Sunlight brings some progress

As March approaches I'm staying ahead on my New Year resolution to make prints and put them in albums. I've made three sets so far, However I'm struggling to think what to select for set number four. I've got all next month to think of something though.

I have settled on a design style though, which makes things easier and using a sheet of overhead projector acetate at the front of the prints works well as protection for the print which shows through the window of the Easybook. Cutting the acetate with a knife was tricky, but when I used my rotary trimmer (like I should have done in the first place) it was a doddle.

Last week after playing around with the design of my upcoming swap zine I picked a forecast sunny morning to have a try at taking some photos for an upcoming zine swap project. I got sidetracked by the light on the old Rams Head which is in a poor state of repair having stood empty since 2007.

 

 

By the time I arrived where I was headed the sun had disappeared and the light was flat. On the way, though, I did see something which gave me an idea for a new series of pictures. One that's been in the back of my mind for quite a while. These travel restricted times seem like the perfect opportunity to get it done. More on this later. The zine pics were taken and although not as bright as I'd have liked they were a start. With plenty of time I'd get another chance to take some more in brighter light.

Four days later I went back, again in an overcast, and re-shot with different framing to better fit the layout I'd devised for the zine. I slotted the pics into the layout when I got home and they worked better. I'll possibly do a post on the development of this zine after the swap has been completed. Until then I'm keeping the pictures under embargo!

Fired up by this unexpected success I went for a roam around the moss in the afternoon. There wasn't much to see as fieldwork hasn't really started yet. There has been a fair bit of ditch and drain maintenance going on. The regularity of the deposits by the side of one ditch struck me as worth a photograph.

 

The sign I'd managed to get my picture of the other week had suffered some kind of mishap. As I approached it another walker propped it back up, which annoyed me a little as I'd wanted to get a picture of the empty frame. I took a shot anyway.

The benefit of treading familiar ground is that you get the chance to record these changes. I trod that ground again today and once more the sign had fallen over. I got my empty frame picture!

Another instance of repeatedly visiting the same place and recording change also occurred out on the moss this week when I changed my route on a whim and went down the path leading to the pump and sump area I have often photographed. This time the pump house was no longer standing. All that remained of it was a pile of rubble.

This sort of picture might not be great art, but it can be a valuable record. Perhaps not when it's of something as mundane as a pumphouse or a road sign, but who's to say? 

With the sunshine holding I've made the most of it, even though I find it problematic for taking the kind of pictures I like taking. It's not so much the brightness as the low angle at this time of year. It can make for dramatic or atmospheric pictures, but equally it can hide detail by creating hard, dark shadows.

Chancing upon some recently 'hatched' lambs by the side of the road on Thursday I was thwarted by the sluggish focusing of my camera in liveview. I was using the screen to save my knees as I wanted to photograph the sheep at lamb-level. By the time the sheep had had enough of me I'd only managed a few in-focus pictures, and they were to poorest of the lot. The better framed and composed shots were all out of focus where it mattered. The light was nice on a couple of sharp pictures, but that's not enough for a picture. the light really isn't what it's all about.

This next one is probably my favourite because of the odd framing. A bit more of the eye in shot would have been better though.

While I've been out on my wanderings I've been scouting for what I'm provisionally calling 'ghost gates'. Unused field entrances where the gates and/or gatepost are standing but either overgrown or obviously unused. At this stage I've not committed to a methodology. Some are a bit close to busy roads so a reasonably wide angle lens will be required, which I'll use for all the pictures (if I progress with this) for consistency.

 

What I can't decide on is how to frame the pictures. At gate level, or eye level. Whichever it will be I'll be avoiding sunny days as they result in too many shadows making the hidden gateways even more difficult to decipher than they are in real life, and producing pictures which have too much contrast of sky and subject making processing tricky. If this does come to fruition it will have to be done in the next month or so before the leaves are fully on the hedges and obscuring the gateways completely.

More meanygate meanderings have resulted in little of note. At times the light has helped me out. Mainly where architecture has been involved as this is a subject which can benefit from contrasty light. I'm a sucker for things arranged in vaguely grid-like ways photographed head on. These pallets by the green houses on the moss were fated to be photographed by me!

This chance encounter was another case of the light helping out. The shadow on the wheel adds a little extra visual interest to what's going on.

Ever since starting to photograph the local veg growing I've been after a picture of either a potato or a carrot, or a few of either, on a road surface. It's always been a regular sight round here at harvest time. But not since I've been looking out for it... that's why I snapped this carrot today!

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Bath time

Yet another week of dire weather keeping me indoors most of the time. One dry morning I took the opportunity to park in my accountant's car park and have a wander down a rough lane in search of sheep. I found sheep but they weren't up for having their photos taken. This lane is the kind of place I like looking at but, as with so many places I like being and looking, it's somewhere I find difficult to photograph.

But give me an object and I'll snap away. Unusually for this area the fields are mostly used for grazing, at least on one side of the track. Stock needs watering and old baths have long been used as water troughs for cattle and horses. for some reason a couple of baths down this track had been put in the hedges. Kind of surreal. So they had to be photographed. That then got me to thinking there might be a project to be had photographing other baths in the countryside. The idea didn't last long, but you never know, it might take over from Lost Balls Found when I finish that one off.

With nothing else to do that day I went out again in the late afternoon. I swithered about going for too long which meant that I was a bit late to get any really decent pictures of some ditch clearing work on the moss edge.

After the thaw and rain three days later I woke to frost and fog. I couldn't face walking far in that so I drove round my most frequently tramped mossland route hoping to see something worth making a picture of. I pretty much failed so stopped and took a boring picture.

