>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Before the Olympics

Saturday I got my proof copy of my second work available on Blurb, Before the Olympics: The Lea Valley 1981-2010, and it is now available to buy. It’s a very different work from my first book, ‘1989‘, still available. ‘Before the Olympics‘ is a collection of photographs while ‘1989‘ was an art work. Although I think some of least of the photographs are of photographic interest, they and the work as a whole should also appeal to a wider range of people.

Its also a rather larger effort than the previous volume, with over 240 pictures rather than only 20, although rather less text. Physically it is larger too, 10×8 landscape format with around 80 pages. I suppose that despite being more expensive (currently £16.45 in paperback, plus carriage) its a rather better deal, with a cost per picture around one eight of the previous effort!

Of course packing 240 pictures into 80 pages isn’t ideal, and although some of my favourite pictures have a page to themselves, some are rather smaller than I would ideally have liked. But I wanted this book to reflect at least all of my early black and white work on the area that I think is worth showing. I took many more pictures back then than are shown here, but the others are either variation on those selected or pictures I now find less interesting. Although the book has images from the source to the Thames, most of the images are from Leamouth, Canning Town, Stratford Marsh, Hackney Wick and up to Ponders End.

With more space to play with (Blurb can make larger books, but the cost increases with a jump between 80 and 81 pages) I might also have chosen to include more of my early colour work, as well as more pictures from after 1995. There are some in the volume, but really I have enough for another book or two.

I found it quite exciting to rip open the packet and get my first look at the printed copy, although of course I had seen it on screen. Although I very much liked ‘1989’ this was in some respects more satisfying.

It isn’t a perfect volume. The reproduction isn’t quite as good as before, though still largely adequate it just has slightly less depth. Perhaps it is just a matter of being made at a different press or using a different printer to the earlier volume. The colour has come out well – more or less exactly as I saw it on my screen. I’d converted all the files (black and white and colour) to RGB jpegs with sRGB profile. The black and white comes out pretty neutral too, just as I wanted it to.

There are a few places where I could improve the design while keeping within the very tight 80 page limit, and in particular some of the text is a point or so larger than it should be. So far I’ve only found one typing error, with the word ‘of’ in place of ‘or’ – just one row out on the keyboard. And there is a curious effect on one page where two pictures have somehow swapped places, thus ending with each other’s captions.

Most published books have a few minor errors at least, and I didn’t feel it was worth correcting these, although most would have been simple. I hope at some point there will be a later edition of this work from a proper publisher, with more pages and more pictures, a paid designer and perhaps a scholarly introductory text. If so, this current edition may well become a highly priced collectible and the errors will probably add to its appeal!

Many of the images can be found on my River Lea web site, and some of the others scattered around on My London Diary. But I rescanned and cleaned up all the black and white and some of the colour pictures for the book.

Leon Levinstein at the Met

Like many with an interest in photography I’ve been reading the blogs and reviews from this year’s Arles Rencontres and from what I’ve seen I’m pleased I didn’t make the effort to go there. But one show I would like to see opened recently at the Met in New York, Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players: Leon Levinsteins New York Photographs, 1950-1980.

Levinstein was really the guy who wrote the book of what we now call ‘street photography’, so perhaps it’s rather unfair of Ken Johnson in the New York Times to denigrate the show as “a compendium of street photography clichés.” Much of it only became clichés because others followed his lead. But then I find it very hard to take with any seriousness the writing of someone who can describe Tina Modotti as “a master of the genre” along with Weegee and Robert Frank. This isn’t by the way a criticism of Modotti, though I’m not her greatest fan.

Gallerist James Danziger presents a markedly more sympathetic view, though I’d take exception at his suggestion that Levinstein is “more known and appreciated by dealers and curators than collectors or even photographers“, as I think more than almost anyone else I can think of he is a “photographer’s photographer”, (as indeed the Economist describes him in a short piece with a small set of images from the show) but although I’ve not seen the show I do know his work and Danziger is spot on when he says “hes the real deal.”

Vince Aletti in The New Yorker gets to the nature of the work well when he talks of Levinstein as a loner “communing with New York at its grittiest, clearly relishing the experience” and producing work that is “brutal, brilliant, and uncompromising.”

In the Village Voice, Robert Shuster picks it as the only photographic show in his art recommendations and in a short piece compares him with Frank and finishes with the statement “Levinstein deserves wider recognition for recording the fleeting, quirky scenes of city life.”

