Shocked of Southport

The idle council workers have now finished their holiday enabling me to go see the exhibition I tried to view last week. If the easily upset get wind of it I expect the local free sheets to be filled with letters of moral outrage. To be honest I was surprised that the exhibition was as explicit as it is. I half expected it to be all portraits and flowers with the homoerotic nudity left out. So well done The Atkinson. There is a warning sign at the door to the room the show is in.

With a couple or three exceptions all the pictures are in square format, and exquisitely composed. While carefully lit studio photography in black and white isn't my 'thing' I have long admired Robert Mapplethorpe's pictures. I can only think that is his compositions which appeal to me. In that respect the portrait of a grinning David Hockney is probably the weakest on show.

The show consists of a number of sections including self portraits, Patti Smith, artists, flowers (not the best selection) and still lifes. I thought there would be more flower photographs in a show like this. Of those the leaf was the pick for me.

Most of the pictures were familiar to me from magazines, books and the internet. It's still better to see real life prints as the tonal range is different and although not large by many exhibition standards they are larger than magazine sized. As is so often the case, however, the glass in the frames makes for annoying reflections at times.

Well worth a visit before the exhibition closes on the 23rd of March. I'll certainly be back for a longer look.

Leaving the gallery to pop into WHSmith to pick up the latest BJP (£9.99!!!!!) I managed to get a couple of Dogtown pics. The Fuji is proving pretty good for street snappery.

I was trying to get the reflection to work in this one, but was just a bit too far away I reckon.

Dogs come in all shapes and sizes...

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Space

Despite still being unusually busy with real work I've managed to make a little progress with a couple of ongoing projects. Both provided hard learned lessons. For my visit to document a fishing tackle business that is shortly to vacate the city centre premises it's occupied for 42 years I was uncertain what to expect, so I went 'loaded for bear' as the Yanks might say. In English I took everything except the kitchen sink.

I thought that space might be cramped, so packed my ultra, ultrawide zoom. I thought it might be dark, so I took along my flash gun and a modifier. I also had the usual couple of fixed focal length lenses and the mid range zoom I use at the poultry shows. As it turned out the wide zoom, which I hardly ever use, and the flash, which I loathe using, turned out to be the most useful combination. Some of the rooms were extremely cramped, and some so dark I didn't know what I was photographing until I looked at the screen on the back of the camera!

I keep reading about using artificial light on t'internet but always end up doing what the experts decry. Putting the camera in P mode and the flash in Auto using TTL metering. Apparently TTL is rubbish... The one thing that I have learned to do is bounce the flash off the ceiling. Most times this does what I want. All I use the flash for is to provide enough light to get a decent exposure. I'm not trying to be 'creative' with it.

There was one place, on the stairs, where I did have to get a bit clever. With the speedlight in the hotshoe there were dark shadows cast no matter where I aimed the light. So I took it off the camera to point in a more useful direction and fired it remotely using the camera's built in flash. After a few attempts the picture worked out OK. For some of the photos I did something even more unthinkable to the lighting experts. I used teh pop-up flash on its own! There are times when a light that is almost on the lens's axis is what's needed to avoid awkward shadows. The pop-up flash does a decent job.

The pictures which I didn't use the wide angle/speedlight combination for were mostly taken with the other camera fitted with my 50mm lens. Sometimes with flash mostly without.

I'm getting more used to breaking my 'rules' these days. Not only am I willing to crop pictures, I'm also willing to move things rather than photographing them as I find them. This old telephone was too interesting to photograph the back of, so I turned it round and cleared away some clutter. daft as it might seem, I then put it back as I' found it! There are a lot more photos from the visit, but I'm saving them for another time.

 The main thing I learned from all this is that apart from being able to 'get it all in' I don't like using the ultra, ultrawide. I don't like the way, as with all zooms, I find myself using the two extremes. In this case the wide end looks too distorted, and the long end is never long enough. As I didn't get to make use of it's fast aperture, and I almost came to like using the flash, I've decided that this lens shall go. I'll use my slower ultrawide zoom instead, either outdoors without flash or with flash when inside. If I need wider than 24mm without flash I'll use my 20mm lens as I have done at the poultry shows and sales.

