>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

May Day Came Early in Brighton

Getting to Brighton is faster than getting to some parts of London, though it is further away and more expensive. I walked off the train at Brighton station at 11.27 and looked around for someone I knew, but there was nobody in sight, and I guessed few had come down from London for the ‘May Day Protest and Party‘ held a day early on April 30.

I knew at least one photographer had come earlier, as before leaving home I’d read his tweet from a café at the station. The event organisers had decided to try and keep the police guessing by not releasing the meeting point until 11.30 when they would announce it on Twitter and Facebook. Fortunately for the benefit of people like myself with antique mobile phones which don’t read that kind of thing there was also a number we could ring and hear a recorded message. A heavy lorry passed close by just as it started, but I heard enough to guess which way to go, and set off.

Making a mental note to myself that I really need to upgrade my phone to something that will keep up with social networking. More and more tweets are used to keep people informed of exactly what is happening and in particular where the action is in demonstrations, and I’m missing this out on the street unless I’m with another photographer who can read them.

I’m fairly sure that the police will have known in advance, with at least one of those in the group planning every demonstration being an undercover cop, even if perhaps Brighton hasn’t yet got the the stage of G K Chesterton’s ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ where six of the seven members of the anarchist’s central council turn out to be police spies. But certainly by the time I arrived on the seafront there were at least two mounted police and two slightly obvious plain clothes cops there, with a row of police cars watching from the opposite side of the road. More gathered as the protesters also arrived for the start.

It seemed to be a day when neither police nor protesters knew what they were trying to do. The police kettled and then unkettled on several occasions and seemed to panic whenever the protesters started moving, while the protesters – with rather more justification given what happened – thought that every time they saw more than a couple of police they were about to be kettled and rushed off in a different direction.

A few people on both sides occasionally lost their tempers a little, and police arrested eight protesters, some apparently on very trivial or non-existent grounds. Most of the public who saw the protest seemed to be asking what it was about – and if they found out there were generally expressions of support. All of us got sore feet, from walking and running in circles around the centre of Brighton, and well over half of the protesters had disappeared before the protest seemed finally to come to an end and the remaining group began to party on the shingle that passes for a beach and I finally went home.

Compared with the few previous protests I’ve photographed in Brighton – and certainly to some of the videos I’ve watched of other events – this was a relatively peaceful day, with less relatively indiscriminate violence by the police, and much less interference with the press and other photographers. Most of the times I was asked to move I think there was a genuine concern for my safety by officers who realise how dangerous and unpredictable police horses can be – and there were clearly times when they were not really under control.

More about the day and many more pictures at Brighton MayDay Protest.

That Wedding

I’m not keen on weddings, and since I didn’t get an invite to the one that filled our newspapers, TV and radio for most of last week I didn’t go. Like more than half of the UK population I didn’t watch it either, but it was something even the most dedicated anti-monarchist couldn’t entirely fail to notice.

I got a phone call a few days before to enquire and discuss what I was going to cover, and I listed a couple of events related to it. What I thought would be the more interesting of these didn’t happen because on the day before, police called at the home of those organising it and arrested them on an obviously fake charge, holding them in custody until the whole thing was safely over.

Although I wasn’t there to photograph the arrests, I was able to watch a video later in the day, and it seemed pretty clear from what little the police said and did that they were under orders to prevent any possible embarrassment to royalty competing with the wedding in the media. Even if doing so meant breaking the law – or rather inventing a new one – and having to pay compensation for wrongful arrest later. We live in a country where there is clearly one law for the monarchy and another for the rest of us.

Instead I went to photograph the street party organised by the Republic organisation. I’m not really a republican, though I do believe that had this country ever had any half-decent socialist government it would have nationalised the crown and land without compensation, returning the estates they and others over the past ten centuries have stolen from the people, and we would have a royal family who ride bicycles and live modest comfort while drawing an average wage for their not particularly onerous duties. It really was a tragedy in the history of our nation that Cromwell and his supporters were not more reasonable people rather than religious fanatics.

But it turned out to be a rather dull event, in part because the organisers were so keen to keep politics out of what seems essentially a political event. See more at Republic: Not the Royal Wedding Party

I’d actually taken some wedding pictures the day before, on my way to photograph a protest against the government’s intentions to end most workplace health and safety checks. It is just so inconvenient for employers to have to worry about things like workers breathing in asbestos dust or having cranes fall down on top of them.

