>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Life’s Too Short

The second demonstration I photographed last Saturday was much smaller than the 1500 or so photographers in Trafalgar Square, and I could actually count the number taking part. So when I wrote in my account that “more than 150 people” were in the march from St Pancras to Piccadilly Circus there isn’t much room for argument. Of course, it’s still deliberately a little vague, both because the actual number isn’t of any interest and that it is pretty well impossible to get an exact count.

In some ways it’s much easier to cover small events – and not a great deal is likely to happen without you noticing it, whereas your view of a large event can be quite different to that of someone working on the far side away from you.

NoBorders, whose London group organised the demonstration, would like people to be allowed to move freely around the world without the kind of border controls that most states now impose. Seeing the problems that the attempts by the UK to restrict migration to this country have caused, with thousands locked up inside our immigration prisons and so many cases of injustice and inhumanity I feel they have a very strong case; whatever problems free movement might cause I think they would be less.

At the very least we should set up a humane system that recognises our historic liabilities and our obligations under international agreements and human rights declarations, and gives those seeking asylum proper access to our legal system with similar rights to our citizens. What we have are prisons run for private profit, hired thugs and fast-track procedures that deny justice. And an immigration minister who thinks it appropriate to say “The UK Border Agency vigorously opposes any appeal against deportation” rather than feeling it is the duty of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal to come to a decision on the facts of the case.

I was without the Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 EX DG MACRO which has become my favourite lens, as I finally had to send it back to Sigma for repair. Something came a little loose inside a few months ago and it has clearly been getting worse. So I was working with my old Sigma 12-24mm EX on the D700 full frame and a Nikon 18-200mm on the DX D300 (equivalent to 27-300mm.)

The 12-24 is a great lens (and the current version is better still), but considerably more useful on the DX format, where it becomes an ’18-36 equivalent’. On full frame it not surprisingly gives some considerable vignetting at the wide end, and 12mm is really just too wide for any rectilinear lens. There is an unavoidable wide-angle distortion – a matter of geometry rather than lens design. On DX format it gives the same view as an 18mm on full frame which is much more usable, and also has better sharpness and less chromatic aberration because it avoids the extreme corners of the lens. At ’18-36′ it covers the whole of the usable rectilinear wide-angle range. Should you need a wider view (and I sometimes do) the answer is a fisheye – such as the 10.5mm Nikon.

On the FX camera, the 12-24 also abandons you at the longer end, bang in the middle of the useful wide-angle range at 24mm. This is a pain if you only have a single camera, but less so if you can simply pick up your second body. The 18-200 on the DX300 starts at a 27mm equivalent, giving you an almost seamless range of focal lengths.

This is a sort of reversal of my normal practice, where I rely on the DX300 for the wider stuff (with both the 10.5 fisheye and either the Sigma 12-24 or the smaller DX format only 10-20mm.) Then the DX700 with the 24-70mm covers the whole of the middle range (and often it is everything I need), switching back to a cheap and light Sigma 55-200 DX lens on the D300 for any long stuff.

If Sigma made a decent full frame 50-200mm I would probably buy one; the old DX version more or less covers full frame – at least after I took a hacksaw to the lenshood – as I mentioned in an earlier post.

The closest match they have in is 70-300mm, with 3 versions available. The extra focal length does make them a little heavier and bulkier than a 50-200 would be. Having the 70-300mm f/4-5.6 DG MACRO, 70-300mm f/4-5.6 APO DG MACRO and the 70-300mm f/4-5.6 DG OS does seem a little overkill. The OS is an optically stabilised lens, but the APO offers better quality if you can hold it still, while the first mentioned is cheaper.

None of these three are in their professional EX range with “superior build and optical quality”, which does offer the large and heavy 70-200mm f/2.8 EX DG MACRO HSM II, doubtless an excellent lens but too large and heavy for me.

Change We See?

The Labour Party has a Flickr pool entitled Change we see, which asks people to share photographs which show the government’s achievements since they came to power.

