>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Do We Need Property Releases?

Thanks once more to Photo Attorney Carolyn E. Wright fora very interesting post on her blog pointing me in the direction of A House’s Right of Publicity, posted on Wednesday on the Property, intangible blog about Robinson v HSBC Bank USA, a case in which Mr Robinson sued because a pictures of his house had been used in a flyer distributed with the San Francisco Chronicle advertising the bank’s “Premier Mortgage.”

Robinson’s lawyers put up seven different cases under US and Californian law as to why this usage was a breach of his rights, and all were thrown out. A comment on the fotoLibra blog, comes down against the decision, on the grounds that it was “discourteous in the extreme not to request permission of the owner.” Well perhaps so, but that doesn’t make it illegal.

FotoLibra also challenges the policy of the UK National Trust, who as many of us know have for some years been attempting to impose a ban on the photography of their properties other than “strictly for private use” – and have managed to get many photographs of these buildings removed from image libraries, including pictures taken from outside of their property.

Many have questioned the legality of their position, as well as the morality of banning photography of buildings which are owned by them on behalf of us, the nation. But although like fotoLibra we might “defend the right of people to photograph what they will, and sell those photographs if they can, if they are to be used in an educational, illustrative, informative or editorial function” we would also like them feel that, on our behalf the National Trust should both have to give consent and also receive payment for images of our property being used to promote commercial gain.

So the US decision is good in some respects but bad in others. What would be good is a clear ruling that distinguishes editorial and related usages from commercial use.

Recently in the UK, press photographers have been told by police and PCSOs that they need a permit to photograph in Royal Parks in London, which include Victoria Tower Gdns next to the Houses of Parliament. Here I was approached and informed of this by a PCSO on Sat 24 July. The alleged need for a licence laughably also includes Parliament Square where I have taken literally thousands of images this year alone.

The first time I heard of this happening was a couple of days earlier, where a demonstration had been taking place outside Buckingham Palace against the invitation to a BNP MP to attend one of the Queen’s garden parties. Obviously police had been dredging around to find some pretext to try and prevent reporting and someone had come up with this.

The distinction between commercial and editorial photography has long been understood and it is one we need to continue to insist on.

So do we need property* releases? In general for commercial use we do (despite the US case) and for non-commercial use the answer continues to be no. So far as the National Trust is concerned I think it is clearly no so long as we are on public land when we make the photograph, but perhaps less clear once we have gone on to National Trust property. Although the National Trust acquires property on behalf of the nation, often in lieu of tax payments that would have gone into the national exchequer, by some legal sleight of hand (which certainly should be illegal) it isn’t ours. And it probably won’t be long before it is completely privatised and then taken over by some Spanish-owned company.

[*Readers are reminded that property doesn’t just mean bricks and mortar but refers to anything that someone owns. So unless you own everything that appears in one of your photographs it probably needs a property release.]

Voja Mitrovic

Printers are seldom celebrated and it was good to read a two part piece, Voja Mitrovic, Printer to the Greats by photographer Peter Turnley, himself once a printer. Mitrovic, born in 1937, has printed the work of many great photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Josef Koudelka . He arrived in Paris from Yugoslavia in 1964, and worked from 1966 until his retirement at the start of 1997 at the world-renowned Paris photographic laboratory Picto created by Pierre Gassmann in 1950.

Turnley worked closely with Mitrovic, both as a printer (and he reveals it was only with his help that Turnley got a job as a printer at Picto) and when Mitrovic printed his photography, and his closeness to the printer makes this a compelling article.

As he points out, although we may not know Mitrovic’s name, we have all seen many of his prints, both in many exhibitions but for so many books. In the feature there is an incredible list of the photographers he has printed for.

Many photographers prefer to print their own work, and I’ll write about this more in another post. But for many others the collaboration with a skilled printer has been a vital if seldom acknowledged part of the success.

My Printing

Many photographers prefer to print their own work, and I’m one of them, although I realise the difference that a skilled printer can make. It took me years of work- perhaps around seven or eight – before I was usually happy with the results I was getting, and I had one of the best teachers, if only in book form, Ansel Adams. But of course there were also many things I worked out for myself, and a few picked up from other photographers and printers.

