Tag Archives: portrait

Intentional Film Movement

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No, the Intentional Film Movement is not a radical revolutionary brigade, forcing all digital camera users to move to film…! It’s just my play on words in relation to the current trend for ‘intentional camera movement’ (I think ICM - a bit like HDR - is interesting the first few times you see it and then it just gets tedious, mostly because it’s rarely done well, and is often done just for the sake of being able to do it, with little underlying narrative).

Anyway, rant over. Holidays at home are wonderful: I have been tidying up this week, and came across 19 rolls of film (14 rolls of 35mm and 5 rolls of 120) that I had had developed but then never really looked at. I knew there were some portraits in amongst them that I was somewhat concerned at having lost, but also some experimental images.

Un-Intentional Film Movement - a typical 'accident'

Un-Intentional Film Movement - a typical ‘accident’

My old Rolleiflex, with six decades behind it, works really well. Except for those times it doesn’t. In particular, the film transport mechanism can be a bit dodgy: the film doesn’t always quite engage the way it should, and then the winding mechanism fails: it becomes possible to wind through the whole film without making a single image, as it doesn’t ‘lock’ for each exposure, even though the shutter can be cocked. That has resulted in some rather strange double (triple?!) exposures, in part covering the bottom or top of an image, but I found that when the film fails to engage properly (and in the meantime I can tell when this happens with the first winding of the film to get to the first frame), it also becomes possible to wind the film on whilst having the shutter open. Some of the ‘problem’ images I was getting were like this one here (oops - some of my wife’s family at a celebration last year!).

Intentional Film Movement

Intentional Film Movement

However, this also offers some interesting opportunities. Rather than being annoyed about the film mechanism, I began to experiment, whilst also still making ‘proper’ images in between the experiments (after all, this can easily be done, if you guess how far to wind the film on - does cock the shutter, it just doesn’t move the film on evenly). I tend to used Ilford FP4+ in this camera, which has such a wide latitude that exposure doesn’t really matter - and that makes it ideal for things such as this. I began to try doing two or three things simultaneously to create new images:

  1. using a small aperture, open the shutter
  2. turn the film crank whilst the shutter is open
  3. at the same time, also move the camera.

I was using a tripod (I find that easiest with the Rolleiflex - I struggle to keep the image even vaguely straight without a tripod, and so if it’s important to keep straight, then I need a tripod!), but even doing the first two of these three actions requires a degree of coordination that I struggle with - and moving the camera at the same time becomes much harder! However, the images do then become more interesting.

I tried several experiments with these techniques, using several films, all of them in this pile of unexamined films that I found this week.

Only having seen the negatives, I have been aware of the effect I was generating, and did see how moving the camera also played a role (I didn’t do so for the first roll, and, of course, just ended up with a blur). So here are some of the attempts that have resulted in more interesting shapes.

Intentional Film Movement

Intentional Film Movement

This one, which has a floaty lightness to it, is perhaps my favourite of this group of photographs - it involved a longer exposure, a smaller aperture, and slow consistent movement of the film (I think the darker line is when I stopped winding consistently). I was actually seeking to make a portrait of a friend, but I’ll not give her name here - suffice it to say that the subsequent images of her worked really rather well, even if this one doesn’t actually look anything like her!

Intentional Film Movement - a landscape

Intentional Film Movement - a landscape

I think this last image is interesting for a different reason. I intended to create a ‘cloud’, but this worked exceptionally well: what I am including here is not just the image on the film, but the jagged edge where it has been cut, and the straight line from the scanner’s film-tray. It may be quite hard to see on smaller devices (and perhaps I should have processed this a little more to bring out this contrast - all of these are simply straight from the scanner with no adjustments of any kind), but on a larger screen, I can quite clearly see a night landscape here. The jagged edge is a curved hill, and the lighter areas further up the image are (strange-looking) clouds. Of course, it is not just landscapes that can represent more abstract concepts - abstract concepts can also represent landscapes!

There is a pleasant mix here of images. Creating them involves an element of randomness, but I have tried to create certain kinds of shapes and patterns too, even if I don’t see if they’ve worked until the film has been developed.

Do I think this is going to be something I do more of? Probably not, unless there is a motif that I think might be made more interesting with this technique - AND I happen to have the Rolleiflex with me AND the film hasn’t loaded properly! The one thing I can’t predict is when the Rollleiflex will work properly and when it won’t, so there is a further element of randomness in these kinds of images - most of the time I don’t know when I might (have the opportunity to) create more!

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Photography as an expression of self

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What this is not: a theory-laden exploration of self-identity. Or, at least, not much of it is.
What this is: quite long!

I have been following various recent discussions on Twitter about creativity between some very different photographers. Seeing the ways in which people have interacted and some of the statements that have been made has been thought-provoking (and at times rather irritating!). The debate initially came about because of another posting from Rob: A poem on a misty morning. One of the people in these debates, Rob Hudson, eventually felt so misunderstood that he sought to articulate his thoughts in a blog posting (helpfully entitled My views on landscape photography - “it does what it says on the tin”, and is worth reading). In the course of all this, he also posted this tweet:

Do read the article at that link, if you haven’t read it already; it is a well-written and thoughtful piece. To begin with, however, I want to take issue with Rob’s tweet, because I think it can help elaborate on some important issues. I am aware that tweets are often written in haste, and given the 140-character limit maybe not always be formulated in a way that might more accurately reflect the author’s views, but this does give me an opening to reflect on my theme. But first, a story from a different context.

Aspirations and realities

Several years ago, I was in a large meeting of Members of the Iona Community, debating some statement about the Community’s purpose. I have been a Member for many years now, and these lovely people are my friends, in some senses I even regard them as my family. And as with all families, there are some crazy people. Sometimes, the crazies get a bit full of themselves, and I vividly remember several people standing up and in the heat of the debate arguing that we should be describing ourselves as a ‘prophetic community’. Eventually, Kathy Galloway, poet, seanchaidh, theologian and all-round wise woman, stood up and said:

Prophecy is in the ear of the hearer, not the mouth of the speaker.

