WORLDS BEST PHOTOGRAPHERS No 5 - JANE BOWN

Are YOU in for a treat. If you’ve not seen this lady’s work before, these are some of the best portrait pictures you will find anywhere.

Jane Bown worked for “The Observer” newspaper in England for 60 years, and currently an Exhibition of her life’s work is being shown in London. 100 of her pictures of the Great and the Good, and perhaps some of the Not so Good since 1949 are on display.

She is a very self effacing photographer and it is quite likely you will never have heard of her. That’s one reason why she takes such excellent pictures. With people like Annie Liebovich, it's hard to avoid the thought that the image is more about the person behind the camera, than the one in front of the lens. This lady is very different.

Portrait photography is not easy at all. First, even if you know the person well, you have to get that person to sit for you - we do know who we're talking to here, don’t we, by the way? Actually, before that, you have to have an idea of what that person is like, so you know what it is about the person in the portrait, you’re trying to bring out.

Getting people to relax, and “be themselves” sounds all to simple. It isn’t. A few people can do it, most can’t. Even when you know the person well, picking up and pointing a camera at someone brings up the shutters (no pun intended), and the “interview” face comes on, with the person you really want to photograph disappearing.

Photographing celebrities is different. They are used to being photographed, many even welcome it, so that bit is not the problem. The problem is photographing the real person, not the image that the person wants to be seen by the camera. The reality is that we have no idea what someone like Richard Nixon or Marilyn Monroe was actually like. We rely on their own writings, the writings of others, pictures, conversations and snippets from their friends and enemies and those who just “knew them” to flesh out the view of that person in our minds. Always, the distortions which these Third Parties, intentionally or unintentionally, overlay on the reality give us a picture which can only be an interpretation. It takes a special person to begin to slide behind the mask.

This applies to all portrait photography. Everyone, especially the person with their hand on the shutter button, has an angle, a view and an opinion - it's inescapable. The degree to which you’re looking at the real person, or the photographer’s spin on the individual in front of the lens is impossible to deduce. In the end, I believe in the end it’s a simple matter of belief, if you don't actually know the person in the image - if you think it’s the person, then it is.

Jane Bown’s style was to work very quickly, capture the immediate essence of the person in front of the lens, and disappear. There’s a very revealing short video of a Channel 4 interview - http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1184614595?bctid=45769473001 - with her a few days ago, explaining how she took her pictures. Certainly, early in her life, she often had little idea who the people the “Observer” sent her to photograph actually were. Even later on, in the Nineties it was “Who’s Jarvis Cocker?”, which may not have pleased him too much, but at least it meant the guy got treated as much like a normal person as possible. Perhaps that’s why there’s an overwhelming sense of naturalness about her pictures which is so refreshing.

A few words from the interview tell us a lot, when the interviewer asks her about her approach to the subject -

Bown - "Light .... Get you in a good light, so that I can see your eyes ... Pause ... Look into them ... long pause .... And that's it really."

Interviewer - "The eyes are the most important bit ..."

Bown - "That's all .... Eye to Eye ..."

Here’s another link - The Complete Jane Bown, A Lifetime in Photographs – just click on the Gallery tab - which takes you to a slideshow of the 100 images in her Exhibition. I think it’s a remarkable achievement, and shows her to be at the very top of the pile of Portrait photographers in the last 50 years.

A few of these are shown below.

JOHN LENNON

RICHARD HARRIS

MY NAME'S HARRY PALMER - MICHAEL CAINE

BJORK

She is in a wheelchair and has stopped taking pictures now, but when I look at her body of work, she made a unique record of her times, of the Good and the Bad, the Beautiful and the Not so Beautiful – in immediate and fresh Black and White images which will stay in the mind for a very long time.

What a legacy.

Tags:jane bown,
photography

STILLS PHOTOGRAPHY - ON THE MOVE?

This post is going to have a ripple of photographic geekyness flowing through it, so for the unbelievers among you, you have been warned.

I’ve been a keen photographer for much of my adult life (yes, that’s getting on for nearly 5 years, my wife has just pointed out). As with most interests, the one thing you collect as you ply your trade, is Equipment. Drawers full of the stuff. So you go out with your camera for a day looking like Quasimodo suffering from a slipped disc. Camera, lenses, tripods, filters, flashguns, film et-bloody-cetera.