Feeling as though the moss is probably best left alone as the returns are diminishing I still couldn't think of anywhere or anything else to photograph so it was back there again this afternoon. To my surprise I saw a few things which I either hadn't thought of photographing before or things which had appeared since my last wander around the route I took.

The patterns made by the trailing pumpkin stems (or whatever they are called) struck me as otherworldly.

One of the flooded field wasn't as wet as it had been for weeks. This was partly due to a drainage channel having been dug to the nearby ditch. I made two pictures of this channel. One as an abstract, the other in vertical orientation to show the scene in full - and explain what was going on.

The vertical shot has given me the idea to make more pictures in that orientation of the mossland landscape. Something else I'll probably forget about...

I seem to have a thing about diesel pumps. Although I've photographed this one before it hasn't had a leak before.

The print making has got started. How long it will last is another matter. However, the albums work well. I've populated one with a set of prints from my short canal project. It took a bit of messing about to work out the layout for the first page but now I have a template it'll be easy to make variations on the theme.

Using 270gsm paper I have 23 sheets in the album and reckon a couple more will fit with ease. 

Going forward I intend to add a clear coversheet for the front page to protect what is visible through the hard cover. The snap-in page loading has also given me ideas for including other material along with the photo prints, and maybe also to use double sided photo paper.

Recently I've added a couple more books to my library. Photo Work was recommended on The Online Photographer. It was reasonably priced and the concept appealed to me. Forty photographers answering the same questions about the way they approach project based photography.

It's a book to dip in to, or read in bursts, rather than from cover to cover in one go. This is because it's a little repetitive. I'd have liked it more if the photographers hadn't been mainly American, and had been ones whose work was familiar to me. One I'll dip into again.

The other book is the third edition of one of my favourites, Paul Hill's Approaching Photography.  This is a significant update and worth having even if you have an earlier edition.

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Technology advances

Although I feel like I could do with a change of direction and to give the beach project a rest to refresh my brain I keep on getting drawn back to it. The weather over the weekend was dire. Rain, rain and a bit more rain. There were a couple of breaks and one coincided with low tide. I thought there might have been a chance to catch someone tending a net, but if anyone had had a net out overnight they'd been and gone. However there was a speck in the distance with some sort of trolley that seemed worth investigating. It was a youngish chap who had just given up trying to catch shrimps.The wind was too strong, stirring up the sand in the shallows and putting the shrimps off.

 

If the forecast hadn't been for even stronger winds he'd have been back on Sunday. When the rain stopped and the sun shone on Sunday this idiot grabbed an old camera and the lens that time forgot and hit the beach again. It was very windy. Despite the rain having soaked the sand the wind was drying it rapidly and sending it flying across the beach. I felt sorry for the small dogs having to put up with it at their level. Only the occasional gust made it sting my face. 

The near gale had brought the kite surfing madmen out and the lens was almost long enough to get some decent shots. But kite surfing action is not something I have much interest in photographing these days. The wind was really whipping up the sea and I kept having to clean my glasses and the front element of the lens.

I wasn't the only one out with a camera. There was a chap in a hi-vis jacket who I've seen there before. Like other wielders of strange white lenses he wasn't too approachable. So I took some pictures of him. One with a very feint rainbow in the background.

There was a weekender at Pontins and some inappropriately dressed ravers were wandering the beach. The beach is a place where anything can happen I didn't ask what was going on here...

I'm gradually getting to grips with the new toy. I've sort of sussed out most of its quirks and am now testing it's technical limits. In terms of ease of use it's better than the compact I bought for 'street' photography and in that department and technical performance it beats my fishing compact. So much so that I'm thinking it might find a place in my fishing bag. With that in mind I snapped up a rather well priced used telephoto zoom for it today and gave it a quick whirl at the still windy beach. Or I tried to.

As I was driving along the coastal road there was a heavy shower approaching from the west. I just made it to a parking spot in time to grab some snaps. The first with my 'proper' camera and a 'good' lens.

 Then some with the toy camera and lens. At these sizes there's nothing to choose between them.

Since I had my other toy camera sensor technology has advanced enough for me to notice. It's the same make of camera, the same sensor size, but the files are much 'smoother'. That's the only way I can describe them. The old camera's files were sort of 'chalky'. The colour gradations unnatural. The new toy makes much nicer pictures to my eye.

High ISO values in low light are better, but nowhere near what Nikon's full frame magic can work. In good light the high ISOs aren't too bad. Somewhere close to what an APS sensor delivered seven or eight years ago. Even the cheap lenses manage to produce enough detail to keep me happy. Maybe that's because I still judge things in terms of 400 ASA black and white film! This shot is at ISO 2500. It needed cleaning up a bit to remove some noise, and a bit of sharpening, but it's surprisingly clean. I'm sure it would print OK to A4.

Talking of printing, I ran some off last week to change the ones on my wall. What interested me was how pictures which didn't look all that sharp at 100% on the computer screen looked bloody sharp printed out at 15" x 10". Plenty of fine detail to be seen. And they weren't shot with the 'best' lenses either.

While I can't see me dumping the proper camera system, the micro four thirds will make a light weight option to carry around with the telephoto zoom on. It might not give me the shallow depth of field of a fast lens on full frame, but that's not something I crave, and for the times I want a focal length over 100mm it will suffice. The lens that time forgot isn't going to be got rid of. I might not use it much, but it has its uses every now and then. The lens that I forgot, however, is going to get sold. It might fund another toy camera. One with a flip round screen for easier self takes when fishing. I might even use the toy camera for some more serious video work!!

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