Bluebell Season

Bluebells, near Corhampton, 2010

There is a very brief season when certain woodlands in southern England acquire a lustrous bluey-purple carpet of beautiful bluebells. The season is usually quite short, starting around Mayday and over by Whitsun. These delicate plants need the warmth and light of spring to encourage them to come out, but the display comes to a fairly sharp end when the trees above come into leaf and starve the bluebells of light. Well, in this rather peculiar dry then wet, warm then cold spring, the bluebells were largely gone when we went up to Micheldever Woods this weekend for an evening stroll. There were a few to be seen and those that were around looked in fairly good condition, but there just wasn’t the density or extent that we have seen in many previous visits over the years.

The image above was taken a couple of years ago in another local wood to the east of Winchester. The typical bluebell shot is one of a swathe of blue taken in open woodland with tall, bare vertical trunks reaching up to a bright green canopy, often shot with a telephoto lens to compress the flowers and increase the density of colour, often shot in wide format. Whilst the mass of blue in a wood is very attractive, I find the subtle variations in hue in the petals, from light blue to purple, as well as the delicate shape of the plants, visually more interesting. So to make this picture I went in very close - a bluebell flower is only about 10mm long. One of the problems of shooting in woodland on a sunny day are the bright spots of sunlight that can blow out the highlights in the background, which makes for a messy and distracting, uncontrolled image. Because of this I went out shooting early in the morning, and as a result the bluebells were in shade. I had been hoping to find a shaft of light that would light a few specimens, but I could not find any. So this image was lit by a little pop of fill-in off-camera flash, through a small softbox to give a delicate illumination. I tried different positions of the light and liked this version best with the light coming from below. It gave good definition to the bluebells and seemed to make them glow in a fairy-like manner.

This picture was taken last year on my Panasonic LX3 camera, and is a good example of how high-end compacts have a unique set of attributes that make them a very useful tool in the photographers toolkit. The first important aspect of the picture is the proximity of the lens, which from memory was about 50mm. This, coupled with a wide angle of coverage, makes the subject appear very large, whilst allowing a large view of the background to be captured. It is a completely different perspective from the dedicated macro lenses of larger cameras, and to my mind, a more natural and attractive look. It is the difference of holding something close, or using a magnifying glass. The small sensor and short focal length enable this, and I know of no other way to get such an image in larger formats; m4/3, DX, FX and beyond. It was the primary reason that I bought the camera in the first place.

The other key element used in the picture is the flash. Whilst just about every camera above compact size will have a hotshoe to connect a flash, only a handful of compacts have this feature, and it enables the use of off-camera flash. In addition, the LX3 has the advantage of a leaf shutter. All DSLRs and mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras have focal plane shutters that have a maximum sync speed of 1/250, and usually quite a bit lower. This makes it very hard to balance the flash light to the ambient, unless one has a lot of flash power. The LX3 will effectively sync at all speeds, allowing a high shutter speed to choke off the ambient light as needed. With the LX3, I can use a high shutter speed, a largish aperture and be able to light the subject with a small flashgun through a diffuser. The ambient (background) exposure in this image was f8 at 1/10, ISO100, so I wasn't taking advantage of the high sync speed, but it's a handy capability to have when you do need it. The other benefit of the leaf shutter is lack of vibration. This makes the camera silent when taking pictures but also allows lower shutter speeds to be used without blurring. Coupled with the in-lens image stabilisation it is quite possible to get shake-free images at 1/10s as in this image.

So, a picture that relied on some of the more unique aspects of a high end compact camera that continues to earn its place in my camera bag.

Sometimes You Have To Make It In Monochrome

Droxford Field, 2008

It was interesting to see that Leica have introduced their black and white-only M Monochrom camera last week. Apart from a few specialist cameras back at the dawn of digital, no-one’s produced a monochrome camera for a very long time. By discarding the Bayer filter and colour from the image making process, Leica are promising improved resolution and dynamic range over more conventional cameras. We’ll see. I’m not convinced; modern cameras and software are now so good that I don’t think the advantages will be anything other than theoretical, and owners of the new cameras will have to start using coloured filters over their lenses once again if they wish to manipulate contrast. But that’s not really the point. Leica is playing on its heritage. For many decades the archetypal photojournalist, street shooter and life-as-lived photographer, would shoot Tri-X in their Leica rangefinder. Monochrome and Leica do seem to go together.

It’s a long time since I put black and white film in a camera, and since using digital cameras I’ve always shot my images in colour. In the old days of black and white silver film base photography, one would try to pre-visualise the image in monochrome, and would shoot accordingly. This often meant looking for strong composition and dramatic contrast. If the contrast wasn’t there at the point of exposure then as long as the feature was there, one could bring this up in the darkroom, or as we do now, in post-processing. We learned how to manipulate the image, and we all learned how to look at this sort of manipulation. In monochrome you can push the tonality much harder than you can in colour and still create an acceptable result. Viewers will often call supersaturated colours garish and unreal, but pitch black skies and chalk white fields are acceptable in monochrome. Tonal manipulations in colour portraits will have people saying that image is ‘Photoshopped’, but a similar approach in black and white will usually be met with approval. Putting aside nostalgia & retro styling, some images just work better in monochrome, just like some music is best played as a solo piece and others benefit from using the full orchestra. Knowing when to make the final image in monochrome is the important thing.