Only you don’t go out with it all because, all up, it’s just too heavy and bulky. So you leave a couple of lenses behind. And which lenses do you find you need when you get snapping. You’ve got it – the ones sitting on the desk at home.

Being, supposedly, someone in the top 1% of the country’s intelligentsia, it only took me until about a year ago to realize the barking stupidity of all this. So I called for a serious, long term, fundamental strategic review with myself. And, as a result, out went three cameras, five lenses, the back-pack and a huge pile of associated photographic crap. A new regime of Camera-lite overtook the Cable household. If I can’t carry it all in one hand, it’s history.

Luckily, technology had got there at the same time when I did all this, and 1 new Nikon D300 camera, and a couple of light, versatile lenses, and a small bag I can throw over my shoulder later, my equipment portfolio has been totally transformed. And the result - I take a lot more pictures now because the camera is with me more often. And because the stuff I’ve now got is appropriate to what I want to take, the resultant pictures I take are way better than before.

A guy called Michael Reichmann, who writes a truly excellent website - The Luminous Landscape - puts it perfectly. “Most cameras are better than most photographers”. But you have to have them with you. So, once again, size is important (my dear wife also had something to say here), and at least, I’m a bit ahead of the game.

The one area where camera technology still leaves me wanting is the really pocket sized machine, the one you can ALWAYS have with you. I bought the best one I could find a couple of years ago, but I still couldn’t get on with it. It was OK, but I wanted more than OK. So that’s been sold as well.

Two photographic blogs today report developments which I think could lead to a seismic shift in The Art of Smallness. Up until now, you could have Small, but not Very Good, or you could have Large and Good. But not both. The Small and Good mix didn’t exist. But Canon have just brought out a new camera, the G10, which Michael Reichmann has just put through a few of its paces. He sat it alongside a Hassleblad H2 with a Phase One P45 Back (39 Megapixels and $40,000!) and took the same picture with both machines. He then printed both sets of images at a size of 13” x 19” and showed them to a dozen of his professional photographic colleagues, asking them to guess which camera had taken which picture. 60% of them got it right – and 50% would be the pure guess figure. So, what does that tell you? And anyway, how often do you produce a 13” x 19” print?

Now the Canon fits in my pocket, whereas I would need a manservant to carry the Hassleblad around for me. And if I had just shelled out the $40k to buy it, I then couldn’t afford the manservant. Just for comparison, the Canon’s list price is $499.99. That’s like putting a Veyron up against a Golf.

For yours truly at least, I don’t think the next move is very difficult.

On the same day, on another (extremely good) website - The Online Photographer – there is the first review of a brand new type of camera – the Micro Four Thirds. It’s a Panasonic DMC-G1 – a Digital SLR-like camera with interchangeable lenses, except it doesn’t have a mirror or an optical viewfinder. So, yes, it’s not a DSLR. But the sensor is the same size as my Nikon, and therefore should be capable of similar picture quality. And without all the gubbins they’ve got rid of, the body is about half the size and weight of the Nikon. And the size of the lenses are reduced in the same way. It uses a very high quality electronic viewfinder, and it all seems to work extremely well. The guy testing it had already seen the next iteration of this design, from Olympus, which he says is about the size of a bar of soap. And it records high quality video. And it fits in your pocket. The Times, they are A-Changing.

If you look at the camera world, it’s suffered from a massive degree of design conservatism over the last 50 years. Nikon’s top line camera in 1957 is recognizably similar to their top line model today. I know it’s now digital now, but the design hasn’t moved on a lot.

It’s about time someone stood back and went back to First principles here. Canon and Nikon, the world leaders, tend to be ultra-conservative in their thinking. They produce terrific cameras, but they don’t do ground breaking innovation. It seems to take the underdogs, who probably need to get ahead of the game to get a bigger toe in the water, if you can unravel the mixed metaphor there, to forge ahead with these developments. The issue here is that, if someone like Panasonic or Olympus gets it right, you could see major changes in the way camera development changes, and very quickly.

And the two giants could then be playing a game of catch up they don’t want.

We live in interesting times.

Tags:

canon,
nikon,
photography,
luminous landscape

SIX OF THE BEST - NORFOLK 2

England's coast stretches around 2,800 miles - not a lot by continental standards, but the variation available around it is considerable. My favourite bit is the North Norfolk Coast - a stretch of about 40 miles of gentle, almost unpopulated (for England), flat, undeveloped landscape. It's not the sort of place where huge mountains, and "big" scenery impress you. But, whenever we come here, the calmness and non pushy nature of the people and the place drains all the stress out of me.

