>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

I’ve been thinking for a few days about the complaint made by New York City-based photographer Alex Brown aginst the Glasgow artists, Littlewhitehead (Craig Little and Blake Whitehead) who had based an installation on an image by him of a young boy in a Darth Vader mask sitting in a cheap restuarant.

You can see the photograph and a picture of the installation on PDNPulse, which also gives details of the story, though I think I first saw it somewhere else.

My immediate question are where do we stop? And frankly is it a good idea for photographers to raise such questions?

In this particular case much of the impact of both works relies on a heavily trade-marked and copyrighted plastic head dress warn by the child in the picture. So perhaps Lucasfilm Ltd have a pretty good case for suing the arse off both of these guys? Then for Alex Brown, perhaps we might ask whether he has a property release for the diner, and there looks like another copyright issue involved in that red shirt, which even has some photographic imagery…

Every time we take a picture, we are copying everything within the frame of our camera. And of course using our skills to organise it into some kind of statement – I don’t in any sense want to belittle the activity of photographers in general or Brown in particular by using the word copying. It’s at the basis of our medium.

And of course the installation is not just a simple transformation into 3D of Brown’s 2D work. There are obvious significant differences, but of course his work acted as an inspiration for the sculptors (though I think it an abuse of language to call it plagiarism.) Perhaps too we need to remember the dictum that is still at the base of our copyright laws “there is no copyright in ideas, only in their creative expression” even if some court decisions appear to contradict this.

It’s an area where photographers very much live in glasshouses, and if every artist or photographer who had inspired some of my pictures were to form a line outside my house it would stretch a very long way. And near the head of the queue would be guys like the two Henris (Matisse & Cartier-Bresson) and Walker Evans.

But back to the Darth Vader image; since Littlewhitehead were deliberately making use of a particular image, I would have assumed that they would have acknowledged it when exhibiting their work and in their documentation. And that they would have carried out sufficient research to include the name of the photographer (it wouldn’t have taken much at all.)

But really that’s all. If I put an image of – for example – the Lloyd’s of London building on line, I don’t inform Richard Rogers, ask his permission or expect him to demand payment. Though I rather hope if he happens to see it he will like it. And if someone ever goes to the trouble of creating an installation based on one of my images, I’d feel flattered.

And my thanks to Charles Caleb Colton for the title to this piece!

Wonderland

Yesterday I was out taking pictures and I met a photographer I know, Brian David Stevens, who a couple of weeks ago at the photographers protest in Trafalgar Square had come and asked me if I thought he should buy a Leica M8, knowing that I owned one.

Well of course I told him not to be silly, and if he really wanted a digital Leica to start saving for the M9. So I wasn’t at all surprised to see him with a new M8 around his neck, and he is very pleased with it, and you can see some of his early results from it already in the last four posts on his Drifting Camera blog. Of course it’s no coincidence that the best work with the new camera – from the event we were both at, the London Arbaeen Procession, is in black and white, where the problems of using the M8 as a colour camera don’t arise. You can see a few of my pictures already on Demotix, but I’ll post again about it here later

But he also told me about a couple of books he thought I’d like, and later posted the details to me on Facebook. One of them was Wonderland, and today – another co-incidence – James Pomerantz published a lengthy illustrated Conversation With Jason Eskenazi who is the photographer concerned. On Eskenazi’s own web site the only pictures from the book appear to be thumbnail-size page spreads. You can see a dozen of the images from his book on NPR and also read about it and listen to a short program from the link on that page. The title does come from Lewis Carroll if you were wondering. As well as writing the Alice books and his day job in maths he was also a photographer, some of whose work has aroused controversy.

You can order the book direct from Eskenazi’s site, although orders sent now will not be processed until he comes back from his travels around the beginning of March. It’s a book that I think is worth getting.

Kew Bridge Eco Village 8 Months Old

Kew Bridge Eco Village was occupied on the 6 June 2009, and 8 months later it is still there and has expanded considerably since I visited it in the summer (see here and here.)

