Coal picking

As I seem to want to take photographs again I called in at the beach for an hour yesterday. Unusually the tide was not only 'in' but high enough to cover the sand right up to the sea wall. Among the usual detritus of the disposable society washed up on the strandline was the Irish Sea coal, black amongst the broken razorfish shells. With all but a narrow strip of the beach covered in sea there was just one chap on the sand. He was carefully picking out the larger lumps of coal for his fire.

As with many of the regular coal pickers he had his means of transporting his gleanings home sorted out.

This is the sort of activity which goes unreported in the usual course of seaside documentary photography. Local people doing stuff that they, and others before them, have been doing for years.The kind of thing that local government generally tries to put a levy on.

Cockle pickers have to buy a licence. Kitesurfers are likewise restricted. It can't be right for people to gather and use a horribly polluting fuel for free!

Did I wish I had a zoom fitted while taking these shots? Not at all. The trusty 28 was just the ticket. Partly, I'm sure, because when you use one focal length for long enough you stop seeing pictures that require something different. While this is limiting in one way it also concentrates your mind and vision by ruling out distracting alternatives.

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Selling up

When you do something for the sake of doing it and the satisfaction you get from doing it there comes a time when you question the sanity of it. This is especially so if that something is normally accepted as being done for the appreciation of others. Making photographs falls into that camp while fishing doesn't. I abandoned painting in favour of fishing when I left college because I knew I was never going to make a career as an artist, so I might just as well spend my free time doing something for no other reason than the satisfaction it gave me. There is no end product with fishing. The time spent doing it is the reward. Time spent making pictures is a reward, but there are the things produced at the end of it. Things which by their very nature are intended to be looked at. But by whom?

This is where I have always struggled to find an answer. My ego would  like to have my pictures seen and appreciated, but I haven't a clue who by! I have never known where my photographs fit. I have no interest whatsoever in making pictures which will garner the approval of camera clubs or even the RPS. They are all too formulaic and technique driven, and I'm a sloppy, lazy practitioner. The populist photography magazines are taste driven. It would be fairly easy to conform to their accepted standards, but the pictures would be boring. The serious art world is too pretentious for my liking (it's the bullshit that matters rather than the pictures) and driven as much by taste and fashion as any other outlet. Posting to Flikr groups or forums is a waste of time as they are all about easily given praise or disapproval which is meaningless. They also encourage conformity.  So it came to pass that making photographs for the sake of making photographs became an absurd practice for me. I thought about selling my camera gear and went fishing.

However....

Even when I abandoned taking a camera with me everywhere I was still seeing pictures. This got to me to the extent that I went back with a camera and made them. The picture below couldn't have been seen or made a few weeks ago because the flowers weren't in bloom. It fits into the ongoing Over The Hedge series, which might well continue in its ad hoc way. One reason I could never make it in the art world is that while I can be serious about making pictures, I can't find it in myself to take it seriously. As soon as I find that happening I take a step back to consider the absurdity of it all. I know that fishing for fun is absurd, so the absurdity doesn't worry me. Yet we are conditioned to believe that art (which is absurd) must be taken seriously. When I start taking art seriously I go fishing!

It was while out fishing that I came across an agricultural sprinkler. The juxtaposition of the machinery in the flat farmland struck me as visually interesting. It also relates to pictures I have made previously of drainage and irrigation. of all the pictures I made I like the one below for its simplicity. The colour palette is limited. There's a contrast between the mechanical and natural forms, yet the industrial nature of the agriculture is hinted at by the converging rows of plants.

From a technical point of view I like the way I used the much maligned (in camera geek circles) built in flash of the camera to add some fill and form to the sprinkler head. I doubt a separate flash gun would have done a better job. The rest of the best shots are in the gallery below. All were taken using the 28mm lens and are in what I think of as a photo-journalistic mode. They are not intended to be art pictures, they are documentary in nature but with an attempt at giving them visual impact having been made.


Better seen larger here.

I don't find having the one focal length to use as limiting as some might think. It's all well and good having zooms to cover every eventuality, but there does seem to be a (visual) reason that 28mm became the focal length of choice for many of an earlier generation of photographer. For all that 50mm is supposed to represent the way we see the world the wider view feels more natural to me.

