>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

I Didn’t Get Up Early on Tuesday

I couldn’t be bothered to get up early on Tuesday morning, although I expected something interesting would happen when police came to search the ‘Democracy Camp’ in Parliament Square before the State Opening of Parliament.

The flashpoint came when the police moved on from there to also search the tents of the two long-term full-time residents of the square, Brian Haw and Barbara Tucker. Brian has been there – except for a night or two locked up in the nearest police station- since early June 2001, and has witnessed a few state openings in that time, so there seemed little reason for police to want to search their tents too. You can see the altercation with the police on a You Tube video taken by one of the campers, and pictures of him being handled rather roughly by police were in the evening paper.

I missed being there because I like to sleep at home which is around 20 miles away and don’t like to pay the high fares for travel in the early hours unless I’m actually being paid to be there.

I called in later in the day to find out what had happened, and to talk to people who had seen the events. So I was able to put a story on Demotix, but it rather lacked the drama it would have had where I there at the right time. You don’t get stories by lying in bed.

(There was actually another reason that I’ll mention in a later post why I needed to be at home that morning, but I probably would not have been there anyway.)

Earlier in the month I’d written another story about what was happening in the square which did attract quite a lot of interest – also on Demotix, as well as My London Diary (with more pictures) and Indymedia.

Distortion Correction

An interesting article on DPReview, A Distorted View, looks at the use by camera manufacturers of in-camera correction of lens distortion. It concentrates on geometric distortion, but also mentions lateral chromatic aberration.

Lens designers can make simpler, smaller and lighter lenses by failing to correct some of these distortions, which can then be removed by software. Overall this can result in higher image quality. Many camera manufacturers have taken this route and the examples on the site I think demonstrate how effective it is.

Generally these corrections are applied in-camera to jpegs, but RAW files are left RAW. Where manufacturers supply their own RAW conversion software, this will then apply similar corrections when processing the RAW files.

There are two problems here. Firstly few of us use the specific software for our cameras, because good though it may be, it lacks the workflow advantages of Lightroom (or Aperture) so it is essential that the information about correcting the lenses is available for use by other programs. Some manufacturers currently are unwilling to share the necessary parameters, although these can fairly easily be found from a series of test exposures of a suitable subject.

Of course not all lenses we use with cameras that allow interchangeable lenses are made by the camera manufacturer. One statement that made me laugh was that about Sigma lenses where the feature states “no Sigma lenses currently require software correction.” I currently own four Sigma lenses, and although for some purposes the images are fine without correction, every one of them requires software correction of both distortion and chromatic aberration for critical uses. I would not dream for example of sending out a high-res image of an architectural subject without doing so.

One of Lightroom‘s major missing features is its lack of ability to correct distortion. I export images to Photoshop where I can use plugins including the excellent PTLens (which can also be used as an external editor for Lightroom) Panorama Tools and other software.

I’d like to see this built in to Lightroom, along with an automatic removal of chromatic aberration – the manual version works, but is time-consuming.

The 10.5mm Nikkor DC fisheye provides an extreme example of both chromatic aberration and also what can be achieved by way of software distortion correction, although of course the distortion here is an intentional feature.

Correction to rectilinear using Panorama Tools
© 2005 Peter Marshall.
Correction using the Fish-eye Hemi plugin

Where Was I on May 8?

Writing about ‘The New Thinking’ on copyright and the National Photography Symposium reminds me that I’ve not mentioned at all here what I was doing that weekend. Apart of course from drowning my sorrows after the election results.

Saturday 8 of May I didn’t get drowned but I did get rather damp, as it poured down on several occasions. I’d hoped to be on Hayes Common, and so had around a thousand other people, for the Merrie England and London May Queen Festival, but it was far too wet for that. The event went ahead, but in a rather smaller format with many fewer people present in the Village Hall.

I’ve been photographing various May Queen events in London, including this, since 2005, and have more than enough material for a book or an exhibition about them. One show already promised was then cancelled apparently on cost grounds, perhaps an early victim of the recession, but I’m hopeful of getting another. And its definitely one of the things on my short list for a Blurb publication if I can’t find another publisher (although that short list is getting rather long.)

