mikegreenimages

The making of: ‘Selenehelion’ and ‘Pendle mist’

This pair of images are most notable, to me at least, for being radically different in colour, yet taken from precisely the same place within minutes of each other, albeit in different directions. They also amuse me in retrospect since neither includes the primary object I intended to capture when I started walking up to White Scar on the morning of the winter solstice; namely, the eclipsed Moon.

After considerable effort in generating self-motivation on the previous day, I managed to get up at some hour which should have been the end of a very late night, not an early morning, and walked over rough moorland and scrub grass for getting on for an hour to reach the prominent tree on White Scar, only to find that I had walked too quickly, or at least that I’d given myself too much contingency. As a result, I was up on the limestone pavement for ninety minutes in total, which would have been fine had the temperature not been approaching minus 20C that morning. I’m used to low temperatures, but standing around doing nothing but fiddle with camera equipment is not the optimal way of keeping warm and I certainly did get very cold before I headed back down again.

I should perhaps describe why I was there on that obviously inhospitable morning. I had gone up to photograph the selenehelion, thinking that the tree would make a good foreground for the hills of the Lake District. Wikipedia defines a selenehelion as follows:

A selenelion or selenehelion occurs when both the Sun and the eclipsed Moon can be observed at the same time. This can only happen just before sunset or just after sunrise, and both bodies will appear just above the horizon at nearly opposite points in the sky. This arrangement has led to the phenomenon being referred to as a horizontal eclipse. It happens during every lunar eclipse at all those places on the Earth where it is sunrise or sunset at the time. Indeed, the reddened light that reaches the Moon comes from all the simultaneous sunrises and sunsets on the Earth. Although the Moon is in the Earth’s geometrical shadow, the Sun and the eclipsed Moon can appear in the sky at the same time because the refraction of light through the Earth’s atmosphere causes objects near the horizon to appear higher in the sky than their true geometric position.

To summarise its relevance to making an image: it’s a specialised lunar eclipse during which the Moon should be an interesting colour, and there should briefly be sunlight reaching the ground whilst the Moon is still both visible above the horizon and discoloured. To me, it sounded like a good opportunity for a White Scar photograph with a difference.

All of those things were accurate, with the exception of the ‘Moon is still visible‘ aspect. Oops. I’d used the remarkably useful (and free!) piece of software called The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) to determine where the Moon would be when it set, where the Sun would be at the same time, and hence exactly where and when to stand on the White Scar pavement. What I had not done was check with sufficient thoroughness as to the relative height of the Lakeland hills – something which would have been very simple to do with TPE – I’d just assumed that the scar would be high enough. As it turned out, I had an excellent view of the Moon becoming progressively more eclipsed as I approached my chosen area, only to watch it disappear behind the very distant hills just before the Sun came up. Somewhat irritating!

Nonetheless, the whole ‘gathering light from all the simultaneous sunrises and sunsets on the earth‘ aspect worked very well indeed, so much so that the colours in the RAW files I captured needed to be desaturated to complete the two images; not doing so just looked ridiculous and false.

'Selenehelion'

The pink image, the one I’ve called ‘Selenehelion’, is looking towards the Lakes; it’s the image I’d planned, though with a singular lack of the Moon of course. I’d been hoping to get far enough from the tree to make the hills larger, but backing off further than I did meant that the hills themselves started to disappear over the horizon as the ground I was standing on dropped away. The resulting image is a compromised version of the composition I was aiming for: it trades off making the hills as large as I could in favour of aligning them against the tree.

'Pendle mist'

The orange image, ‘Pendle mist’, was an unanticipated bonus! The extreme cold that morning meant that the air was very clear and distant Pendle Hill was remarkably prominent on the southern horizon. It also had a thin, low layer of mist surrounding it. I occupied myself and tried to keep warm as I waited for the few minutes of the actual selenehelion by rotating the camera away from my composed shot of the hawthorn tree and making a series of captures of this famous, Lancashire feature. I deliberately blurred the foreground slightly as I was expecting an ethereal ‘hill floating on mist’ shot. As this turned out, it’s not floating quite as much as I’d hoped, but it’s certainly not a view of Pendle Hill which I’ve seen often. Comparing the two photos, the contrast between the vivid pink of the westward shot and the warm orange of ‘Pendle mist’, to the south and just a few minutes before the Sun rose to the left of it, is ….. ‘somewhat marked’.

