What is there not to like about winter? I fell out of bed at 7:15 and was on the beach at the bottom of the road twenty minutes later – marvellous! In the summer, I’d have to be up at some horrific time to do the same thing (and the light isn’t so good…).
It was lovely to watch and photograph (sort of) the sunrise, seeing the light change and transform the shapes on the beach. I wasn’t too interested in the sun itself, of course, but the patterns of the beach and the water on black and white film will hopefully work.
I wasn’t the only one out there: apart from the perennial dog-walkers, two other folks with cameras and tripods were on the beach. Of course, I felt terribly superior: they had some new-fangled digital camera-thingy, whereas I was using my 60-year old Rolleiflex TLR… and now I’m off home to breakfast (whisper it: and to my digital camera for some family photos later on!).
At 5:30 this morning, I collected Stephanie and we went to Gullane Bents, a lovely unspoilt beach east of Edinburgh, in order to take portraits in the soft light that comes at sunrise. When I first discussed this with her she almost immediately said ‘yes’, despite my warning of the cold temperatures. She now lives in Los Angeles, where the average temperatures lie considerably above those in Scotland. Theoretically she knows this, having lived here for several years…
The plan had initially been to create a narrative sequence, but the water was much colder than Stephanie had anticipated, despite my warnings, and we couldn’t complete the sequence – which would have entailed her being immersed in deeper water!
But it doesn’t matter, because some beautiful images were created, and Stephanie, despite the cold, managed to concentrate and pose, even, I think, looking positively sensual in between the temperature-induced screaming from being almost naked in the cold sea!!
Afterwards, much warm water was poured over her, much hot tea drunk, and many layers of clothing added. I understand that in the meantime she has regained sensation in her limbs and has remembered that she does still have feet attached to the bottom of her legs… I appreciate her tolerance, patience and courage in the face of the climactic conditions and thank her for posing this morning.
(More images can be seen here, and one or two are for sale on RedBubble.)
One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is the aspiration that people have to make beautiful images, coupled with a complete lack of realism about how to go about doing that, or more specifically, when to go about doing that.
There is absolutely no need to have a really expensive camera to be able to make spectacular images. This photograph of Stirling train station was taken using a cheap 4 (or 5?) year-old 4.1 megapixel point-and-shoot no-brand digital camera with dodgy red-rendition.
Stirling train station
I love it. It’s not the greatest image ever, but for me it communicates a city’s winter evening: magical skies over a new and interesting piece of architecture (the bridge, although lit up, was not yet open). I was in the right place at the right time, and just happened to have a camera to hand (actually, that’s meant to be funny: I rarely even go to the supermarket without a camera of some kind in my pocket/bag, even if it’s a Fuji single-use camera!).
Wherever we go, whether to a secluded spot or to a warehouse store, there are interesting things to photograph. But the time of day is crucial. Here is an image from my recent trip to the Lake of Menteith, where I went with my colleague Antonio to photograph the dawn:
Lake of Menteith
And here is pretty much the same scene an hour later:
Lake of Menteith
Although the framing is different, the dramatic changes in light and colour are all nature’s doing – I have done almost nothing to these images in Photoshop. If I had tried to make such dramatic changes on the computer, the resulting images would undoubtedly look AWFUL (incidentally, both of these images are also available to buy as prints on my RedBubble page; it’s also interesting to see which of these two generates more comments from the RB community!).
After making these images, I went to the Lake of Menteith hotel (just to the left of the church) for a departmental staff awayday. Colleagues were amazed at the photographs Antonio and I showed them, even on the rubbish little screens on our cameras, and several people said things like ‘those photos look like postcards! My pictures never turn out like that!’ The main reason for that, of course, is that most people don’t get up at a sensible time in order to see this light in the first place! Joe Cornish, Bruce Percy, Martin Guppy and all the other greats don’t stay in bed until 8:30, stagger down to their hotel breakfast at 9:30, look blearily out of the window and finally get themselves out the door at 11h to wander round to the jetty for 11:30… and then see bland, washed-out midday skies. They do exactly what Antonio and I did: get up at 5:15, arrive on location at 7:15 (almost half-an-hour before dawn, and in fact a bit later than I would have liked), capture the rising sun and the magical light – and then go to the hotel for breakfast and lots of hot coffee to warm up just after 9h!
All that a bigger/better camera does is help to ease the process of making photographs, but even using a cheap digital point-and-shoot would allow some amazing images to be made… if you can be bothered to get out of bed in time to see the fantastic morning light!