There's a series of little villages, some for the boating fraternity, some more working fishing villages, along the coast where the local shops serve whatever seafood has just been caught a few yards away. That's fresh!

Anyway, I like it, and below, I've put together a few pictures of the coastline.

BLAKENEY

BRANCASTER BEACH

WEST RUNTON

HOLKHAM BEACH

SOUTHWOLD AT DAWN

BLAKENEY AT SUNSET

Tags:

photography,
norfolk,
blakeney,
cley

WORLDS AND HOURS APART

It’s really quite amazing what difference a few hours can make in the way you look at the world. A week or so ago, I was sitting on the edge of the Hudson River taking pictures of New York’s skyline as the sun went down. If you failed to be awestruck by what I was watching that night, then I simply don’t think you have a soul. Yes, I know all about the carbon footprint and the emissions and… and… and… but it was simply one of the most impressive sights I’ve ever seen in my life.

MANHATTAN'S CLASSIC SKYLINE AT DUSK

TIMES SQUARE ON SATURDAY NIGHT

Fast forward a couple of days, and I’m on a beach, in the sunshine, on England’s North Norfolk coast. I’m with my wife, and our 2 dogs ..... and basically no-one else. The beach goes on for ever. And as far as the eye can see in each direction, there is just, well … nothing.

LOOKING TO THE WEST ON HOLKHAM BEACH, NORFOLK

LOOKING EASTWARDS ON HOLKHAM BEACH, NORFOLK

THE DOGS THINK THEY'VE DIED AND GONE TO HEAVEN

WEST RUNTON BEACH - A FEW MILES ALONG FROM HOLKHAM

For the cinema buffs among you, if you’ve ever seen the Gwyneth Paltrow “Shakespeare in Love” film, the sequence at the end where she walks up an unending beach in America to start her new life there, was actually filmed on the sands where we were walking.

Talk about a contrast – the most vibrant city on earth to simple rural tranquility in a few hours.

Thank Goodness we invented the aeroplane.

Tags:

photography,
norfolk,
new york,dogs

THE HUMBLE PHOTOGRAPHER

I’d never really thought of myself as an arrogant git – I leave that to others. But when you’ve done something for a decent length of time, you tend to reach a point where, if you’re not careful, you know it all. Of course, you don’t know it all – you just think you do. Which makes it infinitely worse.

So, one of the things I’ve tried to impose on myself as life flows along, is as much as possible, to see things with an open mind. I specifically and deliberately exclude Rap Music from this, on the basis that every rule must have an exception.

But, take Photography. Now, I know a little bit about it, not an enormous amount, but quite a lot more than Mr Average. Over the last twenty years, I have had more “religious” (in a non God like way) experiences with a camera in my hand, than at any other time. I take predominantly landscape images, and the utter beauty of being the only one within eye-shot of a glorious sunrise, or a menacing storm-cloud, can make me feel that time has stopped, and all I see in front of me is being produced by some power just to make my life perfect for a few minutes.

But even here, I like to think I’ve developed a personal “style”, which is ME. I like it when people point at a picture, among a selection in front of them, and say “That’s one of yours, isn’t it?” I can’t see the point of it all, if all you do is emulate other people’s work.

I belong to a local Photographic Society, where several times a year visiting lecturers gives talks on his or her speciality. Most times I can admire, but what they say or show doesn’t affect me greatly. Just occasionally, however, an hour there can set your mind racing off in directions you were not expecting.

Two or three years ago, a young lady (she must have been all of 30) arrived with the most ancient of manual SLR cameras, and a single fixed 50mm lens, to give a talk on Taking pictures of Flowers. We all looked down our noses rather snootily at her camera, and thought the worst – we were in for a boring evening.

I was absolutely transfixed. Her pictures of flowers were like nothing I’d seen before. They were almost abstract, impressionistic, colour washed images with an ethereal beauty which suited their subject perfectly. A million miles away from the sterile “everything in focus” way Club photography tends to approach such a subject. I was hooked – I’d never bothered to take pictures of flowers before, but I certainly did after looking at this lady’s work. Well done her, and she probably never knew about the conversion she had made.

