>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Two Years to London 2012

Today is exactly two years to the start of the London 2012 Olympics, and various events are taking place to mark this. The man in charge, Lord Coe of Ranmore (still better known as Seb) was interviewed on the BBC this morning and talked to the presenter about how just five years ago, the Olympic site was an undeveloped wasteland.

It’s a lie, and one that Lord Coe knows is so, all part of a deliberate attempt to justify the Olympics as bringing some great redevelopment opportunity to the area (which might just be true.) These are some pictures from around the site before the Olympic redevelopment, which led to the closing down of many small local employers, along with a few larger companies, some of which did rather better from the forced removal.

© 2005 Peter Marshall
This housing estate and tower block was demolished for the Olympic Village
Of course there are many more pictures from the area here on My London Diary (the index page only covers work up to 2007 – see entries under Newham) and rather more on my River Lea site, with pictures from 2000-2005 starting here.

More convenient for some is my recently published ‘Before the Olympics‘, still available on Blurb which packs 240 pictures into its pages, including a significant selection from the Olympic area, particularly from the 1980s before the London Olympics was even a gleam in Seb Coe’s eye. Had he really wanted them on a “undeveloped wasteland” he could of course have chose Ranmore.

BP Plugs Leak

If you’ve not already seen it there is a great piece on The Russian Photos Blog today, BP Plugs Leak, Photoshops Entire Gulf Coast.

Of course much of the anti-BP US hysteria is no more than an attempt to deflect attention from the US government’s responsibility for encouraging unsafe oil exploration in the gulf and elsewhere, which has backfired spectacularly, exposing the almost total lack of proper regulation of the oil companies activities.

And it would be hard to find anyone with any understanding of the matter who has any sympathy for the attacks on BP and the Scottish government over the release of the the Libyan who was convicted on very doubtful evidence of planting the bomb on an airline. Perhaps the remaining documents that the US government and the UK government will not allow the Scots to release could make their way to Wiki-leaks and might then help convince those US politicians that there is no case for the Scots to answer.

BP of course do have plenty of things to answer for, not least their intention to exploit the Alberta tar sands

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Picket at BP in solidarity with Colombian Oil Workers
and their lack of care and respect for the dignity of their workers in Colombia.

Democracy Camp Stops Traffic

The Democracy Camp which set up in Parliament Square on May 1 was cleared by bailiffs and police early on Tuesday morning after two and a half months there. I wasn’t there to see it go, but I did visit last Friday after the court had announced its decision that they had to leave.

For the moment Brian Haw and his Parliament Square Peace Campaign is still there, and in its tenth year, but very much under threat. He’s become something of a national institution and I hope he manages to keep there until he feels it is time to leave.

It seemed to me that the Democracy had perhaps in several ways outstayed its welcome, although certainly its presence had livened up what is normally one of London’s dullest areas, and one that the city has always completely failed to make sensible of proper use of. It did at least provide a little entertainment and amusement for tourists. It also gave a temporary home and some hope to a number of London’s homeless – including some ex-soldiers – at minimal cost to the tax payer. But perhaps like the Climate Camp it should have cleaned up, packed its bags and left of its own accord after a decent period of occupation.

Of course there were down sides, though the councils and the press seemed to make rather too much of these. Clearing the rubbish was only a matter of a lorry coming occasionally to pick up the neatly piled black sacks as the campers did the rest of the work and it’s hard to see how Westminster Council can work out the rather large amounts it has quoted. The site too was largely self-policing and there was certainly no point in the presence of ‘heritage wardens’ who simply stood around doing nothing there (I did see one taking a few photographs.) The grass about which so much fuss has been made was not in much worse state than my own lawn, and I confidently expect that to recover given a few decent falls of rain and a few of months of my usual neglect rather than the unnecessary turfing and reseeding the Mayor will spend Londoners money on.

One of the causes which the camp has brought some attention to through its protests is the war in Afghanistan, and the longest banner on its site read ‘SOLDIERS COME HOME ALIVE!’ On Friday evening Stop The War were holding a demonstration opposite Downing St against the war, so I wasn’t surprised to see the campers coming up Whitehall carrying the banner.

