Light and shade: Black and white

It’s quite simple to develop your own personal style of picture making. You do this by making lots of pictures, as often as you can. Persevere, and your portfolio will become a visual history, recording your progress as a photographer with the passage of time.

This week, a friend asked me to look back through my files, to find a couple of black and white shots I made of some Adirondack chairs. They were taken about ten years ago, during my first visit to New England. I was borrowing a classic, twin-lens reflex film camera, which produced twelve negatives on a roll, each one two and a quarter inches square. Just for fun, I was seeing how I could fit my subjects into that format, printing them later in the darkroom without any cropping, as the example above shows.

This afternoon, when I got back from work, the September sun was streaking longer, and therefore more interesting shadows across the patio than it was in July. So I grabbed my digital camera, before the clouds moved in, then I played for ten minutes in my garden, making studies of a similar wooden chair .

What you see here are merely two of the pictorial punctuation marks taken from a decade of moving continually forward in the exploration of my photographic style. I’m currently appreciating the freedom of digital photography, which allows me to shoot as many frames as I like, with virtually no running costs.

I can’t wait to see how I’ll be working in the year 2017.

Many people ask me why I photograph what I do, or how I make the pictures I make. I believe that using a camera teaches us to see our surroundings more clearly. I do it for fun. I carry a camera with me wherever I go, which is so very easy today: even a mobile phone will do.

I think of a miniature digital camera as a notebook containing an almost endless supply of blank sheets, just waiting to be filled with visual experiments. Unlike film, there are practically no running costs, so if I don’t like what I’ve made, I simply remove the “page” and recycle it.

Today’s study, below, in black and white, is the result of having looked just that little bit more carefully at an ordinary setting. Above is a general view of a typically traditional English tea room, so that you can get your bearings. There’s nothing remarkable about it. The lighting is flat: it lacks contrast. As a picture, I find it empty and boring.

While waiting for the waitress to bring my order, I used the time to see what the sunlight outside was doing to the surfaces of the walls, tables and chairs by the windows. They looked far more interesting, promising possibilities.

It helps us, as picture makers, to try to imagine the end result, even before picking up the camera. When we are new to this approach, we must first make lots of pictures, study them, work out the nature of the gap between our expectations and what the camera gives us, then try again, until we begin to produce photographs which satisfy us. It’s an iterative process, one ideally suited to digital photography, since doing this with film and prints is expensive. As a student at art college, thirty-odd years ago, I frequently chose to spend my food budget on materials (no easy decision for a Cancarian).

Faced with a random collection of lit surfaces, I knew I needed to reduce the fuss, by throwing away the colour later, because the library of classic pictures in my head was already throwing up matches to what my eyes were seeing. They were culled from the kind of artistic interpretations that pioneering photographic artist Paul Strand created in the early part of the last century.

I spent a few moments at what I call “working” the subject, adjusting my viewpoint, paring down the complex story told by the lines and shapes, gently coercing them to fit into the rectangular frame of the viewing screen on my point-and-shoot. They complied, graciously, before my peppermint tea cooled, or my vanilla ice cream melted.

There’s little post-production applied to this image. I employed a few basic techniques in Photoshop, before settling on a range of tones that pleased me (almost any other photo editing package would have done).

I find the end result pleasing, because it makes a more dramatic statement about light and shade than anything else I noticed around the room that afternoon.