important feature of the Leicas – interchangeable lenses, but as someone who walked around for several years with an M2 and only a 35mm f1.4, perhaps I feel this is less important than some others. Of course since then I’ve become rather attached to shorter focal lengths, and would have preferred Fuji to have chosen 28mm rather than 35mm equivalent.

At f2, the lens is a stop slower too, in fact the same combination as on one of my earliest cameras, the Olympus 35SP on which I took my first published pictures.

The big difference, and something that is taking me a while to get my head round, is the hybrid viewfinder. For me this really comes into its own for close up work, enabling focus down to around four inches, and also in providing a review image in the viewfinder, so that you see exactly what you have taken without the usual peering on the camera back at an image hardly visible in bright sun.

But I am having problems getting my head around all the different possibilities of display and view, and occasionally have just found it impossible to get the camera to work in the mode I want it too. I’m not sure whether the fault is in my brain or in glitches in the firmware, but I am pretty convinced that Fuji need to come up with a firmware upgrade that sorts things out a little better.

The one big disappointment about the camera is that inexplicably Fuji have provided it without a filter thread. On the front of the lens is a useless front ring, which has to be unscrewed and replaced by the AR-X100 adapter ring before you can add filter and or lenshood. Hard to see why this ring was not a standard part of the camera. Also hard to see why when the ring is sold as separate item the lens hood is only available as a set with the ring. And triply hard to see why Fuji did not foresee that most owners of the camera would want these items, currently out of stock at most dealers.

I’ve not yet used the camera enough to write a sensible review – nor too have any of the people whose reviews I’ve read, although of course Digital Photography Review have their usual (and valuable) in-depth technical stuff, I find this never tells you much about how a camera might need your actual picture-making needs.

One thing that has impressed me is how quiet and unobtrusive this camera is – much like the Konica Hexar F (another fixed lens 35mm f2 model I loved.) My Hexar F, even though I saved £150 by buying it from New York, still cost me around £500, and I think that was around 15 years ago, so at £900 I think the FX100 is hardly overpriced.

The other good news is about image quality, which I’ve not yet fully explored, but seems to be more or less similar to that of the D300 and considerably better than the 4/3 competitors, noticeably so at ISO 800 and above.

More on this camera when I’ve really done some work with it.

Keep the NHS public

It was surprisingly dark and gloomy on the Euston Road around 5pm when I arrived for the Islington march to ‘Keep the NHS Public’, which was gathering under the trees opposite University College Hospital. Although I know that digital cameras such as the Nikon D300 and particularly D700 that I use give great results at high ISO, I find I still have a great reluctance to push them into the regions that were off limits in the days of film. Looking at the results I got, it seems obvious that I should have given myself at least a stop more to work with most of the time, and there were just too many that were not quite sharp enough, either because of slow shutter speeds or insufficient depth of field.

One of the first people I met there was a woman I’ve known for some years – and a former colleague of my wife – who embroiders her own placards for protests. The health service affects us all, and there were a very wide range of people attending the protest along with many medical students and health professionals, and I hope my pictures reflect this.

I rather liked this woman who was walking around at the start of the march waving a red ‘Unite – the union’ flag, reminding me of a socialist realist poster, and took a number of pictures – several of them on My London Diary – though I don’t think any of them quite caught what I saw. I also took several pictures of one of the organisers of the march, Janet Maiden, who works in the Haematology department at UCH, which I felt happier that they captured some of her energy – even if they weren’t always quite sharp.

Backgrounds are important too – and in the image above it is clearly to those who know London taken at UCH. More readily recognisable are perhaps these gates at Downing St, where a small group decided to sit down away from the main group.

and even more so, the man on the column in this image.

Although I perhaps took better pictures with the slightly less well known but still fairly recognisable National Gallery and portico of St Martins in the Fields in the background, which you can see with the rest of the pictures on My London Diary in Keep The NHS Public.

Lebanon Bans Altneuland

I have to admit not having paid a great deal of attention to the 2011 World Press Photo before today. I almost always go and see the show when it comes in London, and it is due at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall from 10 November – 29 November 2011. But although I always find some work of interest, the overwhelming impression is always one of déjà vu. Yet more blood and though it is vital that photographers document such things and that they appear in newspapers, magazines, TV and on-line, I’m often uneasy about treating such images as aesthetic objects on oversize display on a gallery wall.

But there are always some images, some projects that stand out, and one that I will certainly be looking for in November is by Israeli photographer Amit Sha’al, brought to my (and the world’s) attention by being banned in Lebanon – with the result that the WPP show there closed early.

You can of course see his work in the winners gallery at World Press Photo – it took third place in the Arts & Entertainment stories category. I find it slightly annoying that in the larger slide-show view there I can’t find a way to read the captions, which I think are essential.

On Sha’al’s own web site, you get a little more of the story behind the project Altneuland which these images are a part of. The idea came from the novel Altneuland, written in 1902 by Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian journalist who is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern political zionism and thus a father figure of the state of Israel, although he died in 1904. In 1896 he published Der Judenstaat, a pamphlet advocating the restoration of a Jewish state in their historic homeland of Palestine, and the utopian novel Altneuland six years later set out the great advances this could acheive – for both Jews and Arabs – over the course of a generation, with two travellers revisiting the new state after a period of twenty years and noting the changes.

The English translation, published in the same year was entitled The Old New Land, a straightforward translation from the orginal German, but the Hebrew version of the book came out with the title ‘Tel-Aviv’, later adopted for a new city now Israel’s second largest.

Herzl’s vision of a Zionist state was very different to modern Israel. His vision was one of a nation where everyone (men and women) would have equal rights, where Hebrew would be one of many languages and Judaism one among other religions without special status. It was essentially of a humanist and mutualist state and he wrote: “It would be immoral if we would exclude anyone, whatever his origin, his descent, or his religion, from participating in our achievements.”

Sha’al collected black and white photos taken in Israel from 1926 to 1979and found the exact locations where the pictures were taken. He then photographed the pictures in these locations, holding the prints in his hand (resting on a tripod out of shot to keep it still) fitting them back exactly into their place in a wider scene. He writes on his web site:

The photos portray 3 different times: the old black and white photos, the present colored photos and the time that has passed between capturing both photos.

The third time mentioned is not a visual one, but a mental and emotional dimension, filled in by the knowledge we have of the dramatic changes that have occurred between the two times.

The pictures were on show in Lebanon for a week as a part of the WPP display there before anyone apparently noticed that Sha’al was an Israeli photographer and the Lebanese censors demanded that they be taken down as Lebanon and Israel are still “in a state of war.” To their credit World Press Photo refused to comply with this ridiculous and unacceptable request, and instead closed the whole show ten days early.