Wet and dry

What a summer.A traditional British one with no two consecutive days the same. Or so it seems. My visits to agricultural shows have been a mix of red hot and soaking. Last Thursday was the Westmorland County Show with a weather forecast so bad that I very nearly gave it a miss. Looking out of the back window early morning I was lulled into a false sense of hope. Like a fool I set off. As soon as I arrived I put my waterproofs on and my hood stayed up until I left not all that much later. Once the sheep classes had been judged I gave up. Despite the drenching it was a fairly enjoyable three and a half hours.

In some ways rainy days are good for my kind of photography. The light is even and the wet surfaces (and people) provide a sense of atmosphere. I'd gone expecting rain and  had the hated 70-200mm on one body because it is more weatherproof than my other longer zooms. The other body could have had the 24-70mm on for the same reason, but I opted for the small and light 35mm. I ended up wishing I'd gone for the 28mm at times. If I had taken that route I'd probably have been wishing I'd used the 35mm!

The photos were pretty much the usual stuff with a few fresh ideas tried to relieve the monotony.

Two days later I went to the Hodder Valley Show, arriving early the lush grass was damp with dew from a night of clear skies. The clouds stayed away and it was soon warm enough to dispense with the sweatshirt. What a difference a couple of days made!

Again I was prowling around the sheep pens. Again it was mostly Lonks and Swaledales. Unlike the Westmorland where I was outside the judging areas I sneaked in at Hodder Valley as it's a more relaxed event. This time I was back using my two zoom approach with the lightweight options. I'm not sure this really gives me any advantage over the superzoom to be honest. Although the shorter lens does seem to give a nicer 'look' to some pictures.

Particularly early on while the sun was quite low there was a warm, Autumnal light which was pleasing.

Testicle checking is still on my wish list of pictures, although a short sequence (of which the next two shots are a part) might be the way forward.

I was still, inevitably, looking for detail shots.

 I'm not sure how I'd categorise pictures like the two which come next.

I don't often set up pictures. I might turn a bottle around to show a label or something like that, but nothing much more. However, when I was handed a rosette and prize envelope to look after while judging continued I tried something. I should have taken a little more care, and made more than two attempts.

There are more sheepy pictures here.

Being a small show everything was close to everything else, and this included the sheep dog trial which was visible from the sheep pens. With judging over I strolled down the hill to the trial where the sheep were being uncooperative.

If I had got there earlier I might have had better light on the pen, but there wasn't much action there while I was watching thanks to the sheep. I'd been on my feet for a long time and my dodgy foot was starting to ache a bit. That's my excuse for not taking many photos. I got one or two which were okay though.

That's almost it for this season's shows. Where my photography is headed from here I'm not sure. I went to the bantam society show on Sunday and maybe I was still tired from the Hodder show (or wanted to listen to the final test of the Ashes series) but I really couldn't get up any enthusiasm for photographing poultry, made my excuses and left after an hour and a half. Despite that I did get a couple of pictures to add to the poultry file. I guess there's always an outside chance of getting something. Maybe that's the way forward with long term projects. Be more selective and don't try to always record everything from a day. I dunno.

With the death of Robert Frank a few days ago there have been many obituaries all mentioning his most well known work, The Americans, and most pointing out that the 83 pictures in the book were chosen from 767 rolls of film - a total of some 27,000 frames. That's roughly one picture from every 333 by my reckoning. A reassuring statistic to my mind.

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Conformity?

For the last two years I have entered the British Life Photography Awards, simply because the theme appeals to me. I'd never entered any competitions before and was surprised to have one photo short-listed at my first attempt. I was less surprised that it was a picture I'd entered to use up my quota of entries. The others where ones I considered 'good', the one picked was one I considered 'trite'.

Foolishly I did something similar for the completion just finished. As a sort of experiment I entered a picture very similar to the one which had been short-listed, but which had more interest in it. To my eyes at any rate. I also included a couple of other pictures which weren't in my usual style but which I thought had a look of pictures which had made it through to the book and exhibition in the past.

It was no surprise this time when I was notified that one of my pictures had been short-listed, and less of a surprise which one it was. Yup. The one similar to the previously short-listed picture!