These days I commute to work by train (where I write this blog), but when I do take the car I often travel along the country lanes. Although I often see things I’d like to photograph, stopping is impossible on these narrow lanes. However, just above Droxford there is a muddy pull-in area that I sometimes stop at. One February morning the light was particularly wonderful, and I had a strong urge to pull over and see if I could make a picture or two. Ploughed fields are always a magnet for me; I love their well-groomed appearance, their graphic nature. Caught early in the morning or late in the day the low sun accentuates these features. In the picture above there is no single focal point for the image. Instead, the subject of the picture is the interplay of curves between the clouds and the ploughed field, together forming a reflected ‘S’. However, the tonalities of these two elements were quite different, with soft white clouds in pale blue sky, and the sharper, more defined brown soil and dark shadows. Just boosting the contrast in the colour image ends up in ugly colouration. So the trick here was to remove the colour altogether, and to apply quite strong contrast and darkening to the sky. The result was a pleasing image that worked in black and white, but could not be achieved in colour. Sometimes you have to make it monochrome.*

*Apologies to U2; my daughter groaned when she saw the title of this post!

Worth a Look: Colin Summers

© Colin Summers

Last Sunday I had the good fortune to catch up with Arena colleague Colin Summers. It had been over a year since I had last seen Colin at an Arena meeting; he had spent most of the past year with the rebel army recording the fight which would eventually end in the overthrow of Gaddafi’s troops in western Libya. The pictures that he showed us were stunning, emotionally charged images that encapsulated many small fragments of the fierce battle for Tripoli.

© Colin Summers

I first came across Colin’s images in 2007 in an issue of Ag magazine. Colin had gone to Banda Aceh to witness the aftermath of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. These monochrome pictures were, at the same time, both beautiful & horrific. Poignant images of bloated bodies floating in flood pools, personal belongings washed up inland, survivors anxiously searching for news of loved ones. What made these images special were the way in which he dealt with human frailties set against overwhelming natural forces. Shortly after the Ag publication Colin was invited to show his pictures to Arena. We had no hesitation inviting him to join the group, and since then we have seen him rapidly grow to become a ‘conflict’ photographer par excellence.

© Colin Summers

I must admit, before I met him I wondered if there was a touch of ‘disaster tourism’ about his work. However, when one looks at the impressive body of images he has built, and meet Colin in person, you soon find that this most gentle of men wants to tell the story of those less fortunate, more desperate than ourselves. His quiet, unassuming nature helps him to make friends easily and gain access to other’s lives. But a story can only be told if there is an audience. Because the tsunami images were self-funded, Colin found that there was no ready outlet for his picture essay, and the pictures were simply too late to get exposure in newspaper and magazines. But one thing leads to another and since Banda Aceh Colin has taken commissioned assignments for NGOs and charities, such as covering AIDS/HIV in India.

One can only wonder at the anxiety that his family must have felt whilst Colin was away in Libya, so it was a great relief to find that had survived the campaign unscathed. As his images showed, he was never far from death and injury, and the deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros underlined the fact that journalists do not have any special protection in conflicts. For his protection, remaining level headed and not taking undue risks were his main protection, with a helmet and body armour his back-up.

© Colin Summers

In a conflict like the Libyan uprising, one can only get meaningful access to events when ‘embedded’ with one side or the other. One cannot be an interested bystander. In the case of Libya, this meant being with the rebels, who relied on external support for munitions and food supplies. Colin worked alongside the same group in the rebel army, earning their trust, and spending every hour with them, photographing, eating & sleeping. One can only wonder at the privations he went through, sometimes sleeping in caves in the mountains. Certainly no returning to a 4 star hotel at the end of the day.

This closeness of living is what gives his pictures immediacy and impact. You can see the dust and concrete flying around, the rounds of bullets jerking violently as they are drawn into the machine gun. You see the sweat and blood on the skin, eyes wide open with fear or rage. Photographs can’t hope to show the dynamic action of battle, but in the hands of a skilled artist, the still image can give context and layers of information and meaning. This is what Colin does so well. 

© Colin Summers

Colin started the conflict self-funded, and later managed to be a freelancer for AFP, which meant that he had a ready outlet for his images. The conduit for his pictures was the mobile satellite uplink, essential for any journalist or photographer needing to file their stories. He was able to wire a dozen or so of his best pictures each evening, which were then distributed via the agency to the world’s newspapers. His pictures have been widely published, netting him a couple of front page covers.

You might be interested to know what gear Colin takes with him. He told us that his rucksack is full with satellite uplink and battery chargers. And one Nikon D3, a 35mm lens and a 24-70 zoom. That’s it; no spare camera body, no arsenal of expensive large aperture telephotos. Just a simple one camera two lens setup that is reliable and predictable. The short lens means that the only way to capture the action is be up close, and being close makes the images ring with presence. F/8 and be there indeed…

© Colin Summers

Some of the Libya pictures are just sublime, such as this Rembrandt like scene of three weary combatants resting during a lull in the hostilities.

© Colin Summers

 

Or this breathtaking image of a woman in supplication, giving praise for the removal of Gaddafi whilst the menfolk plunder his ransacked home.

© Colin Summers

It is the human element, the struggle of real people, which interests Colin and energises his photography. One question a colleague asked him was "would you put down your camera to help someone who was injured or dying?" “Oh yes, of course” was his reply. As if we needed to ask...

For more of Colin Summer's pictures please visit his website.

Worth A Listen: On a similar theme, you might like to catch up with an interesting programme on BBC Radio4, Life and Death on the Frontline, in which veteran reporter John Simpson examines the pressures and constraints on journalists in modern conflicts.

And Still It Rains

Rain at Micheldever 2012

It is still raining here in Hampshire. But that's not an excuse for not taking pictures...