I’d actually not been thinking of going to Hayes this year, as I should have been at a conference (not the NPS but another one) but an e-mail inviting me made me change my mind. We missed you last year it said, and so I changed my mind and decided to go.

Despite my getting soaked on the way there, it turned out to me a good decision, as being packed into a small hall gave the event a different atmosphere and of course a different look. It’s nicer when the sun is out and everyone is having fun and dancing around – and of course much nicer for the girls and families involved – but the wet weather did give me something new. Not the best pictures I’ve taken of these events, but something that widens the work.

Photographing events like this does very much involve getting to know people and establishing trust. Working in the closer atmosphere (in every sense) did I think help me to talk to people and get to know them a little better. There are perhaps a few more things I may want to do in this project and this will make them easier.

I wasn’t sure whether to use flash or rely on a highish ISO inside the hall. The lighting was about as mixed as you could get – overcast grey sky through largish windows and fluorescents and some stage lighting. In parts of the hall it was bright enough to work at ISO 1600 but there were plenty of darker corners.

I took a few without flash, but the colour on the back of the camera didn’t look too encouraging and I decided to switch the flash on. That way I could reduce the ISO a bit, with the flash as the main light source, but still picking up enough ambient to give reasonably even overall lighting. Most of the pictures were taken on the Nikon 16-35mm at 1/30 f6.3. I would have been better off at 1/60 as I lost quite a few images through both camera shake and, more often, subject movement, and could well have increased the ISO as I was working with the D700. Though there are a few where I’ve actually panned a little with the moving subject thanks to the slow shutter speed that I quite like.

If I’d known before I left that I would be working inside, I would also have taken the Sigma 24-70 f2.8, which I’d got back a few days earlier (a new lens as replacement for one that Sigma had been unable to fix) but I’d left it at home. I’d also have brought a second SB800 flash which I could have used on the D300 body; I had the Nikon 18-200mm on that but didn’t take many pictures with it.

The hall was too high for bounce, so I was using direct flash for all the pictures. So long as there is plenty of ambient fill I usually find the results quite acceptable. In the hot shoe, the SB800 puts the flash about six inches above the centre of the lens. Usually I use the built-in diffuser screen with wide-angles to get more even light distribution, though sometimes I like the little bit of vignetting you can get without it.

One little thing I find helpful when there is someone very close to the camera on one side of the image is to twist the flash head away from them. Otherwise it can be hard to burn them down to an acceptable level in processing.

And processing is something that can greatly improve flash images, often allowing you to make the lighting rather more event when parts of the subject are at different distances from the camera. People often don’t realise that I’ve used flash, and photographers sometimes ask why the lighting in my pictures is usually more even than theirs. I sometimes tell them that I prayed to the great god Ansel and was granted a special derogation from the inverse square law.

Of course there are many more pictures on My London Diary. It’s one of those events where it’s deliberately a very loose edit, because during the event I handed my card to many of the mothers and the people taking part all want to see pictures of themselves and their friends.

New Thinking on Copyright

It was largely the work of Stop43.org that succeeded in getting the disastrous proposals on orphan works (Clause 43) removed from the Digital Economy Act that was rushed through in the closing days of the Labour government.

The problem that so many of us found when we wrote to MPs and got replies from ministers and shadow ministers was that they really had no real idea of how the markets worked in photography and of the importance of intellectual property rights in general. MPs and peers were being made to vote on things they didn’t understand, written by civil servants (with more than a little help from the major industry players who stood to gain financially at the expense of the creators.) The people at ‘Stop43’ write:

We promised the new Government that we, creators, would produce New Thinking to replace the inequitable and unworkable ideas behind Clause 43

and they have, and it is most impressive. In outline they state:

We propose to allow cultural use of so-called orphan works and for this cultural use to switch all other uses and users to known works, to stimulate cultural and economic activity to the benefit of everyone.

