Not Really a Camera Review

I have returned to a project I began thirty five years ago and rediscovered the joys of working in black and white with a small camera. Only this time, instead of film and a Leica, I'm using a digital Fuji X100.

The photo above was taken with the Fuji a few weeks ago; the one below is a scan from a B&W negative shot in 1993.

I took my first pictures at Speakers' Corner in 1977, and have continued to photograph there sporadically ever since.  However, when I switched to digital in 2003 and film processing fell out of my daily workflow, the occasional visit to Hyde Park with heavy and obtrusive DSLRs produced immaculate but unappealing colour images that I filed away and forgot about.

My recent purchase of the X100 coincided with my involvement with a new Speakers' Corner oral history and archiving project, Sounds from the Park, but it wasn't until I revisited the place with it that I realised I had in my hand an almost perfect digital replacement for my old M6.

The camera was clearly designed to appeal to photographers nostalgic for the retro look of knurled dials, exposure rings and chrome finish. But it's the small size, virtually silent operation, and high quality files that make it such a pleasure to use.

For any non-photographer reading this, that's pretty much all you need to know about the camera itself. For me, its most significant feature is that it doesn't look like the weapon of a paparazzo. Like a Leica, nobody – apart from the occasional camera buff – pays it any attention.

For those after a bit more detail, I can add that even its limitations are a plus. It has a fixed lens (equivalent to a 35mm on a full frame camera), so no time is wasted selecting a focal length: the only option is to find a 35mm shot that works. And because it's not the fastest camera to focus or write to card, it encourages care in choosing the decisive moment.

For most of the work I do, the specifications of the equipment I use are irrelevant – I just need to make sure the particular bits and pieces I bring along are capable of producing the required image quality. What is different about fly-on-the-wall documentary projects like Speakers' Corner is that the intrusiveness, or otherwise, of the camera is also a factor, and can make a big difference to the process of making pictures. The DSLRs I have been using for the last ten years are great machines, and produce fantastic pictures, but they are big, heavy and noisy. It's hard to pass unnoticed with one hanging from your neck. Not so the X100. Its innovative design has enabled me to continue my old project in the same spirit in which it was originally conceived, without having to take the radical step of re-activating my long-neglected darkroom.

Speakers' Corner has changed over the years. It has got smaller; there is a narrower range of speakers. The demographics have shifted: there is still a predominance of preachers, although now at least as many are Muslim as Christian. But it still has the buzz generated by the energy and eccentricity of face-to-face argument. There is nowhere else you can get that with such intensity. I love it.

And in case you're wondering, the Fuji is great in low light, has a brilliant hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder, and produces very nice colour too.

Dormant History

There must be many photographers whose working lives began before the digital era and who, like me, have shelves of black and white negatives lying dormant, the stories they tell hidden from view.

To be visible, images now need to be online, or at least on-screen. But unless they are in immaculate condition, digitising black and white negatives is either expensive (commercial rates start at around £35 + VAT per scan), or extremely time-consuming - an average of about an hour a frame, in my recent experience.

Why does it take so long? The tonal adjustments that need to be made to the raw scans, and the captioning and keywording that make the finished files accessible, take a while. But it is dust and scratches that are the killer. They seem to be unavoidable on film, although careful processing and storage can minimise the damage. Film scanners equipped with the right technology can remove them from most colour films, but not from silver-based black and white. The clean-up must be done by hand, spotting each blemish of the scanned file with a mouse click. On a high resolution scan there can be hundreds of them. There are Photoshop short-cuts that work on parts of some images, but they can degrade grain pattern and sharpness if used too liberally. Having just scanned a small set of 30 year-old photos of the campaign over the status of political prisoners in Northern Irish gaols, it is evident that my early rolls of Tri-X were not always well processed or cared for.

On the plus side, there is satisfaction in knowing that, unlike the retouching of paper prints, each scan only needs to be processed once. And still being in a position to do all this must count as some sort of success: the need to digitise their collections was what bankrupted many of the smaller photo agencies during the transfer from film to pixels, and led to the closure or takeover of so many of them. At least I'm still here.

But it's important not to forget the point of all this technical stuff: what happened 30 years ago is still relevant today. The government is currently pushing through plans for secret courts (back then it was internment without trial and juryless Diplock courts), and only this week the prime minister indicated that, despite a ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, he doesn't have a problem with the potential use of evidence obtained by torture (back then it was commonplace in the Six Counties). History is always worth a look, especially if you like repeats.