Saturday was a day of thick fog pretty much from dawn until dusk. So I got work done. Sunday didn't start off much better but I headed for the beach just the same. This might become a regular Sunday thing. Or probably not knowing how I change my mind and get sidetracked. Luckily the fog cleared as I neared the coast, but there didn't appear to be much going on. There was, however, a horse box in the car park. No horses in sight though. The tide was a long way out and some tiny specks on the horizon to the south. Horses. I wandered out towards the sea.

There weren't even any dog walkers out on the sand. I made some pitiful attempts at capturing the emptiness of the shore. All got deleted, either immediately or back home. The further out you go from the sea wall the more and more sparse the marsh grass becomes. It breaks up from one continuous mass into isolated clumps of gradually decreasing size. Of course this is actually the reverse of how the sand is colonised. I took the picture below to, hopefully, illustrate how the colonisation begins with one plant taking root. Sand then build up around it and more plants join in. The clump expands and eventually joins up with a neighbouring clump. Eventually the clumps homogenise and the land marches seaward.

In this case the mist was beginning to roll across the sea to provide a soft background to isolate the plant against. I had to get a low angle in order for the leaves to break the horizon line. Simply shooting from a standing position wouldn't have made a picture conveying space and distance.

Gradually the horses, which turned out to be one ridden pony and another pulling a trap, got closer. After being approached by the two timid, but pretending to be brave, springers accompanying the horses I asked if I could take some photos. Apart from the pleasures of trying to photograph animals, which take direction less well than humans, I made one big mistake. It's a mistake that zoom lenses tend to force on me. Zooming in too tight.

All the stuff you read about composition tells you to frame things tight to keep unnecessary stuff out of the frame. They never tell you that you can frame looser to get necessary stuff in the frame. Framing looser also gives you more scope for levelling horizons if you tend to lean a bit. Even with the in-viewfinder level indicator I still mange to end up with a sloping horizon far too often.

Again I've gone for a 5:4 ratio as it just seems to work for these beach portraits. As is often the case I managed to get some bits right in one frame and some wrong, then swap them round in another frame. In the first picture the framing and the dog's pose are good, in the second one the horse's pose and the rider's expression are. On balance I've gone for the second shot. Trying to time the shots for a horse with a dog on it's back was worse than photographing twitchy chickens!

They're both better than some frames I shot!

On the bright side I'm slowly getting better at giving people (if not animals) directions for how I'd like them to pose so I can get the pictures I want. Partly that's because I'm forming a better idea of what that is.

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Open door policy

Whenever I get stuck for ideas the beach seems to be as good a place as any to head for. I continue to find it more alluring in winter than summer. Maybe because the light is more interesting in winter; either harsh and low or dull and flat. As opposed to bright and overhead as in summer - apart from those horribly cheery sunsets.

Because the council have seen fit to prevent beach parking during the 'off season' there aren't as many people around at the south end of the shore. Not doing interesting things at any rate, mostly the well wrapped up dog walkers and people out for a bracing seaside wander. Although I tend to prefer flat light the low angled winter sun does make photographing the dunes more appealing. It can all get a bit contrasty making the files difficult to process. Shooting almost into the sun doesn't help matters. In the dunes the fencing makes a good compositional aid.

This kind of picture is what I class as 'easy'. Just a matter of framing and not much else. In this case the fence line reflects the shape of the dune beyond. I don't think the picture says much other than 'this is what it looked like, though. The next shot, on the other hand, was made because seeing the fence almost buried by sand made me think about the futility of trying to slow the march of the dunes. Particularly on a windy day when the sand was being blown landward. I made the effort to get down at sand level and frame the picture rather than make a simple record shot. Both approaches have their uses but I felt this called for some formal composition.

That was before the dreaded festive break. Yesterday was sunny once more with an even stiffer wind blowing. So strong a wind I could hardly stand being out in it. It proved worthwhile though as the usually padlocked gates to the shrimping compound were open. By the looks of the remains of one lying on the ground they'd suffered a sever impact of some sort. Anyway, using the Urban Explorer's approach of 'if the door's open it's OK to go in' I had a look around.