To enable this we propose some changes to current copyright law and the establishment of a National Cultural Archive, which must be free to use.

You can download the detailed document ‘The New Thinking‘ or read the details on their web site. It really does take a new look at the whole area and make what appear to be well thought out and practical proposals. And very much at its basis is the “granting of Inalienable Moral Rights, copyright and fair contract law.”As well as covering the usage of so-called “orphans” it also includes ways in which works might be re-united with their creators. Moral rights of course include that of attribution, which if implemented would reduce if not eliminate the loss of the connection.

The proposal was first presented at the recent UK National Photography Symposium in Derby, where the audience expressed almost universal support, although unfortunately I was unable to attend.

It’s something I think all photographers should read, and not just in the UK. Almost everyone has long recognised that copyright needs to be international – even if some major countries have had some rather peculiar if not perverse implementations of the international agreements.

I don’t for a moment think that we will get legislation from the current UK government that does everything in the proposal – and I’m sure there will be very strong opposition from several powerful lobbies. But I think this is an important document in the debate, and one that I hope will change its course.

Time For Fair Votes?

The UK Elections came and we voted – or at least many of us did, though one of the big stories was that many people in many places came to vote an hour or more before the polling stations closed but were unable to get in to do so. Because the local recording officers had failed to make sufficient provision they were denied their right to vote, and almost certainly at least one Labour MP lost his seat as a result. Unfortunately, perhaps because things seldom go wrong, we have a system where it is prohibitively expensive to challenge the results.

And of course, while usually I can turn on the radio the following morning and hear who will form the new government, this year it was different, with days of discussion and horse-trading. As virtually the only justification for our present system is that it delivers clear results, it perhaps is not surprising that it has now very much been called into question, and there are probably relatively few people who are not sitting MPs who support it.

What has been more surprising are the demonstrations that have taken place in favour of electoral reform, and although I missed the first on the Saturday following election day as I had a prior engagement, I’ve covered a couple of these in Westminster since, and more are happening in cities around the country this weekend.

The coalition has promised some kind of referendum on the matter, although it seems likely it will be on a very half-hearted change – and that even then many of the majority party will campaign for a vote against it.

When the furore broke over MPs expenses, I was extremely dismissive. Frankly it seemed to me a lot of fuss over very little, and at least in some respects the fact that the body now set up to supervise the system will cost a great deal more than the relatively minor sums involved in the disputed claims in some respects confirms my attitude. But it wasn’t about money at all but about trust, and it was an issue that raised great forest fires among the public. I wonder if voting reform is another issue whose time has come and will resonate in a similar manner, so that eventually even the most dogged of politicians will have to bow.

On the Monday evening following the elections, the Lib Dems were holding a meeting to discuss the coalition offers from both Conservative and Labour parties (though Labour didn’t really have anything to offer and certainly weren’t prepared to offer it, many of them relishing the idea of the Tories having to struggle with their legacy for the next session.) There was a noisy but peaceful protest outside the building where they were meeting and I went along to photograph it.

Police had ensured that the protesters left a clear path through the crowd to the door of the building, and the media – including me – lined up for some time along its edge to photograph the people coming to the meeting. But for some reason most of them decided not to face the crowd and walk in this way, but to barge their way rudely through the protesters. The media were disappointed and the Lib Dems rather went down in my opinion.

Among those protesting were quite a few members of the Lib Dems, some waving party membership cards, which was one obvious thing to photograph. Slightly more dramatically, one had a party rosette and had presumably stood as a candidate for the party and was holding that out. The ‘Take Back Parliament’ movement has also adopted the colour purple, a reference to a hundred years ago when the suffragettes wore purple sashes in their fight for votes for women, and supporters were urged to wear purple clothing, purple armbands and to have purple painted fingers; some too had purple face paint and there was a purple cow too at the protest.

