Light and shade

Accentuate warm colours

Arriving at work at much the same time each morning throughout the year could be boring, if it weren’t for the changing seasons delivering different lighting conditions on a daily basis.

This morning the orange sun flamed down from a clear, pale, blue sky, raking amber warmth across frosted grassland.

I set my camera to capture something of the glowing lighting effects I could see all around me. Selecting the white balance icon for “cloudy”, I forced the camera to adjust its internal sense of colour, tricking it into expecting a colder, more blue illumination than that which was really there. Yes: I cheated, simply for effect, deliberately recording the golden light as even warmer than it really was.

Why not explore some of those unfamiliar menus in your camera from time to time? Try out different colour balance settings. Discover what happens. Always sticking with those automatic program functions can seriously damage your picture-making health.

Please print your photos

There’ll be a dearth of snapshots in the future, if we don’t print our digital images now.

This is one of my early attempts at self-portraiture, a process almost every photographer goes through when learning about the medium. The year was 1966. I was experimenting with my first 35mm film camera, a cheap import, made in Hong Kong, bought with money I’d saved from my paper round and washing dishes in a coffee bar.

My mum kept this three-and-a-half by five inches, glossy black-and-white picture for years, along with dozens of others, in an old shoe box, in a drawer. She gave me some more of them recently; a random selection taken from those she’s still hanging on to, saying “One day this will all be yours, Peter.” She’s been telling me that, once or twice a week, for the last twenty years.

If it had been possible, way back in the Sixties, to have taken this photo with a mobile phone, the chances of it surviving for over four decades would have been nil: changes in consumer technology would have soon seen to that. So, I repeat my opening plea: print your work.

Today it’s never been easier to produce attractive, good quality photograph albums, quickly and cheaply. There are plenty of online services available. You simply upload your files, drag a few thumbnails around some preview pages on your computer screen, pay electronically, then wait for your order to arrive in the post. When they are delivered, display your albums on bookshelves, where people can access them, in a low-tech way, for what they are: hugely enjoyable anthologies of unrepeatable moments in time, some of which, like this one, might make you glad they survived.

Remembrance Day

Aftermath

Have you forgotten yet?. . .
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same--and War's a bloody game. . .
Have you forgotten yet?. . .
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench--
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?"

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack--
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads--those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?. . .
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget.

March 1919
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

Display courtesy of Saint Mary Magdalene Church, Himbleton, Worcestershire, UK.

Foreground interest

There are often times when I need to be free from toting a bag full of heavy camera gear, so I set off with a small point-and-shoot in my pocket instead. It’s a fantastic little camera, capable of conjuring picture-making magic, but there are times when I wish its lens would zoom out wider.

The art of compromise is to make the best of what you have. One of the tricks I employ when photographing people in their working environment is to add some foreground interest. Dave and I, when we're in three-letter acronym mood, refer to this as “including a bit of FGI”.

Including a bit of foreground interest is a time-tested technique used regularly by professional photojournalists. It's a way of squeezing a lot into a single shot, and, as you see here, the exaggerated perspective, produced by getting in low and close, generates the illusion that the lens is just a bit wider than it really is. Once you do this, you’ll be using one of the very basic items in the visual tool kits of world-famous documentary photographers. Take a look, for example, at what Sebastião Salgado does with it, when he wants to.

In summer, I was delighted to have discovered the watercolours of Artist in Residence Christopher Ware, in his studio gallery at Levisham Station, on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. I was impressed by the way he had captured some atmospheric light in one particular interior scene, which immediately reminded me of the very happy days when, as a small boy, my granddad, who was a steam engine driver, would take me to see working locomotives at close quarters. I then believed they were alive. I do still.

Chris’ painterly talents combined some of my favourite childhood memories with my lifelong passion for observing the behaviour of light, which is why I journeyed north a couple of weeks ago, to fulfill an earlier promise I'd made to meet him, then treat myself to one of his high quality Giclée prints.