Fine photography

Although I check out The Online Photographer (TOP) on a daily basis because I like the style of writing about photography - down to earth and lacking in artspeak - I'm realising that I'm not a fan of the kind of photography that seems often to be promoted there (or the stress on well crafted prints).  It's the kind of stuff that I was inspired by, approved of, and sought to aspire to when I was starting out. A cut above the usual camera club formulae, but somehow still formulaic. It feels rather dated.

Certainly not a fine photograph!

This was brought home to me by a recent posting of a chicken photograph, and a link to the photographer's website. As it happens I'd seen her photographs before and had that same feeling of disappointment the first time. At first sight they looked really impressive. The more I looked, however, the more obvious the appeal and the less there was to see. They don't ask any questions, they don't contain surprises. The subjects seem (for the most part) irrelevant to the structure of the photographs. Cats and chickens being interchangeable. One commenter said the work wasn't romantic - yet it seemed highly romanticised to me. Cow pictures have been better done by Keith Arnatt.

And therein lies the dissatisfaction I find with 'fine photography'. It's too much about process and perfection. Arnatt's cows are sometimes shot using harsh flash, the compositions are 'off'. But the results are more engaging - to me. They are pictures I can return to.

Maybe this is just an expression of an appreciation for a different aesthetic, perhaps born from the ideas that are surreptitiously instilled at art school - to always be trying new ways of looking at and doing things. Maybe it's got something to do with the original punk ethos of making rough and ready music with limited technical ability.

I think that TOP is too hung up on the photography side of picture making. There was a quote from Matisse posted on TOP a few days back which rather sneered at. Unsurprisingly I thought the final part of it was pretty much spot on - Photography should register and give us documents.

More and more I feel photographs should be documents and pictures before they are photographs. Being photographs should be incidental. The document bit is easy (every photograph documents what is before the camera), the picture part more difficult. Yet it is the picture element, alongside being photography, which 'fine photography' is all about. While technique and craft are worthy they should never be apparent. And nor should the medium. Thinking always about making photographs is almost as bad as thinking always about what camera to use!

This is just me rambling away with off the cuff thoughts - which I'll probably contradict in teh not too distant future.

Anyway, while loosely touching on style here's an example of how it shouldn't be used. Fast lenses shot wide open automatically give pictures a 'look' that seems to be almost obligatory on Flickr. That shallow depth of field automatically gives photographs a look of quality! Fast lenses do give you greater control over depth of field, but that is to be used wisely. Pictures, especially documents, are about information. The first shot here looks 'dreamy' but doesn't hold as much information as the one below it.

Because my intention was to make a document of the kind of farming that takes place around my village (there are acres and acres of leeks and glass houses) I took the lower shot first - then the upper one to make a point on this blog! This is part of my attempts to build up a set of pictures about the village.

At the risk of  immediately contradicting what I wrote earlier, I am trying to make many of these pictures somewhat obtuse. Which seems an odd ambition for documents. A picture of a leek field is obviously about farming, that a couple of parking cones are about a rugby club less so! By the time there are more pictures, sorted into a sequence or juxtaposed, it might all make some sort of sense. Or not, as the case may be...

There is, it should go without saying, no guarantee that the above picture will make the final cut, that the project will continue in the same manner, or that the project will even reach the stage where a final cut might be made!

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Over the top

When it comes to processing my photographs I try to keep things as restricted as possible. In the darkroom (read 'bathroom') all I ever did was vary the exposure and the grade of paper. In all honesty the paper never seemed to make much difference. Dodging and burning was beyond my abilities and the capabilities of my cheap and nasty enlarger.

In the digital darkroom dodging and burning is a doddle. As is altering contrast, colours and all manner of other things. Because it's so simple it's also all too easy to go too far. But every now and then a file opens in Lightroom which demands a bit more than my usual treatments in order to make it something else.

There's been an old second world war helmet hanging in my slowly decaying shed for years. It's a long story how the helmet came to be there, but when I went in to get my slasher yesterday evening there was a sliver of light falling on the helmet, now surrounded by ivy and cobwebs, which gave the scene a melancholy air. Perhaps with thoughts of the recent WW1 commemorations in mind I went to get a camera and take some photos. One of them was better exposed than the rest - that shaft of late sun in the shade made exposure tricky. Better to expose for the highlight and hope that processing would lift the shadows without too much detriment.

