End of the Year Review, 2013

Its that time of year when its customary to look back - and forwards - so here goes.

I've made a few images of which I'm quite proud this year, perhaps five or six. Some of them are included in the montage above.

I took a different approach to my flower photography, eschewing the shallow depth of field and 'environmental' backgrounds (i.e. whatever happened to be in-shot) of previous years, opting for plain white, or occasionally black. I even put my pretensions aside and produced some colour images. In the process, I think that I've moved things forwards.

On the other hand, my landscape photography almost ceased to produce anything usable, with a late revival just before Christmas at Shapwick.

I also tried, without much success, to document events in Liverpool, as we cleared my father's house of his belongings.

Regarding this blog, I wrote one or two posts that I'm pleased with - the one about SAW, the series about Sony's strategy spring to mind - and a whole lot of pointless verbiage besides.

So, what about next year - 2014, that is?

Well, for one thing, I'm going to stop writing text to post with my images just because I feel I have to - if I have an image to post and nothing to write, then I won't write anything, aside from a short description of the image itself.

I'll try to do some more landscape photography, and get my light tent out more often.

But what about the flower photography? Have I taken that as far as I can? It actually forms the majority of what I do at the moment. My instinct is that I haven't, there's more mileage in it next year, but I really don't know what form that will take. I guess that I've a couple of months to figure that one out.

PS: Coming soon - the Williams Music Awards 2013.

Slight Return (to Landscape)

Those of you who've been paying attention may remember that I do a bit of landscape photography as well all the macro work. You may also recall that I was having some trouble making decent images with my Alpha 550, which I designated for landscape work about eighteen months ago. To be honest, I haven't made any landscape images worth posting in a long while.

Anyway, Christmas Eve afternoon found me at Shapwick Heath nature reserve for a walk with my son, who was generally over-excited and needed to burn off some energy. On the upside, sunset was approaching and the quality of the light was very good although there was a stiff breeze. On the downside, I had a wound-up six year old with me, and I needed to keep my wits about me in case he wandered into one of the many pools. Overall, not a good set of circumstances for photography, then.

However, I determined to make the best of it. We spent the first twenty minutes or so looking at the Sweet Track - or rather, the water filled ditch in which it lies. This is another of those access issues, but I'm not entirely sure what the rights and wrongs are, so I won't digress here.

Following this, we walked a bit further into the reserve, with me taking shots as the opportunity arose, until my companion got fed up and we retraced our steps. This image was made on that return trip. What drew me to it was the symmetrical shape of the copse and the setting sun catching the reeds in the foreground.

I didn't have my tripod with me and I wouldn't have had time to set it up in any case. The image was shot handheld with a relatively wide aperture - 1/160s @ f/9.0, if you're interested - with my Tamron lens zoomed slightly to 85mm.

I'm not entirely sure about the composition. I experimented with cropping out the trees on the extreme right of the frame, but in the end decided to present it as shot. Whatever, I think this is an atmospheric image and an improvement on previous images that I've posted of this location. I've a couple more acceptable shots to post from this set, which I'll get round to in the next week or so.   

Goodnight, Rose

Last weekend we were back in Liverpool for the pre-Christmas visit. On the Sunday evening, as we left the city to return home, our car was written off in an accident, which left us all uninjured, but I've been busy sorting the fallout, hence the hiatus in posts.

Anyway, this really is the last image of a rose that I'm going to post this year.

This particular bloom is the last on a patio rose that we rescued from my father's house. It was given to him as a birthday present a couple of years ago, ostensibly from our son, so he looked after it rather more assiduously than most of the plants in his garden.

A couple of months ago we hired a transit van to clear the last of the stuff from the house and we manhandled this bush, in its pot, into the back and brought it back to Somerset. Its now round the front of the house, standing next to my father's workbench, for which we've no space indoors.

For the record, the title of this post is taken from a Ryan Adams track which appears on his "Easy, Tiger" album.

Osteospermum Again

Despite that fact that we're into December and the winter frosts have started, many of the plants in the garden are still flowering. This osteospermum is in a trough on the north side of the house, so I hadn't noticed that it was hanging on in there until last weekend. Its a bit bedraggled, but I like the asymmetry that introduces. 

I just couldn't justify desaturating this image - I really like the intense the blue of the centre and the green of the background.  

Postmodernism Ate My Hamster

Postmodernism has a lot to answer for. 

Ever read a novel in which the main protagonist is a blocked writer? That's post-modern mental ju-jitsu for you. Suffering from writers block? Then write about writer's block. If I have nothing to write about in this post, then I'll write about having nothing to write about and hey presto, we have a post written without having to find anything to say.

Eating your own smoke, as engineers like to call it.

Anyway, an image of another one of those roses that were hanging on in there last Sunday.

The Last Rose of Summer

I seem to remember writing, in a recent post, something to the effect that I'd finished with flower photography for this year.

