David Thorpe's (Mostly) Photo Blog

I came across this the other day, a short piece I wrote for the Sunday Times after reading about a terrible plane crash in which an Ilyushin transport plane was in mid-air collision with a Jumbo jet 60 miles north of New Delhi. At least 350 people were killed. It sent a shiver up my spine because shortly before I had traveled on one of these planes from the UK, via Egypt and Tanzania, to Congo.

This is me in front of the plane while refueling Cairo. For the landing, I climbed into the nose (bomb aimer’s pod) and watched the whole thing laying full length on the glass. Very exciting.

When I heard about the Indian air crash tragedy my first reaction wasn’t horror. I just wondered how it hadn’t happened before.

I travelled on an Ilyushin IL-76 from East Midlands airport to Goma in Zaire two years ago to photograph the Rwandan refugee’s plight. The flight, via Cairo and Dar es Salaam took eighteen hours. At the end it felt like it had taken 18 years.

Travelling with a journalist colleague and three aid workers, I boarded the Ilyushin in the late July evening. We said our hellos to the crew. There seemed to be about 7 of them but it was hard to tell as they were all moving around the vast plane, checking that the fork lift trucks, jeeps and boxes of equipment bound for Zaire were securely stowed. They all look hollow eyed and pallid. They were plainly tired.

The inside of the Ilyushin looked more like the interior of a boat than a plane. It had nautical style hand-wheels, pipes, cables, and ladders all over the place. It struck me as a cross between a combine harvester and a cargo ship.

It was loaded to bursting point. There were no seats, we were hitching a ride on an aid flight after all, so I jammed my cameras and myself in the 18 inches between a jeep and the unpadded fuselage and prepared for a long and uncomfortable flight. I just hoped the cargo was lashed down securely.

The crew were distant, though not unfriendly, and it was plain that none of them spoke any English at all.

The Ilyushin 76 was a shock compared to other aircraft I’ve flown on, cargo or otherwise. Where European and American planes use modern design for strength and lightness, the Russians seem to use crude metal. Brute strength is their virtue and their answer to western technology. I could imagine this thing limping home after a raid with large chunks missing, like an old ginger tom after a scrap, bleeding but unbeaten.

The four jets fired up, we taxied out to the runway and the engines screamed and vibrated. And screamed and vibrated. The Ilyushin accelerated like a channel ferry leaving port.

You could feel the power but with such weight to propel it gathered its skirt and ran more than accelerated. East Midlands airport has a long enough runway so that normally you’re quite high off the ground before the runway slips away behind. The Ilyushin staggered, shaking, off the ground just before the runway finished.

I settled in my slot and watched the naked control cables moving back and forth as the pilot forced the unwilling machine to climb.

The crew had looked tired before we started. I wondered how they’d be when we arrived in Zaire after 18 hours flying.

Some hours later we reached our first stop, Cairo. Dawn was coming up and I decided to take the bomb aimers position in the transparent lower nose section for the landing.

That was a mistake. Because we were so heavily loaded the plane hit the ground with such force that, laying prone on my stomach, it nearly winded me. I was grateful for those agricultural strength wheels, and we rolled to a halt after using most of the runway. The crew looked even more tired than when we started.

They broke out some packed food from a stack inside the plane and ate voraciously.

I spoke to one of the Cairo ground staff who told me that this plane, after unloading in Goma, would fly straight off to Saudi to pick up more cargo en route to Pakistan. From Pakistan to another country, and another. The Ilyushin can go to primitive airfields where western built cargo planes cannot because it has a fifth jet engine on the side of the fuselage. This is left running on the ground and provides power to keep the systems going and restart the main engines when required. More modern planes require ground support to do this which is not available in places like Goma. The crew went home to Russia only if they happened to be delivering there.

They were badly paid and needed to fly round the clock to make enough money to send home to feed their families. They travelled the entire globe, never changing any foreign currency, never able to leave the airfield compounds, living, eating, drinking and sleeping in primitive conditions on the Ilyushin.

Like the 18th century seamen who lived their lives on the ocean, these men are the latter for the landing and we looked at one another puzzled.

