I never learn

In a fit of madness I got myself yet another camera with horrible reds. The trouble is the bloody things tick all the right boxes on my 'camera for wandering round town with' spec sheet. Except for the way they render various shades of red. First time out with the thing and the reds hit me straight between the eyes as soon as I loaded the files on the PC. After a bit of fiddling I've made a profile which tames them a bit. Today's search for red things to test the profile was fruitless. There was nothing red to be found! I'll give it a few more goes before throwing the camera at a wall.

The main reason for buying the camera was to get a tilty touch-screen. This does work well. Apart from it being too easy to touch the screen accidentally. As the camera has no viewfinder the use of the tilty screen automatically lowers the viewpoint, making it similar to that of a twin lens reflex camera, or any with a waist-level viewfinder, from the days of film. This makes you less obviously photographing when around people.

Reds are easily sorted in black and white. If only I could find a project to justify black and white conversions. Doing them just for the sake of it is a bit naff. Even worse if it's done because 'street is best in black and white'.

The bus station, however, is mostly black and white, so conversions don't lose much, in fact they rather enhance the graphic nature of many photographs taken there. Although sometimes a small touch of colour works too.

One unexpected advantage of a tiny camera, and this one is tiny, is that it could easily be held at arms length as I leaned over a railing to take a couple of shots of the interior of what was the art school where I did my foundation course. The place has been deserted and up for sale for a few years now. A shame.

Or held up high to another window. The windows were very grimy, hence the soft look to the pictures.

The lens I got with the camera is nice and compact, although it does distort a lot at the wide end which isn't a big deal for people pics but not so good for architecture.

The dilemma now is to persevere with this latest small camera and ditch the Fuji, or look elsewhere for the perfect little camera. This one would be fine to take fishing. My fishing compact might be better for taking anywhere. Decisions decisions. So far no camera I've tried has been as easy to use as a DSLR, although teh fishing compact comes close. Maybe forget the quest and stick with one of those great big lumps!

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A week off

With no work to be getting on with, well not much, I decided to spend this week chillin'. I started off scanning more of the dusty negatives, which was less of a chore than I anticipated. Possibly because I had plenty of time to do it rather than a couple of hours of an evening. Not much of artistic merit turned up, but some interesting pics which show how places have changed in the last 35 to 40 years.

There are enough pictures to make a couple more books which I'll get printed when Blurb has another big discount offer. One will be pictures of Southport and the other pictures taken while travelling by bus and train.

Of course the week I decide to spend taking photographs turned out to be wet, cold and windy. That was why I sat down with the scanner. There were a few breaks in the rain during which I managed to sneak out. The sun even shone a couple of times. One was a visit to Southport where I didn't really do much but did walk past a potential picture, stop and go back. I think it was worth it. A little straightening on the computer and I like it - for now. While some say photography is all about light, the shade helps at times. A limited colour palette doesn't go amiss either.

The black and white project has wound itself up so I was back in colour in the woods trying something different. It was an experimental session to see if there might be something to work on. As yet I'm uncertain.

One wet afternoon I had another go at photographing the skull. I'd bought some more reflectors and with a little messing about made some progress. I don't think I have either the space or patience for doing this sort of thing. I certainly couldn't face doing it on a daily basis.

 

After a false start this morning I made it into Preston after an early lunch. Like a pillock I hadn't taken enough change to get two hour's parking so had to restrict myself to an hour. At least the sun was shining, which I like for taking photographs in towns. Even if there's nothing happening there can be architecture that benefits from some contrast.

being time constrained seems to concentrate my eye and I felt like there was too much to photograph at times. In towns there are always plenty of graphic subjects to play with. Rectangles, squares, circles and so forth. They often seem to suit a vertical framing too.

 

It's a bit of a 'trick' but including a figure in an essentially graphic picture can make a difference. Or at least relieve the repetition.

While walking around it was soon apparent that it would be quite easy to make a set of pictures on the theme of the declining high street. Boarded up shops and for sale signs abound once you step off the main thoroughfare. Again a series of pictures of such subjects might be boring without the inclusion of a figure here and there. The easy option would be to frame a straight on view and wait for someone to walk past.

I dropped lucky with a slightly angled shot when a woman wearing a scarf with a colour that matched the shop came into the corner of the frame. I noticed her as I made a click and took another two frames but the first lucky one worked better because of it's less contrived appearance.

