Winter Serendipity

Golden Seedheads, 2010

I should think that there will be many photographs over the next few days that will exhibit the shiny head syndrome. This is what my daughters call flash lit photographs, often taken on small compact cameras. Light from the flash flies across the room, is bounced of a sweaty forehead and straight back into the lens of the camera. Instant glowing head (if you are lucky you might get red glowing alien eyes too). Probably not quite most people want and one of the main reasons why photographers use flashguns with tilting heads.

Even though direct flash can be very unflattering for people, it can work amazing well for inanimate objects such as these seedheads, taken three years ago in one of the nearby allotments. Here the slight damp of the seedheads and the directness of the flash have conspired to give a golden sheen that was pure serendipity. I expected the flash to make the plant look more attractive, but really had not expected this magic gilding to appear. I’ve since found that direct flash on-camera usually works better for plants and grasses than more considered off-camera lighting setups, and I’ll write about that in a future post. 

But for now I’d like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and hope that you have a good break.

Instagrab

There is, as they say, no such thing as a free lunch. Instagram’s announcement this week was the equivalent of asking you around for lunch then letting slip after the main course that they were going to sell your coat to pay for the meal.

One thing that happens with computing or tech is that critical mass soon swells over into dominant if not monopolistic mass. Despite several pretenders to the throne twenty years ago, Microsoft Office is the only office suite that anyone uses these days. Photoshop dominates image editing; likewise Mathcad for scientific modelling, and the same is true in every discipline and niche. These long established, pre-internet programs got to where they are by different technical and marketing routes, but all share one feature in common; they are paid for in cash. Functionality, compatibility, reliability are all key factors. Now we live in a world where much of the functionality and data in computing resides in remote unknown servers somewhere on the internet. The only way these online applications and services can get established and dislodge the incumbent program is when they are offered ‘free’ or at no financial cost. Generally, what the service providers want from us the users is volume; lots and lots of users, in exchange for the opportunity to advertise to a captive market. The more clever providers, like Google and Amazon, also seek some data that allows them to create more accurately targeted, more qualified leads for a range of goods and services.

For me, the exchange with Google is a fair one; they have a profile of me; my demographic, my tastes and interests. In exchange I get access to free email, free blogging and a host of utilities that I use all the time, the pre-eminent one being search. The advertising I have to put up with is largely not intrusive and sometimes even useful. The terms and conditions seem OK to me.

Instagram is a photosharing web service, built onto the back of an image editing app for smartphones. In today’s brave new world of photography, it has become easier to post and share photos than it is to write messages. No wonder the social media players were interested in the Instagram phenomenon. Facebook famously bought Instagram for an amazing $1bn earlier this year. At first, it looked like the asset they were buying was the Instagram user base, and the photo sharing utility. But now it is clear that they want to have the right to use the images, and the associated metadata how they see fit. Would we use Office if Microsoft could use any document created on it – letters, manuscripts, legal documents, novels? Would the aircraft and car manufacturers be happy if their designs could be sold by the people who write their CAD software? Most of the images on Instagram will be personal pictures; people sharing photos of their life with friends and families. For some others the pictures will be more considered pictures with a potential commercial value for the author. Is it fair for Instagram to exploit their users’ pictures for their profit? I can’t imagine who would find that acceptable.

Almost as worrying is their claim to the metadata. Most smartphones will tag photos with GPS data and face recognition. Even if you don’t want your photographs on Instagram, it is quite likely that images of you and your family could be posted by others and thus sold on to third parties. Your locations, friendships and behaviours will be up for grabs. If they are happy to use you photos, what guarantees do we have over their use of metadata?

I feel very uncomfortable about social media websites. Although I have a Facebook page and a LinkedIn account I don’t use them. I opened both at the behest of others, and I don’t like what I see. I don’t like the way you can be stalked. I don’t like the whole liking and recommending thing. None of it feels very social to me. As I am one of the few people left without a smartphone, I don’t have Instagram. Judging by the outcry in the media, many people will be leaving Instagram. No doubt Facebook and Instagram will retrench and try to reassure their users, but the cat is out the bag, as they say. 

You get what you pay for. Caveat Emptor.

Focussing on Details

Along the Oxdrove, #1

We are being treated to some fine, bright and mild weather at the moment. This Sunday just past dawned bright and fine, so I took off towards the Oxdrove near Northington to the east of Winchester to take some pictures. In visual terms is not a particularly interesting place to visit; long vistas of gentling rolling countryside, and fairly nondescript paths, but it is relatively high and bright, and I felt in need of a good dose of sunshine.

Along the Oxdrove, #2

The most appealing features on the walk were the bleached leafless branches of some of the younger saplings. Once again I concentrated on using the 20mm prime for my G3, separating various planes of interest in the images by using the shallow focus possible from this lens. I scarcely need to say that it is always important to pay attention to the background on any picture, and it was my intention with these pictures to have softly drawn stems that echoed crisply focussed elements in the foreground. 

