After a long long winter spring has arrived and nature and the weather need to do some catching up. The current weather we are having is more like that which you might expect in April.
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| April in May - Spring Growth |
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| April in May - Tree in Rain |
Crabwood Clearings /
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| Logpile |
There are virtually no unmanaged spaces in this country today, and this is just as true for nature reserves as it is for farmland and commercial forests. I've often mentioned Crabwood in posts, a small area of woodland that serves as a nature reserve a couple of miles west of Winchester. I've been visiting this area for the best part of three decades now, and in that time I've seen many clearings. Large trees are felled, coppices trimmed and new growth either in the form of plants or saplings take their place as the canopy of trees is removed or grows back.
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Quatrefoil Stump
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It is hard to see the steady growth of the woodland; the rides are cleared on eight or sixteen year cycles and so one becomes accustomed to the layout of the trees. When an area is cleared it is very noticeable and sudden, and to my eyes, a very interesting place to explore. One particular ride has been extensively cleared of its small trees this winter. There has been a lot of activity by the foresters in recent weeks, and now, as spring starts, it is the turn of nature as new flowers and sapling start to shoot upwards. Soon the logs, stakes and trimmings will be removed and nature will be left to its own devices once again. As it does so, there will be plenty to reward the visitor who spends time to look.
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| Caught in the Trimmings |
Virtually all of these pictures were taken on the G3 with the 20mm lens. My camera bag is becoming lighter these days. I usually only carry the 20mm and 45mm lenses and try make sure I'm not carrying anything that won't be used. If it is sunny I will carry a small reflector. If the light is not so good I will take flash and diffusers in a separate large bag, but in general I’m happier when I carry less equipment.
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| Coppicing |
Books by Artists /
Art book and photo books have been occupying my thoughts a
fair bit over the past few weeks. The Guardian this weekend had two interesting articles and a photo gallery which seems based in large part on some of
material from the Guardian Photobook Masterclass that I attended back in
February. One of the small galleries in Winchester has just staged a small (but
perfectly formed) exhibition of artists’ books, and I’m waiting for a Blurb
book that I created from a small body of work created this Easter.
Books in contrast are designed to
be touched, held, turned. A book is
intimate, and a well-crafted book is a pleasure to handle and to own.
Oftentimes, and particularly with photography, it is the book that is the
artwork, the finished article. Frank’s The
Americans and Klein’s Life Is Good & Good for You in New York
were first and foremost books and not gallery shows. Indeed, Christina de Middel
is nominated for this year’s Deutsche Börse Prize on account of her book The Afronauts as was Rinko Kawauchi in 2012 for Illuminance. One of the joys of the Afronauts was the feel of the
book. From the stiff, buff cardboard covers, the matte paper, and the
onion-skin diagrams and ‘handwritten’ letters interleaved between the photos,
the book informed through the fingertips as much as by eye.
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| The Afronauts by Christina De Middel |
For these reasons it was a
pleasure to take in a small exhibition Books by Artists at the City Space, a small gallery that is part of Winchester’s
Discovery Centre. This is a wonderful display of just some of the handmade
artists’ books from the Artists’ Books Collection belonging to the University
of Southampton, and housed at the Winchester School of Art. There are
concertina books, hand-sewn books, pop-up construction, books with heavy wooden
covers, photobooks and amazing feats of paper engineering. All of them were
delightful and inspirational. The exhibition of about 50 works was divided up
into several sections – fabric and textiles, text based, 3D and sculptural
approaches, connections with the land or locale and so on. Most of the books
presented were handmade one-offs or from very small runs, showing a very high
level of craft skills. A great deal of imagination had gone into many of the
works shown, by artist who were clearly thing ‘out of the book’. By necessity
all the books were enclosed in glass cabinets. However, for an exhibition
intended to inspire it did seem rather unnecessary though to deny the taking
photographs as an aide memoire.
The Books by Artists show has now closed, but for those that were unable to visit, the WSA Artists’ Book Collection
is supported by some useful online resources about artists’ books. A nice booklet
describing the WSA Library’s Artists’ Books Collection accompanied the
exhibition, which can be downloaded as a PDF.
Easter Light /
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| Easter Light #1 |
At long last the clouds parted and the sun came out at a
time when I could get out and feel the rays on my neck. But it is still
bitterly cold, and the woods and vegetable plots still look as though it is mid-winter.
There is no blossom and leaves are still tightly folded.
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Easter Light #2
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I headed up to Crabwood and tried to pick up (pictorially) where
I had got to last autumn. It sounds dumb, but I felt really clumsy taking
pictures yesterday. Nevertheless, it’s good to be back making images.
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Easter Light #3
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Looking at Books /
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| Looking at Ravilious |
I know; it’s been more than two weeks since the last post.
