>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Lightroom Magic Brush?

One small discovery in using Lightroom that has really changed things for me.

Ever since the program came out I’ve had problems with the ‘Recovery’ slider which you can use to ‘recover’ image highlights – areas of the picture that are too bright to fit on the histogram. If you load any image and slide this slider from 0-100 you will see that although it does shift the highlights down, it also alters all areas of the histogram, and that with higher values you get very dull-looking highlights.

So I try to use only very low values of ‘Recovery’, if any at all, usually reducing the level set by the Auto-tone that’s part of my development preset. This usually leaves large areas marked in red as being overbright (that setting you toggle with the ‘J’ key.)

Sometimes you can get rid of these simply by reducing the Exposure Value, but of course that will usually make the image too dark. But while Auto-tone often seems to over-egg the ‘Recovery’ it generally seems to soft-pedal on ‘Fill Light’, and increasing this can both sort out those blue blocked shadow areas and brighten up the picture . And if necessary you can brighten up a bit more with the ‘Brightness’ slider.

The I had what in retrospect seems a blindingly obvious idea (and it’s probably mentioned in all those books on using Lightroom I’ve never quite got round to buying because I know I’d never get round to reading them.)

Often if the ‘red’ areas are just in the sky or other easy areas I’d simply attack those areas with the selective brush tool, usually using a value of around -40 for exposure. But this sometimes brought the problem of giving obviously visible boundaries, and in skies sometimes some very artificial looking cloud edges and poster-like effects.

The obvious answer was to use a brush set to both decrease Exposure and increase Brightness, and after a little experiment I found that sets of values like -40E, +25B or -50E, +35B did more or less as I wanted, bringing in over-cooked highlights while the rest of the histogram stayed more or less unchanged. Because it has zero effect except on very light values you don’t need to worry about applying it carefully, and can use a broad brush, applying it several times to the same area (with a K, K to turn it off and on again) if necessary. It all seems too good to be true.

Of course no kind of magic can get back the really over-exposed, where you have over-saturated the sensor and there is no detail, but I have rescued a few shots which I’d thought were impossible. In more extreme cases it may help to add a little ‘Contrast’ and ‘Saturation’ to the brush as well.

Banstead May Fayre

I started photographing May Queen festivals in 2005, when writing a lecture about photographer Tony Ray Jones who died tragically young in 1972, I came across a picture he had taken at the London May Queen Festival in the 1960s. This seemed to fit rather nicely into the work I’d been trying to do about suburban life, and Google and a fair amount of persistence led me to take the train to Hayes, Kent, where I had found the annual crowning of the London May Queen was still taking place almost 40 years on.

Taking pictures of young girls isn’t always without problems, but I talked to people about what I wanted to do and most of them were happy – and certainly once they had seen the pictures from that event I got invitations to photograph at other May Queen events. By last year – when I photographed two events in April and three in May (as well as some maypole dancing) I felt I had enough work for an exhibition and book – but was disappointed when a show at a major venue was called off on financial grounds at the final stage. I’m still hoping it will happen at some point and a book still seems likely, though it may not be for several years.

This year I’ve been working on other things, but I decide to take another trip to Banstead, where I’d photographed their May Fayre in 2006, as this year they were celebrating their 25th May Queen. As well as this year’s May Queen there were ten previous Queens in the procession.

The May Queen plays an important part in the May Fayre at Banstead, which also involves many other local groups. In 2006 there had also been local press photographers taking pictures, but the local press has now more or less disappeared. Of course there were many amateurs taking pictures, doubtless some of them taking good pictures (as yet none appear to have found their way to Flickr) but I think it’s important to record events such as this as a part of a wider context.

More of my pictures from the event on My London Diary.

May Day the Stalinist Way

Hearing on the radio the news of Stalin’s death in 1953 is one of my earliest precisely datable memories. At the time it was still possible to think of him warmly as ‘Uncle Joe’, whose stand against Hitler had made it possible for us to win the war. Without him history would have been different, and Britain would most likely have suffered a German conquest and occupation.