For my walk round Southport I'd taken just the 60mm macro lens. I found that a bit too long at times and knowing that Preston streets are a more cramped and crowded I swapped it for the 50mm in an effort to learn to love it again. Looking through all my old negatives had made me realise that it wasn't such a bad focal length.

There were a couple of times when the 28mm would have saved me from stepping into the road, but it didn't take me long to start seeing in 50mm. One thing is for certain, having only one lens doesn't limit the number of pictures you can find, and having no other option stops you dithering over which lens to use! If I had all day to walk round town I might take two lenses, using one in ten morning and the other in the afternoon. Chopping and changing every few minutes messes up your way of looking.

The failing high street strikes me as a bit of an easy subject. That's not to say it should be discounted. However, I also noticed something else during my hasty wanderings. Something which might just make for a project if I can get motivated and summon up the courage to do it the way it should be done. Which probably means it won't happen...

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More monochrome madness

 Blurb have a 35% discount on offer until the end of this month so I've been hurrying to get together enough scans on one subject to make a bit of a book so I can see how they turn out in that format. I decided to concentrate on my Preston pictures and found one or two oddities I have no memory at all of taking. I don't even have a clue where this one was shot.

I wanted to make sure that both orientations were displayed at the same size, in a landscape format book the landscape pictures usually print larger. That meant making a template to output the pictures they way I wanted them. As it turned out this is a much quicker way of formatting the book pages than messing about with the page templates. Another lesson learned.

Depending on how the book turns out I'll either make a series of books from the Dusty Negative Archive, or one big one with sections devoted to the various subjects. That will also depend on how many pictures I end up scanning. No rush now I have the sample on its way.

Preston 1978-1981

By Dave Lumb

Further to my belief that putting a black border round a monochrome picture I have been playing around with the split toning controls in Lightroom. I haven't a clue what I'm doing with them, but they have a similar effect on photographs. Making them look like 'proper' pictures. Add toning and a border and the result is that a casual snapshot suddenly looks like art!

If you take the photo using a wide aperture and crop to 5x4 it can make a digital picture look almost like it was shot on large format film. I could imagine making a set of pictures of sheep like this. But I won't!

One thing all this scanning and toning nonsense has driven home is that digital is much more flexible than film. And that's not mentioning how much technically better my photographs are these days. There's certainly been no improvement in my level of competence over the last 40 years. So it must be the gear and the technology that's got better!

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Steps which can't be retraced

Scanning all those old negatives got me thinking about revisiting some of the places in the pictures. With that in mind I went to Preston this morning to have a look at what has been done to the outdoor market. Not with the intention of recreating earlier pictures, but to see what it is like since the regeneration project. I know we tend not to like change, but it seems planners don't like outdoors very much. Half of the main market is now an enclosed space. There'll be no fear of a pigeon crapping in someone's coffee. The glass box which now resides under the Victorian market roof is home to some of the stalls from the recently closed indoor market - also due to be redeveloped into something we can't live with out these days. A cinema complex I believe.

No matter where I go I can usually find some untidy quarter to photograph. There's always a tension between making good pictures and making a point. Trying to do both at once is the ideal. Difficult to pull off though. Very difficult.

The other end of the market is as it always was. Open to the elements and pigeons. I guess stalls of cheap goods staffed by people in layers of thermals isn't the kind of image that town planner and councillors like to project of their domain. Yet it is things like that which give towns and cities (I keep forgetting Preston is a city) their character, and which are part of British culture.

The smaller covered market section, the old fish market, has also been given a 21st century facelift with fancy new stalls and 'market boxes'. In other words, containers turned into supposedly trendy shop units. They're a big thing in the metropolis, apparently. There is no market in this section on a Friday, hence it is deserted.

Feeling a little despondent I went for a roam towards the (in)famous bus station. In so doing I passed the inevitable pound shops. No town is without the nationwide chains, but there are independent pound shops with individual character. There's probably a project there for someone...

After some years of dispute over the future of the bus station, loved and loathed with equal passion on both sides, it was given listed status and is being renovated. As Preston isn't a place I visit regularly these days I was unaware of the extent of the changes being wrought. The underpass from the Guildhall to the bus station is no more. Which makes me rather glad I took some photos of a walk through it back in late 2014. Those are steps I'll never retrace.

Although I have always been a fan of the place I'll admit that the bus station itself had become tatty. The clocks weren't working and it was looking tired. Given that the council used the prohibitive cost of refurbishment as a reason for demolishing the Brutalist building there is a lot of work going on and everywhere is bright and clean.

