Restricted

Not long after my previous post the zines started to arrive and soon the collection was complete. I felt that mine was rather letting the side down in terms of photography. My 'get out' is that it was a conceptual project! Already plans are being hatched for a second 'zine challenge'.

With all sheep dog trials cancelled for the foreseeable future and auction marts off-limits to anyone except buyers (even vendors can only stay as long as it takes to offload their beasts, and that without leaving their vehicle) and social distancing practically eliminating communication with strangers, it's been a case of hunting around the garden for 'wildlife' subjects or looking for 'landscape' pictures during my daily exercise walks.

Garden wildlife soon gets boring when there's no real point to it. No point I can get enthused about at any rate. The only highlight has been rediscovering how good my fishing camera can be for close up photography when the light is good enough. Even a crop of the 12mp file looks pretty detailed. A shame that the direction control on the camera is flaky and making it difficult to operate at times.

That meant it was landscape or nothing. Having more spare time available for a daily walk, work having dried up, I was going further than I usually do and covering fresh ground. After a few walks in new country I found myself photographing to a theme. Not a totally new theme, but with a tighter focus. The flat, farmed landscape of the mosses. One moss in particular criss-crossed by arrow straight single track lanes known as 'meanygates'. And so the meanygate project has commenced. How long I'll stick with it is the usual imponderable.

I hope it will be part straight recording things as they are including detail pictures, but also with a formal edge to some pictures. I am already collecting a few pictures which might make a series within the project.

Being restricted to where you can go forces you to look harder. It's the old cliché that having limited options expands possibilities. How long it will be before the initial freshness becomes stale remains to be seen. But there might be more possibilities than I imagine.

From a technical perspective I started off using pocketable cameras. The Fuji worked OK, except the focal length was a bit restrictive. I almost got to thinking that it could become my staple camera for the project with the longer lens adaptor fitted. That didn't last long as I soon had the same frustrations I've had with it before. All it needs to do is focus faster and I could live with it, but...

The Panasonic I bought to replace my fishing compact with the dodgy selector fared no better. The controls are annoying, the viewfinder horrible, and the files continue to lack something. I reverted to type and took the big camera out with it's consumer standard zoom attached. Apart from curving the horizon when used wide (easily correctable on the PC) it does a perfectly acceptable job during daylight hours outdoors. f5.6 and be there works for me unless I need more depth of field. Even at f6.3 I find the out of focus areas look nice enough.