Along with looking at the winners this just reinforced my view that photographic competitions promote conformity. Whether it's British life, landscape, portraiture or whatever, the way to succeed is to enter pictures which you know the judges will like. And with the competitions aimed at a mass audience what the judges pick tends to be eye-catching images. Understandably so when they have thousands of pictures to look through. Contrasty light in a picture is a good way to catch the eye. This year's winner has it, and my short-listed picture had it too. High impact imagery is the way to go nine times out of ten. Enough of that.

When it comes to style I'm very much in favour of simplicity. Not simplicity of composition but a simplicity of picture making where there's nothing flashy, clever or 'showoffy' to the works. Solid, straightforward photography. Probably why I'll never win any photographic competitions! I think this simple type of photography stands the test of time because in its way it is style-less. Less is more as the saying goes.

A fine example of straightforward photography is to be found in the work of former Guardian photographer Denis Thorpe. Last year I picked up a used copy of his book The Shepherd's Year to add to my growing collection of sheep related books (not just of photography). The other week I bought a copy of his new retrospective book, from the wonderful Bluecoat Press, A View From The North. After sheep The North is my abiding passion when it comes to photography.

It's a cracking book which contains a number of pictures from the older volume - but the reproduction is somewhat improved. Although the pictures are from the past, and there is a hint of nostalgia here and there, they are just solid, down to earth, photographs. Great stuff which documents times and places in a no-frills manner.

Also in the picture above is a slim volume from the Slaidburn Archive. It's a historical book rather than a photographic book which I bought to inform myself about the sheepfolds I see on my travels. I now know a bit more than I used to about sheep keeping history. There are contemporary photographs in the book but the archive pictures are far more interesting both as documents of events no longer practised and as pictures in themselves. While many are vernacular there are some which are clearly taken by a more discerning eye. Another worthwhile addition to my expanding library.

I was looking at some Raymond Moore pictures a few days ago and wondered if I'd ever seen them in my photographically formative years. Had I got my fascination for photographing road markings and tarmac from looking at his photographs? I was doing it in 1978 and I'm still doing it now!

The picture above was taken on my way to the wood to pursue my black and white project. I've decided to keep it going until the leaves start to appear. One or two are already breaking out on teh elders in the understory. But as yet the canopy is bare. I messed around for an hour or so and made a little progress. I don't think this could be classed as a documentary project. Although it sounds pretentious to say it, it's more poetic or metaphorical. One thing's for sure, I can't see any of the pictures winning Landscape Photographer of the Year!

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In print

As promised my photos appeared in Fancy Fowl. In addition to the poultry portraits one of two judges was also included. The portraits looked okay in print. Not quite as good as ones taken with better lighting set ups, but good enough.

A lot of hobbyist photographers, and some pros, suffer from GAS (gear acquisition syndrome), I've pretty much cured myself of that affliction having reconciled myself to the fact that there is no small camera/system that meets my needs and that I have all the lenses I'll ever need. I might even get rid of some lenses. No. My affliction is book acquisition syndrome. I keep on telling myself that enough is enough and I will only buy books of new photography and no 'must have' titles. The reissue of Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi tempted me and I have to say it didn't disappoint.

Another taboo for me was supposed to be black and white photography. Yet when Bluecoat Press announced two projects on Kickstarter I signed up. I didn't take the slightly more expensive, ego boosting option, to have my name included in the book's list of supporters though.

Small Town Inertia has had a lot of coverage for Jim Mortram. I saw an early exhibition a while back. The subject is a tough one. People with various health issues struggling to survive on benefits. All very worthy, but I do find myself wondering if such books make a difference. What coverage it has had seems to have been mainly in photography and culture circles. What might be called 'echo chambers' these days. The pictures are highly reliant on the accompanying text, in my opinion. Not that that's a negative. Photographs can't always tell the whole story. Certainly a book worth having. Although I do question why Mortram has to work using black and white film. That's just my prejudice against using old media when newer ones which can do more are available.

The late Tish Murtha didn't have the option of using digital when she was working on the photographs in Youth Unemployment. Another book I'm glad to have broken my 'rule' for. Again I wonder how much effect these pictures had when they were originally made and shown. Maybe that's not the point. Perhaps they serve as social documents to warn future generations against what can happen? Maybe they're just pictures? That's part of the difficulty with photography. Photographs are documents and they can also work on an aesthetic level.

