…coming to an end ( I hope)

As things stand, and assuming I pass this particular course, this is going to be the last post on this blog. If anyone is interested in my continuing studies they can find my future musings over on my Landscape blog.

All my assignments, and the working associated with them, can be found via the links on the right. The assessors have received my documents on CD, but for anyone else who is interested the links to the final assignment submission documents are here:

• Assignment 1
• Assignment 2
• Assignment 3
• Assignment 4
• Assignment 5

This is going to be quite a long post, but I want to cover three main areas: My thoughts on the course itself, my personal assessment of my achievements against the learning objectives, and the impact of the course on my personal photography. So first up – the course – and I’ll stick with the same general headings I used at the end of DPP.

What did I want/expect from the course?

Having completed DPP I had a much clearer idea of what to expect from the course material so what I wanted was a course that would effectively force me into my ‘discomfort’ zone – people photography. I think that I was a little worried that it would immediately force me into social commentary – but was prepared to give that a go if it was what was needed. Beyond that there’s not much to say under this heading.

Did it deliver?

Unequivocally yes! The early stages of ‘people aware’ allowed me the escape route of self-portraiture – although that has it’s own set of issues to resolve – but the ‘people unaware’ stage pushed me well and truly into photographic places I’d not tried before. I also found the approach to place quite challenging – it’s easy to snap a place, rather more difficult to photograph it. I think it’s at this point that it finally dawned on me that I was doing a degree course, and that my previous certainties and overconfidence wouldn’t cut the mustard.

I struggled with some of the middle phases – not because of the course material, but because it was so unfamiliar to me as an idea. I also think that my perception (right or wrong) of the UK as a very hostile environment for street photography caused me some problems, because I found the same thing considerably easier in Switzerland during my holiday. In some sense this holiday came at a fortunate time, because I was becoming bogged down on the people exercises and it restored some momentum for me

For reasons explained elsewhere in this blog, Assignment 3 was a bit of a wake-up call. I found the somewhat open nature of the final two assignments quite tricky as well – photograph more or less what you please, but be prepared to explain why you did it and how the photos support that. The first part is easy – that’s what us amateurs do – the second part was new territory for me. It’s a measure of the course’s success however that by this stage I had the nerve to wander the streets of the local town in the dark with a camera – even if I wasn’t quite ready for walking up to people to photograph them in that circumstance.

I think another part of the courses success for me was the way it has developed my understanding of the ability of a photo or series of photos to tell a story or convey an idea or feeling, again the last two assignments feel like good examples of that.

I still found the reading requirements a little vague. I revisited some of the photo theory texts I read during DPP, and this convinced me that I needed a better understanding of the artistic context in which photography has developed, so I’ve tried to work on that as well. Alongside this I’ve tried to look at more photography. The nearest decent gallery is nearly 2 hours away so I’ve tended to rely on the web, and on books, but hopefully these efforts are reflected in the reading list I’ve developed and various posts in my blog over the duration.

How do I think I fared against the learning objectives?

• Use technical and interpersonal skills effectively to capture images which reflect your ideas – I feel that my last 3 assignments in particular show that I have the technical skills. On the interpersonal skills side, I still have some way to go before I could take a close portrait of a complete stranger uninvited, but otherwise I think I have demonstrated that I can take photos of people with a reasonable degree of success, and use people in shots to emphasise the points I am making, or to add emphasis or interest to a shot.
• Demonstrate the importance of note-taking, research, ideas and concepts to the process of developing a story – this was a big step forward for me on this course, perhaps most effectively demonstrated by the difference in my approaches to Assignment 2, which was quite spur-of-the-moment, and Assignment 5, which was planned as thoroughly as I could make it.
• Demonstrate a good level of ability in the effective selection and editing of images to achieve objectives – difficult to make a neutral comment on this, as I would not willingly submit a set of images which I thought did not achieve the objective I had in mind.
• Show that you can reflect perceptively on your learning experience – again difficult to give a neutral answer, but I believe my response to tutor feedback on Assignment 3 demonstrates that I can react positively to feedback, and take on board lessons learned along the way. I think this is most effectively demonstrated by the way some of my personal projects are developing.

Which leads very neatly to:

What impact has the course had on my photography?

Overall my photography has developed a thoughtful, or experimental, strand that was missing previously. Rather than individual photos I am beginning to think in series or groups, with an attempt at an idea behind them. Clear examples include my reflective self-portraits, my night-time shots and the series on roads that I have just started to develop. Both of the latter I hope to be able to develop further during the Landscape course.