Nor was I surprised that rather going across the road to the area on the opposite side of Whitehall where demonstrations are permitted they instead stood on the pavement to block the gates to Downing St. Like them I’m not happy with the restrictions including this on the right to demonstrate that were made by the Labour government in SOCPA (Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005) which were a serious assault on our democratic freedoms.

The police at least responded fairly reasonably and after a few minutes told them they would have to move, and they did, but only to the centre of the road so as not to obstruct the gates. It was difficult there for both police and photographers who were in danger from the traffic that was still being allowed to move along the road, and police politely explained this to some of the leading campers and requested that they move across to the pavement where they were allowed to demonstrate.

Instead some of the other protesters from the camp decided on a different logic of solution. If traffic created a hazard, stop the traffic – and so they did. Police made some attempt to get them to move, but there were simply not enough present to actually force them. After around ten minutes I saw one of the officers talking to one of the leading protesters and they shook hands, I think having come to an agreement. She organised the protesters to stand with their banner for a few minutes across the road, then led them back towards the camp.

It was a protest without violence from protesters or police. The protesters had been allowed to make their point clearly but the police had also minimised the disruption caused by the protest, although it had held up traffic for almost 20 minutes by the time it ended. Perhaps it was a little bit of democracy in action.

Pictures from Parliament Square, the Stop the War demonstration and the Democracy Camp’s contribution to this on My London Diary, along with more about the event. A few thoughts on the photographic problems in another post here.

Waterloo Carnival

There is a certain chaos and madness about this picture that I like and is perhaps why I like to photograph the event it comes from, a relatively recent annual carnival held close to Waterloo station, in an area centred about a street called Lower Marsh.

The carnival itself is a symbol of a changing area, not long ago a down at heel and solidly working class area which came to life a little on weekday mornings with a street market, but after than packed up in the early afternoon was pretty dead.

Lower Marsh is the remnant of a much larger market through the centre of Lambeth from Vauxhall to Blackfrars which was notorious in the nineteenth century for the depravity of those who traded there and frequented it. Building Waterloo Station cut it off from the area to the north in 1848, and in the 2oth century road building, wartime bomb damage and slum clearance continued its decline. The end of the GLC came as a blow too, as workers there would come through Leake St under the station to shop and eat. Also in the 1980s property developers brought up much of the area hoping for a windfall from redevelopment around the Paris-London Eurostar train service to Waterloo but it didn’t happen and many buildings were more or less left to rot.

But over the last ten or so years it has begun to pick up, with new offices around and it’s become a much trendier area, with various specialist shops, cafés that have moved beyond the full English breakfast (though I love a good ‘greasy spoon’ even though my diet forbids it) and a pub called the Camel And Artichoke which despite the name serves a decent pint.

The population is also considerably more mixed with the selling off of both council housing and formerly cheap private rented accommodation to people who see the advantage of living within walking distance of Westminster and central London.

As usual at the moment I was working with the D700 with the 16-35mm f4 Nikon lens and the D300 mainly with the Nikon 18-105mm, with just a few pictures on the 10.5mm fisheye. And for once everything worked as it should.

More pictures on My London Diary.

Trent and Narelle

Thanks to Magnum for a tweet pointing out a “Wonderful 30 minute documentary about photographers Trent Parke and Narelle Autio“, Trent Parke – Dreamlives (2002) – Australian Story which you can watch on Vimeo.

According to my computer its actually 25 minutes 17 seconds long, although perhaps it does seem longer as Magnum suggest. Although it does have a lot of interesting moments and comments – it was good to see some of the locations of pictures in ‘Dreamlives’ and also some more about the making of their joint book ‘The Seventh Wave’ I did end up feeling it would have been a much better 10 minute film.

But if you want to relax for a while with a glass or two of wine or a couple of beers 10 minutes would be a little short. So perhaps its a film about a very photographically driven couple for an Australian audience who perhaps won’t notice the title and the strapline “Newcastle’s own Trent Parke” omits to mention the female half while the film itself stresses the importance of them working together. And in case anyone is confused, that’s Newcastle, New South Wales and I think Parke was Magnum’s first Australian photographer.

