Mike Green

Posts by Mike Green

Musings on: being aware of the ‘right kit’

The camera doesn’t matter: really?

After nearly two years of making images, I’m convinced that it’s the photographer who creates a good photograph, not the camera. Composing the image by choosing complementary subject, light and point of view, and then processing the capture to best effect; these are the things which make a fine photograph, and consequently many types of image may be captured well with the whole gamut of camera types, albeit with differences in what the capture can be used for (size of print, primarily). Of course, there are a few clear, general exceptions to this: large format cameras are not exactly ideal for fast-moving sports; mobile ‘phone cameras are not the best tool for photographing underground (I’ve tried this; it was not a great success…. particularly not for the ‘phone in question).

Somewhere between ‘the type of camera makes no difference‘ and ‘the camera cannot be of type X‘, however, there are certain pieces of equipment which can enable an otherwise impossible shot. I’m prompted to write about this due to a recent experience where I realised that I could now make an image which I first attempted nearly two years ago, purely due to the acquisition of a particular item a few months back.

I’m talking about tilt/shift lenses here; not in the context of making toy-like images of full-sized objects, but in their ability to move the plane of focus to somewhere other than parallel to the film/sensor plane. For anyone not familiar with the opportunities afforded by camera movements, one important effect is that achieved by tilting the lens, relative to the back of the camera. Doing this produces a focal plane which can be placed conveniently where it’s needed, rather than parallel to the film or sensor. In the case of landscapes, the most obvious usage is to produce sharp focus from somewhere beneath the camera, right out to the far horizon. In fact, this plane also has depth of field around it, as with a normal lens, except that this depth is wedge-shaped, diminishing to virtually nothing close to the camera and increasing to ‘a lot more’ at infinity.

Exactly where the plane of focus is, and how it behaves, is explained in several good articles on-line about how this all works, so I’m not about to write another one. For details I’d recommend either Tim Parkins’s description in issue 12 of the excellent ‘Great British Landscapes’ on-line magazine, or the Cambridge in Colour article on using tilt/shift lenses. For the purpose of this article, the key point is that my 24mm tilt/shift lens enabled me to place a plane of focus from a point about 300mm below the camera to a point about eight miles away, something I could not do before I bought it and which was essential to the composition I wanted.

And my particular problem was?

To backtrack a bit: I live in the Three Peaks area of North Yorkshire; this is karst landscape, formed by the erosion of limestone by the climate. i.e. it rains a lot here, there is a massive layer of limestone exposed on, or just beneath, the surface of the dales, and limestone dissolves in water. One of the major, visible features of karst landscapes is limestone pavements: great areas of limestone with deep cracks called grikes and blocks of ‘pavement’ called clints. When I first took up landscape photography I saw the obvious potential of these dramatic features as subjects and spent some considerable time walking the pavements looking for interesting formations. One that I found, the one in this image, is up near Ribblehead viaduct on the edge of a small outcrop of pavement imaginatively named ‘Middle scar’, it being in the centre of a line of three such scars. Having found it, I spent, without exaggeration, several hours, on more than one occasion, attempting to make a decent composition from it. I failed miserably (and the misery was real; I was very, very frustrated!).

'Talon'

The composition I was trying to achieve was the one above, but I couldn’t get it to work at the time. Whilst I had a wide range of focal lengths available to me, I simply couldn’t find a combination of tripod position and focal length which kept this striking rock feature as the dominant, main subject whilst also having a depth of field great enough to include both the rock, 300mm away, and distant Pen-y-ghent, one of the Yorkshire Three Peaks, eight miles away. The best I could do was to use a very wide angle lens: this gave me the depth of field I wanted, but left the talon-like feature as a diminutive series of runnels in an expanse of horizontal limestone.

At the time, I didn’t understand how this could be done. In fact, with the kit I had then, I’m now sure it was impossible. What was needed was a camera with movements; either a large format camera or its poor relation, a tilt/shift lens on my SLR. At the time, I did make a few images with the ‘right’ foreground, and I convinced myself that the blurred hill was ‘just fine’; except that I didn’t really convince myself; I never liked any of those images! At the time, I wasn’t diligently recording possible future shots and forgot all about this frustrating and unsuccessful early foray into photographing limestone pavements, and about that interesting feature. And then I bought Joe Cornish’s new film ‘With landscape in mind‘.

This was an excellent purchase and I thoroughly recommend it. It’s a fascinating and beautifully filmed documentary account, narrated entirely by Joe Cornish, of a week in his life of making images. For me, it’s particularly good as several of the sites used are relatively local. Most pertinently, one of the images in the film uses the ‘talon’ feature, which had slipped from my memory. Joe captures an image using that same piece of rock, though differently from how I had sought to use it and in considerably less time than I spent when not capturing what I wanted, I’m sure! Needless to say, I was out on that scar the very next evening after watching the film and was finally able to produce the shot I’d envisaged many months ago. Understandably, I was very grateful for the prompt to return and also rather relieved, comparing my shot later, that they use the same two major features but are otherwise distinctly different images.

A broader point

Returning to the beginning of this item, I can now see that having a broad knowledge of the type of facilities various cameras and lenses can offer is important to avoid restricting creativity. Perhaps it’s not restricting creativity precisely – I wasn’t prevented from thinking of the image when I didn’t have the necessary piece of kit, I just couldn’t make it – perhaps it’s more a case that it’s necessary to know what’s available, in terms of equipment, in case it should ever be needed. In my case, I didn’t know that cameras with movements existed at all, let alone their purpose; and then later I didn’t know that tilt/shift lenses existed for SLRs. By the time I knew both those things, and had such a lens, I’d forgotten about the composition.