Another major change has been my adoption of black and white photography. My first real experience with monochrome was during DPP, but I have found that it works very well with night time shooting to support the atmosphere I am trying to create, and I expect it to continue featuring in my photography going forward.

Conclusion

I found this a difficult course to engage with in the early stages, because it pushed me so far from my comfort zone, but I’m glad I persisted. Whatever the outcome of this assessment I’m sure my photography is better for it. A key challenge for the next few months is not to lose the momentum on people photography simply because I am engaged in a Landscape course. Whether I’ll be able do this by weaving people into the Landscape module, or by developing some more personal projects remains to be seen, but I’ve gained too much to drop it now.

Two-lane Blacktop

Posting this here because it has emerged from the shots I’ve been taking during the later stages of this course, although in reality I’m hoping to develop the idea as I move through Landscape. Roads are a reality in all our lives, but doing 30,000 miles a year means they feature in mine quite a bit more than the average so I guess, as with hotels, that it’s inevitable I should want to photograph them.

If you travel them enough, roads, even parts of roads, seem to develop personalities – this is a good bit to drive, this bit is just tedious - and you start to develop a relationship with them. The relationship is even closer at night when the countryside is essentially invisible and even the towns seem otherworldly and distant from your car/road bubble. Turn the radio off and the only company is engine/wheel noise and the flashing white lines just head off hypnotically into the distance – it’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s just you, the road and the night. I like walking in the dark for much the same reason – the loneliness and the sense of being inextricably linked with the road or path.

So, whether I can weave it into Landscape or not, this set is going to be developing over the next few months and we’ll see where this particular road trip takes me.

A few loose ends (i)

Have been reviewing my Flickr collection for this module and have spotted a few examples of shots I took with the an exercise in mind which I subsequently didn’t use or comment on. As they clearly felt worthwhile at the time I thought I would do them some justice and post them here.

One thing I have learned in the course of this module is the joys of black and white, and in particular how well it works (for me at least) when dealing with shots in extremely low lighting conditions, allowing te creation of very definite moods. In truth any number of these might be used to develop the ideas of Exercise 3: Experimenting with Light – the shot of my wife in the Northumbria set, for example – but for this post I wanted to show another candle-lit shot, taken on my daughters 17th birthday and uploaded to Flickr back in the March of this year.

The original was already quite dark and after conversion to black and white I lit the face a little more by brightening the orange/yellow channels and deepened the blacks further to produce this version. As I noted when I posted it originally this creates a ghostly effect which seems to hint at the memories of childhood slowly fading.

A Northumberland weekend

Spent a few days in Northumberland over the Jubilee Bank Holiday weekend. Didn’t take quite as many photos as I expected – not quite sure why – but there is something about this course in the reasons. Can’t quite put my finger on it but it feels that many of the the things I used to shoot are losing interest for me – I don’t have the urge to shoot flowers and pretty landscapes at present, and I keep asking myself, “What am I trying to say with this shot?” and if I can’t think of an answer I don’t press the shutter. While that may be good in some ways – who needs a hard drive full of pictures of buttercups – a part of me worries that in striving to make my photography ‘better’ (whatever that means) I may be losing some of the fun. Our visit to Lindisfarne typifies the experience. Previously I would have come back with 50-60 shots – mainly of obscure stonework – whereas this time – if we ignore bracketing the total is about 8!! Perhaps the answer is that the fun was in pressing the shutter and collecting.

Anyway, I appear to have substituted trying to take something more meaningful for simply amassing a huge number of shots to ‘prove’ (to whom?) that I’m a keen photographer. Sometimes this is fun, sometimes it isn’t. I’m guessing the secret is working out how to make the meaningful stuff fun on a more regular basis – I’m also guessing that when the meaningful stuff is not fun, it’s probably less meaningful.

Anyway – enough theorising – time for some photos. First up Lindisfarne – and only two shots that I thought were worth showing.

The first is an attempt to catch the historic image that the tourist brochures harp on about. The two kids on the wall caught my eye at about the same time as the view of the castle beyond the abbey.

The second shot – which I’ve already posted on my photo-a-day blog – catches more of what I felt about the place. Forget the beauty,  forget the spirituality – it struck me as a giant celtic themed gift shop – not so much spirituality as spirits.

Not quite sure how to tag this post – not even sure it belongs in this course, other than that I have tried to capture my sense of the place at the time I visited it.