Both these images have been dodged and burned slightly to focus the composition on those parts I felt important, but the colours are rendered very much as I saw them, with a slight reduction in the pink if anything.

I found this exercise to be a good learning experience, quite apart from being fun to do and producing a couple of reasonable images. Even dressed in ice climbing clothing, I was still slightly chilled through standing still, but it convinced me that getting up horribly early is worth it. And it also showed me, through my failure to do so properly, that I should use TPE more thoroughly in future when planning compositions, and that I must make sure that marginal aspects – in this case a ten minute window in which to make the shot – should be checked carefully for the relative heights of the shot’s various components! That said, had I known that the eclipsed Moon would be hidden, I might easily have failed to convince myself to get up, and I’d then have missed what turned out to be an amazing light show for twenty minutes or so.

There are larger versions of each of these images on my Flickr ‘stream.

Musings on: the ethics of digital manipulation (post-processing!)

(Just a note for clarity: I’m talking below about landscape photography only; there are obviously somewhat wider-ranging ethical considerations in journalism and several other types of photography.)

I’ve read several discussions recently about the ethics surrounding manipulating digital files, whether those produced by a digital camera, or those scanned from an exposed film. I’ve found them all very interesting, but also more than a little bemusing. Essentially: why are people bothered by what others do whilst creating their own work?

That’s a slightly disingenuous question. I have a moderate understanding of the various reasons people object; I’m just unconvinced by the arguments. The most common may be summarised as follows:

It’s cheating. This is very much the idea that photographs should show reality, accurately, and nothing more or less.
It’s deceiving. Similar to the above, but with the suggestion that the photographer has deliberately misrepresented reality to the viewer; an additional misdemeanour to that of altering it in the first place.
It’s not what the ‘master photographers’ have done in the past. The weakest argument, since they very much did, just not digitally.
It should all be done in-camera. This one is simply an argument related to how a goal is achieved, and falls more into the realm of an individual photographer’s personal choices of working method than anything else. It does not, after all, relate to the finished image more than incidentally.

I don’t accept any of these objections, at least not in the context of landscape photography. Rather, I do accept them, and if people viewing photographs want to hold those views, that’s fine (with the possible exception of the second one on deception) but they’re purely personal and shouldn’t enter the realm of telling other photographers how to go about their photography. They also make no difference to the finished image, which means that I, as the viewer, don’t really care how it was made when viewing it as a piece of art, though I may well be interested to know how it was done in order to further my photographic learning process!

I’ll address each in turn.

1. ‘Cheating’. This is predicated on the assumption that a photograph is nothing more than a depiction of something in the real world. Whilst this may be true for certain types of image – accurate renditions of architecture for commercial reasons, perhaps – it’s no more than an assumption, and one which really doesn’t have to apply to landscapes. There is no intrinsic reason not to endeavour to faithfully reproduce a scene, but then, nor is there any reason to do so – it comes down to what the photographer wishes to achieve. If we make the additional leap and consider a photographer to be an artist, then how a scene is portrayed really is entirely down to their intentions or aspirations. Personally, I tend towards making things look credible, but this is no better or worse than people who enjoy obviously unrealistic images. I also do consider photography to be art, which is a handy way of saying that ‘anything goes’.
2. ‘Deceiving’. This is a fair cop, but only if the photographer claims that they’ve not manipulated the image when, in fact, they have done so. I’ve noticed that some viewers will claim that they’ve been deceived when, in practice, they have simply seen an image and later learnt that it’s been ‘manipulated’. I’d argue that, for deception to occur, the photographer really needs to have said that the image is unaltered. It also indicates a misunderstanding of the nature of both film and digital photography, which I’ll come back to, but which is based on the unsurprising concept that a two dimensional image produced by numerous technical processes and then viewed as a print or on screen can never really be what was seen, or what was there.
3. ‘A break from the past’. Essentially, this is simply indicative of a lack of knowledge of the history of photography! Both black & white and colour photographs have always been manipulated. It was considerably more difficult to modify colour than black & white before digital imaging became available, but it was always part of the photographic process. I think this objection arises now since, using post-processing tools, people are able to make images which quite obviously don’t represent reality. Famously, Ansel Adams’ prints were very different in tonality to what was captured on the negative, as were/are those of many other ‘masters’. Adams himself, using a musical analogy, referred to the negative as the score and to the print as the performance. Looked at in this perspective, ‘interpretation’ is an entirely valid part of the artistic process which goes to make up the finished item, whether it’s a musical performance or a printed photograph.
4. ‘It should be done in camera’. Viewed as a finished piece of art, does it make any difference how an image was constructed? There are somewhat abstruse and esoteric arguments to say that it does, but in general most people would concede that the main point is the finished piece, and not how it was arrived at. Personally, I use neutral density graduated filters in preference to high dynamic range (HDR) techniques involving combining multiple exposures. So what? I happen to like to work that way; it’s not intrinsically better in some ethical way.