I was reminded how far modern cameras have developed of the past few years. It is so much easier, more interactive, using digital cameras for this type of work. Even with depth of field preview levers, it was largely a game of luck trying to work on shallow focus images using film cameras. I’m now wondering how I might extend narrow depth of field working to the creation of joiners.

Along the Oxdrove, #3

I had always found it difficult to control the focussing on small details when using the 20mm Lumix lens, finding that the camera would usually focus on the background when my intention was the thin near-field detail, such as branches and leaves. In the past month I’ve given a couple of lectures, and in one discussion during the interval a member of the audience told me of how useful he had found the pin-point focus mode on his G3. This has proven to be a very useful tip, and I now find that by using this mode I can now quickly get the focus I wish when using this lens. On Sunday I was using it all the time.  

Along the Oxdrove, #4

Focussing was one of the main issues for me when I decided to move away from a DSLR to a mirrorless system camera. DSLRs, with their separate AF sensor are always prone to alignment tolerances, and there were many times when I could not focus accurate at close distances with my previous camera. Apparently this is still a problem even on some very expensive new full-frame cameras. Because the autofocus works directly from the image sensor on mirrorless cameras, the focus is always correct. Added to that, the whole process of touching anywhere on the monitor to set the focus is so intuitive and so quick on the G3. The focus modes, such as pin-point, subject tracking and face recognition are not gimmicks, but useful practical tools that work to help you get the picture much more reliably than was possible just a few years ago. Some progress is real progress.

Prime Numbers

In my camera bag, 20 and 45 are prime numbers. Or to be more precise, I have two fixed focal length prime lenses of 20mm and 45mm. These are my prime lenses in terms of use and choice too; I use these two lenses in preference to the standard zoom that came with the camera. I also know that any new lens I might buy in the future will not get the same level of use as these two lenses, which helps me resist doing further damage to the bank account.

New hedge near Corhampton, #1

The two lenses I’m talking about are the Panasonic Lumix 20mm/f1.7 standard lens and the Olympus 45mm/f1.8 short telephoto. When I bought my Lumix G3, one of the big attractions of the m43 system was the availability of these highly praised lenses. You can find plenty of reviews on the web about how excellent these lenses are and they are all true. Both are very sharp, very bright and very light, and fortunately, reasonably priced. And they both share the same trump card; they are both excellent when used at full aperture.  It is this quality, which allows one to create sharply drawn detail against a softly rendered background that makes these lenses so appealing.

New hedge near Corhampton, #2 © Graham Dew 2012

The 20 was the first lens that I got. A pancake lens, much wider than it is long, it gives the camera a very low profile which just about allows one the opportunity to put the camera into a pouch. It weighs next to nothing, and allows you to tuck the camera under your arm discretely. Optically it is very clear and sharp, no visible distortion. The great appeal of this lens is that it can truly be used wide open, with pleasing depth of field drop depending on the closeness of the subject. If you need more depth of field, commonly when focussing on nearby object, you can always dial in more depth by setting the aperture smaller. Optically, the lens is very good indeed. The tonality, sharpness, and transition from sharp to blurred is as good as you could wish for. The only thing I would really like to improve is the focussing. Many of my pictures are of objects close-up. If the object is small or thin, then the AF has trouble focussing. The lens will hunt from near to far, often passing through the chosen point of focus. As the focus is quite slow (slower than the kit zoom) this can take some time. When this happens I switch to using the pin-point mode of the G3, which usually helps to find the focus. Overall, it’s a great lens and one I grow to enjoy more and more. It is now my normal lens, the one lens I'll take if I'm limiting myself to the minimum gear.

New hedge near Corhampton, #3

The 45mm is the same but different. Again, it has very high image quality, can be used wide open too and is also very small and light. But the depth of field effects are even stronger as one would expect from a longer focal length. This Olympus lens is much faster at focussing than the Panasonic lens and always seems to lock onto the desired object quickly snapping into focus. Its shape is different too. The barrel of the lens is smaller than any other lens I have owned, even smaller than the lens mount. It just feels tiny in the hand and on the camera. Like the Lumix the barrel construction is plastic, but silver finished as opposed to the gunmetal colour of the Lumix.

New hedge near Corhampton, #4

The only control on either of the lenses is the manual focus ring; something I rarely use. For hand held close up work you really want to take the picture as soon as the focus is achieved, and this is best done with AF. Neither of the lenses have image stabilisation. When used at large apertures the shutter speed stays high in a wide range of uses so this is not often an issue, especially coupled with the clean images I get from the G3 at high ISOs.

New hedge near Corhampton, #5

As I mentioned in the first ever post on Joined Up Pictures, I’m really interested in depiction and the way we perceive things, how we turn three-dimensional space into a flat 2D image. When there is a lot to be seen, joiners have a special appeal, allowing an image to be built from multiple viewpoints and memories. But there are times when one looks with a focused gaze on a single object, usually something in the near-field, and these lenses do a good job in replicating that experience. When making near-field pictures control of the background is every bit as important as the main subject. Position, lighting and colour are all important aspects of making such an image, but the ability to soften the background through out-of-focus blur is probably one of the most effective ways to de-emphasise the surroundings.