Stretton: Space and Place

A couple of people on Flickr have recently asked me where I’m going with my night time shots – both the black and whites and the sodium/tungsten lighting shots. In all honesty I’m not fully sure – there seems to be something there that’s a bit beyond my grasp at the moment. My response has been to keep taking the shots and as I said in response to one of the comments try to extract a thread.

I think the following quote in the Hockney book is one of those threads – it’s certainly worthy of some investigation and experiment:

“..a photograph sees it all at once, in one click of the lens from a single point of view, but we don’t. And it’s the fact that it takes us time to see it that makes the space.”

I take this to mean that our perception of space is related to our memory – we’re seeing lots of individual “shots” of the scene and our brain/memory is piecing them together to make a whole. It was this he was pursuing in his multi-point perspective ‘joiners’ when he was experimenting with photography.

To me there feels to be more to it than this. When I remember a place – or the sense of a place – I don’t remember it as a single image – even if it’s really remarkable. Of all the places I’ve visited Uluru is my favourite – but I don’t remember a single image of it – more a collection of images that build up to form my memory. So where does that take me? How do we use photography to create both a sense of space, and a permanent ‘memory’ (as opposed to image) of a place – in other words a genuine sense of space and place?

I’m a bit of a literal soul at times, so the place to start seems to be to replicate the building process I perceive in my memory – take several shots and view them together. The key point here is it is not about building a multi-shot panorama – it’s about combining images that not only serve to give you a sense of place, but that also work together to give a sense of space.  The six shots I chose for this first attempt are in this set on Flickr together with a couple of others I rejected while working out the final result. They are not all taken from the same place – in fact they are not all visible at once from any location - but they are things that trigger memories for me, and they are all of Stretton – near Warrington. Combining them in a reasonably logical way – sky at the top, roadways at the bottom etc. - produces this final composite image:

For the record all the shots were taken at ISO1600 on an an E-P1 with a 17mm lens. Post processing was generally limited to the crop although in a couple I adjusted the contrast with curves in Lightroom to deepen the blacks, one (the car park) had a sight colour balance adjustment and a in a couple I brightened the red and orange channels a little to bring the colours back after the contrast adjustment.

As a first attempt this feels to work quite well – the lines leading into the picture combine with the ‘flatter’ images to to provide a sense of volume, and the pictures work reasonably well together to give an idea of what you might find there and the sense of otherworldly lighting from the multiple artificial light sources is conveyed fairly well. The absence of a shot across the bottom also seems to emphasise a sense of being ‘under the trees’.

This has me wondering if I shouldn’t investigate the images of Uluru in my computer memory to see if I can produce a similar image to match my real memory. I’d be interested to know what anyone else thinks.

The Village Hall

My last week has been absorbed with stage crewing for a production of Cinderella at the local community centre/village hall. Under other circumstances I guess it might have provided lots of opportunities for theatre photography, but if you’ve never done it stage crewing requires a bit of concentration so I didn’t really want the distraction. HOWEVER – I did take my camera along to the dress rehearsal and just before kick-off I took this shot.

I was trying to catch something of the sense of anticipation – which hopefully I’ve achieved. Why post it here? Because for me it exemplifies some of the things that I have taken from this (and the previous) course. I’ve chosen the view point and crop deliberately to emphasise the importance of the stage, in a way that I don’t believe I would have done before – and I’ve included a person. Even if I had chosen to do this shot previously, prior to this course I would have asked the guy on stage to move – or waited for him to step out of shot. I considered this time, but then decided to leave him in because without a person the shot is just empty. As it is I think it raises a number of questions about what is actually happening. What is he doing? Why are all the seats empty?

To me this feels like a step in the right direction.

Whinlatter

1000/778: 07 April 2012: Whinlatter a photo by nmonckton on Flickr.

Not sure if this belongs here or in Landscape 2, but this is my current blog so it's here for the moment.

for those who've never been Whinlatter is a large Forestry Commission area, full of very tall and very straight pine trees, and with a lot of nicely laid out and signposted walks.

I was about half way round one of thee walks when the 'verticality' of everything around me finally made contact with the old grey matter. So that's what I tried to capture in this shot.

The original colour version was a bit too plain for it to be really obvious so I emphasised the verticals with this high contrast B/W treatment. Am tempted to try a vertical panorama treatment at some point to emphasise the effect even more - the trees were certainly tall enough to take it.