This was a small airport. As we approached we could see that the runway was too short for a plane this size. The pilot and co-pilot seemed not to have noticed or were unconcerned. Between the pilots’ seats was a bottle of gin.

As we were a few feet above the runway, one of the crew shouted and pointed in front, waving his arms wildly. Right across the middle of the runway was a wall of sandbags. It was a military airfield, probably in Rwanda, not Zaire.

The pilot hauled back on the throttles, the engines screamed, and we struggled enough height to just clear the sandbags. We looked at one another wide eyed, relieved and looked back to the windscreen to see the next obstacle, looming fast.

It was a line of trees at the end of the runway. The Ilyushin just didn’t have it in it clear these, and we hit them with a loud bang and judder of the airframe.

At this point I didn’t want to see what would happen next and went to sit on the floor behind the bulkhead. My colleague, Stuart, and the aid workers did likewise, all in separate parts of the fuselage.

I think we all felt the same. If the worst was going to happen we’d prefer to be alone with our thoughts and not see it coming. Having navigated to the wrong airfield, it was hard to see how the crew would now find the right one. The next half hour seemed to last forever.

Until we heard the jets throttle back. As we lost height I went back to the flight deck. In front of us was what looked like a Cairo car park. Massive planes parked at all angles, all over the place. And dozens of children playing on the runway.

As we approached, they scattered to the grass. I wondered if the undercarriage had been damaged.

It hadn’t. One thing about those dinosaurs of the air, they’re tough, even with parts of tree tops embedded in them.
We lumbered safely to a halt and the crew set about unloading. A few hours later they were on their way again.

The thought of these monsters plying the airways, tired, homesick crews, old guidance systems, heavily laden, is worrying. Are they serviced properly? Do the planes and their crews comply with modern safety standards?

For the sake of all travellers, I hope the enquiry into the Indian disaster finds out.

Well, I’ve gone and done it. I’ve sold nearly all my Pentax equipment, including my lovely 200mm f2.8 and Sigma 50 f1.4.

Have I gone off Pentax? The cameras, not a bit. The weight? Yes! I was going out on my photo forays with a K5 Pentax in a Lowepro backpack with Pentax 12-24mm , Pentax 35mm f2, Sigma 50mm f1.4, Sigma 105mm f2.8 and either the Pentax 200mm f2/8 or the Pentax 60-250mm zoom. That little lot with a few accessories but without tripod came in at between 7 and 8 kilos. It’s a big load on your back when you’re cycling but there is no point in having these lenses unless you have them to hand when you are out taking pictures. Unless you know exactly what you will be photographing, of course, but I never do. It was easier in my pro days since you knew in advance what the job was. Nowadays when I go out it’s simply a matter of what catches my eye.

What I found was more and more I would go out with just my Olympus E-PL3 and 14-140 Panasonic zoom and 20mm f1.7. I’d previously had a Panasonic GF1 and liked the 20mm lens so much that I kept it when I sold the GF1 for the Olympus. I swapped because The Pen was smaller and it had the articulated screen. And a decent accessory EVF which at that time had eluded Panasonic. They have a good one now, of course.This little Oly/ Pana combination was no trouble to carry around and while no match for the Pentax in quality it passed muster for my Alamy contributions with no problems at all. Alamy are sticklers for technical quality. They pixel peep for sharpness and any SOLD as they call it, softness or lacking definition is rejected out of hand.

How to deal with weight problem? The obvious way was to get a set of Pentax’s pancake lenses. I’d previously owned their miniscule 15mm f4 but found it lacked real sharpness until it was stopped down to f8. And so gloriously crisp was the 12-24mm zoom that I flogged the 15mm. But, to avoid a broken back, I could live with the 15mm. In itself, it was a beautifully made solid and smooth feeling lens. It reminded me of my Zeiss lenses for the Hasselblad and that is high praise.The other Pentax pancake primes? Well, I’d had a 70mm f.2.4 and that was a stunningly sharp and contrasty lens. I’d sold it to buy the 60-250mm zoom.There was the 21mm f3.2 which from the reviews appeared a competant performer. So I could go 15 – 21 – 40 – 70. A good range and with the compact K5 body, a pretty good outfit. Keep the Pentax 60-250mm zoom – a sparkling performer – and you’ve got a pretty light outfit in weight with excellent optical performance except the 15mm which was merely OK.