She then sat down, and the room fell into complete silence for a moment. More sensible discussion then ensued - with that one line, she had silenced the pomposity of the lovable crazies and clarified the terms of the debate.

Iona Abbey, ca. 1990 or 1991

Iona Abbey, ca. 1990 or 1991

I think we need to think about creativity in a similar way. I’m not sure we can aim to be creative, instead I think we should aim to be true - true to our subject, true to our intentions, true to ourselves. I’ve written about similar themes before, in less explicit fashion and in other contexts (for example, here and quite a while ago now, here). I think one of the key issues is the importance of reflecting, of thinking, and not just of ‘shooting’, as another wonderful contemporary photographer, Christopher King, expressed it on Twitter a little while ago:

Torridon, Scotland (click image for more Torridon photographs)

Torridon, Scotland (click image for more Torridon photographs)

One of the issues that arises here is, of course, knowing what and how to think! Working that out can only happen over time, and by doing: I am very aware that I am on a journey with my photography, a journey that has taken me from seeking to make pretty images such as this landscape in Torridon, to images that ‘do’ more, at least for me. This is something that I continually struggle with. It has to do not only with how I understand what that ‘more’ is, but with how I might go about achieving it.

There are, I think, two aspects to this. The first is very simple: learn technical skills. This is rather boring: it is something that happens through making images and learning from what has worked and what has not, learning from other photographers about how they created certain effects and so on. All this is, of course, important to some degree, but it is mostly a bit tedious and I don’t want to waste time on it here.

The second aspect is more complex: if I say ‘we should aim to be true - true to our subject, true to our intentions, true to ourselves’ then the obvious question to ask is ‘what is true to my subject, true to my intention, true to myself’? These are all related and inter-dependent, and I want to elaborate on each of them briefly.

Being true to my subject

Stephanie (click image for more photos of her)

Stephanie (click image for more photos of her)

One of the prompts for the recent Twitter debate on creativity was the recent debacle over the Landscape Photographer of the Year competition. I disapprove of such competitions and don’t want to discuss this story in any detail, but in short: the winning image was withdrawn and replaced with another after it became clear it had been manipulated in such a way as to break the rules, which specified minimal manipulation of the image. Whilst there are complex questions around what such representations mean (and I think Jean Baudrillard would have had much to say on this story!), one interpretation of the story is that the photographer had not been ‘true’ to his subject. Some people might say that landscapes can be more difficult than portraits in this regard: Stephanie told me that she likes this portrait, and, as I note on the page that this comes from, she has used a version of this image herself - so it might at first seem as if I am being true to the subject, if even the subject likes it.

However, being true to a subject does not necessarily mean that the subject likes the end result or that something should ‘look like’ whatever was in front of the camera. This next image, from my What Lies Beneath series, did not ‘look like’ this, because we do not see moving water in the way I have photographed it here - and yet I would maintain that it is still a true representation.

Glen Affric (click for more What Lies Beneath images)

Glen Affric (click for more What Lies Beneath images)

Some photographers, such as the wonderful Lucy Telford, create images that sometimes bear only a passing resemblance to what something ‘looks like’. And yet I would argue that Lucy is being completely true to her subjects.

So how do we know when we are being true to our subject? I think it is not enough if someone says they like it and feel it is a good representation, and in some cases, that might even be counterproductive: I have made portraits of people that they do not necessarily like (I’m sure we’ve all had subjects say ‘I look too fat/tired/pale/silly/worried in that photograph’!), but which I think accurately reflects who they are in some way. I therefore think I am being true to my subject. And this takes me to the next point: the photographer’s intention plays a key role in whether a photograph is true to the subject.

Being true to my intention

Some photographs (actually, quite a few in my case!) don’t work out, and at the moment I can only be rather vague about how this relates to being true to my intention: perhaps this is about honing intuition.

What (doesn't) Lie Beneath I

What (doesn’t) Lie Beneath I

Sometimes an image appears to be technically in order, and I might even feel it to be true to my subject - but it doesn’t actually do what I want it to do. After releasing my What Lies Beneath series, I also put some images online that didn’t quite make it into the series. This is an example of the rejects. I was reasonably happy with these images, but none of them belonged in the final set. The reasons varied. Apart from the fourth image, which predated (by a matter of hours!) the beginning of the series in my head, all the others just didn’t evoke the right emotional reaction for me. It is very difficult for me to articulate precisely what that is, and I’m not going to try and do it here. I spent a long time with each image, studying it, letting it work its way into my head, seeking to ‘befriend’ it - a difficult selection process. But some photographs just were not right - they didn’t seem to be sufficiently engaging or they didn’t have the emotional connection I was trying to seek out. Whilst I feel I can’t say much more about this, it does point to the third aspect, because part of what I’m saying is that being true to my intentions involves being self-aware enough to be true to myself.

Being true to myself

Click the image to read why this doesn't work

Click the image to read why this doesn’t work

I have explained before why I think this photograph does not work. The fundamental problem is that what we wanted was to communicate a feeling of loss and abandonment, and what I have created is an image that emphasises Stephanie’s breast. But I didn’t want this to be about her breasts (and neither did she!), and being true to myself means not using this image (other than to illustrate a point, I mean - it’s not in my galleries or for sale; I feel I want to add that this photograph comes from 2009, and I hope that I would approach it differently now, taking in the entire frame rather than focussing on her facial expression before squeezing the shutter).

Being true to myself means that what I really want to create in every single image is something that is of me - and photographs that focus just on a woman’s breasts are not what I want to create. Portraits of people are in some ways also self-portraits (as Oscar Wilde and numerous others have said), but so are the landscapes I photograph. Therefore, whilst the monochrome portrait of Stephanie above communicates something of her joyful approach to life, it also communicates something about me (despite the faux-grumpiness I often exude, I am mostly optimistic and take great pleasure from being alive!); the landscapes I photograph are meant to do that too. This may not always be obvious to others, but - and I’ll come to this in a moment - I don’t really care what most others think about my images.