From another perspective – and this is something of a killer argument which addresses everything above except active deception – cameras, whether film or digital, do not record light in the way that the combination of our eyes and brains processes incoming light and enables us to perceive an image. It seems to me to be almost inevitable that the majority of captures will need some form of manipulation, even if the objective is to come as close as possible to ‘what I saw’. If I look at a scene with shadows in it, my eyes continually adjust both their focus and the aperture of the iris to enable me to see both highlight and shadow detail; cameras can’t do that (at least, not yet, and not without using multiple exposures to achieve it; and even then, it’s a static result, not the dynamic experience we perceive when we are viewing the scene in reality).

Beyond that, what is defined as ‘manipulation’? I happen to record RAW files; they contain just data, not a photograph in any meaningful sense. These data have to be converted into a usable image in a format capable of being displayed or printed, and in doing this conversion I am manipulating the photograph (through settings in the RAW converter) even before I do any dodging and burning of the image itself! Were I to record JPG images in the camera, I could copy them over to a computer and view them immediately, but then I’d have previously chosen the JPG settings in the camera, which is simply very-early-on manipulation of the finished image… After conversion, I lighten and darken areas of some photographs to control how the viewer’s eyes move around the image – equivalent to dodging and burning black & white prints. This is unequivocally manipulation, but I’m attempting to represent how I saw the scene to a third party, and the technique undoubtedly helps in that. Again, this is aiming to be art, so conveying how I felt, how I saw the composition, is part of that art.

In conclusion, I would find it bizarre if I were to learn that professional landscape photographers did not, at the very least, dodge and burn images before completing them. If we assume that photography is an art form, then surely the vision of the photographer should determine what may appropriately be done to the raw material in producing the finished picture?

Of course, all of the above is purely opinion. I’m not remotely saying that anyone’s view on the ethics – to be somewhat grandiose – of manipulation is right or wrong, merely expressing my take on it. Personally, I’m happy to dodge and burn, but have never yet cloned anything out, or in – and I’m pretty confident that I wouldn’t do so; but that’s just my personal take on photographic ethics … I wouldn’t, however, deny that I’d ‘manipulated’ the image – what would be the point?!

What’s your view? I’d be interested to hear more comments and discussion on this.

The making of: ‘Shadowed peaks’

I feel almost as if this is an image which ‘got away’. It’s very close indeed to my pre-visualisation of it, but not quite there.

The shot was taken early in the morning, high up on the Bolivian Altiplano. What I’d envisaged was that the two clouds – virtually the only ones in the sky that morning – would drift at a rate which would cast their shadows on the very top of each volcano at the same time. It didn’t happen: in this finished image, the far cloud has already passed the peak, heading rightward. It did come close though, and I still very much like the composition as the shadow on the foreground cone is perfectly positioned; I feel I can live with the minor one being just a little less than ideal.

I mentioned pre-visualising above, which suggests some considerable degree of planning. In practice, I made this image only about ten to fifteen minutes after first seeing the volcanoes, let alone the clouds and their shadows tracking towards the peaks. I had been fortunate enough to come over a rise in the ground in the Land Cruiser I was sharing with three other tourists just as the clouds formed and began to move towards their positions in the image.