Joiners might be considered to be a quite radical manipulation of images, but other than making joiners and performing tonal adjustments, I really don’t like modifying images in software. I prefer to make the image in-camera, using the lens and shutter for control of blur. The camera lens behaves like our eye, so focus and blurring only have believable three-dimensionality when done in camera. In fact, the Lumix 20mm has a focal length and field of view that almost exactly matches the human eye, perhaps making it the most natural of any lens available today.

New hedge near Corhampton, #6

I’m really pleased with both of these lenses and recommend them to anyone using m43 camera. The 20 is a very nice lens for photographing things, the 45 for people. The other day I came across a brochure from the late 80s for the Leica M6, a camera that I would have loved to own at the time. At the back of the brochure it suggested a few kits of bodies and lenses for a number of purposes. The small kit recommended for travel and street shooting was an M6 body with a 35mm & a 90mm lens. A quarter of a century later I still can’t afford a Leica, but have arrived at their recommendation of focal lengths.

Michael Kenna: Images of the Seventh Day

Back in the 80’s Camera magazine that was, for me at least, a compulsory purchase. As its name suggests, it carried a camera review or two, and usually a technique section. The one thing it excelled at though was the presentation of portfolios, usually from an acknowledged master of the craft, an up-and-coming star and a talented non-professional. It was here that I first saw the mesmerizing night-time images from Michael Kenna, as the ‘rising star’ portfolio. Shortly after I bought a slim softback copy of Night Walk, a collection of nocturnal images shot on 35mm film. Since then, Kenna’s star has continued to rise, to the point that he is one of today’s undoubted masters, and a feature on Michael Kenna will always be the main billing in any journal.

Bill Brandt's Snicket, Halifax, England 1986 © Michael Kenna

Today, Kenna’s bibliography is longer than most photographers, and each new addition to the library is eagerly snapped up by avid collectors. To date, his principal publisher, Nazraeli, has produced two major retrospectives of his work, in 1991 & 2004. Images of the Seventh Day is a catalogue to accompany an exhibition of Kenna’s work held in Reggio Emilia, Italy in 2010. As such it makes a new retrospective that includes many of his most famous images from the past as well as some of the best of his most recent work. In some ways, the composition of the book is like one of those ‘Best of’ CD compilations, where the collection of old favourites is fleshed out with a few new tracks in an attempt to make the completist fan purchase the new product. In the case of this book, it looks like Kenna has taken a commission of the area of Reggio Emilia in Italy and this has been appended to the ‘retrospective’ section. No matter, the new Italian pictures are very beautiful and well worth seeing.

Light over Dinard, St Malo, Brittany, France 1993 © Michael Kenna

The book is beautifully printed in duotone and the images are rich, clear and show the work well. The layout is appealing and well paced, from large single images to small multiple images on the page. In all the layout of the pictures is excellent and it is a joy to read through the book. The images are of course, classic Kenna. Always beautiful, simple clean geometries, often wide angle, often long time exposure, and since about 1987 always square format and always monochrome. His style and approach has been widely copied and imitated to the point that it has almost became a cliché, such as jetties and piers stretching out into smooth blurred water at night. To my eyes there is something about the simplicity and elegance to Kenna’s work that elevates it above the other pretenders. The book covers many of his key projects – Early British power stations, French formal gardens, the Rouge Steel works, Easter Island, Japan in winter, lace makers. Some projects are missing, such as the series on Concentration Camps for example. But overall, this is a comprehensive compendium of Kenna’s work and is very enjoyable.

Island Shrine, Taisha, Honshu, Japan 2001 © Michael Kenna

The one area in which the book does fall down however is the accompanying text. There are three essays which are meant to illuminate the images, but all fail to do so. Originally written in Italian, the text is terribly translated, appears to be pretentiously arty-farty, and is completely indecipherable. I gave up on all three essays; my time was better spent looking at the images, which in contrast are clear, lucid and intelligible.

I would recommend this book to anyone who admires the work of Michael Kenna but does not have many of his previous tomes. Kenna’s books are usually quite expensive and sell out quite quickly, so at a around £30 currently available from Amazon and Beyond Words, this is a book that you should get before the opportunity is lost.

Lessons Learnt

On the southern reaches of the city of Winchester lies the rather lovely church of St Cross. It has set of very attractive almshouses attached to it. I’m not sure if they still receive pilgrims and offer them shelter on their journeys, but there are a good number elderly residents who have their home there. It must be a very charming place to stay, located near to the river Itchen with views to St Catherine’s Hill beyond.
 

St Cross 2, November 2012

When creating joiners or still movies, I find it almost essential to have a reasonably clear idea of where I want to shoot and how I’m going to tackle the picture making. It helps to know where you need to go, how you might start to collect material for the image, which lens to use, and some idea how the final composition will be put together. All of these are good starting points, but sometimes the outcome is rather different to plan.

I had originally hoped to make a composition that took in a tree-lined path that runs to the east of the church, and included the church to one side. In this way I hoped to create an image of the church, almshouses and path that I’m sure many people have in their memory, but can’t actually be seen from a single viewpoint. I shot the material, but when I came to compose the picture in Lightroom I found that I had not really collected the right constituent pictures that were needed. 

