When in doubt

Whenever I'm really, really stuck and down about photography I head for the seaside. A warm and sunny Sunday afternoon saw the beach quite popular. Once more I missed out on the fun. The horse riders were all packing up. I'd also missed the sea anglers launching their boats and couldn't be bothered hanging around until they came back in on the tide. One of these days I'll go to the beach earlier in the day instead of leaving until the day is almost over. Maybe. The strange thing is I actually prefer the beach when there aren't many people around.

I tried to make a suggestion of the boat anglers in their absence by photographing the tracks of their vehicles and trailers. It might read more easily at a larger size. The repetition of shapes at the near edge of the gully appealed to my eye. Not much of a pictire but it might work in combination with others. Or it might not.

I was struck by the way people flock together like waders on the tide edge. Either side of the group below there was empty sand. What appealed was the matchstick figures making a frieze-like image. Hence the panoramic crop. To really make this sort of picture work it should be made with a high resolution lens and printed large I feel.

As can be seen, the sun decided to hide by the time I reached the sea and made my way back to the car. Typical.

Monday was a day of fishing and playing with the compact camera. The limitations are a minor frustration. What really bugs me with all the small sensor cameras I've used is the magenta/purple cast to the images. Not just fringing round high contrast edges but over the whole picture. One thing that small cameras do for me is encourage experimentation. This usually leads me to push them beyond their capabilites. The pictures can work okay as web images though.

This afternoon saw more bright sunshine and another trip to the seaside. I really should have put my hand in my pocket to park closer to the action instead of walking in. I made more pictures than I'd intended, and almost all were absolute rubbish. The best of the rest were pretty dire too. Sometimes it feels like a complete waste of time. In fact there was nothing worth posting except for one which reminded me of an idea I thought about pursuing a while back.

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Pumping it up

Once more the benefit of snapping anything interesting and revisiting places paid off. Just over 12 months ago I took three photos of a bit of a makeshift pumping solution. At the time the drainage theme was floating around in my head with not much form to it, but the idea was there to make pictures relating to it in case they came in handy at some future date.

I hadn't been back there for some time until today when I chanced upon a fancy new pump being installed and made my usual half-arsed attempt at documenting the process. A mid-range zoom would have been useful - but all I had were two fixed focal length lenses. At least I had two bodies with me.

Only this morning I'd made the decision to make more pictures of people doing stuff instead of taking the easy option of photographing 'stuff'. This is far more challenging. Not only do you have to find people doing things you have to engage with them while trying to make pictures which are more than just snapshots. It's far from simple. I think I managed one or two pictures which contain information which explains the situation. The one below shows the forklift up to its front axle - illustrating the sodden nature of the earth requiring drainage.

Like most blokes they installed the pump and fired it up without consulting the manual. Eventually looking at it when no water was going through!

A few more here.

The concept of trying to make individual photographs which aspire to the condition of 'art' seems to be becoming less interesting to me than the idea of sequences or collections of images which tell a story in some way. Where the Lost Balls fit in this I don't know!

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Higher ground

At the moment I'm in one of those periods of doubt. I want to make photographs, I know what I want to make them of, but I wonder why I should bother. Nonetheless I set off this afternoon to look at the end of a drain where it passes through (under?) the floodbank which keeps the sea at bay. What the floodbank does, photographically speaking, is quite literally provide a different point of view and a new perspective. An unusual one in this flat landscape.Before I got to the drain I came across a field which was in the process of being drained. Having set out to travel light with a mid-range zoom and a camera I was a bit scuppered for making any worthwhile images of a subject which fits well in the theme of drainage!

Pictures of the modern drainage of fields illustrate how unnatural farmland is, despite it's acceptance as bucolically timeless in the eyes of the general public. Fields are fields and crops grow in them. In fact they are industrialised and managed. It's just that this is all hidden underground. Maybe the picture above makes this point in a subtle way which requires the photograph to be read before it can be understood rather better than the one below which spells things out more literally.

I would have liked to get closer but the lack of a longer lens prevented that from where I was, and I couldn't get physically closer because of a couple of fences and a ditch! I've yet to find out why the ditches in this area run a rust brown. It makes for colourful and perplexing images though.