Day two of our course began very early. Here’s an approximate breakdown of my day:
get up 5:30
out 6h (rain)
ca. 6:20 arrive on location (a LOT of rain) – we are at Loch Clare
waiting in the van
rain clears a bit, returning intermittently; we’re out, taking photographs
back to the hotel and breakfast for 9h
out to another location shortly after 10h – this time Loch Torridon
more photos, more rain – then lots more rain (run back to minibus)
new location (no rain)
ca. 13h rain
at Bruce’s suggestion, we decide to return to the hotel and have lunch
14h everyone chooses two photos to critique
15:30 out for sunset
periods of heavy rain, and beautiful calm
moon photographs (visible for exactly 25 seconds – see below!) and more
return to hotel
18:30 in the bar
19h dinner
and then blog writing and bed!
An excellent day, though a long one… and I think all six of us felt that.
When out, we all wandered off in our own direction, photographing what we saw. Bruce knows the area, and chose locations that he had either photographed in the past, or that he knew would offer something tangible for us to photograph (after all, this weekend is about learning techniques etc., not about photographing something that has never been photographed before – though, of course, each of us returned with very different images from each location). He then made a point of going to each person and reviewing some of their photographs (we’re all on digital this weekend to help with the teaching process, though I am not the only film shooter here), talking through how they were approaching their imaging, what might work differently, ways to deal with particular compositional or lighting problems, suggesting alternative perspectives, exposures and so on. For example, I have often felt that the metering on my Nikon D40 was out, and have therefore almost always had the exposure compensation set at -2/3. Bruce discussed this with me at length and demonstrated, even on the crappy wee screen at the back of the camera, that this resulted in problems with my shadow detail (lesson: there is a difference between dark and moody… and just dark). I realise that this is also partly Bruce’s style – I sometimes think that although he describes himself as a landscape photographer, I wonder if this not more of a convenient label: his images are often not really landscapes, but images of light that is transformed in some way through reflection, absorption etc. in the encounter with the land. That is what attracted me so much to his art in the first place, and so I have no objection if even a tiny fraction of this sensibility rubs off on me.
I want to describe some images. After breakfast we went to Loch Torridon. Bruce drove us quite high up, and we took photographs overlooking the loch, towards the mountains around the water. In the foreground, there were substantial erratics (a new term I learnt: these are the rocks that have been brought to their present location by glaciers that have long since vanished, leaving just the rocks in their incongruous locations), and Bruce wanted us to try and think about the use of foreground detail as well as background material. The wind was strong, it was raining, but despite water droplets dribbling down both sides of the filter, we managed some spectacular images. When Bruce came over to me, we talked about what I had been trying to do, and he asked me if I had turned and seen a particular tree; I hadn’t. He borrowed my camera, and took three or four photographs. He showed me the last one, pointing out the simplicity of the image, and the ways in which the mist isolated the tree from the mountain in the background, making for a very simple, but very powerful image of the tree. This is his photograph (which I post here and on my website with his permission):
Tree and mountain (Bruce Percy)
I liked this immediately, but also wondered about other ways of taking this photograph. I took several photographs, and ended up with this one:
Mountains and tree
Bruce’s photograph is undoubtedly fantastic (though he said he thought it was a little underexposed; without wanting to sound presumptuous, I’d agree – and also add that mine was underexposed too; I’ve corrected this a little here, but didn’t feel I should manipulate his photograph!). But I also like mine, bringing in more of the mountain outlines, setting a wider context, and offering a different role for the tree. In my image, I realised later, the tree almost serves as an anchor for the mountains, rather than the mountains doing that for the tree. It’s as if the majesty and grandeur of these incredible hills is given additional meaning by the tree’s inclusion in the image – although several times as tall as me, it is quite tiny in comparison to the massive mountains in the background – and thereby it perhaps helps to give a sense of the amazing landscape we were in. I also converted this to black and white, and cannot quite decide which I prefer – the subtle tones of the colours in the original, or the even more simple tones of the black and white (comments on this are very welcome!):
Mountains and tree
As we were driving back in really hard rain, Bruce slowed the minibus and pointed out the view. He asked if anyone wanted to photograph this, and two of us leapt out of the bus, getting ourselves and our dried off cameras wet all over again. This is the image I came up with:
Mountains, Torridon
I post it here as a kind of contrast to the tree/moutain images. Although I think this is beautiful, the large white expanse (that’s the mist…) in the bottom left corner decontextualises the mountains, making them almost more of an abstract series of lines than a mountain range. Although these are pretty much the same mountains as in the tree photograph, in this photograph there is nothing much that anchors them to the earth, and so the photograph becomes something quite different.