So, my lesson learned is to continue to read widely on equipment, largely so that I’ll know what might fit the bill when I next find that I need ‘something different’. I’m just hoping that whatever that item is won’t one day turn out to be a large format camera and film, as I discussed in an earlier piece on the lure of large format.

Musings on: photography as art, or not

“Photography is not art…”

What a ridiculous statement!

I’d never, to my knowledge, noticed anyone expressing this opinion until I moved from taking mountaineering snapshots to making photographs for their own sake. Now, since I read a fair few books and on-line magazines on photography, variations on the theme seem to crop up all the time. OK, so not as much as ‘which is the best sensor / lens / film / software?‘ – the prevalence of those debates is in a whole different order of magnitude – but pretty frequently nonetheless. I’ve been resisting the impulse to express a written opinion on the topic for a few months now, but here I shall succumb to that inevitability, and I’ll do so largely to record what I think now, as a relative beginner to photography, in order that I can revisit this and see if my views have changed at some unspecified point in the future.

I shall judiciously avoid attempting to define what ‘art’ might be, but definitions are always handy and one of the best that I’ve found, at least in terms of being comprehensive – though ironically not in its art or poetry – is the opening statement on ‘Art’ from Wikipedia. The following is a selective quotation:

”Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items … in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings…. Generally, art is made with the intention of stimulating thoughts and emotions.”

There are a few important aspects to that definition, but I think the last sentence is especially pertinent, and it conveniently allows for art to be not fully defined by the activity itself; rather, it’s a combination of the activity and the intent to ‘stimulate thoughts and emotions‘. In that sense, my images of various mountains and ice-falls don’t qualify as art – which is entirely reasonable, fine and most certainly true – but my ‘for their own sake’ images do. Whether or not they’re good art is another question, but I certainly arrange the objects within them and intend that they engender an emotion, or perhaps a thought or two; I may fail to do that, but the key thing, from the perspective of fulfilling the definition above, is that I try.

Based on the above, it’s entirely obvious that some photographic images constitute ‘art’.

I really cannot see how it can be reasonably denied that a subset of photographs are ‘art’. Perhaps it’s more revealing to look at this from the the opposite viewpoint? I think that the whole question arises since so many photographs are clearly not intended as ‘art’; they’re intended as recordings of a time and a place; a stimulus for memory or a mechanism for sharing an experience with people not present when the photograph was taken.

When such a vast quantity of photographs exist as do now, it’s easy to forget that a minority of them have been created not as mere recordings but for a completely different reason: as ‘objects to stimulate thoughts or emotions‘. What I’m suggesting here is that the predominance of photographs which were never intended to be ‘art’ tends to conceal the fact that this small minority of photographs certainly are intended as such, and the Wikipedia definition above implies that this intent itself is sufficient to qualify the result as ‘art’, whether they be good or bad examples of it. (Clearly, ‘art’ may be simultaneously a record, but the simplistic division helps [me] in seeing where the argument that photography is not art might stem from.)

Technology dependence…

The real elephant in the room here, however, is perhaps the perceived highly technical nature of most photography: its machine-dependence. Yes, some photography can be very simple to create, technically, but it’s never as intrinsically simple as mixing various coloured liquids and arranging them on a piece of drawing material with brushes; after all, starting from nothing, it’s necessary to first build a camera, which I’ll suggest is more problematic than creating paint and a brush. It appears that some people will never accept something which is so fundamentally reliant on non-trivial technology – the camera – as ‘art’.

This technology-dependence, combined with the ubiquity of cameras, also contributes to photographic art being seen as at best a second-rate art form. The usually-unvoiced argument would go something along the lines of “I can’t paint, but I can use a camera” or “I’m not an artist, but I can take a photo; so a photo cannot be art”. The fatal flaw in this argument is, of course, that most people don’t use a camera to its fullest potential since they don’t try to, in much the same way that most people cannot use a set of paints and brushes to their fullest potential either, though they’re for some reason aware of their lack of skill with the paints and don’t attempt to. The camera, however, is a means of recording things, as well as a creative tool, so the majority of people do use them, just not with the intent of creating art! Famously, ‘familiarity breeds contempt‘, and people in general are very familiar with cameras.

‘Photographer’ is a tool-centric label…

A last point which I suspect strengthens the ‘not art’ opinion: people who make art using a camera are almost invariably called ‘photographers’; an accurate but not entirely helpful label. People who paint on canvas, or paper, or whatever medium they’ve chosen, tend to be called ‘artists’; and, when they’re labelled as ‘painters’, there is usually an extra adjective or two added in there to make it clear that they’re not painting the surfaces of buildings (unless they’re ‘graffiti artists’ or painters of frescos, of course!). The ‘photographer’ label is akin to calling people using brushes on canvas ‘users of paint’ or some such wildly general and prosaic term – unhelpful and misleading in the extreme whilst still, undeniably, accurate. Avoidance of apparent pretension makes it more or less unavoidable that we use the term ‘photographer’ rather than ‘artist’ when describing ourselves, but it’s unfortunate that it’s such an unequivocally tool-centric word. Some sculptors form their work by beating metal into artistic shapes: are they usefully described as ‘hammerers’? I think not!