St Cross 1, November 2012

As you can see, the finished joiner is effectively two separate images. The cells for the church and the cells for the path and trees work well enough. But I did not capture enough linking frames of the ends of branches, and have ended up with an uncomfortably sharp boundary to the trees. I also felt that the church was not sufficiently large enough in the frame, so maybe I should have walk closer or used a more powerful telephoto (which I don’t currently have).

Once I felt that I was through with the shooting of frames for this joiner I then walked up closer to start photographing the frames for the joiner that you see at the top of the post. Dealing with the flat distant planes of a building is much easier than tree branches in the foreground, and I quickly built up an image that looked in and around the church and almshouses.

So what were the lessons learned? Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

 

Rainy Day Blues. And Browns. And Greens

Rainy Day Colours – pots

It's been raining continuously today. The roof needs fixing. I’m tired, my body is aching and I can’t concentrate. But the colours are lovely even if seen through a glass wetly.

Rainy Day Colours – leaves on patio

Rainy Day Colours – leaves on the vegetable plot

End of Autumn

Autumn Colour 1, November 2012

Day break this morning was greeted by clear skies and a fair frost. Only a few trees now have their leaves, so I made an effort to get out and photograph the last remaining foliage before it is all gone. Usually the trees are bare by the end of November and then the land is bald and beached until early March.  

Autumn Colour 2, November 2012

I guess I should have tried to make a joiner of two but I have not been feeling too well recently so it was just a question of trying a few ideas out and concentrating on some near-field pictures. So sticking to familiar techniques and compositions, taken in relatively new locations (for me) around town.

Autumn Colour 3, November 2012

Quite a few of the pictures were taken on the Olympus 45/1.8lens, which is a real joy to use with my G3. I bought this lens to use wide open which is what I do most of the time, the only exceptions being when the light is very bright and I need to get the shutter below 1/4000, or when I know I’m going to need a bit more depth when used close up.

Autumn Colour 4, November 2012

Winchester Cathedral

Winchester Cathedral, June2012

Following on from the Orbit post, this joiner of Winchester Cathedral was originally shot with the intention of compiling the image as a multi-layered panograph. I deliberately took many shots angling the camera clockwise and anti-clockwise from the horizontal to give a lively feel to the final image. I had started to create a panograph in Photoshop, but this was very time consuming placing and turning the individual cells, especially once the file size started to become large. The composite rapidly grew to around 2GB and ended up lying around for several months unfinished because I didn’t have the time to complete it. But recently I’ve found Lightroom a much faster tool for creating joiners, and so I wondered if the material shot of the cathedral could be used successfully for a joiner. I’m pretty pleased with the result, and it’s surprising how well a joiner can hold up even with poorly placed horizons and verticals.

There are a couple of things about this picture that might be of interest. Firstly, this picture was shot very close to midsummer’s day in June this year. Naturally, all churches and cathedrals in this country face east, but the best views of Winchester Cathedral are from the north-west. For most of the year, and for most of the day, this view is in shade and the sun makes the sky uncontrollably bright. However, at the height of midsummer, the sun sets a few degrees north of west and so for about an hour before sunset the sun illuminates the cream stone and makes glow a lovely orange. So the time was set, the other part of the problem was to capture the as much of the cathedral as I could. All around the cathedral yard there are many trees that obscure the view. To take the component photos I needed to walk around the cathedral grounds, capturing clean lines of sight of the building and then moving onto the next available view. In this way I was able to build up a comprehensive view of the cathedral, even if the final composite made the building look more of a Frank Gehry design than an 11th century Norman masterpiece.

Orbit

Orbit Panograph, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, 2012 © Graham Dew

With the first heavy frosts of winter arriving this week it’s easy to forget that the London Olympics and Paralympics finished only a couple of months ago. For a few glorious weeks, the rain stopped and the country came together to cheer on the athletes of the world and enjoy the spectacle. Every time the Olympics come up in conversation, the abiding memory everyone shares is how good it was; how everything worked and worked well, and how much joy it brought to our country. There has been much said about the legacy of the games, of how the facilities and infrastructure will be of benefit in the future and how British sport has benefitted from the games. I hope one aspect of the legacy is that we will remember that Britain is a great place to live and that we can still achieve great things.

There was a fair amount of scepticism before the Olympics, including the sculpture/edifice/tower that is the Orbit. Designed by Anish Kapoor, this idiosyncratic structure suddenly seemed to fit into the rest of the Olympic landscape once the games were underway. Its twisting nature is easily seen from below but is best appreciated when walking down the spiral staircase when exiting the viewing platform at the top. It’s a fun, slightly ridiculous folly and so I thought I would try to reflect that in the way I photographed it.

Inspired by the energetic panographies of Mareen Fischinger I decided I would create an image made of many overlapping cells. With scarcely any vertical or horizontal lines in the Orbit, it seemed appropriate to turn the camera 45° and use square cells. I should have switched on the gridlines in my camera, because I managed to hold it at about 40° throughout the whole of the sequence of shots. At least I was consistent!