Although I prefer to make colour photographs these days this one wasn't working. First I made it black and white, then I gave it an aged look. This seemed to fit the subject, which for once was in keeping with a nostalgic feel. Then it was a matter of getting the contrast and detail I wanted, partly by altering the overall tones, partly by playing with the colour sliders to lighten the ivy leaves, and also by using a brush to dodge the top portion of the frame and bring out the leaves there. Finally a vignette was added. It took me a lot longer than just putting an 'S' curve in the tone curve! I think it works well enough for what was, essentially, a quick snap.

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Make it easy on yourself

Getting technical with artificial lighting has always baffled me. I might have mentioned this before, but I have finally discovered a way that works for me to photograph 'products'. It works because it's dead simple. No light stands, no umbrellas or softboxes, just the one flash gun on the camera.

Place object on white paper, flip the flash head round to point at the white ceiling, boost the output by one and a third stop, set the camera to overexpose the meter reading by one stop and off you go. Easy to correct minor exposure errors or make the background pure white in post. Good enough for me! Anyone want to buy a couple of flashguns, light stands and umbrellas?

One great piece of advice in On Being a Photographer - David Hurn and Bill Jay is that when deciding on a project it should be practical to work on. My loosely defined 'parking' project is just that. There's subject matter almost everywhere. Signs, in particular, interest me in any case. So I photograph ones that relate to parking. The last few days have got me a couple which I'm liking at the moment and which might be pushing me in a new direction.

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Trials and tribulations

This week just gone I think I've managed to put a project to bed. After the hot weather and bright sunshine putting me off doing anything that involved moving about for ages I had two evening sessions with the camera trying to add to the collection of shots for my Autoflora project. My enthusiasm had been rekindled after carting my camera to the Post Office the other day and finding some inspiration for my village 'project'. That got me keen to do something more focussed.

This has been ongoing for a couple of years. It's only possible to do much with it for a few weeks each year. Too soon and there are no plants growing between the cracks, too late and they have either died of natural causes or been sprayed with weedkiller by the council. In the place where I take the pictures time of day is important too, so it has to be evening. Again timing is critical and after a certain point my shadow enters the frame.

After working out a viewpoint, focal length and shutter speed I was determined to do it properly this time. The tripod went with me and the remote release. That way I'd get more 'keepers' with the plants and foreground sharp. Or so I thought. As it turned out I didn't. Back home I reasoned why that was the case, and a trial in the back garden revealed that the problem was mirror/shutter shock using the camera in burst mode. Using mirror lock up I could get sharp-enough frames at 1/10th sec and 200mm. Another attempt would have to be made while I was still in the mood.

The first problem to hit was the remote release playing up. Long story, but my own fault. Still, I could use the receiver as a cable release so all was not lost. The burning issue was if I would be able to time the shots while limited to one frame at a time? I'd been using burst mode to give me a fighting chance of getting one out of three or four with a car in the frame. As things turned out my 'hit rate' was much better!

Using the mirror lock there were still bits of the plants which were blurred, but that's unavoidable as the draught from the passing vehicles moves them. The kerbstones and tarmac were as sharp as I could hope for. Success.

It didn't take me long to get the shots I was after. Given that they are all just variations on a theme it didn't seem worthwhile to carry on taking more of the same. Certainly not when I have already got a number of similar pictures on file, plus variations which were made on the road to the current stage. I reckon the project has gone as far as I can take it - unless I think up a different angle to approach it from.

In other news. The sandplant continues to throw up occasional interesting pictures for me. I liked the way the folds of the plastic mimicked the folds of the leaves in the shot on the right. Despite the seemingly endless opportunities and inspiration the place provides it really is time for me to put some order into the pictures I've made there. Even if I carry on visiting and photographing the place. What kind of order that might be is what's stopping me. I should edit the 600+ frames down to 200 or so, then whittle those down into a coherent set of 50-100. What I could then do with them once whittled is anyone's guess!