The camera is merely a tool, just like a paint brush…

In conclusion to this first record of what I think about this supposed debate: photographers with artistic intent must arrange their images by choosing their viewpoint, matching it with complementary light, including or excluding subject matter through choice of lens and framing, and then must process the resultant capture, whether film or digital, to suit their vision and intent in making the image. To me, all that seems to tie in very well with the above definition of ‘art’. The observation that a camera may be used, and predominantly is used, with no consideration of any of the above simply shows that the camera is merely a tool, and that not all tools always produce art – it depends on what they’re used for, how they’re used, and by whom. Conversely, art may be produced with any number of tools, and those include the camera.

Incidentally, the unfortunate tool-centricity of the word ‘photographer’ is why I, after much internal debate resulting from the strong dislike of categorisation I expressed in an earlier article, chose to prefix ‘photography’ on my portfolio site with the words ‘fine art’. It is perhaps, as yet, an aspirational label, but I concluded that I preferred to err by appearing overly-ambitious than to define my endeavours purely on the basis of my use of a particular tool.

And finally, yes, I’m entirely aware of the irony of seeking to refute the ‘photography is not art’ argument whilst also objecting to categorisation… My only defence is that it’s a different sort of category, and that I did say that some categorisation is useful! Nonetheless, please do comment on any other contradictions which I may have missed.

Musings on: increasing your ‘photographic luck’…

“You were lucky to catch that shot!”

I’ve heard that said more than a few times since I started making ‘serious’ photographs, mostly from – and here I’m continuing an entirely tongue-in-cheek gripe from my last blog item – non-photographers. More specifically, non-photographers who have cameras and don’t often ‘get lucky’ in the same way that they perceive that I do.

In recent months, I’ve adopted the approach of not arguing the point, preferring the “Yes, didn’t I” response to “Well, no, I did lots of preparation…..”. The trouble is that the type of preparation I’m talking about here is not the specific planning I discussed in my last article on using The Photographer’s Ephemeris and Google Earth ground level view to pre-visualise compositions. That’s a possible, and very useful, aspect of preparation, but not the whole of it, and it’s the part which is quick and easy to describe:

“TPE tells me where the Sun and Moon will be, and Google Earth shows me what the view is from any given point”;

done; simple; and it doesn’t usually engender a great long debate, unless the questioner is genuinely interested in the implicit how part of that statement. Conversely, trying to explain what I’m discussing here, the wider factors which go into being prepared to make a photograph, can end up in…… let’s say ‘a degree of contention‘.

I think the contention arises since what I’m essentially going to argue in this article is all about probability and statistics – not literally, this isn’t a mathematical treatise of any kind, but that’s what it amounts to. In summary:

if I prepare better for a photographic opportunity which may arise, the likelihood of my making a half decent image when that opportunity does arise goes up considerably. Put another way “you make your own luck”.

At its most reductive level, the old adage that ‘the best camera is the one you have with you all the time’ clearly comes into play: it’s much more likely that I’ll ‘get lucky’ if I always carry a camera. I don’t, and I know that reduces my opportunities, but pretty much everything in life is a compromise and I’m not yet ready to start carrying my backpack of kit at all times.

Understand your equipment as well as possible

That point does lead to the first and most obvious element of ‘being prepared’, however; the technical element. There’s little point in having a camera capable of capturing good images and failing to learn how to use it flexibly. More accurately, and returning to the probability idea: if you do learn as much as possible about how your equipment works, what it can and can’t do, when and how to use which filters, and all the other things which make up the technical side of photography, then the chances of getting all those technical details right, even in a rush, when the fabled opportunity arises are considerably raised. Often, that moment of stunningly fine light lasts just that, a moment, or a few seconds; fiddling around with camera controls for any longer than strictly necessary is likely to lead, as they say, to disappointment. Personally, I don’t find the whole ‘how to drive a camera’ thing terribly interesting. Important: very much so. Interesting: only in the way that any complex piece of kit is interesting – it’s not what making images is about (to me, that is – but each to their own!).

I’m not ranking aspects of preparedness; I think that all the elements I’m writing about in this item are important for improving the odds of ‘getting lucky’, but I do think that familiarity with the equipment – camera, lenses, filters, tripod, light meter; everything – is fundamental. To veer dangerously close to mathematics again: it’s a necessary but not a sufficient requirement, and it’ll increase the probability of success.

Maintain a list of compositions

Another – not the second, just another – element is having compositions in mind ready for when the light is either ‘good’ or ‘right’, depending on whether you’ve also worked out what the ‘right’ light will be for a given composition. This is a big topic. It covers a range of time, in terms of preparation, from seconds to months, or even seasons. At one end of the scale, I like to look around an area for compositions before leaping into getting the camera out; there’s little point in waiting for stunning light and then frantically hunting around for something to put in the frame. What that means in practice is that I will sometimes scout a location and not actually make any exposures. More probably I’ll take a few shots as reminders, even if the light is uninteresting. That’s where the longer term comes in: I’m gradually building up a set of notes on things that I think may be good compositions, given certain lighting conditions. The idea is that I can revisit those areas at the appropriate time of year, or when a particular weather pattern is predicted, and know exactly where to go. In theory, it means that I can hurry to a pre-planned composition and get set up as soon as the weather deigns to do what I’d like it to, and having several of these ideas ready means that there’s more chance of at least one of them fitting the weather on any given day. Again, it increases the probability of being lucky.