It's been said many times that having a fixed focal length makes you think more about composition and that zooms make you lazy. It's said because it's true. As you move around to frame pictures you see alternatives that you wouldn't have noticed by turning a zoom ring. I could quite happily be limited to just the 28mm view of the world. Or the 35mm view, or the  50mm.... It's' as if I have gone back to where I was in 1982. A 28, a 50 and an 85 (in place of the 100 I used to use). Why not use my midrange zoom and have done? Because it weighs a ton and it mostly gets used at one end or the other of its range. As do most zooms.

Working out a lens selection is all about finding out what suits your ways of seeing and working. Unfortunately that means buying stuff you end up not using. Time to write out a list of stuff I don't need. Starting with that mid-range zoom.

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Not taking photos

The next best thing to taking photographs is looking at them. Which, apart from taking scenic shots when fishing, is pretty much what I've been doing of late. I did take my X10 along to a fishing show at the weekend, but I'd forgotten how to use the thing and most of my efforts were messed up. Still, I did manage a couple of 'snapshots' which made me realise that even when I'm framing quickly with no conscious thought of making a picture I sometimes manage to get some sort of composition starting to work. Of three 'portraits' I snapped all have the subject's face off centre and approaching the dreaded 'third'!

The photographs I've been looking at have been in books I have added to my collection. After missing out on the first edition of Pentti Sammallahti's acclaimed Here Far Away I made sure I secured a copy of the second edition when I saw it announced on The Online Photographer (TOP). When it arrived I was excited to open it up. Alas I had that feeling of dissatisfaction I've mentioned before of finding myself admiring the cleverness of the pictures rather than what they have to say. I had that feeling looking at the print offer on TOP too. As if these are photographs made to appeal to photographers. It's all a bit too much like jazz to me. Stuff you can only appreciate if you are in the loop and thoroughly tedious if you are not.

But perhaps that's how the sort of photographs I find I get more out of appear to others. Two more books arrived a few days after the Sammallahti. Two books of boring photographs of Britain: Pierdom by Simon Roberts and Strangely Familiar by Peter Mitchell. Neither book contains obviously 'clever' pictures. They are both quiet, unassuming collections of pictures which benefit from quiet, considered perusal. Maybe I connect with the subject matter better. Pierdom is about the British seaside and Strangely Familiar about the North. There's an element of nostalgia in both books, even though some of the pier photographs were taken as recently as this year.

One thing that Pierdom (and, just yesterday, this article) has done is stop me worrying about the white balance issue I thought I was having. The colours of the sand and sky look pretty similar to those I was getting before I started having doubts.

The Reuters piece made me think again about how clichéd photographic representation of the British seaside has become. Did it start with Tony Ray-Jones and get continued by Martin Parr and his followers? Is it the way the British really see their seaside resorts? It's always the tourists who are depicted by outsiders. Middle class outsiders photographing the working class holiday makers always brings with it a suspicion of the sneering which Parr was accused of. Photographs aren't neutral and people always read into them what they want to.

For all I have reservations about Parr and Ray-Jones I still admire their work. If it wasn't in London I'd go see the exhibition which brings some of their photogrpahs together. I'll no doubt be adding a couple more books to my shelves soon - one of Ray Jones's colour pictures and one of Parr's black and white (the reverse of what they are both most noted for).

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Evening light

For the last month I've been making the most of the fine weather holding and going fishing whenever I've had any spare time. There has been some interesting light which I have photographed in my usual lazy way when I'm fishing. Near enough is more than good enough!

One evening when the sun had been officially set for almost an hour and I was walking back to the car the afterglow reflecting on the wind ruffled lake stopped me in my tracks. Of course I had no suitable tripod with me and had to hand-hold the camera. Whenever I do this the most pleasing composition is the one which suffers from camera shake, and so it proved.

I resolved to return the following evening without fishing tackle but with tripod and wider lens. The light was good and there were sparse clouds promising a chance of getting a similar shot. The only thing missing was the wind. I set up in advance to get the framing right - and realised the wider lens was just a bit too wide. Before the sun set it was possible to hand hold and keep the shutter speed up enough to avoid wobbly-hand syndrome doing its worst. This allowed me to position the sun behind some leaves, stop down the lens, and get a starburst. A nice enough picture, but not what I was aiming for.