Have been reading a series of conversations with David Hockney, which features his Bigger Trees series. Think that may have had some influence on my approach to this.

Change of heart - again

Ok – I’ve been wondering for sometime about the how to incorporate some of the stuff I do in parallel with the course into the course itself. I guess it wouldn’t matter except that I simply wouldn’t be shooting some of the stuff I’m currently doing if it hadn’t been for the course, and it seems a shame not to capture that in some way.

In particular the black and white night shots seem to be where my mind is at the moment, so why would I be thinking about something else for an assignment? The answer is that i don’t know. I’ve tried shooting for my original ideas about showing the two sides of Allonby – the tourism and the residents, but it simply isn’t coming together in my head – it feels like random shooting in the hope that I’ll be able to extract a theme, which is scarcely the point. On the other hand, I find myself leaving my photo-a-day project until the evening every day so that I’m ’forced’ to shoot in the dark if I want to do something interesting (or resort to indoor diary shooting)

With that in mind it seems wisest to shelve the Allonby plan for a while and concentrate on the night stuff – which actually interests me - while the evenings are still reasonably dark. Obviously it has to fit with the theme of shooting for an intelligent travel publication – whatever that may be.So I’m going to shoot a chapter on ‘Small Town Britain’ for an illustrated travel book called ‘Britain at Night’, and I’m going to concentrate on Maryport. This should put some of the ideas/techniques I’ve been working on to better use than my photo-a-day blog.

While I’m at it here are a few of the night shots In wont be able to use, because they aren’t Maryport – and there’s little point in cheating. Perhaps ironically they’re actually of Allonby.  First up a couple linked by the constellation Orion:

      

And as Orion was visiting Jacks Surf bar in the second – here a shot of the bar as well:

  .

And – finally – a shot of The Square. The rather grand building is the old Bath House, which seems oddly out of place in a small cobbled street full of tiny cottages.

  .

I may have to put up some daylight shots to show how different the atmosphere is

How much light is enough?

One thing about the photo-a-day challenge – when I’m taking it seriously – is that it forces me to think a bit differently or risk every photo being a close-up of a household object. It also means that sometimes I have to take shots in fairly challenging conditions, which can be a useful creativity driver.

The ‘Fence’ was one example of that and it got me to thinking about how little information – and by implication light – you might need to make a reasonable photo. Most weeks I spend one or two nights in Stretton, just off J11 of the M56, which is fairly limiting from a photo opportunity angle but does have a rather splendid sandstone church which is sometimes, but not often floodlit. When the lighting is off the lights from the street and the nearby hotel cast a rather eerie glow onto the tower, which struck me as rather atmospheric. It’s also a bit tricky to capture, if you don’t have a tripod handy – which I didn’t. Usually I can find a wall to prop the camera up on, but without losing the composition that wasn’t possible – not least because I needed a portrait format to catch the tower.This forced me to ISO 3200 and f/2.8 which gave me a 1/4 second exposure (about 2/3 stop underexposed), which was just within the limits of handholding with a bit of wall support and IS. Even then I was exposed well over to the left – contrary to normal advice – don’t think there was a pixel above half-way on the histogram.

Lets not even talk about the chroma noise in the file.

But conversion to B&W and judicious use of the orange/red sliders, exposure clarity and noise reduction gives this rather atmospheric end result:

I know it’s soft, and grainy, and looks like it was taken a hundred years ago – but that’s exactly as I saw it turning out. It has that sense of mystery which churchyards have at night, there’s just enough detail to keep me looking and the small white dot (Venus) adds a slightly disconcerting note. In short – I think it has a real sense of place. Interestingly I think the chroma noise is a factor in the slightly other-worldly glow from the tower - tweaking the noise settings certainly had a marked impact. There’s an experiment for another time.

The following night I tried a slightly different approach – this time a portrait of a statue on the path behind the church. There was enough light from the street lamp to make hand-holding just feasible – although I’d have preferred a tripod so that I could get some extra depth of field as f/2.8 is a bit limiting at 2 feet or so. I could have pushed the ISO a bit further (to 3200 perhaps)but for this shot I didn’t want to risk softening the boundary between light and dark too much. Again most of the pixels were well to the left of the half-way mark on the histogram, which with a bit of tweaking of the red/orange/black point sliders produced this end result.