'Shadowed peaks'

This was a five day trip from San Pedro de Atacama, in Chile, to the Salar de Uyuni, in Bolivia. The way these tours work is that the drivers more or less follow a beaten path to certain places that they think people will want to stop at, which basically means ‘all of the lagoons, and a couple of impressively large rocks‘. It’s far from being the ideal situation for photographers, but I was fortunate that there was another, similarly-afflicted tourist in the vehicle who also saw this scene developing. We both asked the driver, very nicely, to stop. Then we asked him to drive back a kilometre or so to get the darkened area of desert into the shot as a leading line, mainly since, with our rather inadequate Spanish, the whole ‘stopping the car’ process had taken rather longer than might be considered ideal. And then we waited. Fortunately, it was a relatively short wait: the other two passengers would quite possibly have become impatient had we insisted on just sitting in the desert watching a couple of clouds move for more than a very few minutes! As it turned out these two non-photographers proved to be very tolerant over the next few days though, and our driver quickly became used to being the last of the group of vehicles to arrive at every place – without exception. We tipped him well at the end!

The light levels were remarkably balanced between sky and foreground in this composition, so I had no need to use any graduated filters. I also didn’t have a polariser on the lens at the time, though the colour of the sky might suggest that there is. The altitude here is around 4,300m. so even a sky which has not been deliberately polarised by using a filter tends to be visibly polarised to the naked eye, hence the very deep blue colour. I took this shot in both portrait and landscape and I preferred this version; partly since it fits the subject matter slightly better, but also since the landscape version at this wide angle shows radical variation in the blue from left to right, which is so extreme that it rather spoils the image.

As to the very wide angle (this is the equivalent of 15mm on a full-frame SLR) I used it partly since we were too close to the volcanoes to use a longer focal length, and also because it emphasised the foreground dark line in the desert, which I thought was an important compositional element to lead the viewer’s eyes to the two mountains.

I think I can safely say that the only thing I’ve learnt from this photo so far is that sometimes, you get lucky….

Musings on: the usefulness of taking, and reviewing, ‘not-so-good’ images

The point of this item is to argue that all the relatively poor photographs I’ve taken since I took up photography have been very useful in helping me to make what I think are improved images, some of them at the same locations and of the very same scenes, that feature in the earlier, less successful ones.

I’ve recognised the above for a while now, but I was struck today, whilst browsing through some photos I took when I first started using a ‘proper’ camera, and also considering the thoughts I’ve had in writing the first few ‘making of’ posts here, by how useful to my development the many less-than-good images I’ve made have been. Thinking further, that’s still true: I (of course!) still make images that don’t work – though the ‘keeper’ ratio is improving slowly – and I still find reviewing what went wrong very useful. Pleasingly, however, the nature of the problems with them is changing over time.

Early on, I almost exclusively concentrated on drama of some kind: with very few exceptions, every image I still have from the first six months is either taken at a very wide angle or is of some extreme set of colours, whether naturally so or as a result of pumping up the saturation in post-processing. The typical wide-angle shot – something small in the foreground taking up a large part of the frame, combined with some inevitably distant scenery – is an easy way to exploit the equipment and produce an eye-catching image. It’s a perspective that most people not perpetually scanning through photo sites don’t generally see, so showing such images to friends and family is an easy win; they’re impressed with the extreme visual impact and oddness of the result. Somewhat similarly, pushing the sliders in post-processing to make a colourful scene even more so through saturation and contrast works in the same way. Early on, engendering exclamations from people you know is great, and such methods certainly achieve that.

Thirdly, and to some degree similarly to the previous two methods of producing drama, I found that I’d taken lots of shots using all sorts of things – mostly, but not exclusively, trees – to frame photographs. Some of these images even include bright sunsets and a wide-angle lens to produce the trinity of ‘easy win’ images. Maybe it’s just me, but, after a while, having something to produce a frame as part of the image becomes a little predictable.

Not that any of these techniques or subjects are, per se, bad, but they can be over-used; and I most certainly was over-using them! These are not necessarily bad photos then – many of mine may well have been, but the general styles aren’t intrinsically wrong. What they are is very repetitive. ‘Formulaic‘ is very possibly the most apposite word here; and the problem with a successful, visual formula is that, once it’s been seen numerous times, the differences start to be insignificant; one image blends into another. If you add to that the fact that I’d been taken in by the myth of the ‘rule of thirds’, which I seem to have followed rather rigorously early on, and my early collection of images is very much a series of minor variations around two or three themes. Not overly exciting, as a body of work, even if each one, taken by itself, may seem dramatic to anyone not conversant with this type of image.

To return to the theme of this musing: I can see now that taking numerous versions of what were, if I’m honest, very much the same handful of compositions, albeit in different locations, was extremely useful to my development into what I feel is more interesting photographic territory. I became aware, with each new set of images, that they were all becoming rather similar, in terms of both lighting and composition.

