Sand, sea, sun and stupidity

During the week I'd been taking some 'product' shots for my fishing blog. Because I had control over the light, plenty of time to correct errors,  and I wasn't needing big files I set the camera to shoot the smallest, lowest quality jpegs to make processing the files quicker. When I went out this morning I arrived at the sandplant in bright, low sun and the heavy plant was back in evidence. I wandered around for about twenty minutes making a few pictures.

After that I headed for the beach and it was there I realised I hadn't reset the camera to shoot raw files. At the sizes displayed here you'd never know, but trying to compensate for the contrasty light when processing the jpegs was not as easy as it is with raw files. Today's lesson; check the quality of files or when shooting jpegs set the camera to shoot them alongside raw files. Ho hum.

The drive to the coast had been on icy country roads. It was still slippy underfoot as I got to the beach well after nine. I think the cold had kept a lot of people from making an early start as there weren't many about. However the ones there were mostly dog walkers.

The tide was well on its way in making for a short walk to the water's edge where there was a woman with a pack of dogs racing about like mad things. They were quite large and boisterous, but when three of them charged past me I realised they were harmless. It turned out they were not only harmless but very friendly.

Whenever you meet people doing mildly unusual things on the beach you get to learn something. I learned a bit about pointers today. I thought chickens and horses were troublesome to photograph from a control perspective. But trying to make a picture of seven lively dogs must be only slightly less troublesome than herding cats!

One thing I am beginning to realise is that while I am reasonably competent at making candind portraits of people while they are doing things I still have a long way to go at making posed portraits. I'm getting a bit better at it. Giving direction is becoming easier, not least because I'm forming ideas as to what I want to achieve. I'm also making more exposures rather than the one or two I usually take. Although that doesn't seem to be improving the results all that much. I always seem to miss something crucial. Mind you, it's a lot easier with one person than it is with two, or a load of dogs to wrangle!

Earlier in the week I'd managed to sneak to the beach and made another 'not quite what I'm after' portrait. Two people, and a dog, had been beachcoming. There was a good portrait to be made, but I bodged it. It's little things like the dog masking the woman's legs. I also forgot to ask them not to smile. Mind you I did whistle to get the dog's attention.

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Prose

My poetic diversion didn't last long! Simply presenting things in literally is the best way to get across what something is like. The expanding saltmarsh is an example. Straightforward documentary landscape pictures show how the marsh grows. Viewpoint and perspective imply the sense of scale.

After getting to the beach late on my previous visits I tried to make an early start today, and rather than take a quick look and leave if there was nothing 'interesting' going on I had a good wander up and down. Apart from the inevitable dog walkers there was nothing happening so I took myself to the visitor centre, closed for the weekend. Like anything else that doesn't move in the dunes it is in danger of being buried by sand. Salt in the air is taking its toll on anything prone to rust too. After a bit of staring I manage to make a geometric picture.

Making my way back to the car I saw a couple of horses being walked down to the sands so I followed them. The horses were having a bit of a seaside break and enjoyed rolling in some dry sand and paddling in a beach pool. The least bad picture I made would have been better if the horses had been closer together, but that's working with animals for you...

Time had flown by and I was ready for something to eat, so I headed home. I could have sat down and started processing my mornings pictures but something made me get back in the car and head back to the seaside. I think it was a couple of conversations I had in the morning that prompted my return. It seems I'm not alone in thinking there is an agenda to get people, and horses, off the sands. The lack of vehicular access to the sands in winter, with inadequate off beach parking, is one potential clue. Another came to my mind when I read a recently published book about this stretch of coastline which devotes just a few pages to the use of the coast for recreation. With this in mind I'm feeling it's important to record the uses the beach is put to before the conservation Nazis put an end to them all. Paranoid? Maybe.

My return proved worthwhile. The sea retreats a very long way in places, making people who have walked out to its edge appear as tiny specks in the distance. By taking a photo and zooming in I realised one of these specks was digging lugworm. I've not had an opportunity to photograph lugworm digging before, although I have taken some distant shots of people using worm pumps. I tried to take some photos giving the sense of scale again. It does feel like the sand goes on to the very horizon when the tide is a long way out and you are well beyond the end of the pier.

This next shot could have worked well had i been using a longer lens, and if I'd managed to catch the flock of waders nearer to the bait digger. So a failure really.

Then I tried for some documentary pictures.