Numbers Game

 

It seems like only yesterday, but in fact was about two decades ago, I was having a discussion with a work colleague, each showing the other some photos we had recently taken. I guess that I was talking about photography as an expressive art, when he said “Well, photography, it’s all really a numbers game, isn’t it? You know, give a million monkeys a million typewriters and they will come up with the works of Shakespeare. The same with photography, if you take enough pictures you will come up with a few good ones”.

That was in the days when monkeys used typewriters, before the advent of computers and Monkeysoft Word. Today it’s easier than ever to type documents and plays, but I haven’t noticed any new Shakespearian plays.

It was, and still is, a pretty dumb argument. But the ‘numbers game’ opinion is a common one, and one that still rankles with the serious photographer. What about those great photographs by Andre Kertesz? He said “I only ever take one or two pictures; I know when I have the picture”. Or those classic once-in-a-lifetime, decisive moment pictures by Cartier-Bresson and all the other great street photographers. Or any great picture by any great photographer – they all show an attentive, discerning, deliberate eye, married to good technique.

But over the years, it has become clear to me that photography is indeed, a ‘Numbers Game’. Not in the ‘fire-away-at-random-and-something-good-will-happen’ way (it doesn’t happen), but in the ‘practice-makes-perfect’ way. Just like any other activity involving hand, eye and brain coordination, taking pictures requires lots of practice. It’s like playing tennis.  Once you are on court, you don’t know how the game will develop. But if you’ve put the practice in, you can react by getting into the right position, getting your timing right, developing the rally and hopefully winning the point. Just occasionally you will hit a return that is so perfect you will surprise even yourself. The same is true of any sport, playing an instrument, or any art or craft. You just won’t get there without putting in the practice. Kertesz may have only been taking one or two pictures of any subject, but he was still taking an awful lot of pictures compared to the common man. It’s just that he was hitting an ace every other shot! Others have used a sporting analogy; Lee Friedlander has said that taking a picture is “a bit like being thrown a basketball, you have to decide what you are going to do with it”.

The more you practice (and try to get it right) the better you get. After playing a hole in one, the great golfer Arnold Palmer was asked “How do you get to be so lucky?” “It seems the more I practice, the luckier I get” was his reply.

Cartier-Bresson would shoot off a couple of rolls of film before breakfast just to keep his eye in. Likewise, Bill Jay tells of how Josef Koudelka would shoot at least three rolls of film on the days when he wasn’t taking pictures. And is there a photographer more prolific than Gary Winogrand? He would regularly go down to Times Square in New York and shoot off several rolls of film every afternoon. When he died in 1984, it is estimated that he left behind 300000 unedited images and 2500 rolls of undeveloped film! Were these images all classics? Certainly not, but they would all be better than the very best a monkey could have achieved.

These masters, of course, spent all their time taking pictures, and the cost of film, developing and printing was not something to concern them. For us mortals with mortgages to pay and jobs to hold down we could never afford to work that way. Twenty years on from that original conversation, times have changed and photography is now literally a numbers game, with digital being the predominant technology for our art. After the initial outlay, we can take as many pictures as we like without incurring cost, allowing us to practice and experiment in way that was never available in the past. The benefit of quickly reviewing our work on the LCD screen seems so obvious that it makes one wonder how we ever managed before.

I’m still coming to terms with working using a DSLR. For the first time, I have a camera that I can use to make pictures as quickly and as often as I wish, without worrying about the cost and the volume of negatives, transparencies and prints that would result. This is making me examine the ideas I have, try for new ones, experiment with more challenging viewpoints and compositions, and explore different exposures.

With digital, it seems that the hit rate, compared to film, goes down. This, of course, is the price of experimentation; experiment more and you will waste a lot more frames, but ultimately you will discover something fresh and interesting. But what would you call a good hit rate? It depends on how critical you are of your own work. Ansel Adams thought it a particularly good year if he managed to get four really good pictures in that year. Adams was a keen judge of his work and from the plethora of mediocre images on photo websites it would appear that few have this skill today. For the past twenty years or so I’ve exhibited my work, generally in small low-key venues. Even for a small grouping of, say, eight pictures it is incredibly difficult to get a fresh set of pictures that can work together and stand up individually.

There are times when I seem to go through periods of photographers block – like writers block, but with (no) pictures. I can’t seem to see the image in front of me and I loose the imagination to dream what I might achieve. This always occurs during a period of low activity, and I lose my sharpness. The only way out of this malaise for me is to shoot my way out. 

The past few months have been like this for me, but I’ve plugged away, trying to get the basics right on the mundane records I’ve been taking. Last night, as I drove home from work, I pulled up on a country lane struck by the lowering clouds and a field of corn. I tried a few ideas out, the pictures started to get better. Working on a few different subjects, it all felt good. Later that evening, I printed out some of the best images. These were the first images I had been excited about for ages. Good enough for the portfolio? I’m not sure yet, but they were pretty good - at least, they were pretty good for a monkey.

This article first appeared on the Arena website in July 2007

The Misery of Printing

I’ve always believed that a photo is not really a photo until it is printed. It’s all very well to see it full-screen on your monitor, but even the best displays cannot begin to show the detail and smooth tonality that modern cameras can achieve. Large prints just have a presence that has to been seen to be appreciated. They give you time to study and appreciate the picture, in detail and as a whole, and are the most interesting and most practical way to discuss work with peers. 