Considerably more interesting photographically is his Minutes to Midnight, produced over a two-year period tavelling across Australia with his partner, and culminating with the birth of their first son in November 2004.

This 2006 Magnum in Motion essay is clearly to date the definitive presentation of this work, (the book is a 32 page pamphlet with only 20 images) and I think is a now a real classic. After completing it he stopped working in black and white and moved to colour.

Road to 2012 at NPG

The latest stage of the National Portrait Gallery/BT Road to 2012 project is on show (admission free) in the Studio gallery of the London National Portrait Gallery from now until 26 September 2010. It consists of a larger set of pictures from the project than previously shown by Brian Griffin along with some individual portraits of athletes by Bettina von Zwehl.

I think you can see all the pictures, along with much other material about how they were made on the NPG project web site although it seems to me to have an unnecessarily confusing interface to navigate. Of course seeing the pictures in reproduction on the web (click on them to see them larger) is no substitute for seeing the actual work.

I went to the so-called “Breakfast Launch” of the show (an entirely breakfast-free event) where one of the athletes pictures, rower Katherine Grainger talked about being photographed by von Zwehl.

Later I was able to photograph her standing beside the portrait of her (all photographs in this review are © Peter Marshall 2010, but included works by the photographers in the show in them are © Bettina von Zwehl – National Portrait Gallery/BT Road to 2012 Project or © Brian Griffin – National Portrait Gallery/BT Road to 2012 Project respectively.)

It and the similar pairing of young weightlifter Zoe Smith I think typify the problem I have with her portraits.

Somehow to me these portraits all look too much the same. And unfortunately they don’t seem to much resemble the real people who were used to make them. It’s a particular look which I think best suits sullen adolescents but none of those in the show fits that bill. They seem to be images that tell me more about the photographer than the sitter, which isn’t what I want from a portrait.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Roy Haggan won the Everyday People competition – his prize a portrait by Bettina von Zwehl – perhaps the most recognisable of those on show

As you can see, these pictures are surprisingly small – only moderately sized – and at this scale fail to demonstrate the kind of quality that the 8×10 camera can give. I’m not usually a fan of printing stuff large, but I do think these needed a greater scale, although I don’t think I would have found them any more convincing. One aspect of the larger format is that the subject stands out more from the background with the greater inherent depth of field, but here, combined with the over-lighting of the subject it often creates a kind of cardboard cut-out effect. Looking at a number of these I felt they would almost certainly have been improved by using only ambient light.

I know that von Zwehl is a very successful photographer and have admired some of her previous work, but I just don’t get these images. The gallery notes on the show describe them as “meditative observations of face, mood and physique” but I fail to find this in them. Doubtless it’s my loss.

I have long been a fan of Brian Griffin, and as well as producing interesting work he is always an interesting guy to talk to. These works show that he has lost nothing of his touch and the show includes several that can rank among his best over the years.

My favourite of the new works is one which I immediately christened “the conspirators“, perhaps a scene out of Hamlet, where David Luckes‘s right eye peers out over the shoulder of Simon Clegg. Both of them have a hand on the 395 page report written by Luckes in 2000 which persuaded the Mayor of London and the government to back the bid, and its white plastic spine is surely the murder weapon. Something very nasty is certainly about to happen! As we’ve now found out.

I’ve also included this image to show the framing of these works with a white border and a white frame, which I think as very effective.

There are others that struck me powerfully too. Ken Livingstone, posing with LDA Managing consultant Tony Winterbottom shows Ken pointing and Griffin makes powerful use of the frame with one finger pointing to his left exactly at its edge, and the other hand on the opposite edge above the open palm of Winterbottom, doubtless waiting for the cash to drop into it. Ken is of course wearing a red tie, the only touch of colour in the scene, taken in front of a dynamically sloping background at City Hall, reinforcing the dynamic thrust of Ken towards the frame edge.

Many of those in Griffin’s pictures are men in grey suits (and some women too) but one dramatic piece of colour is provided by architect Zaha Hadid in a group showing the Aquatics centre team. Like many of his works this also illustrates his very theatrical use of lighting (and also some superb printing of his work.)

