>Re-PHOTO

After the egg on their face at Millbank last Wednesday, I went to Saturday’s National Anti-Fur march wondering if their was going to be some reaction.  Animal Rights protesters in groups allied to the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) –  have carried out non-violent illegal direct actions and in some previous years this march has attracted some very heavy-handed policing. In 2008 I wrote:

“I was several times impeded in my work by being pushed by police as I took photographs and being refused permission to walk onto the pavement, despite shoing a press card. Demonstrators were also prevented from going to hand out leaflets to people on the streets. It doesn’t seem to me to be a democratic way to police a protest.”

Last year, post Tomlinson, things had improved greatly, and I was pleased to find that again there were no problems this year.

This was I think the best picture that I took on Saturday, although I didn’t spot it in my first quick look through the pictures when I selected twenty or so to upload to Demotix on Saturday night. But it’s certainly a picture that has grown on me since, starting with the word ‘CRUELTY ‘ in the top left and the distorted face below it (that distorted ‘R’ in the word helps too) then moving across to a second piece of text ‘Everyone Wants to Live‘ which perhaps asks rather more questions than it answers, then a group of three heads – a rabbit, a bear and a young woman whose megaphone both sweeps us on across the picture and for me links back to the open mouth at left.

There is also something about the placement of the other figures that I think could hardly be bettered, both the two men standing at the right and the two women in the background at left, and the banners behind. I’m not sure that the hands of the man who is looking a his pictures on the back of his compact camera are really what I would have wished for (it looks to me as if he is rolling a cigarette), but for it’s perhaps something that illustrates the real power of photography, coming up with things I would never have dreamed of, and part of the kind of ordered chaos that makes taking pictures exciting. They are also a part of a kind of swirl of hands around this picture – I start from the upraised paws of that bear and my eye works round through the hands of the two women, the rabbit, a hand holding a cardboard placard, the hands on the megaphone and then on to those holding the camera.

It also pleases me that this is exactly as I framed it in the camera – as indeed are most of my pictures, though I’m not a religious fanatic about it. Sometimes in the heat of the moment you don’t get it quite right, and I’ll happily shave off a few pixels if necessary. But this is exactly as I saw it.

Perhaps too, had I been arranging a shot like this in a studio or on location (it could never had been the same – why does Jeff Wall bother – it just shows up his limitations) I would have arranged for the text on the front of the rabbit to be more easily legible (it says ‘THIS IS MY COAT NOT YOURS’.)

This was taken on the D700 with the 16-35mm zoom at its widest, and it isn’t often that I get an image that works as well across the whole frame with that extreme a wide-angle.  The inherent distortion from such a wide view in a rectilinear lens helps her, exaggerating the pain and anger in the face at left and making what was a very large megaphone seem to loom even larger.

Of course I didn’t stand there thinking about all these things when I took the picture – but I did recognise something that made me press the shutter. Of course I always (well, almost always) have a reason to press the shutter, but things seldom work out exactly how I want. But its all part of training the mind (the ‘eye’) along with looking at the results afterwards. And just sometimes the arrow hits the target.

I can’t remember why I had the camera set to ISO360 at this point. There wasn’t a great deal of light and more typically I would have been giving myself at least a stop if not two more. I think I’d probably forgetten to reset it after taking a portrait earlier. But this was shot at 1/100 at f8, and everything is pretty sharp – 16mm gives fairly extreme depth of field.  But the two closer figures, where fill-flash was more noticeable have just a slight, very slight suggestion of blur along with the sharp flash image. It isn’t visible at this scale, but I think helps prevent the scene looking static when viewed at a larger size.

Using flash of course meant that the closer elements of the image were too bright as taken, and a little bit of burning down was needed. The flash is no longer obvious but it does really add to the picture.

A’ bloody’ hand and a tatoo (upside down) that reads A. L. F.

Most of the other images I liked from the day were really of single figures or concentrating on a single figure in a crowd. This image below was one, like the top picture taken outside Harrods, currently the only department store in the UK still selling fur, although the march organisers, the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade, have hopes that the new Qatari owners will end this when they fully take over in January.