My personal age of digital photography started with the printing, and not the cameras, just after the turn of the century. When I first started out in photography, like everyone else, I sent my negatives away to be processed and printed. Throughout the eighties and the first half of the nineties, I worked in 35mm monochrome, processing my films and printing in my home darkroom. With the arrival of our first child the darkroom made way for my daughter’s bedroom, and my ‘art’ photography was put on the back burner. For a few years virtually all my photos were shot on colour negative film and processed at one of the mail-order labs. 

Peeling Bark, 2011

 

Then in 2000, I needed a new A3 colour printer to replace one that I was using for my self-employed consultancy. By this time printers had rapidly evolved to give photo-quality output. It is always easier to stump up the cash for gear if it can be used for business, and before long I had the means to print my own images. The printer I chose was the Epson 1270 colour printer that used dye inks. The printer also came with a cut-down version of Photoshop, and I already had a PC with a high spec (for those days) so I was almost ready to go. The first films were scanned by a local photo processor, but within a few months I bit the bullet and bought myself a Nikon Coolsan IV and I was up and running. It was just amazing to create your own prints that could be tweaked to taste and printed as large (well, 13”X19”) or as small as you wanted, on demand, in the light, with no smells from chemicals. The quality was good too; the scanner gave 11Mp images which meant no pixellation in the finished prints. 

There were a couple of problems though that had yet to be sorted. It was really difficult to achieve a true black-and-white print without an unintentional colour cast, and the prints were prone to fading. Most of the ink and paper combinations at that time could fade in several months. I settled on Espon’s Colorlife paper that did better than most, but prints from that era have now faded horribly, now showing ugly green shadows and magenta highlight. Back then I still wanted to produce black and white images. Looking back I don’t know why; I’ve worked almost exclusively in colour since I got my first digital camera in 2004. But I guess old habits die hard and I wanted to reproduce some 20 years worth of monochrome images. So to kill two birds with one stone, I ‘invested’ in an Epson 1160 and fitted it out with a set of special monochrome inks imported from the US by Permajet. And that’s when the misery of printing started to set in. For some time now there have a been a wide range of art papers available for inkjet printing, and combined with these inks I could achieve nice, really nice, prints. The papers usually had a matt finish, but had a very clean white. The inks were carbon pigments with very subtle colouration, which meant that when used correctly one could achieve cold tone, neutral or warm tone prints, with very dark blacks. When the printing went well, the prints looked utterly gorgeous; deep detailed shadows and bright, clean highlights. 

Bretignolles Beach

Unfortunately, you had to use the 1160 every few days or else the ink would dry in the print heads and block up. Quite often the cleaning cycle could take half an hour or so, and the printer might have ink deposits that would smudge onto the next several prints. After I while, I gave up with the pigment inks and switched over to Lyson dye-based monochrome inks. These worked better, but were still prone to head blockages. I then had a couple of breakdowns on the printers. I dropped the 1160 and damaged the power socket, and the 1270 jammed when printing on canvas due to paper curl. I had two dead machines, both of which were uneconomic to repair. More misery.

If I wanted to carry on printing I would need a new printer, so once more I stumped up for another Epson printer, the R2400. By now (about 2005), printers had evolved some way, and the R2400 was able to give cast-less monochrome and colour prints that would last up to 200 years without fading. Only another 193 years to go to see if they are right! And for a good while, this printer gave me good service, and has produced some lovely prints. I was working with a colour-calibrated workflow, from camera to monitor to printer, and was getting good results. This came, however, at a price, and the price is well over £100 for a set of eight inks. The ink cartridges have a really tiny capacity, and usually during a print session I would need to replace at least one ink cartridges. I would estimate that it costs me about £2.50 to £3.00 per A3 print, with another £1.50 to £2.00 for the paper. I like to print large, because my prints are either for exhibition or for display and discussion at our Arena meetings. At up £5.00 a print this is bad enough, but this is the minimum price only if you can make a print without any wastage.

What Spider?

Over the past few years the printer has become increasingly less reliable. The first problem has been the colour accuracy of the printer. With the same inks, paper, & profiles I can no longer match the colour on screen. I probably need to get the printer recalibrated, but how often will I need to do this? Making test prints is tedious and time consuming. The second problem has been the time-outs, the incomplete prints where the printer & PC suddenly stop talking to each other. I’ve had this problem on other printers and devices and fixed them, but it has proven impossible on the R2400. It has been so bad on some print sessions that 50% of my prints stopped half-way through, making the cost per print move up towards £10 per print.

I got to the point where I was not sure what to do next. I really could not afford to buy another printer, and I don’t think anything available today would be markedly different. I didn’t want to use 3^rd party inks because of potential incompatibilities. It was my Arena colleague Dave Mason who commented that he too had given up on using a desktop printer, and that he now was getting his prints made online for a fraction of the true cost of an inkjet print. He showed me some recent prints of Egypt that he brought along with him. I was amazed by how good these prints from digital files looked – every bit as good as a quality inkjet, with good colour, detail and tonality. He used DS Colour Labs, and since that day I’ve used them too, and I’m really pleased with quality and the service I get. There’s clearly been a revolution in online printing technology that I had missed.

Dandelion and Grasshopper, 2011

These days, when I’m spending an evening working on my pictures I will edit them in Lightroom (much faster than using Photoshop), and then batch process the images into JPEGS, ready for upload. I’ll then log on to the DSCL website, and do a batch upload. Whilst the images are uploading I’ll go and spend time with the family, or have a beer, or have a bath or anything else I fancy. It’s much more relaxing than sitting by the printer waiting for it to go wrong! The prints are printed the next day, and arrive at my door in the post the day after that. The 18”X12” prints on Fuji Crystal Archive that I order from DSCL provide cost £1.25 each, so about 25% of the cost of my home-grown inkjet prints. The Crystal Archive prints meet most of my needs. However, if I want to produce an exhibition print for sale it costs only £3.75 for the Fuji Pearl Ceramic paper, which looks spectacular and is ideal for special prints.