The real turning point came when I was in the Atacama desert and the southern Bolivian altiplano a year ago; not on a photography tour or workshop, but on a general holiday, just travelling about. More precisely, it came when I returned and started processing the images. The nature of the type of semi-organised trip I was on is that landscapes are mostly seen around midday, not at the ends of the day. At the time I had a vague idea that there was something better about dawn and dusk, but no real understanding of just how much difference there could be in the potential of the captured image. Years spent high on snow-covered mountains mean that I know very well how delicate colours can be in the pre-dawn light, but not how much better they can be photographically. The bright colours I captured on the South America trip were pleasing – they still are! – but the few images I took late in the day, mostly simply snapshots as memories, revealed notably more interesting light, albeit light ‘wasted’ on mediocre compositions of camp-sites and desert towns. I saw that I could capture more subtle and interesting colours using the lower light levels to be found at the ends of the day, and that this didn’t invariably mean bright images of sunrises and sunsets.

Another significant step forward, after months of trying to achieve subtle, or muted, colours without doing the whole get-up-very-early thing (I’m not exactly a ‘morning person’) was when I attended one of Bruce Percy’s excellent workshops in Scotland. I did this in large part so that I’d be ‘morally compelled’ to wake before dawn; so much easier to do when you know that prevaricating over the whole, arduous getting up process will result in several people waiting around for you, having themselves got up very early… The images I managed to capture on that trip were a large part of the answer to what I’d been trying to do for some time: many gently-varied colours and lots of detail in the RAW captures which can then be used to produce much stronger compositions and more interesting finished images than contrasty daylight can ever produce.

I don’t think that I could have come to the recognition of what I want to do with photography – which is currently very much tending towards the subtle and away from the shouting, bright colour, high contrast type of picture – had I not spent quite some time recognising the limitations of highly saturated, dramatic shots by making images of exactly that type. And now, my Flickr ‘stream is showing good signs of not containing solely ultra-wide angle shots. There certainly are some, and there will continue to be, along with the sun rising and setting, but I hope I’m now only using those devices when it helps the image in some way, rather than because the kit will do it, or because I know my friends will be impressed.

I should add that, whilst I’d been thinking along these lines and reassuring myself that taking ‘bad’ pictures was useful as part of my learning curve, I was provoked into thinking about it once more by an article on a similar subject in issue 9 of the on-line magazine Great British Landscapes, a great source for all sorts of thoughts on landscape photography.

I’d be interested to hear your comments on whether this is a completely normal progression, or whether I’m just being reactionary, the latter being entirely possible!

The making of: ‘Charcoal sunset’

This is most certainly one of my favourite images, so far. It doesn’t have much in the way of depth, and there are really only three major colours in it, but it’s simple and graphic, and the colour that there is – essentially orange – is one I like. What I particularly enjoy about this is the clouds, hence the name; they look as if they’ve been drawn on with a soft pencil, or a piece of charcoal. It nearly didn’t happen; I was on my way home, fairly late in the evening on a Sunday, and the idea of losing the forty-five minutes this took wasn’t immediately fully-appealing! When I did decide to stop and try to capture something, I was only a minute or two away from missing it.

The photo was taken on the road from Hawes to Ribblehead, in the Yorkshire Dales, and I was very fortunate to be able to capture it; very much a ‘right place, right time, but no planning‘ situation. I had been to Newcastle for the weekend and the sun dropped below the horizon as I entered Wensleydale to drive westward. Throughout that twenty or thirty minute section, the sky became increasingly orange and the clouds gradually formed into interesting swirls, but there was nothing worthwhile to use in the foreground. Leaving Hawes, in near-complete darkness by then, the road gains a fair bit of height and I noticed the three trees on the horizon, nicely framed by the dark hillside and the now-black clouds, and picked out against a vivid, orange sky.

The Hawes to Ribblehead road is not known for being littered with safe stopping places, particularly so in the dark. By the time I’d pulled off the road I was a solid half a mile from the point at which the composition would ‘work’ – I needed to be able to see those trees on the distant hill. A quick run back along the road, carrying tripod and camera, and I was back at the perfect point and stretching the tripod to its maximum height to exclude a dry-stone wall from the foreground of the frame. The orange had already faded a little by then, but was still very much there, and I took three shots about a minute apart, playing with aperture and focus between each to ensure that I didn’t miss capturing something I could use (those trees are a couple of miles away, but the lens I used has no ‘infinity hard stop’, nor would it focus in the low light).

