Repetition

Flat, un-scenic, landscape is difficult to photograph. Not least when so much of it looks the same. Some would say boring. If it's boring then make boring pictures of it instead of trying to make 'interesting' pictures. This is my excuse for adopting a very similar viewpoint and framing for a lot of my meanygate pictures of the farmed land. The horizon is kept high, and the land is the main subject. Maybe if the skies weren't so uniformly blue recently that might have been different. I might have been tempted to make the sky the focus of the pictures.

As it turns out I'm liking the repetitive  nature of the pictures as a series builds.

The main things which break up the flatness are the ditches, tracks and pylons crossing the moss. Again I prefer to centralise these features.

 Here and there are buildings. Some houses, mostly bungalows, barns and suchlike. After trying out angled views I once more found the straight on shots seemed more fitting.

Something that these wanderings at different times of the day have made me more aware of than usual is the direction of light. I see pictures which frame well, but don't work because something is in shade which needs to be lit. That said, I am still not a fan of early or late light for a lot of pictures. Apart from making for dark shadows it can make the pictures a bit too 'interesting' and become the subject itself.

When I saw the old Massey Ferguson chain harrowing the dry soil it felt like there was a picture to be made. The problem being that the backlighting which made the dust apparent put the red tractor in shade. You can't always have it all! Some fiddling on the computer made something of it.

As well as small scale farming on the moss there are larger concerns operating on a more industrialised basis. Their modern units provide a counterpoint to the more ramshackle outbuildings of the smaller farms.

Covering the same ground can lead to familiarity, but every now and then I take a second look at something. The pile of ploughed up tree remains which I photographed the other day being a case in point. The picture below works in a different way to my first attempt. I don't think either is better than the other as they tell different stories.

The weather is set to change and revert to normal spring conditions. Maybe this will provide a change of look to the moss and my pictures?

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Restricted

Not long after my previous post the zines started to arrive and soon the collection was complete. I felt that mine was rather letting the side down in terms of photography. My 'get out' is that it was a conceptual project! Already plans are being hatched for a second 'zine challenge'.

With all sheep dog trials cancelled for the foreseeable future and auction marts off-limits to anyone except buyers (even vendors can only stay as long as it takes to offload their beasts, and that without leaving their vehicle) and social distancing practically eliminating communication with strangers, it's been a case of hunting around the garden for 'wildlife' subjects or looking for 'landscape' pictures during my daily exercise walks.

Garden wildlife soon gets boring when there's no real point to it. No point I can get enthused about at any rate. The only highlight has been rediscovering how good my fishing camera can be for close up photography when the light is good enough. Even a crop of the 12mp file looks pretty detailed. A shame that the direction control on the camera is flaky and making it difficult to operate at times.

That meant it was landscape or nothing. Having more spare time available for a daily walk, work having dried up, I was going further than I usually do and covering fresh ground. After a few walks in new country I found myself photographing to a theme. Not a totally new theme, but with a tighter focus. The flat, farmed landscape of the mosses. One moss in particular criss-crossed by arrow straight single track lanes known as 'meanygates'. And so the meanygate project has commenced. How long I'll stick with it is the usual imponderable.

I hope it will be part straight recording things as they are including detail pictures, but also with a formal edge to some pictures. I am already collecting a few pictures which might make a series within the project.

Being restricted to where you can go forces you to look harder. It's the old cliché that having limited options expands possibilities. How long it will be before the initial freshness becomes stale remains to be seen. But there might be more possibilities than I imagine.

From a technical perspective I started off using pocketable cameras. The Fuji worked OK, except the focal length was a bit restrictive. I almost got to thinking that it could become my staple camera for the project with the longer lens adaptor fitted. That didn't last long as I soon had the same frustrations I've had with it before. All it needs to do is focus faster and I could live with it, but...

The Panasonic I bought to replace my fishing compact with the dodgy selector fared no better. The controls are annoying, the viewfinder horrible, and the files continue to lack something. I reverted to type and took the big camera out with it's consumer standard zoom attached. Apart from curving the horizon when used wide (easily correctable on the PC) it does a perfectly acceptable job during daylight hours outdoors. f5.6 and be there works for me unless I need more depth of field. Even at f6.3 I find the out of focus areas look nice enough.