So there was my featherweight main outfit backed up by the Olympus and two lenses. Then the leap in logic. Some very interesting lenses were coming out in the MFT world. A 12mm f2 from Olympus. A 45mm f1.8 from olympus. A 25mm f1.4 from Leica/ Panasonic.

All the exciting developments seemed to be in the MFT world. High quality video, AVCHD format. Touch screen focusing. Fully articulated LCDs. Electronic viewfinders that gave a nice big image with fast refresh seriously rivalling their optical counterparts. Not as perfect when you panned, you still got a bit of ‘streaking’ or ‘shearing’ but then the optical finders give a dark image when the subject is in darkness. The EVFs amplify it so you can see what you are doing even under dim street lighting. Swings and roundabouts with the viewfinder but the EVF is no longer an also ran.

The leap in logic? Why was I running two different systems side by side? Logically, wouldn’t it be sensible to have two cameras that shared the same lens mount? I couldn’t have a small Pentax for walkabouts that shared the Pentax K mount lenses. No such thing. So, could I get something close to the K5 in MFT? Answer, a qualified yes. The panasonic GH2. Both equally capable in handling terms, fast focusing, plenty of external knobs and dials for intuitive and fast manipulation. There is one area in which the GH2 didn’t come close to the K5 and that is dynamic range.

In Lightshop, the K5 RAW files seem able to just keep pulling in more and more detail from shadows and/ or highlights showing as blown on the Lightroom histogram. Up to a point it makes the exposure you give irrelevant. The GH2 with its smaller sensor just can’t match that. If a highlight is blown, you have a bit of leeway but that’s it. The only answer to this is to use the histogram more and manipulate your exposure setting according to the sensor’s requirements. It’s the compromise you have to make for smaller size but my salient point is that MFT provides good enough quality for what I personally need.

So, I decided to sell all my Pentax gear and go over to MFT. I’d have a GH2 Panasonic and the Olympus E-PL3 as my carry about camera. Now some people don’t like change but I’ve always loved it. If I cycle to Kensington, I never go the same route on two consecutive trips. I like upheaval. So what about the clean break? The Panasonic G3 had just come out. Flog all the Pentax gear and the Olympus Pen lite. Get a GH2 to sub for the Pentax K5 and a Panasonic G3 to replace the Pen.

If you took the Pen and added the VF-3, as I had because I like eye level finders, it wasn’t that different in size from the G3 and the G3 had the advantage of a better EVF and a screen that folds into the camera so that when you the bung the whole thing into a bag with a lenscap on, there is nothing to scratch or damage.

The GH2 and G3, while different, were both from the same stable. Plainly, going from using one to the other would be, if not seamless, smoother. They are actually very different, as I point out in my YouTube comparison here but less different than offerings from the two separate makers.

So, that is where I now am. I have two cameras, a GH2 and a G3. I have a fabulous set of lenses comprising Panasonic 7-14mm zoom, 12mm f2 Olympus, 20mm f1.7 Panasonic, 25mm f1.4 Leica Summilux, 14-42mm Vario X compact zoom, 14-140mm Panasonic zoom, Olympus 45mm f1.8 and Panasonic 100-300mm zoom. Of my Pentax lenses, I have retained only the Sigma 105mm f2.8 macro which fits the MFT cameras via a Kiwifotos Pentax K mount to MFT adaptor.

I have achieved what I wanted to – the weight on my back is now down to a fraction over 3kg. I don’t pack all my stuff in the bag when I’m going out on a photographic mission. I don’t need the 14-140mm, the Sigma macro lens, G3 body 14-14 zoom. But basically, with 5 lenses I’m covered from 7mm through to 300mm or 14 to 600mm, ultra wide to ultra tele in a little outfit weighing nor more than three bags of sugar. I find that remarkable.