Whenever I look at my photographs of the landscape they never look like the ones I see in photo magazines or on photography forums or blogs. Even when I carefully compose a picture, as in the one above (believe it or not!) I choose views which fall outside the widely accepted formulae for making landscape pictures. I think it's because I'm as much interested in what is in the picture as how it is constructed.

Just the other day I saw a picture of a sandy cove with some people enjoying the sunshine and the sea  posted on a forum. It looked a bit of an obvious view but nice enough. I felt the people gave it some scale and their footprints showed how they had got where they were. Someone took it upon themselves to edit out the people to improve the shot. This is what I find so wrong with the aesthetic which populist photography follows. It's an aesthetic of idealised romanticism that doesn't want to say anything or try to make any point other than 'this is pretty'. So here's a picture of some soil and some water.

I've been taking my new compact around town with me recently and liking the way it handles. More importantly I like the way the pictures it makes look.

I still find annoying frustrations with the whole compact camera thing, though. The different native aspect ratios of compacts and DSLRs is one such. You can switch this compact to shoot in 3:2 aspect ratio - but only in JPEG. Why? One of my DSLRs can be set to shoot in 5:4 aspect ratio in both JPEG and raw, but not in 4:3. When using both systems to work on one project means there has to be some guesswork involved if trying to compose for future cropping. At least with the micro four thirds Panasonic I had it would shoot raw in 3:2. This must be a simple firmware issue. And quite why the thing has to be sluggish to respond is another bafflement. Ho hum.

That aside the only other niggles I have are, I guess, connected to the lens quality and the size of the sensor. There's a lack of dynamic range and a strong tendency for purple fringing, plus quite a bit of distortion which was evident in the railings above. Aside from the dynamic range, which I overcome by deliberately underexposing to preserve highlight detail, the fringing and distortion can be easily corrected. A3 prints look good enough after a bit of tweaking to me.

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Watch it while you can

Another episode in the BBC seemingly periodical series on what artists do all day features Tom Wood in Ireland. http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b03wxk2w/ A fascinating insight into his way of working, and some great 'photies' too - if you like that sort of thing. Although a contemporary and friend of Martin Parr, and a photographer of not dissimilar subject matter, his career could hardly be more different!

As this is supposed to be a blog about photography here's two from today's trip to a nature reserve. Like Mr Wood I tend to have too many balls in the air at once. The drainage thing is still in the back of my mind, I even made a couple of pictures that might work in to it, but I've got the nature reserve thing nagging at me now. There might be a format developing here. The two pictures below were deliberately taken to work as a pair. Whether I can make a cohesive set of pairs of pictures in this vein remains to be seen.

While I was wandering around today I got to thinking about how you can try to make individual pictures that are not just of something specific but also about a bigger idea, or you can take a lot of pictures of things which when put together become, in total, about the big idea. This just demonstrates that there is no one thing that photography can be defined as. It can be put to many uses. Which is one of it's great fascinations and attractions. Particularly to someone with a grasshopper mind like me who has never been able to work in any one style, genre, or mode in anything I do for any prolonged period. Most artists settle into one groove, and many amateur photographers seem to be in search of a personal style as if that is the apogee of success. It takes something like genius to pull off changing, or varying, styles and remaining consistent and not coming across as a dilettante. Only a handful manage it. Picasso? Neil Young?

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Getting my eye in, and messing up

Strange how using one focal length gets you seeing with the same viewpoint. The other day I took a zoom out for a wander with nothing much in mind and found many shots were made with it around the 50-60mm mark. Unfortunately I've been getting my timing wrong this week. Not just being in the right place at the wrong time, which is normal for me, but timing shots badly.

It's not often I get to the shrimp track when there are shrimpers around. One day this week I did. With the tide still well out I got plenty of warning that the tractor was coming is and got myself in a position where I thought I might make a reasonable picture. I got the framing pretty much how I wanted it with some churned up muddy sand bottom left and the patch of the tractor predictable on the right. As it passed through the deeper patch of water I knew there'd be some spray to suggest movement. Even the seagull took off when I wanted it too.

