Light and shade

Dare to be different

There was a stunning sunrise during a recent drive to work.

I’d been thinking about how our creative energies often benefit when we take a different approach to routine: dressing in colours we don’t normally wear, walking through town using different paths, listening to music we wouldn't choose ordinarily. Such tricks help our brains burn new paths for thought, enabling us to hook into ideas in ways we’d overlook if left to stagnate in our ordinary habits.

I wanted to photograph the apricot sky on that crisp morning, though not simply in a picture-postcard way. My car’s dark paintwork and smooth curves offered me a less travelled road to this image, one which I was infinitely more pleased to work at capturing.

Reflecting

This is typical of the kind of complex image I love to capture. The fascination for me is in the variety of ways in which light behaves: refraction, reflection and transmission to name but three scientific terms for this most mercurial and enigmatic of physical energies. A simple piece of curved glass in a bookshop window, here behaving as a wide angle mirror, showing Ludlow architecture, yet simultaneously allowing through a glimpse of the interior display lighting and some of the stock items.

I thought more deeply about this picture after I read a poem last week, written by one of the blind children I teach. I had also just helped another compose an e-mail home. One boy was imagining, the other dreaming. Both were questioning what it must be like to be able to see.

The frustrating irony of it for me as a photographer is that I can't ever share with these students my impressions of light. I can only dimly hint at the sense of sight, inadequately, by using words. It's like trying to show a two-dimensional being (who lives in Flatland) the solid volume of a sphere. The discussion would be limited to what they could perceive purely as a shape called a circle.

High anxiety

“You can get all the news you need from the weather report”, sang Paul Simon. For those of you watching the news, Tewkesbury is in the headlines again, right where it does not want to be.

This public footpath in Birlingham village, where I live, was under water four days ago, after twenty-four hours of constant rain, simply because the ground is completely saturated.

There are still many families living, cramped and cold, in caravans and static homes, displaced, miserably, since the summer floods, waiting for repairs to their devastated homes. Now the rains have returned, precipitating a depressing, fearful atmosphere across the region.

These days, I can get all the weather I need from the news reports.

Establish a rapport

There’s a deal of Internet discussion on some of the photography forums¹ about the law as it applies to taking pictures in public places. Many photographers seem to believe they can snap away freely at almost anyone or anything, at any time, in any place. It’s as well to remember that personal belief systems may not automatically be considered as valid defence in civil court actions.

I’ve been enjoying my street photography for decades. In that time I’ve come to realise that to produce a documentary picture like this one, one that pleases both me and the sitter, it's absolutely essential to establish a rapport with those I photograph, long ere I aim a lens at them.

I find that genuine street musicians, like Madi Stimpson here, are universally receptive to three main approaches: a no-strings cash donation up front, coupled with a genuine interest in them as working artists, leading to a respectful request for permission to photograph them. For me, being a guitarist always helps start a conversation. When I met him, Madi was playing Scott Joplin’s “Piano Rag” dexterously in the key of C, enlivening Ludlow town centre on a bitterly cold day. I began with "Your fingers are working well today", clapping my gloved hands together.

As for the law, I’m happier respecting it. If the image was to have been for profit, a Model Release form would have protected both me, as the photographer, and Madi, as the subject, for nothing more than a “consideration”, which could have been as economical as the gift of a print, or, as in this instance, the promise, dutifully and professionally fulfilled, to illustrate a part of Madi's musical life on one of my photo-blogs.

1. I’m sure my old purist of a Latin teacher would much prefer “fora”.

Curt's "Foolproof Pancakes"

This evening, Sparkly decided to whip up the perfect antidote to a rainy Monday, by opening one of my spiral-bound journals at the page where our New England friend Curt Miller’s pancake recipe was written. The entry was dated Saturday 17th October 1998.

I remember sitting watching Curt in his kitchen, expertly producing a tempting stack of delicious treats, then experiencing several of those melt-in-the-mouth moments as Jane and I appreciated his perfect breakfast pancakes, liberally covered with Maple Syrup.