There are just one or two which I don’t think work, some where perhaps he seems to almost be parodying his own work, and others that just don’t quite come off. But overall he is creating a powerful set of work. It may well be the best thing to come out of the Olympics.

[My own ‘Olympic’ contribution is the book of pictures ‘Before the Olympics: The Lea Valley 1981-2010.’]

Nikon 16-35mm & Lens Hood Lunacy

If there is one thing that is ever likely to alter my allegiance to Nikon and switch to some other make of camera (and I don’t think it is likely to be Canon, though I’ve nothing against them, but there is just no real advantage) it will be lens hoods.

The 16-35mm f4 Nikon is a fine lens in many respects, and once I find the time to make a profile for it to use with Lightroom (or someone else kindly supplies one) I’ll be happy using it for almost anything. Even at f4 it seems pretty sharp right to the corners across more or less the full range (perhaps just a little less than biting at the 16mm end.)

For many of the pictures I take or people and events the slightly obvious distortion at 16mm doesn’t even show and can actually be a slight improvement, as more often the little bit of vignetting can also be. If it wasn’t there I’d probably want to add it in some images. And the chromatic aberration generally isn’t too noticeable in moderate sized prints either, though I’d like to remove most of it as a matter of course. I’ve seen little or none of the more troublesome blue fringing that besets some lenses, probably on account of the slightly awesome length of this wide-angle. It does get rather confusing when I’ve two cameras hanging around my neck, one with the 16-35mm and the other with a 55-200mm and I have to keep telling myself that the one with the considerably shorter lens is the telephoto.

Doubtless the size and weight of the lens are linked to its optical performance as well as to the presence of the vibration reduction. I’ve yet to detect any real advantage of this when I’ve had it switched on, and I suspect it is actually a problem in fast-moving situations, where I’ve found some frames with an inexplicable lack of sharpness that I can only blame on it.

It’s fast to focus, and I think precise in doing so. It feels pretty well built and although we haven’t really had the weather to test it I suspect will cope with the elements better than my other lenses.

The only real problem I have with it is the lens hood. Of course you don’t expect it to be too effective for a zoom of this type and to some extent it is as always just a convenient rest for your hand which will do the real job of shielding the front element from direct sun without obscuring too much of the picture (since you don’t quite see the frame edge in the viewfinder you may have to crop slightly.) And its main function is of course to cut down the chance of those straying fingers marking the front element, which it does reasonably well.

But almost every day I use this lens I find at some point, sometimes several times that I’m having to reach down to the ground to pick the wretchedly flimsy and poorly fixed plastic ring up. Yesterday I was lucky to be able to retrieve it in once pieces as on one of the three occasions it came off it rolled onto a busy road in front of oncoming cars. Fortunately they swerved to avoid me as I stepped out towards it, thus missing the lens hood also.

I’d glue it in place, but the lens fits much more easily in my bag with the hood reversed. Perhaps I should carry a roll of sticky tape and add a length of this after bayoneting it in position. Although the Nikon HB-23 hood looks and acts as if it should be disposable, this simple plastic moulding that must cost pence to produce actually costs £15 or more to replace.

I’m not sure whether the answer needs simply the use of a better material for the lens hood or it actually needs a redesign of the bayonet fitting. Perhaps a hood with the existing bayonet could somehow be fitted with a more adequate locking system. But guys, it really is a problem and I know I’m not the only photographer who thinks so.

So Nikon make a really good wide angle zoom that costs around £1000. With some slight doubts about the need for the VR it’s a lens that can be highly recommended. So long as you don’t mind occasionally risking your life chasing errant lens hoods.

Cuts & Compacts

I hadn’t actually gone to Croydon to photograph a demonstration but to pick up some my pictures that had been at a show in the library there. But the library is next to the town hall in one of those fine Victorian municipal complexes (though perhaps not as fine as that in my own home town, replaced by a featureless shopping centre in the 1970s) and there were around 50 people protesting on the town hall steps.