Dornoch Sands (click for more Dornoch images)

Dornoch Sands (click for more Dornoch images)

For example, this image from Dornoch Sands communicates something about my state of mind and thinking at the time I made it. It may be that this is a bland blue nothingness to most people who see it, but to me it conveys something very important. There are various factors at work here: the expansive depth of the sands, the sky and the clouds, the distant hills, the magical dawn light - all speak of home to me, though I had never been to Dornoch and the surrounding area before, and had spent just a few hours on this beach. Nonetheless, there was something inviting, welcoming and generous about what I was encountering, and that is what I have sought to capture here. Whether I have done that for anyone else doesn’t really interest me.

Having said that I often exude a faux-grumpiness, it may seem as if there is nothing ‘faux’ about it! I’ve said I don’t care what most people think of my images, I am not interested in whether they generate emotions for others… surely that makes me a grumpy misanthrope?! Far from it…

The question of identity

Kwame Anthony Appiah, one of the truly great philosophers of our age, has written a profoundly important book on The Ethics of Identity. He discusses the need for us in the contemporary world to pursue what he calls ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’. This, he argues, is a way of engaging in the world that allows the individual to make a life for themselves (the classical task of modern individuality), but he connects this individuality to the global context we are in and the ways in which we relate to others. We need to understand our own place in the world in order to be able to engage with it. What and who we love needs to be clear to us, because without that we cannot relate to others: ‘no island… is an island’ (p219).

What I want to glean from this relates to the first part of my statement: ‘we should aim to be true - true to our subject, true to our intentions, true to ourselves’. I have explored, briefly, three aspects that I suggest constitute being ‘true’. As should be clear, these are all aspects of our identity, and identity can be formed in numerous ways, for example:

  1. ascription - to attribute an identity to someone (e.g. ‘you are… [something]‘ - clearly, this is often problematic because it silences the voices of others and casts a singular identity upon them, something that Amartya Sen criticises)
  2. treatment - to act as if someone belongs to a particular group (e.g. ‘women are… [something]‘ - but this silences a collective group that may not choose to mark any common identity in this way at all - for example, in certain contexts, being women might not be important to the people concerned, whereas being photographers, for example, might be more so)
  3. identification - when someone uses particular markers to identify themselves (e.g. ‘I am… [something]‘ - this allows individuals to speak for themselves).
Ardalanish Bay (click for more Mull images)

Ardalanish Bay (click for more Mull images)

We all, of course, aspire to the third of these possibilities - who would not want to be in a position to define themselves, rather than be defined in some way by others?

And yet, this is not easy!

Above all, it requires self-knowledge, self-understanding, self-awareness. We need to know what our roots are before we can engage with the cosmopolitanism of wider (photographic) society, and that means we need to know what we want, what we are trying to achieve, and how we might go about portraying this in photographs. Most of this activity is not about thinking, it is about feeling, about emotion. This happens by listening: to ourselves and to the landscape, for example - it is always possible to force a composition when out somewhere, but to engage with the landscape, to really begin to understand it, requires more. Michael Jackson, who photographs just one beach, is an exemplar of someone who listens to the landscape and himself - and his images convey profound personal emotion.

In the course of the Twitter debates, I have seen the term ‘workshop photographers’, meaning those who go on workshops and produce images similar to those of the workshop leader. Now, I have been on two Bruce Percy workshops and have benefited from them enormously, but his images are not mine. I do not want that photographic identity to be ascribed to me (‘oh, look, you can tell he went on one of Bruce’s workshops’), nor do I want to be treated as someone who makes images in a ‘Bruce Percy style’ (not that I could or would, and Bruce wouldn’t want it either!).

Instead, I want to make my own images that are rooted in my own experience, that come from my own listening to the hills, my own engagement with my subject, my own conversation with the individual I am photographing, my own understanding of my place in the wider cosmopolitanism of the world. My photographs should be about my voice. I need to know what it is that I am wanting to express with my images - and my sense is that I am gradually getting there, gradually finding my own way to express my thoughts in my photographs. Getting there requires a certain level of stubbornness (something I do not lack…!) and the ability to persist with something, even when others have no idea what I’m trying to do.

Tolastadh Chaolais, Isle of Lewis (click for more What Lies Beneath)

Tolastadh Chaolais, Isle of Lewis (click for more What Lies Beneath)

I have found that there are many people who would look at an image such as this from Tolastadh Chaolais and ask why I pointed the camera downwards instead of seeking to capture the fantastic hilly vista cliché visible from the road. Part of the process of finding my own voice has been to differentiate between (a) the people who say that, and (b) those who ask what it is that I am trying to do, or find something for themselves in the image. That is what I meant by not caring what other people think - if I pander to the beautiful hilly vista people and produce clichés, then I miss the stones and grasses under the water that actually speak to me, if I take the time to listen. Being true to my subject, my intention, myself is what creates my identity, and enables me to be rooted in a wider - cosmopolitan - context, and this identity-construction is, of course, an on-going process. I’m not, in the words of Rob’s tweet, trying to be creative, I’m just trying to be… me.

Two final thoughts

Firstly: doing all this is about being whole people. Photography is not my ‘hobby’, in the sense that it’s something I do in my spare time for pleasure (I’m reminded of the Edinburgh-based artist, Trevor Jones: ‘Whoever says painting is relaxing isn’t doing it right’). It’s an integral part of who I am, as is my academic work, and my engagement in contemporary Middle East issues - and all of it needs expression. That is one of the things I was trying to communicate in my What Lies Beneath series, and it is also why it grates and irritates me that a student resource page I used to have on this site had to be moved due to administrative managerialism (see e.g. Richard Roberts’ article on this, summarised in a short blog posting here) in case students - who are not as stupid as the university’s managers seem to think they are - thought the university was endorsing my photography. All of these things are part of me, and I seek to live out my identity in my academic work, my writing, and my photography.