Not quite true actually – I had to put quite a bit of effort into developing a decent range of tones in the lit areas while retaining the very sharp shadow edges. Again I’m quite pleased with the outcome. Given that it’s a statue it feels quite characterful – the moon behind adds some helpful atmosphere and at the risk of sounding pretentious the black shadow feels like a metaphor for time eating away at history.

I’m beginning to wonder if I have the basis for Assignment 5 here – if only I could think of a legitimate commercial brief.

I digress. It seems to me that it is possible to get interesting shots with very little light indeed, provided that you understand what can be done with that light. In some senses I think digital photography makes this easier because a quick peek at the preview shows whether there is anything useable recorded or not and you don’t have to worry about reciprocity failure. On the other hand, noise rears it’s ugly head and can have some interesting impacts on the B&W conversions. But this is both fun and rewarding and I’m beginning to hope that the evenings don’t draw out too quickly.

Colour or Black & White – that is the question?

As noted in my last post I was ratching through the Ralph Gibson website yesterday evening. It so happens that I have a copy of World Photography – Ed: Bryn Campbell that also has some good quality reproductions of several Gibson prints (book review later). Several of the shots reminded me of photos I’ve taken in the past but left in colour – largely because until recently I’d had no interest in black and white reproduction – so I though it might be instructive to choose a couple – convert them to high contrast black and white and see which I preferred and what, if any changes in impact I could identify.

First up is a sandstone buttress on a local church with a blue sky behind – brought to mind by this shot of Gibson’s. In the book the stone blocks print rather brighter than the reproduction on his website so the suggestion of ‘heat’ is more noticeable. The thing that strikes me most about this particular image is that despite the simplicity I have spent significant time just looking at the fine grain in the blocks and wondering about the purpose of the building. It comes from a set called Quadrants which is loosely based, as far as I can tell, on photos containing squares or implied squares.

The image it reminded me of, and the black and white conversion are here. To get from one to the other I used the fairly obvious expedient of reducing luminosity in the blue and aqua channels and increasing it in the red, orange and yellow channels in lightroom and then adjusting overall exposure contrast black point etc.

  

The colour version feels unmistakeably British. The stone is a mellow red-orange, the blue is a nice saturated contrast, there’s no obvious glare – to me at any rate it reeks of temperate climate and summer. The b&w version, on the other hand, feels like hot climate, unremitting heat, glare and so on – so there is a quite different feel as a result of the conversion. The first version relies purely on hue for its effect as the saturation and luminosity are about the same (easily confirmed by temporarily converting to grey scale in PSE and measuring the density) – the second relies purely on luminosity. If it isn’t a strange distinction to make I would say that the colour version is more pleasing – but the b&w version is more interesting – in part because the surface textures are enhanced and, if you know what you’re looking for, it highlights the different stone dressing techniques that were employed.

There is the hint of an eye in the top right – I suspect the edge of an abutting roof or gutter – I may have to make a return trip in the summer to see if it’s practical to emphasise that aspect.

The next image I was reminded of by these two: Black Series and Deja Vu. The first of these set me trawling through all the window frames and door decorations that I had photographed when I made my book on Maryport, the second focussed my search to this one, which is nothing if not drab:

I had to work a bit harder to extract the image I was after from this one, but in the process I got a surprise result – it’s quite dramatic in minimal colour as well as b&w.To get the colour version I had to massively increase contrast in curves, push the black slider to 100% and increase exposure by 2.5 stops, it was then simply a case of Lightroom’s default conversion to get the b&w version.

  

The original, as noted above is just dull – I doubt it’s interesting enough to be worthy of a second glance. There’s not enough in it to give any real clue as to what it is, and little to attract the eye. I think the full b&w suffers a little from the same problem, although there are hints of detail in the black to suggest painting and hints of a 3-D structure at the base.

For me the minimal colour version is a significant improvement on both with hints of the colour field work of Rothko or Newman. Compared with the Gibson Deja Vu it clearly lacks the hint of narrative provided by the human presence, but is still intriguing enough to stand on its own.

I think where this is getting to is that it is not the large areas of dark or light that interest me in Gibson’s work, but the way in which his approach concentrate the eye on the detail. This would fit with some of the ‘profiling’ I’ve done at work, where it’s my interest in detail (although not my attention to it) and my ability to find patterns and connections that crops up regularly.

So for me the answer to my opening question is whichever provides me with the info I need to engage with the photo. In the first case, I’m more engaged with the b&w version – in the second the minimal colour. Nothing terribly insightful there I guess except that I’m becoming more and more interested in the potential of B&W to isolate patterns and detail.