Unusually, and because I had half a dozen framed pictures to carry home, I hadn’t taken a ‘proper’ camera with me, but I did have my small Fuji F31fd compact in my pocket, so I went across and took a few pictures, some of which you can see on My London Diary, where I also have written more about this protest over the withdrawal of grants to many local voluntary groups including the BWAC – something we will see happening across the country.

Of course at the scale reproduced here, apart from the squarer aspect ratio it is hard to tell the difference between this image and what I might have taken using my normal Nikon. What did surprise me was how little difference there is between this image and those when looked at much larger on screen.

Part of the reason for this is that instead of using the jpeg image straight from the Fuji camera I imported it into Lightroom, and worked on it in much the same way as I would have done with a RAW image from the Nikon, using some noise reduction, altering contrast and exposure, burning in some of the highlight areas and opening up the shadows.

There are differences, with a little kind of blue haze around some of the edges that Lightroom can’t remove, and the image is only 6Mp rather than the 12Mp from the Nikons. But overall the result is pretty good, and would certainly hold up well for an A4 full page reproduction.

Perhaps the biggest difference was in taking the pictures, both in how I could work and in the reactions of the people I was photographing. There were two guys from the local press also taking pictures at the same time using the same kind of gear as I would normally have, and they were getting rather more attention and cooperation from the protesters than I did. It wasn’t a problem as I generally like to work in a more informal way than the local press, but there was a noticeable difference in the interaction.

But I also felt that I was working more or less blind, holding out the camera in front of me and peering at an almost invisible image on the camera back in front of me and had very little idea exactly where the edges of the image would be. After taking the pictures it was possible to see a little better by holding my hand around the screen, but I couldn’t really tell if the pictures were sharp or see them well.

It wasn’t a very visual event, with only a handful of placards and nothing much happening, and I had other things to do so was unable to stay long and see if anything developed. It served to remind me why I find it worthwhile to carry a couple of relatively heavy cameras and a bag with extra lenses rather than a camera that would slip in a pocket – even though the quality of the results – with some help from Lightroom – was a pleasant surprise.

Working with jpegs in Lightroom requires a few different settings to normal. The main thing to remember is that jpegs have already been subjected to a tone curve in the camera and don’t need your usual one on import. I find the Linear Contrast option gives the best result with my files. Again your normal import sharpening is unlikely to be needed as the jpeg will already have been sharpened (even if you have selected to turn off sharpening in the camera options. The camera will also have applied some noise reduction but it may be possible to do a little more with Lightroom without losing image detail.

Camera settings are of course also vital. If you are working with a compact and want high quality results you need to make sure you use the lowest possible ISO setting for the lighting conditions as well as highest quality jpeg setting (called Fine on some cameras) and also a large enough image size – usually the maximum the camera can produce, and certainly at least 6Mp. Other settings such as contrast, sharpening and colour are also important, and you will almost certainly get the best results if you are working with your images in Lightroom if you use the lowest contrast and sharpening settings and also the most neutral colour.

Battersea & Wandsworth

After a fairly quick and not too productive visit to the early Bastille Day celebrations in Battersea Park last Sunday (more pictures) I decided to go for a walk along the Thames. There don’t seem to me to be many ways you can photograph a lively quartet of young women dancing the can-can (and it’s been a long time since I was in any way turned on by frilly red underwear) and I’ve never really understood why anyone would pay to watch the kind of dance spectacle put on by the Bluebell Girls at the Lido de Paris. It was I suppose moderately diverting for a few minutes at Battersea Park, but I certainly had no desire to watch it again.

The Thames Path had considerably more visual interest on offer, and a few surprises as you can see from the pictures.

Of course I’ve walked this way before – and was at the Peace Pagoda last month for its 25th anniversary. I’ve photographed the buildings of Albion Riverside before, some fairly remarkable recent cityscape and probably an improvement over the bus garage they replaced – one of relatively few London riverside residential developments of some architectural interest, along with the neighbouring offices of it’s architects, Foster + Partners.