Two weeks that have been cold, grey, busy, tiring and stressful. Two weeks of
painful aching muscles, two weeks when the only visual interest was to catch up
on some books and look at the work of artists that I admire, mainly on nights I
could not sleep. I have been looking at the English landscape work of David
Hockney, Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious over the past fortnight, dreaming of
warmer, brighter days. Days of thinking about, writing about, and making pictures. Not long now…
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| Looking at Hockney |
Seven Years Ago /
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| St Catherine's Hill Boardwalk, 2006 |
It’s either too cold at the weekend, still not light enough in the evening, or I’m not feeling well enough to go out and take new photos. So I started to wonder what pictures I had taken in late winter in previous years. Since switching over to digital eight years ago all of my pictures now carry accurate timestamps that have been diligently recorded by my cameras. It is easy to flip back and see what I was taking pictures of during the month of March in previous years. This picture was taken seven years ago in 2006, and is of the boardwalk that protects the heavily used path up St. Catherine’s Hill to the south of Winchester.
Times change and so do approaches so making pictures. Although I had by then been using colour film and then colour digital pictures since the start of the millennium, old habits die hard and I still had a tendency to process images in a monochrome based style. This picture, a cropped image from my Fujifilm F810, was stripped back to a black and white image, tonally adjusted and then re-coloured, a technique I used quite a bit then. These days I like to do as much as I can in-camera, and use only the ‘gentle’ image editing in Lightroom rather pixel bashing that tends to happen in Photoshop. Perhaps I should return and re-shoot the scene and see how much my photography has changed over the intervening years.
In fact, it is easy to see a lot of changes just by looking at the images in the monthly folders in which they are stored. Back then I was just looking, hoping to find interesting single images. I was working without a plan, and had a scattergun approach to taking pictures. Time, with a young family, was perhaps even more restricted then than it is now. But today I have a much clearer idea of what subjects I want to shoot and the photographic techniques I want to employ, so I can make good use of my time and opportunities.
The biggest difference though is in the pictures of the family; we all look so much older. It’s hard to look at the pictures of my children without a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye; they look so small and so sweet. They are all very lovely now I’m pleased to say, but they are no longer little.
Dog Days of Winter /
Late February sees the dog days of winter; days of flat,
dreary, cold greyness and last week was no exception. A time for getting on
with work and chores; tidying up and preparing for brighter warmer times. Even
as I type this post on the morning train the early March sunshine is up and it
won’t be long before we get the first signs of spring.
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| Very Early Rhubarb, 2013 |
We headed over to our allotment this weekend to continue
with preparations for our first season growing our own produce. As ever I took
the camera along, and as the light was so flat, I took my new flashgun and
lighting kit along. The new flash is a Metz 52 AF-1, and it is a very
impressive bit of kit, with lots of power and many useful features. But the
most useful feature and the reason that I bought it, is that it has a facility
called high speed synchronisation. This means that I can use fill-in flash even
at high shutter speeds above the normal 1/125 or 1/250 second X-sync limit
imposed by most cameras and flashes. So now I can use a small amount of flash
to energise an image even when using large apertures and hence high shutter
speeds. The new flash extends my range of options, giving me more creative
control over my pictures, rather than forcing me to use small apertures and
undesired large depth of field.
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Shed Foliage, 2013
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Both the shots of the rhubarb and the leaf where taken this
way, using the flash off-camera with a small softbox and a half strength orange
gel to give suitable modelling and warmth to the light. I’ve been using fill-in
flash for quite a long time now, and admire the work of people like Roy Mehta
and Andy Hughes who are masters of this technique. If painters can choose what
colours they want to use in their paintings, then I see no problem in employing
a judicious splash of light to add colour and life to my photos.
Exhibition News from Noel Myles /
Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of the joiner pictures of Noel Myles. I really recommend seeing his work when exhibited, because his images are generally quite large, and work well when seen large. Web pages and computer projects just don’t show the size and clarity of his work. Noel currently has a piece called Earth that is on show at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. Made up from 288 individual 12” x 8” prints, it is, as you can see, huge, measuring 2.75 x 6.53 m. He reports having very sore thumbs after pushing in over a thousand pins to mount the PVC reinforced prints. The installation will be on view until Easter at least, but due to alterations at the SCVA, it is worth checking in advance.
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| Earth © Noel Myles |
If Noel’s Still Films images can be considered as a form of photographic cubism, then this work is a close parallel to the colour field (!) work of Mark Rothko. The hue of the ploughed fields is as found; the typically rich red soil from the around Hereford and the light hues from East Anglia. To quote Noel: ‘I took the photos one winter in Suffolk, Essex and Herefordshire. I knew I wanted the red soil that's there. The bluish tinge is frost. I was using the different colours in a similar way to an artist using paint; the overall colour of the piece emerging with the placement of one colour next to another. After this series I moved from film to digital. Changing rolls with numb fingers and dropping them was too much for me.’