Not sure how I weave any of this into the remaining assignments though :0(

Der Abend (inspired by Ralph Gibson)

1000/714: 03 Feb 2012: Die Abend (inspired by Ralph Gibson), a photo by nmonckton on Flickr.

I posted this on my photo-a-day blog but I feel it belongs here as well. Have been interested in Ralph Gibson ever since one of the tutors (thanks Clive) threw his name 'casually' into a conversation. He has a very distinctive signature style featuring very deep blacks and strong contrasts and I especially enjoy the graphic nature of his images and the way he plays with space and form. Interestingly, especially in view of the advice we usually receive, he also has a couple of mixed colour/b&w sets on his website, but even the colour sets are quite high in contrast and have the same focus on form and shape.

Anyway - to cut a long story short - I was having a good look around his website and came across a shot in Die Nacht which I liked so much I thought I'd have a stab at my own take. A couple of points – his shot was clearly of someone else's hand unless he had a cable release, and I struggled to get the range of skin tones that he managed – I suspect this may be down to the light source, which in my case was quite hard. In some ways I regret using a watch as the ‘object’ because it now feels too much like a copy – I think it could easily be brought up to date and retain the impact by using perhaps a smart phone or a PDA instead. However, in fairness to myself, it was a spur of the moment idea sparked by the website, and it’s worked better than I expected.

There are a couple of colour shots in my archive that I was reminded of while browsing his website, so I think I’m going to dig some out and compare them in colour and with this treatment to see how the impact varies. Somewhat unexpectedly I find that black and white is featuring more and more in my everyday photos and I’m hoping that this kind of contrasting of colour and b&w images will help me understand why – is it just the pleasure of the ‘new’ or is it something more fundamental?

In praise of lesser photography

Having posted the link on a previous post I have now had a good read of this little manifesto for simpler photography. As is often the case with American authored self help books it is full of home-spun wisdom and lashings of Mom’s apple pie, but tucked away inside is the core of an idea that rings true if you don’t wear it as a strait-jacket – that spending money on kit doesn’t improve your art and that the viewer doesn’t really care what kit you used.
It’s an interesting irony that in order to experience this for myself I ‘had’ to buy another camera, but I’m glad I did because it’s changed my thought processes to a degree. The camera was the Pen E-P1, which is small, fully controllable and equipped in my variant with a 17mm prime lens (35mm equivalent on a 35mm camera – the PEN has a four-thirds sensor). I still love my E-3, but it stays at home more frequently these days, because I enjoy the simplicity of a single focal length, and the portability of a small camera.
A single focal length makes you work, and think , harder. I think my photography has improved as a result. Using the same focal length again and again gives you a real understanding of what does and doesn’t work effectively. It also forces you to think about composition so that all your photos don’t come out the same. A slightly wide angle lens can make everything seem small and insignificant unless you work at it. You have to work a bit harder to give the subject some context:

Of course, you can also use it to ‘get everything in’ when that’s appropriate:

One thing I’ve not been convinced by is “zooming with your feet”. With a relatively wide lens on distortion soon creeps in and I’ve found it preferable, rather than attempting to fill the frame, to use composition to put the emphasis where you want it.




And adopting this approach has changed the way I use my ‘full-size’ kit as well. I used to take everything out with me – but now I tend to think ’Today I’ll go wide/standard/tele” and just take the appropriate zoom rather than all three.

Buildings in use – the natural world

There is an implicit assumption in Assignment 3 that buildings are man-made, which is fair enough in the context of the course, but misses a whole range of built structures which are not made by people. Even if we rule out grown structures such as shells and corals the ‘manufactured’ structures are often very ingenious (termite mounds), beautiful (spiders webs) or practical (birds nests) and all have been honed by evolution to be a very close fit to their intended function.

Now I’m not quite brave enough to submit a series of natural ‘built’ structures for Assignment 3, which seems to be one of the few places in this course, or any of the related courses, where we might submit natural history photography. However, it seems legit to add it to my blog so here we are.

House martins nests, in the unlikely event that you haven’t seen one, are shaped like a half-bowl, and built from gobbets of mud and saliva between the wall of a house and the eaves. They have a small entrance hole on the top edge and typically can house 2-3 chicks and a pair of adults (which must be quite cramped as the chicks reach full size). Most other birds find them difficult to enter – so nest stealing is not an issue, and most predators can’t get up the wall or over the edge of the roof so they are well protected from natural enemies and the weather. The rough surface makes it easy for the parents to cling to the outside of the nest while feeding the young.