Naturally, that sort of preparation is easiest for local subjects. There’s a particular composition I have in mind in the Cairngorms, but I’m not about to drive hundreds of miles on the spur of the moment when the met office predicts a certain weather pattern which will suit it! That said, I’m currently working on – and when I say ‘working on’ here, what I mean is that I have decided to do this and will shortly get my act together and start – I’m currently working on making a list of possible compositions in the area of Scotland I shall be visiting in a few months. I’ll be using TPE and Google Earth for this, as well as my existing knowledge of the area and OS maps for access routes and timings. The intention is to arrive knowing where to go in response to a variety of weather conditions, both at different times of day and at those points when the rain slackens off and the midges aren’t too active.

To reiterate the main theme of this article, whatever level of compositional preparation I actually do, whether it’s on the obsessive end of the scale or the ‘here’s a list of a few ideas‘ end, it will increase the probability of coming back with worthwhile images from a trip. Clearly, in any distribution of probabilities, there is the potential of returning with ‘nothing’ – I would like to make that as unlikely as I can, in advance.

'Unexpected sunshine'

Revisit good compositions

On a related facet of preparedness: whilst visiting a place once, working out some compositions, and then pre-visualising the weather that would suit them is a good technique, it’s even better to simply revisit those places, if possible, and see how the weather affects the scene. I used to be very disappointed if I went out and failed to capture a ‘keeper’; now, whilst I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I don’t care, I’m much more relaxed about it. Considering the image above, for example: I’ve been to this site numerous times – it’s very local to me – but that’s the first time I’ve bothered to photograph it as it’s the first time the light was at all interesting for that particular composition. I’m fairly happy with this image, but I shall undoubtedly go there again, and I’m sure I’ll use a similar composition in the hope that the lighting will be sufficiently different for that to be worthwhile; ideally, it’ll be better in some way, of course. Again, having discovered and practised a composition which is pleasing, at least to me, I shall increase the likelihood of eventually using it to produce a great shot by photographing it in varying weather and at different times of year.

Stand around and do nothing for a while

Considering the probability of success in the time frame of minutes or hours, rather than days or seasons: if the weather is changeable, or it’s getting towards sunset, I’ve taken to working on a composition, getting everything as ‘right’ as I can in terms of framing and technical aspects, and then just waiting for the light to change. I enjoy just being outdoors and in a beautiful place, whether I’m already very familiar with that place or not, so I’ve never so far considered it to be a great hardship to simply stand or sit awaiting a change in the light. (As an aside, this particular behaviour is the one most likely to produce a certain degree of discontent on the part of anyone you’re with who’s not also attempting to make photographs, as I discussed in an earlier article!)

Of course, the whole ‘waiting around doing nothing’ thing can be more of a challenge in various forms of inclement weather, but it’s still worth it. The image below was taken at sunset, or ‘mid-afternoon’, as it might be called. It’s a good example of a few of the above approaches to upping the probability of success. This tree is close by and I’d photographed it a few times. On each occasion, I imagined that it could look very good in snow; so, when we actually received a little, I took myself up there with the hope of making this precise image. As may be obvious, it was rather chilly up on the scar that afternoon; minus 12C in fact. Had I not been familiar with my kit, my fingers would probably have become even colder, whilst setting up for the shot, than they did. Had I not pre-visualised and planned the composition, then I’d have spent time wandering around on what was extremely slippery limestone pavement – it’s not the easiest or safest surface to amble across when dry and warm, and it’s even less conducive to extensive exploration when covered in snow and ice! As it was, I was able to go to exactly the right place, having readied the camera with the appropriate lens and settings back at home and having not wrecked the snow by walking on it, looking for the right spot. Setting everything up took under a minute, followed by roughly an hour of standing still, becoming progressively colder as the light changed. I’m rather fond of this shot, and I sincerely doubt that I’d have made it without all the luck-inducing preparation.

'White Scar winter hawthorn'

Get out there, even when the weather looks vile

One final thing is worth mentioning, mainly since I’m very susceptible to this particular problem and am working on avoiding it. Planning in advance to go somewhere, knowing that there is a usable composition, particularly when the ‘somewhere’ in question is a long walk up a hill, helps to avoid crying off due to unappealing weather. The banner image at the very top of my blog is a good example of that. It was raining heavily when I set off and I had to really force myself to get up on the scar, knowing there was a tree up there and hoping for some kind of dramatic light to occur as the various storm fronts passed over. It did occur; I was ‘lucky’. That said, I was lacking in every other area of preparation for this shot. It was the very first image I took after I’d bought a ‘proper’ camera and set out to deliberately make photographs; so in many respects I really was lucky on that occasion.

I’d have been even ‘luckier‘, however, had I already learnt how to use the camera, bought a tripod, examined the area in advance, and not been shooting hand-held jpegs on full automatic…. There are better compositions of this tree and, if I’d prepared for luck, this would have been a better shot. Still, maybe the next time I’m fortunate enough to experience light like that, it will be!

I haven’t even mentioned here that this sort of preparation can help with inspiration, but this article is already quite long enough, so I’ll save that topic for another possible post. As always, I’d welcome your thoughts and recommendations for other things which can increase the ‘getting lucky’ factor in making landscape images.

Addendum/edit

Tim Smalley has a very nice piece on his blog covering some of the same ground as this. Definitely worth reading: Forget about the camera for a minute

Musings on: using technology to pre-visualise images

I am now, or so I’m told by certain non-photographer friends, not only ‘fiddling with images’ in post-processing, but also ‘cheating’ by pre-visualising them with the aid of technology. Shocking! I refuted, or made a serious attempt to refute, the former charge in a previous post on the ethics of digital manipulation. I shall now refute the latter.