I have used transparency for all of the cells (set at 70%) to give some bleed through of overlapping cells. This means that the image needed to composited in Photoshop as the print module in Lightroom does not allow transparency of images. By pre-processing the cells down to 600 pixels square I managed to keep the overall file size down to realistic levels, but if LOCOG would like to buy a giant version I will be very happy to create a high resolution version…

Leaf Fall

Autumn Leaves, Winchester Cathedral Yard, 2011

We have seen a lot of leaf fall in the past few days in Winchester. Recent strong winds and heavy rain have shaken the foliage down and many trees are now leafless, showing their delicacy and structure once again. It is all rather lovely, and gives us an excuse to get outside and get some exercise clearing away the debris. Many paths in the countryside have a good covering of colourful leaves too. The world is indeed mud luscious and puddle wonderful, and will probably stay that way until spring time.

Making Joiners in Lightroom

In my Mother’s Garden, Autumn 2011

I’ve recently had some unexpected time at home which has given me the opportunity to catch up on a few joiners that I had shot in the past but never found the time to finish off as completed images. Up until this summer I used Photoshop to build my joiners which has worked well enough, but does place rather heavy demands on the computer in terms of disk, RAM & processor performance. But increasingly, I’ve been experimenting with Lightroom, and now have a pretty reliable alternative way of building still movies. This newer method centres around the use of the Print module, which allows me to build and re-edit multi-cell images with very little in the way of computer resources. Lightroom is a parametric, metadata driven editing system unlike most others including Photoshop, which work on pixel by pixel editing. The upshot of this is that the final size of the completed joiner does not have to be considered until the very end of the project. Very high resolution, very large print size images can be prepared as easily as small web based output; they just take a little longer to be processed. 

Crucially, since the arrival of Lightroom 4 I can now save my print layouts and revisit them at any time, unlike in Lightroom 3. There are some weaknesses in the method; I would dearly love to be able to zoom into the display in the print module, and it would be great if I could use the Develop module functionality whilst still displaying the Print module view. But overall, using Lightroom is a much quicker and freer way of constructing joiners than using Photoshop.

Lightroom became my editor of choice about a year ago. Prior to that I was using Photoshop but rarely left Camera Raw when editing my pictures, so the transition to Lightroom was fairly easy and obvious.

The picture above is made up of photos taken a year ago on my LX3 compact. I wish I had found time to put it together sooner as I’m quite pleased with the result. The individual cells were taken with the lens set at a focal length equivalent to 60mm in 35mm film terms.  If I were to reshoot in the future I would probably use the G3/Olympus 45 combination which would give small cell sizes, but I think the picture holds together well with only four cells height. It reminds me that pictures can be made whatever the weather; blue skies and bright sunshine are not a pre-requisite for a a successful image.

In my Mother’s Garden, as Seen Through the Bathroom Window, Autumn 2011

Making Joiners in Photoshop

About a year ago my Arena friend Tony Worobiec approached me to write an article about creating joiners in Photoshop. Tony is the prolific author of many photography technique books for the publishers David & Charles. This series of books have sold very well, both at home and abroad, and have been translated into other languages. The latest volume Creative Photography Ideas Using Adobe Photoshop is now available, and my piece is one of the final chapters in the book warranting four pages to itself, which is rather nice. I’ve not yet seen the book other than a proof of my chapter, but I expect that it will follow Tony’s usual clear prose and the publisher’s clean layout as in previous titles.

The example described in the text uses the Spring Trees image which I created in Spring 2011 and have written about previously. It’s interesting to see that the designers chose to run an intermediate edit as the largest reproduction and the final edit at a smaller size. I’m not precious about these things; maybe the larger version has a better appeal.

Although the book has a publication date of 30^th November it is currently on sale at Amazon, where you also get a small preview by clicking on the Look Inside feature. In fact, if you do this you may be able to read my article as this was one of the preview chapters when I last looked.

It was quite strange seeing this on Amazon recently, because although I’m happy to stand by the method outlined in the book for Photoshop users, I now prefer to create my joiners in Lightroom. But that’s the subject of another post, or maybe a commission?

Looking at Still Films

In Mexico © Noel Myles

I spent a very enjoyable evening last Thursday at the PV of Noel Myles' new exhibition Paradise which has just opened at the Alison Richards Building on the Sedgwick site of Cambridge University. As ever, it was worth the trip to see Noel’s wonderful images up close, to catch up with Noel himself, and this time to be able to share the experience with my daughter who is currently studying at the university.

I’ve written before about Noel’s work and have to admit I am a very big fan of his work. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about his pictures is the length of time you can be engaged in his still films. Conventional photographs can be seen very quickly. It is a difficult task to create a photo that has many visual layers or interconnections that can hold the viewer’s attention. We tend to see the image, accept the truth of the photo and quickly assimilate the key points, and discard the unwanted information, just as we do when looking at the real world. To lift a photo out of the ordinary we can try a number of different ploys – an unusual angle, reflections, depth of field effects, dramatic lighting, a particularly interesting subject or really elegant composition.