In the context of this course I think the key features photographable from outside are:

• construction
• use as a feeding station for the young
• access arrangements and location

Hopefully these three shots capture those key points reasonably well. The first clearly shows the blobs of mud and the location (I do wonder if a little more context is needed for the eaves), the second shows the access arrangements and the manner in which the chicks are fed and the third specifically shows the access arrangement, with an adult leaving the nest.

  

Thoughts

The first thing I need to say is that this exercise (which I have tried on a number of occasions over a several summers) increase my respect for wildlife photographers immensely. The participants are living creatures not amenable to direction. I have taken (and deleted) dozens of failed photos attempting to catch the birds in the upward sweep towards the nest, both at high shutter speeds attempting to freeze the action, and at lower speeds for more ‘artistic blurs’. It is not a trivial exercise to capture more than fairly static shots of small fast moving creatures. Roll on next summer for another try.

The next thing that strikes me is that I do think it is a shame there are not more opportunities for this type of photography built into the course – even if I accept that I am sometimes too literal in interpreting the exercises and assignments. There is plenty of narrative potential in these pictures. I would have to accept that they are not particularly creative or original – but are they any less so than a lot of street photography for example?

And finally, these shots crystallise some thoughts I’ve been having about how I integrate my ‘personal’ photography with these courses – which must surely be the aim. There seems little point in paying all this money and expending all this effort if I end up with personal photography and degree photography. This, and future blogs, seem to be the showcase for this integration, while the ideas taken from the course, such as accent, and narrative and understanding the purpose of your photography all serve to make that photography more enjoyable and productive. I may even feel I’m getting somewhere – let’s hope the assessors agree.

Reflecting on Shiny Objects

Some time ago I took this shot for my photo-a-day blog and it’s intrigued me ever since. It appeals to my sense of humour – which is probably a bit self-indulgent given it’s a self portrait but I think that’s the joy of self portraits – I’m not attempting to portray someone I don’t really know, so there’s a bit of positive feedback to emphasise whatever part of my character I choose to display at that moment.

Hadn’t really given the idea much more thought other than I kept returning to the photo until last night when I produced this shot in a CD – again for my photo-a-day blog.

So now I had the germ of a series, a little odd perhaps, but definitely a series in the making. Just to prove it, here’s the shot I took for today’s blog post.

Not quite sure why these photos feel right yet. Might be the distortion, perhaps the simple pleasure of doing something a bit oddball or perhaps even the idea that I've hit on a series that says something about me (not sure what though). Whatever – I’m going to try a few more as the muse takes me and see if something other than simply reflection emerges from the series.

Edit 15 January:
Here's a slide show of the full series - I've done this continuously for a fortnight. Still not sure what it says about me but it's certainly an interesting challenge, and has received more interest on Flickr than anything I have previously posted.

The Church Car Park

I'm quite intrigued by low viewpoints and the panoramic format - somehow it seems to provide a different view on the world - in this instance almost voyeuristic, or perhaps as a spy. This set was taken by simply placing the camera on the floor by my rear car wheel - a technique which raised a few eyebrows among the congregation as they were leaving. The mist to the right of the shots is simply the exhaust from the car. I tried to balance the shutter speed to allow blur on the lights of the moving cars, while not causing the pedestrians to blur to invisibility. I think the conversion to high contrast black and white adds a sense of drama to the scene - I had this treatment in mind when I took the shots - it certainly does not look like church car park after the annual carol service. The anonymity of the figures adds to this sense - perhaps even becoming threatening.

Of the three shots I think that the first below is perhaps the most dramatic but that the latter two have perhaps more of a sense of narrative because of the increasing visibility of the people in the shot.

Naomi's Prom

Took these of my daughter in her prom dress in the middle of the year. I had intended to add them to the blog - but I clearly forgot. better late than never I guess.

They were all taken using a ring flash, which I was trying out as a light source - and because it gave the shots a bit of a 'fashion' feel which I thought would appeal to my youngest (I was right)

Could perhaps have used a bit more separation from the subject and a slightly longer lens for some of the shots, but there are a limited number of places I can shoot these types of shot indoors. Similarly I think a full height backdrop would have been a handy thing to have to lose the skirting boards in one of the shots.

