>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

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.

Budget Day Blues

We had an ’emergency’ budget ten days ago in the UK, though like most such things I don’t think it is going to make great changes. Perhaps the biggest thing for us is that from next January most things will cost more as VAT, our sales tax, is going to go up by 2.5%. So a camera or computer system now costing £1000 will cost another £25. Not a great change, and currency fluctuations before then are quite likely to make a greater change in either direction, so it isn’t even necessarily a great incentive to go out and buy now.

There are traditional budget day pictures of politicians that I’m more than happy to leave to the staff and agency photographers who get paid to take such normally terminally boring stuff (which the papers etc keep on using) and just occasionally one of them will take something a little out of the ordinary that gets used. Too often I’ve heard them show their work to other photographers and comment on the one good picture from such an event “of course they didn’t use it.”

But outside of this, it was pretty certain that more interesting things would be happening around Westminster throughout the day, though it was unfortunate I didn’t get there early enough for some of them, having business elsewhere to attend to. Parliament Square itself has been a more interesting place to be in over the last couple of months with the tents of the Democracy Camp set up on May Day adding to the long-term presence of the Parliament Square Peace Campaign that has brightened what was previously surely the most boring public square in London for over 9 years. It’s changed from being a grassed area almost impossible to reach, surrounded by traffic with no crossing places, to a lively area.

Last Tuesday, the High Court granted Mayor of London Boris Johnson an eviction order against the Democracy Camp, and they have been given until 4pm today to leave or face forcible eviction. It is likely that many of them will fail to leave by the deadline, although I am not sure that the clearance will start then.

Although immediate eviction of the separate Parliament Square Peace Campaign is not expected, with the judge stating that Brian Haw had been camping legally in the square since 2001, this is only a temporary reprieve. The BBC reports the judge stating “As the terms of the injunction make it clear that he can continue to use a tent or similar structure provided he has the permission of the mayor, I would expect the mayor not to enforce the injunction against him until his application for permission has been considered.”

But back to Budget Day as well as the two groups living in Parliament Square there were also protests by trade unionists against government cuts, a protest over the housing problem, a funeral procession by a new group calling themselves ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay‘. The police made asses of themselves by searching a man under terrorist legislation for waving a brass and clearly decorative antique pistol, the Democracy Villagers attempted and came close to making a couple of ‘citizen’s arrests‘ on former Labour ministers for their backing of the war in Iraq (which curiously some are now backing away from) and various politicians walked around in grey suits trying to look important and be interviewed by TV crews in the media village. And the final event (at least for me) was an early evening demonstration by CND and Stop the War.

The real problem was knowing where to be at the right time, and I did miss some of the action (including those citizen’s arrests and the main trade union and climate change demonstration.) It was also one of the few hot sunny days and at times I just went and sat down in the shade for a few minutes. Must add a sun hat to my camera bag!

More about what went on, and more pictures as usual in Budget Day in Westminster on My London Diary.

The Romford Incident

The arrest by police in Romford of young photojournalist Jules Mattson was a serious assault by police on the freedom of the press in this country. I suspect they initially picked on him thinking he was an easy target, but his behaviour was an example to us all, keeping calm, continuing to state clearly what he was doing and his right to do so, showing a far greater appreciation of the law than the officers. Throughout the confrontation in which he was eventually arrested by an Inspector Fish, he managed to continue to record the events, both on his i-Phone and also for much of the time continuing to take pictures with his camera which was on a strap around his neck, all despite having one arm twisted behind his back. Of course when police illegally took his camera away from him he protested – and couldn’t take pictures.

You can read his own account, hear the recording and see some of his pictures on his blog. Even though at one point police pushed him down some steps (producing the single expletive in the recording) he continued to argue his case politely. As you can hear, it is an altogether remarkable performance, and one that few, if any, more experienced photographers could have managed under the circumstances.

You can also read about the story elsewhere, for example in the Amateur Photographer, Boing-Boing, The Independent, The Register, Police Specials, Jack of Kent …

You can also see some of his pictures in Police, photographers and the Law, a feature on EPUK in which Civil Rights lawyer Shamik Dutta answers fifteen key questions on police powers and photography in Britain today.

I first met Jules a year ago taking pictures at an event I was photographing, and was particularly impressed that he managed to sell his work to one of the organisations taking part. Since then I’ve met him regularly at events and occasionally seen his pictures on his blog and elsewhere – he has managed a remarkable amount of work considering he has also been working for his GCSEs. As well as putting images into various libraries he has also signed with one of the more active agencies around. As a full-time student not studying journalism he probably does not at the moment qualify to be a member of the NUJ, but certainly will have the support of many in the union, particularly in the London Photographers Branch where many of us know him, and his father is a member.

Legal action against the police is bound to follow, and I understand that he has the legal advice of the very same solicitor whose work last week resulted in Marc Vallee and Jason Parkinson each getting £3,500 compensation for being pushed around and forced to stop working outside the Greek Embassy in London in December 2008.