The Vintage Village series continues on it's whimsical way. I still can't decide if it's 'serious' or just a bit of fun. Trawling car boot sales and charity shops for old frames and making 'aged' prints to go in them is the kind of thing an art student would do. Which is why I'm reluctant to do it myself!

These 'vintage pictures often come from the rejects from my more self-consciously serious picture taking walks around the village. Trying to find things, and ways of photographing them, which will build up to a picture of how I see the place, without avoiding the obvious views, is a challenge I enjoy.

Making the church spire a small element in a picture was one way of including a village landmark in a less than obvious way. Another, which I'm not entirely certain of, was to photograph the modern Catholic church so that it was out of focus while the spindly sapling was sharp. Not a very original concept, but the result was moderately pleasing. Although maybe a lower angle might have been better. Damn those creaking knees...

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Tom Wood says;

I think I understand why I like Tom Wood's approach to photography.

“The important thing is not to have an aim, I just go out the door and, whatever’s real, I try and deal with that.”
Source.

"When the stuff is too journalistic and documentary then it is journalism, if it is too conceptual and arty then that is another thing, but where the two meet - that is interesting."
Source.

None of which is as easy as it sounds...

The trade off or balance between art and documentary is ever present for me. I firmly believe that it is photography's ability to record, to make documents, that is it's greatest strength. Which is not to say that those documents can't go be something more.

I now regret that I didn't make an effort to document the demolition of the mill by the canal. When I moved to the village in the late 1960s and on until the eighties it was a major employer in the area - my mum worked there. It closed as a weaving mill in the nineties and became a factory shop. When I walked by it last week the last of it was gone. Soon it will be another housing estate. Maybe someone else has recorded its passing in full. The few pictures I have taken are gathered together here.

Once more I find myself struggling to come to terms with a 'small' camera. Daft as it sounds I prefer the results I get from my fishing compact to the mirrorless Fuji X-E2 I've been using for some time. Although I've finally managed to set it up so that I can use it more intuitively and quickly I still find a it frustrates. It's odd that little things you take for granted with a DSLR, in my case manually override the focus away from a focus point, can't be done with these 'lesser' cameras. It's handy if you are trying to shoot through a grill or branches at a subject in the background, and it's really useful when photographing people who are moving around faster than you can shift the focus point. Far better than letting the camera select where to focus too.

Mirrorless evangelists bang on about how much more accurate the focusing is with their cameras, and how superb the visual aids are for manually focussing. Yeah, but you can't have manual and auto focus at the same time. What's more the visual aids are only any use if you have time to use them. I also hate the way (at least on the Fuji) they only work in a zoomed in view of the centre of the frame. So you carefully frame, twist the focus ring and get a cropped and zoomed picture to look at - if the subject is off-centre you have to re-frame. By the time you have the subject in focus and zoomed out again you have to recompose. It's a faff. I don't care what anyone says, it's much easier (and quicker) to manually focus with the big, bright optical viewfinder of a DSLR.

Why is the picture above in black and white? Just because I don't think the Fuji makes a good job of photographing people. Skin colours always look too pinky-red and its texture unnaturally smooth. The texture thing even comes across in monochrome conversions. The woman's bare arm at the left of the frame looks like a prosthetic! All a great shame because the camera is small, light and fun and discreet to use. Maybe I should sell a kidney and buy a Leica?

For outdoor shots without people, however, it does a decent job,although I'm not sure the colours are as 'rich' as I get from my Nikons (even the compact). I might persevere with it for my latest project-without-end. Recently I've taken to wandering round the bits of the village I've never had any reason to visit in all the years I've lived here. Which makes them visually surprising and interesting to me.

Sure enough I've got funny looks and been asked what I'm photographing and why. My answers almost always result in a bemused shaking of the head!

"Are you photographing that bench?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Why not?"

Which is where I come back to searching for that intersection between documentary and art which Tom Wood mentions. It's all about trying to avoid the clichés used in photojournalism, and the pretentiousness of art photography. For me it's about the information in the pictures allied with formal arrangements. I'm also coming to favour making pictures which need time to understand rather than give everything at a glance. Pictures where small details matter. Which isn't easy...

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