A zine project

In January 2020 I posted a thread about making books and zines on Talk Photography forum, which lead to someone else starting a zine swap thread. I originally intended to make a zine using some of my poultry photographs, but that fell by the wayside when I read the suggested page count for the zines. I decided to do a project specifically for the thread challenge, having in mind a series of night time black and white pictures. As usual my plan changed yet again!

It was taking photographs of reeds that got me thinking about, and shooting specifically for, a set of pictures to be presented in a small (16 page - including cover) zine.

My initial efforts were all quite random in style as I worked out both what I wanted to show and how to show it. Pictures were sorted in Lightroom and an initial selection made.

The next step was to take the pictures into a publishing application. As it was a small zine I used OpenOffice which I have used before so know my way around. However it tends to freeze with larger numbers of images. Sixteen pages would be OK.

The images outputted from Lightroom were made in the print module at the size of the proposed zine - A5 portrait. This was where I played around with page layouts. I have a habit of embracing random acts when it comes to designing things and when I set the images to a square format I liked the look of them on the page. This lead me to crop all my selected pictures to a square. Not all of them worked when cropped and I also saw that there wasn't a consistent look to the pictures. Regardless of that I then made a dummy copy of the zine on my desktop printer, in black and white, just to get an idea of what the layout would look like.

With that done I went back to take more pictures which would fit my new vision for the series. This was to eliminate the sky from the pictures, to think in terms of squares, and to keep the colour palette limited. A couple more visits gave me a new selection of pictures to select from. These I laid out in a virtual contact sheet where I edited them down, crossing out the rejects, circling the probables and leaving the maybes unmarked.

Returning to the publishing software I sorted through the sequencing and changed the cover design and project title. Another black and white dummy was made. Satisfied that I was getting somewhere I made a colour dummy. 

This was the stage where I left the project to simmer. It's always a good idea to step away for a while. I find it stops the inevitable tinkering that happens when a project is almost complete. The break also allows you to come back to things with clearer eyes.

Refreshed I made some alterations to the sequencing and added a few words of text to the inside front cover. I also thought that this could become a bigger project looking at reedbeds through the year, or at least in summer as well as winter. I added a subtitle to the cover and made a fourth dummy.

After a couple of days I knew that the other parts of a bigger project were unlikely to happen and got rid of the subtitle. The zine was now ready for proof copies from on-line print services Doxdirect and Mixam. The Doxdirect proof was the full zine, including card cover, at full price. Mixam's was their 'free' (pay postage only) eight page (side) proof with no cover.

What the proofs would do was give me a chance to compare the print quality of each service and to see how the pictures reproduced in this print medium.

As far as reproduction quality went there was nothing in it. However Mixam's colours were a little closer to what I saw on my screen and outputted from my home printer. Both proofs showed up one picture which wasn't reproducing well and some which needed reprocessing. The odd picture out was ditched from the sequence and I went out to take some more in the hope one would take its place. I was successful. All that was left to do now was wait and see how many copies would be need printing to send out when the 'zine challenge' deadline was up.

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Strange days

Only a week ago it was reasonable to drive to a nearby country lane, park up and go for a walk. Now it could to lead to a £30 fine.

The idea was to explore some footpaths I haven't ventured along to see what there might be. On the Friday I found some signs to add to my collection of 'keep out' images and another overgrown pond.

On Sunday I ventured a little further to the finney where I've rarely seen anyone walking. I'd consulted my OS map and took a different route to my usual one to seek out some ponds. On my way I spied a field of sheep. There was plenty of baler twine in evidence so I took a few shots to add to that collection of mine.

Nearing the packet of sheep nibbling at a mineral block close to the path they saw me and turned tail.

 I hung around and waited. The mineral block soon proved more tempting than I was threatening!

Leaving the sheep behind I was in uncharted territory and on unexpected Tarmac. Another 'keep out' opportunity.

It was here that I started to notice that there were more people around. Everyone kept their distance, as advised, but it was obvious that a bit of springtime sun and warmth after a miserably wet winter is hard to resist.


