Great minds

One of my recent book acquisitions is Approaching Photography by Paul Hill. Essentially it's an illustrated essay about various aspects of photographic practice (as opposed to technique). It is written in plain English rather than abstruse academic language, making it easy to comprehend. For anyone new to the theory behind photography and photography it is a good starting place. Although not to in-depth I'll be going back to it again.

One thing that struck a particular chord with me, being in one of my periods of doubt about what I'm up to, was the comment that just because everything seems to have been done already it hasn't been done by you.

This was a timely and encouraging reminder. For some reason I had searched Google images for Lewis Baltz. I'd done this before and been discouraged by finding pictures of walls and piles of debris that, despite being in black and white, reminded me of some of my photographs. Despite having started photographing these subjects before seeing the Baltz pictures I had become dispirited when I first stumbled on them. However I had forgotten about them until the other day, having put them out of my mind. The best plan is undoubtedly to do what you want to do even if someone else has already done it. Even if your photos don't make the grade they can lead you somewhere new.

I had been planning on writing something here about perspective a couple of days ago. This morning I opened up Eric Weight's latest journal entry today to see he had mentioned one aspect of it. The way mist can gradually soften the appearance of things as they recede into the distance.

My intention had been to compare the ways the two pictures below suggest space within the picture frame.

Both of these pictures were made with the blocks of complimentary colours in mind. Maybe subconsciously I had also seen that the warmer blocks were closer to the lens than the cooler ones. The left hand picture uses aerial perspective to suggest space (distant objects are hazier than closer ones) while the right hand picture uses linear perspective (objects that are the same size in reality appearing smaller as they recede). That one has a shallow depth of field and one is in greater focus enhances each picture's reliance on it's means of describing space.

With thoughts of imitation and coincidence in my mind walked to the Post Office this morning, camera round my neck set to shoot in black and white. Quite what I was going to shoot I had no clue but I wanted to work in monochrome. It had rained overnight and I saw a dry patch where a car had stood on the drive of a house I passed. I took a couple of shots thinking it had something about it. Then I realised that I had seen more of these dry patches and that they had a melancholy feel to them. At the risk of becoming pretentious they seemed somehow melancholy. On my way home I photographed each dry patch I saw.

Ordinarily I impatiently upload pictures as soon as I get in, but today I was a good little boy and did some paying work first. Only when that was out of the way in the late afternoon did I see what I had got. Loaded into Lightroom, and edited down (some I shot in landscape and portrait format) I found I had precisely 20 shots which worked as a coherent series. There were some which stood as single images, but the whole was much greater than the sum of its parts. I processed the files then made a simple Blurb book which I uploaded and ordered. The physical collection, and time, will tell if my initial judgement is to be trusted. Right now it feels like this spur of the moment project has succeeded.

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Call me cheap

For a change I stuck my two cheapest zooms (both bought used for comparative peanuts) on a couple of bodies and went to see what I could find at the beach yesterday. Almost as soon as I arrived, to find the beach closed to cars, it began to rain. So I didn't stop long. What I tried to do was make a picture that showed the beach as deserted. I failed. Not easy making something empty look interestingly so.

There were a few other detail shots, details really, that which worked a little better. One experiment was to try the macro setting on one of the lenses. Previous attempts had lead me to think it wasn't so good but with some thought it seems to be reasonable. A trite shot of rust and paint looked pretty detailed on the computer screen at pixel-peeping level.

This gave me the impetus to try the lens out under more controlled conditions to see if it would serve for doing product shots for my website. If it did it would save me buying a short focal length macro lens as my long macro lens is a bit awkward to use for this work. Camera on tripod, ISO low, aperture stopped down and hey presto. Close enough for rock and roll!

Zooming in to 100% and it looks too good - showing up dust and flaws! More than adequate for my purposes. My bad impression of the lens before must have been due to operator error. No surprise there.

This little experiment also made me think that using available light might be a better plan than the messing around with flashguns I've been trying. Pick an overcast day and lock the camera down so shutter speed isn't an issue and I should be okay. With my improved processing skills cutting out the background, when required, is a lot easier than it used to be. Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

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Misty morning

Ever since I got my first SLR I've liked taking photographs on misty days. Tones become mutes, the light is soft and even and distant backgrounds get obliterated making for flatter images that are often more graphic - which suits my way of seeing.

Unfortunately the mist burned and blew off before I arrived at the sandplant. A pea souper would have been more suitable for what I had in mind. However, things had altered since my last visit and I managed to make pictures that were different enough to those I've made in past visits. One in particular could be the best I've managed of the sand washing troughs.

I had intended to use the tripod but I didn't see any need for small apertures. I prefer using a  shallower depth of field in the sandplant than I had done in the quarry the other day.


View larger here.

As I headed inland the mist was still quite thick so I took a detour to the lane that winds over the moss. Just as my arrival at the sandplant seemed to cause the mist to rise so it did along the lane. There is a stand of trees that I want to photograph, but they usually get lost amongst the background. Today they stood out against the mist. Until I got the camera out that is. I grabbed a few hasty shots before the moment had gone completely. Oh well.

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Out of the comfort zone

Quite why I ventured forth with my tripod and remote release this afternoon I'm not sure. Making something of the flooded farmland using the tripod, its use forced on my by the very dull light late on the other day, must have played a part. Indeed, it was my intention to try more of the same today but I took a detour to the disused quarry I've visited many times before without much photographic success. Rather like the sandplant it is a mix of a man-altered landscape and natural recolonisation, but in this case with some landscaping as the place is now a country park come nature reserve. It is still prone to misuse by the mountain bikes which the signs clearly forbid.

