Light and shade

Three poppies

I'm keeping it simple for now. My local Library offers a really great little Internet café facility, but time tonight time is running out fast.

Sparkly and I went for a walk with friends last night, just around the village. A sunny wall of the old church has been nourishing a fine collection of tall poppies. I'll wait for these seed heads to dry out, then take one or two home for planting, to see what colours they might bring to next season's flowering.

Watch this space.

Three stallholders

Cakes, baked by some of the members of Bishops Cleeve Women's Institute were on sale in the High Street during the splendid summer fair on Sunday. The theme was World War II, which explains the dress code for these three stallholders.

I wrote their names on the paper bag containg the tea-time goodies I bought. It got lost in the chaos of the weekend house move, though happily not until after the contents had been consumed. You see here, from left to right, Sandra, Yvonne and Margaret.

The four Enots were out and about too, kindly photographed here by Sparkly's brother Simon.

Three benches

The weather pattern this year seems to be a repeat of last year: a wetter than usual May has left surface water all over the fields which surround my home. The car park at Eckington Bridge was under water again last week.

It’s scary echo: an extremely  wet May preceded the floods last summer, precipitating misery from which many people are still recovering. Repairs to damaged homes are still incomplete. Nerves are frayed.

Summer? That's merely a word, one which appears to be changing its meaning.

Three Mackerel

I don’t often interfere with my pictures in Photoshop, but these three fish on ice were rather poorly lit in the retail side of the smokery where they were on sale.

Mackerel have distinctive, rather graphic markings, so I decided that a posterised image would quite suit them.

Three in one

I write here quite often that having a a few picture themes as ongoing strands to explore is a way of keeping one’s eye in.

Occasionally, a random combination of strands pops up, as here: a window and a group of three. In such moments, it’s nigh impossible for me to resist call of the camera.

Three candles

I promised Peacebear over at "Eye of a Lens" that I’d post my next phone camera picture. We’d been talking, on and off, about making pictures of lighted candles.

Tonight, after my weekly guitar lesson, I needed to escape from some tricky fretboard practice which was stretching not only my mind but also my fingers. A set of new, thicker strings had dealt its own sadistic challenges to my dexterity.

I hunted out a box of matches (no mean feat in the middle of house-moving preparations, as says it meself) then lit three waxy red stalks, the better to play with the buttons on my Sony Ericsson mobile.

I liked what the “Night” setting was doing. After that, all I had to do was keep the tiny, fixed-focus lens far enough away from the flames not to crack it, then press the OK button a few times.

As for that guitar, it insisted on being the subject of the final phone picture of the night. The deliberate loss of colour conceals some sanguine sweat and tears, dripped during the riffs and licks I made earlier this evening when jamming .

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.

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.

Prodded

Even when my mind is drifting in neutral gear, miles away from all thoughts of picture making, two of my top personal photographic affirmations can be forceful enough to push me into having fun.

 They were, in this case: 

1) Always carry a camera

and

2) Recognise groups of three 

This image was made at the weekend, in the home of my two dear old friends, Al & Jan. Their house is an Aladdin’s cave of random, creative artefacts. I was stacking some cans of booze, in a post-party, morning after a very late night, clearing-up sort of a way, when I spied these three pieces of skewered ceramic, gently bathed in soft skylight filtering from above, down through the milky way of the conservatory roof above me. 

The picture was made in seconds. The tidying up took rather longer.

Three lanterns

‘Twas the night before the Winter Solstice, and my dear old friend Alex had again asked me to photograph the parade of lanterns in Salisbury, Wiltshire.

This year’s event was the biggest ever, with about 850 people of mixed ages processing through the centre of this historic English Cathedral City, carrying on high the lanterns they’d made under Alex’s patient, creative guidance during the many workshops he’d held earlier this year.

I dutifully amassed scores of shots to Al’s brief. None of them were the kind of images I’d make if left to my own devices, but there are times when professional standards means obeying the client’s instructions, because the photographs were needed to tell a certain story. On-camera flash isn’t my favourite form of artificial lighting, but sometimes it simply can’t be avoided for spontaneous press work on freezing cold, pitch black nights.

When it was all over, I spent a few minutes looking at the world through my own eyes again: work hard, play hard is my motto. These two girls had jumped down into one of the grassy pits containing the pairs of powerful floodlights which illuminate Salisbury Cathedral and its tall spire each night.

I made exactly the kind of picture that satisfies me on several counts, and it’s one that neatly answers those who ask me what I like to photograph. My main interest is, and has always been, the way light behaves: what it does, and how it can be recorded, however challenging that may be. In such conditions as these, persuading even the best digital electronics to capture a recognisable view requires the application of some fairly extreme techniques. But if you’ve only got a little point-and-shoot, just fix a “night” scene setting, them jam yourself and your camera against something solid (big, old trees are good) and don’t press the button until after you’ve breathed out, because image stabilisation systems need as much help as you can give them in very low light.

Regular observers will also recognise yet another addition to my virtually eternal series of “threes”.

Viewpoint

My mate Dave quietly acknowledges the struggle I have with my fear of heights, which is probably why he stumped up both our entrance fees to the bloke who was on duty at the base of the old stone lighthouse in Whitby last weekend.

I climbed manfully up eighty-one steps up, then edged stoically out onto a plinth surrounded by railings, and the customary battle of mind over matter began. I employed my most successful diversionary tactic to date: I set myself the task of coming up with a picture for this piece, which focussed my concentration sufficiently sharply to almost forget my height above sea level.

The point of this picture, apart from being simply yet another in my long-running series of “threes”, is to get you to start looking at how you can make the ordinary appear to be extraordinary, when viewed from an unusual viewpoint. The figures here have been drastically foreshortened by perspective, abstracted as shapes, set against a backgound, creating the kind of image we see less often, which is harder to read quickly, and therefore, I think, more interesting.

When I was a child, I was an avid reader, so my father used to bring me home a copy of The Children’s Newspaper once a week. It often published a photograph of an everyday object, shot from an unusual angle, which the reader had to guess. I was good at that, which might explain why I like constructing similar pictures so much.