I’ve also never been into portraiture or people pictures. It always struck me that it was a bit like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Physics. Here, if I understand it correctly, the position or the momentum of an atomic particle is changed by the act of locating it, so you can never know both accurately. In photography, when you point a camera at someone to catch a mood, or a look, the act of pointing the camera at them changes the look to something different – which is exactly what you don’t want. So setting someone up for a portrait would not give you a “real” picture of who they were – what you would get is the picture of who they wanted you to see – a very different animal indeed. Rather like someone presenting themselves at an interview, and we all know how false that can be.

So getting a natural picture was almost impossible, and I didn’t bother. Until a Dutch ex-newspaper photographer came along and showed how he took real candid pictures, with the predictable results that I, and a few other like minded individuals said, “Now they’re the sort of pictures I want to take”. They were unforced, they showed life as it actually was, rather than as the participants wanted you to see it, and another convert was made.

Recently in New York, I tried it all out, and was tolerably pleased with the results. You get a lot of failures, but it’s the ones which aren’t failures which make it worthwhile.

So this may sound like an e-sermon, which, given it’s Sunday over here, is reasonably appropriate, but this is Proof Positive, to me at least, that if you keep listening and watching other people at work or play, sooner or later, you’ll learn something important.

Now, I’m off to ask one of my offspring to borrow a Rap CD.

Tags:

photography

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU'D SEEN EVERYTHING - ALONG COMES A SCARECROW FESTIVAL

It’s so easy to get dispirited by what you read in the newspapers - the unending saga of the unravelling of Gordon Brown (didn’t Blair SO get his timing right?), the whole economic situation, the impending demise of the planet due to my inability to remember, when in a supermarket, to use the plastic bags I’ve once again left in the car, Andrew Flintoff getting out twice in five balls the other day (although I bet they pick him for the Test next week), and we’ve now got to endure Cherie Blair’s memoirs being remorselessly serialised all next week in the Times.

It’s easy to get really wound up about all these things, and wonder where the world’s going. Except, I’ve just come back from a short trip into Holt in Norfolk, and driven through one of those things which seriously makes you glad to be alive – the next village from where we are staying, is putting on - you'd better believe it - a Scarecrow Festival.

Outside the houses, the pubs, and the guest houses, life size scarecrows have been planted – at least I’m assuming they didn’t get there on their own. Who knows – we are in a very rural part of the country – it could be Norfolk’s answer to the “Wicker Man”.

They (the scarecrows) are sailing on the village pond, chatting over the garden wall, mending their cars (as one does) and generally loafing around doing not a lot - apart from presumably Scaring a few Crows. They look brilliantly zany, and are just what England needs just at the moment – a touch of utterly pointless, but charming, silliness.

In typically English fashion, you watch a good proportion of the tourists driving through the village, eyes facing forward, and completely missing the whole thing. Quite odd. They don’t know what they’re missing.

I’ve put a few pictures below, and there’s more, which I’ll include in Episode 2 in a couple of days.

"HEY JIM, I HAVE FOUND IT!" - I'VE NO IDEA WHAT IT MEANS!

JUST BECAUSE I BURNT HIS STEAK - NORFOLK HUMOUR

SENOR SCARECROW - SIESTA

BINGE DRINKING - SCARECROW STYLE

ON THE VILLAGE POND

ON THE BONNET IT SAYS - "WOT, NO BATTERY!

OVER THE GARDEN WALL - THE SPITTING IMAGE OF LES DAWSON!

BOXER AND REFEREE IN FRONT OF THE LOCAL CHURCH

- NORFOLK SURREALISM AT WORK

You’d never get this in Manhattan! It makes you proud to be English.

Tags:

norfolk,
photography,
scarecrows,
wighton

A SHOT IN THE DARK - NORFOLK FASHION

Up with the lark this morning. There’s something creepily virtuous about getting up on a Sunday in the dark when you don’t have to, and you could be having a lie in instead.

The weather forecast here in Norfolk was very good, the tide was right, so off to take some pictures. Wandering around the estuary at Morston, a small sailing village, as the sharp, morning light spread slowly across the water and climbed its way up the sides of the boats moored there, was one of those magical moments which make you feel good to be alive.

Having taken a few shots, I drove into Wells to wander along the front, and find some breakfast. I ended up with the Anglo-Italian fusion of Toasted All Day Breakfast Panini, and a large Espresso, from the local Deli. As I chomped my way through this, a Police Car appeared and parked on the open space next to the quay. It was quickly followed by an ambulance, which in turn was followed by a Fire engine.

