Mayday Protesters

Yesterday, I got my new Olympus 14-42mm m4/3 lens. While it's pretty plasticky and a very slow kit lens with f3.5-f5.6 it is small enough when collapsed and good as an all-rounder lens for holidays, it was also cheap enough. Still, I hope either Olympus or Panasonic will release a decent zoom lens for m4/3 like the one on the LC1 and not more of these useless slow kit lenses.
Today, I got the chance to try out the lens and take some pictures of the May Day protests. It performed very well although the zoom was counter intuitive for me since it's the 'wrong way round' compared to the LC1. It would have also been nicer if it would ocus faster or at least not be so slow when zoomed in.
Still, I really like it and would recommend it over the Panasonic kit lens because of the size and cheaper price. Sure, the Panasonic is optically better and has IS but neither are good or fast enough so I rather take the smaller and lighter lens.

Don't ask me how but all pictures I selected for this series ended up being taken at 84mm, will post more at different focal lengths in the next days.

The Big Nothing

Today was a strange day, after the big protest yesterday everyone expected even bigger protests for today. But it turned out that there were only a handful protesters, twice as many photographers and around four times the police at Bank and at the ExCel Centre.
A lot of people expected disruptions and violence but no one showed up. Over half of the protesters at the ExCel Centre were good spirited Ethiopians. It was strange and a bit disappointing indeed that not much happened. Reminded me of a slogan I read: "What if they gave a war and no one came?"


After my criticism of the police yesterday, I have to say that they were great at the ExCel Centre today, they allowed people to demonstrate and did not bully them around. The police near Bank however was a bit rude in the way they dealt with people, still it was overall not quite the same as yesterday.

"The Day of the Big Protest, Or...

How the Police Managed to Escalate a Peaceful Situation".


The G20 Summit started and massive demonstrations were expected in the City of London for today. At first there were more police officers and reporters than protesters but this turned soon and around lunctime a lot of people came to protest but also to see what is going on.


In the beginning everything was fine, people were having a good time and were in good spirits, police was present but did not impede or bullied the protesters and other people there. This turned soon when the police got the stupid order to contain people and circled the people in. I was one of the people who got caught in the middle with the police refusing to let anyone out, even an injured person. Only reporters were alowed through.


People were nice and talked to the police at first but after being "contained" for over 1.5h people started to get impatient and angry. They called on the police to let them through and when this failed started to call them faschists and nazis. It did not take long till people decided that pushing was the only way out.
The police thought it was a good idea to bully people and push them to the ground and this is when the situation escalated and everyone pushed their way through. I was in the front line just in front of the police and while I could avoid being pushed by the police I was pushed forward by the people behind me. This resuled in the police line breaking down and the ploce finally moving away and letting people get out.


This whole situation only escalated because some idiot gave the order to contain people, after people pushed their way out they went peacefully about their way. So a note to the London Police, if you want to escalate a situation and turn people against you just go ahead and "contain" people.


Overall it was a very interesting experience and I really enjoy covering protests. Getting caught up in the midle was not great but the people I met, including the police, were generaly very friendly and passionate. Using the GRD only was great and it is the perfect camera for these events, it's fast, small and easy to handle. Took over 450 pictures today, not all of them good but sometimes it is better to take more than not enough on an event like this.
I even managed to get another photographer interested in my GRD. It was generally also a great opportunity to spot the camera people were using and from big dSLRs over Leicas, Contax G2, Rolleiflex, compact and mobile phones there were all sorts of cameras present.

For more pictures go an see my Dropbox gallery here.

Tomorrow after work I'll be heading to the Excel Centre to cover the 2nd day of the protests so check back for more pictures.