That is something James Ravilious was aware of. Reading his widow's memoir of his life it was made clear that, when cataloguing his archive, he drew a distinction between the photographs which he considered to be well made as pictures and those which served only as records of a disappearing world.

When I ordered the memoir I also ordered the new collection of Ravilious photographs, The Recent Past. More so with rural life than the urban life depicted in Tish Murtha's work from around the same time, there is an air of nostalgia in the Ravilious pictures. Even when they depict the harshness of the farming world we inevitably see it as romantic.

This continues today. The popularity of books written by shepherding folk is, I'm sure, due to some rose tinting on behalf of the readers. Living a rural idyll sounds great when sat reading these books in a cosy sitting room. But how many of the readers could face having to get up in the predawn cold every day? No days off because the stock doesn't take holidays. Whether it's possible to depict that sort of lifestyle without the romanticism, I really don't know.

The acknowledged influence of Henri Cartier-Bresson on Ravilious is obvious. But he was far from alone in that. Most documentary photographers who followed Cartier-Bresson were similalry influenced, at least in their early years. Some broke free of the chains of his formality of composition and the decisive moment. I don't think Ravilious did. While working in one area of the country on one theme for seventeen years is a rare luxury for a documentary photographer I get the feeling it trapped Ravilious in a way.

Getting burdened with a subject matter is something that always concerns me. The poultry thing is something I need to break free of. Hence my return to the beach. The photos I took there last winter, I think, are a little different to my chickeny ones. Unfortunately I can't seem to find the same enthusiasm for the beach as I did. There haven't been many people around during my two short visits this weekend, so that might explain it. Although the nagging feeling that I should be elsewhere (although I don't know where) photographing something else (although I don't know what) kept nagging away.

It could all too easily become a case of taking different pictures of the same subjects at the beach. There are only so many ways to photograph, for example, kite boarding without resorting to the clichés. That's where the line between documentary and photojournalism lies. The latter uses tricks of the trade like wide angle close ups and flash to give their pictures impact. The pictures still record, but they don't document. Documentary photographs are more matter of fact. At least that's the way I see it.

When I saw a 4x4 drive on to the beach towing a trailer I was intrigued. Even more so when I saw that a push net for shrimps was being unloaded. Unfortunately the shrimper didn't want to be photographed, but he didn't mind me taking a couple of snaps of his gear.

Leaving the beach I went in search of livestock. Conservation grazing is a big thing these days. All very right on. Land of conservation interest has rare breed cattle and/or sheep let loose on it during the winter to, in theory, keep the scrub at bay. Luckily I didn't have to go far to find the cattle, and the lowering sun was great for making romantic pictures of them. Foolishly I had gone out with the intention of trying to love a lens I keep thinking of getting rid of. Which meant I couldn't frame shots they way I would have liked to. With livestock a zoom is always a help when they don't go where you'd like them to. So my options were limited and the rapidly setting sun didn't give me much time.

It should go without saying that when I returned today with a more suitable lens the cattle were a long way off and the light was less favourable. I didn't bother tramping through the dunes to get closer.

Again the beach was fairly deserted. There were a few horsey types around, but as someone was already taking photographs of them I kept away making just a couple of environmental pictures. All in all my sense of directionless frustration continues.

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This and that

There's a lot of bad photography gets posted on line. I admit that I post more than my fair share of it! One  of the genres that suffers most from this is 'street photography'. What I find depressing about a lot of this stuff, apart from the endless repetition of the stale tropes, is that many of the photos simply aren't good pictures. They don't go beyond the 'I saw this' level. What's more they rarely seem to constitute a body of work. In recording everyday life as it is I think this is more important than in any other field.

A one-off landscape can stand on its own in a frame. To do that a 'street' photograph has to be something special. A set of not especially good street photographs, however, if shot to a theme has a change of saying something more than 'I saw this'. That's where I am trying to go with what has become my Dog Town project. They're quick grab shots of people walking dogs. Individually they aren't up to much. Put them all together, and if I stick at it long enough and make a good edit, they might just mean something more. That's what I'm hoping. In ten or twenty years time the background details will take on a social history tinge too. I'm probably being egotistical here. I doubt either I or my photography are as good as I imagine.

