Sunday 16 February 2020

Rethink and more sheep

After another period of reflection I returned to the reedbed, and over the next few days made more short visits with a better idea of what I wanted to achieve. It's funny, but I've photographed phragmites on and off for years but having the zine project as a sort of motivator because there's a deadline I've got round to doing something more focussed about it.

For reasons of design I am cropping all the pictures (except the covers) square. It's an arbitrary choice. The cover pictures I'm cropping from horizontal to vertical for design purposes because I didn't take any in a vertical format, and at the size they'll be printed there's no loss of quality/detail.


With sufficient pictures to make a small zine needing only twelve it's all in the editing now. With over a month to the deadline, however, there is a strong temptation to tinker with the ordering of the pictures. That's one reason I've made four dummy copies before sending anything off for a proof. I'll try to be strong and resist any further fiddling!

I managed to take these photos before the storm arrived, although it was quite windy. That didn't matter too much as some of the pictures I wanted to have movement blur in them. What changed most over the few days was the elimination of the sky from the pictures. This was to give a visual consistency across the set of pictures. Initial ideas have to remain flexible.

With another storm scheduled to arrive on Saturday it wasn't hard to decide where to go looking for photographs on Saturday. Sheep dog trial in the hills? No chance! Poultry show? Not after last week's burnout. Sheep sale? That'll do nicely.

Once again it took me a while to get my eye in. It's as if I don't know what I'm looking for when I first arrive somewhere. One of the first pictures I took was to get a second chance at photographing a stick I'd messed up on at the last sale I went to. This time I did a better job and, although it's at high ISO, it is in focus this time!


The light levels were the usual problem in the main shed. Made worse by the cloud cover which was noisily dumping rain on the shed roof by the gallon. Being an in-lamb sale all ewes were being scanned. As last year the chap doing the scanning was tucked away in his crate, but one pen of ewes were scanned in their pen, which gave me a chance to try to record that. A couple of frames worked okay.


This was a sale of rare and traditional breeds. With a large consignment of mixed rare breeds I tried to get some record shots of those. The dim light and dark wool didn't help though.



There was a bit of showing taking place too. This was in the better lit new shed. Unfortunately I messed most of the action by being in the café eating a bacon butty... I still managed a few frames for the files. I'm not sure if I 'saw' this picture or it was down to chance, but I like the way it combines two things in the one shot, even with one being slightly out of focus. Had it been shot in teh fashionable super-blurry background mode it would have had no narrative to it, but as the background activity can be 'read', it does.


As usual I continued with my sub-framing approach. Again chance played it's part and I got two, maybe three, sub-frames in one shot if you can count the faces on the left framed by the ring structure and the ones behind the ring gate.


Either I'd settled in to looking or the butty and brew had kickstarted my imagination but I was now seeing pictures and reacting when something happened.


The prize winners' photo call is part and parcel of shows these days as marts are quick to poist to social media. A phone snap instantly uploaded beats a professional shot even a few hours later when it comes to promotion. It's become one of my habits to photograph the photo call, always trying for a new angle, but rarely succeeding. Choosing where to focus is tricky when light levels restrict apertures but this time I think I got it about right. Sub-framing again.


Did I mention sub-framing? A bit extreme this but I was trying to show the size of the crowd and give context by including a sheep. Otherwise it's could be a picture of a crowd of people attending an auction of anything.


I've been looking at other people's sheepy photographs again on t'interwebs, and again I see that mine often take a different approach. Not just to the technical aspects such as composition and processing, but purpose. While the documentary aspect is important, so are the formal ones, but most of all I try to avoid being journalistic without being arty to the point that the documentary aspect gets lost. Hence my liking for 'busy' pictures which many might consider cluttered. Then there's also my penchant for large areas of nothing. Which doesn't always work!


An uncurated over-long gallery here.

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