Both provided me with an opportunity to try out the possibilities for image correction of Lightroom 3, although for Albion Riverside I chose to only slightly reduce the fisheye perspective of the 10.5mm Nikkor, as is fairly obvious in the curvature of the straight-sided buildings at left and right. The lower image of the architects offices has been corrected for the fairly obvious barrel distortion given by the Nikon 16-35mm f4 lens at 17mm, and had I not been in a rush to put work on the web site I could also have corrected the very slight convergence of verticals and rotated the image the very slight amount needed to keep the verticals absolutely vertical.

Although very large amounts of correction do give visibly less sharp or detailed results it is very easy to make small corrections in Lightroom, and produce an image from a relatively quick hand-held exposure into the kind of picture that would once have needed long and careful setting up with a camera on a tripod, and probably only really possible with a camera with movements. Of course not all architectural shots need everything so tightly controlled, but it is good to be able to do so easily if required.

As you can see in the pictures on My London Diary, I walked on around four miles in all, turning back to catch a bus just beyond the mouth of the Wandle. The temporary path there has a fence around 6 foot tall with railings too close together to photograph through with the largish lenses on my Nikons, and on my previous visit there in April I gave up at this point.

This time I decided to photograph over the top of the fence, and held the camera up above my head on the top of the fence, far too high to look through the viewfinder. I always knew there must be a use for ‘Live View’ mode, and this was it. Although the bright sunlight prevented me from seeing the image on the back of the camera with any clarity, I could see enough to tell whether or not I had the camera level.

I’d have preferred the tide to be lower and will need to go back one day when it is to get some more pictures, but as you can see the image is pretty well level, thanks to just a little tweaking in Lightroom.

More of the pictures from the Thames Path on My London Diary.

Fiesta!

Last Saturday I was in St Pancras, not the station but the area of London just to the west of it, photographing two linked events, one a neighbourhood street festival in an area which includes many people from various countries around the world, and the other, just a few yards away, a part of one of our great institutions, the British Library.

The BL is also one of our younger institutions, and until around 40 years ago was simply a part of the British Museum, with the great reading room at the centre of that complex. I got to know it and took just a handful of pictures of it when my wife worked there in the early 1970s, though those negatives are now sadly in a very poor state. But although the new building has many advantages, and I’ve been to several fine exhibitions there, its always seemed to me architecturally disappointing. I find the interior disorientating and the exterior rather a hotchpotch that lacks the kind of organisation I admire. Much of the site too is covered by a large courtyard which appears 99.9% of the time to be unused and a kind of no-man’s land between the street and the library.

But this was one of the rare occasions when it was being made use of, for a festival of Latin American music and dance, Fiesta!, and I split my time between covering the dancers here and the street festival a short block away, though I also tried with little success to photograph a demonstration in Trafalgar Square a short tube ride away which, as is often the case, was rather less of an event than expected.

Many of the dancers had exotic costumes and it would have been hard to take a picture of them which didn’t have at least some interest because of this. The main visual problem I had was in trying to place the event in context. The building isn’t very recognisable and in any case for nearly all the time I had my back both to it and also to the audience, which was generally rather sparse and spread out. Probably the most recognisable feature on the site is the statue Newton, after William Blake by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, and I used this in the background in a number of images, although it raised the second problem later in the day in that it meant working more or less directly towards the sun.

Light levels were generally fairly high through the day, and so was the heat. I felt for the guys dancing in heavy costumes, I was having enough of a problem simply standing in the sun to take pictures. More pictures on My London Diary

At the street festival, almost every picture seemed to be in a mixture of sun and shade, and although sometimes I could use fill, for other pictures it wasn’t possible or I didn’t have time to put the flash on the right camera. Using two bodies I find it just too much to have both with flashes in the hot shoe, so generally find I have it on the wrong one when I have to grab a pictures quickly!

But really I just could not get into the mood. I often find it hard to start taking pictures, there is a kind of mental barrier to climb to overcome my very British inhibitions, but usually once I start things are fine. It didn’t quite happen at this event, and I don’t know why. Perhaps it was connected with going back and forth from one thing to another and not really getting stuck in, perhaps it was the heat, but somehow I just couldn’t relax and get on with the job. So although there are a few pictures on My London Diary that are OK, I wasn’t satisfied with the day.