Dewey Grass, 2011

 So for me, printing has gone full circle twice now, and I am back to sending my pictures away to be printed. Unless a new technology comes along that makes home printing substantially cheaper and more reliable, I can’t see this changing for some time yet.

Mousehole Geometry

Mousehole Geometry - Stripe

A couple of months ago we had a short holiday in Cornwall; I’ve already posted some images from Sennen beach that I took during that visit. The weather during our break was not much different to that which we have now; squally and quite grey. It was on such a day tour that we visited the pretty little fishing village of Mousehole. 

Mousehole Geometry - Angles

Our previous exposure to Mousehole came from reading the charming Mousehole Cat story to our children when they were younger; of how a brave fisherman braved weeks of storms to bring in a catch in for the hungry villagers whilst his loyal cat imagines fighting with the storm cat that threatens his master.

Mousehole Geometry - Square

Mousehole was every bit as attractive as we had been told, and we spent several happy hours pottering around the village and its port. However, with mainly grey skies overhead the best pictures I got on this visit were a series of geometrical abstracts, all taken within a few hundred yards of each other around the sea defences.

Mousehole Geometry - Ring

Longstock Water Garden

I have to admit that I’ve got a soft spot for John Lewis. Their focus on good customer service all seems to stem from the fact that they are one of those rare breeds of business, a partnership, run by and for its employees. So instead of focussing their energies in feared panic of institutional stockholders, their priorities seem to be on doing the right thing for the business and their relationship with their customers.

One of its non-core business activities is the Leckford Estate in the Test Valley, where it runs a farm that grows produce for it Waitrose food stores. Part of the estate is run for leisure facilities for its staff, and one part of this is the rather lovely Longstock Park Water Garden, which is opened up to the public twice every month during the spring and summer. These charity-run open days give us an opportunity to wander around this beautifully maintained and well stocked garden.

I visited there last Sunday with my family, and we spent a happy hour or two wandering around the place, looking at all the flowers and plants coming into bud. I’m no gardener, so I can’t tell you what is planted there, but it is all very carefully maintained and manicured. It's a very relaxed and calm place, with lots of water, lots of tall trees and lots of little islands to stroll around. There's no visitor centre, no cafe, no amusement park. Just the way it should be.

My daughter and I took a path less travelled and ended up by the compost heap. Even that was a visual feast, with red and yellow dogwood cuttings making a colourful pile.Well worth a visit if you are down in this 'neck of the woods'.

'Got Those Rainy Day Blues

Rainy Tree, 2005

It's been wet, windy and cold today, with the prospect of more to come over the next week. Where did the Spring weather go?

Worth a Look: Roy Mehta

Whenever I feel in need of inspiration, whenever I tire of the pictures I see in magazines or on the web, I invariably head over to Roy Mehta’s website to revisit his wonderful images. It must be almost 10 years since I first came across his work on the now largely dormant Fotonet-South website, around about the time he had completed his ‘Coastline’ series. A slim hardback book was published to accompany the exhibition. It's print run had sold out when I tried to purchase it, but I was fortunate enough to find a good copy at Abebooks.

© Roy Mehta

His work is always focussed on the personal, either in the form of calm, relaxed portraits, or in elegant observations of personal effects. He also produces beautiful pictures of nature, landscape and flowers, which too are very personal. The landscapes are of cultivated land, farmland and gardens; details of flowers and poppies are taken in these environments too.

© Roy Mehta

He concentrates on details, and through the use of close, low viewpoints, concentrates our gaze on these features whilst placing them against the wider background. Shallow depth of field too is used to draw the viewers attention to the detail and at the same reduce the clutter of the background.

© Roy Mehta

Some of his images are very sensuous. In this languid picture of a young woman on a beach you can almost feel the freshness of damp sand on the feet and legs, and the grittiness of the sand on her toes. You can feel the pleasure of being on the beach in the towards the end of the day.

© Roy Mehta

Mehta’s portraits are often shot on location, and often as double portraits. Fill-in flash is use to more clearly depict the face. The portraits show empathy between the photographer and his subjects; they look relaxed, the camera held close to eye-level.

© Roy Mehta

Mehta’s skill in mixed lighting carries over to his unpeopled photos. In this seemingly simple photograph, a discarded cigarette is energised by a small pop of a strobe, the wands of smoke alive when backlit. The intensity of the green in the grass and the purple of the sky suggest that Mehta has filtered the camera and gelled the flash to get this colour combination. 

© Roy Mehta

In this picture a falling leaf, like the smoke in the photo above, achieves a state of suspended animation through the use of fill in flash, whilst at the same time highlighting the yellow-brown leaves against the cold winter blue of the forest and sky.

© Roy Mehta

  Roy's photographs have been widely used commercially, for advertising, magazine journalism and for a wide variety of book cover. I'm sure you will enjoy seeing more of his work on his website, which he regulary updates with fresh, new, exciting work.

Spring Trees, Farley Mount

We are blessed, in the city of Winchester, in living in a small and attractive city, which is surrounded by lovely countryside that is quick and easy to access. To the west of the city is an area of mixed woods and farmland known as Farley Mount. On previous springtime visits I had noticed the blossom on a line of trees edging a field and making a boundary with the road on the other side. Last year I was keen to revisit this area and make a joiner of this line of trees, and see what I could do with the field, which is always in productive use and often has appealing tractor tyre marks crossing it.