I can’t claim to be a great printer, certainly not in the same league as Voja Mitrovic, but I certainly became a reasonably adequate one, and was fairly often asked by others if I would make prints for them. But I had a job, and I didn’t want another one, so I always refused. I’m not sure if it would have worked, or whether as I suspect my skills were very specific to my own work and my own negatives. I have occasionally had my work printed by other people, though never any of the truly great printers, but the best black and white prints of my own work have been those I’ve made myself.

Now that darkrooms are more or less a thing of the past, and we almost all print using a computer, it’s rather easier for anyone to acquire the technical skills (though many struggle.) But the hardest aspect, knowing what a good print would look like, is still much the same.

At the moment I’m working on the first major project I produced in the early 1980’s on Kingston upon Hull. Most of the prints were made on Agfa Portriga grade 3 (and later on Record Rapid) both now long discontinued. Their formulation had changed considerably earlier to remove cadmium, and certainly Record Rapid was never the same again.

Portriga had a warmer tone (in the right developer you could get a kind of chocolate brown that most people took for a toned print) and Record Rapid was a warm neutral but both were capable of very deep blacks and a kind of velvet quality with pearly whites. I consistently overdeveloped both papers, using either Agfa’s own Neutol developer at higher than normal concentration or, better still, May and Baker’s Teknol, formulated for use in tropical darkrooms, which I used at 23-24 degrees.

Even if I wanted to, I could no longer get the same print quality in the darkroom with modern materials. And today I would find it very hard to perform the tricky dodging and burning that I managed in my youth, some of which is still roughly recorded on the back of the contact sheets but these sketches will still come in useful when printing on the computer.

The original prints I made for the show were deliberately, perhaps wilfully small at 105 x161mm, (4.13 x 6.3″) over, designed to be viewed intimately by people with good eyesight! The just over 4x enlargement gave images from 35mm (mainly taken on a Leica M2 with a 35mm Summilux lens, though later I moved on to an Olympus OM2) a large-format quality even though only on a small scale. They were designed so that either a portrait or landscape format image could be mounted on a 10″ wide by 9″ high card, which where then mainly shown as groups of four in 20×18″ frames.

I’m intending to show this work in a group show where I have only an 8 by 4 foot panel rather than the top floor of a large gallery they filled in 1983, so I won’t have all 148 prints on show. But printing digitally does make it a lot easier to make several prints on a single sheet of paper, as well as simplifying the process of dodging and burning.

Good digital prints start from good scans, which is where the dedicated film scanner helps. Scanning the large number of negatives is a little of a chore, and at the moment I’m perhaps a third of the way through. I use VueScan software because I find it easier to control (and it gives great results with colour negative) and gives very good scans, and I’ve written a very short guide on how I scan b/w negs with it.

The scans are saved as 16 bit TIF files, using my default working space for greyscale, Grey Gamma 2.2, usually a good choice for greyscale images as it is almost identical for them to sRGB. In Photoshop I rotate them as needed (using Photoshop’s ‘Measure Tool‘ to mark along one edge of the image area, then Image, Rotate Canvas, Abritrary to make it accurately horizontal before cropping with the rectangular marquee. I then do a quick and rough correction using the levels command and/or the curves command before archiving the files to DVD and to an external hard disk. This means I can always go back to this file at this state should I mess it up in some way, and I’ll not need to re-scan.

Further work on the file includes the inevitable spotting, mainly with the Healing Brush, but occasionally some areas need the Clone tool. That’s generally the longest part of the process and I’ll usually update the archive file on the external hard disk after this is done.

Next comes dodging and burning, mainly by selecting areas with the lasso tool, feathering them by an appropriate amount (anywhere from 5 – 200 pixels, depending on the size of the area and only using low values where an object selected has a clearly defined edge) and then using the levels command, with values between 1.10 and 0.90. If a greater amount of burning or dodging is required, it’s normally better to build it up using different selection areas, made by moving the original selection or using the Select Modify command or the image can start to show distinct boundaries where burning has taken place.

As well as dodging and burning to get the results I want will also require some tweaking of the image curve, either for the whole file or for selected areas – again making sure to feather any selection appropriately.

Its easier to do most of this work with a stylus rather than a mouse, and in some ways I’m as busy as I used to be working in the darkroom, but for much longer on each image. But there are two good sides to this; first you can take a break whenever you want and nothing will change, and second that when you’ve done it for the file you never have to do it again.