PS I was very sad to sell the Pentax and lenses because there was nothing about the camera or lenses themselves that I didn’t like, other than the weight. The K5 is weather proofed and tough and comes with an array of lenses second to none in quality. Gems for me were the 200 2.8, 70 f2.4. All my lenses and the body have gone to good homes. I was very pleased with the prices I got for them, in one case even a bit more than I paid. But, all were in as new condition. I’ve always looked after my gear. Even in the most hectic of my professional days my 5 Nikons, 2 Hasselblads and all their lenses were cleaned and checked over once a week. The lenses always had UV filters fitted for protection as soon as they were bought. Camera bodies were never left with a gaping maw to collect dust or scratches on the mirror, body capos were always fitted after use.

It has paid off over the years in greatly lower equipment depreciation. But it’s not only that. I used to hate to see photographers, and there were many of them, who after a job would just bung their cameras in the boot of that car and drive home. You’d hear the metal and glass bouncing about in the back, see them with dents and dings. I always felt it was disrespectful, somehow, like when Pete Townshend used to smash up guitars.

Disrespectful? To inanimate objects. How can that be? Maybe I’m a psychopath.

I’ve always loved Paris but somehow never known it. I have been there more times than I can remember, both as a tourist and working. But going there for business or a city break – it feels like surfing a city, when you really want to dive in.

I didn’t want to go to Michelin starred restaurants, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower or anywhere on the Île de la Cité. I’d done that and that was no more Paris than The Ivy, Tate Modern and Buckingham Palace are London. Any big city is the sum of its parts, the districts where the denizens eat, drink and sleep.

How best to explore the Paris Arrondissements? The same way that I get about London, I thought – on my Brompton folding bicycle.

I booked 4 nights in a travel hotel in Montreuil, just outside the 20th Arrondissement and half an hour’s pedaling from the centre. I made no plans and took no maps. This trip was to be pure serendipity apart from my handheld GPS with the hotel location waypointed.

The morning after my arrival, I unfolded my bike and hit the road. I gauged the direction of central Paris by cycling into the Parc Jean Moulin near my hotel. From there, I could see the Eiffel Tower so I headed in that direction.

It brought me to the huge roundabout of Place de la Nation. I hung back and waited before entering the Place.

A young woman on a sit-up-and-beg bicycle wearing a long floral dress, Louis Vuitton handbag placed stylishly in the basket, swept past me and seamlessly entered the roundabout. I tucked in behind her.

Can you be accused of stalking someone on a bicycle? I hoped not. Her way round this intimidating roundabout was illuminating. Signal where you are going. Without nervousness or hesitation, go there. It works, even traversing the notorious Place Charles de Gaulle which I did for the cycling experience, rather than any wish to see it again.

For the next 3 days I rode where the whim took me, from one side of the city to the other. From the canals of the 19th to Paris’s Kensington, the 16th. From ‘un sandwiche et une biere’. in a pavement cafe near the Sorbonne to dinner in a restaurant on the Avenue Parmentier.

I rode about 30 miles each day from 9am to 6pm, returning to the hotel for a rest and shower before going out to eat in the evening. I ate when I found somewhere I fancied eating. I drank in back streets in the 20th. When I’d had enough, the GPS pointed to my hotel.

There is a line in a Joni Mitchell song where her character says ‘I was a free man in Paris, unfettered and alive’. She is spot on.

Advice is that the secret of a enjoyable holiday is careful planning and attention to detail . I propose an alternative. No planning and no detail. Not even a map.

But don’t forget your bicycle.

I have been using my iPad for quite a while now. When I first saw Steve Jobs toting one at his introduction, I wasn’t sure I could see the point. It just looked like an overblown iPhone, too big for the pocket, too small for serious work. And then I realised you couldn’t make a call from it anyway. But what really put me off was the moronic whooping and hollering of all those Apple arse-lickers.

A couple of months later, someone I knew came round to my place with one. Having hooked it up with my wifi, the sheer ease of use and slick design won me over. So I bought one.