As with his other joiner pictures, you can spend much longer looking at these large composites than you can with individual photographs. The eye scans and rescans the image, picking up similar, but often different, detail with each glance. Because we are familiar with photographs and largely believe them to be an accurate document, we read them very quickly. With paintings and other manually crafted images, we take longer to explore and decode them. The experience of viewing Noel’s abstract expressionist composites is much closer to viewing a painting than a photograph, and one of the reasons they are so rewarding to see on the wall.
Following on from his successful exhibition at Cambridge University Noel Myles will shortly have the opening to a new exhibition at the Minories Gallery in Colchester. This is a joint exhibition with James Maturin-Baird called Between Photography and runs between March 16th and May 11th. Noel tells me that he will be showing a fair amount of new work which I’m looking forward to seeing.
Cristina and the Afronauts /
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| umfundi © Cristina De Middel |
If you follow modern photography to any degree you will have undoubtedly heard of Cristina de Middel by now. Last year she self-published her book The Afronauts and her career has accelerated from newspaper photojournalist to the darling of the art photography world, currently nominated for this year’s Deutsche Börse prize. When I saw that she would be presenting at a Guardian Masterclass alongside The Guardian’s photography critic Sean O’Hagan and Bruno Ceschel of Self Publish, Be Happy I knew I had to make the effort to attend. I’m a keen reader of Sean O’Hagan’s wide knowledge and balanced commentary. As he said in his opening remarks, self-published photobooks seem to have reached a critical point as a means of delivery of an artist’s delivery of their work to waiting world. While there have been photobooks as long as there have been paper prints, a physical book that can be placed in the hands of key critics and curators seems to now be a viable way to present one’s work to the world. For many types of photo project, it would seem to make more sense than a me-too website or ruinously expensive exhibition.
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| iko-iko © Cristina De Middel |
I must admit I had first railed against the Afronauts when I first saw it described online. The premise of the book is that just after independence back in the sixties Zambian school teacher Edward Makuka Nkoloso, declared in a moment of high excitement that the new country, like Russia and the USA would have its own space program. Of course, nothing came of this wildly optimistic aspiration, but De Middel took this simple idea and developed a plausible photo story based on our common conceptions and iconography of both Africa and the space race. I guess my concern was that such a story could be construed as a way of presenting Africa and Africans as backward and foolish. Having listened to and spoken with Du Middel I am sure now that her intentions were only to illustrate and develop a rather ridiculous story that happened to have come from Zambia, and as a consequence, involved Africans. In a similar way, Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards managed to paint a rather singular picture of Britain’s skiing abilities…
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| hamba © Cristina De Middel |
As it turned out, none of the photographs were made in Africa. Many were shot near her home town of Alicante in Southern Spain. The props for the photos were similarly home-grown. A converted street light served as a space helmet, the space flag was invented for the story, and the African space suit was sewn together by De Middel’s grandmother. The space control centre was part of a disused factory; the derelict space capsules were the drums from old cement mixing trucks. The only genuine space item was a Russian cosmonaut’s jump suit that was used and decorated for some of the pictures.
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| ifulegi © Cristina De Middel |
De Middel has played with our belief in the truth of photographs, and our willingness to suspend our disbelief in order to absorb a story. She has done this well. The completed book (original price €20, currently changing hands at €800) is small, like a notebook or instruction manual. It rather reminded me of some children’s books from my past and those of my children. There were lovely transparent interleaves with space diagrams, and typed letters to characters in the story. The pictures of Afronauts staring dreamily into space in some of the pictures, and the naivety of the original story, served to reinforce this impression. I rather loved the whole concept and its execution.
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| jambo © Cristina De Middel |
The other story that will captivate many photographers is the way that De Middel has followed the courage of her convictions, and gave herself a year away from photojournalism to realise The Afronauts. She told us how she decided that she would ‘have a year of living in Utopia’, believing that The Afronauts would be only successful, and devoting all her energies to make sure that this would happen. It is a shining example of positive thinking becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps the Zambian space program required just a little too much self-belief.
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| botonguru © Cristina De Middel |
Remembering Ag /
A couple of nights ago, after more than an hour of churning
guts and thumping heart, I gave up trying to get to sleep and wandered
downstairs to find something to read. On seeing my collection of Ag journals on
one shelf I took a couple down and read a few articles. It made me remember how
wonderful this small quarterly journal was, and how no other magazine quite
‘hit the right buttons’ as this did.