The occupation was inspired by other similar protests, particularly the 1996 ‘Pure Genius‘ occupation of the Guinness site next to Wandsworth bridge by The Land is Ours, and aims to demonstrate how people can live in harmony with nature, cultivating food and recycling waste. You can see a few of my pictures from ‘Pure Genius’ on My London Diary and I wrote about it her on >Re:PHOTO last year. One of the earliest protests I posted about on the web was the first anniversary of this occupation which I put online in 1997. Both the page design and scan quality of Pure Genius – One Year On leave much to be desired, and are a reminder of how much the web has developed since then. File sizes had to be small when the fastest modems ran at 56 kbps and many of us were on considerably slower lines.

The Kew Bridge site had been empty since the demolition of the Scottish Widows insurance offices in 1992, and has been owned by property developers St George since 2003. In September 2009 their latest plan for the site including 164 flats, offices and a piazza with a riverside pub was attacked by various local community groups and failed to gain any support from councillors, despite being recommended by the council officers, and a decision on it was deferred, at least until March 2010 and quite probably until June. Given the cool reception the plans received it may be that the developers will need to submit revised plans, which could hold up the development for even longer.

There are now around thirty permanent residents, roughly as many as the site will accommodate, along with occasional visitors. While I was there a small group was clearing a largish area for planting as a vegetable garden along the side of the site next to Kew Bridge, and there were various cold frames and a polythene growing tunnel elsewhere on the site.

Others were painting posters in preparation for the Kew Bridge Eco Village’s ‘Seedy Sunday‘, Brentford’s First Annual Seed Swap next week, on St Valentine’s Day, Sunday 14 Feb, from 11am to 3pm. If you haven’t any flower or vegetable seeds of your own to swap, seeds will be available for a small donation, and there will also be information, gardening related stalls, refreshments and, from 12.30-1.00pm, storytelling for children.

The seed swap is one of a number of similar events taking place at various locations around the UK mainly during February and early March, the largest of which is held in Brighton and Hove. ‘Seedy Sunday’ is also “a campaign to a campaign to protect biodiversity and protest against the increasing control of the seed supply by a handful of large companies.”

There are a few more pictures from my short visit on My London Diary.

Giacomo Brunelli at Photofusion

I was very pleased to meet with Giacomo Brunelli again at the opening of his show ‘The Animals’ at Photofusion in Brixton this evening. The show continues until 26 March 2010, and if you are in London it is one you should not miss.

There are few photographers who have produced such an individual and intense vision as this, one which reflects a peculiar and single-minded devotion it its subject. Frankly I find most animal pictures boring and would run a mile to avoid any ‘Wildlife Photographer of the Year’ exhibition (and frankly who gives a toss whether that wolf was wild tame or even stuffed.) But these small dark and glowing images are something else completely, a different and highly personal way of seeing the world.

I first saw this work when Brunelli brought it to Rhubarb-Rhubarb in Birmingham in 2007 and was knocked out then. These are small but dramatic images, printed by the photographer himself (in his bathroom when his wife lets him take it over for the purpose), with dark edges and rounded corners and just so different from anything else.

I wrote about it on this blog then and included a couple of examples, so I won’t repeat myself. It still has that same freshness and impact. Don’t miss it.

Waitangi Day On Foot

This Saturday is Waitangi Day, and unless you happen to be a Kiwi, you probably will not have the slightest idea what I’m talking about. It’s a national holiday in New Zealand, commemorating the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between Britain colonists and the Maori chiefs, which made New Zealand a part of the British Empire.

Its hard to avoid the suspicion that we were not being entirely above board. The text of the treaty was different in the two languages, and the colonial courts later ruled it had no legal standing. So perhaps the Maoris really have little to celebrate, though there were a few of them taking part when I photographed the event in 2008.

London seems to have almost as many New Zealanders as there are left back home, and traditionally they have celebrated the event here – for reasons that remain obscure to me – with a Circle Line pub crawl. This has been an all day event, starting with beer for breakfast in Paddington and then working station by station around the circle line via Earls Court, getting off at each station and making for nearby pubs before rejoining the Underground.

There are a number of rules that have been set down, the chief among which appears to be that those taking part can only travel on Circle Line trains – and not the District Line which also runs on part of the route. And also drinking rather a lot of beer!

They aim to arrive at Parliament Square for tea-time, 4pm, when they indulge in the Maori haka, a kind of war dance which is normally performed at the start of rugby matches by the All Blacks, on the stroke of Big Ben, before continuing on to the final two stops to the finish at Temple – making 12 stations in all. I made a slightly shorter pilgrimage – from Gloucester Road to Westminster, and not coming from New Zealand didn’t feel bound to have a drink at every stop, or the pictures might have been even less sharp than usual.