Sharia Shuffle

Whitehall got rather crowded at times the other Sunday afternoon with four different groups of protesters. The instigation of it all was a protest by ‘One Law For All‘, a group combining various people opposed to the imposition of Sharia Law in the UK. They include members of various secular and human rights organisations and a large group of Iranian human rights activists, trade unionists and socialists of various persuasions. The denial of equality for women in Islamic societies is one of their main complaints and they call for laws to be secular and completely separate from religion, both in Iran and in this country.

One Law For All also believe in freedom of religion, but not in the right of people to impose their particular religious beliefs – or laws that arise from them – on other people. Laws should arise from principles such as equality and human rights and not from religious books and their interpretations. In England we still have some remnants of faith-based laws – such as those against blasphemy, but in general our laws have moved away from this over the years.

It clearly isn’t an Islamophobic movement, but arouses vocal opposition from a small fringe group of fundamentalist Muslims who campaign for the UK to become an Islamic country. This group, formerly Islam4UK but now calling itself Muslims Against the Crusades, is best known for its demonstrations at army home-coming parades, but was there a few yards down the road, using a high-power loudspeaker in an unsuccessful attempt to drown out the speeches at the One Law event. Fortunately police had places the two groups in pens separated by a few yards on Whitehall, and the rally was able to continue with few problems.

Next on the scene were around 20 or 30 members of the English Defence League, opposed to the increasing influence of Muslims on our former way of life in the UK. Some of the slogans they shouted were clearly Islamophobic, and One Law for all people clearly showed their disapproval of this. The police led them to a third pen, then searched most of the men and made sure they left the area.

At this point I said to Chris Knight who was also watching the protest that it was hard to know who would appear next. But we didn’t have too long to wait to find out, as around 40 minutes later a heavily policed group of young Asian men came up Whitehall. They were looking for the EDL, and came from an East End rally against the BNP and EDL, both labelled by them as racist organisations. By then the EDL were long gone, and it wasn’t at all clear what these young men, mainly Muslims, felt about either the Muslim or One Law For All protests.

While the police were holding this last to arrive group on the west side of Whitehall just past Downing St, the One Law For All protest started on its march to another rally at the Iranian embassy in Kensington. They had got several hundred yards ahead of me and I ran after them and took a short cut across Parliament Square (those tents were a bit in the way.) As I ran, my SB800 flash decided to part company with the D700, suggesting that it was not fixed on properly – which may well account for the flash problems I had.

The combination of the Nikon 16-35mm on the D700 and the Nikon 18-105mm on the D300 (27-158mm equivalent) is a good one, the little bit of overlap between the two coming in handy, and covered virtually all my needs for these demonstrations. For some events the 105mm isn’t quite long enough, and it’s good to have the lightweight Sigma 55-200mm DC in my bag, and of course also the 10.5mm fisheye. There aren’t that many situations where the fisheye will work, but when you need it nothing else will do. I didn’t use it here, though I did take a few with the 55-200 where the police were keeping photographers apart from the young Asians.

Umbrella Parade

June 20 was World Refugee Day, and came at the end of a week where there had been various other events connected with refugees, although I’d not managed to photograph them though at the start of the month I had photographed a couple of events in the rather more radical European Week of Action to Stop the Deportation Machine. But the demonstration today was organised by the Refugee Week partnership, which includes groups such as the UNHCR, Red Cross, Oxfam and Amnesty International.

Together they had ordered large numbers of white umbrellas, rather more than the number of people who turned up for the protest, and others had brought their own decorated version, all to give the photographers something a little different to take pictures of. Unfortunately there weren’t many photographers, or at least not many pros, in evidence. Refugees aren’t news for our media unless they can manufacture some scandal or scare story about them flooding into the country in hordes, overburdening our social services, living a life of luxury thanks to our bountiful handouts. Unfortunately the truth – which is so very different – doesn’t get much of a hearing.

I don’t generally pose pictures, though I do often talk to people while I’m taking them and rather too often they pose for me when I do so, and I spend a lot of time asking people just to get on with what they were doing. This young girl really was just standing next to the road sign showing a man putting up an umbrella and I didn’t get her to pose :

Probably the best opportunities for pictures came at the start of the parade and later when it was passing the Houses of Parliament, where Big Ben has the advantage both of representing the government and also meaning London to almost everyone around the world. At the start I was pleased to be able to take a view showing not just the street filled with people and umbrellas, but also to capture the full text around the umbrellas in the three most prominent”ECRE For the Protection of Refugees‘. It was just a little bit of luck, although had I been organising things I might have preferred it reading better left to right across the image. But this way the word ‘refugees’ gets more prominence.

Incidentally, just after I’d taken the picture the woman on the left helpfully stepped out of my way, but by then I’d taken the picture. It was a ‘Hail Mary’ shot, holding the camera with the 16-35mm as high as I could reach, at 16mm, 1/500 f11.

