Les Halles at night looking across the lit up square of Place des Halles. The famous cafe, Au Chien Qui Fume, is in the background in the rue du Pont-Neuf. Photographer Harold Chapman recalls taking "the ballet of the barrows". Two heavy wooden barrows, one balanced on top of the other, needed to be moved and manoeuvred by the porter who had rented them for his work delivering goods to customers. Chapman recalls that when he became seriously interested in photography, he found a handbook published by Ilford called The Ilford Manual of Photography... "So on flipping through I came to a chapter called Faults in Photography. It was illustrated by photographs. To my amazement I found a lot of what was considered then faults in photography made a fantastic picture. I read up how these faults were caused. So I understood how to do it and my favourite pictures of all there were trying to stop motion - panning with the moving object such as a person or a car and if you did it badly you got a rotten blur but if you understood what you were doing, learned to pan with them, you could have someone moving - the most important part of the picture was sharp and other areas blurred." Conversely Chapman understood that this "technique" could then be applied in another way to get sharp backgrounds with "ghosts" of people and objects moving about... "Now getting to Les Halles, I started trying to take pictures of people in motion and after a while I was able to get what I wanted and one day in front of Au Chien Qui Fume, a famous cafe called The Smoking Dog, there was a character doing a ballet with two diables right in front of the cafe so I waited for the opportunity until he was moving and held the camera very steady and got a picture of him and the blurred barrows, and everything in the background - Au Chien Qui Fume and a lorry - pin sharp. It didn't look comfortable, it was very like a dance, but they must have practised no end to be able to do it. Pushing and pulling