Again I usually update the archive file on the external hard drive when the file is exactly how I want it.

Usually I print from Photoshop, using either a Cone Piezography Quad Grey ink set on matte paper (usually Hahnemuhle Photorag) or Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks using the Epson ABW (Advanced Black and White) on a fibre based glossy paper. Both methods can give excellent results, and once images are framed under glass the different Dmax are seldom important. Although matte papers have a considerably lower DMax they can still seem black and the mid tones can be stunning.

For printing I take the saved 16 bit file and convert to 8 bits (unless I’m using a specialist print driver that works with 16 bit files.) The Cone inks I have are only suitable for matte papers, and as they work through an ICC profile it’s possible to ‘soft proof’ the file on Photoshop, giving an on-screen version of what the printed version will look like. You can then add adjustment layers to the file to compensate for the effect of the ink and paper. I’ve always used Epson printers (since one early and slightly unfortunate experience with another brand) and as well as Epson’s own solutions for them, they have the widest range of support outside this.

Printer manufacturers would like you to always use their paper with the printer and seem to deliberately make using it with other papers difficult by making the details of how the printer driver works. Sometimes I use a print ‘rip’, third party software that sends data direct to the printer rather than to the manufacturer’s print driver. Particularly if you want to use specialised black and white inksets, then the shareware ‘Quad Tone Rip‘ is excellent value, and it will also work with the Epson Inks, though of course limited by them – and if you print just using the three blacks you get a slightly unpleasant greenish black. Quadtone Rip has tools to enable you to produce profiles for soft proofing, but I’ve not used it.

Epson do not make grey profiles available for their ABW system and there are none I can find to download for the Epson 2400 printer that I use, although some have been made available for the Epson 3800, and may work with some other printers If you want to use ABW, you should read the lengthy report by Garry Eskin, which greatly clarifies some of the aspects that Epson deliberately keep quiet about. I usually only use it for Epson’s own poorly named Archival Matte (which is at least matte) and for third-party gloss papers with which ABW seems to pose fewer problems.

As Eskin notes, using gloss papers you can usually get a reasonable match by simply using the Tone setting. This appears to be a gamma setting, changing the mid point but not altering the white or black points. The ‘Dark’ setting seems often to be better than the ‘Normal’ setting or the apparently default ‘Darker.’

Media type and ‘Paper Config’ settings in the Printer driver are also important. The media type alters not only the warmth of the black, but also the maximum amount of ink used – watercolour papers which are more absorbent apparently need to have less ink used. Probably its best to start with the type recommended by the paper maker.

The amount of ink can also be altered in the ‘Paper Config’ dialogue, using the ‘Color Density’ setting. I often find prints can be improved by setting this at around -10% and it will also cost less per print.

It’s easy to make black and white printing sound difficult, and perhaps to get absolute control over the process it is, but with just a little trial and error it is easy to get decent prints using ABW, particularly if you are willing to print on Epson papers.

Scanning B/W Negs With Vuescan

A lot has been written about scanning black and white film, and not all of it makes much sense to me. But different scanners work differently, and you need to try and find a method that works well with your negatives, then hope it continues to do so. A few months ago I replied to a query on an internet forum saying that I didn’t have problems with Newton’s rings (interference patterns with an oil on water appearance) with my negative holder – and within days was doing scans were they really were obviously apparent.

So what works for me isn’t necessarily the best approach for you. Some people like to scan things as positive rather than negative and then invert later, or to tell the scanner they are using a different media type. Others always scan in RGB then convert themselves to grey, or choose just one of the three (or four)

With my scanner and Vuescan software I find I get good results from a straightforward approach, scanning as black and white negative, 16 bit grayscale. I scan at a preview resolution of 1200dpi, which both enables me to crop precisely and also to zoom in to check sharpness. I set Vuescan to take 2 samples, which slows the scanning down but improves the scans over normal single sampling. Values higher than 2 give little if any more information but greatly slow down the scans.

On the crop tab, the vital setting is for the ‘Border’. I set it around 10 which means that I can crop images with a slight border (especially necessary when the negs are not in the carrier exactly straight and you need to rotate later in Photoshop.) The exposure and histogram then ignore a little bit around the edges of the selected area.