The charge goes something like the following:

“Using tools such as Google Earth and The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) is cheating; you should just find places to photograph by wandering around.”

That is, of course, a paraphrase of what a non-photographer would say, but it’s what I’ve done for a couple of images, making it a reasonable one. In fact, I’ve been using TPE for well over a year now, it’s invaluable in working out where the Sun and Moon will be at a given point in time, at a specific location, and in determining both whether they will be visible and whether they’ll be lighting the landscape in the way that I would like them to. TPE, however, presupposes that I know where I’m going to be, whereas Google Earth, and in particular the relatively new ‘ground level view’ introduced in Google Earth 6, enables me to get a remarkably good idea of what things will look like when I’m standing at my chosen location. By combining the two it’s possible to go a long way to composing an image without even leaving the house. I don’t think that’s ‘cheating’, as such; I’d characterise it as taking advantage of technology to get a good result when it’s not practical to scout a location on foot and in a variety of lighting conditions

A real-world example using Google Earth ‘ground level view’

By way of example, I used both tools in creating the image below, which is of a valley in the centre of the Howgill Fells, in Cumbria, England, an area I’ve described in a post on its photographic potential. I’d noticed the interesting, interlocking spurs of hills on a previous walk in the area, but didn’t have a camera with me, and in any case the Sun was high in a clear, blue sky – less than ideal (and that’s why I didn’t have a camera…..). At the time, I just noted the location and then later, at home, investigated what could be done with it. It’s a non-trivial drive to the Howgills, followed by a walk-in of a few kilometres horizontally and about half a kilometre upwards, so I wasn’t keen on going up there at random and hoping it was worthwhile. To be honest, I probably would have done, but I felt much more confident that I was not about to waste my time, having planned it in some detail in advance.

The first thing I did was find the area in Google Earth, then I zoomed down to ground level, at which point the view shifts to the cunningly-named ‘ground level view’. This isn’t a tutorial on how to use the software, so suffice it to say that you can move around as if you’re walking and that the view you’d see is represented topographically. From my two ‘serious’ uses of this excellent facility, I can say that it’s sufficiently accurate to plan from – at least for the areas I’ve looked at. The following images are, on the left, a screen shot from the precise location I eventually stood to take the photo and, on the right, the image itself. The photo is zoomed a fair bit, so it’s of the top half of the Google Earth representation. No, they’re not identical, but they’re remarkably close if you look at the degree of overlap of the spurs and the shape of the river in the valley. Certainly, they’re close enough that relying on the software to aid visualisation saved me a good deal of hunting around on awkward terrain for a point to set up the tripod.

To show how close the representation is, I’ve deliberately done this backwards for the sake of this article, using the location data from the photograph to return to Google Earth and make the above screen shot. The on-line investigation I’d done in advance enabled me to mark a point which looked promising, and then drive / walk to it and be within fifty metres of where I ended up. More importantly, it let me play with compositions in advance. I was standing on what might be considered a steep slope which I had, of necessity, approached from above, and in inclement weather. Since I’d already determined, by ‘walking’ down the slope in Google Earth, the lowest level which improved the shot, I simply descended to that contour and then traversed the hillside until I found the composition I’d visualised on-screen as well as, more conventionally, in my head. Running up and down the hillside to see whether the composition would work better from lower down was something I was thoroughly happy to forego!

TPE

And what of TPE? Well, what I really wanted was sunlight on the right hand slopes, which means ‘sometime in the morning’ (the valley runs roughly north-south). More precisely, I wanted illumination, but not direct sunshine, so I’d used TPE to determine when the Sun would be low enough to not create harsh shadows anywhere – TPE showed me that this meant that I needed to be there within half an hour of sunrise. Unfortunately, the only place to park – the only sensible place to park anyway – is by an isolated house. Doing so at least an hour before dawn at any time of year might be considered anti-social; in late May, it really wasn’t an option. I settled for ‘any day with grey, high cloud’ instead. As it turned out the cloud was somewhat thicker than I wanted and it was decidedly dark in the valley, so the only thing which was still lacking precision was, as usual, the weather forecast! Oh, and it was raining and very windy too – a couple more things the weather forecast had assured me wouldn’t be the case…

TPE helped me work out what was best, I merely wasn’t able to follow its guidance on this occasion, though having now seen the way the various spurs in that valley lie, I’m sure the early option would be the best in terms of the end result – maybe I’ll return in winter.

'Hidden valley'

That, then, is the combination of techniques, but I’ve not yet actually refuted the argument that using them is in some way ‘wrong’; all I’ve done is say that this sort of planning is very practical and effective, at least for ‘big vista’ type compositions where the overall shape of the land is important – Google has not as yet recorded sufficient detail to enable anyone to decide in advance which trees to include in an image – give it time though.

Conclusion

Would I feel in some way better about the image if I’d not worked out roughly where to stand before I got there? I think not. I might have lost some time in searching around, up and down the slope which, as I’ve mentioned, is verging on being very steep. I might even not have found the spot, or left insufficient time to find it and found the valley even darker than it was when I arrived. If either of those things were true, then I’d possibly have felt some aching of the legs afterwards too. More probably, not being confident of how good the composition would be in advance, I’d not even have left home at six in the evening, aiming for a vaguely-defined point two hours travel away, so I’d not actually have made the capture at all.