While the Prospect union representative for Londons HSE inspectors, Simon Hester was telling the protest about the dangerous conditions he had found the previous Friday in one of the site inspections that are being abandoned to save money, his boss, employment minister Chris Grayling came out of the office and there was a short argument between them, with Tony O’Brien of the Construction Safety Campaign joining in, which ended with Grayling running off down the road.

More at International Workers Memorial Day.

The offices are just around the corner from Westminster Abbey, so I walked past the people camping out on the street there to catch a glimpse of the royal couple, and I did stop to take a few pictures.

And I also made a point of going to see the protesters in Trafalgar Square, still there despite the promises of our leading politicians to get rid of them for the wedding. Brian Haw has been in hospital in Germany for some months, but his colleague Barbara Tucker was there and we had a long talk.

A little way along the pavement, Maria Gallastegui was on top of one of her boxes dressed in orange Gitmo jump suit and a black hood; I’d talked to her a few days ago and she told me then that she had agreed to cover up her display for the royal event. More pictures at Parliament Square Protests Continue.

On the day itself there were no buses in the central area of London, and I walked through the streets with another photographer on my way back to the station, looking for signs of celebration. We did find a few people on the streets, but most were still around the actual route back from the Abbey to the Palace or watching the large screens in Trafalgar Square. And after having seen the rather pathetic flypast as I was walking towards Charing Cross, I looked up and saw the royals just leaving the balcony on those screens, as you can see in the final image in Royal Wedding in Soho.

Thames Walk, Almost Dive

“The St Lawrence is water, the Mississippi is muddy water, but the Thames”, said John Burns in 1929, by then a Labour MP “is liquid history” and he was right at least about the Thames, although 70 years earlier he might well have replaced those last two words with “largely sewage.” There were reminders both of Burns and the work of the great Victorian engineers whose work so changed the river as well as more modern developments in the walk or ride I took downriver from the Thames Barrier with two of my family on the May Bank Holiday.

They were walking, but I’m still recovering from a painful bout of plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of the tissues which make up the arch of my left foot (apparently it usually takes around 9 months to go away completely) and can’t really cope with the kind of long and fast walking they like, so I’d taken my folding bike – of course a Brompton – and was either pushing or riding this.

If paths – like those by the Thames – are good it’s very useful. They are A to B people while I like to wander, and the bike allows me to detour or to stop and take photographs, and then easily catch up with them. Too often on walks in the past I’ve found mself having to run several odd quarter miles to catch up with them.

But this walk almost started with a disaster. From Charlton station we started a tedious walk along the busy main road as there is no path through the industrial area by the river before arriving at a roundabout where the Thames path extension heads off through a recent housing estate. Leading more directly to the river – where it is a dead end unless you have a boat waiting at the steps is Warspite Road, renamed presumably after the various navy vessels of that name from Trinity Street in the 1930s. Although so far as I’m aware none of the nine ships named HMS Warspite was built in Woolwich, perhaps some were refitted there. The Woolwich Naval Dockyard ran from its east side, and on its west was and is an industrial area, though now partly occupied by warehouse stores, artists studios and other facilities.

So I sped off down Warspite Rd to the steps leading to the river at its bottom while they continued along the Thames Path (actually the Thames Path extension here.) I’d photographed from these steps on previous visits, and to get a better view had walked out along the wall above them. It’s a fairly wide wall and seems safe enough, but there is a drop on one side to the road and on the other to some concrete steps leading down to the river. On this occasion I discovered I’d completely lost my head for heights. As I raised my camera to shoot several overlapping images for a panorama I couldn’t hold the camera still, and started shaking more and more. Then I felt myself about to faint, and only just managed the yard or two back to the safety of the rail I had ducked under earlier, falling towards it and clutching it as I subsided to my knees. Once I was holding the rail, my panic attack immediately cleared, but it had been a nasty moment, in a place with no one else around and nobody passing.

So I didn’t get that picture, and was more than a little shaken, but the rest of the walk went well, though I had to give up before the end to go elsewhere. Perhaps the highlight was again “largely sewage” with the fine Romanesque buildings of Bazalgette’s Southern Outfall, which at every high tide discharged all of South London’s sewage into the river to flow out to sea untreated until the 1950s. Next to it the huge tanks of the more modern sewage treatment plant, still in use, which now purifies it and discharges clean water – except when it rains and overwhemlms the treatment plant.