Nature never repeats itself, so it was no surprise that when the sun set cloud formations wouldn't perform and replicate those of the previous evening. The pink glow refused to materialise, the clouds began to block in and foil my carefully chosen composition. I was forced to move and make the best of things. While the result wasn't what I had in mind it evokes a different, but still satisfying, mood.

A rainy day today meant no fishing, so when things dried up towards evening I ventured out to my usual haunts along the shore. The light was changing all the time, with showers moving overhead and along the horizon. The sandplant wasn't doing it for me so I drove south to the track the shrimpers use. To me these two shots evoke what it feels like out there. The light certainly helps (the low grey cloud helping the framing for one thing), and it also seems that the telephoto's compression of depth manages to convey the space and flatness. Which is counterintuitive. A wide angle lens, encompassing far more, would seem to be better suited to conveying the feeling of being in a wide open landscape.

There is nothing along the coastline until the Lakeland Fells in the north and the Welsh Mountains in the south. The only thing that breaks the horizon is the gas rig. Unsurprisingly this gets photographed regularly by all and sundry. Myself included. Until now I've not managed to make a picture of it that has been much more than a silhouette against a sunset. The temptation is to make the rig as large as possible in the frame. I think this picture is more successful because the rig is small, but readable, and it is placed in the context of it's location rather than isolated as a shape against a sunset. In that case the sunset is really the subject. Here the whole scene is the subject. The rays of light just happened to appear in the vicinity of the rig, making it more of a focal point. While there might not be much going on in the foreground there is sufficient to hint that people traverse the marshy land. This is not a romanticised landscape in the way the lake pictures are intended to be. But it's still a subjective image because of the way I chose to frame it, what I included, gave prominence to and omitted.

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Guidelines

I came across this video via a comment at The Online Photographer. It started well enough, although the deconstruction of Cartier-Bresson's pictures reinforced my change of appreciation of them. Maybe it's like analysing humour, but the more I look at HCB's famous pictures the more contrived they seem. The same goes for Steve McCurry's work. Compositionally 'stunning', but the technique overwhelms the subject matter. You tend to appreciate the artistry rather than the picture's content and the message is lost.

It's all to simple to make pictures which follow compositional rules, even if you don't do it consciously. The best bit of advice in the video is to squint at a subject. Painters do it all the time and I find myself doing it more and more as I peer through my camera's viewfinder. It makes you look at the picture as a whole.

Deconstructing the picture above it's simple to see the compositional strengths. There's a frame, a dark foreground, rods and horizon on thirds (more or less), rods dark against lighter water, and so forth. None of this was thought through in those terms when I framed the shot, I just moved the camera around until it looked right. While it's pleasing on the eye, I'm not sure quite what the picture is about. To an angler it will mean something different to how a non-angler views it. A caption would also alter it's meaning. I took it because I liked the effect of the light on the trees. It would accompany an article about eel fishing well enough, but as a stand-alone picture it's something and nothing.

Remembering the compositional guidelines outlined in the video will make for good pictures. But they'll be pictures which look safe and familiar. It's no surprise that enquiring photographers choose to try and make pictures in different ways than following formal modes of construction derived from classical, representational, painting. Photography can be about another way of picturing than creating an ideal view of reality. Reality is messy. Photography is a great medium for conveying that.

The Winogrand on the right was criticised in the video for it's lack of formal composition. It seems to me that it is the chaotic nature that makes it interesting. The fact that you have to search for the subject which comes as a surprise. Photographs can have more than one possible subject, all equally stressed.

Photographs which try to be no more than abstract fields of colour usually fail by becoming banal. Photographs need a subject. Or at the very least recognisable objects to be seen. They don't need to be 'perfectly' composed to be successful pictures.

This is my excuse for some of the photographs I've been taking recently. I realised that I had been concentrating too much on the formalities of making 'good photographs' and not enough on the content and meaning.

The ongoing Over The Hedge series is an attempt to break out of the rut. The pictures are about arrangements of shape and colour. The subject, as in what the picture is about, is the whole of the frame rather than just that which stands out visually. I hope the eye roams over the picture rather than concentrating on one element. For all that they might look to have been casually taken they are carefully, or perhaps that should be thoughtfully, composed.

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