Ag was a beautifully produced, 100 page 8 inch square
magazine, advert free, and apart from some outlets in the London galleries,
only available by subscription. Its focus was squarely on the art and craft of
photography. Born as an off-shoot of the BJP, it really found its voice when it
became the early retirement project of former BJP editor Chris Dickie. As is
often the case with niche photography magazine, Ag was a one-man-band
production, with Dickie writing editorial, design and general management of the
journal.
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| Photo by Robert and Shana ParkHarrison |
Over the years I’ve seen several fine-art photography
magazines come and go, and they have usually failed because they too closely
matched the opinion and interests of their owner/authors, and as a consequence
became stale and dull. Not so with Ag; Dickie regularly invited great writers
including AD Coleman, Bill Jay and David Lee whose scripts kept Ag vital,
entertaining and challenging. If there was one common theme linking all the
writing in Ag it was the complete absence of pretentious arty clap trap talk.
It was a journal that you could actually read.
Ag was a show case of excellent photography, and would
feature short portfolios of work from many well-known and up and coming
photographers: Michael Kenna, Mark Power, Branka Djukic, Noel Myles, John
Claridge, Keith Carter, Beth Dow, Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison, John
Davies; I could go on many times over. My little little library has many books
that were purchased after seeing the artist’s work in Ag. It was the springboard for many photographers’
careers, including Arena’s Colin Summers. Chris Dickie clearly was a man with a
wide appreciation of photography, and the work presented ranged from the
traditional to the very modern, but was always of a very high standard. Maybe
I’m getting old, but there does seem to be a lot of photography these days,
especially on the webzines and in the art house photography magazines that make
me wince at its craft-less and point-less uselessness.
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| Photo by John Stezaker |
Chris Dickie died early and unexpectedly in July 2011 from
cancer, and Ag along with him. I never met the man other than brief telephone
conversations when ordering back numbers, but I certainly miss my quarterly
copy of Ag. There is nothing available today that matches it for quality,
interest and plain good taste.
Five Minute Writing /
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| Allotment Grid 1, 2013 |
I have very few memories of my
school days, and of those memories only a very few remain about the lessons or
the homework that was set. My first English teacher, and my form tutor in the
first year of Woodcote Secondary School was a gentle and kindly man by the name
of Mr Lees-Jeffries. If memory serves me right he was a Kiwi, had a bush of
wavy ginger hair, an even more unkempt orange beard and thick, heavy framed
glasses. English lessons were I guess pleasant and agreeable, but I can’t
really remember that level of detail. What I do remember is that he set us the
most unimaginably horrid, tortuous, unreasonable homework that any teacher had
ever set for poor overworked 12 year olds. He set us five minute writing.
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| Allotment Grid 2, 2013 |
He asked us to write something, anything, each night, that we wanted to write about. It could be an observation of the weather, about something we did at the weekend, about something we had read or seen. It could be a poem; you could even add a drawing. The only stipulation was that it was meant to take five minutes, and definitely not more than ten. My efforts at five minute writing were risible and shameful, usually a dire serialisation of a very dull story. I was amazed, late in the year, when my best friend showed me something he had written recently. He had completed the task each day, and his book was full of interesting and varied subjects. He had done things, he had something to say. I felt rather foolish on account of my laziness and lack of imagination.
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| Allotment Grid 3, 2013 |
Of course, at that time I didn’t
see that it was a wonderful invitation to creative writing and diary keeping.
Maybe there are teachers with the same insight today encouraging their charges
to take up mini-blogs; I hope so. Each time I write a post for this blog I
think about five minute writing, and the mantra is always the same; make it
interesting, to the point and keep it succinct. But only rarely does it take
five minutes to write.
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| Allotment Grid 4, 2013 |
Today is the first birthday of Joined Up Pictures, and this the 85th
post that I’ve published. It’s been a lot of fun and I’ve met quite a few
people along the way. Thank you for reading and please feel free to leave
comments or to contact me. Graham
Worth a Look: Pentti Sammallahti /
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| Pentti Sammallahti, Solovki, White Sea 2, Russia (1992) |
Pentti Sammallahti’s retrospective book Here Far Away was one of the best books to be published last year. If you have read any online or magazine reviews in the past six months you will almost certainly have seen this book glowingly praised in reviews. I have a copy (a very nice Christmas present); every word of praise for this book and the pictures within is fully justified. I have seen Sammallahti’s photographs in the past but never as a large collection. This book puts together some 300 images drawn from an impressive number of books that he has had published over the years.