The Met now has a decent short piece on him on their site, the real gem of which is a po0dacst with exceprts from a 1988 archival recording in which Leon Levinstein talks about his work.

The Howard Greenburg Gallery site isn’t my favourite – in my view a rather bad use of Flash, and if you have a recent Flash version installed you may well be told you haven’t got the correct one, but it will still actually work if you tell it you have. Under the ‘Artist’ tab if you scroll down you will find Levinstein and eventually a set of around 40 of his images.

Section 44 Victory

Last Sunday around 50 of London’s finest photojournalists and a few other friends of freedom gathered at Scotland Yard to celebrate the European Court of Human Rights ruling that meant ‘Section 44‘ which police had been widely using to harass photographers (as well as demonstrators) was illegal. Yesterday we heard that Home Secretary Teresa May had finally bowed to the inevitable and accepted their decision. Section 44 truly was dead.

It may well have been the media storm over the police arrest of a young freelance covering a military parade in Romford the previous week that had been the last nail in the coffin for this ill-conceived legislation, although it was probably about the only offence which Jules Mattson wasn’t accused of during the farcical eight or nine minutes he recorded police digging themselves a deeper hole.

Jules was held up on his way to Sunday’s ‘flash-mob’ not by police but by witnessing a traffic accident, but when he did arrive those of us still there certainly gave him a hero’s welcome before posing so he too could take a picture of the demonstration.

Jules got in the news again on Tuesday, having been asked to photograph an event where his former army cadet group was among those being inspected by Prince Charles. Police were consulted as he came into the area and were happy with him there, but when he stopped to take pictures of the Prince saluting his group of cadets, a grey suited member of Charles’s bodyguard ran towards him and held him for a few seconds before apparently being satisfied that he was not intent on assassination.

It looked like the end of the incident, but shortly after a couple of plain clothes police in flowery frocks (allegedly female) from the police covert operations group (still usually referred to as SO10, though officially now SCD10, and and one of the 10 Specialist Crime Directorates – or possibly 11, though if so SCD3 is a closely guarded official secret) came over and grabbed him. He was questioned, and stopped and searched before being held for around 30 minutes; he could have left earlier, but sensibly demanded a stop and search form which the officer concerned deliberately went through very, very, slowly indeed.

Of course the loss of Section 44 does not mean an end to police harassment of photographers, and nor will the issuing of yet more statements and circulars telling them to lay off the press. But I think they are coming under increased pressure to actually do something about it by the increasing media coverage, as well as more settlements being made in favour of photographers.

With everyone there having at least one camera and spending a lot of time using it, getting pictures that were more than a simple record of the event was hard. Of course there are obvious things you have to take, and I did. But there were perhaps one or two of those on My London Diary that stood out among the rest.

Pride

As usual the Pride Parade on Saturday was a glitzy event, and I enjoy much of the atmosphere, although over the years it has changed drastically from kind of free and liberating political event it was when I photographed it in the early 1990s.

Until just a couple of years ago it was the kind of event that people joined in, but now the parade is fenced off and stewarded along the whole of its route and it is very much an event that people watch.

I’m not sure I’ll bother to photograph it another year. Or at least not the actual parade, perhaps just the rather more interesting preparation for it and some of the partying in the streets that takes place later – which this year I was too tired to cover.

Of course there have been complaints about the increasing commercialisation of Pride over the years, starting so far as I remember in 1997. What made it even more of an issue this year was that the event was celebrating the start of the movement 40 years ago.

It wasn’t the only controversy around Pride. Although it wasn’t entirely a LGB rather than a LGBT event there are unresolved problems around the relations of the trans community with the event, which this isn’t the place to go into, but I did miss seeing some of them.

Of course there was still much to photograph, as you can see from the more than 150 pictures from this year I’ve put on My London Diary – and there were more I could have added, but I did feel it had rather less of the spontaneity and individuality that were once at its heart. But perhaps that just reflects that it is now pretty mainstream to be gay.

Photographically I had few problems. It was a sunny day with plenty of light and I worked at ISO400 getting both fairly fast shutter speeds to stop movement and also apertures that usually gave plenty of depth of field. About two thirds of the pictures were taken using the 16-35mm on the D700 and the other third with the D300 and 18-105mm. I carried the 55-200mm and the 10.5mm fisheye but didn’t take a single image with either.