Secondly: all of this requires effort, and in some ways, courage. Many of us are conditioned away from listening to ourselves (‘scientific medicine’ has often led us to ignore our bodies and seek a ‘fix’ for ailments, for example). It is, of course, immensely rewarding to do so, but the effort is a strange one. Much of the time I find the effort is about the need to stop trying to constantly do - it is about being still and listening to the inner voice we all have. Letting that voice come to the fore is a risky business. We may find things out about ourselves that we would rather not know, or rather not share, and doing so can involve courage. We are, after all, exposing something of ourselves to others, and that makes us vulnerable - it’s like becoming naked. On the other hand, it is only through allowing ourselves to be touched at our core that we can truly be who we ought to be.

Finally, one last thought from Christopher:

Warm thanks to Rob Hudson for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this text.

Our debt to other photographers

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Over the summer I’ve been making several portraits, almost by default just with the Rolleiflex. This is in part to do with my 1953 project (at the time of writing, I need to add lots of portraits to these pages… I’m way behind with this!), but I’ve also just found it pleasurable to photograph some of the people I’ve encountered. Here are two of them.

Alex (Rolleiflex, on Ilford FP4+)

Alex (Rolleiflex, on Ilford FP4+)

This is Alex, my brother-in-law. He was somewhat sceptical when I asked him to close his eyes, but I hope he likes this! I think it softens the portrait considerably: not that he doesn’t photograph well, but I think he looks really relaxed here.

Gwendolin (Rolleiflex, on Ilford FP4+)

Gwendolin (Rolleiflex, on Ilford FP4+)

And this is Gwendolin, a long-standing friend: my wife met her parents at university, and we first met Gwen when she was a bump! We’ve seen her almost every two years since then and she even lived with us for a little while some years ago. Now she makes me feel quite old - she has become an assured, adventurous and beautiful young woman, rather than a toddler running through our flat with her toys muttering ‘ticka, ticka, ticka…’

There are, of course, portraits I have made this summer in which the subjects have their eyes open! However, the ones I have put here owe their look in part to another photographer: I have been following a fascinating project that Jenny Wicks is pursuing. Jenny is creating astonishingly striking portraits - and all her subjects have closed their eyes at her request (do click on that link to her work, and maybe read her blog too - I very much admire her use of photography for this kind of social engagement). Many people do not like being photographed by a large camera, but I have found that by copying Jenny’s idea I can put my subjects at ease, and other portraits - with eyes open - then become more relaxed. So thank you for that little idea, Jenny!

I mentioned this sort of thing in a blog posting some time ago, but I think it is important to note more explicitly that we should acknowledge our debts to others. So often as photographers we create images borrowing ideas of technique, composition and form from other photographers, but fail to acknowledge that we have done this, pretending something is entirely our own work. As more and more people attend photography workshops, this happens ever more frequently: surely there should be some acknowledgement that the workshop leader has (hopefully!) helped in some way with an image, perhaps even stood by and offered suggestions at the time of exposure? After all, none of us create images in a vacuum! We are indebted, whether we are aware of it or not, to countless other photographers (and other artists and creators) - and not only is it good to show these other photographers that we appreciate their ideas, but consciously acknowledging our indebtedness also helps us to critically examine our own work and identify what is really distinctive about it. Of course, if we come to the conclusion that our work is largely derivative rather than distinctive, perhaps we need to re-examine what it is that we are doing…!

P.S. If it is not already obvious, given that ‘Bruce Percy‘ is one of the largest tags in my tag cloud on these pages, I see myself as being substantially indebted to Bruce for what I do photographically. You can see his incredibly beautiful and engaging work on his website.

Karine Polwart CD launch and a new concerts page

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Karine Polwart, August 2012

Karine Polwart, August 2012

My last posting included some images of Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham, concluding with a note that I was going to Karine Polwart’s CD launch on 17.8.2012. I made some images there too, and realise that I have several photographs from various concerts over the years that I could put online that might be of interest to others, and future concerts might also result in further photographs. So I’ve started a concerts page…

Here is one of the Karine Polwart images, with more on the concerts page. It was a great occasion, and I look forward to her autumn concert in Edinburgh. And do buy her album!

Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham in concert

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On Friday evening we went with some guests from Germany to see Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham in concert in Edinburgh - just amazing. We had seen them in concert before and they are always worth going back to.

We were just a few rows back, and I found my Nikon 105mm f2 DC lens at f2 on the D90 just perfect for catching these portraits of the two gentlemen in action.

Aly Bain

Aly Bain

They were playing a number of pieces from their new album, Five and Twenty, which is rather wonderful (yes, of course I bought it!).

Phil Cunningham

Phil Cunningham

This is a time full of musical delights: Karine Polwart is releasing a new album, and I hope to be at a launch on 17.8.!

Musings on my muse

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This title was just asking to be used…!

What is a muse? What is a muse for me? I have regularly referred to my good friend Stephanie Tait as my muse, and as I am presently hoping she’ll be visiting the UK again later this year (she now lives in Los Angeles), I wanted to reflect on what it is about her that makes me regard her as my muse, and what that means for me.

Stephanie

Stephanie

I have thought about this at various times over the last few years, and, unusually, I have not spent any time researching the topic by reading about it. What I mean by this is that I have not followed my usual academic-inspired route of studying the question of muses and how they have been seen and understood in the past by artists. This has been very deliberate: although I do, of course, have a general sense of the idea of muses and have regularly come across artists who have seen particular individuals as muses (for example, Harry Callahan photographed his wife Eleanor Callahan extensively: Suzanne Shaheen’s obituary in The New Yorker on 2.3.12 described her as ‘[o]ne of the greatest muses in photo history…’). I have also engaged with artistic representations of the question of muses (narratives such as Jacques Rivette’s La belle noiseuse comes to mind, for example). However, whilst noting en passant that these are mostly gendered relationships - as is mine! - which almost automatically makes them an interesting object of study, I have not sought to actively research muses in a scholarly way. Exercising such deliberate restraint is not that easy for me to do, but I have wanted to write this blog posting for some time, and I very consciously wanted to try and write it in such a way that it would be a reflection of and on my own emotional experiences, rather than a treatise on the place of artistic muses in history. Doing the latter would be easy for me, whilst I knew that doing the former would be more difficult. However, I was also clear that engaging my own emotional experience would be much more interesting - at least for me, perhaps for Stephanie, and possibly for others.