But of course we now know much more about the ‘Great Terror’, the ruthless purges, the show trials and the estimated 20-30 million who died under his orders. Few of us would now want to march behind his portrait, as a number of groups in the May Day march in London do.

As well as the usual large groups of Turkish and Kurdish communists, there are also many other groups in the march, headed by a number of trade union banners. It’s a real shame that May Day is not a Bank Holiday, when a rather larger and more representative event might be expected.

The rally in Trafalgar Square is dominated by the trade unions, and many marchers didn’t stay. The final speeches were the most interesting, especially with a very lively Tony Benn who now seems to be getting younger with every public appearance.

One trade unionist missing was Jack Jones, whose funeral Tony Benn and some of the others had attended earlier in the day.

On the march was a sizeable block of Sri Lankan Tamils who went on to join the continuing demonstration in Parliament Square against the continued assault by government forces on civilians and Tamil Tigers confined in a small area a couple of miles wide. Considerably unwelcome was another group of Sri Lankans, the Sinhalese JVP, a party now part of the Sri Lankan government, and whose intervention stopped the government considering a federal solution and led to the all-out attacks on the LTTE.

The JVP on the March

More about the event and lots of pictures on My London Diary.

No Half Measures

Green campaigners demonstrated opposite Downing St on Thursday 29 April against the Government’s intention to allow the building of new coal-fired power stations with only limited carbon capture.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Joss Garman from Greenpeace addresses the demo
Coal is inherently the ‘dirtiest’ of fuels, releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide on burning. Current carbon capture and storage technologies can cut emissions by around 20%, still leaving a massive pollution.

Our government want to build new coal power stations despite this, promising that in 15 years time unless all the carbon can be captured they will be close. As several speakers, including Green MEP for London Jean Lambert pointed out, it is by no means certain that 100% CCS will be achievable, and almost certain that if it isn’t no government will close down these dirty power stations.

More on the demonstration on My London Diary.

WMD in London

April 28 is International Workers Memorial Day, recognised in many countries around the world. Consultations are taking place over recognition by the UK government, with construction workers union ICATT pressing for it to be made a Bank Holiday, but at the moment although WMD was observed in various places in the UK it remained rather easy to miss in London.

People do get killed at work. Many if not most are not killed by ‘accident’ but because of a deliberate flouting of safety practices. ‘Accident’ rates are higher among small firms and sub-contractors, where the financial incentive to ‘cut corners’ is higher.

The main London demonstration started at the statue of the Unknown Building Worker in the pavement by the south side of the road at Tower Hill. Unless you are catchng a bus there you are unlikely to see it as most pedestrians walk along the underpass and miss it. There were apparently great problems in finding a suitable location for this statue, but it is a shame it isn’t in a rather more prominent place – just a hundred yards or so west near Tower Terrace would be better.

Most of those taking part in the march and rally were construction workers, many in work clothes and carrying hard hats. Also present were relatives of some of those killed – there are roughly 80 such deaths a year (as well as many more who die from exposure to asbestos.)

Not far away the march stopped for a short period of silence outside a site where a worker was killed in March, before going on to the London offices of the Health and Safety Executive. HSE staff there complain about the number of inspectors being cut – and less inspections being made. There are very few prosecutions brought, and even when these are successful, penalties are often virtually negligible. We need much tougher laws, better enforcement and sensible sentences to improve safety at work.

You can read a fuller account of the march and rally with more pictures on My London Diary

Guggenheim Grants

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has contributed greatly to photography over the years.

Ansel Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Diane Arbus, Lewis Baltz, Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, William Christenberry, Imogen Cunningham, Roy De Carava, William Eggleston…

These are just a few of the more famous photographers who have been awarded fellowships in the past – I soon got tired with reading through the listings.

Great works like Walker Evans’s ‘American Photographs‘, Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans‘ and Edward Weston’s pictures for ‘California and the West‘ would not have been possible without them. Of course as well as names familiar to everyone, there are also those in the Guggenheim lists who are less well known – and even some of those with photography prizes who I’ve never heard of.