This year, whether by accident or by cunning plan, the Circle Line is closed on Saturday for engineering works. This isn’t an unusual event as those who travel in London will know, for the past few years large parts of the Underground network close down at weekends. But this year the celebrants will have to walk rather than take a train.

I photographed the event in 2008 and there was a certain amount of friction between police, underground staff and the Kiwis, with various stations being closed. Boris Johnson then got elected and announced a ban on drinking alcohol on public transport, which perhaps had a certain dampening effect on the celebrations, though I suspect it was widely ignored during this event. The year I took these pictures there was already a ban in place on drinking in Parliament Square but there was no attempt to enforce this on those taking part in the Waitangi Day celebrations.

Although I had great fun taking the pictures I won’t be doing it again this year. It just doesn’t seem the same without the Circle Line.

Magic Realism

I first came across the work of Stephen Ferry (he describes it as ‘Non-Fiction Photography‘) when I was sent a copy of his 1999 book ‘I Am Rich Potosi’ to review (as usual, my review is no longer on line.) I found it to be not just striking images but also a fascinating story of a city which was once the fabulously wealthy centre of the Spanish empire which ran on the vast quantities of silver from this ‘Rich Mountain.’ The pictures present the remarkable story of the present day Quechua miners and their culture. I wrote a lengthy review, looking in detail at some of the images, and was surprised and gratified to get a very appreciative and detailed response from the photographer.

You can also see work from this book as well as his other projects on Ferry’s own web site, which unfortunately is another of those that opens in a new browser window that fills your screen (and on my screen that means is twice the area it needs to be to show the work.)

More recently Ferry went on a trip to the area of Colombia where Gabriel García Márquez grew up and inspired the ‘magic realism’ of novels such as ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude‘ and ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold‘. Márquez has described himself as just a journalist, reporting the events of the world that he knew in what most people think of as fantasies. And in the pictures that Ferry brought back from the fictional ‘Macondo‘ (and the real town of Sucre, Sucre in which he spent three weeks) at times support this thesis, as you can see in the presentation on ‘Lens.’

Don’t miss the other work on Ferry’s site either, particularly The Sinister Hand on the Civil War in Colombia. On a slightly lighter note you can also see pictures of Cholita wrestling featuring Aymara women petticoats in Marisol Khali.

Right Up My Street but

Unfortunately I’m more than unlikely to be in Milwaukee in the next couple of months (I’m not sure they’d let me in to the USA, and with the current fuss over “security” I think all those of us who need to travel with syringes are likely to have a hard time of it.) But for those that are, the show Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in AmericanPhotography, 19401959, which features the work of Lisette Model, Louis Faurer, Ted Croner, Saul Leiter, William Klein, and Robert Frank, continues at the Milwaukee Art Museum until April 25, 2010.

You can read a little more about the show (including that it also has work by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, Helen Levitt and Weegee, among others) and that it claims to be the first major examination of street photography of the 1940s and 50s in nearly 20 years on Art Knowledge News.

While its hard to disagree with the statement that the six featured photographers “embraced photography as an ‘act of living‘”, it is perhaps harder to accept the opposition between this and telling a story, particularly with the work of photographers such as Cartier-Bresson and particularly Smith in mind who did pretty well at both. But like many shows it sounds as if it would be good to view whatever caveats you might have about some of the curatorial texts.

There is a short review of the catalogue on the NY Times and a little more about the show here.

Where Three Dreams Cross

Where Three Dreams Cross, continuing at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (Aldgate East or Aldgate tube) until 11 April 2010 is an important show although it perhaps does not live up to its subtitle, 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It is worth going to see mainly because of the broad cross-section of contemporary work it displays from the sub-continent, but perhaps fails to deal adequately with the earlier history of photography there.

I say perhaps, because I don’t know in detail what history exists, though I feel sure there must be considerably more than this exhibition reveals. One indication that this is so is the very poor showing given to the work of India’s first great indigenous photographer, Lala Deen Dayal (1844-1905), whose work I wrote about at some length a few years ago. There are eight pictures by him on display in the ‘Street‘ section of the show, four of them interiors. None really fits this section of the show, and only one is a good example of his work.