The idea of muses in western contexts comes, of course, from Greek myth: the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne who are the goddesses of the arts are the original muses, though I would not have been able to name them all without a reference work (see, the academic in me breaks out after all…!): Calliope of epic poems; Clio of history; Erato of love poems; Euterpe of music and lyric poems; Melpomene of tragedy; Polyhymnia of sacred lyrics; Terpsichore of dancing; Thalia of comedy; Urania of astronomy. There is clearly an inspirational connection here, but until fairly recently it has not been very clear to me how this might relate to my own thinking about muses. To understand this requires a wider understanding of some personal history… indulge me…

My most beautiful model

My most beautiful model

Although happily married to the person I want to be married to, long before and throughout our marriage I have held - and articulated - the belief that one other person can never be a complete counterpart for anyone, at least, not in the sense of being someone who can reflect all their interests, needs and desires: maintaining otherwise is to create an idol of the other, leading to (self-)deception and unrealisable expectations. All long-term relationships are unique creations built on certain mutually agreed foundations between individuals, whether spoken or unspoken, and in this case, this understanding about idolatry of the other is one that both of us in this marriage have always understood in broadly the same way, with a similar sense for the boundaries and parameters (of course, my wife might articulate these things slightly differently, but that doesn’t detract from the fundamental mutuality). This understanding manifests itself in different ways, not least in the form of friends: we have mutual friends with whom we share a great deal, and equally, we both have friends to whom the other has less of a connection or affinity. Exploring varying aspects of our personalities through relationships to other people is completely normal.

So how does all this connect to Stephanie? Without wanting to elaborate on the details, a few years ago, during a particularly stressful and difficult period, Stephanie became someone I found I could rely on and relate to as a good friend: the kind of person who really was there when needed, if that’s not too much of a cliché. That this happened is all the more remarkable in that she is (and, I hasten to add, was already at that time) a former student of mine - it cannot be taken for granted that a connection initially based on a structured power relationship (such as lecturer-student) can be transformed into one that is more about people relating to one another as equal human beings. She knows that she has my immense gratitude for her kindness to me in this period.

Stephanie

Stephanie

As I have described here, it was Stephanie who first suggested I might work on portraits, and she has been a source of inspiration to me ever since (it’s interesting to me that this was a hurdle to her too, but she didn’t give that away at the time - I think she knows that would have intimidated me even more!). Given that Stephanie is a script-writer, film-maker, and film-scholar, it is perhaps appropriate that she reminds me of Radha Mitchell’s Syd in one of my favourite films, Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art. For sure, it is rather presumptuous to compare myself to Ally Sheedy’s Lucy, the photographer in the film, but my comparison rests loosely on the inspirational role that Syd plays in relation to Lucy. Long dormant, Lucy rediscovers her desire to pursue her photographic life through her encounter with Syd, although this has tragic consequences for the main protagonists of the film, especially Lucy and her partner, Patricia Clarkson’s Greta (I’ll say no more, but I do highly recommend the film!). I don’t think I had realised how much I wanted to photograph people until Stephanie more or less made me photograph her.

Now, I’m aware that this perhaps sounds a bit like a teenager’s first proper kiss, with Stephanie taking the role of my first true love! That is not what I’m seeking to suggest here. Of course, at the risk of veering into psychobabble, all relationships also involve some form of physical connection, and it would be completely naïve to pretend that didn’t exist: yes, I see Stephanie as a beautiful woman, and in other circumstances I may well have been very attracted to her - but that is not really the issue here. I encounter a great many people that I think of as beautiful in one way or another, both male and female, but I don’t want to pursue physical relations with all of them. In that sense, I tend to take a broadly conservative attitude to my marriage!

Stephanie

Stephanie

Furthermore, I have photographed many other people, and I have enjoyed the engagement with both friends and professional models who have been tremendously forthcoming in their openness to my photographic ideas. I very much want to continue to do this. But… but… photographing Stephanie is somehow qualitatively different to all of this.

Initially, I can identify two significant elements that make photographing her such a different kind of experience for me. Firstly, I have an intimate relationship to Stephanie based on our profound empathetic encounter from a time of adversity that fosters and encourages an almost totally free exchange of thoughts and ideas (insofar as such freedom is possible; even if it is, some ideas are never meant for sharing, even with the most intimate of confidantes). Secondly, her role as my muse is an active one: she is herself an incredibly creative person who brings her tremendous energies to bear in all areas of her life. Photographing her becomes an active process of cooperation in transforming ideas into photographs.

These two elements - her profoundly sensitive nature and her own rampant creativity - mean that when I’ve described ideas to her, or developed ideas that she has brought, they suddenly seem totally natural, no matter how crazy they may have seemed at first: I feel as if she intuitively and intimately understands where I am coming from and what I am trying to do, often without too many words needing to be spoken. Injecting her own personality into the process, she is, for me, an inspirational woman who engages in intimacy with me on a level that makes the attempts to create something just work. The end-result may not always quite reflect the extent of the initial vision, but that is probably down to my technical failings rather than her lack of engagement or understanding. So Stephanie is not only one of my best friends. Stephanie is also, for me, an inspirational goddess, a muse: the one model above all others who makes these things imaginable in the first place.

