Back in the day (early 1980′s) I spent (quite a lot of) time protesting outside Lambeth Town Hall supporting a Labour council who fought Thatcher’s cuts tooth and nail.

Here we are, nearly thirty years later, outside another Town Hall, outraged that a Labour council is rolling over on its back to implement the Tory cuts as painlessly as possible for the coalition government. Fuckers. This isn’t why Lewisham council got the Labour vote in the recent elections.

Megaphone photos are obligatory…

I turned up with the vintage Nikon F4, which seemed appropriate somehow for such a back-to-the-future protest. And it wasn’t working as it should. The winding mechanism in the old warhorse is obviously feeling its age and slipping. Like me really.

Bemused of Lewisham

Not happy people

For such short notice there was a decent turnout with several unions represented. The NUT organised the rally, and I saw GMB, Unison, Unite, PCS and others represented (and NUJ if I include myself as a [non-]partial observer), plus the Green Party, SWP (quelle surprise) and Labour Party. Goldmiths too.

I knew the winder on the F4 was fucked when I looked at the counter and somehow had only shot 15 frames. I knew I had pressed the shutter release more times than that! However, the results could have been worse. Sometimes double/triple/quadruple/quintuple exposures are lucky accidents:

This my personal take on the protest. It is hard to be objective in your own back yard.

More coverage of the protest, interviews with local people affected by the cuts and videos by Hangbitch

(Usual disclaimer not applicable)

Cover:

The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health is a professional, awarding and campaigning body at the forefront of environmental and public health and safety.

<smug /> hehe

First time I’ve used the digi for some weeks so that was a bit of a jolt. Set to ISO 400, SB800 flash with the 24-70 f/2.8 used exclusively. It is probably the best lens I have with beautiful bokeh and colour rendition, and despite what I say about sharpness, fabulously sharp.

Here are a some shots of protesters

I love the way the 24-70 renders backgrounds:

And I obviously have a thing for megaphones!

That last one is Our Ken rallying the troops.

How different this workflow is compared to film. I took approx 400 photos in RAW format (12 reels of film equiv) in conditions that would have been challenging with the rangefinder. Got home, imported the CF to the hard drive using a batch process in Bibble to rename them and dump them in the appropriate folder. Backed up the unmodified files onto an external hard drive (because shit happens…), did the first cut for keepers and followed that with some minimal post-processing. Converted the 5-star images to jpg and uploaded them to snapsthoughts at around 01.00 hours for John Burgess at Barnet Unison to use the following morning

Oh, and here is a last one of Santa (and helper…). Bit of a crap image technically but I smiled