Whichever camp you are in there is no denying that Preston Bus Station has character, and as a designed space a sense of integrity.

I got to thinking about character of place as I passed coffee shop after coffee shop. All the same as the ones in every other town and city. That monotony can be relieved in Preston. Long before Costa and the rest were thought of the then-town had a coffee shop of note. It's still there today and looking just the same. It's got character. Terribly old fashioned though.

With the seemingly ever expanding UCLAN (Preston Polytechnic in my day...) there is another growth sector which I'm sure the city fathers love dearly. Student housing - a potential project for the architecturally inclined. Despite the shiny new accommodation blocks I managed to found it's seedy side.

With my time running out I had a brief wander down some back streets and found a picture that's just a picture. No message, no social comment. Just a pair of gloves.

A sort of fruitful couple of hours which gave me a few things to consider and work on. And I managed to sort the settings on the X100T to stop me messing up pictures. It did take me an hour though! Interestingly, or maybe not, I took most of the pictures at 28mm equivalent. I tried 50mm eq as a nod to the lens I used in 1979-81, but it just didn't work for me.

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Caravan Gallery exhibition

Last May I bought, and wrote briefly about, a book by The Caravan Gallery (Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale) - extra{ordinary}. An exhibition of the pictures in the book is on tour and right now, until the end of March, the Museum of Lancashire, in Preston, is hosting it. Why I chose a day during half-term to go and see the show is one of life's mysteries. It wasn't too busy though. Most of the kids were in the other exhibitions.

What was nice was to see the pictures printed larger than ion the book. Even though I'd seen them all before some still made me chuckle. The pictures show the general quirkiness of of Britain and it's people in an affectionate way. What I like about the work is the way it documents Britain in an unpretentious way, and the pictures aren't about being technically great photographs, they're all about being documentary. The subject is what is most important. That's not to say there aren't really some good photographs, there are.

One of the aims of The Caravan Gallery is to get people involved with their Pride of Place projects. Photography helps engage people in this with a competition, and the projects are documented in books. All in all it's a feel-good use of photography, which makes a change from some of the up-its-own-arse stuff you see in galleries these days which has to be deciphered to be understood.

 I'm a sucker for books, especially reasonably priced ones, so I took the opportunity to pick up a copy of the Lytham Pride of Place book, a guide to Liverpool and half a dozen postcards.

Having parked across town I used my compact to take some snaps on my way too and from the museum. That meant passing by a footbridge which I had photographed back when I was a foundation student doing a one week photography course. The bridge hadn't changed, but my photos have.

When the sun shines colours are more striking, which I guess is why most landscape photographers only venture forth on sunny days. Sunlight certainly does make pictures look different. I think it also explains why a lot of the photos I take outdoors don't look like everyone else's - because I go out regardless of the sunshine, or lack of it. Even when the sun does come out for me I carry on photographing the same kind of rubbish!

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Street Photography

Maybe not fitting the usual definition of street photography! My obsession with tarmac and road markings continues as part of the developing parking project which seems to be coalescing, at least in my head. In this instance the head-on, symmetrical, approach seems appropriate to the subject. The more pictures I make the more I see ways to bring the various elements together visually.

As usual my mind wandered while wandering round seeking out parking related viewpoints. The 'big city' has a lot more to look at compared to the smaller market and seaside towns I visit more frequently. It's also the place where I first photographed road markings back in 1978. I think what fascinates me about tarmac and road markings are the textures and abstract shapes which the camera frame makes by isolating sections - which also takes away part of their meaning as instructional devices to road users.

There's also a Pop Art influence in the use of found mass produced imagery. (I'm sure some visual artist somewhere must have used the Highway Code as source material.) The ubiquity of road markings and parking signage is certainly of interest to me - things we see every day and ignore other than to do what they tell us to, failing to see the small variations in the apparently standardised markings which are what interest me.

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I give up

 Against my better judgement I've been using my 'fishing' camera for a walk-around camera recently. Like my other attempts at using small cameras this has been met with frustration. They can make good pictures. The trouble is that for supposedly easy to use cameras you (I) have to take more care operating them to do so than with a big, bulky DSLR.