Through the day I worked with both cameras on P and I don’t remember altering the settings or the exposure at all from the program setting, though there were just one or two images where it would have helped. Everything was on autofocus too, though of course I sometimes had to make sure it was focussing on the correct part of the subject.

During the parade things often happen quite fast (though it also at times stops and hangs around for ages) and you have to think fast to get in the right place to take pictures and of course miss quite a few. But being able to leave the technical stuff to the camera at least most of the time is a great help. In the old days I did it using zone focus and preset exposures and relying on the latitude of black and white film to see me through.

One big problem with this event is that so many people want to have their pictures taken and will stop and pose every time they see a camera pointed in their direction. Of course sometimes these posed pictures work well, but getting the kind of spontaneity I normally prefer can be a problem.

More on the Olympics

One of the reasons I’ve been getting a little behind in posting about my own work here is that I’ve been busy putting the finishing touches to my first book of pictures of the Olympic area (It’s now completed and I’m waiting with interest to see it in print.) The Lea Valley around London’s second river, the Lea, is an area I started to photograph in the 1980s and have continued to go back to occasionally ever since.

In the early 1980s my work on Hull had been accepted for a major museum show there and I was looking to repeat my success in London. Possibly the reason it didn’t happen was that the subject I chose for my next major project was the Lea Valley, which at that time absolutely nobody other than me seemed to have an interest in.

Then I could walk along the Northern Outfall Sewer for several miles and have the area completely to myself, and the paths along the various waterways of the back rivers crossing Stratford Marsh would, at least in the close season for fishing, be totally deserted.

Things have changed drastically with the success of the London Olympics bid, and last Tuesday I had to keep stopping as I rode along the path on top of the sewer, long since re-branded as the ‘Greenway’ which was crowded with various groups of visitors.

Thanks to the Olympics, the area has also been noticed by the London Festival of Architecture and was the site of an ‘urban gardening’ intervention by students from the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

I’d gone there to continue my series of images of the Olympic area, where I’ve been trying to make roughly monthly visits to see the progress on the site.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Olympic stadium, Greenway and View Tube
and also to meet an artist friend with whom I’m working on a joint project with us both producing images from the same areas of London – and the Olympic site is one we’ve chosen. We’re looking for a venue in London for an exhibition of our joint work, though so far without success.

I spent around an hour there taking photographs, particularly some panoramas – like the one above. I’d hope to be able to photograph from the viewing platform there, but unfortunately it isn’t available when school groups are using the classroom, so this time I couldn’t do so.

But I had thought to bring a monopod with me, virtually a necessity to take pictures above the temporary fencing that lines the area now. The mesh of this isn’t particularly fine, but you can’t put any Nikon DSLR lens through it and at six foot and a couple of inches its hard to photograph over unless you are rather tall.

The monopod is good for panoramas anyway as you can rotate the camera while keeping it in the same position (though I’d forgotten my attachment which enables rotation around the lens near nodal point, which is essential if you have any close objects in the frame.) But unfortunately it only reaches up to a little over five foot, so I had to hold it well off the ground so that the camera had a clear view over the fence.

This introduces other problems. It’s hard to keep the monopod in exactly the same position between exposures and the camera may actually be too high to reach to fire the shutter. For a single exposure the self-timer can deal with the second problem, but if you want to make multiple exposures while rotating the camera in order to make a panorama it makes getting the camera back into the same position problematic.

So although it might have been nice to lift the camera higher for some shots, in practice when making panoramas I was limited to the height I could reach to the shutter release. And making panoramas works best when I can work either with the foot of the monopod firmly on the ground, or with some part of it braced against some solid structure.

For the panoramic images I decided to use a fixed 20mm lens, a Nikon f2.8. It has reasonably low distortion and cuts out one possibility – altering the foal length that can make multiple images with wit zooms hard to stitch.To make panoramas that are easy to make and print, I want to stick to using a single row of images, and a relatively wide lens produces images that work together with those taken with my swing lens film cameras which have lenses of roughly 26mm focal length. Y

However carefully you work, the geometry means you lose some vertical coverage when stitching images (the actual amount depends on the angular overlap between images) and starting from 20mm. Screwing the camera directly to the top of the monopod means using it in landscape mode, which isn’t ideal, but is considerably simpler.