There were overgrown ponds along this track. So overgrown they were difficult to photograph. I suppose that's part of the thinking behind this sort-of-project though.

At the first opportunity I turned off the Tarmac and headed back to the car along more deserted tracks. It's an open and strange landscape. Far from photogenic in the usual landscape sense. It's also out of bounds for the foreseeable future given the coronavirus situation.

Being restricted to walking from home it's back to photographing familiar sights. Although there is still change taking place as ploughing and planting has commenced since the land began to dry. Leaves and lambs are appearing. Then there's the addition of disinfectant to the roadside egg sale, and many notices in shop windows and other places relating to closures..

The skies are free of contrails, the background hum of traffic is barely audible, the streets and lanes are almost empty. It must have been like this before the second world war when horse power had four legs and a mane.

As the natural world is warming up and coming to life to fill me with hope and expectation there's a heightened sense of my own mortality as soon as I think about the preparations for emergency mortuaries being laid. Strange days, indeed.

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Sheep dogs from a new angle

I've been following Damian Bird's project documenting six farms on Dartmoor for some time and eagerly awaiting publication of the promised book having bought and enjoyed his previous book about south coast fishing, Seabird.

With some 500 photographs this hardback book is great value, and makes me wonder at the  prices of some photobooks these days. Maybe they are printed to higher standards? But for a book such as this which is a valuable document of farming at a potentially pivotal point in history 'fine printing' is less important than having a comprehensive visual record.

This is very much a book of no-nonsense documentary photography. Just my kind of photography.

With the coronavirus pandemic spreading and restrictions on social gatherings being more and more strongly advised I thought last Saturday's sheep dog trial might be the last chance for me to do some of my own documentary photography for some time with events such as this being cancelled in teh near future.

I was keen to get to this trial because it was at a new venue. Not just new to me but new to everyone. After almost getting my car stuck in the entrance to the field and parking it somewhere firmer I was glad I made the journey. The field being used had an interesting topography which gave me plenty of variety in the way of angles and backgrounds. The pen and shedding ring were also well within lens range - although for the action shots I still resorted to cropping a number of frames to improve composition. This is something I am becoming less disturbed by. Better to catch the action and crop than miss the action by trying to get the framing right in camera.

Dogs on quads are irresistible subjects. Better still when there is an interesting background. I took quite a few shots using the rise of the land to give me a lower viewpoint without having to bend my knees or kneel down. Things those knees don't take kindly to these days! By altering my position I was able to hide various distractions in the background while still getting the smoke from a chimney in the shot. The closeness of the field to a former mill town was something that I wanted to bring out in some of my pictures.

A good illustration of how the sheep are separated in the shedding ring is something I've been trying to get for ages. usually it's difficult to get a good angle on the ring, but this time I was more fortunate. Some might find the use of plastic bottles to mark out the ring spoils an idealised vision of a rural pursuit, but I like it. I'm more interested in how old pursuits are carried out today than a romanticised view.

Standing down the slope of the field made it easy to get down to sheep and dog level, which again was an aid to making engaging pictures.

There's the inevitable wider selection of pictures here.

While I was concentrated on the trial I did let my eyes wander, as I always do, looking for pictures. When I spotted some Lonk tups in a nearby field I wondered if I could get a picture I've had in mind for ages. A Lonk with a mill town in the background. Better still this town was Haslingden - the former name of the Lonk was the Improved Haslingden! The sheep wouldn't quite play ball and position themselves where I could line up an obviously industrial background, but it was a start. At least the tups weren't skittish and those near the path didn't run away from me.

As I feared the first virus-related event cancellation was announced yesterday. Great Harwood Show at the end of May as been called off. June's Todmorden Show had already been cancelled for financial reasons. This summer could be bleak for a lot of agricultural societies. They'll no doubt find it safer, financially, to cancel early as they are often run on a hand-to-mouth basis with one rain affected show being a threat to their continued existence. I can't see much show photography being done this year.

While I didn't have anything planned until mid-May other than poultry auctions - which I'll now be giving a miss if they take place - I don't know what I will find to take photographs of if I can't get out and about. Months of self portraits? That'll be a last resort!