With water in mind I was drawn to the peaty pools that are a feature of the quarry. It took me a few attempts to find my eye, but by the time the light was failing I was wishing I'd arrived earlier.

There was an accidental discovery. The shot on the right was taken by my inadvertent firing of the shutter by the remote release in my pocket. I liked the look of the frame and tried to use the slow shutter speed to better effect. I'm not sure why it is that the consciously made images never seem as spontaneous as the accidental ones even given the abdication of some control. The frame below was the best of the bunch. It sort of captures some of the atmosphere of the quarry in winter.

More straightforward were the static shots of the pools, birch trees and rocks. I deliberately desaturated the files to try and stress the overcast, late afternoon winter light and the feeling of dankness in the quarry. It was interesting to work in a different way, using the tripod and often the live view screen for framing (although I still check composition through the viewfinder).

All today's shots were made with my little used ultrawide zoom. In the confines of the quite claustrophobic quarry it proved invaluable. I think I'll be returning for a longer session at some point to try out some more ideas.


View larger here.

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It's all a bit fishy

I got my fishing head on over the festive period to the extent that I didn't use a camera to make any 'proper' photographs during that time. Mind you the way the weather was I doubt I'd have ventured forth in any case. I did make one discovery concerning my ongoing wavering between small and large sensor cameras and their relative merits.

What I found was that, to my eyes, my small sensor camera doesn't make fish look as fishy as my large sensor camera does. This was the first time I used the X10 to photograph a decent fish and the results were quite pleasing. A couple of days later I took a DSLR along and thought I'd try some comparison shots. Back home the shots from teh DSLR looked much more 'fishy'. That's the only way I can describe them. Not just the colours but the way the form of teh fish was revealed.

At full resolution on the computer screen there was also a difference that was subtle. More detail resolved and clearer. I wasn't using an expensive lens on the camera either. My next comparison was a couple of self takes. The two shots (of different fish but both taken with flash) are in the composite below.

I much prefer the 'look' of the lower image (despite it's technical flaws caused by me rushing the picture taking using a previously untried method of tripping the shutter).

For the casual camera user the small sensor should have the benefit of getting more in focus for shots like this - yet when I browse fishing blogs I still see people with in focus faces behind blurred fish. However this is often only apparent when the pictures are viewed large. At the sizes the embedded photos are on the screen they look quite acceptable. This is something Eric Weight touched upon recently when he mentioned the rise of tablets and smart phones for viewing photographs.

Eric was bemoaning how the smaller screens will force the majority of photographs to favour subjects that appear large in the frame at the expense of fine detail. It is rather ironic that this shift in viewing practices is occurring at a time when cameras are gaining more pixels than ever before.

Another way of looking at this shift is that it is a return to how casual amateur photography began. I have photographs taken by my father during the Second World War (I also have the camera) which are nothing more than contact prints from the 120 negatives (the negatives are long gone). That was how all early photographic prints were made. If you wanted a large print you used a large negative or plate. In a way the viewing experience is going retro!

Then again, as most photographs today are taken by looking at a small screen on the camera (or phone), the resulting image is likely to be viewed at pretty much the size it was conceived. This will avoid the pitfall of making these images too detailed. The downside is that just as the compression used to make MP3s and CDs reduces the subtleties of sound, so making small photographs to be viewed small reduces the visual subtleties. This seems to be a symptom of the age we live in. Good enough is all that most people want. There listening and viewing experience is all too often either transitory or an adjunct to some other experience. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. All too often I find myself trying to simultaneously read a blog and listen to a radio programme - taking in neither.

With fishing taking up a lot of my time this last fortnight, and enjoyably, I was beginning to wonder whether I still had any drive to make photographs. After all I don't do anything much with them. Then it stopped raining and I remembered how I'd been thinking of recording the sodden landscape. With nothing else to do I picked up a couple of cameras and set off to see what I could find. Having made some landscapes that I felt were getting somewhere before the fishing took over I had some ideas in mind.

What I have come to realise is that for me the landscape has to have some man-made element in it if I'm to make a picture. I just seem to need some hard edges to help my composition. I'm also finding that black and white often works better. Maybe I'm trying to steer clear of the romanticised landscape? But then again perhaps it's a different kind of romanticism?

The fields around here, and most everywhere else I suspect, are nigh on waterlogged. I've see a few with lying water that farmers have had to cut channels through to drain them. A picture of one might go some way to showing the effect of the rain on agriculture. I found one such today and for once I had taken my tripod with me.

Nothing is simple, and while the shot from the tripod was the most successful (I envisaged the crop when framing the shot) I took one shot hand-held with another camera and lens. The resulting images raised a worrying question.

The left hand picture was taken using a rather expensive lens, the one on the right with a lens I picked up used for about a tenth the price. At these sizes I might as well have used the X10, but comparing the two files at 100% (with the same degree of sharpening applied) I'm hard pressed to tell the two apart when it comes to sharpness and similar pixel-peeping differences. And there isn't that great a difference in the depth of field either - the main reason I had used the tripod was to allow a smaller aperture.

There is a difference between the two 100% crops below (ISO values are not the same - which accounts for some of the image quality drop), but I'm not sure it's enough to get excited about, and is unlikely to be noticed in a print.

For some time I have been thinking that it's better to use the lenses which are most useful rather than the ones that are sharpest. Especially if you have no need to make prints any larger than A3. From that point of view I could take the vast majority of my photographs with my two cheapest zoom lenses.

Where I think the real value of expensive lenses lies is not in the sharpness department that most people seem to rave about, it's in subtle nuances of colour, contrast, and smoothness of the out of focus regions and similar functions that are all but impossible to measure. It's the aesthetic quality of the images they make which is what stops me getting rid of them. But if the photos are only ever going to be seen on an iPad...

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