The photographer's responsibility

Shopmobility

"It is the duty of contemporary photographers to question continually what they are looking at, and why it is appropriate to permit others to look too." An excellent quote from a very thought-provoking article on the BBC website. The article is by Max Houghton, course leader in MA Photojournalism at the University of Westminster - here is a link to the full article which I expect to read again more than once http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-16282985

I sometimes take pictures, in the street and elsewhere, and struggle to decide whether it is right to share them. Where does observation, with maybe a little humourous undertone, shade into unkindness or just a cheap recycling of stereotypes? I took the picture above a few months ago but haven't posted until now. Still not sure whether it is right to do so.

The year that was: 2011

As 2011 draws to a close I want to look back over my photography this year and take stock. I have been inspired by all those 'Picture of the Year' photojournalist threads but this post will concentrate on what I have done or learned photographically this year. Sometimes it is difficult to see what, if any, progress one has made over time and I have found it interesting to look back. I hope to make similar posts in years to come and over the course of a few years it may be interesting to see themes emerge and develop or run their course.

At the start of the year I made a conscious decision to spend time in my own area and not to reserve my photography for trips to Kew and the countryside. I wanted to make pictures that looked at the world I actually live in, warts and all, and not the world I would like to live in. The pictures to the left and above were taken on a cold but sunny day as I wandered the area looking for anything that might be interesting. I have enjoyed my walks around the area, turning down streets I would have no reason to go down normally just to see what's there. I am naturally interested in pretty much everything and have found it easy to be increasingly intrigued by how we live now.

My second assignment for PWDP was called 'A day in the life' and required one to take a series of images documenting a day and make them into a composite. For a variety of reasons I decided to make pictures of myself and after one false start ended up with this composite of details. It's an evening in front of the telly rather than a whole day. It was an interesting experiment and I learned a lot from this. I had hoped to make a composite image that said something deep about who I am but found that immensely difficult and settled on this outside view instead. I have continued to explore portraiture from time to time during the year and want very much to make progress on this front in the year to come.

Around the time I was completing these Clive mentioned on the OCA forum that using Google Image Search with your pictures can bring up some interesting results. I had a play - see below. I haven't done anything with this yet but am very intrigued by it and want to note it as an idea to explore further.

Some of these selections are really very strange indeed...

Selective vision

One of the things I want to work on at this time is improving my skill in making selections. I began working on selections in my first PWDP assignment (see here and here) but want to spend time over the winter honing my skills. It is a helpful skill and while I may choose not to use it often in my work I want that choice to be made for artistic or ethical reasons rather than because it is in my 'too difficult' pile. This picture - originally taken as part of the TAOP lighting module - came into mind as a subject with potential. The original version (below) had a dark background, and while I was not unhappy with it I did feel that it was a bit flat. The dark background gave a reasonable contrast to the flower but did seem to drain some of its colour and vivacity.

The complex shape made it a good subject for an exercise. I had hoped to find some quick way of making the selection but didn't manage that - it took ages. I am sure that if I do a few more I will eventually pick up speed and learn ways to make a smoother and more efficient workflow. I strongly suspect that this is an area where the only way to learn is to keep working at it - like a painter learning to draw hands.

Technique and reflection
I made a selection initially using the 'Color range' option in Photoshop. I had thought this tool might work well given the uniform appearance of the background but it wasn't great. The edges needed a lot of work (I used quick mask and the brush tool to refine the selection). In addition, I found out rather late in the day that pixels that appeared selected were often only partly so - this meant a fuzzy selection that showed up when applying the background, though not really when viewed as a cut out or in 'marching ants' view. It was kind of visible on Quick Mask, in light shading. This partial selection could be useful in some cases but in a picture like this you need precision. so my learning points from this are to pay more attention to mask shading, and also to see a way if I can easily refine the initial selection to reduce this difficulty.