“Upload a photo of a local hospital we’ve rebuilt, a local Sure Start centre we’ve opened or a local school we’ve invested in and, together, we can show everyone the importance of the Change We See.”

Kate Day in The Daily Telegraph rather gleefully points out that people have been uploading images that were not quite what the party had hoped for, and in particular photographers have been uploading stop and search forms provided for them by the police when they tried to photograph buildings.

When I visited the site a few minutes ago it looked like this:

Flickr

And the third item in the lower row – the long pink form – is Grant Smith‘s Stop and Search form from the City of London Police.

The first item in the top row is a picture of heavily contaminated land on which the government has overruled a local council and given permission for new homes to be built. To the right of Grant’s stop and search is Mark Thomas’s ‘Stop and Search Card‘ and to the right of that, after the couple of ‘Rage Against New Labour‘ posters under ‘Waitrose Essentials’, a spoof of one of the Met’s anti-terrorist and anti-photography posters – the caption under it reads ‘My take on the Met’s misguided, paranoia-inducing “Seems Odd” campaign.’

Perhaps you have some pictures you could upload to the pool?

NOT Terrorists

Trafalgar Square got pretty full of photographers at lunchtime last Saturday, and the event gained a useful amount of publicity, and I hope will have done a little to make it easier for people to use cameras on the street. We need to remember that the law is on our side even if some of the police are not, and to get that over to the general public.

It wasn’t exactly by choice that I photographed the event entirely with a 12-24mm lens on the full-frame D700, though a wide angle was a good lens most of the time as things got pretty crowded. I did try to take a few pictures with an 18-200 on my D300 (27-300mm equivalent) but it took me rather a long time to realise I hadn’t put a card in the camera! I always work with the camera on a setting that refuses to let you release the shutter without a card there, but Nikon in their near-infinite stupidity made the default for the Custom Setting that controls this not only to let you release the shutter without a card, but also to display the pictures you haven’t recorded on the back of the camera as usual.

A little while ago I had to perform a full reset on this camera, and I must have forgotten the need to alter this setting. The default does seem crazy to me, and the only possible reason I can think of is that it is for the convenience of dealers when demonstrating the camera before sale. If so it seems a very curious priority for a company making tools for photographers to use.

At times it wasn’t easy taking photographs with so many photographers all trying to do the same thing, but mostly we managed without coming to blows. The only real example of unprofessional behaviour I came across came from BBC TV, whose reporter speaking to camera proved himself to be totally incapable of estimating the size of the crowd, reporting that there were 300 of us. My own rough estimate was at least 1500, while other experienced journalists put it at 2-3000.

It’s often hard to be sure about numbers on demonstrations, but an error of this magnitude suggests an agenda rather than simply incompetence, and the numbers reported by the BBC are often on the very low side.

For events with fewer than around 500 people I have a simple approach – I count them. You can seldom get an exact count, but fairly close, though usually it will be an underestimate as some people leave early and others arrive late. For larger events it is a matter of estimation, though again I’ll often count a section of an event and then try to base an estimate on that.

Sometimes differences in numbers can be because people count at different times. The local paper reporter at the Harrow Mosque demonstration – whose figure was widely quoted by other news media – had clearly made his count fairly early on in the event, and numbers opposing the EDL had roughly doubled by the time I went home. But here there was no such excuse; it was either incompetence or the deliberate misleading of the public.

If I was shooting simply for the web, I wouldn’t have needed a longer lens than 24mm for this demonstration, but could simply crop pictures. After all I’m taking images 4256 pixels wide and web images on this blog have a maximum of 450 pixel width. (Most of them I use are actually 600 pixels wide but scaled down by the browser – and you should be able to see them at full size if you want – in Firefox, simply Right Click, select ‘View Image.’ Probably you can do something similar in other browsers, though perhaps the best advice would be download Firefox.