Although my piece on Lala Deen Dayal is no longer on line, you can find more about this remarkable photographer on the Lala Deen Dayal web site. He gained international recognition with his work being exhibited in the photographic shows in London and Chicago as well as India, gaining over 25 gold medals between 1875 and 1905. The problem perhaps for the organisers of this show is that Deen Dayal was very much a photographer of the Raj, and honoured by the Nizam of Hyderabad who appointed him Court Photographer and gave him the title of ‘Raja’. In November 2006, one of his images appeared in an edition of 0.4 million on an Indian 500 Rupee stamp.

Deen Dayal was certainly the leading Indian portrait photographer of the nineteenth century, but unless I missed them (and it is large show in a gallery where the layout is always misleading to simple guys like me) this work was missing from that section of the show.

The work in the first gallery of the show deals with the two themes of ‘The Portrait‘ and ‘The Performance‘ with the historical material in the second containing considerably too much routine cinema publicity work.

Raghu Rai is I think still the only Indian photographer (born in what is now Pakistan in 1942) to have made it to Magnum, and his work certainly stood out in this show. You can also read about him on Global Adjustments.

Most of the nineteenth century work on display in the portrait section appeared to be studio portraits by unknown photographers, and much of it was pretty ordinary stuff. It’s hard too to believe that the first half of the twentieth century has so little to offer from India, and although there was some exciting material from the second half, most of it came from names that will already be well-known to many, though it was still welcome to see it being given greater exposure here.

Perhaps the most intriguing work in this gallery was that of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870-1954.) I actually find his work rather more interesting in itself than in the more widely known works based on them by his daughter Amrita Sher-Gil. Umrao Singh began taking photos in 1889 and continued for over 60 years, during which time he married a Hungarian opera singer in 1912 and was a political exile in Hungary for the next 9 years. The family returned to Europe for five years in 1929 so Amrita and her sister could study at the the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. His best-known work is probably an extensive series of self-portraits. Another member of this artistic dynasty also has work in the show, Vivan Sundaram, the nephew of Amrita Sher-Gil, whose work in ‘The Family‘ section consisted of montages of Umrao Singh’s pictures. I’d rather have seen the original photographs on which these works were based.

The Family gallery also contained perhaps the most traditionally Indian of the works on show, large hand coloured rather symmetric tableaux that could almost have been embroidery. Here photography was being forced into a very non-photographic mould and retaining little of its inherent magic, although the results do have a certain charm.

The final gallery of the show contains work on the two themes ‘The Body Politic’ and ‘The Street‘, and although there was a great deal of fine work it was dominated by the large colour photographs of Raghubir Singh, (1942-99) arguably the greatest Indian photographer and photographer of India of the twentieth century and one of the first to work seriously with colour in the early 1970s.

But there is plenty more fine work, particularly some pictures by Rashid Talukder (you can see more of his fine pictures on the Majority World site.) Talukder’s powerful images of the liberation struggle in Bangladesh were the outstanding work in the Bangladesh 1971 show at Autograph in Shoreditch, and the co-curator of that show, Shahidul Alam, also has an interesting set of pictures (and a letter) ‘A struggle for Democracy 1967-70′ on view here. As well as being a fine photographer, Alam is the founder chair of Majority World, and also founded the Drik picture library, the South Asian Institute of Photography and much more.

Sunil Janah, born in 1918, photographed much of the history of India from around 1940 on, including the Independence movement and partition. You see his work and learn more about him on his Historical Photographs of India (and they truly are) which also contains a virtual version of his 2000 San Francisco show, Inside India, 1940-1975. The site are rather dated and the reproduction of images is often not up to current standards. You can also watch him talking about some of his work on YouTube. It was disappointing not to see more of his work here.

Apart from the work that I’ve mentioned, the strength of this exhibition lies in the survey of contemporary work it shows. It does exhibit a wide range of work, some from well-known artists (Saatchi has bought Pushpamala N‘s work for example) and others from photographers unknown here. I found it hard to find anything much peculiarly Indian in the best of this work, but there is certainly much of interest. But I think the best is probably the least known here. There really is too much worth looking at for me to list. Go and see it and make up your own mind.