Stephanie

Stephanie

There is, however, a third element beyond the intimate empathy and creativity Stephanie embodies: when I say she is “the one model above all others who makes these things imaginable in the first place”, I find I want to ask both how this manifests itself, and why it might be the case. When I seek answers to these questions, I find that they are, unsurprisingly, dialectically related to one another. For a long time, I wasn’t completely clear about this. However, what has recently helped me understand this is a very simple realisation: whenever I have an idea about something I want to do that involves a model, it is always Stephanie who first comes to mind. As I seek to try and envision an image, she is the one I imagine posing, she is the one I imagine wearing whatever garment I am thinking of, she is the one who is asking the questions about how and why something should be done one way and not another… I suppose I am conducting long conversations with her about my images, even when she isn’t there. She may not be the person who appears in the final image - and given the distance between us that is increasingly unlikely! - but she is always the one I am thinking of initially, to the point where my sketchbook of ideas is, in fact, largely a collection of sketches of her. In so many ways, she is not only a model for me, she is my model model, as in: my model for other models, irrespective of gender or appearance.

This can sometimes have interesting and slightly strange repercussions: I have a small series of images in mind that picks up on something important that has happened to me, but I very much want to ask Stephanie to be the first model in that series. I haven’t spoken to her about this yet so she doesn’t know what I’m thinking of - that’s something I’ll describe to her when I see her - but I have already partially created the second and third set of images. What is rather strange about this is that I feel I can’t show these other images until I have created the first one, ideally with my muse, my inspirational goddess, addressing issues of pain and beauty that are very personal for me.

Incidentally, I have long been enticed by her online name: in various places, such as her blog and her Twitter account (do read and follow!), she uses “Queendom of Mab” to identify herself. From Shakespeare’s description of a fairie who comes to lovers in Romeo and Juliet, to some of the stranger usages by other authors, there is something about the inspirational, unexpected, and supernatural in her usage of this moniker that really appeals to me - but perhaps that’s just my own view, coloured by the emotional attachment I have to my friend.

I would like to think that this muse-relationship will continue: that when we’re both old and rickety, even though we will perhaps still live on different continents, I might see Stephanie every once in a while and want to photograph her - and she might continue to be happy to be photographed. We’d spend time discussing and gently exploring our way forwards in the mutual transformation of a particular vision into a photographic reality - and we’d enjoy doing it. After all, the inspirational goddesses don’t stop inspiring just because time progresses…

Stephanie

Stephanie

Before concluding, I think it is important to note that muses can take many different forms. For some, it is a person, for others it can be a place: I don’t know if he would use the term ‘muse’, but a landscape photographer I know has spoken of a particular hill that he has photographed in numerous different ways almost as if it were a person. When I look at his photographs, which are connected to poems, I feel as if I am eavesdropping on an intimate conversation he is having with the landscape. It seems to me that ‘his hill’ is a place that he ascribes with conceptions of intimate refuge, occasional struggle, and substantial creative energies - perhaps it is a kind of muse to him? There are undoubtedly many different forms that such inspiration can take.

Stephanie, muse

Stephanie, muse

I’m interested in other people’s understanding of their muses…

Musings on film latitude and related matters

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I’ve posted very little here recently, and have only added a couple of incidental items on my micro-blog. This has two main reasons: I’ve been very busy travelling for work (Germany, Norway, England in the last four weeks), and I’ve also had quite a backlog of films to scan and process. Concentrating on film and finding a revised routine to my workflow - now that I think I’ve understood what I’m doing with my new Epson scanner - takes time, and after various false starts, I think I’m finally getting there. There is now, of course, a bit of a backlog of both film and digital images (I’ve not stopped photographing!), and coupled with a desire to redo the galleries here, you’ll appreciate that I’m struggling a bit…

A beautiful Rollei image, as scanned

A beautiful Rollei image, as scanned

However, this posting is tangential to all of these thoughts! I have, partly because of the 1953 Project (and yes, there are images to go online from that, too!), occasionally been carrying the Rolleiflex with me as a ‘casual camera’. This regularly elicits interesting conversations with complete strangers, which can be surprising and very nice. For example, last week I was dining with a friend in London and after our meal I wanted to photograph her with the Rollei; a couple at a neighbouring table began talking to us about the camera, photography and so on… culminating in a request that I might consider photographing their wedding next year; of course, I declined!

Adobe Lightroom settings

Adobe Lightroom settings

The film I’m using for the 1953 Project is Ilford FP4Plus, which is rated at an ISO of 125. Ilford’s website says it has ‘enormous latitude for exposure error above and below‘ this speed. I chose it for the project partly for this reason, thinking it wouldn’t much matter if the exposure was slightly off on my portraits because I could always recover the images once they were scanned in. I didn’t realise quite what ‘enormous’ meant to Ilford, but these images clearly show that. The first image above is the scan from the negative (Vuescan reversed the negative for me). I made adjustments in Lightroom, as this screen capture shows: upping the exposure by four stops, pushing the fill light and brightness up, and then reducing the contrast and clarity settings to bring the grain under control. Aside from dust removal, these are the only changes I made to the image, revealing… Elizabeth Eva Leach, Professor of Music at Oxford University, with whom I had a stimulating lunch at the beginning of September (click on the photograph to go to her blog):

Elizabeth Eva Leach

Elizabeth Eva Leach

It’s not a great portrait, but it astonishes me that it worked at all, not just because of the film exposure issues: the café was relatively dark and I could barely see anything on the ground glass (so focusing was mostly a lucky guess), the lens was wide open at f2.8 with an exposure speed of 1/10th of a second - and yet it’s reasonably sharp despite all this! And this isn’t a coincidence: another portrait taken under similar circumstances was just as underexposed and with similar Lightroom adjustments it came out fine too:

Another Ilford FP4Plus sample, with similar exposure settings

Another Ilford FP4Plus sample, with similar exposure settings

What I love about all this is the visceral nature of the film and the process. For sure, I could have taken these portraits on a digital camera and bumped up the auto ISO settings - but I’m not convinced they would have looked any ‘better’ (they would have been different…). Of course, even the process of ‘extracting’ an image from an almost entirely black square of film gives me enormous pleasure - it’s like finding a treasure! I don’t regard myself by any means as a format fetishist, but returning to film does give me huge pleasure: my use of the Mamiya for landscapes makes me photograph with much greater consideration and precision than I used to with the digital camera, and I LOVE that.