What I would welcome is a more compact monopod. The cheap unbranded model I have is reasonably light and sturdy, has rapid locks for quick and reliable extension and extends at maximum stretch to hold the camera exactly at my eye level, but is around 17 inches when collapsed, too long to fit my camera bag, though it does just slip in at an angle to the bag on my Brompton folding bike which I often ride in London. But looking through the various models available (ranging in price from a tenner up to around £250) I can’t really see anything better.

And there is of course nothing better than PTGui for stitching the images. You can see the above pictures and a few more on My London Diary, where there are also some more non-panoramic images of the urban gardening, as well as from the Olympic site and my travels back into the centre of London by a rather roundabout route on the Brompton.

Carl de Keyser & Google Earth

I meant to point out last week that Carl de Keyser has been answering questions on David Alan Harvey‘s ‘Burn‘, “an evolving journal for emerging photographers.” Some of the comments make interesting reading, though of course not everyone has “Two assistants in Magnum/Paris” who ” go around the entire European coastline on Google earth and put flags in places where they think I might find an interesting situation to photograph that reflects that idea of waiting for the big one.”

I’ve written about de Keyser’s work on several occasions and as well as on Magnum you can also see more on his own web site, and on the site devoted to his latest project Moments Before the Flood, involving the whole European coastline.

He is currently working in the UK, and on the site you can see his images from a number of places I’ve also photographed, including Hornsea, Withernsea and Skipsea, and I see that on Saturday he was in Brighton, photographing its derelict West Pier. Pictures are going up more or less as soon as they are taken and comments are welcome on the site.

Although I admire his photography, and there are plenty of good pictures, I’m not sure that I think that the project is really quite coming together, though I’ve only looked through the 80 or so pictures from the UK. It’s perhaps just a little too scenic (and in one or two cases too picture postcard) although of course the editing may well sort that out.

But sometimes looking at his pictures I do get the impression of a man in a hurry driven by a huge mission to complete, and driving at great speed from ‘flag’ to ‘flag’ around our coastline.

Hornsea, Skipsea and Withernsea particularly interested me because I’ve visited them quite a few times over the years (of course I’ve also been to many of the other places around the coast) and have photographed the effects of erosion there and along the whole Holderness coast. But I think I took my best pictures when I used a bicycle to get around, there is a lot to be said for working at a slower speed.

But Google Earth and Google Streetview and other mapping and satellite image services have very much changed the way we can look for subject matter.

I had a query yesterday about a picture I took in 1995 in London (its on the Buildings of London site I wrote in 1996 and have hardly updated.)

(Sorry it’s not a great scan, but technology back then was relatively primitive.)

Of course I could go back to my contact sheets from 1995 and find the image, and fortunately I had put down the details and was able to confirm that the street I’d given was correct. It also had a six figure grid reference, but that only locates it to roughly a hundred metres. Rather than just check on the map, I started with finding the street on Google Earth then used ‘Street View.’ And it wasn’t there – which is why I’d had the query.

Fortunately one of the other frames I had of the building showed the right hand corner where there was a street with a name I could read with a magnifying glass from the contact sheet, so I could tell exactly where it had been. Back to street view and I could also clearly identify the very dull red brick block that had replaced a rather interesting piece of 1930’s architecture.

Of course the new block has an extra storey and almost certainly made a decent profit by fitting more units into the same space. And probably the new building will be more energy efficient and with luck the roof won’t leak, often a problem with ‘modern’ buildings that were really designed with warmer drier climates in mind.

If I was in power I would insist that any new building that replaced an old one had to be at least as architecturally distinguished. But our planning system has little control over visual aspects of building, as you can see on almost any walk through London.

Economist Blunders

Thanks to the New York Times Media Decoder blog you can read the story of how The Economist doctored a cover picture to make it show Obama all alone gazing apparently down at his feet on a Louisiana beach with a handy oil rig in the distance.

The problem is that this isn’t at all what the original photograph showed. Firstly Obama was in a group of three people, one of whom was cropped out and the second, closer to him, retouched away. Almost as significantly, the hazard tape in front of the three and the material in front of them on the beach – which in the original appears to hold his attention – has also been cropped away. For copyright reasons you will have to click on the link above to see the two pictures.