THE CLANS GATHER

The crews all got out, quite relaxed and chatting away. I know life in this part of the world is a bit Manana-ish, but your first thought was that with what was clearly quite a sizeable emergency unfolding, a bit of zip wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Then the Coastguard boat, fully manned, “Shipshape and Bristol fashion” chugged around the channel and moored, followed by the fully kitted-out Lifeboat crews ambling up to have a chat with each other.

THE WELLS LIFEBOAT AND CREW

Then the local Community Police girl (disarmingly pretty, I have to say) on her designer bike, and her equally disarmingly unpretty male colleagues on their machines. Then a shoal (don’t know collective noun for) of Flood Wardens arrived, one wearing a very rakish Bush-Wacker hat, at the same time as a large orange and professionally equipped Rubber Dinghy.

NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL COMMUNITY POLICING

By which time it dawned on me that all this was in all probability not the result of a local resident’s emergency call. Especially when a guy erected a ladder at one end of the quay, climbed up it and got out a loud-hailer and a camera.

CREATING ORDER FROM CHAOS

As the minutes passed, a massed gathering of the Norfolk Rescue Clans came together, increasingly obviously now to have their pickie taken. There seemed to be an awful lot of them, and if the chaotic way they milled around as the poor photographer tried spectacularly unsuccessfully to create at least a veneer of order is anything to go by, then having your accident in the next county would seem to be a prudent self-help strategy. I suspect though, that when it’s serious, and they move into action properly, you’d see a very different side to it all, but on a lazy Sunday Morning, it all seemed like someone trying to herd cats.

STAND STILL OR I'LL SHOOT YOU

The photographer had me totally transfixed – he moved everyone backwards, forwards, sideways and back again. He seemed to have them putting their helmets on, taking them off again, turning sideways, looking to the front, not picking their noses and generally trying, without any visible success, to get them to behave like honourable, grown-up members of the county’s accident and recovery structure system. But as time went on, the cast showed a slowly collapsing level of interest (actually not very much at all), and when he announced that “the helicopter” would arrive in 15 minutes, there was a communal groan and he lost them completely. They had 10 minutes at least where they could simply chat to their mates or try to get off with the female Police Officer by asking her intense, searching technical questions about her bike.

UNDIVIDED ATTENTION AND .....

..... TOTAL COMMITMENT

After the 15 minutes, exactly on time, the helicopter appeared, very “Apocalypse Now”, low on the horizon, and all we needed was a decent military band to strike up “The Ride of the Valkyries”, and, in my eyes at least, the day would have been complete. But Ford Coppola he was not. The photographer raised his loud-hailer to try to tell the helicopter pilot what he wanted to do, and suddenly dropped it, realising the pointlessness of what he had just done and clearly hoping that no-one had noticed.

The helicopter could only fly slowly past, since hovering at the most appropriate spot was apparently not allowed, so the photographer only had one go at getting his picture. With exquisite timing, we now had the glorious sight of some slightly disorganised old gent, who clearly had no idea of what was going on, deciding to walk slowly and painfully with his stick across the front of all the carefully orchestrated groups. He’d got halfway across before our snapper noticed him, and a couple of helpers tackled him to try to bundle him off the set before the helicopter arrived a few seconds later. He did a pretty good “Mr Bean” impression, except in this case you knew that he really didn’t know what was going on.

THE INTRUDER DEPARTS

It probably reflects very badly on my image as a nice, caring person, but I found all this utterly hysterical. The frantic jibbering of our man on his ladder when he saw the intruder was an utter joy to see.

The rest was, in all honesty, a bit of an anti-climax. The helicopter swung its way past, our man pressed the shutter, and he asked a henchman, who, one assumes had “Walkie-Talkie” contact with the helicopter pilot, to get him to go round again, which he did. Everyone said a communal “Cheese”, and our intrepid snapper had the luxury of two bites at this particular cherry.

I have to say that, when it was all finished, they all looked very professionaI, and gave a real sense of comfort that if you got into difficulties, there was a real team waiting to help you out. As far as the photographer was concerned, I only hope he’d remembered to put a new Memory Card in his camera, and charge the battery.

Tags:

norfolk,
wells,
photography,
coastguards

PICK OF THE PICS - No. 7

The last in this sporadic Pick of the Pics series, a few days ago, showed a picture of Ironbridge Power Station, seen from my house, pushing Goodness knows how many tons of Carbon Emissions into the atmosphere - but doing it very beautifully. Hence the picture.