Photographers only form a small proportion of the over 16,000 fellows it has supported in 85 years, and, as it tells you on the State of the Art blog, 7 of the 180 fellowships this year went to photographers. You’ll find all 7 mentioned there with one of their pictures and at least in most cases a link to more work.

Many in the UK will have come across landscape photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, Professor and Senior Researcher in Fine Art, The Glasgow School of Art. His exhibition True opened at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London last Friday (until 30 May 2009.)

Another photographer among the seven honoured who I’ve written about several times is Brian Ulrich. I’m pleased to see that his work has been recognised in this way.

Visteon Workers Win – But Fight Continues

One of the better pieces of news on May Day was that the occupation and picketing by sacked Visteon workers in Belfast, Enfield and Basildon and the strong support given by their union, Unite, has led to a greatly improved offer on severance pay, which the workers have now voted to accept.

The deal, achieved through the kind of fighting spirit I witnessed on my visits to the plant at Enfield shortly after the factory occupation started and when the workers came out of the works following a court order has been described as “ten times better” than the initial offer, with most workers getting six months or a year’s pay. The campaign also benefited from considerable support by students and trade unionists who brought supplies and joined in the pickets and demonstrations at the plant.

One of the workers from Enfield gave a powerful address at the Trade Union May Day rally in Trafalgar Square, stressing the need to stand up and fight for your rights – as these men and women did.

However, despite this victory there is still a battle to be fought over pensions, which highlights our unsatisfactory laws governing company pension schemes. Legislation is needed to ensure that money paid into these by employees and employer should be entirely separate from company accounts and not something that can be lost.

After the rally in Trafalgar Square, workers and supporters held a picket outside the offices of Visteon administrators KPMG just off Fleet Street (once of course the home of the UK Newspaper industry.) They demanded that their pension funds be restored to them.

There were speeches from several of the workers, including Raymond who had spoken earlier at Trafalgar Square, as well as one of the local Unite officials. The picket was also supported by London anarchists, including members of the London Branch of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), and trade unionists.

Jiro’s Café

Of course it’s only sensible that the lighting in art galleries is on the pictures, but it doesn’t make things easier when you are trying to photograph the people at an opening. There might be ways around this with some serious effort, but I hadn’t gone to the opening of Jiro Osuga‘s installation, Café Jiro, in the Flowers Gallery in Cork St, London, to take pictures, but to admire his incredible imagination and painting.

The lighting on the pictures gives a white balance at around 2300K (and around -6 magenta) so using flash to add a bit of light would really need a suitable filter to bring it from around 5600K. And there is a largish door and window at one end of the room with evening daylight at closer to 8000K. I’m travelling without my camera bag, just the D700 with a 20mm, and its built-in flash isn’t too great in any case, so though I take a few with it, most of the time I elect to work with available light at ISO 3200 and later adjust the lighting balance in Lightroom, burning the brightly lit painting on the walls and dodging the dimmer figures.

I discover you can even apply a little amber to the street outside the gallery to more or less neutralise the colour cast should you want too, but I quite like the mixed colour effect. The quality from the D700 at ISO 3200, which allows hand-held exposures at around 1/100, f3.5 in the fairly dim interior, is nothing short of amazing compared with the bad old days of film.

I’ve long been an admirer of Jiro’s work and have organised several group shows including some of his pictures, but in this show he has created something on a larger scale than before, re-creating the whole ground floor of the gallery as ‘Jiro’s Café’. The words ‘accessible’ and ‘fun’ can seldom be attached to shows in this most famous of Mayfair gallery streets in London, but this show is certainly both, and also a powerful showcase of the intelligence and vision that Jiro’s work always displays, applied to a much larger canvas, or rather series of canvases.

The large area around the room took seven months to paint in the artist’s studio, where he could only see and work on it a canvas at a time, and it must have been a considerable relief to see it altogether for the first time in the gallery when the show was hung and find it all fitted together perfectly.