I don’t know what caption the photographer put to his original image, but it could have gone something like “Obama looks at pollution evidence on the beach and consults with US coastguard Admiral Thad W. Allen and local parish president Charlotte Randolph.” The picture used in on the cover would suit a quite different caption, suggesting a lonely and desperate man looking down in despair.

The most depressing and rather frightening aspect of the story is that the deputy editor concerned seems to have no idea of the gross distortion that her decision to change this photograph has caused. She writes “the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers.” It seems to show a very low opinion of Economist readers and in fact it was not an “unknown woman” (surely a gratuitously offensive description when we have both her name and photograph), but one with a peculiar relevance to the scene which the image showed, the president of the particular parish in which Obama is standing and on whose beach the oil has landed.

Emma Duncan, deputy editor of The Economist goes on in her e-mail to state “We dont edit photos in order to mislead” when clearly the evidence shows the opposite is true. Either she doesn’t take at all pictures seriously or fails to understand them.

The difference between the two pictures is just like the difference between writing “President Obama was alone on the beach racked by worry about the pollution” and “President Obama visited the beach with the local parish president and a US Coastguard Admiral to see the damage for himself“. I’m sure Duncan would see that those statements were different and that to substitute one for the other was misleading – and it really makes no difference if you do it with pictures rather than words.

The Economist needs to quickly apologise to its readers for misleading them – and also needs to make sure that it leaves the editing of pictures to someone who understand them. They wouldn’t do this kind of thing with words and doing it with images is equally corrosive to their credibility.

Section 44 Victory

Photographers in London yesterday celebrated the final nail in the coffin of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 nailed in the previous week by the European Court of Human Rights. It wasn’t just used against photographers, though I think we suffered disproportionately, and all that now remains is for the government to give it a decent burial.

There is some hope that some of the anti-photography laws such as Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 (and I think its section 56a of the 2000 Act) which makes photography of the police and military that might be of aid to terrorists an offence will go with it.

We held a small victory celebration at New Scotland Yard at noon on Sunday and stood around taking pictures of each other. On David Hoffman‘s sousveillance blog (that’s him above) you can see me gazing up to heaven holding a Mamiya Press, though it wasn’t actually mine but its owner felt my beard went better with it. Although I used to use medium and large format (when I had to) I never got around to buying one of these although I did rather lust after the 6×9 format (you could also fit 6×7 backs) and the rather splendid Mamiya 50mm on the model here, I think roughly equivalent to a 20mm on a 35mm camera. The widest lens I ever afforded for medium format was a superb but not particularly wide 65mm for a Mamiya 7 on the 6×7 format.

Things have changed so far as lenses and focal lengths are concerned. Forty years ago, 28mm was thought of as being exceptionally wide, although there were a few wider lenses they were really specialist items and few photographers used them. Come to that unless you were in a specialist field such as sports the longest telephoto in your kit was probably a 135mm, and my first 200mm was really something special. I didn’t find a use for the 300mm equivalent in my bag at this event, but it was worth fishing out the fisheye!

And the photographer at the centre of all this attention is none other than Jules Mattson who performed so well when wrongly arrested by police at Romford the previous weekend, also in the picture below.

More about the flashmob and more pictures from my set on Demotix – and I’ll put them with a few more on My London Diary shortly.

South Korea Lose

Coming home on the train I met a whole group of friends of my wife and they saw my camera bag and asked me what I had been photographing. “The World Cup” I replied, and it was true, although I hadn’t actually been to South Africa. Had I just flown back into Heathrow I might have come on that same train, as there is a local bus service rather ridiculously called by the rail company a ‘Rail-Air bus link’ which takes you to one of the local stations we had just passed through, though being rather more sensible I would have simply caught a different local bus that would take me (rather slowly) to ten minutes walk from my home.

Actually I’d been in south-west London, at the Fountain, a pub in New Malden in the centre of Britain’s South Korean community, watching the match between South Korea and Uruguay on a series of large screens surrounded by hundreds of excited South Koreans.

They had every reason to be excited because their team – many of whom play for English league sides from Manchester United down – had put up a pretty good show, dominating play for much of the game, and with a little luck the game would have been down to penalties or even gone in their favour.

I’d decided to take the 16-35mm on the D700 along with the 24-70mm for the D300 (36-105 equiv) as my two main lenses, although at least for the first half I found myself shooting mainly with the 55-200mm on the D300 (80-300 equiv) as I stood between the screens along one side of the large pub garden facing the spectators. There were certainly plenty of interesting faces and expressions as the game ebbed and flowed.