Undoubtedly the most useful part of the day was the critical review. We had very little time, but we each had to choose two photographs we had taken, and offer them for review (not easy to choose, when you have just a few minutes and are scanning 150 images!). Bruce had brought a projector and showed us our images on a large screen. We then explained what we had been trying to do, why the image was important to us, what we felt about how it had turned out, and so on. Other participants then offered comment, as did Bruce. This was in all cases incredibly positive and helpful criticism. Bruce then went through the images in Photoshop, and showed us simple and effective ways of manipulating them in order to bring out contrasts, highlights etc. There are many many ‘small’ things that I took from this, but the really major one that I took away was a reflection on image size: even when I crop my images, I tend to leave them in the original aspect ratio (i.e. based on a 35mm film image – perhaps this is a subcounscious desire to ‘retain’ something of the ‘original’? even though I know this is a nonsense), even though most images benefit from different shapes. I’ve often felt my images were too ‘long’, and this session radically opened my eyes to the more pleasing ratios of 4×5, 6×7, or 1×1 as well as arbitrary crops – you’ll see that nearly all the images from today on my website are now cropped in such a way, almost as if to make a point to me, never mind anyone else.
In the late afternoon, we went to another loch, Bruce hoping to offer us a location and a sunset for trying out some of the techniques we had talked about in the critique and other locations. It was very wet. Not just the loch from below, but also the clouds from above. I sometimes think that rain in Scotland must have magical molecular properties that other rain does not have… but more on that later! I went down to the edge of the loch, and also into the loch (very slight shoreline, so that wellies were more than adequate). It was cloudy and overcast, making for very soft light. No real sign of a sunset, but despite this, some of the resulting images were great. I was very pleased with my foregrounding of stones, for example, and the capture of the moonlight, which appeared once, for about 10 seconds, and I missed it; but I saw the clouds moving in such a way that it might reappear. It did, for precisely 25 seconds (I know this, because I took five images at 5 seconds each – and it was gone!). The image originally has the moonlight curving, which I think might be the lens’ barrel distortion (I’ll perhaps get around to correcting this at some point…):
Moonlight, Torridon
Bruce then took us all back to the hotel – and our first shower of the day! The dinner discussion in the evening was stimulating, covering the purpose of this kind of photography (one participant argued that it is to document reality/something ‘real’; Bruce asked if that was so, why was this person using a wide-angle lens?!), the processing stage (are images ‘doctored’ if they’re manipulated in Photoshop to bring out the highlights etc.?), Vettriano (is it art?), the BNP on BBC Question Time (should they have done/should they not have done?), free speech in a democracy, the Iraq invasion/war, the significance of 11.9.2001…
One of the big problems with digital cameras and long exposures is noise: in long exposures, for example at sunrise or sunset, the shutter often needs to be open for lengthy periods of time. This can be 15, 30 seconds, or many minutes. What happens then, however, is that the camera sensor begins to introduce noise into images – it seems to me that this is often especially visible on “flat” or even surfaces, such as still water (and water then loses the glassy look that makes such images work so well). This noise can look a little bit like grain on traditional fast film. Most digital cameras have a noise reduction “feature”, but it is best left turned off, I think: these usually work by mushing up the pixels to reduce noise. What you get is an image that looks poorly focused – which just defeats the object of taking the photograph in the first place.
So what to do?
I’ve been going through a number of the images that I took on Mull this summer using Fuji Velvia 50 slide film (I plan to add some of them to my website soon; all the Mull ones that are online just now are from the digital camera). Many are taken using longer exposures and there is – of course! – no noticeable noise/grain, even on the longest exposures. So rather than worrying about how to solve the noise problem on my digital camera, for now at least, I think I’ll just stick to Velvia and my old film camera for the long exposures.
(Note that this post doesn’t even attempt to touch on all the other issues that relate to image quality when discussing the digital/film issue, I’m just focusing on noise… clearly, Velvia, properly used, is immeasurably superior to most digital cameras)
Most photographers know that the best light for photographing landscapes is usually found at sunrise and sunset. Taking photographs in the middle of the day is rarely a good idea, unless there’s a way of mitigating the glare of the midday sun, or it’s intended to be an integral part of the photograph. It’s easy, of course, to find out sunrise and sunset times online (all decent weather sites offer that information for most common locations). But I’ve also just found a great little application for identifying these times that is available (free!) for the iPod touch/iPhone. I don’t know how to post a link to it, but a search for “Daylight” in the “Apps” section of iTunes should work. Not only does it show sunrise and sunset times, but also dawn and dusk. This makes it even easier to plan ahead and catch the magical light that can transform the landscape at those times.
If you live near the sea, you might also want to know about tides. I can recommend a free App called “Marine Day Tides”.
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December: I’ve also added ‘MoonPhase’… which does exactly what it says: tells you when the moon is doing what!
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