Colour breaking out

Late on yesterday the sun threatened to shine for the last few hours. I had some shots in mind so set out. It turned out the sun decided to go into hiding again, and the shots I had visualised weren't possible anyway. Things had changed. Stuck for ideas it was to the sandplant where, sure enough, flowers are starting to appear at last.

I'm no botanist, but even I can tell there is a huge variety of plants growing on the apparently barren ground. Some native colonisers and some immigrants - either decorative or agricultural. Just as I am no expert on plant identification I'm not proficient in the skills of plant photography either. I wouldn't have a clue how to do it 'properly'. So what I do is something that satisfies me.

Last year I made some shots using on-camera, and off-camera, flash while shooting from a low angle to isolate the flowers against the sky. By underexposing the sky this highlights the colours of the flowers. Any background goes darker too while foreground detritus is picked out which sort of emphasises the derelict nature of the environment the flowers are surviving in. That the lighting is harsh doesn't bother me at all; the whole place is artificial. Last night's darkening sky was ideal for doing more of this.

Yet again the articulated screen of the little camera came in really useful for these low level pictures. I've tried using an angled viewfinder attachment with a DSLR and it just didn't work for me. The touch screen focus point selection is superb. The whole screen can be used and not just the central area as with a DSLR. Then again when using a drastically reduced exposure the screen reflects this, making framing more difficult. You can't have it all.

A lone plant with no clutter behind it and a rising ground far enough away can be isolated by the flash just as well as against the sky. The only problem I have found with using the camera's flash is that it can overexpose the immediate foreground in these low level shots. It would be better positioned to angle slight upwards. However, a neutral grad added at the computer overcomes the effect quite nicely.

I suppose I should use these pictures as reference sketches and go back with a couple of off-camera lights, lighting stands, tripod and DSLR to make a more slowly and carefully considered set of pictures. More likely I'll get distracted and go do something else.

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That's done - for now...

My hard copy of the quarry project, pretentiously (and possibly temporarily), titled Out of Stone arrived today.

The trouble with these things is they rarely turn out the way you think they will. The cover colour wasn't quite dark enough, what little text there is was a little too large, and a couple of the photographs had a technical flaw which I thought was a facet of the screen previews (I should perhaps have made test prints). The photographs came out well enough though.

Minor glitches aside, which I think I have corrected should I choose to get another copy printed sometime, I'm quite happy with the way it has turned out. Running pictures across the gutter was a gamble that doesn't work as well as it does on the screen, but if the book were 'properly' bound it would work better. I deliberately chose to place the gutter to one side or the other of the pictures -which is why some are aligned left and some right - to minimise it's impact.

Although I don't like to crop carefully composed pictures the full bleed pages were a visual device I used to break the layout into sections. In all it was an interesting exercise - both from a photographic and a presentational perspective. I wanted to try something other than the standard centred picture on a  page layout.

Having got fresh ideas to investigate at the quarry this might only be a starting point.

Out Of Stone by Dave Lumb | Make Your Own Book

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Return to the quarry

I'd been wondering what the beach looks like in the early morning for some time. Today, with a wet afternoon forecast, I went to find out. Maybe there'd be some horse riders around before the parking charges kick in. Turns out that apart from a handful of distant dog walkers way out at the water's edge it was deserted. It was also bloomin' cold with what felt like a north-easterly blowing.  No wonder there was nobody around. I would have hung around a while if it hadn't been for the wind. As it was I thought I'd seek shelter at the quarry.

With the gorse in full bloom and the trees leafing over the place looked completely different to how it had in winter. The new greenery sprouting up made the place more uniform and only when the sun was shining was I able to see any pictures which fitted the style I had become accustomed to making here.

Unfortunately the cloud was building and the light became changeable. The fresh growth was making me look at things differently and consider a different approach which I wasn't geared up for. It's time to start looking at details and using telephotos to compress space now it is a more claustrophobic environment. I was going to leave the quarry alone but this visit has given me fresh ideas to pursue.

Following a trail of feathers lead me to the partly eaten corpse of a heron. This proved difficult to photograph with the gear I had with me. The G2 was useful with it's flip out touch-screen making picking the focus point simple while holding the camera low, but the dim light (clouds had rolled over the sun and I was under a thick leaf canopy) showed up the limitations of the sensor - although at web size it's fine and a 5x7 print doesn't look too bad. I must start working to the camera's limitations.

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Changes revisited

That's my new cluttered Flickr photostream.

Thinking about it I realise that it has been designed by technical people rather than visual people. With the variety of viewing devices available these days, using screens of various sizes and aspect ratios the challenge is to make web pages to 'fit' all of them. So dynamic, flexible pages are being made which adjust to the screen format. A great concept from a technical point of view, but less so from that of a uniform 'look'.

When it comes to visual design this introduces compromise. But the whole point of visual design is that the creator imposes their choices on the viewer in order to make a point a particular way. If I want to present my pictures in a grid that's what I'll do, if I want to present them individually then I want that choice too. The old Flickr gave you a little more flexibility in that area. You could have a single column of larger images or a spread of thumbnails. Now, it seems there is one option... one that alters depending on the width of the screen and the format of the pictures!

By making something sort-of-work for everyone the inevitable consequence is that it works well for only a few - or the undiscerning mass. A form of dumbing down which the world seems to be tending towards in so many areas. An anti-elitism that will stifle creativity - because creativity is, by it's uniqueness, elitist. The New Creativity is a replication process - make Flickr look like Picasa, make your photos look like everyone else's by using the same presets to process them and get the likes, favourites and 'well captured's that pass for criticism on the internet.

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Changes in cyberspace and a change of format

Seeing as Flickr has altered its layout to a cluttered mosaic of images, and there doesn't appear to be any way to customise it It's all very modern, but there's no space around each image making it hard to consider them individually but in conjunction with others. It's a visual cacophony. Unless things change I think I'll be posting photos to a blog similar to Sandgrounding for the purpose of contemplating a session's pictures in future. This post is a sort of trial to see how it might work.

Tucked away at the end of town the tourists never see unless they are lost is the disused Park and Ride car park. Gates locked, signs faded, one part of it a council depot which seems equally disused judging by the plants growing among the stacked kerbstones and pushing through the tarmac. All in all an ideal place to roam around on a sunny but cold spring evening!

I'd actually set out intending to shoot entirely in black and white and 16:9 format as a challenge,but I got sidetracked. The wide screen format makes for a different way of looking for pictures, and the results have a different feel to them.

This first one was taken in the same spot as the similar colour frame above. yet the relationship between the lamp posts seems different to me as does the way the space is expressed. The width makes me read the picture from one side to the other rather than starting in the centre and working out, so the lamp on the far left is more obvious.

 This second shot reads from left to right in a curve which comes back to the staring point.

 Just to prove the rule, the third picture seems to read from bottom to top! The lines and shadows on the tarmac leading to the centre.

Although a format associated with horizontal screens and moving pictures it is another sort of challenge to make pictures in portrait orientation in the 16:9 format.

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