‘Infrared cleaning’ does not of course work with normal black and white films, but with chromogenic films it can be worth using the lowest setting. With other black and white films I use ‘grain reduction’ at the light setting. I’m not convinced it does anything, but high settings certainly lose detail.

My aim in scanning black and white film is not to get a perfect image direct from the scan, but to transfer all of the information from the negative to the scanned 16 bit file. So the vital tool is not the image preview but the histogram. Vuescan has a pretty confusing number of parameters on the Color tab when in ‘Advanced Mode’, but fortunately most don’t matter a great deal when scanning black and white.

You can play with the B/W Vendor, brand and type, but will generally find nothing that quite corresponds to the film you are scanning, and it really doesn’t matter a great deal, though you will see some changes. Similarly with the curve high and curve low, though I find values of around 0.25 and o.5 generally work well. The two vital settings are actually the black and the white point, but unfortunately setting them isn’t entirely straightforward.

In general, for most negatives I find I need to set the Black Point to zero and then use the ‘Brightness’ setting to avoid clipping the shadows. Sometimes the White Point also needs to be at zero, but more often a small value that cannot be directly set using the buttons is needed, perhaps 0.08. You can also set the needed value – at least roughly – by switching to show the ‘Graph b/w’ and sliding the right hand triangle to meet the bottom right of the curve. But mostly its the ‘Graph Image’ that you need to keep an eye on.

Sometimes when you’ve set both black and white points as above, the actual image may be too dark or two bright. You can try altering the brightness setting while keeping an eye on the Graph Image to see you are not introducing excessive clipping.

Years ago when I first bought Vuescan (having found the software that came with my Canon scanner was useless with colour negs) I had some e-mail exchanges with Ed Hamrick, the writer of Vuescan about the white point and the small problem I had with that. I don’t think I ever got him to understand my difficulty, and although the software has improved greatly and he has responded quickly to other bug reports, this hasn’t changed.

Because I scan in 16 bit, its possible to adjust the curves considerably without getting any problems in Photoshop. So altering the tones of the scan is simple. If I ever want to I can hide shadow or highlight detail. But if you don’t scan it you can’t use it.

Uncle Earl’s Photos

I thought I had said my last word about the pictures that made the headlines when it was claimed they were long lost works by Ansel Adams when I wrote Lost Ansel Adams? in which I made clear that whatever the authorship of these images, I felt they were of no value, going perhaps a little further by writing “Id really like to see some kind of mechanism for losing much of Mr Adamss work rather than anyone coming up with more.”

What seemed absolutely clear from the images on the web was that whoever had made them they were not a product of the mature photographer who produced a number of truly outstanding images. I found it hard to believe that had he made them he would not have destroyed at least some of them, and more than unlikely that he would, as alleged have shown them to others during his teaching. It was also clear that none of those supporting the claim had any real competence in the matter.

But I revisited the scene after reading A D Coleman’s comments in his Cowflop from the Adams Herd (1) largely because of some of the points that he made about the idea of ‘original prints’ with a post Coleman on Adams or Not in which I tried to look at whether there was any way we could reclaim the term and give in some true meaning in a photographic context.

But now I’d recommend you go back to Coleman’s Photocritic International, scroll down to the bottom of the page and start reading each of his contributions in turn just for the sheer pleasure of seeing a critical sledge-hammer applied with immense control and precision to a rather small and mouldy nut. It kept me up for an hour later than I intended last night reading through it.

Coleman has not yet finished his series, and there is more to come, and I think it possible that there could be some clumsily litigious comeback against him from the by now aggrieved parties, though given his apparently meticulous evidence-based approach I see little chance of any success.

Of course the whole story has little to do with photography, but a great deal about the curious distortions that the art market has imposed on much of the institutional basis that now underpins our medium. It perhaps would not matter much if it was confined to the world of dealers, but it also now very much determines the agendas in the museum and academic sectors.

Personally, I’m going to get on with making pictures and with showing them on the web and elsewhere when and where I can, producing moderately priced books through Blurb and perhaps in other ways, and selling them for reasonable prices as prints or licensing them for use at costs that reflect both my needs and my customer’s ability to pay rather than the kind of bulk-buy rates available from the image superstores.