For example, here’s a dawn image from the Mamiya taken on Velvia 50 of the Ratzeburg Küchensee in northern Germany this August. I remember taking quite a while to compose it in order to make sure the twisted twigs were below the tree line, whereas I think with a digital camera I might have fired off a good half-dozen shots at different heights and then hoped one had worked when I was back at the computer - but here I composed slowly and carefully, got it right, and then made… two exposures (er… the first one had a misplaced graduated filter that I noticed after squeezing the cable release!).

Küchensee, Ratzeburg

Küchensee, Ratzeburg

(I’ve lightened the exposure by half a stop and added a little fill light, otherwise it’s as it came from the scanner.)

In a few weeks’ time I’m off to Assynt with Bruce Percy. I’m really looking forward to this, and though I’ll take my Mamiya, I will mostly use the Nikon D90 so that images can be readily critiqued by Bruce and the group. I’m keen to observe myself with this, as it were: I’m sure my recent return to film will have changed how I use the digital camera for landscapes. Before going to Assynt, I’m also going to the Isle of Mull for a week of secluded reading - and I may just take a photograph or two whilst I’m there…

‘Imperfect Mirrors’ book available

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‘Imperfect Mirrors’ by Kevin Scully is soon to be released (2. July) and is now available for ordering, e.g. from Amazon. This is the book with my photograph on the cover (clicking the image takes you to the Amazon page):

Kevin Scully: Imperfect Mirrors

Kevin Scully: Imperfect Mirrors

I sent the designer/publisher three versions of the image, one in colour and two monochrome conversions - and they have chosen my favourite of the two monochrome versions. I’m delighted to see this now available, as is my wonderful model, Fran Whitton.

Photographic narration - narrating photographs

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Stephanie, icon of the silver screen

I have begun to rework some of my image galleries, which I thought were becoming somewhat stale and not very helpfully organised. In addition, I began to feel that just ‘dumping’ a series of images in a gallery was no longer what I wanted to do. Photographs should both tell a story, but there is also a story behind most photographs. So my galleries are now organised by type: land (land- and cityscapes), models, events. Within these broad categories the galleries will hopefully offer more of a sense of the story behind the photographs, as well as - in part - perhaps suggesting ways in which the photographs might be interpreted. Of course, this latter approach is broadly about how I understand my own work, and that isn’t necessarily how others see it!

In the first instance, I’ve done some work on the models galleries. There are several reasons for this:

  1. there are a limited number of galleries making this a task that was more easily manageable!
  2. for a while now I have felt I wanted to pay homage to Stephanie, who has been a profound influence on my portraiture. In the introductory narrative to the models section, I describe her role to me as a photographic muse (and I’m already thinking of the beginning of a new series of photographs that I’d like to start with her when she is next in Scotland, whenever that’s going to be). I have therefore written what are almost little photographic essays about our first two portrait sessions that might be of interest (do start with the Edinburgh narrative and then move on to the London collection!).
  3. although I was very aware that I would have to put a lot of work into these particular narratives, I don’t expect many of the other galleries to involve quite so much work. This means I am better able to gauge the task, but also see how a detailed textual accompaniment would work.

My next task will be a little tidying up and adding to for the events section, and then I’ll begin to work on the landscapes - this looks as if it will be the most work because there are more galleries and images, but as noted above, I don’t see myself writing quite as much as I did for the two long Stephanie essays. I’ll be splitting the land galleries up into countries or regions, and will also include some of my photographs from the Middle East.

Of course, this is a bit of an ongoing project for the moment, and so I would be very interested in any comments - good, bad, indifferent - about what I am trying to do here. Please either use the comments sections below, or write to me directly using the contact page - thank you!

My most beautiful model - see the Galleries, Models page for more information

My most beautiful model - see the Galleries, Models page for more information

Thinking about colour and monochrome images

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There are some images that I just know need to be monochrome, even before I squeeze the shutter - I think that is perhaps the case for many photographers. And if I have my film camera with me and it has black and white film in it, then I try to compose and visualise accordingly. But sometimes I create a colour image and then come to the editing stage and find I have an image which could be either, and it’s not clear to me which one is ‘better’. This is especially the case when I have a series of images, and I wonder if a monochrome development of one or two individual images might be good.

For example, this image of Ngoni is a case in point. I have a number of these images of her on the bridge in the snow (in her bikini, in a dress, and in a coat), and this one seemed quite strong when converted to monochrome, emphasising her dark naked skin against the white snow and white bikini, with the bridge playing a less significant role than it appears to in the colour version (of course, that’s also an editing question). I did eventually put the monochrome image on RedBubble for sale - and you can see a larger version of the image there - but I’m not wholly convinced this is the right one to have used. The tones (values) of light and darkness are what make or break a monochrome image… and I find I’m not completely sure if this is quite right when examined under these criteria (and you may think this is because it’s not a particularly strong image, despite what I think!). Of course, in the ‘old days’ a camera would have had either colour or black and white film in it, and composition and visualisation would have been guided accordingly, but in these digital days (even with scans of colour images from film), conversion to monochrome is always an easy possibility - and perhaps this makes life a little bit harder. Thoughts on all this in the comments section below are most welcome!

And, of course, these questions apply not only to portraits… they also arise when thinking about landscapes.

I’ve struggled with this before…!

Photographing Ngoni Namate (in the snow…)

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Ngoni in the snow

Ngoni in the snow

I had the great pleasure of photographing a new (to me) model yesterday: the fabulous Ngoni Namate. When we first met a few weeks ago to talk about possible shoots sometime during the next few months, she mentioned that she would really like some photographs in the snow, were it to snow at some point soon…

Well, providing snow pretty much anywhere in northern Europe is currently not such a big problem! So we met yesterday, and she spent much of the day in gorgeous dresses in the woods - and she even managed not to freeze to death (for those who wonder what it is about ‘my’ models being cold… no, no, no, it’s just a coincidence, honest!). This is one of the (unprocessed) snapshots of Ngoni from the day - proper edited images to come once I’ve had a bit of time to go through them (not 15 months for most of them!).

