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Hillsborough, 25 years on

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"You'll Never Walk Alone", Shankly Gates, Anfield, Liverpool
“You’ll Never Walk Alone”, Shankly Gates, Anfield, Liverpool – photo by Andy Nugent, on Flickr

Writing about Hillsborough is difficult for me, but not for the reasons you might think.

I wasn’t there on 15th April 1989, I was in the car with my Mum in Norwich, returning home after a day’s shopping with the radio on when I heard what had happened. At the time I don’t think I had realised exactly how bad things were – I was only 16.

There are so many people who were directly affected by the tragedy – not only the families of the 96 men, women and children who died, but also the survivors who were there and witnessed the horrific events unfolding, who tried or were unable to help, and who subsequently saw their names dragged through the mud in the following days by a certain newspaper (still, shamefully, the best selling newspaper in this country). With their experiences, who am I to comment on something that did not affect me personally? Yet I still get upset reading about that awful day, and I’m only beginning to understand why.

There was certainly a perception of football fans at the time as no more than sub-human hooligans. And it’s true that travelling as an away supporter, to Liverpool or elsewhere, was an unpleasant experience for many – I’ve heard stories of people waiting at Lime Street station for fans in away team colours in order to deliberately target them for abuse or physical attacks. The image of scousers in general was also a negative one – growing up in Wigan, if we heard Liverpool accents we walked the other way, the prejudices of a generation being handed down to us children without being questioned. The actions of a minority who were responsible for the tragic events at the Heysel stadium in 1985 were also conflated to the extent that all English clubs were banned from European competition for years.

Of course all groups are stereotyped, and usually on the basis of the actions of a small but disproportionately vocal or visible minority. Liverpool, a city with high unemployment and two major football clubs, was an obvious target, and the way a major national newspaper even thought it could get away with its scandalous ‘The Truth’ front page was an indicator of just how mainstream, almost accepted, that stereotyping was.

JFT96
JFT96 by Graham Walton, on Flickr

I now know, of course, having travelled to Liverpool myself as a supporter, and having met many people older than I who have been travelling to Anfield since they were children, that this stereotype just does not apply to the vast majority of fans. Even outside the football grounds, the people of Liverpool are ridiculously friendly, not suspicious of someone with a camera and tripod like in London, always chatting to strangers like they’ve known them all their life, much like most towns and cities in the North of England. And knowing that 96 of these wonderful people, whose only wish was to see their team play an FA Cup semifinal, were seen as somehow unworthy of the respect usually reserved for the dead, is still only part of why I feel so upset when I read about what happened on that day and afterwards.

No, the one thing that transforms a person’s capacity for empathy is becoming a parent. My son is now 15, the same age as many of those who were at Hillsborough. The thought of him being taken away so indiscriminately, by something that people had been warning could happen for years, and yet still was not prevented, is heart-wrenching. I can’t possibly imagine what it’s been like for the families of the 96 who have had to wait 25 years to find out why their loved ones were let down so shamefully. I can only hope that they finally get what they have been so desperately searching for all this time.

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Rest in Peace

Case study: Luxury furniture showroom

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This London based furniture showroom sells a range of high end Italian designed furniture. While I was at the shoot, a couple had flown over from Bermuda and were discussing their requirements with one of the staff. Many of the units on display here fetch four or even five-figure prices, so not the sort of thing you’d find in the January furniture sales as advertised on the TV after Christmas!

The London store is a franchise, operating under the name of the furniture manufacturer but being run as a separate company. They had shown me the catalogue produced by the Italian franchisor to give an indication of the sort of images they wanted. I composed the images to capture narrow colour palettes and desaturated the images very slightly to match the mood of the images from the catalogue I had been shown.

With hotel interiors, the emphasis is generally on the space, with the size of the space an important consideration, so wider lenses (around 16mm) are usually preferred. However when shooting furniture, you’re concentrating more on elements, so I stuck with a 24mm lens for most of the shots, shifting the lens slightly where needed.

IMG_4464

IMG_4429

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IMG_4505At times the angles needed meant shifting the lens horizontally to ensure the strict horizontal and vertical lines were retained, even when not aligned with the centre of the object:

IMG_4503I always take longer lenses with me to interior shoots as the detail shots can be as effective as the wider images:

IMG_5450

IMG_5448Of course for the shots of the whole showroom, it was necessary to go a bit wider, and from the elevated perspective I had to take full advantage of the shift capability of my 17mm lens:

IMG_4552As you can see from the plum-coloured pedestal, when shifted this much, the distortion can be quite extreme, so you need to be very careful using these lenses with elements that are visible at the extreme edges of the frame.