Perhaps finally on this topic (though who knows what may ensue) Eric Felten has an interesting piece in the Wall St Journal, Ansel Adams And the Art World Name Game which concludes with the thought:

“we might want to be more open-minded when we encounter art of dubious provenance, allowing ourselves to judge and appreciate works for their quality rather than their attribution. Who knows, maybe Uncle Earl was an artist with something to say.“

Although I very much regret that Uncle Earl isn’t around too enjoy his moment of posthumous fame and gallery showing, I’m afraid it is only too clear that he was not.

Photo Paris

I still get a great buzz from seeing my work in print*, and although once again it’s “only in Blurb” I still felt that same thrill as I ripped open the packet containing my latest publication, Photo Paris.

Although it’s a new book – I finished and uploaded it earlier this month but only made it public today when I’d checked my first ‘proof’ copy – in some ways it’s also rather old. I took the pictures in 1988, twenty two years ago, and shortly afterwards assembled a number of the enprints from the visit there into a single copy of a book, made from cartridge paper sheets cut to page size and bound together using an office report binding system that punches a row of rectangular holes along one edge for a plastic ‘comb’ binder. To make it look more like a proper book, I laser printed a cover to go around and hide the binder. It’s still there on my bookshelves and over the years I’ve often taken it down to look through.

Although it looks rather amateur and is now showing signs of wear, it has one advantage over the new Blurb-printed edition, in the the pictures are genuine photographs. But they were machine-produced prints with no dodging or burning and the colour is sometimes not quite how I think it should be. Although the printed work just lacks the kind of quality of a photographic print, at least I was able to work on the scans to get the pictures looking how I wanted them. The print quality from Blurb is adequate though not spectacular, and I think the premium paper which I specified makes slightly less difference with colour than with black and white.

This is an extended volume – which has more than twice as many images as the original version – now 67 in the actual ‘Photo Paris‘ series, along with the view from the window of the flat I stayed in and the usual portrait of me.

Rather than working from the original, I made contact prints of all the negatives from the project using my Epson V750. Most of the negatives were already in transparent filing sheets and it was relatively quick and easy to simply put them on the scanner in these, although some I had to transfer to new sheets to do so. From these ‘contacts’, scanned at 1200 dpi so I could enlarge individual frames for a good look, I discovered a number of images I’d overlooked at the time, in some cases because the en-prints were rather poor.

I then scanned around a hundred images at 4800 dpi on a negative scanner – the Minolta Multi Pro, no longer made but still one of the best negative scanners around when equipped with third party ‘Scanhancer‘ diffuser and Xpander negative carrier. This was around 20 hours of work, with probably around the same time in Photoshop needed to get the scans into decent shape. Of course I didn’t need files that big for the book, but I’m also working for a show of some of these pictures in a couple of months, and if you are making scans it generally makes sense to scan at the highest optical resolution of the scanner in case you need a larger file later.

Scanning negatives doesn’t entirely take up your time for all those hours – it takes some time for each actual scan when you can occupy yourself doing other things. As I write this I’m actually scanning another book/exhibition project – Blurb is seriously habit-forming! But using Photoshop or some other software is too processor intensive and seriously slows down the scanner on my computer.

Computers are good for many things, but at this point I still find it best to go to physical prints. The next step was to make a set of small prints of these scans to continue with the selection and editing process. Although Photoshop can print out multiple images on each sheet of paper, I find it easier to use QImage for this job.

Our dining table is fortunately large enough to lay out all one hundred of the prints, and to start working out a sequence for the book and discarding any images that I didn’t want to use. Some photographers like to get other people to work on their books at this stage, but for me its a vital part of the creative process that I want to keep 100% under my control.

I think a photo book needs to have both some kind of structural idea, a start and a finish and a view about how you get from one to the other and the various themes that run through the work, and also be alive to and work with the graphic elements in the pictures. If, as in this case you use pictures on facing pages you have to be particularly careful in selecting images that will work together, not least because although you design a book to be read from start to finish, many people will read it simply by turning to random spreads.

Looking through the book now, I think I made a pretty good stab at it, though perhaps there are one or two images I might have ordered differently, and one or two I might have left out. But had I done so I’m sure I’d now be thinking the reverse. I was surprised in making a new selection from the contacts how good my editing had been before – every single image from the original 25 is in the new book.