Location location location

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The title of this post is taken from a really terrible - on all sorts of levels! - TV programme in the UK that I have watched bits of once or twice…

This last week I met two potential models, with whom I plan to do some interesting and in part slightly crazy photoshoots in the near future (not necessarily with the two of them together, though that is also a possibility at some time in the future). One of the very nice things to come out of these discussions is that I am thinking a lot about about locations for shoots - we have a number of ideas, and so I can link plans for landscape excursions with planning photoshoots with these two lovely models. This has to be a good thing!

An idea developed with one of the models involves a particular setup on a hillside. I know which hillside I want to use, so I planned an exploratory return trip this weekend. The photographs I have from my last visit are quite uninspiring, for example:

Castlelaw Hill Fort, Pentland Hills

Castlelaw Hill Fort, Pentland Hills

But today I had snow to contend with! The car wouldn’t even get up the little road to the car park when I was out before dawn this morning, so I gave up on the idea of exploring the hill altogether - and explored some fields and woods instead! There are some images (just the digital ones - the film ones will take a little longer) in a gallery tracing some of the changes from autumn-winter.

Castlelaw Hill, Pentland Hills

Recommended site

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Being a cheapskate and fairly broke (these two are inexplicably related, though I don’t want to go into that just now!), I was very happy to stumble across this site: DIYPhotography. The first page I came across was a posting from a little while ago on making your own softbox:

Image © DIYPhotography home-made softbox (click image to go to the Flickr page)

Image © DIYPhotography home-made softbox (click image to go to the Flickr page)

This is just great: I love the improvisational and creative elements to this, and the diversity of comments offering all sorts of advice and improvements. There is something very communitarian about all this that really speaks to me! I’m excited about photographing a couple of new models soon, but before I do that I’m going to print this out and make myself a softbox or two to go with the umbrellas I already have…

Fashion show photography

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A purple shirt and a turquoise dress

A purple shirt and a turquoise dress

Last week I had great fun photographing the Africa-in-Motion closing party and fashion shows, along with my friend Mabel Forsyth. Mabel kindly sent me one of her photographs, capturing a beautiful model in an amazing turquoise dress, with a little purple-shirted gnome in the background… honestly, does that purple really go with that turquoise?!

Photographing an event like a fashion show is new to me - this is about portraiture on a super-high caffeine overdose! Portraits are fine, and I generally love engaging with people to create interesting photographs, but at the fashion shows decisions about composition needed to be taken at lightning speed - I was able to set myself up in a corner (as you can see in Mabel’s photo), which played a key role in the kinds of shots I could get, but there were still decisions needing to be taken all the time. Professional fashion show photographers are said to attempt to capture each model’s face, head and shoulders, and full body - all well-composed and properly lit, of course.

Well that’s a great aspiration… but I only managed this for one or two of the models, and even then the shots were not of a uniform quality! Of course, a professional zoom lens keeping a constant f2.8 aperture might have helped a bit (my non-professional zoom goes from from f3.5 to f5.6 depending on focal length), but this is not really about equipment. It’s a question of skill and incredibly fast reactions that come with a lot of practice - and I have no problem admitting that I’m not able to keep up with that! I don’t see myself having too many opportunities to reach that stage, and I probably wouldn’t want to anyway, given my limited interest in fashion. But I had great fun, produced some usable images, and have even more respect for the hard work done by professional photographers at fashion shows. And that has to be worth something, right? ;)

Event photography: Africa in Edinburgh!

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Directors with Jean-Marie Teno

Directors with Jean-Marie Teno

Photographing at my first wedding in May, I found it a very pressured experience, but this last week I’ve been engaging in a different kind of event photography. Together with my friend Mabel Forsyth I’ve been photographing for the Africa-in-Motion film festival, one of the largest African film festivals outside Africa. This involves us photographing at selected events (the organisers have not booked us for every one of the myriad events that make up the festival) and ensuring images taken in the evening are available for press use by the next morning. There is a pressure in doing that, because there are usually a substantial number of images that need to have quick edits performed on them and made ready within hours of the event happening - no 15 months for edits allowed here!!

I have found all this (a kind of photojournalism, I suppose) to have a certain appeal: composition and ‘getting it right first time’ are important here, as is the need to quickly assess an image as 1) good, 2) good enough provided it’s edited a bit, or 3) not good enough/rubbish (hopefully not too many in the third category!), and then thinking about which edits are needed to improve each image. Having edited more than several hundred images in a couple of nights, I realise that the only edits that I have really been performing are related to cropping, occasional red-eye removal, adjusting/lifting exposure, and noise reduction. For sorting, editing and exporting large numbers of images very quickly, Adobe’s Lightroom 3 has been simply invaluable: I haven’t needed to open Photoshop once (Photoshop will be used for editing a selection of images for high quality print usage after the Festival, of course).

The reception

The reception

One of the interesting things about my crops that I have noticed is that most of them have automatically become 4×5 crops. Without consciously realising it, I have made this my default crop size for portraits; I was aware I was doing this (or going with completely square images) for landscapes, but I’ve been shooting just (environmental) portraits these last few days. The standard 6×4 size that SLRs produce (for historical reasons, it’s the size that 35mm film went with) is too long and thin for me and I generally prefer squarer shapes. That much I knew. But after editing over 200 images in one evening, I realised that most of them had ended up in 4×5 format too… an interesting little development on my part, I think.

The festival is still going strong at the time of writing, ending next week with a fashion show - I’m looking forward to that!

There is a gallery of images here from the festival that I’ll occasionally add to as time goes by (especially from the fashion show), but the festival Facebook page and (I think) the website are showing more images, including ones by Mabel - so check out the photographs and if you are nearby, go to some of the excellent events being organised in the festival!