 

Two copies is not enough

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diskdrive
Image © Norlando Pobre; licensed under Creative Commons

A friend of mine, who shall remain anonymous, today lost nearly 1TB of data after a disk drive failed. The disk was mirrored, so it may still be recoverable, and indeed they have recovered about 750GB from the damaged disk, but they don’t need me to tell them that a robust backup setup would have saved them the cost of that recovery software, and the stress of potential loss of data.

A disk can fail at any time, for no reason, and with no warning. This fact should be at the back of your mind every time you consider your data storage setup. If it worries you, it should, but a good backup regime will help to minimise that worry.

At no point in time should you ever have only one copy of a file. This is the foundation of a good backup schedule. When you are taking photos, if you have a camera that supports multiple cards, ensure you have the photos written to both cards simultaneously. The next best thing is to ensure you import the images to your computer as soon as possible and as regularly as possible. If you have enough cards, don’t delete the images from the cards until they are fully incorporated into your backup system. If your hard drive fails, and you’ve formatted your card, the images are lost.

So, let’s say you use have a regular backup of your files, such as Apple’s Time Machine or an equivalent. Are you safe? If your computer’s hard drive fails, then you are left with just one copy of your files (on your backup disk) which is exposed and vulnerable to drive failure until you are able to replace and restore the drive. If anything happened to your backup disk during this time,  your data is lost again. Ideally, your important data should be stored initially on a RAID mirrored drive, where two disks contain identical data so that even if one fails, the other is still functional, and you still have a second copy on your hourly backup.

OK, so what happens if your house burns down? All three copies of your data could still vanish without trace. But there is still more that you can do. Services such as Backblaze act as a third line of defence against data loss. For a fixed monthly or annual fee, Backblaze will back up all your data (except for items that can be more easily recovered, e.g. applications for which you still have the installer disks or which you can re-download from the publisher) every hour. There is no limit to the amount of data you can store (I currently have 1.6 TB of data backed up to Backblaze) and being offsite means that you can recover all of your data even if your house or office is physically damaged. It may take several months for your first initial backup, depending on your internet connection speed, but once that first backup is complete your data is even safer.

If reading this doesn’t make you want to review your backup regime immediately, you’re either already sorted, or beyond help! Just ask yourself what you would do if all the data on your disk vanished in the next minute.

The Image Story

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Interestingly enough, not long after I started my brief series of posts on ‘The Story behind the Photo’ here on my blog, a site appeared called The Image Story that does the same thing for a whole range of photographers (disclosure: one of whom is your correspondent).

Screen Shot 2014-02-08 at 20.39.03

Started by Todd Owyoung, the New York based music and portrait photographer, The Image Story lets the photographers tell the whole story behind the images, including the preparation, execution, post-processing, and any other related information. It includes a great picture by a friend of mine, Valerio Berdini, alongside a wide range of image styles and genres, and promises to be a great source of inspiration to photographers of all levels as it grows its collection and its audience.

The story behind the photo: King of the water

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Perching kingfisher, Alcedo atthis (click the image to view larger)
Perching kingfisher, Alcedo atthis (click the image to view larger)

Kingfishers are a popular subject among photographers, and it’s not hard to see why. Their vibrant colours look amazing, and they are so fast and skittish that capturing one on camera comes with a real sense of achievement. It was years before I saw my first kingfisher, at Sparham Pools in Norfolk, but that was through the lenses of a pair of binoculars. I’d been determined ever since to get a ‘proper’ kingfisher photo, and realised it would take patience and planning, and a not insignificant slice of luck.

Where we live in Hertfordshire there is a small stream very close to our house. It’s not very fast, and often dries up in dry spells, but during the spring there is a steady stream of shallow, clear water running beneath overhanging trees on one side, with a vertical bank of soil on the other, making it the perfect habitat for these elegant birds. I remember one day seeing a flash of blue-green as I approached our car (which parks on a spot that overlooks the stream) and realised that we had kingfishers for neighbours! By now aware of their presence I made a point of looking each time I went out to the car, and more often than not, I’d see one perched on a branch overlooking the stream, who would fly away as soon as I got close.

It didn’t take long to get to know their habits, so one day I decided to use what I knew to get a shot of one of them. I set the camera up on a tripod which sat in the shallow stream, pointing at the branch I had spotted the bird on, and focused manually. I then sat in the car which overlooked the branch, and waited. I didn’t have to wait long – about 5 minutes later, this male bird came and perched on the branch, completely oblivious to my camera, and had a good long look around. With the remote shutter release I took a sequence of photos, and among them was this lovely side-on view with his eye and beak in pin-sharp focus.

Over the next few days we saw this one and the female (identified by the orange colouring on her lower beak) regularly, and came to the conclusion that there must be a nest nearby – the soil bank, it turned out, was perfect for the burrow nest they like to make, so I decided not to bother them any more.