Yes, perhaps the process is marginally less Romantic than wandering the fells hopefully in search of surprise compositions, but I’d emphasise the ‘marginal’ aspect quite strongly. It was raining, cold, and windy up there, and getting dark; had I not been near-certain of a good composition, I suspect that I would have turned back. This refutation is perhaps a largely pragmatic one, but I think it’s also convincing. I’m certainly not advocating doing this for every image; that simply wouldn’t be possible. Using the technique for certain types of composition, however, at least as a means of getting an idea of whether it might ‘work’ and where to start, seems to me to be a very helpful addition to the set of methods for pre-visualising compositions.

I’d be interested in hearing your views, especially if you disapprove of using such technological techniques for pre-composition, or pre-visualisation.

Addendum

Since I first published this article, Stephen Trainor, who wrote TPE, and Bruce Percy have jointly published an e-book in which Stephen describes all the facets of TPE and Bruce relates this to how he uses it in his work, in combination with Google Earth. i.e. exactly the same topic as this article, but with rather more ‘how to’ detail! I recommend it if you’re interested in taking this approach to planning images. ‘Understanding Light with The Photographer’s Ephemeris’

Musings on: categorisation and labelling in photography

I’m not a huge fan of categorisation: it has its place, but the results should be used with care. I’d like to explain my rationale for this aversion, and I’ll use the nature of the work of photographer Simon Norfolk as illustration. I won’t conclude that we shouldn’t categorise work into landscape, portrait, etc., but I shall suggest that

we should not use categories to determine what we look at; at least not exclusively.

So, what’s the problem?

This post is another in the series asking questions about why, and for whom, we make photographs, albeit one which is at a slight tangent, in that it’s about how grouping images by genre influences who looks at them, and with what expectation they do so. I’ve felt for a long time that categorisation, whilst necessary, effectively unavoidable, and often useful, is an inhibitor to fully appreciating whatever it is that’s being categorised; sometimes it may influence how we perceive the work, more often it may prevent us ever experiencing that work at all. This musing is on why labelling should perhaps be both applied and viewed with caution, as an adjunct to the work being labelled, not as an absolute.

The problem with categorisation applies to many things: consider music. It has long been the case that music, particularly contemporary music, has been pigeon-holed by reviewers, fans and shops; it is, after all, quite useful to be able to refer to liking a particular genre, and it’s helpful in searching for new music, whether physically, in shops, or on-line. That’s the good bit; the downside is that, if I’m told that a piece of music is in genre X, then I may well dismiss it out of hand simply based on that label. I certainly used to do that, though now I like to feel that I’m considerably more open-minded about what I may like, at least to the point of ‘giving it a go’ (perhaps thrash metal is now the one remaining genre whose mention equates to ‘don’t bother listening’, for me). I’d argue that approaching any set of work with the attitude of taking a look, or listen, to see whether it’s interesting, is better than dismissing things in advance due to their labels.

An additional problem lies in the margins, the grey areas of overlap where a piece of work falls into more than one category. With music, this often leads to simply adding the word ‘fusion’ to whatever two genres the labeller thinks are being fused. Again, useful in some contexts, but it can also lead to tiny sub-genres which will be either dismissed automatically, by certain parts of a potential audience, or followed to the exclusion of all else by others. Both of these effects narrow the range of things people are likely to sample, and perhaps to enjoy: it reduces potential experience. My contention is that this is not really a good thing in general.

In terms of photography, categories are useful for defining competitions, amongst other things; they’re helpful to some people who want to categorise themselves too, but they can be terribly exclusive. I know that, when I was choosing a title for my portfolio site, I started off having the word ‘landscape’ in there somewhere; then I realised that I’ve taken a handful of abstract shots which simply couldn’t be included if landscape was in the title, so I removed it. I then spent considerable time wondering whether to just say ‘photography’ or ‘fine art photography’ before electing to do the latter, with the conscious intent of excluding things I don’t do, such as wedding photography and architectural photography. Yet, those could be ‘fine art’ too, in some circumstances and from some viewpoints, so those two words become not quite meaningless, but at least potentially unhelpful. Again, I’m not saying that this is not useful in some respects, but it certainly is restrictive, and perhaps viewers need to be consciously aware of this inherent problem with selecting what to look at by its nominal category.

Simon Norfolk

This musing began when Malcolm Macgregor, prompted by my recent article on putting meaning into photographs, made we aware of the work of photographer Simon Norfolk. I’ve since spent considerable time looking at Norfolk’s work and reading his writing on his project-based photography. His current exhibition at Tate Modern in London, ‘Burke + Norfolk’, is particularly pertinent and led me to these thoughts on classification, as well as to others which I may consider in later posts.

Simon Norfolk’s work spans multiple categories, both over his career and within individual images and projects: he started out as a photo-journalist and now, somewhat reticently I believe, describes himself as a landscape photographer. Both those categories, however, conceal a much wider set of subject matter which melds photo-journalism with portraiture, landscape, contemporary political and social commentary, documentary and others. There are several interviews available on-line in which he explains his decision to call himself a landscape photographer, so I won’t seek to do so here; I’ll simply mention that he has stated in interviews that he would be happier not to be categorised. His work spans multiple genres and is not, to me, enhanced by any of the labels which could be, and are, applied, even though they doubtless serve to attract viewers and enable the galleries to present his work in a manner which both suits them and draws in some types of audiences, whilst simultaneously, I suggest, excluding the work from consideration by many people. The label ‘war photography’, for example, which I’ve seen used, would very probably deter some potential viewers who consider themselves only interested in ‘landscape photography’, whereas in fact the images are equally interesting, whether they are viewed as ‘of war’ or ‘of landscape’, as well as ‘of people’.