A few yards further on is an elegant metal swan-like structure of the 1998 sludge incinerator, and a short distance further a more recent but less elegant second version which has appeared since I last came this way.

And back to John Burns, his name was given to one of the three vessels that now provide the Woolwich Free Ferry, joining London’s North Circular Road to the South Circular that never really became a joined up road. We didn’t really want to go to North Woolwich but we took the ferry across, walked around for a few minutes and then came back on the John Burns.

More pictures at More Thames Path.

St George Takes a Rest

There didn’t seem to be a great deal happening in and around London for St George’s Day – April 23 – this year. Not that that is unusual, as for many years the only national saint’s day we really celebrated here was St Patrick’s, but in recent years there has been more of a movement to celebrate the ‘English’ saint.

St George wasn’t of course English. His father was a Roman citizen, his mother a Palestinian, and he was born in either in Roman occupied Palestine, in Lydda, where he was martyred or in Turkey. Lydda since 1948 has been a part of Israel and RAF Lydda eventually became Israel’s main ‘Ben Gurion International Airport, just a few miles from Tel Aviv. We share him as patron saint with a dozen or so countries and numerous cities around the world – including his native Palestine. So perhaps on St George’s Day we should demonstrate in support of the Palestine cause.

The St George’s flag became the flag flown by English ships over 800 years ago, but in more recent times has become a flag associated with English sporting teams, and with football hooligans and extreme right wing nationalist groups. Part of the increasing demands to celebrate our national saint’s day comes from these groups, but it also arises from those who want to reclaim St George and the flag from the extremists.

St Georges Day is also celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthday, although his real date of birth is not known, and it is actually the day on which he died in 1616, so perhaps after demonstrating for Palestine we should all go to watch one of his plays. Cervantes also died on April 23, 1616 (though not the same day as Shakespeare as they used different calendars) and for this reason UNESCO in 1995 declared April 23 World Book and Copyright Day.

Well, at least I did read a book, as I usually do when travelling on the train the half hour or so up to London. And I just about found some St George celebrations, although most seem to have been either postponed or cancelled in favour of the royal wedding celebrations six days later. But the event in Trafalgar Square did seem rather desultory and I didn’t stay long. There are a few more pictures on My London Diary: St George’s Day in London

It was actually a day when most of the events that were in my diary didn’t happen. I’d started looking for a small extreme right wing group who were planning to march along to the St Georges day non-events, but they were so small I couldn’t see them. Later in the day I’d been promised there would be several hundred people marching elsewhere, but again they didn’t materialise. I’d been sent an invitation by yet another group who were to be protesting at an embassy and then marching, but by the time I arrived they had abandoned their protest without the march.

I’d started the day with seven events listed and in the end only found three to photograph (and took a few pictures of a fourth I hadn’t intended to cover.) But it was a day when logistics – working out how to get to seven different places at suitable times – was more of a problem than the actual photography. I didn’t expect to see all seven, as many events are planned and publicised but don’t take place, but it isn’t usually this bad.

St George is perhaps surprisingly not the patron saint of Armenia, but Armenians were out on the streets a day early, as April 24 is Genocide Remembrance Day, when in 1915 the Turkish authorities began the arrest and killing of the around 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey, around 70% of the Armenian population. Armenians in the UK hold an annual march calling for Turkey to recognise the Armenian Genocide, calling on the UK government to put pressure on them to do so as a condition of joining then EU. This year they gathered outside Selfridges in Oxford St and marched from there to lay wreaths and to hand in a letter to Downing St. You can read more about the event and the Armenian Genocide in Recognise The Armenian Genocide.

I left the Armenians near Piccadilly Circus to take the tube to go to a no-show at Trafalgar Square, and then another further north, before making my way to Great Portland St, and here it was my planning that let me down. Great Portland St is around a kilometre long and I’d assumed without checking that I wanted the wrong end.

So I had to run a bit and arrived just in time for a lively protest by the International Congolese Rights organisation who were marching from the Congolese Embassy in Great Portland Street to Downing St calling attention to human rights violation in the DRC. It was an all-singing all-dancing event, and there were a lot of police surrounding them. More at Congolese Protest in London

I left them at Oxford Circus in time to make my way to the next march that didn’t happen. By the time I’d found it wasn’t there I was ready to go home.

My Backup Takes a Rest

Friday I had a little shock. I’d had a few problems uploading images from a CF card into Lightroom. I’d come home, set everything up as usual and the gon e away to enjoy a cup of tea and a slice of cake (Linda’s Simnel cake, a sticky marzipan rich Easter treat) and came back to the computer around an hour later to get on with processing the images to find only about 25 of them had been imported.

It’s something that seems to happen occasionally with LR, and one of the bugs I’d hoped might get sorted out when I recently upgraded to LR 3.4, but unfortunately it’s still there. Adobe doesn’t have a great record at fixing bugs either in LR or in Photoshop, and I suspect don’t spend a great deal of effort with those that are intermittent or possibly only affect a minority of users.

The only answer I’ve found is to quit LR and try again, and quitting is slightly tricky as it seems to be stuck in some kind of state that makes Windows Task Manager the only way to do this. It also seems worth making sure that you give LR plenty of time after it starts up to get itself sorted out completely – best to find something else to do for a few minutes before trying the import again.

Then usually the second time it will work quite happily at a decent speed. As it did Friday for several hundred images. Then one of those incomprehensible Windows error message appeared on screen, telling me that a delayed write had failed and my work had been lost. Somewhere it mentioned $I at the start of an otherwise to me meaningless string of characters, and I guessed it meant a problem with my backup drive.

LR continued happily – it had almost finished anyway – and when it did so, confirmed my guess, telling me that it had been unable to write the backup copies of ten files. This is a message I’ve seen before, when there hasn’t been sufficent space on the drive, but since I knew that the hard drive in question had more than 1.5 terabytes empty, this seemed rather unlikely. Perhaps I had managed to change the backup destination by accident to a drive with rather less free space? I checked on LR and it was still directed to my large, almost empty external drive.

It was after midnight and I was tired, but I wanted to get this sorted out, and went into ‘My Computer’ only to get a shock – my backup drive was no longer there. I checked the actual drive, on the desk next to me, and found the small green light on the back was not on, again telling me it wasn’t connected.

Two cables run into the back of the drive, a USB and a 12v power cable, and both were still firmly in place. I have been known to pull out a cable by accident (and when someone pulls a vacuum cleaner around the room I often find keyboard or mouse have gone AWOL) but both seemed fine. The USB cable is easy to check, and goes into to a cheap and nasty USB hub, so I removed it and plugged it directly into the computer. Rather than checking the power cable, which disappeared into a tangle of wires, I pulled the 12v supply from another external drive and plugged that in place. Nothing happened, so I tried restarting the system, as I got ready for bed. Still no drive and I went to bed cursing that my backup drive was dead.

I woke up in the middle of the night, around 05.30 for the usual reason, just one of the joys of growing old. Usually I’m asleep again more or less as my head hits the pillow on coming back to bed (and very occasionally before, which can be more painful) but instead last night I was awake worrying about what I should do about the loss of my backup.

Of course it wasn’t really a disaster, but things always seem pretty bleak in the middle of the night. I still had at least one copy of everything that was on the backup on my main computer. A backup is a backup after all, although it would take quite a time to recreate it – and time when with just a single copy on my hard disk the work would be vulnerable.

As well as the original RAW files, I also make high quality jpegs of my selected images which are stored on a different drive in my computer. At some point I burn my RAW files a month at a time onto DVDs, and after doing that can delete these RAW files from my computer to make space for new ones.

People often tell me that neither external hard drives or DVDs are long term storage. I’m relying on a new, high capacity storage medium becoming available before both the DVDs and the hard drives fail. Or civilisation as we know it collapsing, when perhaps the last thing anyone including myself will be concerned about is conserving my images.

Saturday morning, with a slightly clearer mind, I crawled on the floor and traced back the power cable from the drive. Rather to my surprise it didn’t take me back to a transformer built into a plug on one two multiple boards under the desk to my left. Instead it went to a small black box more or less under my feet. Which was connected to nothing, but had a socket with two pints for one of those small ended twin 240 volt leads, which was minding its own business a few inches away. The same type of lead that plugs into my battery charger and is only too easily kicked out of place.

I connected the two, fired up the computer and was relieved to find that several months of backup were still there. Just those ten missing files that needed copying over. And some lost sleep I can do nothing about.

Perhaps the other power lead I tried also is unconnected – I should check some time. It is useful to think now and then about what you would do if disaster strikes, but I’d prefer to sleep. My next disaster is likely to be the computer I’m typing this on failing terminally. What would I do then?