Like buses coming in twos, today's picture is another one taken this afternoon from the same place, but in very different conditions. Having seen Man's puny attempt last week, this is the Almighty's version of the scene.

IRONBRIDGE POWER STATION - THE POT OF GOLD

Cue Rain, Cue Wind, Cue Yellow Brick Road, Cue a very different colour pallette.

Tags:ironbridge,
landscape,
photography,rainbow,
shropshire

PICK OF THE PICS No. 6

I don't seem to have put up one of my own pictures onto this site for quite a while.

We live in the country, and have a distant, easterly view of Ironbridge. It has a power station there, and this evening, just as the sun was setting, I turned away from the sunset, and the scene which faced me was the one below.

IRONBRIDGE POWER STATION AT SUNDOWN

Sometimes the results of Man's efforts in the landscape can look rather impressive.

Tags:

ironbridge,
sunset,
power station,landscape,
photography

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST - THE SEVERN IN FLOOD

This Flooding is a really big issue, and not just in Shropshire, where the River Severn already causes problems at least on an annual basis. Solving the issue, at least to start with, does not seem to be a priority to our leaders in Westminster, presumably because they can’t hear the wails and complaints from 130 miles away. But this time, it seems to have become a much wider spread and more serious issue throughout the country.

For ages now, we have had what seems like a farcical situation in Shrewsbury, where the Severn passes through in a large Ox Bow like sweep, dominating the town. When the river level rises dramatically, which it does with horrible consistency, many streets and buildings flood, and parts of the town look like a downmarket version of Venice for a week or so.

Our local council, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the offices they previously occupied had become unworkable, and that a new palatial edifice was needed to accommodate them in the manner to which they would like to become accustomed. They sited it right next to the River in the centre of the town, at a level which guaranteed that all too often, the height of the river water matched the tops of the ground floor desks in the new building. So they built a flood defence system around it, a bit like the bunding system on a domestic oil tank. The only problem this seems to cause is that while, up till now, the protection system for the new building has worked, no-one seems to have given the same amount of thought to the car parks created for the Civil Servants who work there.

So, come the deluge, as it did last week, guess what happens. The car parks sit under feet of water, no-one can park there, and hundreds of employees have to park in the centre of town, wiping out a good percentage of the available parking places used by us mere mortals.

This rather zany Planning logic is all very well, but we now seem to have a major cost stretching out into the infinite future, for something which doesn’t seem to work, and which also causes an ineradicable and inexorable increase in our Council Tax.

Don’t you just love them.

Anyway, on a more pleasant thread, I was out this morning during what a friend refers to as “Burglars Hours”, ie before 6am, taking pictures of the River Severn, which has burst its banks in a most spectacular way. The river is normally about 50 yards wide, but today is was more like half a mile. These images were taken in a local village, where the Wrekin (1300 feet high) sits quite beautifully as a backdrop. For once, the sun was out and the quality of light was gorgeous.

There's something slightly discordant about pictures which contrast an attractive pictorial view with a subject which is causing people pain, but that's what we have here.

There has to be some compensation for the misery that the water has caused so far.

THE PILL BOX NORMALLY SITS IN THE MIDDLE OF A FIELD

A WIDE VIEW OF THE FLOODS

CRESSAGE BRIDGE

CLOSE UP SHOT OF THE BRIDGE

THE WREKIN WITH FLOODS IN THE FOREGROUND

THE WREKIN WITH CLOUDS AT THE SUMMIT

Tags:

floods,
shrewsbury,
shropshire,
severn,
photography

A NEW APPROACH TO SEPIA TONING

Inadvertently last night, I set in motion a piece of Engineering Testing of significant practical importance, namely the resistance of Digital Camera Memory Cards to a hostile environment way beyond the tolerances stated on their Specification Sheets.

Doodling away in my Studio, I made a large Espresso and settled down to do some work. I was organising my camera for the following day, and changed the Memory card for one which had a lot of spare capacity on it. A few minutes later, I went to put the old Memory Card away in one of those dinky little cases they come in, and it was nowhere to be found.

I hunted high and low for a few minutes, and simply couldn't find it. Since I hadn't moved from the seat in front of the computer, I failed to understand how I couldn't lay my hand on it, so, losing reason and logic, concluded that the outer limits of the Bermuda Triangle must now have reached Western Shropshire, and gave up.