You can see around a quarter of the book on the preview on the Blurb site, although I’ve selected pages with some of my favourite pictures rather than just the default first 15 pages. As always with Blurb, at £16.45 it seems just a bit expensive, and adding the postage makes it rather silly – though not so bad if you buy several books at once.

I’ll be showing a few pictures from the book in a show with two other photographers at ‘The Shoreditch Gallery‘ in the Juggler in Hoxton Market in October, and hope to bring some copies for a book signing at the opening at a slightly cheaper price – and of course if you come and buy one you don’t have to pay postage. More details on the show and an invite to the opening later. The show is a part of the East London Photomonth 2010, and the website for this is also coming soon!

* but I still require money for any commercial publication!

Gangland

João Pinas photo essay Gangland Rio de Janeiros Urban Violence, shown in Bite! magazine is a remarkable document, showing the lives of the drug dealers and gang leaders and the police units, working in some of the most dangerous places imaginable and making fine black and white images that tell the story in a remarkably powerful manner. He shows us both sides of a war on the streets in which everyone is a victim and “it is nearly impossible to escape the violence.”

Some of these pictures I found extremely moving though they are not exactly pleasant viewing, and I think it is essential to turn on the captions before you view – though it is a shame they obscure a little of the bottom of the image. I think by default they are off, which I think is the wrong decision for a documentary site; viewing them without captions tends to aestheticise them and turn the viewer into more of a voyeur. I think it is a shame too that the larger set of these images on the photographers own web site – with some more other great work – presents them entirely without captions, although they are prefaced by his statement about the work. Although it is only too obvious what some of the images are about, others are frankly impenetrable without some added context.

João Pina (b Lison, Portugal, 1980) started working as a photographer in 1998, and first went to Latin America in 2002; in 2003 he joined the Portuguese collective Kameraphoto, and from 2004-2005 studied on the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography program at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, USA. Since 2007 he has been based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work has been published in newpapers and magazines around the world. He worked together with writer Rui Daniel Galiza on his first book, Por Teu Livre Pensamento, (2007) about the people, including two of the photographer’s grandparents who were arrested, tortured and imprisoned by the long-running Portuguese fascist regime which only came to an end in 1974.

Honest Reporting by Reuters?

I’ve not come across the Honest Reporting site before, but it apparently started at the time of Yom Kippur in 2000, when a group of Jewish students at British universities decided to do something to combat unfair reporting of the Intifada. In particular there was one photo distributed and published around the world of a “young man — bloodied and battered — crouching beneath a club-wielding Israeli policeman” that was published around the world as a Palestinian victim of Israel violence. In fact it showed an American Jewish student who had been beaten up by a mob of Palestinian Arabs, and the Israeli solders had rescued him and were protecting him from further mob violence.

As too often happens with the media, once the mistake had been pointed out, the corrections were half-hearted and many inaccuracies remained. The photograph is still used as anti-Israeli propoganda on various web sites – you can read more on HonestReporting.

A recent post on HonestReporting looks at the coverage by Reuters of a clash on the Israeli-Lebanese border during what was described by Israeli sources as a routine tree-pruning mission a couple of weeks ago. Their report makes clear the very unusual level of coverage from both the Israeli and Lebanese sides by Reuters photographers, who appear to have been given unusually wide and unrestricted access to the combat zone and have worked without injuries while Lebanese photographer, Assaf Abu Rahhal, working for the pro-Syrian paper al-Akhbar was killed and another, Ali Chouaib was injured.

As well as the five Reuters photographers, the agency also had other images from stringers; normally Reuters give the names of stringers but in this case unusually they are not identified. They too appear from their pictures to have had privileged access to the events.

Its worth reading the report in detail and looking at the pictures. The article raises a number of important questions about the integrity of Reuters and I hope they will issue a full explanation. Thanks to Jonathan Warren for posting a link to this feature on the London Photographers Branch Facebook page.

Another Israel-related photo story of the moment is Israeli soldiers posting images of themselves with Palestinian detainees on their Facebook pages. A story on Haaretz.com (brought to my attention on Facebook by Fil Kaler) reports the claim by Israeli human rights group ‘Breaking the Silence‘ that Israeli Defence Forces soldiers putting pictures showing themselves on Facebook “alongside handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainees represent the norm, not the exception.” To back up their argument they themselves have published a few such more pictures on Facebook.