More about fur, the march and more pictures in National Anti-Fur March on My London Diary.

Last night I visited the holy of holy for many, the inner sanctum of the world of cricket, the Long Room at Lords. Even for someone with so little interest in the game as me it was an interesting experience, and there in a glass case was a small terracotta urn along with some larger and shinier trophies.

As the name suggests it is a fairly long room, and did look quite large when we were some of the first to arrive – our rush hour bus had taken rather less time than the Transport for London web site’s rather pessimistic forecast. But it felt fairly crowded when the other 290 or so had arrived. It’s a pleasant enough space, and but for the fact it was dark would have given us a good view of the pitch with its unlikely looking stretched out lollipop media centre by Future Systems at the opposite end. But for lovers of cricket, this is the spiritual home of the game and the MCC, the Marylebone Cricket Club, “the guardian of both the Laws and the Spirit of Cricket.”

It’s also more surprisingly a part of the London 2012 Olympics, despite cricket not being an Olympic sport (presumably because countries such as America and France have never managed to understand the rules.) Instead they are shooting out the archery here.

We were there not for cricket but for the launch of a book written by a friend about “the first garden suburb“, the villas, many still standing, built a hundred years before the Garden Suburb movement on the extensive Eyre brothers estate of St John’s Wood – where the world’s most famous cricket ground was built on the site of a pond. Mireille Galinou‘s ‘Cottages and Villas – The Birth of the Garden Suburb‘, published by Yale University Press (ISBN: 0300167261) and based on several years of her work on the Eyre archive looks a fascinating and superbly illustrated study of the building of the area and the people who came to live there.

The MCC moved to St John’s Wood – their third ground – in 1814, and the new pavilion we were in was built in 1826 after the previous one burnt down  Many of those who attending the launch were local residents, members of the St John’s Wood Society, founded to promote and conserve their unique area (I don’t think they included any of the pop stars and Russian oligarchs who now live there but keep themselves to themselves in their deeply dug basements behind high gates and security cameras) and the books were selling like hot cakes – I saw one man leave carrying four of them.

Fortunately I hadn’t gone there to take photographs (I commiserated with the man who had), as when I took my camera out of my bag, I found it was completely dead. I’d  brought it mainly to take a few pictures at a party we were going to later, and unusually hadn’t bothered to take a spare battery. I always keep one in my proper camera bag, but I’d only taken the D700 with the 24-70mm and 20mm along with a few books and other things I needed in a small shoulder bag.

I’d charged the battery when I came in on Saturday, as I always do, and had only used it since for a handful of test shots, so it should have been good for the usual thousand or more pictures the D700 can normally clock up on a fully charged battery.

It remains a mystery to me how it came to be fully run down. Sometimes I’ve found that I’ve left a camera switched on when I’ve put it in my bag and it has produced a series of rather noisy but otherwise blank files, but when I checked the card after I got home there were no blank files.

So now I’m left wondering whether there has been some kind of electrical fault in the camera, though it seems to be working fine, or perhaps the battery is faulty. I’ve recharged it and put it back in the camera, and the battery check reports it as good.

But the moral of all this is clear, a message I’ve told others many times, and a practice I always used to follow until the incredible capacity of recent cameras had made me rather slack. ALWAYS CARRY A SPARE BATTERY.

So no pictures of mine showing the Long Room, which is perhaps just as well, because I think almost any mental image you may have of it is probably more impressive than the reality  – a nice enough room of its age (and recently splendidly refurbished along with the rest of the pavillion at a cost of £8 million), but with a rather dull collection of portraits of cricketers (some of whom were surely more impressive on their cigarette cards) and early but largely unexciting paintings of people with oddly shaped cricket bats.

Spacehijackers team warm up waiting for the MPs who didn’t turn up

But of course I have photographed cricket. Not just a couple of games by the Space Hijackers – as here when they challenged our members of parliament (who if they noticed had the sense not to turn up) to a game on Parliament Square, but the real thing a few years earlier when I got a commission from my local council and the Arts Council to photograph one of the leading ladies teams in the country and in particular their younger members.