Postscripts

The show is free for under 18s & Sundays 11am1pm, otherwise £8.50/£6.50 concessions. It was well attended but not crowded when I visited on a Saturday afternoon.
I’m still often asked if inkjet prints can match the quality of conventional silver or dye coupler prints. Reading the labels here, almost all the modern prints are inkjet of one kind or another, though some make a great effort to hide it, with such descriptions as “archival pigment print.”

Scanning 35mm – Will a Flatbed do?

Recently I’ve gone back to scanning quite a lot of my older negatives and, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, have been using the Epson V750, simply for its speed, rather than the Minolta Dimage Scan MultiPro.

Although the scans have been good enough for my needs at the time, I’ve always felt that for the optimum quality I would need to go to the dedicated film scanner. But I wanted to find out exactly what the difference was and so to decide when to use a film scanner.

I chose this negative simply because it was one I wanted to print, having spent some time searching for it in my archive.

Minolta are no longer with us, and the MultiPro scanner which was the best of its type is no longer made. The scans made with it are of similar quality to the best scanners still available, including some considerably more expensive models.

All images in this post are unretouched scans, though I’ve adjusted contrast a little to give a better match than in the actual scans – though they are still not quite the same.

Minolta Dimage Scan MultiPro

I put the negative into the universal carrier with a specially made full frame 35mm mask that ensures film flatness and set the software to 4x sampling to get every last ounce out of the negative, scanning at 4800dpi.

Then I went and had a cup of tea while the scanner got on with the job – which I think took around 15 minutes – and produced a 58Mb 16 bit grayscale TIFF file.

Viewed at 1:1 on the screen (the full 6829 pixels would actually produce a picture 73 inches wide if my screen was large enough – although nominal screen resolution is 72 dpi, actual screens invariably differ from this) the image is pin sharp and shows a fine granular pattern which I think is the actual film grain. The grain is as sharp at the edges as it is at the corners, and it is a pretty impressive performance.

Unfortunately it also shows something else, with large areas of the image being marred by fine white thread-like lines. I’ve tried to remove these by various Photoshop filters, but doing so also blurs some of the fine detail (and the grain.) Retouching using clone and healing brush tools also loses a little of the detail and is extremely difficult and tedious – and would involve several hours of work.

Minolta Dimage Scan MultiPro and Scanhancer

I’d made this first scan without the http://www.scanhancer.com/ Scanhancer which radically improves its performance in place, so the next job was obviously to try it with this. So it was time for a coffee as I let it do its work.

The Scanhancer is a simple plastic diffuser that sits on top of the negative, and it was developed by Erik de Goederen and others on the MultiPro user group. Minolta (and some other scanner manufacturers) liked the idea so much that they incorporated the idea into later scanners.

Although most diffusing materials make a difference, the choice of the right material is crucial. But as the site says, it allows the Multipro to rival “drum scan quality by mimicking the effect of wet mounting.”

And, somewhat to my surprise it solved the problem – those white threads simply disappeared. It also slightly reduced the rather aggresive grain in the image.

Epson V750

Using the V750 with the film in the standard film holder did the scan at the same nominal resolution, 4800 in around 2 minutes – about a tenth of the time. It isn’t as sharp when viewed 1:1, and the grain is more a texture than the discrete pattern of the MultiPro scan, making some surfaces noticeably smoother. In fact it makes me begin to wonder if the ‘grain’ in the MultiPro scan is actually some kind of scanner artefact. The negative clearly isn’t flat, but the scan doesn’t show any really noticeable loss on this account. Because of the design of the holder it isn’t quite possible to scan quite the entire negative (more of a camera fault in the very slight skew of the frame on the film) but the difference is very small.

But although it clearly is slightly less sharp, there is more or less the same amount of detail on the scan (though differences in contrast and brightness may mean this isn’t clear) and, as with the Scanhancer, those little white threads have simply disappeared. Flatbed scanners have more diffuse light sources than most film scanners.

A little sharpening using a tool such as the FocalBlade plugin can bring the sharpness at the maximum print size (33.3% on Photoshop gives a display on my monitor corresponding to a print at around 280 dpi, and an image size around 24×16 inches) to a similar level as the Multipro scans. At this size the main difference is actually the grain apparent on the Multipro scan, and I can get a better visual match in Photoshop by adding a little noise to the V750 scan should I want to!

It did occur to me to wonder if I could get a sharper scan direct from the V750. I tried the unsharp masking in the scanning software but decided the sharpening in Photoshop was better.