My pictures concentrate on the people at the opening – and particularly on friends of mine who were there – including the artist.

A few of those in my photographs are also in the paintings, particularly the gallery staff who can be found in the kitchen. Y0u can see 19 panels on the Flowers Gallery web site
which includes most of the display except the topmost level, but you really need to get to Cork St and see it as a whole to appreciate it as an ensemble and the relationships between the parts. In the basement gallery there are also other some smaller paintings by Jiro (and some other gallery artists) in the downstairs area.

Although it contains some references to the original site for which it was designed – such as the windows on the front wall which are those of the street opposite, it is a work that would stand on its own and could be shown in galleries and museums elsewhere, and I hope others around the world will get an opportunity to see it.

At the gallery you can buy a nicely illustrated catalogue for a tenner and also a one metre long thin card showing all the paintings that make up Café Jiro at a quid, including the panels in the doorway showing a dog tied to the café’s sandwich board. In my photograph he is being photographed by his owner and his head is clearly visible on the screen of her camera in a larger image. Hidden behind her head is the painted wheel of Jiro’s bicycle.

Don’t miss it. The show continues until May 23, 2009.

30

30 – photographic show at the Shoreditch Town Hall, London, open 10-6 until 2 May 2009, is a show by 30 photography students from the University of Westminster, where ‘producing a photographic show’ was a module on their course.

You can see some of their names with an example of their work on the 30 blog, and if you are anywhere within distance I think it’s a show worth seeing, both for the impressive range of work on display, but also for the location itself.

Where else can you see a film of a bride and groom projected above a urinal, images made to fit in a room with the floor half dug up and a large brown earthenware pipe and much much more, and some of the pictures simply pinned up on decaying walls are well worth a look. This was an exhibition I really enjoyed visiting, which is more than you can say for many at more prestigious venues. It has a liveliness that makes the current offering at the Photographers’ Gallery I visited the previous day seem extremely sad.

It’s good also to see a student show with such a wide range of work, rather than some that seem to be largely a series of clones of a particular tutor or small group of tutors. There is certainly a lot of talent here, though perhaps a little depressing to reflect that with the current state of the market for photography nearly all of them will end up doing other things for a living. Of course that isn’t necessarily a bad thing and I’m sure that photography will continue to enrich the lives of many of them – and of others who will continue to enjoy their work.

Don’t put off going to see this – it ends this Saturday. Here are a few of the pictures I took of the location and the work on display.

The Grand Demonstration

There are of course no photographs of the ‘Grand Demonstration‘ organised by the Metropolitan trades unions to campaign for the release of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834, although I was rather surprised that a Google search appeared to turn one up – actually a photograph of a contemporary engraving.

Trade unions had been legal for ten years at the time and the men from Tolpuddle were propelled to fame (and a very uncomfortable trip to Australia and back) only because a local landowner spotted a chance to attack trade union activites using the then current equivalent of our anti-terrorist laws, the Unlawful Oaths Act, passed in 1797 to prevent naval mutiny.

Over 100,000 marched from Copenhagen Fields (now rather reduced in size as Caledonian Park) in Islington down to Parliament carrying a petition with over 200,000 signatures, and, at least according to that engraving, wearing top hats.

Saturday’s event, backed by the TUC, was on a rather smaller scale and unfortunately had not a single top hat, though there were a number of colourful trade union banners and it was led by the fine Cuba Solidarity Salsa Band. And rather than going to Parliament and then on to Kennington Park as in those hardier times, it stopped a short way down the road at Edward Square for a festival. But although small it was still quite a grand demonstration, and the sun came out for it.

But perhaps the biggest difference between marches then and now is that the 1834 demonstration and the rest of the campaign was actually successful in getting the men released and brought back to England. The considerably larger march in 2003 (and the many other large marches and protests in London and elsewhere) against the invasion of Iraq failed to have any effect on the Blair government.

More of the story and more pictures on My London Diary.