There was little to see. A few shrimp nets and plastic buckets. Quite dull. The variety of vehicles was interesting though. Unfortunately the light was harsh and not conducive to what I would have liked to do. I planned to return on a duller day.

As it turned out today started off bright and then clouded over. For once I didn't prevaricate and got my self back, with a different lens too. Having a plan in mind it was a quick job, after poking around a bit more with a wider lens, to take the 'portraits' of the tractors and conversions which have replaced the horses and carts of old. It was tricky to frame the shots without too much background clutter, but the results were ideal for making a grid.

With that done it was time to hit the beach. As I got back to the car I spotted two people walking along the shore with metal detectors. Potential portrait subjects for the Beach Life project. I had two choices. Try and catch them up on foot, or drive along and head them off at the pass. I went for the latter option. It worked too. And they were amenable to me taking their double portrait. They'd travelled from Huddersfield and Barnoldswick to search the sands while their wives went round the shops. I wasn't sure if the sun coming out might have made for too much of a contrast to my previous beach portrait, but the subdued palette seems to work OK.

What I am finally managing to do with my posed pictures is slow down and pay the same attention to them as I would to a static subject. Just as I altered my position to get the perspective I needed for the tractor shots, I did the same with this portrait. I managed to  get the horizon level (thanks to the tool in the camera's viewfinder, and I avoided it going through the men's heads. Having the pier in the background helps make the scene obviously the seaside. Without it the marsh grass could be anywhere. That said, I don't want the landmark in all the pictures. This picture has been cropped to 4:5 ratio as was the coal piker portrait. I'm not yet sure if this is something I'll stick to or not.

After that amiable encounter it was wander along the sea wall and part way back, round Ocean Plaza where I made some photographs which will appear on Sandgrounding, then along the side of Pleasureland. The problem with walking along the sea wall, or the beach for that matter, late in the day is that low sun. Heading north it's behind you and you can both see what is coming your way and get well illuminated pictures of people. Then you have to turn round and walk into the sun. Which can be blinding. Working for silhouettes and shadows is one option. A bit clichéd though. Alternatively use the potential for highlight and shadow recovery of a modern camera's files and see what can be done that way.

I tried levelling the horizon in the picture above, but it lost its vitality. Not the first time I've left a wonky horizon when the landscape isn't the subject.

Always keep looking behind you when out with a camera. Doing that presented me with an abstract view of the go-kart track. By now the clouds were coming back softening the light to the detriment of the vibrant colours. So not totally satisfactory. I made quite a few attempts at getting the framing right, and still had to crop slightly. What makes the picture is that blue to grey band. Had that been all blue the picture would have been less interesting. Not that it's all that interesting anyway!

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History in the making

I've been prevaricating over buying a copy of Stuart Franklin's The Documentary Impulse for some time. Reading the revue on The Online Photographer prompted me to click on 'buy'. I'm glad I did. It's a thought provoking read about what constitutes documentary photography, its uses and purposes, and a whole lot more. I know it's one of those books I'll reread, maybe not all at once but certainly a chapter or passage now and then. It sits along side On Being a Photographer as a must read for anyone interested in reportage or documentary photography in my opinion.

With the book recently read some of the issues it deals with have been in my mind as I've been out with my cameras this week. Although I've not had much spare time as work continues to be hectic by my standards I have forced myself to take pictures this weekend.

With just the short afternoons to work in I returned to old themes which have stagnated. The first was a misty drive around the flatlands. I was looking for agricultural scenes to try out some ideas on but ended up photographing a pumping station on the river. I sort of liked the results but need time to let the initial impression fade to decide if they are any good. They might be a bit too picturesque for my liking. However, the book has made me think again about the worth of making 'nice' pictures as documents. At least I have found an angle (literally) to work from.

Earlier in the day I took my usual morning walk to the Post Office. At that time the fog had barely started to lift. I always like taking photographs when it's foggy. It can be good for hiding cluttered backgrounds and isolating subjects. I photographed a couple of trees on the edge of the playing field. Back on the computer I turned them into a diptych.