Having finally made a reasonable selection I played with background, using some textures from the Florabellaa collection and a range of blending modes. I wanted a background that would harmonise with the flower and set it off but without clashing with it. The thistle itself is so detailed that it would be easy to end up with just a fussy mess. Getting the right balance between flower and background was tricky (too blue and the flower got lost, too green/yellow and it looked odd, some versions were too luminous and some too dark. The picture at the top is version 11 and I am reasonably happy with it but may still revisit (I wonder if there's too much vignette?).

A friend suggested it might work well as a Christmas card so I have produced an alternative version that is slightly cooler and lighter - see below.

Only three versions this time! I had wanted to make this lighter and 'frostier' overall but found that putting any kind of overlay on top of the flower or otherwise reducing its contrast and definition just made it look busy. I think that it is such a finely detailed thing that it needs to be left largely alone.

Conclusion
This took absolutely ages to do: it would have been quicker for me to go out and buy some canvas and paint a backdrop - it is always best if you can get things right in camera. Was it worth it? Maybe not in terms of the picture itself, though I do like it, but it was useful as a learning exercise. even if I had made a backdrop and lit it well in the original I might still have wanted to change its hue and it is good to be able to make chanegs if you need to. In addition I have a request for a print as a Christmas present so that's a bonus!

I'm going to try some more of these selections over the next month or so and hope to improve. And then on to soft-edged and transparent selections...

A different kind of truth

These short films document the process of making an artwork for 'A Graceful Death' a project of work by Antonia Rolls and others exploring how we deal with death and serious illness. I wrote about the most recent exhibition in Birmingham in a previous post.

Stuart's beloved wife Sue killed herself. After an extended period of grieving and recovery Stuart (an old and dear friend of mine from college days) expressed an interest in taking part in the Graceful Death project. He wanted very much to tells Sue's story, to speak about her struggles and decisions, her highs and lows. I will make a separate blog post with more of Sue's story. These films explore the process of making art about painful subjects. They begin with Stuart looking at Antonia's paintings. They explore issues of pain and honesty: sometimes real pain requires a different kind of truth.

The films have many technical and other failings (I have a lot to learn). But I think the subject rises above these irritations.






This final film shows the process of developing the pictures of Stuart and Sue (shown below at the Birmingham exhibition), looking at some of the considerations that went into each aspect.

I have measured out my life in coffee spoons

I took this little video clip with my phone a month or two ago. It was a wonderfully sunny lat summer/early autumn day. My friend and I were enjoying an excellent lunch at Pallant House gallery. The gallery cafe was full of sun and people. There was a courtyard outside and I could sea these leaves dancing in the sunny breeze. They were moving to a different rhythm than the sounds I could hear of human chatter and eating and I felt that I could almost, but not quite, hear the sound of their music. Some lines from T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', half-remembered from schooldays, came to mind:

"For I have known them all already, known them all-
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room."

I have been reflecting this morning about how easy it is to spend time being busy, doing necessary and even useful stuff, and how it is easy in such circumstances for time to slip away and for bigger and more important things to be left undone. Still not making much progress with my assignment four work. Determined to take a little time out this week to play and explore.

Below is another little video clip from the summer. I was trying to capture the experience of
being in a summer meadow. I hope to make a better job of this next summer.

In memory of Kit

This is Kit, my friend Toni's much-loved aunt. Kit died earlier this week. She had been very unwell for some time but, as you can hopefully see from this picture, her spirit remained undimmed through it all. To give a sense of who Kit was, one of her nieces wrote that she "taught me how to fry eggs, curl my hair with rags, how to have a blatant disregard for what anyone thought of me and, most importantly, how to drink gin!"

I was fortunate enough to visit Kit with Toni just two weeks ago. While we were speaking I thought she looked so very lovely that I couldn't resist asking for permission to photograph her. And here is my tribute to Kit. No single picture can ever really capture the essence of a human being, but artists and photographers like me feel compelled to try.