Another small link with the suffragettes was Tamsin Omond, one of the Climate Rush protesters who model their actions on those women who a hundred years earlier called for ‘Deeds Not Words’, and was more recently involved as an independent candidate for Parliament, attracting some support but unfortunately few votes. Given our system it is very hard for parties outside the major two and a half to persuade anyone there is any point in voting for them, even if voters support their ideas. I’ve photographed her at quite a few of the protests that she had been involved in, and it seemed a good idea to take a picture of her with a purple finger.

I’m not a great lover of celebrities, but Billy Bragg is someone who I admire, and who got himself stuck into this election, working against the BNP, and I was happy to take his picture too, speaking at this event. I’m not sure about the blur – the light was fading a bit by the time he spoke and perhaps I should have increased the ISO to get a higher shutter speed.

Of course there were the usual staples of demonstrations, placards and banners and people, and you can see these and other pictures from the event in Take Back Parliament – Fair Votes on My London Diary.

Saturday saw another London demonstration organised by the same group, with perhaps a thousand people on Old Palace Yard opposite the Houses of Parliament. This was a more organised event with a number of speakers and a little bit of theatre – including two guys in morph suits with a bar chart and a bright red dinosaur, as well as an MEP, a former Labour MP and radical comedian Mark Thomas. Both these events were pretty packed with photographers, and one of my favourite images from the day showed one of these:

I particularly like the de-luxe fur-covered camera bag held by her assistant standing behind her.

Later there was a chance for yet a few more pictures of Big Ben (just in case anyone had missed that this was London.)

But perhaps the image I was happiest with, although I’m not quite sure why, was one of the petition that the protest was delivering to Downing St.

You can see more pictures from the day in Purple Protest Demands Fair Votes.

The Color Photographs of Irwin Klein

I’ve seen several references here and there to the work of Irwin Klein (1933-1974), whose life ended tragically with a fall from his Brooklyn window. After his death, all of his negatives, cameras and other gear, and most of his prints were lost or stolen. All that remains are a small number of vintage black and white prints along with a few colour slides.

While most people seem to be interested in the black and white prints (and there are some pictures I really like, although perhaps others that don’t quite come off) it is his colour work that I find more interesting. Perhaps because in 1972-4 when he was taking it there was much less colour work visible around and to some extent he had to find his own way, while his black and white follows more or less similar lines to a number of other fine photographers working around the same time.

There are two shows of his work at the Domeischel Gallery web site and he has an exhibition at the Madison Avenue, NY, gallery which closes at the end of this month. His black and white work, along with much of the other photography I found on the gallery site, is a demonstration of the immense influence of one of the great photographic ferments of the mid-twentieth century based around the New York Photo League. Although this organisation, based as it was around a humanistic and basically left-leaning progressive view of society was brought to a disastrous end by the rise of the cold war and McCarthyism, it’s influence has continued to power much of photography since.

There was just so much happening in photography in New York at that time, so many photographers, and so many good photographers among them. Klein was one of them, and although it is good to see his black and white work, some of which can stand comparison with the best, it perhaps adds just a little to a vast body of great work by so many. When I first looked at the site around the start of the show in March I found one or two outstanding and familiar pictures – such as his Minnesota fire image which fronts his black and white work, but didn’t feel overall that there was anything new to mention. I stopped looking before I came to his colour.

Irwin Klein’s colour pictures all date from the last two years of his life, 1972-4, and it was a time when photographers were just beginning to discover (or re-discover) colour as a vehicle for their personal work. If you wanted to be taken seriously as a photographer at that time it was black and white that mattered (a prejudice that still occasionally surfaces even in this digital age.) There wasn’t the same vast and accessible tradition as with black and white and photographers who took colour (and many of us did) were very much finding our own ways of trying to avoid the clichés of commercial and advertising photography.

There is certainly nothing of the chocolate box about Klein’s colour, which in some images clearly draws on his black and white work, but I think sometimes has a greater intimacy and is more personal. For me there is a feeling that these were pictures that he was making for himself rather than – as sometimes with the black and white – an audience with particular preconceived ideas. It is of course sad that what we see here is probably all or most that remains of his work, and I for one would have loved there to be more than these couple of dozen images.