This was okay, but like a dolt I'd set focus on the foreground when making pictures with the tractor a distant speck and forgot to shift it to the tractor when it got closer making it a bit soft. I'd also neglected to shift out of single shot mode so I couldn't rattle off a number of shots in quick succession. The next frame I managed was the one below.

The tractor is large and better positioned, more side on, but there is less impression of motion - and the seagull is now below and just touching the horizon. Bah! I made an abstract of tyre tracks to cheer myself up. I even got them reasonably sharp.

Today I set out with a purpose in mind. To try to make some photographs about how nature reserves don't actually put people in touch with nature but distance them from it. A big idea to put into pictures. One that I realise I've been working towards for some time, and which needs more than a couple of hours to get to grips with. Anyway, I took two bodies one with the 50mm and one with the 28mm. These two lenses seem to cover the way I see things, and being fixed focal lengths they make me think more about framing as I've mentioned many times before. I also stuck the telephoto zoom in the bag in case I headed for the seaside later.

Needless to say I got sidetracked as I wandered around the outside of the reserve. The ditches and drain got me thinking about the drainage project. The frame below manages to combine a drain and an irrigation pipe, bringing the to themes of the project together. I could have made a better effort of the framing, although I did make a better fist of a picture in portrait orientation, but without the drain in the shot.

I've photographed this gate and sign a few times before. This is the first time I've made a picture of it though. Good photographs can work because of the compositional structure or because of their content and/or concept. Better photographs blend the two. I think this photograph manages to work as a composition and as an idea.

When someone shows what they think is a good picture the failed attempts are, as here, usually kept hidden. I think that's why Henri Cartier-Bresson said that contact sheets should never be shown. By only showing the best shots the mystique of the photographer as a magician able to pluck perfect photographs from the world around them at the click of a shutter is maintained. Show the contact sheets and that myth dissolves. Just take a look at H C-B's contact sheets... But the failures are like a painters sketches. Important to the process, and revealing to the outside observer.

I am tickled by the irony that wildlife frequently chooses to ignore nature reserves. Even preferring to feed across the road from them like the geese in the picture below. At a larger size the geese in the field are much more visible. If the name of the reserve had been visible on the sign that would have made the picture really work.

This problem of scale of display is increasingly problematic for photography, I think. As screens get smaller and become the default way for people to view photographs the benefits of cameras which can resolve a lot of detail become redundant. This may well influence the way people make photographs. I guess that for the majority of people who take photographs these days, with compact and phone cameras, this is probably already the case. Or maybe people will expect to be able to click on a photograph and see it at 100%. This option is frowned upon by photographers wanting to keep their files to themselves so they can sell prints, but who still want to display their work on the web. Quite where photographic display will go in the future is hard to say. There may be a split between photography for the web and gallery display. Massive prints are becoming the norm in the gallery and art world. It's a bit elitist to my way of thinking for the most democratic image making medium.

When I, inevitably, got to the beach it was closed to cars. Like everyone else I had to find somewhere to park and then walk. By now I had the zoom on one camera, and being idle it stayed on. My bad timing struck again and a couple of horses were being readied for going back in their trailer. I almost made a decent picture. I keep on trying to make pictures which bring more than one subject into the frame. This one drew together horse riding and dog walking. Alas the timing was off. So it's just a snap and not a picture. Timing shots is a learned skill. The more you try the better you get. The difficulty is finding the time to try as often as is required. I'll have to keep on making the failures.

One picture that didn't fail quite so badly was this contre-jour shot. Maybe I should have got a bit lower, but my knees aren't keen on that option! Yet again it reads more clearly larger. The tyre tracks lead the eye up and left from bottom right where they meet the matchstick figure walking to the right, taking the eye to the right along the dark band until it meets the pole and bounces back. While the light and texture work to create an atmosphere the figures could be more interesting. That's he benefit Lowry had over a photographer - he could put his matchstick men anywhere in the frame.

It's funny how, no matter how many projects and ideas I keep coming up with, I always seem to end up back at the beach. Perhaps I ought to face up to it and stick to making beach pictures and give up my pretensions of making pictures with messages? Of course, all photographs have an agenda of some sort  (are 'propaganda', as Martin Parr put it) even my beach pictures are loaded; why else would they often involve large areas of negative space and small, distant figures?

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