Olive Grove No 3 © Noel Myles

I would suggest that hand created images – paintings, drawings, etchings, often engender a longer inspection, because we know the image is an abstraction. Every line, mark or brush stroke was placed there by the artist for some reason. We look, we wonder, we interpret, we spent time with the picture.

Along the Stour Valley © Noel Myles

With still films or joiners, each cell has been placed there too by the artist. We can’t see the whole picture in one go, so we spend time trying to piece together the story. Each individual cell is a photo, loaded with information which suddenly needs more careful observation than it would do in isolation. Each taken at a different time and place, build up a visual memory of the piece, we see patches where the cells join up and we start to see the whole picture.

Suffolk winter © Noel Myles

Another interesting phenomenon is the way in which the eye moves across the pictures. I find that I will scan the whole still film in different ways each time I look at it; across this row first and then down that column one time, then a completely different route the next time. It is like looking a strip of movie film that is continually being chopped up and re-edited into a new sequence on every subsequent view. The story is told slightly different on each viewing.

Noel Myles has been developing this work for decades now. His pictures are pictures are so fascinating not only for the overall compositions he creates, but also because of the dialogue that he builds into adjacent cells to create an overall narrative. I strongly recommend that if you are in Cambridge any time before Christmas, give yourself a good hour or so to go over to see Noel’s exhibition. And maybe get yourself a very nice Christmas present.

Paradise - an exhibition by Noel Myles, is on display at the Alison Richard Building Friday 12 October to Thursday 20 December

Ger Dekkers: Postcards From Holland

Dike and field with last snow, Holland 1996 © Ger Dekkers

A few years ago we spent a very enjoyable autumn half term with the family staying in an apartment at The Hague in the Netherlands. During our visit we visited FOAM, the Dutch photo museum to see an excellent exhibition of early Hungarian photos by Kertesz, Martin Munkácsi, Moholy-Nagy and others. In the bookshop I came across some intriguing postcards by Dutch landscape photographer Ger Dekkers. I was immediately struck by the geometry of his work, and bought a few.

 

Dekkers works in carefully orchestrated sequences of pictures, and has two basic approaches. The first is a linear sequence of pictures taken from different, sequential, viewpoints. As we all know from our geography lessons the Netherlands is a highly populated country, so when travelling on back roads through the countryside the hand of man is everywhere to be seen. Fields are carefully manicured and well-tended, often lined with trees and fences. Because the land is so flat, most field boundaries, hedges, stands of trees following straight lines, designed by man. As you travel through the landscape recurrent patterns appear, disappear and reappear. To me, this felt rhythmic and reassuring rather repetitive and boring as you find in larger lands. As you watch the unfolding scene you see that there is no definitive viewpoint, no decisive moment that encapsulates the view. Rather, there are many points that are equally acceptable. Dekkers’ work plays with this concept of views in transit by creating a sequence of five to seven pictures taken from a series of points that describe a similar view. The baseline concept is to place distant landmarks (farmhouses, the horizon) in exactly the same position in each frame, whilst using strong graphical entities (plough lines, stands of trees) to move through subsequent frames. Dekker uses a medium format camera frequently with a widish lens to further emphasise convergent lines.

 

Cycle-track, near Dronten, Holland 1998 © Ger Dekkers

The results are interesting. Because of their linear arrangement the pictures can read as set of very large frames from a movie, giving a dynamic cinematic feel to the resulting set. Individually the pictures are rigorously framed, well lit and attractive enough as images in their own right. Together they often work together to create a pattern en masse. At times he creates an interesting faux-panoramic effect because the sequence looks wide, but the movement around the distant centre of focus is actually quite small. The overall impression is of travelling through the landscape, of building up a visual memory from several viewpoints, to get a better understanding of the subject and the space surrounding it.

 

His second approach is to stand at a fixed viewpoint and slightly vary the direction of view and hence the framing of the scene. The intention here seems to be to create a pleasing or interesting geometric pattern within a 3×3 grid. Dekkers creates a pattern that shows increasing variation diagonally from top left cell to bottom right. It would appear that the ploy adopted by Dekkers was to successively pan the camera downwards in equal increments and then place these left to right in successive rows running top to bottom. Whilst I prefer the narrative of his linear compositions, these grid patterns work, again, by repetition and reinforcement, this time achieved by multiple framings. The linear sequences are ideally suited to regular geometry, but the grid method would work with any subject.

Breakwater, Pietersbierum, Holland 1996 © Ger Dekkers

These three postcards from Holland have been niggling away at the back of my mind for some time now, so I’ve tried researching Dekkers’ work to understand more about his work, methods and ideas. Dekkers is now 83, and judging from the lack of information about him on the web, no longer an active photographer. He has no website, no entry in Wikipedia and at first the only mentions I could find about him were mainly from secondhand and rare book dealers, and a few art listings that gave little more information other than his age and nationality. I have one book in my little library that mentions his work, but with very little useful information. So I decided to buy a book though Abebooks. I ended up with a very slim catalogue Landscape Perspectives from an exhibition held in 1976, bought from a bookshop in Essex - the only volume of his work that was available in the UK. Although the printing is rather poor and the paper discoloured, it does give a fascinating glimpse in to the work of a man, whose work was quite well known in its day, judging by the quality of the museums that showed his work, and the number of books that bore his name. 