In some ways it seems almost wrong to talk about how I processed the picture at this time, but doing so has brought forward a range of reflections and I want to set these out. For me it is very important to be respectful of people when I photograph them: I want to be true to what I see, but not unkind, and that is not always an easy balance. Because this is the final picture of Kit all those decisions seem more signifcant - it feels even more important than normal to try do her justice. This picture has changed in a number of ways from the raw original beyond simply losing its colour. I may post a colour version at some later stage, but removing colour allows one to concentrate on character and the play of light and shade, and that seemed right for this picture. The original was quite contrasty - harder than I remembered the scene - and I slightly reduced the clarity to soften contrast. I also used curves and some dodging and burning to further soften the picture and lighten the shadow side of Kit's face. I corrected a few little skin blemishes. Finally I sharpened only her eyes, and added a little tone as I think she would have liked that.

Kit was very ill and I don't want to pretend otherwise. But I really wanted to bring out the spirit and liveliness I saw, and have processed the picture to draw a little more attention to those things and a little less to the signs of illness, without removing them altogether.

So many choices are available to a photographer once a picture is taken. You can end up with a final image that has almost no relation to the scene the camera recorded, and I have no problems with that when it fits the photographer's vision. But when you want to make a fairly faithful record there are still subtle questions of what you emphasise and what is played down. Would a harder, more contrasty picture have been more accurate or faithful? Perhaps, but it wouldn't have been the picture I wanted to make.

RIP Kit.

Becalmed

"Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean."

Lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Colerdige

I have been working, on and off, on PWDP assignment four for some time. I took a break for a month to finalise my APEL application. Having started again in earnest last week I have come to the conclusion that the work I had prepared just wasn't coming together and have decided to give up on this project and take a break before startng again. The assignment is quite straightforward and relatively open - I am required to produce eight landscape images with a linking theme. Four themes are suggested - earth, air, fire and water - but I can agree another with my tutor if I wish. There is no steer about how you interpret the theme: what I have done is quite literal but that isn't at all necessary and I may take a less literal approach to the final work.

I had chosen water and have in fact been collecting possible images for the assignment since I started PWDP. I was planning on a relatively abstract set, exploring the play of water, light and shade and particularly reflection, in part as a sort of metaphor for the photographic process. I've been through the usual selction routine, narrowing down the images to a potential set and so on. I have done some work to produce final versions - working with colour and shade and so on. The pictures in this blog post show where I had got to when I decided to call it a day.

Although some of the pictures work on different levels, the whole thing just doesn't quite hang together and, to be honest, doesn't really inspire me. It had begun to feel like yet another task to be got through. After some reflection I have decided I need a bit of a time out until I find a concept that inspires me more. I suspect that the fact that I knew deep down this wasn't working is partly why I have been putting it off and finding so many other things to do and write about. I have been very busy and pressured at work and in other areas of life also and that has added to the mix. I feel rather burnt-out and lacking in energy generally. So for the next few months the plan is to play a bit, work through the PWDP exercises I have been ignoring recently and see where that takes me.

I nearly always start a module with a range of ideas about what I will do for the assignment already in my mind and it is very unusual for me (and well out of my comfort zone) to have no real idea at all of what I am going to do. It is still open to me to take more better pictures of water and complete the assignment as I had planned. But I don't really want to do that. I think a setback like this can be very creative if you go with it (at least I hope so). I won't stop doing photography and blogging. I will just try not to push myself to come up with a new idea but to let the idea perhaps come out from my playing and other work. We will see. It is rather disappointing to give up at quite a late stage and having done quite a lot of work: inevitably this will delay completion of the module. But doing the degree is not for me primarily about getting a badge of achievement: it is much more important to me to do decent work that means something to me.

For now, here are the pictures I completed. The picture at the top feels to me like the most fully resolved one. Not sure how it will come across on screen but it works well as a subtle print. I like the combination of interesting detail and cloudy mystery in this picture. Others express different facets and moods more or less successfully.

Killarney reeds

Reeds reflected. This picture is upside down - I found it works better that way.

 

Spring: the play of light and air

Roiling waves

Light on the water