Some of the marchers had transparent umbrellas, so it seemed a good idea to shoot up through them at Big Ben. Again nothing set up, I was walking along beside this woman, very close with the 16-35 at 17mm focal length, focus on the spokes of the umbrella and at f11 most of it is pretty sharp. As I noted in my previous post, I was having problems with flash, and only the top half of this frame received any flash exposure. Fortunately I needed it on the woman’s face and most of it was in that top half. I haven’t quite got the correction this image needs perfect (I did it in a rush to get the story on Demotix on the day) but I think it works well enough.

There are quite a few more examples of umbrella pictures in the set on My London Diary (which also tells you more about the event), including some taken with the Nikon fisheye. Here’s just one more I liked with the 16-35mm, at 16mm:

Rathayatra

The annual chariot festival where the Hare Krishna pull their three giant chariots along Piccadilly from Hyde Park and on to Trafalgar Square first came to London in the 1980s, and I’ve photographed it several times. But it has now settled into a rather similar pattern each year and I found it hard to really find anything new this year. This year’s pictures are here.

Last year was the 25th procession here, and perhaps attracted a few more people, as the numbers seemed a little smaller this year than in previous years. The three large chariots, each with a Hindu god or goddess, were much as before, so while I took some pictures of them I tried to concentrate more on the smaller parts of the event and on the people.

As usual when the sun came out from behind the clouds I used some fill flash, and had some problems with it. The D7oo on the right settings usually works with fill at any shutter speed, though the manual is more than normally opaque about this. However with the SB800 which I was using, with custom setting e1 at 1/320s (Auto FP) when a faster shutter speed is selected in exposure mode P or A “auto FP high speed sync will be activated if the actual shutter speed is higher than 1/320“. Usually this just works, but today it had given up, and only parts of the frame got the flash exposure. Some of them can be be salvaged in processing with Lightroom’s graduated filter or local adjustment brush, but its a pain to have to do it. I’ll post an example from later in the day in another post.

I probably should have noticed the uneven exposure on the camera screen while taking the pictures, but most of the time the lighting was too bright to see them properly, and I just took a quick glance at the histogram to see if everything was ok – and of course it was.

When I did see the problem on the computer screen later, I wasn’t sure if it was a camera fault or a flash fault and though I knew I needed to sort it out, there were other more urgent things to do. When I finally got round to doing some tests I started with the same camera, flash and lens and found everything was working perfectly!

Actually whenever I have flash problems and run tests I get the same results – its only in the field that the system sometimes misbehaves. And I think the problem is mainly the photographer, or occasionally a dirty contact. When you fit the flash working in a hurry it is too easy not to slide it fully into place, and although there is a lock, it perhaps isn’t quite as positive as it might be and I do sometimes fail to push it right across. Then looking carefully at the hot shoe it isn’t as clean as it might be, though perhaps putting the flash on again for the test may have cleaned the contacts enough to make a difference.

But it appears to be good news, and I can avoid another expensive repair (the only kind there is for photo gear.) I’ve taken my glass fibre contact cleaning brush to both flash and hot-shoe to be sure there isn’t a dirt problem and added checking these to the list of occasional tasks to do to keep the gear working, and made a mental note to push the flash on firmly and check I’ve engaged the lock fully in future.

Peace Pagoda Turns 25

One of the more unusual structures in London, the Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park celebrated 25 years of existence earlier this month and I was there to take part in and photograph the celebrations. Over the years I’ve met monks and nuns from the nearby temple at many peace protests both in London and Aldermaston and marching between the two places.

Photographically it was an opportunity to compare the results with my fisheye and a rectilinear wideangle:

And I think you can see that the fisheye that produced the upper image wins hands down in this case.

In the past I’ve often partially corrected my fisheye images using the Fisheye Hemi plugin but in this case this loses the framing by the trees in the corner, and the whole kind of circularity that organises the whole row of figures (monks and nuns from another temple) around the central altar and above that the oval gilded figure of the Buddha. The plugin does produce a better picture than the rectilinear wide angle below but in this case the uncorrected image is stronger.

But the fisheye image at the top above is actually partly corrected. It is one of the rather rare lenses that Lightroom 3 has a lens profile file for. The default correction at the 100% mark is to lose the fisheye perspective completely and correct a relatively small part of the image to rectilinear. It would mean there was little point in using the fisheye, as its very wide angle of view is lost, along with its distinctive rendering. But a relatively small amount of correction moderates the obviously fisheye effect and helps this image.

I think too, that cutting it down a little somehow better fits the image I had in my mind’s eye as I took the picture, despite what actually shows in the viewfinder. The two are often different.

Astute viewers will also note that my images are now watermarked, and also that the jpeg is higher quality than many that I’ve posted. More about both of these shortly.

But perhaps my favourite image is this one, taken with a “standard” lens, or rather a zoom which just happened to be set at a 35mm equivalent focal length of 52mm. It was just luck that I arrived ten minutes before the time I’d been given for the start of the event, as the monks were forming up near their temple for the procession to the pagoda and was able to photograph a procession which I hadn’t been told was going to take place. I’m rather glad I didn’t miss it – and if possible it’s always a good idea to get to events early.

More pictures from the event – where there was a freezing wind along the Thames and it felt more like January than June – at Peace Pagoda Celebrates 25 Years.