Considering solely the current Tate Modern exhibition and an earlier project from 2001, the subject of both of which is Afghanistan, any one label is wildly insufficient to describe the contents of these projects. The Tate Modern work juxtaposes Norfolk’s photographs with those taken by John Burke during the Second Afghan War of 1878-1880. The 2001 work, ‘Afghanistan: chronotopia’, illustrates in photographs the effects of decades of war on the people and the landscape. Both of these collections of images use predominantly landscape style compositions to create a ‘look’ which appeals to contemporary sensibilities by using colour, texture and structure to produce images which are strong and appealing, irrespective of content in many cases. Yet both also contain considerable narrative content as sets, plus social and political comment, as well as being of obvious historical relevance. They span, and use, numerous categories in order to attract viewers and to engage their interest. I feel that, in order to attract the full gamut of people who would enjoy his work, the list of categories would need to be unreasonably long. The work goes way beyond simply ‘landscape’, and it’s not conventional ‘war photography’.

That last point returns to the theme of my earlier musing on actively putting meaning into photographs: I deliberately confined that discussion to ‘fine art landscape photography’ and proposed that deliberate use of metaphor and allusion in ‘pure landscape photography’ was at best difficult. Simon Norfolk’s work is emphatically not ‘pure landscape photography’, however. Both in these Afghanistan portfolios and in his others covering landscapes affected by war and militarism (such as the Outer Hebrides….), he very effectively uses the tools of various photographic genres, in particular landscape, to engage an audience which might not be immediately interested in his observations and message but may become so through being drawn to the beauty of his work. Norfolk uses a large format camera and this, I strongly suspect, enforces a working method and pace which produces photographs that are as much ‘art’ as they are documentary and commentary. The messages he conveys through this combination of tools and methods is very much stronger for this inclusion of an artistic sensibility and they have, I’m sure, wider appeal as a result.

Conclusion

To return to the theme of this article: I’m not remotely suggesting that all categorisation is bad in photography. What I am suggesting, however, is that we should look beyond those labels which are given, inevitably, to particular bodies of work and consider the work on its own merit, not simply as ‘an example of genre X’. Inevitably, our emotional and intellectual responses to portfolios, or to individual images, are shaped in part by the genre-association they have been given by their creators, or by anyone involved in presenting them in a particular place or format; but it’s good to step back from that, when viewing a set of images, just in case there’s a wider, or merely different, context which makes them more significant, or more interesting. Beyond that, I feel that it must be desirable to avoid dismissal of any category, both because the label may have been attached inappropriately, leading to missing out on interesting work, and because the assumption that “I don’t like genre X” may itself be incorrect. (Not that this means I’m planning on being over-receptive to thrash metal in the near future, but I would listen to something if it was recommended – perhaps.)

So, the message from this, if there is a single message, is to

occasionally take a look at work which, on the basis of its labels, you don’t expect to find interesting; you may be surprised once in a while.

The best example I can find in my own work is the following abstract. I think of it as some grass, a boat and the Moon in Ullapool harbour, since that’s what it is and this image is merely what I visualised when I made it, but I’d really prefer to not label it as either, ideally!

Red abstract

The exhibition ‘Burke + Norfolk‘ is at Tate Modern until 10th July 2011, and various images from it, as well as much discussion, can be found on-line. Lastly, here is a link to Simon Norfolk’s site. As always, I’d welcome your thoughts on any of the above.

I intend this blog to be largely about the ‘art’ of photography. Musings on specific images and on places where images can be made both definitely fit into my vision of what I would like to write about here, as do responses to other photographers’ thoughts. Occasionally, I may write something about photographic kit, though only in the context of using it. One thing that I didn’t intend to write about was mundane things such as how to avoid losing captured images, in a technical, backing up the data sense.

That said, a couple of friends asked me to tell them what I do to protect my image files from loss, since they know I have a fairly considered backup strategy. Given the difficulty of remembering all the points to make verbally, I wrote it all down. It may be helpful to anyone who’s never, either metaphorically or literally, sat down and properly worked out where the risks of image loss are in their overall workflow, so I thought I’d post it. It’s not going in as a ‘proper’ blog item though – I don’t want to pollute my overall theme with nasty, technical things! – I’m putting it in as a page linked from the home page of my blog / journal.

This is not a prescriptive ‘how to’ article; it’s more to do with thinking about what you maybe should be doing to mitigate those risks which are important to you, with some comment on, in general terms, the ‘how to’ aspect. The key phrase there is ‘important to you’, to which I would add ‘and which apply to you’; everyone has different requirements and there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution. Anyway, I’m at risk of rewriting the thing again here, so this is a link to the article and there should be a link in the header too. I hope a few people find this useful – at worst, it’s a handy reminder for me!

Why I ‘need’ to return to the Bolivian Altiplano and the Atacama desert

I am so very tempted to simply write “because it contains some of the most fabulously beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen”, but that would be, it could be argued with a degree of fairness, a little trite. In this article, I shall add considerably more justification to my assertion that I ‘need’ to travel for a third time to what is, from Europe, a really rather distant location; even when employing those flying-bus things.

As an aside, I would love to travel by container ship …. shame it’s so demanding of that ever-in-short-supply ‘time’ stuff. One day perhaps; just not any time soon. And as another aside, I make no apology for the relatively high density of superlatives in the following. I have genuinely tried to keep adjectival extravagance to a minimum, but this is a geography which justifies their use!