I also tried using the V750 with the same Vuescan Pro software that I use with the MultiPro (one of Vuescan’s big advantages is that it will work with almost any scanner ever made.) The scans produced were pretty similar with those from the Epson software – and using the 4x sampling didn’t seem to make any difference, except to speed. So as the Epson software did the job faster I’ll stick with that in future for this scanner.

The main problem with flatbed scanners such as the V750 is the lack of focussing. All you do is adjust the feet on the negative carrier to move it up and down slightly. I’d previously tested the carrier to arrive at the current setting of the feet, so felt fairly sure altering them wouldn’t help.

Although I couldn’t see much effect on sharpness, the curving of the film in the negative carrier did actually result in a very slight distortion of the image around the edges. It was only noticeable by comparison with the Minolta scans, but I still don’t like it.

I’m told that wet mounting does improve the performance of the scanner significantly, but have yet to try it. But there have been some reports that the Scanhancer can work a little of its magic with flat beds too, and it is a lot easier than wet mounting, so I thought it was worth a try. There was perhaps a very slight improvement in sharpness, but it was hardly significant.

Conclusions

Although there is a small difference in sharpness – particularly of the grain – when viewed at 1:1, both scanners give files entirely usable results at normal print sizes – up to perhaps 24×16 inches.

Some viewers actually prefer the look of the Epson V750 scans because they reduce the effect of film grain, giving a slightly smoother look to some surfaces.

If you are intending to print to very large sizes – perhaps A0 or larger – then the slightly increased sharpness of the MultiPro would almost certainly be preferable. The Scanhancer is essential for removing some imperfections when scanning old negatives like these, and slightly reduces the aggressive grain.

The question that really persuaded me to carry out these tests was whether the V750 scans would pass the quality control tests imposed by Alamy. Frankly I can’t guess at the answer, but as usable files for almost any purpose they should do.

London Photographers Branch

If you work as a photojournalist or editorial photographer in London for at least part of the time, I’d urge you to join the newly formed London Photographers’ Branch of the National Union of Journalists. I was at the inaugural meeting last night at the union headquarters although I kept my head pretty low, there were others who volunteered to join the committee, and I left feeling fairly confident that they had a wide range of experience between them and would do a good job.

Although the start of this group has been attended by a similar “reds under the beds” scare as marred lost year’s NUJ election for the editor of ‘The Journalist’, members at the meeting last night showed little appetite to continue this divisive bickering, though it is a shame that it has meant that a couple of the strongest advocates of a photographers’ branch in London have decided not to join the committee.

NUJ Left is an important and influential force in the union, and although I’ve never felt it necessary to join it, I do occasionally read the web site and have belonged to the Facebook group. It’s an open group that anyone in or employed by the union can join and its aims seem to me to be to promote the kind of active trade unionism that I’ve always felt was necessary for the union to be successful.

So it doesn’t worry me that some of the people on the committee (though not all) are in NUJ Left. I don’t think they have made any secret of it and we talk enough about politics when we meet on the job or in the pub for me to be aware of their views and for me to trust them to work through the branch for photographers and photographers rights.

To run an effective union branch you need activists willing to give up their time to work for the union. If there is some kind of association for activists in the union they are quite likely to belong to it. So what’s the problem? And if anyone does think it is a problem, then surely the best response is to take a part in the running of the branch yourself.

You can find more details about joining the NUJ on their web site. If you work in the UK and make more than 50% of your income from photography/journalism it is in your interest to join the union and an appropriate branch. If you are a photographer working in London and already an NUJ member, I understand that members can belong to both a chapel and a branch, but not to two branches and it tells you here how to transfer to the new branch (of course you will have missed the deadline for the meeting on the 26th – and one day the NUJ will update its web site.) The London Photographers Branch will shortly launch its own web site and branch meetings will be held monthly on the last Tuesday of each month at 6.00pm at Headland House. The next meeting is on Tuesday 23 Feb 2010, which I see is also Shrove Tuesday, so if I can get time off from tossing pancakes I’ll be there.

Photographers are only too aware of the growing problems we face, particularly over matters such as jobs, contracts, copyright and licences and new technology, relations with the police and more. Being a union member won’t solve all your problems but it does provide some very much needed advice and support.