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| Pentti Sammallahti, Solovki, White Sea, Russia (Dog with Bag), 1992 |
Sammallahti is famous for his pictures of snowbound, bleak Arctic environments, sparsely populated by brave people in heavy coats and thick hats. Always he seems to have his lucky dogs wherever he goes. These dogs that act as people substitutes; dogs bringing in the provisions, dogs enjoying the breeze, dogs hanging out with their mates. As Mike Chisholm commented, Sammallahti seems to be a dog whisperer who can conjure them up when needed and get them to perform a vital pictorial role. When dogs are not needed he seems to be able to muster similar assistance from almost any other species; cats goats, monkeys, you name it. Sammallahti has travelled to many other places other than his native Finland and snowy wastes of northern Russia. Indeed, there are pictures from every continent within the covers of the book. I particularly liked his pictures from Morocco and some lovely group portraits of Roma.
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| Pentti Sammallahti, Solovki, White Sea, Russia, 1992 |
One obvious, striking feature of his photography is his wonderful use of the panoramic format. His images often read as mini cinematic sequences or Chinese scrolled pictures. In some pictures he manages to capture two decisive moments in the same elongated frame, with critical actions happening simultaneously on the both the left and right of the image. His pictures have a consistent elegance, sparseness and humanity. In all my reading and research about him and his pictures I’ve not found out which camera he used for his wide format pictures. No matter, the important thing is the eye and his sense of design.
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| Pentti Sammallahti, Cilento, Italy, 1999 |
It’s worth a word or two about the manufacture of the book. This book is a fine example of the book maker’s craft. Given the large number of panoramic images it is hardly surprising that the book’s designers have chosen a landscape format for the layout. At 242 by 300 mm the book sits nicely on the lap when opened. The pale blue cloth binding with tipped in photo on the cover is nicely understated and the paper is a nice cream heavyweight mat that works well with the neutrally printed monochromes.
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| Pentti Sammallahti, Solovki, White Sea, Russia (Man Walking Away on Snowy Road), 1992 |
The first edition of Here Far Away seems to have sold out from most online retailers, but is currently being reprinted and should be available again in a couple of months. If you would like a copy it might be worth pre-ordering.
Here Far Away by Pentti Sammallahti is published by Dewi Lewis Publishing ISBN: 978-1-907893-26-1
Different Kind Of Blue /
Twilight breaking through
It's a different kind of blue
Snow Fall /
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| Snow on the allotment 2013, #1 |
I've lived in Winchester for almost thirty years now. Until recently snow was an almost unknown phenomenon around here. We would get occasional dumps of snow, but it would rarely be cold enough for the white stuff to hand around for more than a day. Prior to about four winters ago, I think the snow lasted more than 24 hours on only two occasions. My children have grown up denied of the opportunity to play in the white fluffy stuff. For them, snow meant rapidly thawing water ice that was rather poor value to play in. When I was a boy (yes, back in the time of woolly mammoths) we had a collection of sleds and usually had a couple of weeks every winter when we could toboggan down the linear clearings made in the woodland on the Surrey Hills where I grew up.
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Snow on the allotment 2013, #2
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This all seems to have changed over the past four winters,
and this year we find ourselves in the grip of another sustained cold snap. On
Friday school was out and it was play time! Now the kids are of an age where
they don’t want their parents around to go play in the snow, so Kate and I made
the five minute walk around to our new allotment to survey the lie of land in
winter. We didn’t have much time in the fading light, but it all looked so
lovely with the fresh untouched snow. I really wanted to add a gentle splash of flash but perhaps that would have taken too long to set up in the limited time we had available. Unfortunately I’ve not been able to get
out this weekend to spend more time taking pictures so unless we get more snow
in the coming weeks, Friday’s picture are going to be my snow pictures for
2013. I hope you like them.
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Snow on the allotment 2013, #3
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Worth a Look: Andy Hughes /
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| Image by Andy Hughes |
I’m not sure how I first came across Andy Hughes polemical work Dominant Wave Theory (I think it was the journal of the London Independent Photographers). It was love at first sight. His pictures are of the detritus washed up or left on beaches. His argument is that we all play a part, even if passively and carelessly, in destroying our coastlines and oceans.
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| Image by Andy Hughes |
His pictures have an immediate resonance for me; close up, flash lit subjects set in context. The images are bright, colourful and highly detailed and the eye is immediately drawn to the subjects which dominate the picture space. Every detail is revealed by the additional lighting, and skies are often rendered dark and heavy. The images are often beautiful, even if the subject is not, and it is this counterpoint that make them so compelling. While the viewer decodes the image, a realisation dawns on how this sandal, sandwich wrapper, oil drum might have got there. Bright, happy birthday balloons are either left or lost on the beaches; left for others to clear up. Other flotsam and jetsam will have had a longer journey onto the rocks and sands of the shore and keep adding to the problem. It easy to think that this has always been the way, but the diversity of subjects and the durability of many of the modern materials presented indicate that this is a big and growing problem.
