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 – part (ii)

Just a couple more shots from the weekend which seemed to draw on individual aspects of the course material. First up is ‘a comfortable situation’. Alnwick Castle has some magnificent gardens – chock full of people doing touristy things  - like taking photos – so a little bit of candid photography was easy. In this first one I was taken by the match between the colours of the flowers and the lady’s cagoule.

In the second I was drawn by the fairly striking architecture of the tea-room, but felt it was a bit sterile without people (figures as accent) so I tried this angle which aims to capture both the architecture, its scale and, to a lesser degree, its function.

To finish with - pictures of my wife, my daughter and myself drawing on various aspects of ‘people unaware’. First up my daughter:

Then my wife. The location is a tent and the light source is three candles on a tray.

Finally, me, in a fish and chip restaurant. And for the record after my last post – this shot was definitely fun.

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.

Photo anthologies

Not sure anthology is the right word, but I’m talking about collections of photos from a variety of photographers. I have three of these so thought I’d do a mini-review of each as a single post.

World Photography: Ed. Bryn Campbell 1981

This is an excellent collection if you can lay your hands on a copy (there are several on Amazon). It has a dozen photo portfolio from each of 25 of the biggest names in photography – Erwitt, Friedlander, Cartier-Bresson, Bailey, Meyerowitz, Brandt etc. together with an extensive essay featuring the works of a further couple of dozen.

The print quality, particularly for the black and whites, is excellent, and the size of the pages means that the photos are reproduced at a decent size. Plenty of highlights in a collection this big, but favourites include Erwitt’s dog photos, Burt Glinn’s photos of Japan and Brassai’s Paris photos.

Some of the photos are hard to look at – McCullin’s war photos are the most obvious example, but there are similar scattered through the book. In contrast some are just delightful – Hamaya’s photo of Japanese kids walking through the snow in straw snow coats is perhaps my favourite in the whole book although Cartier-Bresson’s little boy with a large bottle of wine in each arm runs it a close second.

Masters of Photography: Ed. Reuel Golden 2008

A much smaller book than the previous one although picture quality is still pretty good. This one contains small portfolios (4-6 photos each) representing around 50 rather more contemporary, but still ‘classic’ photographers, together with some short biographical notes. A few of the pictures are spoiled by being printed over two pages, but the book does contain some almost iconic images – Moonrise over Hernandez (Adams), some shots from Steve McCurry’s Monsoon series, and Migrant Mother (Lange) being obvious examples. The downside of books of this type is that you get very little feel for an overall style from the photographers, but that is set against the sheer range of material on display. I doubt I’d have come across the work of Bert Hardy without it for example, and Nick Knight’s ‘Susie Smoking’ was completely new to me, but is now one of my favourite photos.

The range of artists and the tie period covered also throws up some interesting contrasts and comparisons – for example the street photography of Doisneau or Atget  and Martin Parr, or the rather tawdry-feeling implicit sexuality of some Nan Goldin material with the rather glossy, sanitised Helmut Newton version. These kind of comparisons abound and make the book worth regular visits. It’s also quite a source of inspiration and ideas for development, or simply for playing with.

Art Photography Now: Susan Bright (Revised and Expanded 2011)

According to the blurb this book presents the work of 80 of the ‘most important and best loved artist-photographers in the world today’. Unlike the two above it is divided by broad subject area rather than photographer, and there is very little overlap in terms of photographers with those books – Sherman, Goldin and Gursky being the most obvious exceptions. The portraiture section is big on the ‘snap-shot’ ethic of modern practice – not intended as a denigration – merely a description. Tina Barney’s work is an excellent example of the contradiction this poses – with the work apparently being captured on a large format (4x5) camera, while retaining the feel of genuine family photos. The introduction to the Landscape section makes the following observation which had not really occurred to me before: “The complexities of landscape, which can at first seem the most straightforward of artistic genres, are not to be underestimated…..landscape photography offers the space to explore ever-present artistic and philosophical concerns about our place in the worlds.” The Gursky and Misrach examples provided are to my mind classic cases of those concerns. I was also taken by the New Opposition series from Doug Aitken – something to explore in Landscape 2.

There were further sections on Object, Narrative, Document, FAshion, City and Transitions, all of which are worth exploring – although I’ve concentrated here on the two sections which seemed to have most relevance for this module.

Summary

It’s clearly difficult to do real justice to the work of any photographer in no more than a dozen shots, and no matter how good the reproduction it is not always possible to get the true impact of an image in book format (Holdsworth’s Iceland shots in Art photography Now are a good case in point). However, if, like me, you live in a relatively remote country area where a visit to a gallery is a full day’s outing, this type of collection is something of a life-line, as valuable as tracking down a photographers website, and one of the few ways to get a reasonably structured insight into the relationship between photographers and their practises.

Assessment in the post

Title says it all – everything I can think of has now gone off for the July assessment.

Time to pull my finger out…

..as I’ve just received confirmation of my place in the July Assessment event.

Think I’ve decided to go for a CD submission of my assignments supported by selected prints from each. My blog will be supported by a clippings file and a written log book this time as well (although the latter is a little less padded than it could be because I cottoned on to its value a bit late in the day).

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.