Climate Rush

Last Wednesday was a beautiful day for a picnic, warm for the time of year but not too hot, and with just a little breeze and a clear blue sky, though in the middle of London there was just a little haze of something nastily photochemical cutting down the clarity of the distant view as I walked over the Thames across Vauxhall Bridge on my way to the Tate Gallery, or as we now have to call it, Tate Britain.
I’d arrived a few minutes early and took a rest on of the seats overlooking one of the lawns, as a few people, mainly women in their twenties, arrived to take part in the protest.

Climate Rush were protesting on the first anniversary of the BP Gulf Oil disaster in what they called ‘Oil In A Teapot – Picnic, Exhibition & Auction‘, “in mourning for all those who suffer because of the destruction of BP’s global industry“, and so most of them were dressed in black, and some very much in the style of the age of the suffragettes who they take as their inspiration for direct action, adopting their slogan “Deeds Not Words” but on red rather than purple sashes, along with others such as “Well-behaved women rarely make history“.

I’ve photographed a number of their events since they began with a rush on Parliament on the 100th anniversary of the 1908 ‘Suffragete Rush’ in which more than 40 women were arrested as they tried to enter the Houses of Parliament.

Today’s protest was a part of week-long series of protests against BP organised by various groups including Climate Camp, Rising Tide, Art not Oil and Climate Rush. BP use the sponsorship of art exhibitions at major galleries – including Tate Britain – as “greenwash“, using the events to put over an image as a socially and environmentally responsible company while they are damaging the environment on a huge scale in exploiting the tar sands in Alberta and through disasters such as Deepwater Horizon, as well as more generally promoting and fuelling a high-energy high pollution society.
© 2011, Peter Marshall
The Climate Rush logo at the bottom is a 4″ tall flier held in my left hand – 16mm at f20 for depth of field

For the gallery protest, Climate Rush had produced their own version of one of the Turners on show inside, a picture of boats on the Thames estuary, to which they had added an oil rig in flames. It was a nice though possibly fortuitous touch than t the original had actually been painted more or less on the site that later became one of BP’s largest refinery and storage sites at Coryton (which they sold just a few years ago.)

They also had panels showing pictures from a painting workshop after the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, produced as an entry (and protest) into the BP sponsored portrait competition, an annual fixture at the National Portrait Gallery.

One of the other photographers present set up some pictures with one of the Climate Rushers pretending to eat a sandwich covered with ‘crude oil’. Not the kind of thing I would do, but I did take advantage of it and take my own pictures. It wasn’t actually crude oil, but a thick meat gravy, which as most of those at the picnic seemed to be vegetarian, they found equally disgusting.

Photographically there were few problems, with good light I was working at ISO 320 and mostly at around f8 or f11 with fairly fast shutter speeds even in the shade. For most of the pictures in direct sun I added some flash fill, and where I didn’t it took quite a bit of extra work in Lightroom

I couldn’t really work out a good way to capture the scene when one of the Rushers climbed up the outside of the building to display the ‘Turner’.
© 2011, Peter Marshall
Showing the height she was at made her and the painting rather small, while using a longer focal length there was no way of knowing she wasn’t close to the ground. I don’t think there was a solution as single picture – sometimes you need more than one.

As too I did when the ‘Turner’ was thrown down for another Rusher to catch. It span around as it came down and I was pleased to have caught it facing the right way in mid air – and also later exactly as it was caught. But it was really something that would have been better on video than the sequence of 7 images I took.

Different Cultures

One of the great things about London is that you can turn a corner and be in different worlds. The two events I covered ten days or so ago were rather an illustration of this.

I wasn’t a fan of Smiley Culture, hardly even aware of the existence of this British reggae star who died in highly suspicious circumstances when police came to his Surrey home and arrested him, but his case is just one of many deaths in police custody, far too many over the years. I’ve met and photographed many of the bereaved families, all wanting to know exactly what happened and calling for justice, all apparently being met with obfuscation, lies and cover-up from the police, the so-called Independent Police Complaints Commision, and sometimes coroners and then courts. I’ve written more about various individual cases over the years (and a little more about this one in Who Killed Smiley Culture? on My London Diary.) And, as I wrote in that piece:

Of course not every one of those 930 deaths (since 1990) was suspicious, although a great many were, but we have yet to see even a single officer convicted of any offence concerning them (or earlier cases) – with the sole exception of the death of David Oluwale in 1969. It is more than hard to beleive that justice is being done. And as the protesters chanted on the march, ‘No Justice, No Peace.’