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| Image by Andy Hughes |
Dominant Wave Theory is one book that I keep returning to. It is a photo book that genuinely has something to say and says it well. This large square book of 189 pages is also well designed, and carries no less than four essays that are directly relevant to the subject of coastal pollution. The book was published in 2007, but I believe that there are still a few copies available for purchase out on the web.
Time Slicing /
And now for something
completely different…
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| Claudio, Stella e Farfalla. Cetona, Italy. Jay Mark Johnson |
I recently came across these rather amazing pictures by Jay Mark Johnson. He has taken a high resolution scanning panoramic camera (worth
$85000!) and converted it into a static fixed viewpoint strip camera. This is
not a new idea (all photo-finish cameras used in sport work in this way), but
these photographs are really quite lovely and intriguing to look at.
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| Nicola Spirig wins the Women's Triathlon at the London 2012 Olympics (AP Photo/Omega) |
We rarely stop to think that we are living in a four dimensional world – three spatial axes plus a fourth of time. When we take a single photograph, we flatten one spatial axis (depth) and squash time to a point, giving us a 2-D static image. In these time slice images only the vertical spatial dimension is captured (depth and horizontal information is discarded). But unusually, the dimension of time is recorded and transformed into the horizontal axis. You still have a static 2-D image of course, but you have to read the horizontal axis as time. With joiners where the camera is moved around between cells, you are capturing discrete points in time with different combinations of spatial information, so you end up with a ‘lumpy’ mixture of different spatial and temporal (time based) information.
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| Priscilla Electric Lodge #47-0. Jay Mark Johnson |
A strip camera works by having a very narrow receptor for
light. In this case, and for modern photo-finish cameras, this is a single line
of photo sensors. In the past, it was a
narrow slit projecting onto film. Subsequent strips are recorded in very short
periods, controlled electronically for digital devices or by precise
advancement of the film for analogue cameras.
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| Los Osos. Jay Mark Johnson |
Strip cameras have some interesting consequences. First off, things that move fast appear thinner than they would if they were slower. Static objects (ie the background) will record as plain strips.Generally, time runs from left to right, but this is only the way the camera is set up (in the 2012 Olympic photo finish picture time runs from right to left) . You cannot tell which direction someone was heading (left or right), only if they were going forward or reverse. In the picture of the man with the horse we know that they were moving forward (if time is running left to right). Things moving forward face left, things moving reverse face right. In these pictures, people moving forward face the past, whereas in normal space time if we move forward we look towards our future. How weird is that? Have a good look at the picture below (click on it to make it larger). You have got thick and thin people, moving slower and faster. Everyone is facing to the left,. The image was made in Italy, where cars drive forward on the right hand side of the road. So in fact, the two blue cars were actually travelling in space from left to right. Also, look at the shadows from the nearest people; some have shadows in front of them, some behind them. Which means they were travelling in different directions. If I've read this correctly then those with their shadows behind them must have been travelling left to right past the camera. Please let me know if you think I've got it wrong...
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| Il Mercato a Sinistra 1. Jay Mark Johnson |
Strip photography effects are often seen on video devices
that use a rolling shutter, giving characteristic ‘wobbly buildings’ when the
camera is moved. In fact, just about every camera with interchangeable lenses
is a form of strip photography camera. On all focal plane shutters the fastest
speed at which the whole sensor or film is exposed all at the same time is the
X-sync (typically 1/125 to 1/250), and is a function of the speed of movement
of the shutter blades. Any speed above the X-sync speed will be achieved by creating
a progressively narrower slit. My old Nikon FM2 had a very fast maximum shutter
speed of 1/4000, which meant the film was exposed by a very narrow 1.5mm gap
between the top and bottom shutter blades. It is however, very rarely that we
see strip like distortions with modern high speed equipment. On very old
cameras with large negatives a focal plane shutter took a fair time to pass
over the film or plate, and could give some very strange effects, including my
all-time favourite motoring picture taken by Jacques-Henri Lartigue.
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| Grand Prix de l'A.C.F. Automobile Delage. Jacques-Henri Lartigue 1912 |
Lartigue took this picture back in 1912 when he was just 17.
I wonder how many of our children’s smartphone pictures will survive the test
of time as well as this picture has?
Farewell Jessops /
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| At Black Brook, 1987 |
Jessops, Britain’s largest chain of photographic retailers went into receivership this week, and closed its doors for the last time this evening. Crikey! During the time that I cut my teeth in photography, they were always the shop with the lowest prices and the biggest stock. The shop back then was different from the failing, flailing high street chain that it became.