It was so dark that I really didn’t expect the image to be usable, but I was delighted to find that the first of the three frames was sharp and had good colour. The one taken just two minutes later was far less saturated and really wouldn’t have been worth working on! This final version has the saturation boosted slightly, but that’s about all I needed to do to the shot to make it into what I’d visualised when I parked the car.

My learning points from this?

It’s worth making the effort when things look promising!
Running to the perfect location is also worth it. Whilst my short jog was not remotely on the same scale, I was reminded of Galen Rowell’s story of running across Tibetan countryside to capture his famous image ‘Rainbow over the Potala Palace’ – the alternative being to not miss dinner.
You can get away with rather distant ‘foreground’ when making silhouettes, so long as the background is interesting.

I’m regularly very pleased to have stopped and captured this photograph as I come back and look at it often. I gave it this name since I wanted to remind myself of my visualisation of a charcoal drawing against an orange and blue background, but now I’m not sure I needed the prompt, as I still see it that way each time. What do you think: charcoal doodlings, or just rather dark clouds?!

A larger version can be seen here on my Flickr stream.

The making of: ‘Spine’

I’m going to start this with an important personal learning point:

If you’re going to wander across a high, moorland area, with an obvious aqueduct over a railway further down the slope then either:
1. Look where you’re stepping
2. Wear high, waterproof boots.

There; that’s the main thing to remember then.

More importantly… actually, come to think of it, not more importantly, since getting very wet feet is significant and much to be avoided. So: more importantly from the purely photographic point of view, tilt/shift lenses are very good for photographing things which could broadly be described as ‘fences at interesting angles‘. The image below, which I imagined as the spine of some prehistoric beast, albeit rather loosely I’ll concede, is of a strange old line of posts parallel to, and above, the Settle to Carlisle railway, just north of Dent station and high up on moorland in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales (which happen to be in Cumbria at this point, come to think of it). I’ll return to the overly-watered feet issue shortly.

A friend and I had explored this area a week before on a grand tour of the dales looking for potential locations. We weren’t expecting to do anything other than look that afternoon; the weather was pretty miserable. In particular, it was bitingly cold and standing around for more than a minute or two was not appealing. Fortunately, we did happen to drive up past Dent station, having given up on looking for interesting views of the river though Dentdale. (I’m sure there are some great places along there, but we were too cold to spend the time, and finding suitable places to stop along the road was not easy.) Up on the moor above the station, there are a couple of these fences, parallel to each other and to the railway in its cutting. (If anyone can explain what they were for, I’d love to know.) We went no more than 25m. from the road – I didn’t even get my camera out – but we noted it worth revisiting.

A few days later I detoured back here and spent a short time exploring in more detail, resulting in this image.

Maybe not desperately exciting, as photographs go, but I was very taken with the combination of the long, tufted grasses and the stark, heavily-weathered wood. Also, it was foggy that day, so I thought I could make something where the various stands of Forestry Commission trees would be hidden in the mist. As an aside, I’m starting to like rather low-key, muted colours and subtle shapes, as distinct from the bright, saturated ‘wow’ shots which lots of photo-sharing sites tend to be populated with. Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘wow’ shots, but it’s nice to do something less ‘shouting’ sometimesl. Anyway, I had pre-visualised a shot with the line of crossed posts forming a diagonal across the frame, then disappearing into the mist and over the horizon. As can be seen, that didn’t quite happen: the mist lifted a little by the time I’d finished fiddling with the swing on the lens and getting everything in good focus, but there’s still a definite fade into the fog towards the back of the image.

Even before I reached the stage of setting up the camera, I’d found the answer to a question. My photographer friend and I had debated, on the first visit, what exactly the point of the small bridge-like structure crossing the railway was. One of us had argued that it “can’t possibly be an aqueduct; it’s too small“. It is, indeed, small; not a large structure at all in terms of its diameter, though it extends, sensibly, across the whole of the not-insubstantial railway cutting. Just behind the camera position in the image, my leg disappeared deep into a decidedly wet area hidden amongst the tussocky moorland. It’s not visible – the grass is too long – but if you put your foot in it, it’s very much there, and considerably deeper than the height of my walking boots. In fact, the tripod is so close to it that I had to be fairly careful not to soak the other boot too. A hundred metres or so down the slope this wet area, or stream as I feel I’m now justified in calling it, crosses the railway on the tiny aqueduct. Question resolved, employing the hard, or at least wet, way.

