Light and shade

Three flats

No, not the musical kind of flats, or, sounding even worse to my ears, punctured tyres, but three apartments sharing one front door.

The thing about choosing a never-ending series of threes to pursue is that pictures pop up in front of my very eyes all the time. No thought required, really.

Chrome

Occasionally, taking a risk with a pocket camera pays off in the form of an unusual picture. Playing such games in a public wash room hones one’s sense of timing to a very fine edge indeed, believe you me.

I’ve been fascinated by odd reflections for about as long as I’ve been studying light. There’s a website dedicated to this kind of photography: The Mirror Project. It has accepted a few of my submissions along the way.

Chagford church

Place names in Devon have a certain flavour about them. Churches in The British Isles liberally sprinkled their own unique condiments into the cauldron which cooked our nation's history.

The Parish Church of St Michael the Archangel, Chagford, is in the Diocese of Exeter. It is the largest of the Whiddon parishes of Dartmoor, which is a benefice formed of Chagford and her five adjacent sister parishes of Drewsteignton, Spreyton, Hittisleigh, Gidleigh and Throwleigh¹.

The Church of England has its own jargon, much of it inherited from The Church of Rome, though many meanings have changed since The Reformation. A diocese is an area controlled by a bishop. A parish is an area cared for by a priest. A benefice is a group of parishes under one such parish priest.

¹Source: "A Walk Around", a leaflet on display inside the church.

Did you guess correctly?

You need a lot of air to work a church organ.

In the days before electric blower motors were installed, it was the lot of one of the hapless choristers to pump the heavy lever which operated the bellows. The organist at the console watched a rudimentary air pressure guage, the rate of descent of which was regularly the cue for some (mostly) non-verbal communication between the two individuals involved in that mechanical music making operation.

Guess

My labels read “empty” and “full”.

What am I?

Black and white, or colour, madam?

The story behind these two portraits began a long time ago. I’ve been waiting quite a few years to add something of mine to it.

Sparkly's sister Karen was a student at an Art College in Cheltenham in the Sixties. Back then, a photographer made a monochrome portrait of her, in a lighting style I deliberately reproduced for this photo of her daughter Ruby, who is today much the same age as her mum was when the original image came into being. It’s my practical way of showing the importance of photography as a social documentary tool, recording, as it does in such high fidelity, events separated by time and space.

A colour variation is also here, partly by way of comparison. One of the questions I often ask about the medium is “Do we react differently to black and white photographs?"

It illustrates too how contemporary cameras have changed photographic working methods. In times bygone, I’d have chosen a particular combination of film, developer and printing paper, processing them, chemically, in a darkroom, physically manipulating the contrast and tonal range I needed to create. That whole technical workflow would have differed completely when making a colour print. But nowadays, shooting digitally, the camera instantly records the subject fully. Black and white has become almost an afterthought, merely one choice made from a virtually infinite number of possibilities. Creative decisions can be delayed, reductions achieved through discarding some of the stored data by employing a few software tools.

I prefer to call my new working environment a Lightroom. It seems more fitting. And when summer comes, I can open the window, to let a breath of fresh air in amongst the pixels.

Picasa effects

I use Photoshop regularly. I know that not everyone has that luxury, so I set myself the challenge of seeing what could be achieved with some simpler, free software.

Picasa is one of several applications available at no cost. The simple download installed itself in a well-behaved fashion. Once it had finished indexing the pictures on my laptop, I was able to delete quite a few unwanted images from folders I'd forgotten all about .

Simple abstractions, like the picture above, can quickly be turned into greetings cards, or used for web design. I made this one in a few minutes, merely by playing with some of the various effects offered by Picasa. I liked that I could undo my changes at any stage, and that the original shot was preserved. Also, the on-line help made it easy for me to discover how to export and re-size the image, making it ready for uploading to this page.

We learn best by playing. I'd say Picasa has quite enough tools to encourage easy, worthwhile experimentation on a minimal budget.

Here's the original point-and-shoot snap, for comparison.

BOGOFF

The new(ish) word “bogoff” seems to have all but replaced the word “twofer”. Buying two for the price of one has been eclipsed, courtesy of those hidden persuaders in our supermarkets, with “buy one, get one free”. This imperative practically forces unwary shoppers into accepting the offer, whether or not they actually need two identical items at the time. It may even contribute to rising obesity here in the over-fed, greedy west.