This afternoon I turned west and headed for the beach. If in doubt go to the seaside is my motto! I love the place in winter. All the summer attractions shut and either closed down or being renovated. I've photographed the rollercoasters many times before but today I took a couple of shots which again made a reasonable diptych. I'm wondering if there might be some mileage in making a series of these pairings.

Not an original concept, Sophie Green uses diptychs quite frequently. But she wasn't the first either. There'd be no point making pairs for the sake of it. There would have to be some thematic connection for it to work. Another one for the back-burner I guess.

Continuing my rather aimless afternoon wandering I came across a group of reenactors practising their fighting moves. I'd seen them in the same park once before, but this time I had a chat with them. Apparently Sunday afternoons are practice time and they meet up every week when they are not putting on a display somewhere.

Initially I thought I might have found another project. I could see how it could work out. However, once I began to hear about what they get up to and the lengths they go to I realised there was a problem. Just as with any group of fanatics (be they anglers, photographer, reenactors or poultry fanciers) they all have a wealth of in-depth knowledge of their subject. The trouble was that it wasn't knowledge that I wanted to acquire! This is a stressed lesson in On Being a Photographer - pick subjects that interest you.

Later I began to think there is an irony in what reenactors do. They are all about 'heritage' and history, yet they are not (certainly when it comes to the Norman period) directly connected with what they are representing. It's neither history in action or a maintaining of a cultural heritage. It's infotainment. Poultry fanciers, on the other hand, are maintaining a cultural heritage. They really are an example of history being made right now. And that is worth documenting.

These thoughts made me realise that it might be time to start getting my beach life pictures going again. A chance encounter with a coal picker who let me take his portrait (and I think this time I have made a portrait) got me back in the mood to progress this, and a way to do it. What it needs most is a commitment of time.

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Zoned

At last I've had some time away from work forced on me and managed to make use of it with the camera. Friday saw me having to go into the market town of Ormskirk for an unspecified period while Vauxhall attended to my car on its second recall. The first recall saw me wandering around the place all day, so I didn't know what to expect. Thankfully it was all over before lunchtime. The place grows more like a ghost town each time I visit it.

That means there's not much to photograph, especially on a non-market day when the streets are all but deserted. Without the market there are few places to buy anything that isn't a coffee or junk from a charity shop. Shops which have been there years, as far back as I can remember when I was on work experience in the town, are closing down. The record shop where I bought Never Mind the Bollocks went long ago, but the greengrocer's which I photographed back in 2013 with it's wares displayed on the pavement as ever, is also appeared to be no more. Maybe it was shut for the day, but it didn't look like it. Photograph things when you have the chance because they might be gone before you realise it.

Whether it would be worth recording the closed down shops, the charity shops and coffee houses, I'm not sure. It feels a bit obvious, the sort of thing you expect someone is already doing. But is it being done?

I was in half a mind to go an have a more serious look around today but I let things slide and had some shopping I wanted to do. That meant a trip to the seaside. With the shopping a failure I headed to teh park and ride for some cheap, time unlimited, parking. The bloody council had put the charge up by 50p, so I parked in a two hour free parking zone and used the park and ride toilets anyway. Tight? Me?

I left the car in bright sunshine, and almost immediately began to see pictures to add to Sandgrounding. But barely had I got to the sea front than a heavy mist rolled in.

I've written about mist and fog before. They are transformative and simplify what can be seen. Not one does background clutter get hidden, but colours become softened and can almost disappear completely. Fog is a sort of monochromatic filter. I don't know what it is about the go-kart track that attracts me, but it has done ever since I picked up a camera and walked past it.

Add a wintry sun to fog and it becomes easy to see pictures. It's hard to stop snapping away.

Every now and then the sun would strengthen and add light to a subject.

Then it would fade and a little help might be required to add some 'spot colour'. To heighten it I used the photography enthusiast's hated tool - the pop-up flash of my camera. I actually like the effect the pop-up flash gives. The drawback is that when I'm wearing a cap the peak gets in the way and half closes the flash which then refuses to fire.