But virtually everything here (and on My London Diary) is essentially un-cropped, as I like to work with the frame that I can see in the camera. The viewfinder doesn’t quite show the edges of the image and sometimes I’ll remove a thin sliver from two or four edges if it contains anything obtrusive, and I’m using a telephoto zoom designed for the DX format that I know vignettes a little at its shortest focal lengths when used on full-frame and work with a little crop in mind. But I only crop significantly on fairly rare occasions – as even Henri Cartier Bresson did, for example with his jumping man in the Place de l’Europe (though probably the other 49 in this set are not cropped.) In general I hold to the view that cropping encourages sloppy thinking when you are taking pictures, though the master expressed it more philosophically.

It was an event that reminded me once more of my age. The mother of one of the young photographers I photographed in the square was once one of my best students.

Lost London

One show just opened in London that I intend to see is Lost London, on show at Kenwood House in Hampstead until 5 April 2010. Hampstead is an area of London I seldom visit, though it’s not a long journey, just that there are seldom things that happen there I want to go to.

The show, put on by English Heritage, is of phtoographs that came to them from the former London County Council, who got photographers to document the areas that were about to be demolished.

Years ago I used to make frequent visits to the Saville Row offices of the National Building record (long moved to Swindon) and often had some time to wait for my appointment which I spent in their picture library. There I used to take down the files of pictures from the various London boroughs and leaf through them. A very large proportion of the pictures were of churches, apparently because most of the work on record had been donated by keen amateur photographers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and many of these were clergymen who, having preached their sermons on a Sunday were not frightfully busy the rest of the week.

But these pictures, which cover the years from 1870-1945, are rather different and with a hundred pictures illustrating the themes ‘Work, Poverty, Wealth and Change‘ it promises to be an interesting show.

You can see some more recent pictures of London on my site ‘The Buildings of London‘ and in particular the section of tha, a now antique web site, London Buildings.

This one – the Hoover Building in Perivale – is preserved, but quite a few of those that I photographed in the 1970s and 1980s, here and on London’s Industrial Heritage have been demolished or radically refurbished.

Paris Revisited 1984 – Set 2

The 28 pictures that make up ‘Set 1’ of Paris Revisited included many of the favourite pictures that I took there in 1984, but there are also quite a few others that appeal to me, or that I found of particular interest for various reasons. It was good, for example, to find that Eugene Atget had a street named after him:

though I’m fairly sure he would not have appreciated the architecture. Almost certainly the buildings that were demolished to make way for it were more to his taste – and probably among the many in the area that he photographed. This picture and the others in this post are in Paris Revisited – Set 2

One scene that was virtually unchanged since he photographed it was in rue Berton in the 16th arrondissement, and it is one of the few pictures where I consciously copied one of his works.

Of course there are differences. One is in the aspect ratio – his pictures are much more square than the 1.5:1 of 35mm cameras. Using the V750 scanner with the supplied film holder and Epson software which auto-detects the frame actually crops the 35mm neg to higher aspect ratio of around 1.63:1 making the difference more pronounced.

Most of these images from Paris were taken using an Olympus OM4 camera which had come out in 1983, and using the Olympus 35mm shift lens. This gave some of the control over perspective that is available using the rising and falling front and left-right movement available in many large format cameras, but lacked the tilt and swing of some of them. The greater depth of field on the smaller format largely made this unnecessary so far as getting sufficient depth of field was concerned if your aim was to achieve overall sharpness in a image.

It was quite a bulky lens compared with the non-shift 35mm lens, partly because of the mechanism allowing the lens to shift around 10mm left or right and 12mm up and down between the lens and the camera. But it is also larger to give a wider image circle at the film plane. A normal 35mm lens has to produce a sharp image across the diagonal of the format – around 43 mm. To allow the lens to move 10mm to left or right, the PC lens needs to have an image circle of around 61mm, which also allowed a maximum rise of 12mm and fall of 13mm. You could also combine smaller amounts of sideways and up and down movement – and the lens design ensured that these kept within that image circle.

The larger image circle meant that if you didn’t use the shifts you were working in the central area of the lens, and gave the lens a really excellent performance – and it remained pretty good even a maximum shift.