A year later I remembered how I used to write little programs for my Psion PDAs. Just little things that solved a small but irksome problem. For example, back in the 90s covering the first Gulf War from Israel, I had to develop colour films in my hotel room. It was a pain because apart from keeping the chemicals within a degree of the required temperature, the whole process d to be accurately times as you went from chemical to chemical. Ten minutes of this, three of that and so on through about eight different baths. Taking place all in the dark, it was hard to get it all right. Enter NSBasic. I could sit down and write a little routine for myself with voice prompts when to prepare to change chemicals and all he timing would be accurate. It took me a while to learn basic but it was a worthwhile investment and it has come in useful in so many ways since.

but back to the iPad. I got an email from NSBasic that they had brought out NSBasic App Studio. It was for programming, among others, the iPad. It was amazing how it used the in built controls of the iPad and yet used all the same NSBasic routines as in the Psion days. So now I am beavering away writing an App based around a large database I compiled in my spare time. Actually writing the App is quite easy because a lot of the hard work is done by HTML, CSS and Javascript, all working hard under the hood – or bonnet – as we English prefer to put it.

There is one huge snag, however. The iOS along with many other systems uses SQLite as its database storage. Since the database is entrap to most modern apps, it is a big snag. Sql is horrible, dense, a syntactical maze. If Mervyn Peake had made Gormenghast as labyrinthine as sql, even the inhabitants would have got lost!

Si I struggle on. When I have wrestled sql into submission, I shall do battle with HTML to get it all looking right and then….well I’ll have to start learning all over again, to find out how to get it into the Apple App Store. But the thing is, once I get it in there, I shall be rich. It will be a bonanza. The world will beat a path to my app and I will be showered with money.

Here’s my business plan in case the Dragons want to invest in my world beating product. The App Store has 200 million account holders. If just half of them buy my App at !.99, I reckon that nets me £130,000,000. Can’t fail. Maybe I’ll nip out and buy vintage Strat this afternoon. I can afford it now.

How many cameras do you need? How many lenses? Cartier-Bresson’s answer was a minimalist dream, one and one. A Leica and 50mm.

I started out on my career doing the same thing, a VN plate camera with a 135mm lens. That’s as far as I’d care to take any comparison of me and Henri. It didn’t feel limiting in any way. Then along came the Rolleiflex, the cheaper Rolleicord and the even cheaper Japanese copy of the twin lens reflex, the Mamiyaflex. I bought a Mamiyaflex and still it was one camera and one lens.

Then along came the 35mm Single Lens Reflex. The Leica had been around for 30 years but never caught on with the essentially conservative press photographer. The film stock of the time meant you had to take great care with exposure and processing, something the press man, a professional opportunist by nature had little time for. Time is the press man’s enemy, speed his friend. The prize goes not to the best but to the first. Overexpose by a couple of stops on 35mm and you would have trouble getting a usable print at all. The trusty plate, even the 6x6cm Rollei, you could get away with big mistakes. When you don’t know when or where your picture will occur, accurate exposure is a matter of luck.

All of this applied to the 35mm SLR of course. But the SLR, in its first professional worthy incarnation, the Nikon F, had attributes that overcame the drawbacks. You could see exactly what you were photographing. You had compact wide angle and telephoto lenses. You could even wear two or three around your neck at the same time with different lenses on. And it was built like a battleship. You could fit the photomic head and see when the exposure was right in the viewfinder.

It changed the newsman’s life and quickly took over the business. The Rollei stayed around for many years to come in the hands of skilled car shot photographers like the Daily Mail’s Mike Fresco because it could sync with flash at much higher shutter speeds than the F’s 60th second, thus avoiding the blur caused by available light intruding.

So now, how many cameras did you need? Well, at any one time two with two lenses. So the ante was upped. And anyway, 3 were better, with 3 different lenses.

Which brings me to today. People have money. Even amateurs have an arsenal of cameras and lenses.

For myself, now that my living doesn’t depend on my cameras, I have just two and 7 lenses. A Pentax K5 with 12-35mm Pentax zoom, a Samsung 35mm f2, Sigma 105mm f2.8 macro and 60-250mm zoom.

The second camera is a Panasonic GF2 with 28mm f2.5, 20mm f1.7 and 14-140 zoom.

There’s nothing extraneous there and I now find myself in a position where I have all the equipment I need with no need to look to buy any more. An American woman psychiatrist I photographed for the Daily Mail once remarked to me how lucky I was in my job to have access to “all those tax allowable boys’ toys.” She wasn’t wrong.

Now they’re not tax allowable but I find myself having all I can justify anyway.

It’s a bit boring, really. Come on someone, invent a 50-500 f2 zoom the size of an 70-200. I need one of those.