Soon the fog was really closing in. All I could do was get increasingly minimal.

Maybe it was the fog, maybe it was having a break away from any serious photographing. In just under an hour I'd rattled off a load of frames and come away with some I like and some that have got me thinking. Why it is that some days you get in the zone is a mystery. One thing I do know is that being there doesn't last long. As in anything, when you are in the zone your brain is working overtime. It can't last before the intuitive thinking starts to get sluggish and you slip back into trying to make things work. Which they rarely do when you desperately want them to. far better to stop. Chill. Start again and hope you can get back in the same frame of mind.

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No time to focus

Time hasn't been on my side lately. The old enemies of work and weather have kept my cameras out of action. I'm less inclined to just set off snapping away and increasingly only wanting to take photographs for projects. Luckily my Sandgrounding project, which doesn't require great examples of photographic virtuosity is a good enough temptation when I can add a couple of hours on to a trip into town. As usual my attention was drawn to the scruffy and down at heel!

This time out I actually had something specific in mind to investigate. Something that might become serious. If it does then it would give me something to work at on weekends when there are no poultry shows. However, my plan was thwarted for the time being by two unforeseen circumstances.

Last week I'd ordered three more books from Café Royal Books. Cheap, A5 black and white, saddle stitched (printer speak for stapled!) publications. One was of photos by Ken Grant taken in Southport. So I went and took a couple of snaps in Cable Street for myself.

There's something messy in Ken Grant's pictures, which I also see in some of Tom Woods, which appeals to me.Messy but with some kind of underlying structure at times, but the subjects are what is really important. Fussing over making pictures like Cartier-Bresson's with his famous 'geometry' and decisive moments feels kind of tedious. It's my antipathy towards 'clever' photography kicking in again. Or maybe my low boredom threshold?

I have taken a lot of pictures which fit a certain style of urban, documentary, landscape photography in my time. It's quite prevalent around the web and in print. Where things are presented head on, almost flattened as blocks of colour and/or texture. Often shot on overcast days. I used to really like it, but now it's got to look a bit easy and become another trope.

The more I look at pictures of places without people in them the more I think they are a lacking. Pictures of people doing stuff, in environments, is what is most interesting to look at. Portraits of peopel isolated aren't very interesting to me. That's why I found more of the rejected portraits from the Taylor Wessing prize to hold my attention than any of the shortlisted ones. But I'm no great judge of what makes a portrait.

Closer to home I've been making an occasional snap on my way to or from the Post Office. Over the river the pet food factory is expanding. Too far away and too fenced in to really document it, but it will be changing the landscape. I'll look back at pictures made in the past to see how much of a change.

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Sea Change - thoughts from an exhibition

Twice since it opened I've tried to visit an exhibition I'd been looking forward to at The Atkinson in Southport. Gallery staff must be even lazier than librarians because both times it hadn't opened by ten o'clock. Third time lucky when I waited until the idle gits had had their lunch!

The exhibition is called Sea Change and is of art relating to the coast of the England's north west. There are paintings drawn from the gallery's collection alongside works on loan. There's a parallel exhibition of postcard art, and another of lantern slides of old  Southport. Although billed as separate exhibitions they complement each other well with photography playing a large part throughout.

Something that struck me when looking at two paintings superficially similar in style was the difference between good art and okay art.

The Helen Bradley on the left has 'stick' figures as does the Lowry on the right. However two factors differentiate the two. The Lowry picture has a unifying structure to its composition, the figures being a part of it. Bradley's figures are placed at random, and more importantly on close inspection they look like 'Fuzzy Felt' figures dropped onto a flat surface. Although the Lowry seems simplistic there is space in the picture. Partly as a result of careful drawing, but also because of the use of tone and colour on the sand. Bradley's sand is all one tone and, despite the drawn perspective, flat. Her figures don't stand on the beach like Lowry's do. They hover over it. Which goes to show that it's easy to ape a stylistic mannerism like stick-people, but unless you fully grasp what it is built on (draughtsmanship and close looking) you only make a pastiche.