Layered sunrise

I’ve been to various parts of the Altiplano on two occasions now, once approaching from the north, via Peru, across Lake Titicaca into Bolivia, and once via the Atacama Desert into the southern Bolivian region of active volcanoes, multi-coloured lagoons, and the World’s largest salt flat, the Salar de Uyuni. It’s to this latter area, and including the Atacama Desert in Chile, that I ‘need’ to return; and I recognised that need mere weeks, perhaps days, after I last left. And for a little more context on that rather emphatic opening statement: I’ve seen a generous number of beautiful landscapes, including ice-clad mountains, from their summits, in several ranges, and plenty of deserts – so I’m not solely comparing the high plain which covers parts of Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Argentina to, for example, the Yorkshire Dales, where I live!

So: why?

I’ll expand that: why is this region home to some of the most fabulously beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen? It certainly is – I’ve spent about an hour, since writing the opening sentence, debating with myself as to whether that’s true, and I definitely can’t fault my conclusion.

Cactus on the salar Flamingoes

Firstly, I like drama in landscapes: you don’t get much more dramatic than multitudinous, active volcanoes dotted around lagoons on a sparsely-vegetated (very sparsely!) plain. The lack of roads adds to this drama; the only man-made tracks are of 4x4s and they hardly impinge greatly on the landscape, if at all. In fact, from a photographic point of view, these faint lines can sometimes be used as part of compositions.

Secondly, the colours are quite literally fantastic. Not only are the rocks astonishingly varied, with greens, vibrant golds, reds, blacks and bright whites, but the lagoons, rather than being restricted to the conventional blue shades, come in green, turquoise, yellow and red. These surreal colours are the result of various minerals (copper, arsenic, and others), as well as the self-protective responses of algae living at high altitude in salty water. And I’m not talking pastels here in most cases: the Laguna Colorada, for example, is a vivid orange as a result of the microscopic algae.

Thirdly, the wild colours and dramatic topography are accented in many places by the white of the salt which encrusts the edges and shallows of the lagoons, producing stunning swathes of pure texture and adding shape to everything.

Painted desert

Fourthly, this remarkable plateau is high; the altitude of the Altiplano varies from well over 3,000m. to nearly 5,000m., with some of the volcanoes reaching over 6,000m. The Atacama is lower, but still above 2,000m. and home to several major astronomical observatories. The latter is a good indication that the result of the altitude and negligible airborne pollution is crystal clear air and visibility which extends unusually far. Of course, the lack of moisture in the air isn’t necessarily ideal for photography of certain sorts, but I can photograph ‘trees in mist’ in the English Lake District, so I can happily live with that ‘problem’.

Lastly, the Salar de Uyuni needs a specific mention since it’s inarguably the most memorable place I’ve been. That’s not to say that I want to live on, or near, this perfectly flat sea of salt – it’s rather far from ‘hospitable’ – but, at over 10,000 square kilometres, the experience of standing in the centre and walking around on it is both difficult to describe and one I very much wish to repeat. There are, perhaps, relatively few compositional options on the salar, but they’re all spectacular, given the right light, perhaps some clouds, and the right time of day. For example, one image I totally failed to capture on my previous visit, and which I would very much like to, is of the cones of salt scraped from the salar and left to dry on its mirrored surface prior to being collected manually, bagged and sold.

Salar de Uyuni at dawn

How to see the Atacama and the Altiplano

That last point is my fundamental justification for ‘needing’ to return. I took a camera when I was there last time, but I wasn’t specifically on a photographic trip – I was just travelling for its own sake; a great experience, but not one which entirely lent itself to experiencing the best light. The nature of the terrain, and the outlandish colour palette, mean that there are many subjects which work well in bright sunlight, producing pleasingly strong colours and shapes, but I was convinced, when I was there, that they could all be more interesting, more subtle, if I had the chance to watch a scene all day and pick my moment.

Unfortunately, the default means of seeing both the Altiplano and the Atacama is to travel around in a 4×4 with other tourists on pre-planned tours. Naturally, these do tend to start after sunrise and finish before sunset, though those on the salar, at least when approaching from the Chilean border, generally reach the island of giant cacti in its centre before the Sun appears. Consequently, the vast majority of my images from that trip are of the midday-sun variety. I’ve since hunted around on the web, and this is true of most images; the best to be found, however, are clearly taken at carefully selected times of day to make the most of the particular location (not necessarily the ‘golden hour’).

So, quite apart from wanting to go back because it’s utterly stunning, I need to go back to see it in different lighting conditions and, I hope, to make some more considered images, either by going on a dedicated photographic tour or by hiring a vehicle and guides privately (not as expensive as it sounds, though somewhat more difficult to arrange, naturally).

And the best thing about another trip?

The salar is mostly dry, as in the photo here, but in the short ‘wet season’ the surface is covered with a thin layer of water, producing what apparently looks like a 10,000 square kilometre mirror in which the clouds reflect perfectly – that has to be worth seeing, but first I want to see the dry season again and do the ‘thoughtful photo’ thing. The net result of that is that I’ll have to go twice more. Splendid!

Lagoon

More – and better – images

As I said, most of my images were taken at non-optimal times of day. The finest, single place that I’ve found yet to see a huge number of high quality images of this area is in the ‘Bolivia’ and ‘Atacama desert’ galleries of Gerhard Hüdepohl’s web site. Bruce Percy also has a superb collection of Bolivian Altiplano images in his Bolivia portfolio.

If you’ve been to the region and can recommend any specific times and places, I’d be very pleased to receive comments on both that and on any other thoughts that this article has provoked.