For a long time, it only existed to me as a four page telephone-directory-like listing at the back of Amateur Photographer, with densely packed product names and prices and no photographs or illustrations. The print was so small you needed fresh young eyes or a magnifying glass to find what you were looking for. Even more impressive was the A2 double side single sheet price list that you could pick up in store or you got with your mail order deliveries (please allow 28 days for delivery!), almost a form of paper microfiche. On that sheet you could find just about any product that available on the market at that time. Back in those far off times, it was hard to know what was out there in the market place. If you said ‘google’ back then, most people would have thought you were referring to a wobbly play ball for children. We didn’t know what was out there much of the time, so the Jessops price list was often the first place to look if you wanted something obscure – like a set of spotting inks perhaps.
In the 80s & 90s Jessops started to open other shops outside of its Leicester base. We even had a little store tucked away in Parchment Street in little old Winchester. These stores were Aladdin’s caves of photo gear, and you were served by knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff. Happy times indeed. I could get almost any gear I wanted at a good price and for the most part this meant bulk supplies of FP4 and boxes of lovely Agfa Record Rapid. Looking back now, it’s easy to forget just how much we spent on materials back in the days of film. I was not a particularly prolific shooter in those days and I was well aware of the cost of every frame and print that I made.
By the end of the 90s Jessops changed from being a family run business to publicly listed business, and the shop rapidly changed from serving enthusiasts to being a general high street shop selling digital cameras to a much wider public. Its prices went up and it range of products contracted and I largely stopped using Jessops. It now seems that public has largely stopped using them too.
Nowadays many people are taking their family and casual snaps on smartphones. The family album has been largely replaced by Facebook and Instagram and by online printing services. I read recently that people are still spending about the same on photo-finishing today as they did ten years ago. The difference now is that people are not buying photographs but creating photobooks and getting large prints made for hanging on the wall, and is true in my case too. Many people are now getting their cameras as phones from their phone store. Increasingly, enthusiasts have their requirements met by online specialists. The big question, of course, is this a good thing? From my perspective it is, but I can understand that others won’t see it this way. I like the changes digital technology has brought to photography. I have instant feedback after every shot, I can work in colour, flash is much simpler, exposure and auto-focus is now really very good. I have more control over my work, post-processing in Lightroom is preferable to the physical darkroom, and I can interact with a wider audience.
Times change and we can choose to keep pace or not. Whatever the reason, it looks like Jessops did not.
A Splash of Flash /
Almost by definition, the one thing you can’t do without in
photography is light. You could conceivably make a drawing, compose a story or
record a tune in complete darkness, but you would not be able to take a
photograph. Light gives modelling, shape and vitality to a picture, and yet it
so often it is not given the attention it deserves. There would appear to be
tendency to fix poor lighting in post processing, using Photoshop. I have often
heard photographers claim that they don’t like artificial lighting, that they
much prefer natural light. Well, yes, natural light can be very beautiful. For
many people, the first and last experience they have of flash lighting are the
unflattering family snapshots complete with shiny foreheads and red eyes that
come from on-camera flash units. But what if the available lighting is dull and
flat, or does not help the subject? For subjects reasonably close to the
camera, adding just a small amount of additional light can really help lift a
picture and direct the viewer’s eye. Virtually every film & television programme,
even on location, will use some form of additional lighting to enhance and
control the image.
In the days of film, using flash lighting was often the
domain of those who specialised in studio lighting – professionals and serious
amateurs. Fill-in flash on location required a lot of experience, judgement and
specialist equipment such as flash meters. But that was then. Today, the little
preview monitor on the back of a digital camera changes everything. Now we can
just experiment to our hearts content, whether we are using simple manual
flashguns or taking advantage of the sophisticated units that are available
today. The flashguns themselves have become more sophisticated, using TTL
metering, and size for size more powerful. In addition, digital cameras have
much better low light performance, and so more can be achieved with the power
output from battery powered flashguns. There are many manufacturers such as
Lastolite & Lumiquest now producing specific small flash equipment, such as
diffusers and stands, for virtually every need.
Not only is the equipment better today, but the sources of
information are better too. Once I started using flash creatively, it did not
take me too long to discover the superb Strobist site run by David Hobby. Joe
McNally, often featured in National Geographic, has made a career using small
flashes and has written a couple of good books about the subject (Hot Shoe Diaries is my favourite), and
there are many other good sources to be found on the web.
Inevitably, using flash outdoors involves fill-in or
balanced lighting, mixing the flash light with the ambient exposure. Many, many
years ago I had an Olympus AF-1 film compact, and in the right conditions you
could make perform fill-in flash on bright days if the main subject was heavily
underexposed. This would give really nice deep saturated skies and well lit
subjects, but it was a bit hit and miss. But the idea stuck with me and I started
to use this technique several years ago when I wanted to produce saturated,
underexposed skies and at the same time have well exposed foreground subjects
on landscape subjects. Since then, I often carry a small flash with me. When I’m
out taking pictures I want to be able to create
a picture, rather than take what’s in
front of me; controlling the lighting is one method of achieving this.
