Edinburgh festival

A Scottish Protest – SDL and UAF in Edinburgh 2013

A Scottish Protest: On Saturday 17th August I photographed anti-fascists in Edinburgh protesting a march by the Scottish EDL in Edinburgh, the only time I have ever photographed a protest in Scotland.

I was in the city for the Edinburgh Festival, which I was also attending for the first and only time, having been invited to share a flat for the week with others. We did have a good time and went to quite a few performances and events but should I ever visit the city again I’d prefer to do so when things there were more normal – as I did back in 2003.

I found photographing the protest at times more stressful than usual. Partly because of the slightly different policing and the fact that I knew none of the protesters or the other photographers covering the event, (though I did recognise a few in the Scottish Defence Leagure protest from EDL protests in London) but also because I was using different equipment, working just with the Fuji X-E1 which was then my ‘travel’ camera rather than the brace of Nikons of my professional kit.

Not that the X-E1 wasn’t a good camera – and I’ve now been working for some years with other Fuji cameras to cut down the weight of my camera bag on my ageing shoulder. The Fuji lenses are fine but I still miss the directness of an optical viewfinder and the relative simplicity of the Nikon interface.

And the Nikon reliability. Often with various Fuji cameras I find it hard to get the cameras to behave as I want them too. Last Saturday checking my kit before I left home I could find no way to persuade my Fuji X-E3 to let me work in RAW rather than jpeg mode, eventually abandoning it for an older Fuji body. I did all the things that should have allowed it, but I suspect I will have to go to a full factory reset and then restore my favourite settings.

With the X-E1 I found the autofocus noticeably slower than with my Nikons and I did miss some pictures, but the results on those I did take were fine. Fuji glass really is good and the XF 18-55 is possibly the best ‘kit’ lens ever, though I did at times miss not having something wider than its 27mm equivalent and something longer then its 82mm equivalent.

I left the protest while it was still taking place and made my way to meet my wife and go to the postgrad show at the Edinburgh College of Art and then on to the ‘Attack of the 50 Foot German Comedian’, both something of a disappontment, before a restaurant meal with the others from the flat to celebrate the end of a week together. The next morning we were up early to catch the 10.30 train back to London.

You can read more about our week at the festival on My London Diary, with more from the protest at SDL and UAF in Edinburgh.

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All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
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Edinburgh And the Festival – 2013

Edinburgh And the Festival: We came by train to Edinburgh and the following day, Monday 12th August 2013 was the first of a full week we spent in the city and the first week of that year’s Edinburgh Festival.

Ten years before this we had spent an enjoyable week in the city, three of my family staying in a very comfortable flat close to Haymarket station, and had spent a very full week exploring the city and some of the surrounding area – including Leith and walking a little of the Fife coastal path. That year we left just as the festival was about to start.

2013 was very different. Linda and I were invited to join a group of friends to stay in a large flat in Bruntsfield a short walk from the city centre who were there for the Edinburgh Festival, and although we didn’t have a great interest in many of the festival events had found a number which seemed worth attending over the week.

Between these and our share of the housekeeping for the dozen or so of us – including taking our turn at preparing an evening meal for the group – we managed to fit in quite a few other things during the week, including another climb up Arthur’s Seat, and I even managed to do a little work, covering a protest by the Scottish Defence League and a counter-protest by Unite Against Fascism on the Saturday.

But unlike on our previous visit we stayed inside the city, and spent most of the time in the central area where most of the festival takes place around the Royal Mile.

A few of the events were very much to my taste – such as a guided tour around the elegant Georgian New Town, which took us to a few places I’d not been before, and the City of the Dead tour turned out to be rather more interesting than we had anticipated.

And there were some interesting poetry and threatre performances as well as several talks. We also bumped briefly into a few old friends at some of them or on the streets, though usually then we were going different ways to other events.

On My London Diary you can read more about our packed week. It was tiring but largely enjoyable, but we left feeling going there once was probably enough and we’ve not gone back. We might return to Edinburgh but not to the festival.

There are also pictures from the other days – all of those here are from Monday 12th August 2013. I had travelled light and they were all taken with a fairly compact Fuji X-E1 using either a 35mm standard lens of the XF18-55mmF2.8-4, equivalent to 27-83mm on full-frame.

Edinburgh & the Festival
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday

SDL and UAF in Edinburgh

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All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.

Edinburgh against Fascism: 2013

I seldom photograph protests outside London, and I hadn’t gone to Scotland to take photographs, but we had been invited to spend a week there during the Edinburgh festival. We’d never been to the festival before, and had timed our two previous stays in the city deliberately to avoid it, but decided to go and see what it was like. We did actually enjoy the week, but haven’t felt it was an experience we need to repeat.

On Saturday 17th August we rushed out after breakfast to attend a play about a male clergyman and a female quantum physicist, time travel and religion; clever and quite funny but it was too early in the morning for me. However it was conveniently close to where Unite Against Fascism and others were gathering to oppose a march by the fascist Scottish Defence League, and while Linda went to listen to a classical concert I made the short walk to cover the protest – my first in Scotland.

Like many such events in London it was slow to start. The assembly time was a couple of hours before the SDL were expected to march and the Scottish police were determined to keep the two groups as far apart as they could. But it gave me more than enough time to take pictures of the marchers and their banners and placards.

At the time all of my work on protests was made using Nikon DSLRs, but I’d left them at home when I came away for a week’s holiday, and all of these pictures were made using the relatively light and compact Fuji X-E1 and a single lens, the Fuji 18-55mm zoom. It was the first time I’d used the Fuji camera for a protest, and I did it a little less responsive than the Nikon, with slower auto-focus and sometimes a perceptible lag between shutter press and picture-taking.

The electronic viewfinder couldn’t match the Nikon’s optical one either for clarity, and sometimes was noticeably slow to react when I moved the camera or zoomed the lens. And having just an equivalent focal length of 27-83mm I found limiting, missing both the extreme wide-angle and longer telephoto I usually worked with. But despite this I was reasonably pleased with the pictures from the day.

Eventually the march moved off and was escorted by police who kept them well away from the SDL as they marched to a large pen on Horse Wynd at the back of the Scottish Parliament. Approaching a thousand people had come to oppose the racist march.

There was still no sign of the SDL, but I avoided the pen and walked back up Canongate to meet them coming down. Through a tight police cordon around the group of around a hundred I saw quite a few faces familiar from EDL protests in London – and some of them obviously recognised me and made threatening gestures.

Once police had led them into a separate pen far enough away from the anti-fascists to prevent the two groups throwing missiles at each other but within shouting distance, it got a little easier to photograph some of the EDL. Although there were police lines stopping either fascists or anti-fascists from getting closer to each other a few anti-fascists found their way though the entrance area to Hollyroodhouse and were then arrested as they approached the EDL.

I left as the two groups were still shouting at each other to go to the Postgrad show at the College of Art before it closed, then on to a comedy show and finally to a meal with the dozen of us who were sharing a large flat at a convenient Thai restuarant. We were up early the next morning to catch a train back to London.

SDL and UAF in Edinburgh