After a bit more rooting around on the internet I did eventually find one good resource about Dekkers and his work at Depth of Field. Google Translate makes a reasonable fist of translating this resource from the Dutch original, and shows that his work was given some very high profile displays, including very innovative large format slide projections in the 70s. In addition to describing his working methods, it talks about his fascination with the new territories created in the post-war polders. The main framework of his imagery was the creation of this new, man-made land, and his work resonated with Dutch in their pride of their national achievement.

Although some of his images are still available as postcards and posters in Holland, there seems very little opportunity today to see any of his work well reproduced. Which is a great shame; much of his work still looks and feels modern, and makes a refreshing change from much of the conceptual and experimental work that gets the attention of curators these days.

Pictures at an Exhibition

Caught Feather, 2011

I will have a small selection of my photographs on display as part of the Arena Photographers exhibition held in the Gallery at Salisbury Library. The show runs from October 6^th through to 27^th, with a private view held on Friday 5^th 18:00 – 20:00. Please come along if you can.

Sunset Dandelion, 2010

We have enjoyed a good relationship with the library who have regularly give us the opportunity to display our work every couple of years. Hopefully we continue to deliver a good range of images that are of interest to the general public as well as other photographers.

Floating Leaf, 2009

This year I have put together a set of six images shown here on the theme of ‘ephemera’, using feathers and leaves as motifs for impermanence and fragility. I guess I have been thinking about these ideas a fair bit over the last couple of years.

Fallen from the Sky, 2010

As I’ve mentioned before, I think a picture does not really exist until it has been printed. All the pictures on display have been printed on Fujicolor Crystal Archive Digital Pearl paper. By using a metal oxide coating on microscopic pearl mica pigments, these prints really sparkle and look very nice indeed, giving the image a lovely depth. Well worth the extra expense I think. All but one of the prints were taken on my Panasonic LX3 compact. Yes, we all know that large sensor cameras give the best quality, but it is still impressive to see just how good a print you can get from the LX3 if you stick to ISO100 and shoot in RAW. Each print image is 292mm square, and at that size the resolution is just fine, with pretty good dynamic range.

Wet Leaf, 2012

One of the final things I had to decide upon was the pricing of the pictures. Pricing! How do you decide? The sales and marketing answer of course, is the maximum you can get away with, whatever the purchaser is prepared to pay. In this country, and in non-metropolitan areas in particular, that price might be very low indeed. Especially if you are not a well-known name. Especially if you are a digital worker and don’t use some arcane process to make your images. Especially if the viewing public have decent cameras themselves and would rather have one of their own creations put up on their wall. So I price my pictures to cover my costs, and I’m very gratified if someone should want to have picture of mine to place on their wall.

Winter Seed Heads, 2010

I have always believed that if you are making pictures that are of any value at all, then the work needs to shown publicly. That is why I still take part in exhibitions, as well as give talks, have a website and write this blog. Putting on exhibitions can be expensive and time consuming, but it is a good discipline. It forces you to produce top-quality work, to pay attention to the printing and finishing, and importantly, make sure that you have a body of work that works well together when hung on the wall. And you might just find that there is someone out there who likes what you have made.

Telegraph Hill Revisited

Telegraph Hill 1, 2003

In the recent post about the joiner I made of Telegraph Hill  I mentioned that I often visit that location to take pictures. I guess the attraction is the uncluttered geography, the big open skies and the quality of light.

One earlier visit was in 2003 when I made the picture above. At the time I was shooting black and white film and then scanning it. By then the darkroom was long gone so I used XP2 as it was easy to get processed. It was also easier to scan using the automatic dust removal facility of my Nikon scanner. This picture started life as a conventional 28mm wideangle shot. When it came to editing in Photoshop I chose to work it up into a high contrast image as I often do when there is hard lighting. I wanted to get a greater feeling of space and give a greater emphasis to the cloud. To do this I extended the canvas of the picture, changing the aspect of the image from the standard 3:2 of the 35mm negative to 1:1. I then gave the sky & forground a ‘porc’ – the inverse of a crop – and used the transform tool to stretch the sky up into the extended image space. The trees were protected from the transformation so that they remained in scale.

Telegraph Hill 2, 2003

Around this time I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with straight monochrome images. I wanted images with a greater richness and emotional content than monochrome, and its conventional toning palette could offer. So the final image was hand-coloured using the colour gradient tool for different areas in the print. Since then virtually all my images have been shot in colour, only very occasionally switching back to monochrome or hand coloured monochrome when the picture warrants it.