My flashguns are valuable tools that extend the range and
scope of my photography. With my wide aperture lenses I can control the depth
of focus between foreground and background. With my flash units I can control
the balance of exposure, and even the colour palette between the two.
Quiet Morning in Crabwood /
With the house now devoid of the Christmas decorations and the skies filled with endless grey, it’s all feeling quite wintry and ‘January’ this weekend. I decided to head off to Crabwood, a small nature reserve and managed woodland near Winchester yesterday morning. A heavy mist hung around the woods muffling sound and softening the light; it felt as though the countryside was asleep.
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Quiet Morning in Crabwood 1
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There is always something to look at if you have the time and the right frame of mind, and it was not long before I found a few subjects that would act as suitable motifs to capture the experience of being out among the trees. I had taken along my new flashgun plus brolly & lighting stand to add some light to energise the pictures. The biggest problem on flat dull days is one of poor lighting on key subjects. Just a small touch of light from a flash is needed to draw attention to the subject, to lift it from its surroundings. It took the brolly along so that I could give my subjects diffuse soft lighting.
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Quiet Morning in Crabwood 2
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I was using my new Metz 52 AF-1 flashgun that I’ve just got to supplement the Lumix G3. The primary reason for getting this model was the high speed synchronisation feature, which allows me to use shutter speeds in excess of the normal X-sync of the camera. In this way I can use large lens apertures to give me the shallow depth of field that I want for pictorial reasons and still be able to add light to the pictures. On most camera systems you need both camera and flashgun to have this synchronisation (also known as Focal Plane or FP mode). Fortunately all micro four thirds cameras are equipped for this, but you still need to get a fairly high end flash unit to offer this functionality. I’ll write more about the Metz over the coming weeks, but for now I’m pleased that the new unit is opening up creative opportunities in the way that I hoped it would.
Sands of Time /
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| Sands of Time, la Dune du Pyla, 2007 |
With just a few hours of 2012 remaining, I thought I’d look back on the year, from a personal photographic point of view. So here is a rather odd review of 2012.
One of the highlights early on in the year was meeting Mike Chisholm who writes the idiosyncratic Idiotic Hat blog. His posts are always interesting, thoughtful or fun and usually a mixture of all three, and remains the first blog I check out each day. For keeping up with photographic news and trends then I go to The Guardian’s photography pages, and look forward to Sean O’Hagan’s weekly photo blog.
The best photo exhibition I attended this year? Two actually, both by Noel Myles, first at Gainsborough’s House and then at Cambridge University. I don’t know which one I preferred more. In fact, my absolute photographic highlight this year was a gift from Noel: he very generously gave me a copy of Land Field 4, a landmark picture for still movies and in my opinion every bit as important as Walker Evans’ Peppers or Cartier-Bresson’s Gare St Lazare.
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| Noel Myles, Land Field 4 |
I've bought or been given a few new books this year, and I'm really enjoying looking at Pentti Sammallahti's Here Far Away that I got for Christmas. John Stezaker’s catalogue from his Whitechapel show is stunning for his humour, vision and photographic memory. I managed to track down a good secondhand copy of Hockney’s seminal Cameraworks. This is the most expensive book in my collection, but I'm glad I got it and have enjoyed the pictures a great deal.
The best piece of gear? I'm really pleased with the the Olympus 45mm/f1.8 lens for my G3. It’s light, fast and so sharp, and takes really nice portraits. What’s not to like?
For pure inspiration David Hockney’s Bigger Picture exhibition at the RA was just fantastic this year. I've spent a lot of time reading the catalogue and other books relating to this wonderful set of images, and it has been a major inspiration for me to get out and to experiment.
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| David Hockney, The Arrival of Spring |
The biggest change to my photography this year has been Joined Up Pictures itself. Since starting the blog back in late January I've had many thousands of page views and I'm very pleased with the response. The Misery of Printing was far and away the most popular post, which indicates that a lot of other people suffer the same frustrations that I have done when using desktop printers. The next most popular post was Worth a Look: Mareen Fischinger which showcased her wonderful panographies. After that a reviews of the Hockney exhibition A Bigger Picture and Noel Myles A Bigger Photo picked up steady views all year long.
The readership of the blog has increased steadily over the year. Half of my readers are from outside the UK which is gratifying, and I hope that over the next year I will gain even more as the word spreads. So thank you all for dropping by, please visit next year, and I wish you all a very Happy New Year.
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| Telegraph Hill, 2012 |