Chariot Festivals in London

This month I’ve photographed two Hindu chariot festivals in London, both from Tamil temples, and although they have had much in common, there was noticeably a different atmosphere to the two, and it shows in the pictures.

Ealing was the larger and more showy of the two, with many more dancers and costumes, but although everyone was very friendly I found I didn’t want to stay long. At Wimbledon I felt much more at home; it was smaller, somehow a little more domestic and more caring and I stayed working there for twice as long and was very tempted by the invitation to stay and have a meal but after working pretty well flat out for over two hours decided I needed to go for a rest with a glass or two in the pub, and then get on with processing the pictures.

Of course my view is an outsider’s view of these events, and may not reflect the realities for those involved in these religious festivals. But it’s very important that when I photograph events such as these that it is my point of view, and that I’m not producing Temple publicity.

So though I try to be sensitive to the event and observe so far as I understand them the protocols (like working without shoes) and not get in the way of what is happening, there may well be pictures that some of those in them don’t like. But fortunately, most of the time, the people I photograph react very positively to the pictures.

I also think its important to try and understand what is going on in order to photograph it, and at some religious festivals this is not easy. Hinduism claims to be the world’s oldest religion and seems to me the most intricate and dense, with a deeply philosophical approach and a language that makes it hard for me to understand. Getting the captions right can be problem but I like to try and give some idea what things are about and I’m always happy to correct any errors or make any necessary clarification, although I’m unlikely to alter my opinions. But the pictures are what I saw and how I saw it and I stand by them.

The largest of these festivals in London is I think the Sri Murugan Temple Chariot Festival in Manor Park, East Ham which I photographed last year.

1848 Daguerreotypes

There is a fairly remarkable story on ‘Wired’ about the digital cleaning of the 1848 daugerreotypes by Charles Fontayne and William Porte, a set of eight whole plate (8.5 x6.5″) images taken from across the river at Cincinnati and together showing a couple of miles of the waterfront (with some small gaps.) By 1848 the daguerreotype process was more than 10 years old, although it was only announced to the world in 1839, and technically had been considerably improved, particularly in the USA.

We’ve long known the incredible detail of the best daguerreotypes, so the hype around this particular set of pictures is rather overdone, but it’s certainly good to see that the images can be restored to something like their original state by scanning and the use of digital techniques to remove spots, although I rather wish they had ignored the wishes of the art historians and also removed the polishing marks.

If anything the actual resolution of the images turns out to be rather less than I expected, with a 1mm wide clock face being only just legible after the cleaning process. An 8.5 inch wide print is around 216mm wide, which would be around 20 pixels wide from a D700 file and that might also be just enough to make out the time. But if I read correctly the Bite piece suggests that you would need a 170Mp back rather than the 12Mp of the D700 to match the dags, and that doesn’t quite seem right. Perhaps digital pixels are worth more than dag pixels, just as we found we could outdo film with around a third of the pixel count?

Probably what limited the resolution of the dag were the optics, though at least they had a simpler job to do than today’s lenses, as the plates were only blue sensitive. And since the image made in the camera was the actual final piece, in normal viewing their was no enlargement. It’s perhaps surprising that the “details down to window curtains and wheel spokes remained crisp even at 30X magnification” as this was rather more than required, but I get pretty crisp detail when I enlarge a 12Mp digital file from the D700 by the same amount too.

The daguerreotype is not the only highly detailed process, and perhaps the real trail-blazers were the giant(or even Mammoth) plates taken by some wet plate photographers, which I think would be difficult to equal with modern materials, even by the few people I’ve known who’ve used larger than 8×10 film cameras.

Byte describe it as “one of the most famous photographs in the history of the medium” though I doubt if many of us have heard of this set of pictures and one of the things that appeals to me greatly is how ordinary it is. But it gives us a small glimpse into everyday life in one US city 162 years ago, which is truly remarkable. Of course its great value comes from the rarity of such images at the time – taking them was both expensive and highly skilled. But I think it is likely to be true that those images that we take today which will become truly valuable in the future are not the arty or conceptual creations that currently clog many gallery spaces and dealers, but pictures of the ordinary and everyday.