Then there's the lack of a top screen to give me the info I like to have to hand - shutter speed, aperture and ISO. I know it's all there on the big screen or in the electronic viewfinder - but I don't see it. Those screens are for composing pictures with. Mentally I block all the letters, icons and numbers out. As a result I end up shooting with crap settings and getting crap pictures.

Today's unplanned wander round Preston market was a case in point. I was sure I'd dialled the aperture back to f2 - which would ghave given me a fast enough shutter speed to combat wobbly hand syndrome when shooting single handed using the rear screen. I normally prefer using a viewfinder, but there's something about using a compact which makes me want to poke the camera into corners to get angles of view I couldn't by using the viewfinder. It also allows you to take photographs of people unaware the camera is actually aimed at them. Sometimes! So, I ended up with a load of slightly blurred pictures.

The market isn't what it used to be, at least not today. Maybe on a Saturday it has more traditional stalls, but Thursday is more of a car boot sale. Lots of interesting junk to look at, and strange juxtapositions of objects though. At the time I wasn't sure what caught my eye about the taps in the picture below. Processing it I realised that it was the echo of the arches in the background. That's why I cropped the top of the frame to a 3:2 aspect ratio. Useful as the 4:3 ratio is for some things (portrait oriented for example, and certain landscape subjects) I feel stuck in the old 35mm format, particularly for this kind of stuff. The B+W conversions are mostly to compensate for the blurriness. A grungy 'street photography' look where technical flaws become positives!

For some reason I've been pondering recently if the internet is debasing 'street photography'. Just like landscapes streets are available to anyone. I think this is why they are popular subjects among hobbyist photographers. As such common subjects, themes, compositions, and treatments in these genres get repeated. For many it's enough to photograph Corfe Castle or Durdle Door. It doesn't matter that they do so in exactly the same way everyone else has done before them. They've pretty much has teh compopsition handed them on a plate. With street photography people and things move, that's why good street photographs work - they've frozen a number of elements in a never to be repeated arrangement. That's more opf a challenge. As a result it's become enough to take photographs on the street and give them the 'look' of the 'iconic' street images. Shoot in black and white, use a lens no longer than 50mm and you're half way there.

By that score these pictures are 'internet street'. There are millions of such uninteresting pictures on the internet. Flickr is full of them, people have blogs with nothing but them filling their posts. Some even run workshops teaching others how to produce even more of them. I'm sure the interest in street photography has been driven by the web. It looks easy. It is just pictures of people in the street. Except, when done well, it's not.

I've been thinking about black and white these last few days too. I think it should be outlawed. Sure, colour can get in the way of some pictures. It can, perhaps surprisingly, make pictures look too ordinary. One of the strengths of great photographs is often their ability to render the everyday truly extraordinary. Colour can make it mundane. But just because colour adds an extra difficulty to picture making it can also be crucial. This shot is okay in an 'internet street' sort of way as a monochrome image. But it was colour that made me take it in the first place.

The stress on the subject matter shifts when it's shown in colour. In black and white the eye is drawn to the woman, in colour there's a tension between the attraction to a human face and the brightly coloured soft fabric flower. The picture works differently.

The most interesting stall by far was the one selling (and buying) second hand film cameras and other gear. Luckily for me I was short of cash or I might have come home with another camera to put one roll of film through and abandon. That Nikon was tempting!

Given the assortment of junk on show there was a lot that could be done with colour and shapes. Santa Claus and the Twin Towers? There has to be a deeper meaning there! This picture needs colour.

Prior to visiting the market I had tried to make a 'serious' picture of what the Americans would call 'a vacant lot' as part of my loose Spaces series.I spent some time framing different views and taking care over the camera settings. I got a couple of frames which looked okay on the back of the camera.

On the PC it was different story. The limitations of the camera, which I was aware of, were all too obvious. Distortion and colour fringing. Easily corrected in Lightroom, but annoying. I especially despise correcting lens distortion as it buggers up critically composed pictures by chopping bits off at the edge.

As a fishing camera, and for casual shooting, the compact is fine. I expect limitations. It's not the camera that's the problem. It's me. My habit of seeing 'serious' pictures when I'm just messing about snapshooting and don't have the right gear with me. Rather than leave the picture untaken - which, I suspect, is the correct approach - I waste  time doing what I can with what I have available and then regret it when I get home. perhaps I ought to get one of those new fangled phone camera thingies to remove the temptation rather than continue the futile search for my perfect go-anywhere-do-everything camera? Whatever the case I've got to give up trying to do stuff which the cameras aren't intended to do.

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