I'd been looking forward to seeing which pictures of Martin Parr's had been selected , and to see what they looked like as prints. Both on show were, unsurprisingly, from The Last Resort. To be honest, as objects, the 'real' prints didn't set me swooning over any magical properties. Nor did any of the other photographic prints on show. I really don't get the fuss some people make about 'fine prints' Maybe they weren't 'fine' enough!

Although they hadn't been billed in the advertising it was nice to see a couple of Tony Ray-Jones prints and a famous Bert Hardy. These were black and white prints on a small scale compared to the colour  Parr's. Which brought home to me once more that extra large prints can be a bit of an affection, and a good picture will work well at any scale. It's all down to the picture's structure -as per the Lowry.

Alongside the photographs mentioned was one by a photographer I wasn't aware of, Paddy Summerfield. It's always nice to be introduced to a 'new' photographer and he's one whose work I'll investigate more. There was another new-to-me name, but on the lines of 'if you can't say anything nice, say nothing, I'll leave it at that, except to say that the Bradley/Lowry comparison seemed applicable when I compared his work to that of another surprise inclusion, a large grid of pictures from John  Darwell's Not Starting from Here series.

It's kind of difficult to pin down the difference between the two, it's again partly picture structure, but subject matter and some intangible sense of vision and intent comes through in good photography. Less "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like" and more "I don't know much about art, but I know it when I see it". Which probably makes little sense. Maybe good photography doesn't look forced, while so-so photography looks laboured? I dunno. I do know that I try my best to make photographs that don't look like I've made an effort to frame them.

One of the things I like about photography is that pictures can be about small ideas. The postcard exhibition was full of small ideas. Some were rather grandly hung on the walls, mounted and framed, while others were laid out on tables (covered in glass). I much preferred the less precious table top display. Something that could be transferred to photographs, I think. I'll be returning for another visit, to concentrate on the paintings more.

I'd made a couple of pictures on my way to the Atkinson, but looking at the exhibition must have inspired me because I went off for a wander and made some more. I should have stuck with an idea I'd stumbled on beforehand. An accidentally out of focus 'street' shot got me thinking about the difficulties people have taking photographs in public places and the prevailing attitude of paranoia about privacy. Something that's been at the back of my mind for some time. It struck me that by deliberately missing focus you can achieve a degree of anonymity while still presenting a readable picture which can have a structure to it.

There was a postcard by Richard Hamilton that played around with the nature of photography and how parts of photographs appear as recognisable when small but become meaningless blobs when enlarged. I seem to remember that Tom Phillips had played around with a similar notion too, although more concerned with enlarging details from postcards.

So rather fitting that I photographed two flags later. Here the ability of photography to show the previously unseen (the reverse of what Hamilton is highlighting) was revealed when I viewed the file at 100%. The word 'ENGLAND' on the flags looked wrong. They're being flown upside-down!

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Roll on winter

It must be my naturally miserable nature but I prefer winter time for wandering around the beach and seafront. You'd think that on a warm sunny afternoon with hundreds of people about there'd be lots going on that might make for interesting pictures. To my eyes, if nobody else's, the masses all seem to be doing nothing of interest. Eating, sleeping, wandering aimlessly. My hat's off to those photographers who do find pictures among the thronging hordes. I find people engaged in some activity make for far better picture opportunities. In winter people at the beach are generally there to do something - collect coal, ride horses, kitesurf - rather than idly 'enjoy' themselves.

Again I've been forsaking the viewfinder for the low-level benefits of the rear screen. When my knees worked properly I could have stayed partially squatted to get the camera level with the horse's head. Now I don't have to. Another so-sop picture but the colours work nicely and I don't care if the highlights are blown. It's almost level!

Another low level shot was taken when the shapes of the bowls and the plates attracted me. A bit of a nothing picture but when the girl came into the frame it sort of made a picture. One which I like because, although far less interesting, reminds me of this one.

The day's take away point is: Give up trying to take pictures of people enjoying the seaside in the sun and stick to making pictures of 'stuff' and empty spaces.

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