Telegraph Hill

Telegraph Hill, September 2012

To the east of Winchester there is some wonderful high ground known as Cheesefoot Head. It is not grand or that high, but just has a nice feeling of space and long large views of the surrounding countryside. On the road out there your attention is caught to the north by the impressive Matterley Bowl, a huge natural amphitheatre where Eisenhower addressed the troops prior to D-Day. You would probably miss a small wood to the south. The map says that this sits on Telegraph Hill, but few people know this place by name, as the hill is not on a footpath and given over to the plough apart from the thicket of trees at the summit.

I often return here to take pictures, particularly when the light is good and the sky is ribboned with cirrus clouds. A couple of weeks ago the weather was just this, so I rushed off as soon as I had got back from work. This time the fields were striped yellow and brown from the brushing of the combine harvester that had recently taken in the wheat and I wanted to make a feature of this in my picture. There were some lovely high clouds above which I knew would work well too in a still movie type joiner. I photographed the field every time I cross the boundary of an ‘up’ and ‘down’ sweep to emphasise the lines left in the field, holing the camera higher and a at a steeper angle for the two closer foreground rows. This has the effect of creating a superwide but natural perspective for the final composition. All the cells were shot using the 45/f1.8 Olympus lens.

The original picture was imagined and shot as a 9×7 rectangle with some spares. When it came to the edit the composition worked better when reduced and reordered to a square. All the compositing and tonal adjustments were done in Lightroom, which I now use in preference to Photoshop for creating regular grid joiners.

Dandelion Clock

Dandelion Clock, 2005

I’m currently preparing a lecture for a couple of local camera clubs later in the autumn, and one thing I want to illustrate is how certain pictures are linked to other. Joined up pictures, if you will. This image of a dandelion seed head was shot back in 2005 on a compact camera that was considered to be somewhat better than the pack back then, a Fujifilm F810. This was the first camera/lens combination that gave me really close focussing capabilities, and would focus down as close as 75mm.

Many compact cameras offer very close-up focussing, which invariably comes at the wide setting of the zoom lens, rather than the more normal short telephoto length of conventional DSLR macro lenses. This can make for very compelling close-up images as it tends to make subjects look gigantic relative to their backgrounds. In skilled hands this technique can ennoble the tiniest of details, as in the brilliant miniatures by Slinkachu.

Like September Field, this image was shot when out cycling on September afternoon. This time I was with my daughter, and the weather was as warm and bright as it was last week, seven years on. As we came to this particular field we saw many dandelions backlit by the low evening sun. With the rapidly shortening evenings, it seemed appropriate to make a picture that referenced time, and the fragile dandelion clocks were suitable metaphors. A single stray seed emphasised the impermanence of the plant.

The hardest part of the picture was getting low enough to push the seed head into the sky to emphasise the geometry. This meant lying prone with my head on the ground, getting covered in grass and dust. Later I bought a small compact mirror to use for these occasions, but I find this a difficult way to compose. Much better are the articulated screens like the one on my G3, which allow for hand-held ground level shots without the mess and embarrassment of having to lie down.

This was the first time that I had made special use of the close focussing of the camera, something that I started to do much more regularly, and has become a key part of my photography over the past seven years.

 

September Field

September Field, 2001

Of all the months, I like September best. I love the quality of the light, the weather can often be really good, and the days are still long enough for light in the morning and evening. It is a time of change, a time for looking forward and embarking on new projects – at home, work or study. It is also my birthday month, which probably goes a long way to explaining my preference for this time of the year.

Yesterday, although the last day of August, felt very much a September day; beautiful bright skies and cool fresh air. After having been cycling every day whilst in France, my son and I were itching to get back on the bikes and enjoy the last few days off before going back to school and work. I’m pleased that my son, now twelve, is turning out to be a keen cyclist, and I wanted to show him some more distant trails that can be reached from home. Which is how we came across the point where I took the picture above, some eleven years ago.

September Field was an important picture for me back then. For a large part of the nineties I took a break from ‘art’ photography, a result of simultaneously starting a family and a business. However, by the start of the new century I needed a creative outlet and digital photography was really beginning to take off, which would allow me to print once again but this time without the darkroom, which had given way to a much need bedroom.

The picture was taken when out on a mountain bike ride on a similar day to yesterday. In my pocket I had a small Olympus mju-II (Stylus Epic in the US). This little camera had a great reputation for image quality, but I really struggled to get consistently sharp images from this camera, mainly due to the way in which the lens would always move focus a fraction of a second before the shutter fired; pre-focus only served to measure the focus. It would always take its best pictures in bright light.

The leaf shaped plough marks were the key to this picture, but it was difficult to bring out their shape from the rather flat brown of the original colour negative. Once converted to a black white image in Photoshop I messed around with curves to create a solarisation effect, and adjusted overall contrast thereafter, until I got the graphically effect I was after. Back then we were all really excited about the possibilities of Photoshop and how we could manipulate the image. Now with Lightroom the emphasis is on a gentler photographic editing of images; a better approach I think.

Why was this an important picture? Firstly, I had been trying to move to a more simple graphic style, and the picture was one of the more successful experiments in this regard. Secondly, was a time of change. 9-11 had happened two weeks before. My father died three days later. Photos are so often about memories.