A case in point about superficially dodgy photographs adding up to more than the proverbial sum of their parts is Keith Arnatt's "I  wonder whether cows wonder?" I unexpectedly stumbled upon this in my local art gallery, The Atkinson, in a show inspired by John Berger's essay "Why Look at Animals?" I have read the essay, and I was aware of the Arnatt pictures, but hadn't seen them exhibited before.

Arnatt was a conceptual artist before taking to photography as his primary medium. Therefore it's no surprise that there is an intellectual element to his photographic works. I feel this adds to the pictures, even though they are engaging enough without having any background information. Cows are curious creatures (as in they exhibit curiosity), and like so many animals they make interesting shapes. Some of the 'Wonder' pictures are quite amusing!

I freely admit that I admire Arnatt's photography and approach a great deal, and that his "Walking the Dog" series is an influence on my Dog Town work.

It is always interesting to see work as it is intended to be shown. The scale of the images is always lost in a book or magazine, even if produced at the same scale. It's pretty obvious that the cow pictures are 6x4 enprints. I love this. Unpretentious prints like you'd get back from the chemists in the old days. It's the sort of presentation I could expect from a conceptual artist and it takes the idea of the snapshot aesthetic literally.  Photographs printed for gallery exhibition these days are all too frequently for my liking very big and very expensively archival. Rebelling against the concept of 'fine prints' is right up my street!

The making of perfect black and white conversions from digital files has been boring me to tears has been driving me away from The On-line Photographer recently. Just as I don't care about fine prints I also don't care about great processing. You can fiddle with digital files (and negatives in enlargers) until the cows come home and never settle on the ideal result. Ansel Adams was a perfectionist when it came to printing and he changed his views over the years with later prints looking different to earlier one. It's very subjective. Far  more so than what makes a picture great. Rarely (I'd say never) is that the tonal range or the paper quality. It's usually (always?) the subject and how it's arranged within the frame.

I started getting a little irate shortly before starting this post when reading a blog I'd clicked through to which was bemoaning how digital sensors are so good today that they make you lazy. I've never subscribed to the view that technological advances make creative people lazy. If you can use the ISO to select itself then all you have to consider are the values which affect how  your subject appears. Depth of field and motion blur are creative choices through aperture and shutter speed selection. ISO isn't a creative choice if it introduces next to no noise at any value. The more a camera can do for you the more you can concentrate on making pictures.

The same blogger was extolling the virtues of having an offset viewfinder so that the final framing of his pictures wasn't how he'd seen it. He had some airy fairy notion that this enabled him to compose with his eyes rather than having the scene before him and reduced to a rectangle in the viewfinder. Cobblers. I, and I expect many other photographers, see how they want to frame the picture before they put the camera to their eye. A viewfinder which shows exactly how the final image will be framed is what you need.

So endeth today's sermon rant!

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Interesting listens

As an avid trawler of the internets and follower of various blogs and things I came across some audio interviews with photographers a few days ago. They might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I've found the three I've listened to interesting. They come across more as rambling chats with friends than professional interviews, which gives them a certain charm. At least there's not much talk about gear and the stress is on the process and business of making photographs and making them pay. Check them out here.

I'd better post a picture or two. A walk to the village ended up at the old churchyard. It's somewhere that always seems photogenic in winter sunlight. I never stick around long enough to really get stuck in though. Maybe I ought to make an effort some time. The angel I first photographed back in my student days. It seemed a bit 'Joy Division' at the time.

Maybe it's the subject matter, or maybe it's the contrasty light, but black and white feels right for the graveyard. It simplifies the pictures. I guess it also adds a slight air of melancholy too.

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Some good stuff

No, not any of my photos, but some things I've found or been made aware of on the BBC site recently.

First up a short film about the Amber Collective.

Another short film about John Bulmer.

Finally a programme about a few British (mostly) documentary photographers (that is only available for a month).

I'd better include a photograph, I suppose. Unfortunately I haven't managed to make any decent ones for some time as I've been floundering around without much direction again. The one below was taken when I'd got completely stuck with what I was trying to do and gave up.

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Buses and books

I try to follow Niall McDiarmid's blog on Tumblr but I often miss a few days. Luckily I spotted the announcement that a second book was imminent so I've been checking to make sure I didn't miss out. Having placed my order it's safe for me to let my reader(s) know that Via Vauxhall is now available to pre-order!