Juniors at the start of a training session at Sheppertone Ladies CC

The most interesting action was almost always off the pitch, and during matches of course I had to keep outside the boundary line, but photographing during practice sessions I was at times in some very silly fielding positions with a camera.

Batters wait their turn next to the scorer at Shepperton Ladies CC

It was a nice project and I enjoyed being with the people there. It is one of very few projects where I’ve worked with medium format, though I also used 36mm, particularly at some of the matches where at times a 200mm with a 2x converter was still a little on the short side for capturing action.

I’m not a fan of Halloween, which seems just another sad synthetic commercial opportunity. There is something very unpleasant about the whole ‘trick or treat’ idea, a kind of demand with menaces (and one which sometimes gets out of hand.)

Not that I’m against people having fun, and I do rather like the sight of zombies invading our streets, generally simply out to have a good time and a bit of a party.  These and more formal Day of the Dead celebrations perhaps owe more to All Saints Day and All Souls Day than to Halloween which comes before them, although now they have been drawn into a single commercial exploitation.

In 2006, (somewhere well down this page) I met up with some very fine zombies, including the two ladies below for a tour around Oxford St.

Starting from the very spooky Ben Crouch Tavern (now sadly converted to a pub I find rather plastic and unpleasant) we toured a shopping centre on Oxford Street and walked past the hard-core shoppers before slithering down the steps to Ramillies St (which later became the home of the Photographers’ Gallery),

and on to another pub at the top of Carnaby St.

On that occasion the pub ‘Crawl of the Dead‘ had started in late afternoon, and although the light was failing there was still enough to work with even by the time I left them.

The following year, in the City of London, the Crawl of the Dead started later, which was probably better for zombies but not for photographers, though I was able to take some pictures before the start in ‘Ye Olde London’, a rather dimly lit pub with some appropriate decoration.

but by the time we got to staggering on the streets things were a little trickier.

It certainly didn’t help that my SB800 flash decided to pack up – in need of a rather expensive flash tube replacement – and I was left only with the built in flash on the camera, really only suitable as a fill, and not usable with big lenses which cast a shadow in the image area.

This year it was fully dark when the ‘Dance of the Dead’ street parade from Hoxton Square to Dalston was gathering, and the rather dim street lighting had the very orange colour of sodium lamps.

So although there was just enough light in some of the brighter areas to take pictures at ISO3200 and get some reasonably sharp,  it isn’t possible to get good colour, even when shooting RAW, as the light is essentially monochromatic orange and sadly lacking in other colours.  The image above, taken at 1/20 f4 was about the best I could get.

Using the SB800 mounted on the D700 camera did produce some better results, but the orange light was still a problem. You can’t light up the whole world with a single flash, so I normally use flash at high ISO when I can to pick up enough ambient exposure to add some background detail. Because of the poor colour of that ambient and to get better quality in the flash lit areas, I compromised on using ISO1000. With the flash I was working at 1/60 f7.1 to get a bit more depth of field and avoid movement blur where the ambient was stronger.  I think that was equivalent to around 4 stops underexposure for the ambient, but I didn’t make a precise calculation.  Looking at the results on the computer now, I can see that the flash, despite being set at -2/3 stop was actually overexposing slightly, though seldom enough to burn out the highlights completely.

My favourite image from the event was also the simplest, a young girl waiting for the event to start. I photographed her first with her mother standing watching the preparations, then got down on my knees to make this image, in which her witches hat becomes a kind of purple halo.

There are some other pictures that I quite like – and you can see a largish set on My London Diary – but none that really lived up to my expectations, as it was a very tricky, fussy and at times fast-moving event. Perhaps if I’d followed the parade further I would have found some better lighting, and the dance at the end might well have been fun, but I’d been on my feet and taking pictures for over 7 hours and was feeling rather tired, and when I saw a bus approaching I rushed across the road to jump on it and start my journey home. Perhaps next year I’ll do better.