Spring Trees, Farley Mount, 2011

 
It was a glorious morning when I arrived to park up the car, having just helped with the school run. As mentioned earlier in an earlier post, I had been ill most of last winter but now I was feeling much better – revitalized in fact. The sun was warm on my neck and the air was so clear and fresh you could drink it. I felt euphoric; a couple of weeks earlier I had been barely able to walk, and now most of my strength and energy had returned.

One of the appealing aspects of working with joiners is that you can construct a picture that is part actual and part imagined landscape. I knew I wanted to present the trees in a line on the horizon. This meant walking alongside them and shooting in pairs, using a wide angle setting on the lens, before moving onto the next. I spent a good hour making this picture. I walked in several lines, first photographing the trees, then the field at increasingly steeper angles and increased focal length. The day was blessed with a sky brushed by feathery bands of high cirrus cloud. Rather than shoot these as straight lines I decided that I wanted to construct a sky built from triumphal arches of cloud, so I shot several bands of cloud incrementally rotating the camera between each shot to build the ‘arcs-en-ciel’. 

In all, it took me about an hour to shoot all the material for the joiner. I drove home feeling very satisfied that at long last, I was getting back to doing the things I love. 

April Showers and Spring Sunshine

April Showers - Sapling

I’ve been enjoying a few days off in this Easter week, catching up on some home jobs and some rest.  The weather has been a more extreme version of typical April, bright sunshine and showers, but coming in the form of beautiful clear skies in the morning and torrential downpours in the afternoon.

April Showers - Metal Cloud

Today was more extreme than the preceding days; cool blue clear skies this morning and thunderstorms with hail in the afternoon, capped off with low golden sunshine punching under dark clouds in the evening.

April Showers - Train in the Rain

I happened to be out both this morning and this evening running errands, and so there good opportunities to break my journeys and take advantage of the different light throughout the day. The pictures taken in the rain were difficult to take. Despite hiding under my Storm Umbrella, the rainfall was so fierce that I could only make them in a quick dash.

April Showers - During the Rain

By the evening the storms had run their course, the winds abated and the sun came out for a final burst of glory. Time to go out into garden and check the damage, which fortunately was only a small amount of leaf fall.

April Showers - Evening Light

Plastic Bottles

Over the past couple of decades, the plastic water bottle has become ubiquitous, available in any shop, and often littering the streets when emptied. There was a time when one would use a flask, or simply drink before going out. Bottled water then seemed a frivolous luxury. After all, British water was the cleanest in the world, we were told. These days, it seems a badge of honour to walk around with a bottle of mineral water, or failing that, a small bucket of coffee.

 

 

Whilst down at the allotments the other day, I took a picture of plastic bottles on top of some rusty poles. This is a device that keen gardeners use to cast protective nets over their delicate crops to protect them, usually from birds with a net, but sometimes from the frost with a thin fleece blanket. The bottles, as I’m sure you can see, stop the poles from poking through the mesh. The transparency of the bottles appealed to me, especially with the nearest bottle in focus and the other progressively out of focus.

Late last autumn I was walking alongside a stream in St Cross. It was one of those wonderfully clear bright November days with a strong low sun and deep blue skies. It was also unusually warm. On the other side of the stream were the local allotments, and I could see something rather wonderful going on in one of the plots. Up on poles, instead of water bottles, were plastic milk containers. Being translucent rather than transparent, they seemed to glow with more light than the sun was giving them. They were almost phosphorescent. The owner of this plot had used them in profusion, all at different jaunty angles, and they looked alive as if they were spirits of horticulture. The mesh cast upon them looked like a mist. I quickly made my way around to the plot and then took my time making photographs and making the most of this opportunity before the nearby buildings eclipsed the sun.

This sort of event is one of the reasons why photography can be so rewarding. I would never set out to make pictures of plastic bottles. But with the right light and a receptive frame of mind, one can discover scenes that are far more exciting than can be imagined.

Easter Egg Hunt

 

Easter Egg Hunt #1

In our family, there is one tradition that has survived the transition from childhood to teenage years. The children know who Father Christmas is, the Tooth Fairy “don’t come ‘round here no more” and we never really got into Halloween.  But one thing we all love doing is our own custom of the Easter Egg Hunt in our local woods.

Easter Egg Hunt #2

When the children were small we would spend many happy hours scampering around in the shade of ancient beech trees, secreting eggs that weren’t too difficult too find or reach. After a while all the found eggs would be pooled and then shared equally. The number was always less than we had hidden, with some being inevitably lost and others (rarely) would be eaten by hungry little treasure seekers. Later, the children would then hide the eggs for us, which would be either ridiculously easy to find, or impossible if buried in a bank of leaves.

Easter Egg Hunt #3

These days the kids are much better at finding the eggs, and much better at hiding them. It is still a lovely way to spend an Easter afternoon, to have a stroll in the woods, and to spend time playing together as a family.

The Arrival of Spring - Crabwood

Sometimes, occasionally, things happen that suggest that I might be getting some things right.

As noted in this week’s earlier post, I took my family to see Hockney’s A Bigger Picture last week. When I asked my son what he would like to do on Sunday, his first response was that he would like to go for an early walk to the woods. “I’ve seen it in pictures and now I want to see it for real” he explained. So with a spring in my step and a song in my heart, we went for a walk in glorious spring sunshine early on Sunday morning to the attractive nature reserve at Crabwood, a couple of miles from home.