I left the couple of thousand protesters as their rally outside New Scotland Yard where they had marched from the Wandsworth Rd to photograph a very different event, the annual parade through of the London City of London District Loyal Orange Lodge, along with bands and visiting lodges from around England, Glasgow and Northern Ireland.

It was a very different scene as they walked along some of the same streets, on their way to lay wreaths at the Cenotaph and elsewhere, remembering the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and celebrating the Protestant religion and traditions of Northern Ireland.

I was born and grew up in the Protestant tradition (and with aunts and cousins whose pastor was a colleague of Ian Paisley) but I felt rather more at home and closer to the people marching to the reggae beat than to the drum and flute, and I think it’s reflected in the pictures in a rather more detached view of the Orange march. More about the second event at Orange Parade in London.

In The Black Country

© 2007, Peter Marshall
The New Art Gallery, Walsall, 2007
My previous post reminds me that not far up the road from Birmingham – you could indeed take the Soho Road and head for the M5 to get there – is Walsall with its fine New Art Gallery (I visited it in 2007) and showing there until 19 June 2011 is a show I wrote about when I attended its Paris opening last November, in a very different building.

Brian Griffin is giving a tour of his show and will undoubtedly “share his passion for the Black Country” as well as illuminate his photography on 4 June at 2pm – places are free but you need to book at the gallery on 01922 654400. It should be popular.

Birmingham Under Gods

A new issue of then online magazine lensculture is always worth reading, even if at times I don’t appreciate everything in it. For me the outstanding feature in the current issue is
Under Gods: Stories from Soho Road by Liz Hingley, the result of a two year project on the many religious communities -Thai, Sri Lankan and Vietnamese Buddhists, Rastafarians, the Jesus Army evangelical Christians, Sikhs, Catholic nuns, Hare Krishnas and others along a two mile stretch of a main road in inner city Birmingham.

It’s a project that obviously results from an in-depth approach, getting to know and be accepted by the various groups, and the images have a quiet strength, a spirituality that very much befits the subject matter, along with a fine use of colour. There are 40 images in the feature and every one was freshly seen, and the whole set work together beautifully.

Other features that interested me include Face to Face:Georgian Photography (you can see more work from the show here) and The Social Networ and Gazi Nafis Ahmeds pictures of same-sex couples and tough kids on the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh. You can see more of his photography on his own site.

Stokes Croft

Looking at the pictures, I’m rather glad I was a long way from Stokes Croft in Bristol last night. I saw a few posts on Facebook and Twitter last night and heard the news on BBC radio this morning. But I have to say their report did not seem to make a lot of sense.

It’s always difficult to know from a distance what actually happened, but the account on Neurobonkers.com in The Battle of #StokesCroft certainly has the ring of truth, and as the phone pictures show was written by someone who was very much there.

In the introduction written for the News Networks it includes the following:

Please note the following facts in your reporting:

There was no evidence of violence before the police arrived.
Tesco was NOT petrol bombed as Sky news and The independent are now reporting.
It is extremely unlikely that the police claim that petrol bombs were found is true. The protesters were liberal pacifists (prior to the police onslaught) as evidenced by the links provided and in 4 hours of sustained full scale rioting in which the police were forced out of the area NO petrol bombs were thrown.

It would appear that the police acted on a rumour, and then embroidered that to present to the media as fact. We know of course that this isn’t unusual – and has been well established in several high-profile cases, not least that of Jean Charles Menezes, when police issued an incredible amount of lies to reporters about him acting as a terrorist, which they lapped up and published before the truth – that he was an innocent man, going normally about his daily life – came out.

The news media are far too cosy in their relationships with the police and far too trusting about their statements. Or perhaps the journalists concerned just don’t care about the truth – if it makes a good story they will run it. Journalists often get pretty snooty about bloggers – even though some of the best blogs are written by journos frustrated that they can’t get what they want to say into more conventional media. But increasingly if you want to find out what really is happening you need to go the the blogs and social media – and of course to look at more than one source and use your judgement.

But though I’m appalled at the actions of some of my fellow journalists over this case and others like it, I mention it here because the piece includes photography and video of both professional and highly amateur quality, and I find the contrast of interest.

To see the phone pictures by the author of the piece properly, you need to zoom out a couple of times on your browser – assuming that like Firefox it enables you to do so, as they are too large otherwise to fit the browser window.

There are also some pretty silly comments, and a few are photographic. “Dude, invest in a tripod!” is about the silliest thing I’ve read this month.