Unknown Snapper - Unknown Bandwidth

As I sit on the train back to Pantsville, with a very bruised shin, embarrassing fez/donkey/"papping a growler" related flashbacks from a evening of alcohol fuelled fun and a hangover exacerbated by a carriage packed with Mockney football supporters (honestly, they’re from nowhere near London) drinking Stella and calling each other ‘caaaaants’, I’m still smiling.

I’m still smiling because yesterday, saw me in London again shooting another demonstration. This time a march by organised by the Stop the War Coalition protesting at the ongoing situation in Gaza and I managed to chalk up another first for me – I actually managed to file!

My intention from the beginning had been to submit the images from the day to the agency and I just about managed it. Of course, as usual there were complications, but this one was rather unexpected.

I – along with the usual suspects – followed the march route from Malet Street to Trafalgar Square, quite a nice route and as ever very surreal to be walking in the middle of roads I know are usually chocker block with traffic. Arriving in Trafalgar Square, I managed to get onto the base of Nelson’s Column where Alexei Sayle and George Galloway were to give speeches about Palestine to the assembled demonstrators.
Oddly not having a press card wasn’t too much of a problem this time (although it’s something I still need to address).

After shooting Mr Sayle I whipped out my laptop and started to edit my images in Aperture (thanks go again to Stephen who watched over my shoulder and helped me with what is still an unfamiliar piece of software). The final quick edit finished I plugged in my lovely new 3G dongle and connected to the internet… Unfortunately things were not to be as simple as one would have liked.

Initially, it seemed I had a good connection, but after 30 seconds the bandwidth dropped to a few kilobytes a second. Giving me a total predicted upload time of 45 minutes. Five minutes in and 0.0003% of an image uploaded, a call came through saying that the Sri Lankan President had declared victory over the Tamil Tigers and the war was over, queue everyone else jumping up and high tailing it to Tamil Land (aka Parliament Square) with promises of texts and calls if anything kicked off…
Not really an ideal situation obviously and after 10 minutes (and only 3 of 18 images uploaded to the agency’s ftp) the decision was made to shut up shop, decamp to Tamil Land.

Fortunately, on our arrival, we found that other than the usual chanting, quite a relaxed and family friendly atmosphere prevailed over Parliament Square, so out came the laptop and filing take two commenced.
It took an embarrassing 35 minutes to upload the majority of the files, with a group of my peers sat around the, now very frustrated, unknown snapper. Obviously much mirth was made of my situation. At one point a group of Tamil children appeared over my shoulder to ask innocently, “Mr, why’s your internet so crap?” obviously, at this point my first instinct was to try and calculate how far I could throw them and how many I could throw before the majority decided to run and gather a lynch mob to string me from the top of Big Ben (thanks go to Jools, who by this point was laughing uncontrollably after sending the kids to what could have been a very messy and early grave).
In the end, no harm was done (other than to my ego), with help from others the images were filed and we all trotted off to the pub - though that ended rather messily after I didn’t mind the gap at Turnham Green tube station – really, why would I expect the platform to be a whole 12 inches higher than the train doorstop when I’m trying to exit the train and Tweet at the same time?)

I say this every time, but as ever quite a few points to take away, digest and rectify for next time ranging from getting a better grip of Aperture (shooting with two different sensor sizes seems to be a problem when I want a specific ‘end’ file size), to the obvious upload problem (anyone have any experience with 3G mobile wifi dongles and Macs).
Even though my images didn’t go up on the wire service (too similar to those submitted by one of the other photographers and not the most newsworthy event) I actually feel as if I accomplished something this time – one could say, I had a feztastic time...



As an aside I also broke my Demotix cherry and filed some other images from the same demonstration, which can be found here. Felt like quite silly having a blank profile with no stories!