It's still the early days of spring. I'm looking forward to more shared explorations.

A Bigger Photo

Oak at Wormingford © Noel Myles

As day two in an indulgent long weekend enjoying art, this Saturday just gone I visited the opening of Noel Myles exhibition at the Gainsborough house in Sudbury, deep in rural Suffolk.

I had first seen Noel’s impressive work featured on a couple of occasions in the much missed Ag journal. Noel works on photographic collages or joiners, and picked up the joiner baton where Hockney dropped it, expanding the range and scope of what joiners can do, as well as bringing other photographic methods into the process. His work is primarily centred on the landscape and the natural world, and his most popular images are of gnarly old oaks that have been photographed over many seasons and from many viewpoints.

Still Film of an Oak, second version © Noel Myles

I got to know him well last year in the preparation of his talk at the 2011 Arena Seminar where he discussed his work and his evolution as an artist. I was keen to see Noels pictures up close. Apart from a treasured print that he gave me as a gift last year, I had only ever seen his work reproduced in magazines or projected digitally. It was a seven hour roundtrip by train to see these pictures, but it was well worth the effort because his pictures are visually stimulating and beautifully crafted. It is a splendid exhibition. 

Sea Wall © Noel Myles

There are examples of many of his groups of pictures, from exquisite platinum & palladium prints, to the mixed palladium/colour prints of oaks, to full colour composites of woodlands near his home in Sudbury. These were strikingly beautiful. Often taken in winter or autumn, these images displayed a rich palette of colours and textures, from blues and purples of frosted leaves in shadow, through silvery reflections of tree silhouettes on water, to bright red leaves contrasted against deep blue skies.

A Short Film of December © Noel Myles

Also of note were the recent Fenland marshes and coast made this past autumn. Quiet, reflective pools in a patchwork of heather and grasses are set against dark brooding skies. These images are both beautiful and sombre.

Autumn Wetlands © Noel Myles

Noel says that he works by photographing in profusion small details that interest him, and then composing and assembling the image in the studio, taking many hundreds or even thousands of photos,  eventually whittling them down to a couple of hundred constituent frames that make up the overall image. These days, all of his images conform to a rectangular grid, but he has previously experimented with free placement of images.

Three Trees © Noel Myles

By normal photographic standards, these images are quite large, despite many being made up from contact prints of 35mm or 645 medium format. The largest images were over 1m in their longest dimension, and feel big and impressive. Not size for size’s sake as you often find in the big photo exhibitions in London, but a natural, organic size. Oaks from many acorns if you will. His latest pictures have been shot digitally, but he still does the compositing from enprints. When the final layout is complete, he then reassembles the composition digitally in Photoshop.

Noel Myles

It is dangerous, but somewhat inevitable, to compare Noel Myles’ still films with David Hockney’s joiners from the 1980s. I would say that Hockney’s joiners were ground breaking, cutting edge back then. As physical artefacts, they are beginning to look dated. In contrast, Noel Myles images seem very fresh and of the moment. Most of his work looks both timeless and modern. It seems a great shame that his work is not more widely known, either in the photographic community or in the larger art world. One day, I hope that it will become more widely recognised. I suggest strongly that you take a day out to Suffolk and have a look for yourself.

Noel Myles: East Anglia and the Stour Valley, is on show at Gainsborough’s House, 31 March – 23 June 2012 www.gainsborough.org . For more of Noel's images please visit www.noelmyles.co.uk .

A Bigger Picture

This Friday just gone, after many months of waiting, I finally got to take the family up to the Royal Academy in London to see David Hockney’s mega-exhibition ‘A Bigger Picture’. I say finally, because despite having known about the exhibition way back last year, it was only in mid-January that everyone in my family could agree that they wanted to come, and by then the earliest we could book tickets was for the end of March. Such is the popularity of the man and his art.

Let me start by saying that this is a hugely enjoyable exhibition, and most people in the RA were having a good time and enjoying themselves. The galleries were very full of visitors, but not overcrowded, and you could easily get a good view of the pictures you wanted to see. The images were presented in a wide smorgasbord of media; oils, watercolours, charcoals, photos, iPad images (printed & actual iPads) and multipanel HD video screens.

I’m a big fan of Hockney’s work, especially his landscape and joiner images, so this show was a real treat for me. I love the bold shapes and graphic simplicity of his landscapes, the swooping hills and the animated trees. But it’s the colour that hits you most. On some painting the colours are so intense, so bright that you can find it hard to believe that anyone could dare to use them. For instance, in the first gallery of early landscapes, A Closer Grand Canyon has the most amazing, supersaturated oranges and yellows that can hardly be said to be realistic. But that intensity of colour does evoke the glorious sunsets, the scorching heat, the amazing space of the real Grand Canyon.

 Just behind The Bigger Canyon were three of Hockney’s joiners – two of Grand Canyon and a less often seen or reproduced version of Pearblossom Highway. It was great to see these collages, especially Pearblossom which is a landmark image for me. But I have to admit to a little bit of disappointment. Maybe I should have worn sunglasses when looking at A Bigger Canyon, but these photocollages were dimly lit, and the colours seemed to be fading. Indeed, reproductions of Pearblossom on sale in the RCA shop seemed to have better saturation. 

After this historical scene-setting you then enter the many halls of Hockney’s modern Yorkshire pictures, which are wonderful, fresh and vital. It is thrilling to see a man in his seventies working with such energy and enthusiasm. There is hope for us all cometh the day! Again, there are the signature bold, deft brush marks and that amazing use of colour, from the brightest oils to more gentle watercolours, is always keenly observed, and used to intensify the visual experience.