Having enjoyed Niall's previous book, and having seen a number of photographs from this project, I'm looking forward to receiving my copy.

It seems like there's a bit of a thing in the UK for bus centred photography. Tom Wood's All Zones Off Peak is out of my price range, but George Georgiou's recent Last Stop is tempting. Maybe the subject appeals to me because I spent a lot of time on buses as a student and took photographs of my own in bus stations and even on buses?

Bus stations are places where people gather with a common purpose of travelling, but are often preoccupied and oblivious to everyone else. There's also something about the functionality of bus stations that suits photography - not least the now listed Preston bus station which I am far from alone in having photographed. The three photos below were made circa 1979/80 in the now 'redeveloped' bus station in Southport. I wish I'd made more of them, but at the time the place was somewhere that would always be there. Just like everywhere. We assume nothing will change, although it inevitably will. Reason enough for recording any of the everyday places we visit.

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Tom Wood says;

I think I understand why I like Tom Wood's approach to photography.

“The important thing is not to have an aim, I just go out the door and, whatever’s real, I try and deal with that.”
Source.

"When the stuff is too journalistic and documentary then it is journalism, if it is too conceptual and arty then that is another thing, but where the two meet - that is interesting."
Source.

None of which is as easy as it sounds...

The trade off or balance between art and documentary is ever present for me. I firmly believe that it is photography's ability to record, to make documents, that is it's greatest strength. Which is not to say that those documents can't go be something more.

I now regret that I didn't make an effort to document the demolition of the mill by the canal. When I moved to the village in the late 1960s and on until the eighties it was a major employer in the area - my mum worked there. It closed as a weaving mill in the nineties and became a factory shop. When I walked by it last week the last of it was gone. Soon it will be another housing estate. Maybe someone else has recorded its passing in full. The few pictures I have taken are gathered together here.

Once more I find myself struggling to come to terms with a 'small' camera. Daft as it sounds I prefer the results I get from my fishing compact to the mirrorless Fuji X-E2 I've been using for some time. Although I've finally managed to set it up so that I can use it more intuitively and quickly I still find a it frustrates. It's odd that little things you take for granted with a DSLR, in my case manually override the focus away from a focus point, can't be done with these 'lesser' cameras. It's handy if you are trying to shoot through a grill or branches at a subject in the background, and it's really useful when photographing people who are moving around faster than you can shift the focus point. Far better than letting the camera select where to focus too.

Mirrorless evangelists bang on about how much more accurate the focusing is with their cameras, and how superb the visual aids are for manually focussing. Yeah, but you can't have manual and auto focus at the same time. What's more the visual aids are only any use if you have time to use them. I also hate the way (at least on the Fuji) they only work in a zoomed in view of the centre of the frame. So you carefully frame, twist the focus ring and get a cropped and zoomed picture to look at - if the subject is off-centre you have to re-frame. By the time you have the subject in focus and zoomed out again you have to recompose. It's a faff. I don't care what anyone says, it's much easier (and quicker) to manually focus with the big, bright optical viewfinder of a DSLR.

Why is the picture above in black and white? Just because I don't think the Fuji makes a good job of photographing people. Skin colours always look too pinky-red and its texture unnaturally smooth. The texture thing even comes across in monochrome conversions. The woman's bare arm at the left of the frame looks like a prosthetic! All a great shame because the camera is small, light and fun and discreet to use. Maybe I should sell a kidney and buy a Leica?

For outdoor shots without people, however, it does a decent job,although I'm not sure the colours are as 'rich' as I get from my Nikons (even the compact). I might persevere with it for my latest project-without-end. Recently I've taken to wandering round the bits of the village I've never had any reason to visit in all the years I've lived here. Which makes them visually surprising and interesting to me.

Sure enough I've got funny looks and been asked what I'm photographing and why. My answers almost always result in a bemused shaking of the head!

"Are you photographing that bench?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Why not?"

Which is where I come back to searching for that intersection between documentary and art which Tom Wood mentions. It's all about trying to avoid the clichés used in photojournalism, and the pretentiousness of art photography. For me it's about the information in the pictures allied with formal arrangements. I'm also coming to favour making pictures which need time to understand rather than give everything at a glance. Pictures where small details matter. Which isn't easy...

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