As with the movements on large format cameras, perhaps the most common and certainly the most obvious use is in photographing buildings. To avoid converging verticals you need to keep the camera level and not to tilt it, but to do this from ground level without a rising front, you have to move back so that the base of the building is at the middle of the frame. With a rising front or a shift lens you can move in closer and eliminate all or most of the foreground.

Of course now that images are digital (or scanned) you can tilt the camera and then straighten up the image in Photoshop but this does involve some extrapolation and thus loss of quality in the result and is best kept to a minimum.

But the shift lens really introduces a different dimension to photographic composition, meaning you can to some extent separate perspective from viewpoint. Although text-books draw diagrams and show example photographs I think it really is something you can only really appreciate by working with it day in and day out.

There were some downsides the the lens. Firstly it was rather expensive, even like mine when bought second-hand. But because of the sliding mechanism it was a purely manual lens without the automatic stopping down of the iris we usually take for granted. So when using it the first thing was to stand in the place you wanted to take the picture from, then point the camera and push the lens across or up or down as required to adjust the perspective. As usual you would do this with the lens wide open, and it would stay wide open whatever aperture you set on the aperture ring. For metering and taking the picture you then held down a small button on the lens which stopped it down to the value set by the aperture ring, and when you had set the shutter speed (or viewed that chosen by the camera on an auto setting) you kept holding that button down while making the exposure.

It soon became second nature, particularly since for some years I probably took around 90% of my pictures with this lens. So much so that even now I sometimes find myself trying to slide the lens on my Nikon across or feeling for that button to hold down when I’m taking pictures. And I’m sometimes more than a little disappointed to find that these lenses just won’t shift!

[Nikon do make PC lenses, including the wide angle 24mm f/3.5D ED PC-E Nikkor as well as a 45mm and 85mm, none of which I’d really find suitable for general photography. Unlike the Olympus lens they only shift in one dimension – you can have rise/fall or, by rotating the lens by 90 degrees left/right but not a combination of both. They do however have a tilt, making them more versatile for specialised use.]

Apology

Attentive readers of this blog may have noticed that my previous post, Parc de St Cloud 1984 was about the same set of pictures as an earlier post with the same title, Parc de St Cloud 1984 but at least I wrote something a little different about them second time!

Parc de St Cloud 1984

One of the places on the edge of Paris that I visited in 1984 was the Parc de St Cloud. Since then I’ve had a print of the picture above on my wall and I still like it. The print is just a little darker and more luminous than the web image, which is from a scan made using the Epson V750 Pro flatbed scanner.

The scans aren’t quite as good as those I can get from my dedicated neg scanner (a Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro) which, with an added Scanhancer diffuser, a specially made negative holder and multi-scanning with Vuescan software rivals the best a drum scanner can produce, but they are not too far short. The V750 has a big advantage for things like making a web site as the scans are about ten times as fast.

Of course many other photographers have taken pictures of St Cloud, and I went there in particular because Eugene Atget had worked there. You can see several of his pictures from there in a set of 58 on-line from the large collection at MoMA.

Unlike a number of other photographers, I didn’t try to “re-photograph” the works of Atget, but I was interested in seeing the places where he had worked and making my own pictures there, and I spent a couple of weeks exploring “his” Paris and produced a set of work that I called ‘Paris Revisited‘ and subtitled ‘A Homage to Atget‘, and showed a set of around 40 pictures in 1985.

You can see more of my pictures from St Cloud on my Paris Photos site, where I’ve recently added a large selection of the pictures from ‘Paris Revisted‘ and I’ll write about some of the other sections in later posts. The images on the web site are almost all un-retouched scans, though I have made some minor adjustments to contrast on some.

A Foggy Day

I can’t tell you a great deal about this picture although I took it, other than what is obvious from looking at it (and I do have the luxury of seeing it at around ten times the size of the version above and of being able to look at the contact sheet.)

The field of maize is covered with frost, and from the other frames on the sheet I can guess that it was taken somewhere in Old Windsor (it used just to be called Windsor until some King or other decided to build a new castle a couple of miles down the road in 1080.) Again from the contact sheet and negative number, I can guess it was taken in late 1977 or possibly early 1978.