Hockney has chosen several key locations for his work, and has returned time and again to make images in all seasons. There the Thixendale Trees that greet you as you enter the exhibition, the Woods at Woldgate, a tree lined track christened by Hockney as ‘The Tunnel’. All of these are captured in different lights in different seasons, and all the time there is this wonderful visual sensation of being there, sensing the light and the enjoyment Hockney got from looking at the scene.

 

The culmination of the exhibition is the Arrival of Spring, Woldgate 2011; a room full of large scale iPad reproductions running in chronological order from the New Year to, well, the Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, which is delivered in a huge, glorious and vivacious, multi-panel oil painting.

 

Almost as an adjunct to the exhibition, as if he had done an experiment and thought ‘you have got to see this’, is a large room with one wall covered in a six wide, three deep array of large HD videoscreens. Hockney has been strapping 3X3, and then 3X6 cameras to the side or front of his jeep and driving down country lanes at slow speed to film the location. Each camera is given a slightly different viewpoint and focal point. As with his photo joiners, there are overlaps and some duplication. But they are synced together perfectly time-wise. I had seen some of these images reproduced in books, and frankly was sceptical. It seems to me that 3X3 is too coarse for a still joiner to work. But the sensation as a video image was a revelation. These short sequences looked amazingly three dimensional. Leaves and branches rendered out of focus on one panel would pass onto the next panel sharply resolved. I can’t see this approach being adopted by film or television producers, but it was a captivating visual experience. Interestingly, this sensation evaporated if you were to cover one eye. Sight and perception is an interesting and complex area, and as ever, Hockney is at the forefront of exploring this subject from an artistic viewpoint.

We spent an hour and a half taking in the whole exhibition. Our feet and legs were tired from all the shuffling around, but we all enjoyed ourselves. For me, the highlight of the show was having the company of my 11 year old son all the way around, discussing the works and listening to him thrill to the pictures. Because if art is to be anything, it is about the communication of ideas and feelings, and David Hockney had achieved that. Forget about the pompous, pretentious stuff that masquerades as art these days and is more an intellectual joke than anything else. This is art that we can all make an effort to understand, we can all feel, and everyone can enjoy.

Mad March Hares

A few more pictures from the weekend. I think the speed sign is a warning. March is an incredibly busy month for many reasons, and I’m looking forward to getting the next couple of days out of the way so that I can slow down to walking pace. At the moment I'm rushing around like a Mad March Hare.

Arrival of Spring

Spring arrived suddenly this past week. All at once, warm weather, bright sunshine and light evenings appeared all at the same time and it feels quite intoxicating. It’s a bit like the shock you can get travelling to southern France in the early months of the year, noticing the signs of growth and feeling the sun on the back of your neck.

With weather this nice I headed around to our local allotments as I had promised myself a few weeks ago. The warm weather meant that all the trees and bushes were just showing the first signs of leaf and blossom, but the only produce visible above ground were rather tired winter vegetables. But there is always plenty to see, and many of the fixtures, supports and nettings made for some interesting pictures. I love finding old rakes, spades, forks & other implements in these places. They have a lovely patina of rust, sun-bleaching and wear that speaks of years of hard use. Very wabi-sabi, to use the Japanese term.

One of the main reasons I recently moved over to using a mirrorless camera was because I wanted to use shallow depth of field at close distances. It became clear to me last year that my DSLR was not capable of focussing accurately when using my standard lens wide open at close distances, and that this was a problem inherent to all cameras of this type that use a dedicated focus sensor. The beauty of mirrorless cameras is that the focus and exposure data is taken directly from the image sensor, thus guaranteeing accurate focus.

When I bought the G3 I also purchased the Lumix 20mm/f1.7 lens specifically to take full aperture, close-up detail pictures. This weekend’s pictures were the first where I really started to explore the capabilities of the camera and the lens. The lens is very sharp, even wide open, and the camera allows accurate focus wherever I choose in the image – no more focus and recompose. But best of all, the wide aperture allows great control over the de-emphasis of the background. It’s a very powerful creative tool, and one that I will use quite a lot, I suspect.

One Year Ago Today

Feather, Spring 2011

One year ago today I was off work with an illness that was both undiagnosed and untreated. I had by then been off work for more than two months in some considerable pain. But the weather was beautiful and spring-like, so I dragged myself out of the house up to Cheesefoot Head to take advantage of the sunshine and the warmth. It was good, the sunshine and warmth were what I needed.  I was not going to be walking far that day, so my focus was on small details, especially those that hinted at the arrival of spring. 

Until the arrival of the G3, my small LX3 compact was always my camera of choice. The most remarkable aspect of this jewel of a machine is its wonderful lens that focuses right down to almost nothing. Because it does this at the wide end of the zoom range, it can create powerful images of very small details set in context against a background environment. It was the main reason why I bought the camera in the first place, and is why I won’t buy a macro lens for the G3. I’m not interested in isolating details as one does in conventional macro photography; I want to show the subject in context. 

When you start photographing very small details like the feather, it forces you to look long and hard at almost everything, and pictures can be plucked from seemingly unlikely places. Feathers act as useful metaphors for me. They suggest delicacy, fragility and impermanence. Easily blown away by forces that they cannot resist, they can intimate vulnerability and insecurity. Which is how I was feeling at the time, and why I felt drawn to make a picture of this tiny feather.