How Many Ways

How many ways can you shoot basically the same thing is the kind of question that photographers often have to get to work on. And a couple of weeks ago it was the question I was asking myself as I walked down the road with a 12 foot high puppet of a man in a suit with a rocket in his mouth and a dozen judges.

The occasion was a protest by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade against arms manufacturer BAE Systems, who were having there AGM at the QE2 conference centre in Westminster, and the puppet represented the BAE Chairman. As well as this activity outside the AGM, at least one CAAT activist was inside the meeting as a shareholder, asking questions about the activities of the company, which apparently didn’t get much of an answer from the chairman.

In a way you could almost sympathise with Mr Dick Olver; after all you can’t really say “my company is happy to take money from corrupt and tyrannical regimes around the world and is pleased that the UK government despite pretending to have an ethical policy is happy to assist us bringing in foreign money from almost anywhere for almost anything” which would probably be rather closer to the truth than what he felt he had to say.

But my job was simply to produce some photographs of the event outside the meeting where Dick Olver’s effigy was being paraded along the street before, in true Alice in Wonderland fashion being found guilty and then having a trial.

So I tried various angles, different focal length, close up and long shots, reflections and more. It was quite an unusual event in that there was plenty of time to play and very few photographers to get in my way (or me to get in theirs.)

And so on. You can see rather more variations on My London Diary, using focal lengths from a 10.5mmfisheye to 300mm telephoto.

Obviously some work better than others. One or two perhaps don’t really work at all, but most of them do the job. So far I’ve not found an editor who thinks this is a story worth paying for and one of the benefits of putting work on sites like Demotix (or Indymedia) is that I get to choose which pictures get used (it just doesn’t pay the bills and you can see my choices there.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

I read on Facebook today about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, named after Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University, although the idea behind it is rather older. The link pointed to a radio programme, the Science Show on ABC Radio National, where on 8 May, presenter Robyn Williams talked to Daniel Keogh about it, though I read the transcript there rather than listen to the programme. For most things when you want to think about the details its a better way to consume radio, as I’m finding with the current BBC Radio 4 series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects‘, where both the transcript and there, even more importantly the images of the objects make it almost essential to follow the series on-line. The broadcasts themselves make good listening, more as entertainment, with the text and images being so much more informative.

The D-K effect is all about how people who know nothing about a subject are the most confident of their ability, or, as Keogh quotes Darwin ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge’ and it’s something we are probably all pretty familiar with.

And Keogh rubs it in for photographers “If you’ve ever fancied yourself as a photographer, you might know just how this feels. It only takes a weekend workshop for you to suddenly realise that the poorly lit snaps of your cat in the backyard aren’t quite the masterpieces you’d once imagined.”

I never felt I was a great cat photographer, but certainly recognise something it what he says, though I was fortunate at the first workshop I attended not only to have a few pictures among the dross that were more promising, but also to have a photographer running the workshop who recognised this and set me off in a more productive direction.

But it’s sometimes hard to convince people that they need to work at it, thanks to the D-K Effect, as I often found with students. Those who did best were those who were prepared to listen and learn, and usually those who showed rather less confidence in their own abilities.

Except, as he points out, life often rewards the self-confident, even if this self-confidence has no basis in ability. Some of the ignorant incompetents manage to convince enough other people through their charm and charisma that they rise to the top and become in charge of things that they really know nothing about. They become politicians or managers because of their ‘overconfident incompetence‘. The arts in general and photography in particular have more than their share of such people ‘fully controlled by the Dunning-Kruger effect‘ and it perhaps explains many things that are otherwise incomprehensible.

It is partly this kind of effect that has made it important to me throughout my time as a photographer to belong to formal or informal groups of photographers who have been able and willing to say what they thought about each others work. At times I’ve had things pulled to pieces (and performed a similar service for others) but it really helps. Of course sometimes I’ve gone away thinking that the others were wrong, or just didn’t understand what I was trying to do, but it’s always something that makes me think again, even if I sometimes end up with the same conclusion.