I came across it while looking through my old files and although usually I remember the details about pictures that I’ve taken – or at least some of them – this one was a blank, although as soon as I saw it I responded strongly, but it was like seeing someone else’s work rather than my own.

I’ve often said “I’m not really a landscape photographer” but I think this one isn’t bad. It was taken on 35mm Kodak Tri-X and has – for a ISO 400 film – remarkably fine and sharp grain on the scan I’ve made.

Around that time I had a small commission from an arts magazine to provide some photographs to go with some poems, at least one of which was about winter. This wasn’t one of the pictures I used, but might possibly have been shot with that in mind.

More on Haiti

Joerg Colberg at Conscientious has posted a couple of very useful links, to More Perspectives on Haiti and Crisis Journalism by Matt Lutton on dvafoto and Staring at Death: Photographing Haition Pete Brook’s interesting Prison Photography site which has a very lengthy annotated list of links.

Although Brook, “a very amateur photographer” who has decided because of this to “stick to looking and commenting” is based in Seattle, he writes “I have strong political views about prison reform, particularly in the United States, and increasingly moreso as regards Her Majestys Prison Service in the United Kingdom.”

Me too.

You want to make money?

PDN Pulse has a feature on the top-selling microstock pictures of 2009 showing some of the examples. It is more than depressing to look at them and think that this is how to make money at photography.

Or photography and bad Photoshop in some cases. One of the comments reads “hideous. I’d rather prize my teeth out with a butter knife than look at this garbage” and its hard not to agree. But these guys are making a good living from it, while many if not most good photojournalists struggle to keep going at the moment.

But as I keep telling myself, I don’t do it for the money, though I do need some money to keep on doing it. Some things are worth doing, other things just aren’t. Whatever they pay.

On which subject, from Twitter this morning I found a link to Dont Be Scared of the F-Word When Exploring New Business Models by London / New York based freelance commercial photographer Jonathan Worth on Black Star Rising, in which he argues that doing things for free can be worthwhile. It’s worth reading (sorry!) and I’m very much in agreement that it is sometimes a good and even profitable idea. But just not in the vast majority of cases, when people just want to rip us off and the chances of our benefiting in any way are close to zero.

And yes, I do a lot of things for free, not least this blog and my posting of work on sites including My London Diary, the River Lea/ Lea Valley, London’s Industrial Heritage and the Urban Landscapes web sites.

Saturday in Tragalgar Square

If you are a photographer – or simply someone who cares about our civil liberties, and can get to London on Saturday then I hope you will join us for the mass photo gathering in defence of street photography organised by Im a Photographer, Not a Terrorist (PHNAT) at 12 noon.

This is one of a series of protests by photographers against harassment by police while taking pictures, and in particular about the use of legislation aimed at preventing terrorism against people exercising their right to take photographs in public places.

Of course it isn’t just police. I think the latest silly incident involved a student taking pictures at Hounslow Central Tube station on a Sunday afternoon. I used to live just down the road, used it often (and probably took pictures there) and can certify that no sane terrorist would ever bother to attack it.

The paranoia doesn’t just affect photographers of course. Eighteen months ago, just a hundred yards from where I live, a young student decided to hold a one-person peace protest, holding a placard Stop training murderers outside the building used by the Army Cadet Force (not as the paper says “an army base”.)

Eight police, including armed officers and dogs, swooped on his house to arrest him, while a helicopter hovered overhead. They arrested him under the Terrorism Act, took his books and computer and kept him in jail overnight. In the morning he was charged under the Public Order Act, and on the advice of the duty solicitor, accepted a police caution.

He has now realised how misguided this was (and that solicitor should be struck off) and is trying to have the caution rescinded.

It comes shortly after a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that Section 44 stop and searches are illegal (the UK government has announced it intends to appeal.)

I’ll be there (and so too will Jess Hurd, back from Haiti and one of those involved in setting upPHNAT) and over 1400 people have signed up for the event already on Facebook.

I hope to see you there!