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.

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(

Ancient Eye Placement Principles

In his feedback for my first assignment my tutor noted that it is conventional practise to place the right corner of the eye on the midpoint of the photo. While I agree that this produces a pleasing result I couldn’t help but wonder where this particular ‘rule’ comes from.

Scratching about on the internet produced the following research paper from Christopher Tyler – a visual psychophyicist – whatever that is.

Ancient Eye Placement Principles

The basic conclusion of the paper is that off centring the head so that the artist achieves central eye-placement is a feature classical portraiture over the last two millennia in spite of the fact that eye placement is almost never mentioned in compositional discussion or texts.

The suggestion is then made that there is a subconscious reason for this being the preferred placement, and that other placements are associated with negative qualities in the subject.

I note that Wikipedia refers to the eye-placement theory as controversial and I can certainly see that, from the evidence in the paper, the experimental method might be open to challenge, as might the association with classical Greek and Roman culture (does Japanese or other East Asian art follow the same idea for example?). However the basic idea that we are ‘programmed’ to find some eye placements more pleasing has interesting resonances with the idea of the Golden Mean – even if the maths does not quite align in the two ideas.

PnP1: Ex 3: Thinking about lighting (i)

The aim of this exercise seems to be to consider the effect of various lighting schemes on a portrait. May have to complete this in batches as the weather is not being particularly kind.
As noted in the previous entry, I’ve decided to go with a series of self-portraits in this exercise.
First up is a shot which follows on from this experiment on my personal blog:

It is lit by torchlight from below and the colour balance adjusted in Lightroom to remove the pronounced orange cast. As expected it has a sort of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ feel to it. The rather focussed light casts dramatic, but unflattering shadows from a strange angle, and there is a spot which is nearly burned out under the chin. The overall effect is unsettling and less than flattering.
By contrast – this version is lit with a relatively large light source from the side. This time I used the light from the lcd monitor on the household computer:

The strong side-lighting produces deep shadows on the unlit side of the face, but the bright highlight in the dark eye draws attention to the eyes, and together with the light on the cheekbone provides enough detail to allow us to see the whole face. The photo has a late-night feel to it – perhaps even a sense of mystery. Edit: EileenR on Flickr suggested I should try this as a B/W, which I have done here
The next shot from this group uses an on-camera flashgun bounced from the ceiling:

The illumination is much more even in this photo but the overhead lighting has placed quite deep shadows in the eye sockets and under the facial details This, coupled with my rather sombre expression creates a rather down-beat image which to my mind lacks the visual impact of the previous two, even though the lighting produces a more accurate likeness of my features.
The final shot in this group uses on-camera flash in the same position, but this time angled upwards and away from the subject to bounce from the wall and ceiling on the right of the photo:

This shot needed lightening in Lightroom, perhaps because of the relatively low power of the flash. The lighting is much more uniform, with reasonable detail in the eyes and far fewer unflattering shadows than the previous version. Must remember to look as though I’m enjoying myself though. To be honest this seems the most boring of the indoor shots presented here, lacking in sparkle or interest.
The rest of this exercise and the conclusions will be uploaded in a separate post.

10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits

Some interesting ideas here that could well provide some inspiration for later in this course.

10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits