More banality

One of the good things about the internet is the way you bump into interesting stuff when you are looking for something else. So it was I found the following two films about William Eggleston. What I find even more interesting than reading or listening to what people have to say about how they go about making pictures is watching them actually doing it. It's far more revealing in some ways. Seeing Eggleston at work it becomes clear that his (to some) apparently casual snapshots are carefully observed and considered.

While I like to know and understand how people operate and think I'm less interested in their private lives - although that certainly has an effect on their outlook, and in the case of  Eggleston (and, coincidentally, his early influence Cartier-Bresson) family wealth seems to have enabled him to do nothing but pursue his art without having to concern himself with the realities of earning a living. I prefer to judge the work on its own merits without any prejudice against an artist's personality. Most successful artists get where they are by being obsessive, driven and often ruthless. Only those who are discovered late in life, or later still, ever seem to be well rounded human beings who were kind to animals and small children!

I watched the two films one after the other and found the first (shorter) one to be more watchable. That might have been because the second covered similar ground, but also because it is less tightly edited. This being the internet it's easy to skip the boring bits though!

The influence of Cartier-Bresson on Eggleston's early black and white photos was plain. It also carries over into the colour photographs if you look closely. Something that struck me while watching both films is that work which is 'highly influential' as Eggleston's first MoMA show was often comes early in the artist's career. Most of the best known and lauded Eggleston photographs are from that show - just as the most well known (or reproduced)  pictures of Martin Parr are from The Last Resort. It's a bit like bands often recording their best albums early on.

I'm sure this is because early in a career everything is new and being explored with surprise and delight as a style (conscious or not) is being sought which eventually gels in something different to the mainstream. From then on there are two courses which can be followed: endless repetition of a successful formula or; a continual reinvention of style. Few manage to pull off the latter with continued success. For me both Eggleston and Parr have taken the easier route - albeit with sustained clarity of vision. Parr does come close to self parody at times, but being Parr that could well be intentional!

Undoubtedlygreat as the best of Eggleston's pictures are, they increasingly (as do Cartier-Bresson's) leave me wanting more. There is something a little too clever about them. A lack of warmth. For all the cynicism that is levelled at Parr's photography I find it more engaging, less cold. This is something that exercises my thoughts as I feel my own photographs all too often have a formality and stiffness to them.

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Working the subject

An unexpected break in the weather, and an afternoon to kill, saw me grab a camera, long lens and tripod to try to add to my collection of photos of fallen trees in the local wood. I chucked a short lens in the bag for good measure.

I thought the dead-fall pictures were working quite well with the light coming through the canopy shifting as the wind blew. Once again the camera's screen lied and a number were actually out of focus in critical areas. The ones which were sharp were rubbish. I ended up with one that's sort of okay (which means it isn't really) before the sun clouded over.

After waiting a few minutes for the clouds to blow over I realised they weren't going to. I set off back through the wood not defeated. Not half way to the exit I spotted a dead wood pigeon wedged in the fork of a tree. How it came to be there or what caused its demise I'll never know. It was something to photography though.

My first impulse was to make a picture that showed the environment and the corpse - which reminded me of still life paintings of hanging game birds. I set up the tripod, framed a composition and played around with the aperture to provide separation from teh cluttered background.

I made a few frames from a few angles before trying for the inevitable portrait orientation, moving in close for a different view.

Although this showed the bird's foot for an added touch of complimentary colour it also 'lost' the bird against the tree trunk. A closer still view might be interesting to show more detail and make the flies more obvious. Flies being flies they wouldn't land where I wanted them. Not only that the wind was causing motion blur. I upped the ISO so the shutter speed could be increased too.

The curve of the ivy stem seemed crucial to whatever picture I was to end up with. An even tighter zoom lost that. There was still the niggle of the slightly out of focus ivy leaf obscuring part of the pigeon's head.

These pictures are not the only ones I made. In total there were thirty frames shot over an eighteen minute period. It didn't seem like that long, but that's what the info from the files tells me! You have to love digital for giving everyone the chance to work over a subject for free, and to review stuff in real time. Even if the blasted screen can't tell you for sure if their in focus...

Not sure if I'd got what I wanted I decided to move on. There was one last thing I had to do though. All the while the camera had been on the tripod shooting from a distance there was a voice in my head telling me to put on the 35mm and get in closer. There was nothing to lose so After folding up the tripod I swapped lenses. Leaned in, framed and tripped the shutter. I liked what I saw but I hadn't altered the settings and the shutter speed was too low. A quick fiddle with the settings and I made two more frames. The first one pretty much got it.

Everything is there: the curving ivy to the left (the lower leaves nicely filling the space of the path behind); the gnarled ivy stems climbing the tree; the whole of the bird's head visible; a sense of depth from the receding trees and aerial perspective. I think the subdued light works to the picture's advantage too. All it lacks is a strategically placed bluebottle.

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Swings and roundabouts

This week has been one of those times when I've been questioning the whole point of making photographs. Not only hasn't the light been enough, subject matter has seemed both hard to come by, and when found rather inconsequential.

The beach has been bereft of kite-surfers even when the wind has been blowing leaving me to try and make something of the open spaces again. Waves could make for interesting pictures I suppose, but I couldn't see the point of them. Not even the ones I thought had something appealing to them.

A morning walk from home provided one picture that might fit into a series I'm contemplating. The trouble being that good as the G2 is, and much as I 'd like to use the 4x3 format for the pictures, this one really didn't cut it as a print. There's something I can't put my finger on about the look that doesn't 'do it' for me. At least it has given me an idea in which direction the series might head.

A sunny Bank Holiday Monday saw the beach round the pier packed out - even when I arrived after six in the evening. The crowds and the activity made me realise that what I like photographing at the beach is the emptiness of the place out of season. The way the few people about then are usually doing something more interesting than being at the seaside. That might be something as ordinary as walking a dog, or as strange as riding out on an specially made electric bicycle to collect coal washed up from the exposed seam in the Irish sea. That's why the kite surfers are interesting to photograph.

Although the parking on the beach is free after five had parked further along the coast road and walked back along the front of the sea wall. This provided me with a couple of photographs. One of which I worked at getting.

Late last summer I made a couple of pictures of plant growing between kerb stones on the sea wall with cars passing by. A shutter speed of around 1/15th of a second is required to get sufficient blur in the vehicles. I liked the effect, and the way the pictures made a comment about how slowly and without being noticed nature colonises the man made environment while people speed by. Maybe an obvious comment to make about the two worlds, but at least it gives the pictures some meaning and purpose. This evening was the first time since winter ended that there has been any new growth along the roadside. With the sunlight so bright I was forced to slightly over expose in order to get the effect I wanted. A few shots worked quite well.

As a technical exercise it is quite challenging, and there is a deal of luck involved. Looking through the viewfinder I had to predict a car's arrival by the sound of it approaching. Until it came into view I had no idea if it was going to be a good colour to complement the rest of the image so had to shoot anyway. A better way of doing this, and I am hoping to make more of these pictures over the summer, would be to set the camera up on a tripod using a remote release. It's simple to prefocus on the plant and let the rest of the picture take care of itself. To get the light from the right direction will mean waiting until late afternoon or evening. Which suits me fine!

From being somewhat down about my photography I have renewed interest with a couple of projects to work on . I do need a sense of purpose and direction. Even so there are occasions when I see something that makes me pick up a camera for no other reason than to make a single image. A single cloud was one such today. There had to be a picture to be made from it, the blue sky and the sky-blue sheet on my washing line. I think I pulled it off.

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Infinity Awards

Inside and outside views of two cultures via Infinity Awards.

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The light is not enough

It's all too easy to get carried away by the sudden arrival of sunshine. The world is brighter and more colourful. The photographs I take look more like the ones by other people I look at and wonder why theirs look so much nicer than mine usually do, and so much more like the ones which people seem to aspire to making. In short the light and colour is seductive, becoming the sole focus of the pictures with composition and meaning pushed into the background.

Great light, harmonious colours, shallow depth of focus. what's not to like? It being just another picture of a backlit leaf is what. There had to be some better pictures to be made using the light and the fresh leaves. Trying to find them was far from easy. A backlit leaf against a dark ground shows up best. A group of leaves is more interesting than a single leaf, but harder to find in interesting shapes which can form compositions - not to mention the problem groups cause with deciding on where the focus ought to lie.

Of all my feeble efforts the one below, for all the lack of focus, made the most pleasing arrangement. The silhouetted twigs crossing the frame giving a sense of movement.

One problem I always have when trying to 'work' a subject is that I get bored. I can only spend so long looking at something trying to frame it well before my mind either wanders or freezes. All too often I review the shots and find the first one had the best composition, and almost as frequently has some technical flaw which ruins it. The next frame will be technically perfect but annoyingly not quite right as a picture.

All axioms can be contradicted. The next picture was not the first in the sequence. The first three frames were made in landscape orientation before I realised that turning the camera on its side made for a greater sense of receding space. Then I varied the aperture to alter the depth of focus. For once I got the best technical features to coincide with the best aesthetics and was reasonably pleased with the result.

This image has grown out of a way of using (or more truthfully finding) frontal light on subjects through which can be seen a shaded background. By controlling the amount of detail revealed in the shade a sense of space is created. If the frontal light is slightly angled from one side then the form of the foreground is enhanced. Since coming to understand this I now consciously seek it out in my attempts to make pictures which have a more amorphous or fluid composition to them. If they work as I hope then the viewer's eye should wander all over the picture, shifting focus at times, without leaving the picture bounds.

While these pictures are about their subjects, about light and colour, I'm trying to make them be about a sense of place and countryside. Very much work in progress, which, while challenging in its way, still leaves me wondering if I'm not trying to make photographs of something that should be explored in paint. The landscape paintings of Graham Sutherland and Ivon Hitchens keep flashing into my mind's eye when looking at these subjects wondering how to photograph them.

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