Post-processing this image a few days later, having culled all but two of the subtly varied compositions I’d taken, I realised how tricky it is to check precise focus on an LCD screen when using a tilted lens – possible, but certainly somewhat demanding. The image here is not far off the RAW file. I’ve dodged and burned it a little to bring out the foreground grasses, and to fade the far part of the line of posts slightly to better conform to my vision of the image prior to taking it, but otherwise not much was needed.

This was my first attempt at using the PC-E lens, other than spending a couple of hours practising with understanding where the focal plane would be at various degrees of tilt or swing, indoors. What amazes me is how little movement is needed most of the time. This composition was achieved with slightly under one degree of leftward swing and a couple of millimetres of leftward shift. I made precisely the same composition with another 24mm lens and, even at f/16, the focus is not as good throughout the frame as it is with the tilt/shift. Whilst I don’t remotely think that this image justifies the investment in the lens, it convinced me that it has the potential to be very much ‘worth it’!

Musings on: naming photographs

Why is naming photographs so contentious?

I generally name my photographs. More precisely, I always name any finished images which I put anywhere public, but I don’t give the files themselves names; they’re all of the form ‘My name_date_time’, whether they’re the RAW files or the TIFFs, PSDs and JPGs which I create during my post-processing work-flow. So why is it necessary for me – and it seems the majority of other people posting images on-line – to give their images a name? Is it just pretension, or is it valuable or useful in some way?

I don’t have a definitive answer to this, of course, but the phenomenon is quite interesting. To me it seems that the act of naming an image gives it some form of solidity, an existence independent of being ‘just a photo’. It turns ‘another photo’ into ‘a work’ or ‘a defined thing’. Perhaps that’s pretension; perhaps it’s more the finishing touch to a creative process, somewhat like signing and naming a painting, which is not something I’ve heard much argument against.

From a practical perspective – and I feel this is sufficient justification by itself – it is vastly easier to talk about images if they have names. Before I started naming things, I recall having had several conversations of the following form:

“I like that one with the tree on the limestone pavement.”
“Which tree on which limestone pavement?”
“The one with the storm in the background.”
“Dark, bluish sky or is there actual lightning?”
“Neither: it’s sort of grey overall.”
“Square image, or landscape?”
“I’m not sure now.”

etc…

Starting that conversation with a memorable name saves a lot of time!

It’s practical then, but does a name change the image itself in any way; or, rather, the perception of the image on the part of the viewer? It can be argued that images should ‘speak for themselves’, and that having no name is best for that reason, that naming a photograph overlays the ideas of the photographer on the finished image. Conversely, given that the whole image is the idea of the photographer, surely this ability to add to the intent of the composition is entirely reasonable? It does change things though: a moderately good image with an especially good name, one which is pertinent to the content, or which draws the viewer’s attention to some aspect of the frame, can be made more significant than it would have been as ‘Untitled’.

I think the argument of giving each photograph a relevant name, one which adds to the image, is a strong one. As an example, I have an image I like very much, and which I shall write about in a later post, whose name is definitely important to me. In this case, the name reminds me of what I was thinking when I decided to compose the photograph. It’s called ‘Charcoal sunset’, and I named it that since I saw the scene as a post-sunset sky on which someone had painted clouds using a blunt piece of charcoal. As the creator of the image, it feels to me that conveying this thought process to viewers adds to the experience of looking at the photograph. It doesn’t matter whether they agree with this metaphorical vision or not; the point is to provoke more thought than would be present without the ‘leading’ title.

So, for me, in both practical and artistic senses, I’m in favour of titles, though I’ll caveat that with ‘at this point in time‘. A large part of the point of my writing these musings is to record how I’m thinking at this early stage of my progression in photography, and to see how that changes over time. Maybe I shall be writing the complete inverse of these opinions at some future point?

That said, I can already see myself producing a series of themed images and calling them ‘Untitled’ 1 to n… but then, that’s a name in itself, isn’t it?

I’d be interested to see your comments on this long-running debate!