It was the real American deal.

Foolproof Pancakes
(Makes 10 three-inch pancakes)

One cup all-purpose flour
Three quarters cup buttermilk
One quarter cup whole milk
One teaspoon sugar
One half-teaspoon each of baking soda and salt
One large egg
Two tablespoons unsalted butter
Vegetable oil (for cooking them)

Whisk everything in a bowl.
Place a lightly oiled skillet on a high heat.
Blot with a  paper towel.
Reduce heat to medium high.
Add one-quarter cup of batter for each of three pancakes.
Cook until there are bubble at the edges.
Turn with a metal turner, then cook other side.

Change your viewpoint

Once you’ve found a subject, change your viewpoint. Explore it by putting your lens in different places.

Here I wanted to show you the effect on the picture that the angle between the camera and the light source has. Look a the relationship between the shadows cast from the direct sunlight and the subject. Simply by moving round, three quite different images were produced in seconds.

When shooting on location, give yourself plenty of choice, so that when you look at your photographs later, on your computer screen, you can make decisions about what pleases you most.

Any Port in a Storm

Cap’n Sparrowlegs has an ego the size of Greenland, so it wasn’t long before his boasting about having his likeness posted on “Light and Shade” had produced disgruntled mutterings from the rest of the crew.

Retired First Mate Bluebeard, once a universally feared, gnomic global pirate, lead the sailors’ demands for up to date mug shots, so I got busy.

Typhoon-tempered Bluebeard has been becalmed in his old age by chronic arthritis, brought on by sailing the seven seas in all weathers, without using the proper Personal Protective Equipment, then aggravated, against all sound medical advice, by an excessive fondness for fortified wines. He’s recently taken to pootling around, in calm, warm waters, in a turquoise ceramic coracle. But in a force nine gale, he’ll be found snoring louder than a spouting whale fish, sleep-swinging in his hammock, after drinking his fill of vintage port, filched in the dead of night from a locker 'neath the Captain's table.

These days Bluebeard contents himself with breeding pedigree show mice, an interest he took up when he was but a lowly cabin boy, when vermin control in the  bilges formed a mere fraction of his duties as an apprentice. Now, aged 92, he still regularly wins prizes at miniature travelling circus competitions, presenting the trained, performing trio you see with him here. I've been told by the Second Mate that, as part of the act, these rodents leap over flaming cheeses, but I've yet to see it for myself.

Buccagneering Gnome

A photograph can engage a viewer’s interest and also remind them of previously seen, similar subjects. Regular readers of "Light and Shade" will already have met one of the hand-knitted creations which occasionally take form during dark, wet winter evenings, springing to life from down in the deep fathoms of Sparkly’s imagination.

Allow me to introduce another: Captain Jack Sparrowlegs. Obligingly, he came with me this morning into the garden, ostensibly to keep a weather eye on the land-locked Malvern Hills, though I suspect he’s been hankering after finding a ship of his own to command for some time now.

It was easier to snap him while he was relaxing on a wooden foot stool, under the soft, even light of a bright but cloudy day, than to set up indoor backgrounds, lights and stands, for which extra effort I was not in the mood. Jack didn’t mind. I think, perhaps, he’d heard news of an outward bound clipper from one or two overhead seagulls, who’d likely been blown in from down choppy Bristol way.

Harry Cowan

Not all the pictures I make are lighting studies. Sometimes it’s simply about the fun of capturing certain moments.
Serendipity frequently plays a key role in a Fab Four Day Out. Dave, a long-time model railway buff, spotted a sign advertising a rarely open exhibit when we were out and about today, then delighted in taking us into the front room of a house for a closer look.
Historian Harry Cowan has lived in Stratford-upon-Avon since 1981. He painstakingly built this scaled-down replica of the town, incorporating a great deal of imaginative fine detail.
You see him here demonstrating the workings of his model railway, based on how it might have looked in 1947, today running his trains to an authentic, twenty-four hour timetable.