And finally a portrait.

Despite my dislike for planning what pictures I want to take for my projects I actually have a list of subjects for this beach project. That's as far as it goes, I don't have any preconceptions for what the pictures will look like. Lug worm digging was one of the subjects I thought would take some time to get, so it was well worth me going out again after lunch.

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Poetry

Photography is a very literal medium. That's what makes it so suited to documentary usage. Perhaps it's what also can make it poetic.  There are photographers who take photographs which are unavoidably literal, but which aren't simply about what they depict. The shapes and colours in these photographs bring something else to the picture, in the way poets use words to mean more than what they are saying. In a similar way the lyrics to 'pop' music can  seem banal when laid out on a page, but the way they sound when sung gives them an added meaning which works on us in a poetic way.

All this was in my mind when I was down by the seaside today on a very bright and almost windless afternoon. Taking 'straight' photographs didn't really get across how much space there is, how deserted it felt even though there were quite a lot of people about. I don't usually use shallow depth of field for its own sake. Today I used it deliberately, but not to make the kind of photographs you see on Flickr where there is something sharply focussed against a background of mush, always with lovely colours. I combined a lack of focus with deliberate over exposure. To cap it all I shot into the low sun. I'm not sure if the resulting pictures are all style and no substance, but it was interesting to experiment with a different way of picturing the beach and the sea.

The edge of the incoming tide continues to fascinate me. I think the way to photograph it is with a series of shots showing the ebb and flow of a single wave taken using a tripod to keep the framing the same. Maybe I'll give it a go some time.

I wasn't the only one out with a camera today. I was going to approach the guy for my portrait series, but I had got engrossed photographing the water's edge and when I' finished he was on his way back to civilisation.

Something I have noticed over the years is that people like standing looking out to sea. Numerous people walk out to the water's edge alone. Stand there for a few minutes. Then walk back. It's something I can relate to. There's a poetry in the sea.

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Postcards from the rain

Picture postcards have been an inspiration for artists and photographers for decades. Tom Phillips enlarged details from them  them in paintings, Martin Parr has cited them as an inspiration for his more brash documentary photographs.The Caravan Gallery has produced its own postcards as part of its Pride of Place projects. For some time I've been intending to make my own versions of postcards of Southport. A visit to The Atkinson today provided me with four garishly coloured postcards of Southport scenes. Better still the conditions were perfect for photographing the same views. The bare winter trees and heavy overcast and drizzle were all I could have asked for!

The lettering was hastily done, so I'll revisit that in due course.

I was so inspired by the damp, misty day I carried on taking photographs around the Marine Lake. Some of them would make good postcards too...

Can one ever tire of irony?

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The documentary urge

I'm beginning to wonder if my liking for the documentary approach is something to do with a liking for story telling. After all I like writing blogs about what I get up to. Maybe it's part of the same thing? The current fashion is to talk about 'narrative', but that's the same as story telling. Except it tends to mean a series of pictures (in this context), whereas you can tell a story with one picture. If it contains a number of elements.

This is why I prefer environmental portraits to the sort that I usually see when 'portrait' is mentioned on a photo-forum. There seems to be no desire to paint a picture of the lives of people, just attempts to make pictures which isolate the subject, and usually flatter them. What I'm trying to do with my beach project is at least hint at what the people are doing. So when I met a birdwatcher loaded up with tripod, scope, camera and binoculars i was pleased when he agreed to be photographed. This time I made sure to leave space around him. The clothing and the wintry marsh colours work well together to my eye.

While I was out along the haul road across the marsh I tried to capture the scene. There was interesting light, but not having a tripod with me the hand held shots are not too great. For some reason the square crop seemed to work. I did get some ideas of how to progress the landscape aspect of this beach project though. So maybe I'll return better equipped.

Elsewhere I came across members of the coastguard service attending to a washed up pilot whale* carcass. The first time I've seen anything that large on the shore. Once more my request for a photograph was met with acceptance and I made a couple of frames. The landscape orientation worked best for the storytelling aspect, including the whale and the coastguard vehicle. Not the prettiest of sights, but I'm not in the game of pretty pictures.

for my purposes the light today was great. Bright but not harsh and with skies which weren't a uniform grey. Not what landscape photographers seem to prefer, but ideal to give the feeling of a wintry beachscape. Story telling again.

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* Later formally identified as a Risso's dolphin

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