Protests 11/04/09 or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Bit of a late post, one I'd intended to make before now, but much got in the way - and it's not as if I'm being paid for it!

On the 11th I arranged to nip down to London, two events were taking place on one day, a perfect chance to gain some more experience!

The first of the day was a walk in memory of Ian Tomlinson who die under controversial circumstances after the G20 protests on the 1st of April. The march was to start at Bethnal Green Police Station, with all participants walking to the Spot on Cornhill where Ian passed away.
My initial feelings upon arriving at Bethnal Green were that the press outnumbered the marchers - this seemed to be the case for quite a while.
When Paul King, Ian Tomlinson's son, stepped out of the station to say a few words, he was greeted by a barrage of flash guns and TV cameras. To be expected, given the high profile of the story.

With the march about to start, the decision was taken to leave the rest of the pack behind and take the tube to Bank and capture the mourners arriving. Quite a good idea considering how many other photographrs would be present on Cornhill. The marchers eventually arrived, walking down Threadneedle street and around Bank before heading up Cornhill.

Managing to nip up the street quickly, I grabbed what seemed to be a good spot to photograph the protesters laying flowers, unfortunately, despite my positioning I started to realise that I really was working at the limits of my equipment.
I have always been of the view that a bad workman blames his tools, certainly with the kit I have now I've managed to do quite well over the last few years, but from beginning of the day (which was quite dull) I had started to get frustrated. The get what I needed demanded I up the ISO speed as much as possible, even though the image quality would suffer. The ageing bodies I use really are lacking on high ISO, causing problems should I need to perform any crops at a later point.
The lenses I use also annoyed me slightly, due to the APS-C format sensors, I found when in the midst of the press scrum around the people laying flowers at the site of Mr Tomlinson's death I just couldn't get wide enough and when I needed to I couldn't get close enough to get the effects I wanted (thus coming back to the cropping problems again.

Regardless of the equipment woes, the laying of flowers and speeches afterward went smoothly enough, with only a few problems from a small minority of Anarchists spread throughout the crowd and shouting over people trying to have their say at the megaphone.


Leaving Cornhill behind, we meandered our way over to Embankment where the Tamil protest was in full swing. The amount of people present really had to been seen to be believed, with estimates ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 all being very well marshalled by the march organisers. Actual numbers aside, it just showed how many people cared about the the ongoing genocide in Sri Lanka. More astonishing than anything was the fact that it warrented so little coverage in the media, with only a small mention online to show that it had even happened - even though at one point the demonstration stretched from Charing Cross Station to Hyde Park!


Maybe it was that the protest was organised so well that there was no real trouble, maybe that Sri Lanka is on the other side of the world and not deemed newsworthy; whatever the reason it seems slightly wrong that so many people should take to the streets and bring the centre of London to a standstill to make their voices heard and for it not to actually garner any support as such from the popular media.

Everyone that I met was very friendly, and only wanted the person with the camera to understand why they were there. As an example of the level at which the protest was organised, as I walked away from the main stage where several high profile people were talking about the situation in Sri Lanka, smoke could be seen rising above a rather dense area of the crowd, it took 30 seconds to run to the source and see that some of the demonstrators were burning an effigy of the Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Within 3 minutes, the protest marshals had arrived on the scene with a crate of water and were dousing the flames. Only a couple of minutes later the now extinguished dummy was gone, having been placed in black bin bags for disposal.

Photographic equipment ignored, again another invaluable learning experience.

Thanks go (again) to Stephen and Jools who put up with my waffle for the duration!

Images from the 11th are up on Flickr (they have been for a few days now, but wanted to accompany them with a blog post).

Shall post a bit of a status update on what's going on shortly!