My favourite shot is the first - with the deeper coloured background and the vignetting - which used a Lightroom pre-set called 'PH in the City' which I downloaded from somewhere. The shots follow the suggestion of my tutor to keep one of the eyes on the centre line – which was a rule I’d not encountered before but does seem to create a pleasing balance to a portrait.

A sense of place on my hard drive

Another trip into my archive – this time to practise some editing skills ahead of Assignment 4 – A Sense of Place.

I have thousands of photos of my hard-drive and one of the biggest sources is holiday photos – since 2004 I have seldom taken fewer than 500 photos in a one/two week break (these days it’s closer to 1000) and while they serve as a happy memory of those holidays I’ve never really tried to construct a meaningful mini-portfolio from any of them.

I sense that Assignments 4 and 5 will provide a large number of images and I thought it would be helpful to get a feel for the mental mechanics of assembling a ‘sense of place’ from a group of photos which were, often as not, an immediate reaction to my surroundings. The two sets I chose were of holidays in Ibiza and Fuerteventura – but what to say about them? – that’s the first question. They are both Spanish speaking/culture islands, in hot climates, with a lot of tourist activity, so how do I recall the differences?

In my memory Fuerteventura was very – and I mean very – hot. Some days with the breeze blowing it was like standing in a blast from a giant hairdryer. This was reflected in the landscape – lots of sand, barren rocks, limited vegetation and the occasional shadier village location providing fairly dramatic contrast to the general feel. Where we stayed there were also a number of fairly brash tourist strips.

Ibiza was also hot, but not as hot – there was more vegetation, the coastline was gentler and less barren, the colours richer. There were also more towns, and more people and busy market places. Although we travelled inland my lasting memories are of the coast and markets.

To me this is the key to the edit – starting with a clear idea of what I wanted to say about each place. This was especially important when it came to deciding whether or not to include my favourite holiday shots, because although they leap out at me as being worth including they aren’t about sense of place, they’re more about us as a family enjoying ourselves which is a different subject.

Initially I started with the formal first selects, second selects approach that  we developed in DPP but as I had already culled the technical failures and the majority of duplicates and I found very rapidly that I could reduce the list to 20 or so shots from each collection which stood out as matching the ideas I outlined above.

I struggled for people shots from the Fuerteventura set, simply because I didn’t take many and I also struggled to capture some of the barrenness of the interior because again I hadn’t taken many shots of the areas that looked like the surface of the moon – it was so hot I simply couldn’t be bothered to leave the comfort of the air conditioning in the hire car. Had I specifically been tasked to take these shots this would, of course, have been a different issue.

In the end I settled for the following 12 of Fuerteventura. They seem to me at least capture the sense of heat and the emptiness of the landscape, while at the same time showing some of the marked contrasts provided by the odd patch of vegetation and tourist activity.

Ibiza provided a different challenge as we spent rather more time in towns – so shots including people were not an issue whereas shots of the countryside/coast were a bit more sparse. In the end I went with a series which I think captures warmth , colour and liveliness which is a bit different from my initial recollections but seems to represent the place fairly well.

Concluding thoughts

It’s clearly important – faced with a collection of several hundred photos – to have an idea of what you hope to portray at the end of the edit. Equally, you have to be sensitive to what the photos are telling you where that differs from your memory. In assignments 4/5 this should be less of an issue as the idea and the execution are much closer together

PnP Ex 21: Making Figures Anonymous

1000/657: 30 Nov 2011: Home Again a photo by nmonckton on Flickr.

It just struck me that this - which has appeared as 1000/657 on my npmimages blog - is a good example of making people anonymous. The picture would be nothing without human presence, but if I included the full figure it would be a picture of a person in an armchair - the rucksack would lose much of it's impact and significance.

30th Wedding Anniversary Portrait

1000/662: 05 Dec 2011: 30th Wedding Anniversary a photo by nmonckton on Flickr.

Thought I would include this in my Learning Blog as I consciously tried to bring some of my learning - in terms of eye placement - to the photo. Overall I think it is one of my better portraits to date although I wish I'd spotted the interior of the card (bottom right) before IU pressed the shutter.

Place - Maryport

As this blog is about People and Place it suddenly occurred to me that the following is of relevance. Produced it a couple of years back as a personal reaction to Maryport. You wont find any people in it - as I observed in my previous post my photos have until recently been largely uninhabited - that's one of the reasons I took this course. Hopefully it provides a sense of place though.

Maryport: A Photographer's View Nigel Monckton by Nigel Monckton | Make Your Own Book