As I drained the cup of coffee, you probably don’t need to be that clever to realise what was lying in the bottom of the cup.

As the most fundamental law of the Universe would have it, I was just about to transfer a few images I had taken that day onto the computer, so the card was the only place in the entire known universe where these pictures existed.

It had been there in 80-90 degrees for about 10 minutes, and looked very much the worse for wear. So, we’re now trying an experiment. It’s drying out, and tonight we’ll see, using a sample batch size of one, if these things have any degree of thermal resilience in them.

If you want a bet, a “No images on this Card” response is 10 to 1 On at the moment.

I will report back.

Tags:

photography,
memory cards,
coffee,
humour

GREAT NEWSPAPER PHOTOS - No 2

The theme again is Water.

Today’s “Times” had this lovely picture on the Front page today, and doesn’t it capture to perfection the simple essence of torrential rain on the city streets.

Taken in Westminster yesterday by Jack Hill, it is one of those all too few images which tells the whole story in one simple, uncomplicated view. We have a street, a woman with an umbrella, and more rain than you can throw a stick at. And that’s it.

There’s no detail in the picture – it’s almost an impressionist study. And it’s the fact that there is no detail which makes the picture work. I doubt if even the individual in the image would recognise themselves. As well as no detail, there’s almost no colour, with shades of grey turning it into almost into a monochrome study.

Except, of course, the little smudge of red in the background. And it’s this that makes the picture come alive.

The composition is excellent – the woman is walking at the edge of the buildings, to get away from the rain, and here she is positioned in the picture space right at one side to emphasise her position and give the feeling of keeping under the roofs if she can. The perspective leading your eye along the street is very strong.

It’s good that there’s only her in the picture, paring down the picture content, so you’re left in no doubt what the picture is about.The bottom part of the image is just tons of rain bouncing off the road, and this puts the whole thing into context. Almost half the picture is "out of focus" rain. Gene Kelly is NOT going to spring out of the shadows here and start singing. The mood is damp and the person wants to get home.

Great atmosphere and great picture.

Tags:

times,photography,landscape,jack hill

FLOODS OF TEARS - SHREWSBURY

Today’s theme, rather unsurprisingly, and rather more depressingly, is Water.

Watching the Open Golf Championship at Carnoustie in North East Scotland and the Test Cricket at Lords, I was seduced by the TV images of people not carrying umbrellas, and not wearing waterproofs, sitting in shirtsleeves, drinking a glass of lager and enjoying the sport.

Here in Shropshire, I am seriously wondering what we’ve done to deserve this weather. I have this worrying thought that it’s actually our family’s fault. We bought a new Gazebo a few weeks ago, and ever since its erection, the rain has not stopped. I am seriously thinking of taking it down to see if it is the cause of the problems.

Yesterday, the heavens opened again and stayed open all day. It didn’t just rain, it poured. Our garden was awash and this morning we awoke to find there was no way out of our village. All the roads were closed, and the local brook had changed from a gentle stream into a seriously raging torrent. People whose gardens previously led beautifully and elegantly down to a babbling brook, found their houses and gardens under a couple of feet of dank, muddy water.

DIFFICULT TO READ UNTIL YOU'RE ON TOP OF THIS ONE!

Without seeing it in person, you don’t realise the damage that such an event can have. The water is relentless – it pushes walls over, knocks down fences, turns greenhouses and sheds over, and makes a ghastly mess of what has taken people years to build up.

Very, very sad.

I managed to find a way through the water into Shrewsbury this afternoon, and the river was pushing against the flood defence walls, with the riverside walks being more suited to ducks than humans. I took a few pictures of the mess, and here they are.

THE ENTRANCE TO A NEIGHBOUR'S HOUSE THIS AFTERNOON

THE ENTRANCE TO A SELECT DEVELOPMENT NEAR OUR VILLAGE!

THE ENTRANCE ROAD TO THE NEW HOUSES - THE SHOW HOUSE WAS RUMOURED TO HAVE BEEN SOLD LAST FRIDAY!

A LOCAL GREENHOUSE

THE POOR OWNER'S SHED ADOPTS A NEW ATTITUDE!

SHREWSBURY CYCLEWAY NEAR THE RIVER SEVERN

RIVERSIDE WALKWAY

BENCH FOR TWO

Tags:

floods,shrewsbury,shropshire,photography