Editorial

Shot on a Hasselblad 503CW, Fuji Neopan film.

It’s May 1st – May Day – summer is around the corner. So it’s a Bank Holiday weekend ( do banks deserve holidays anymore? ) so here’s comes the rain and temperature drop just to keep us all in our place and put those barbecues and sunglasses away. The morning of May 1st also spotlights the great British eccentrics keeping alive traditions that go back to our pagan past on the isles. It is the heralding of summer and fertility ( summer officially starts in June ) dating back from the Roman festival of Flora and beyond. From the anglo-saxon, Þrimilci-mōnaþ, to the Christian mass of Roodmass – Christianity loved to piggyback on pagan customs and claim them for the new religion. To oncoming days of May day queens, maypoles, morris dancing, English country pubs, real ale, garlands of flowers, well dressing, the start of the cricket season. This morning to Oxford and the broadsheets’ favourite, the early morning song of the choir  atop the Great Tower of Magdalen college ( followed by the more recent ‘tradition’ of some bright-young-things jumping off Magdalen bridge into the river Cherwell and potential paralysis ).

I had hoped to post some images this morning of a notable tradition here in Sussex, but having hurt my back ( running ) a couple of days ago I am currently doing an impression of a very unsprightly ninety year old man, so couldn’t make the early morning walk up the South Downs to Chanctonbury Ring. The remains of a small Iron Age hillfort and a Roman temple, the ring is now a landmark thanks to the trees planted by a landowner in the eighteenth century. Many of these trees were felled by the great storm of 1987 and the replanted ones are slowly restoring this feature. Like many geographical features locally, it is connected to the Devil – very supersitious lot they were in Sussex it seems. By running around the ring seven times, some say twelve, in an anti-clockwise direction the Devil, by some versions, as the church bell in the plain below tolls, it is said will appear in the branches of a tree to offer you a bowl of soup in exchange for your soul. Seems pretty cheap to me but this legend has encouraged my kids to walk up the hill and try to run around the Ring to summon up the Devil – not worked yet! But back  to the tradition of May 1.

Every May 1st, the Chanctonbury Ring Morris Men, arrive atop the Ring to dance at 7am and welcome the sun and ‘summer’. As I say I couldn’t make it this year, but here the weather looked cloudy and it is starting to rain as I write so not sure how it went today. But hopefully next year I’ll get to witness a sunrise there as I did in 2005 as seen in this small slideshow below.

Another old photo and again from 1992. This shot also made the BPPA ( British Press Photographers’ Association ) book, Five Thousand Days – Press Photography in a Changing World, to mark the reformation of the BPPA after 5000 days absence. Obviously quite a major event in the UK that year – my main memory is trying to get to Windsor from my home in Clapham on a Friday evening and the chaotic traffic, after a call from The Times night picture editor asking if I ” could go and have a look “. Shot from a nearby bridge on a tripod that had decided that evening to develop a fault – it hit the bin when I got home. Then the car dash back to London and across to the East End and News International’s base in Wapping. Big prints were made up and run down to the back bench ( remember these were pre-digital days ). This image ended up running across most of the front page the next morning, and I even made my local pub for last orders, clutching a print.

Shot on a Hasselblad 503CW, Fuji Neopan film.   More images at www.martinbeddall.com

Shot on Hasselblad 503cw, Fuji Neopan film           More images at www.martinbeddall.com

Shifting through some archive cds today I came across this assignment from 2002. A “day in the life” reportage following the senior associate and Senior Vice President at the London regional office of Prudential Capital Group (PRICOA). A day spent full of meetings as part of their role in seeking out companies needing private placement investment. Shot on a Nikon D1X ( how digital has moved on ! ) and tilt / shift lenses.

Latest tearsheet is a cover and a double page spread in the February issue of PM Network Magazine produced by Imagination Publishing in Chicago. The portrait is of Tim McManus, a Senior Vice President at AECOM, taken on Waterloo Bridge in London as he passed through the city on his global travels.

Canon 1DS MKIII,  16-35/2.8 mm & 85/1.2 mm lenses    Profoto AcuteB 600 Flash

Another of my favourite shots, again from 1992. It came out of an assignment for The Times to cover a lookalike contest in London one Sunday morning. Looking for something different from the photocall type shot, I spotted the Marilyn Monroe lookalike sat outside the entrants tents and watched as entrants came out to go onstage. One of the first to come out was a security officer from Birmingham dressed as Mr Spock from Star Trek.  The serious, ‘logical’ character seemed to contrast well with the laughing Monroe and this was the shot that was published in the paper. In 2004 it also made, along with another image,  the BPPA ( British Press Photographers’ Association ) book, Five Thousand Days – Press Photography in a Changing World, to mark the reformation of the BPPA after 5000 days absence! As a student I used to buy the yearbooks of press photography ( Assignments ) that the association in it’s previous incarnation produced in the late 1980s.

Canon 1DS MKIII, 45mm TSE lens, ISO 100, 1/80th @ f4.5  Profoto 7b with two heads + grids

Canon 1DS MKIII, 16-35/2.8 mm lens, ISO 100, 1/200th @ f11  Profoto 7b with two heads + grids

Canon 1DS MKIII, 16-35/2.8mm lens, ISO 100, 1/200th @ f13 Profoto AcuteB 600 with one head