After the interval (time for a decent pint as my colleague had rushed to the bar just before the half ended) I decided to make use of the wide angle and mingle with the crowd, which involved quite a lot of crouching down so as not to interfere with their sight lines as they watched. Fortunately the seating was on a slight slope which made things easier.

We’d got permission from the pub manager to photograph, and very few people seemed at all worried by me getting close to take pictures with the wide angle. It’s perhaps a little odd as it is physically rather a long lens – and I sometimes get confused and pick it up when I want my telephoto – which is a little shorter. The long design is to make the rays incident on the sensor closer to perpendicular which causes problems as the sites on the sensor are at the bottom of small pits, leading to cut-off with oblique rays. Sometimes it’s an advantage as people to one side think you are shooting things further away, but it’s big enough to be a little intimidating when pointed straight at you.

Probably it’s easier to photograph Korean supporters than English and I think they are less obsessed with ideas of privacy and more sociable and less suspicious than typical English groups. And although most were enjoying a drink, I think they were considerably more sober than I would expect from English fans. At the end of the match, most left immediately. Obviously they had nothing to stay and celebrate, but few felt a need to drown their sorrows. I’d gone inside the pub to take pictures there a few minutes before the match ended. My colleague had stayed inside, working with flash (and I’m sure his results were fine) but I found I could get usable results in the fairly dim interior at ISO 2000 and above.

More pictures.

Watermarks

I don’t like visible watermarks on photographs. It so often spoils the enjoyment of photographs particularly where they are repeated at intervals across an image or are particularly large. Even where they are added in a reasonably sensitive way – as on the Demotix site which I contribute pictures to – for example this recent story about the Sharia Law related demonstrations in Whitehall or on other commercial sites, they sometimes just interfere too much with appreciating the pictures.

But increasingly I’m finding my work being used without permission or attribution on blogs and web sites, though unfortunately so far seldom on the kind of site it would be profitable to take legal action against. Usually when I point out the problem I get an apology and a timely and appropriate response – removing the image or adding a link if it is the kind of non-profit acceptable use I’m happy to allow.

Most of the people who misuse images seem to do so out of ignorance. They search on Google Images, come up with a suitable picture and assume that because Google can use it so can they (despite what the site actually says.) We do have a lot of education to do about intellectual property rights.

Until fairly recently we didn’t realise the importance of image metadata and many web sites and web tools for preparing images simply stripped out any present to slim down image files as much as possible. In the days of dial-up connections, it paid to keep your sites clean and mean. Now it’s long past time to get rid of such systems – still around on some major sites – and everyone should now realise that removal of such information from files is an offence.

As a photographer I didn’t realise how important metadata was to me until relatively recently – perhaps around five years ago. Naively I assumed it was enough to just put a copyright statement on every web page, and metadata was then pretty obscure technology and time-consuming to add, even if you had software that could handle it.

Things have changed. Lightroom now adds my copyright data automatically from a preset to every digital image I take and import (its also there from the camera, but hard to find software that understands those notes.) My Epson scanner software currently doesn’t have this capability, which I think is a major failing that they need to address.

The threat of orphan works legislation still looms over us here in the UK, despite the valiant efforts of some photographers (see New Thinking on Copyright) and our problem is that it does not only affect photographers. Some of the other groups with an interest in the matter were quite content with the proposals that were defeated, and I’m at all not convinced that we will get a satisfactory end result.

So one of the things that I’ve changed as I moved to Lightroom 3 is to update my output settings for files to include a copyright watermark for all images I will put on the web. I’ve made it small, not very noticeable and in the bottom left corner of every picture. Although it isn’t always very readable, I think it is always fairly definitely present and hard to entirely miss.

It could easily be cropped off, although I think most people would realise they were doing something wrong if they did so. And I hope few of my pictures work quite as well with the bottom missing.

Actually, certainly when looking at a number of amateur sites, there does seem to be some kind of rule which applies, stating that the more prominent the watermarking the less the pictures are worth looking at (or stealing.) So I’m happier than mine are not too intrusive, though it might perhaps be nice to use one that automatically inverts the tone of the surrounding pixels in some way to produce dark print in light areas. I can’t at the moment see how to achieve this in Lightroom – unless someone has produced a plugin for it.