The show I’m part of that’s opening tonight in Croydon is not the greatest show the world has ever seen, but is something that comes in part out of that kind of critical process, by eight photographers who regularly meet and show each other their work in progress. I like some of the work more than other pictures, but I think most of it is interesting to look at.

Three Years – 1000 Posts – 3000 a Day

Several small milestones for the site.

The first book completely my own work (very much so – photography, text and book design) in the previous post,
A Book At Last: 1989 and this post should be the 1000th on this blog.

I’d like to thank those who’ve visited the site since it started in May 2007 – and since then there have been more than 1.4 million page views.

So far this month, three years since I started, there are just over 3000 visitors on the average day. Thanks to you all.

Of course I have other sites too, including My London Diary, Paris Pictures and the Lea Valley, and currently the total average for all the sites is just a little under 8,500 hits a day – so >Re:PHOTO makes up around just over a third of that total.

A Book At Last: 1989

Time after time over the past years I’ve been asked “Do you have a book of your pictures” and until now, the answer has always had to be negative, because the only books I’ve produced have been single copy ‘artists books’. One or two were made as ‘book dummies’ to try and sell the idea to a publisher, but although I might have had the occasional appreciative grunt (and even an offer to publish if I could come up with a large grant) I’ve never found anyone who felt it could be worthwhile as a commercial proposition.

Of course, as we all know, publishing on demand has changed that, and anyone can produce a book and make it available without a great initial outlay. In the past few years I’ve seen a number of such volumes produced by photographer friends, but certainly with black and white, always found the quality a little (sometimes more than a little) disappointing. Apart from a few specialised and very high price services the technology didn’t seem quite there.

But a few months ago I saw a book that changed my thinking about this, and decided me it was time to try it for myself. A few days ago I finally received a hardback and a softcover copy of my work ‘1989’, twenty photographs taken in north-east London in (would you believe) 1989 and first put together for the web with my own text in 2005-6. I’ve now had time to revise it and it is now on-line and on sale at Blurb.

You can actually still see the whole project on the web, and the book follows this fairly closely with a few minor revisions to the text I made (mainly typos) for its recent showing at the London International Film Festival.

I’m pretty pleased with the printing which is on Blurb’s recently introduced ‘premium’ lustre paper. I’d say print quality is adequate rather than excellent, and certainly better than many published books, but not of course at the standard of better (and often highly subsidised) publications using duotone, tritone or quadtone printing.

The hardback is a nicer volume, although the print quality in both is very similar as they both use the same premium paper and lustre finish. It also comes with a dust-cover which includes a picture of me, which may put some off! You do really need to have a different cover design for the two versions, and so far as I can see, with Blurb you can only get that by publishing hardback and softcover as two different books.

There are a few minor things where I wasn’t quite able to get Blurb’s Booksmart software to do exactly what I wanted. It does make the design easy – and allows you to produce your own customised page designs, as I did, but there are a few inflexible elements. You can submit your books as PDFs instead, but the software I have for this doesn’t give the required file type.

I’m still thinking about setting up my own “press”, buying a block of ISBNs and bringing out this volume under that imprint, together with around ten other projects I have more or less ready, along with others I’m working on. And a couple of friends are also interested in becoming a part of this publishing process.

For that it might be worth buying a copy of Adobe Indesign, for which Blurb supply templates, but I’m not yet convinced that Blurb is the right answer for this yet, partly because it does add significantly to the cost of Blurb books to remove their logo and message and replace it with your own, but also because there is an unresolved problem which does not allow the normal placement of ISBN bar codes.

Even with the Blurb logo, the books are not cheap. This a 7 inch square publication with 20 pictures and short texts (around 50 pages in all) costs £10.95 for the softcover and £18.95 for the hardback and so is a little expensive and I don’t expect huge sales. (Prices have gone up since I wrote this – but the book is now available more cheaply as a PDF as well as a softback.)

As well as seeing the entire set of images on the web, you can also look through a part of the published book on the Blurb web site. And of course order it from there.