The powerful marketing psychology concealed within a bogoff offer is presented, misleadingly,  about how the consumer “saves” money. It's never about quickly shifting old stock that isn't moving. Newsflash: we customers spend money when shopping. We can only ever save money in our piggy banks.

I did think that applying the seductive term to shoes, as illustrated here, created a kind of oxymoron. I’ve always been content buying my footwear in pairs.

Sunglasses

If your pocket point-and-shoot or phone camera doesn't zoom out sufficiently wide to get enough into your pictures, take a moment to look around for a handy substitute. Sunglasses and polished metal teapots spring instantly to mind, but lots of other curved reflective surfaces will materialise, once you've open your eyes to the possibilities.

Sunday surprises

It's unusual to get April snow in England, so Sparkly and I got up early, then went for a walk round the village with our cameras, before the sun melted away the picture postcard effect which Birlingham had adopted this morning.

Jane needed photos for her firm's magazine; I wanted to fix some pleasant memories of where we've lived for nearly ten years, before we move away.

The snow was not the only surprise: I'm not used to being observed by Alpacas when I'm making pictures.

Lifting the shadows

I walked into St Mary’s Church, Batsford this week. The walls were set with candelabra, each one sporting three candle sticks. I found one I liked, near a window, in front of a pew covered by a carved wooden canopy.

This was a corner of the building with extremes of light and shade. There was too much range for the camera to record in one frame, so I decided to add a little lighting control, to help the camera capture the image I could already see in my head. I used two accessories: a cigarette lighter to bring the candles to life, and a small, remotely triggered flash gun to light the dark panelling. The process went like this:

1) I found out what the camera was already giving me. As the wide shot shows, the soft light from the north side of the church washed in from the right, catching the white wax, the wrought metalwork and the dogtooth pattern of the wooden arch, gently revealing their shape and form. Inside the canopy, the panelling and pews are in deep shadow, without detail.

2) I wanted to force the flames a warmer yellow, so I white-balanced the camera to “cloudy”. The glow from the three flames brought out more of the carving.

3) I needed to show the texture of the carved woodwork behind the pew, so I put a radio-triggered flash gun out of sight, on the seating, setting it to manual exposure. I also wanted this new light source to add a few highlights and bright edges to the ironwork, so I stood by the wall bracket and looked into the pew, to make sure I could see the flash. I could, which guaranteed that the light from it would hit the metal from behind and to the side (as the lens would see it). Back at the camera, the flash unit was still hidden from view, so I knew I wouldn’t get any unwanted lens flares from stray, uncontrolled  light. I made this one light source do as much work as possible; I like to keep my lights simple and efficient.

4) A test shot showed the flash was too strong, so I dialed it down in power a couple of stops (it was set on manual, remember), covered it with a clean, white handkerchief, to smooth out the harsh, focussed look which the raw head has, then made the picture I’d first imagined.

I reviewed the image, checked the histograms, and zoomed in on the sharp shadow of the candle holder thrown onto the wall under the window. I could accept it might have been coming from the candles, (it’s really from the small flash source, far away, so it has hard edges) so I chose to live with it. I could have spent more time repositioning the flash, but there’s a fine dividing line between having pure fun with my ongoing series of “threes”, and getting bored with the impossible quest for perfection: life is way too short, and anyway, outside there was a patch of sunshine breaking through, just crying out for different pictures to be made.

Brixham, Devon

Brixham is situated in what has been called The English Riviera. A varied pastel palette of high rows of houses contrasts gently against the primary hues of the fishing boats floating beneath.

A modern fishing industry keeps the town alive: diesel-engined crabbing vessels chug slowly back into harbour, laden with crab pots filled with writhing catches destined for the dining tables of some of the best restaurants in the land.

This tiny stretch of coastline saw William of Orange land to take the crown of England in 1688. It’s forts and cannons stood resolute against the threat of Napoleon. I stood too, fascinated by the relatively tiny size of a full-scale replica English galleon: The Golden Hind. The original ship was commanded, on its famous expedition, by Francis Drake, in 1577. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I, just three years later.

Albion’s shores are indeed its history books.