Well, I was wrong. 

Last Sunday, I noticed that three of our rose bushes were still flowering, with one bloom on each. The weather was dull and overcast, damp and cold, but perfectly still - so ideal for photography. I headed outside with my camera in the late afternoon, when the light was softening towards sunset.

The above is one of three or four (or maybe five) decent images that I made, which I'll post over the next week or two. They feature the rather ragged, fag-end of the year flowers that are left just before the first real frosts arrive.

The title is a literary reference for a change, to a rather drippy poem by Thomas Moore, but it seems appropriate.

Ninety Percent Sturgeon

Twenty years ago, when I was a fresh faced software engineer, Sturgeon’s Law was all the rage. This is probably because it enabled this short of exchange:

“Your software is crap!”

“Yeah? Well so is ninety percent of everything else!”

Fast forwards to today, and Sturgeon seems to have been forgotten by the younger generation, as represented by the grad who works in our office. He gave me a blank look when I mentioned Sturgeon and remained resolutely unimpressed when I filled him in on his "revelation".

Anyway, now I'm older and no wiser, I still find Sturgeon’s Law relevant and useful and not just for shutting up those ignorant individuals who have the temerity to criticise the standard of my professional output – should they be able to find any these days.

I find Sturgeon an inspirational and freeing alternative to the reductive mentality of the Jonathan Critchelys of this world. The implication of Sturgeon – that ten percent of stuff is actually valuable – is fine by me. I've done a fair amount of photography and generated numerous images this summer. But of these, there are three or four images that I'm really proud of and that I feel have moved my photography forwards. The rest are disposable, but it was necessary to make them – it would have been impossible to create the best without making the rest.

Having said that, I still regret posting those images of jasione, murky, horrible photos that they are – they were part of the ninety percent, no matter how you cut it.

The image above was made during a day out to Dunster Castle that we took some time in September. We got there on the West Somerset Railway's Dunster Express, which was fun. This flower - whatever it was - was growing on the South Terrace, where we stopped for lunch. I was without my macro lens at the time so this is another effort made with my Tamron super-zoom.

Marigold Again

I read a variety of photography magazines, but the only one that I read every issue of is Black + White Photography. That's not because of the quality of the writing - its pretty patchy, like most magazines and they could do with giving Tim Clinch a bit of a rest. But it does have good production values, features a variety of imagery and steers away from critiquing readers photos, which is a practice that I find very procrustean.  

Anyway, in Issue 156 (November 2013), there is an interview with Jonathan Chritchley in which he says something to the effect that you shouldn't publish an image that you're not 150 percent sure of.

As I'm only ever eighty percent sure of my images at best, that's a whole seventy percent certainty deficit that I need to make up.

The image above is one of these eighty percenters. So, what's my problem with it? 

Well, apart from the fact that I'm aware that I've posted lots of images of marigolds in the past, its a colour image, and I always feel a sense of defeat when I can't make a decent monochrome image from a shot that I've taken. Oh, and the white balance is a bit off...and the composition is nothing to write home about...and, well you get the gist.

As an amateur, I think it's quite difficult to judge the value, or otherwise, of your imagery. Selling pictures to make a living, like Mr Chritchley, is a very direct way of getting feedback on what you do. This links back to the points I made in my previous post about access to arts events and indicates some uncertainty that I'm feeling about how to progress my photography. 

Winter is coming on and my flower photography is over until next spring. Last year, this blog suffered a serious hiatus due to a general lack of anything worth posting. I'm determined not to let that happen this year, but how to produce images to my eighty percent standard during the dark months is a bit of a mystery to me at the moment.

I'll continue to post the stuff that I have backed up, which should take me down to Christmas or thereabouts, then we'll have to see where I go from there.

The Hungry SAW

One of the dangers associated with the practice of digital photography is the tendency encourage solipsism. For a long while, I produced images that were seen by me alone. Eventually, the urge came upon me to get my images in front of people, so I set up this blog and started looking around for other ways to get my images out there.

One potential outlet that I noticed was an annual event called “Somerset Art Weeks” (SAW). This is essentially an open studio type of event, with a central organisation producing maps and promotional literature and the artists providing the venues in which their work is displayed. So, on the appointed date each year, little yellow signs appear all over the county and visitors can follow them with the help of the nicely-produced map and brochure to any or all of the hundred-plus locations.

[Inter alia, it occurs to me that artists, who have a propensity for bleating on about the environment, have organised an event that pretty much requires the audience to drive to many of the venues in private cars, but I obviously don’t understand the finer points of environmental activism.]

The idea of participating in SAW had been in my mind for a couple of years, and it seemed entirely doable, as our house has a largish room with floor to ceiling windows and external access, that could be set up as a ‘gallery’ for a week. If I made some large format prints of a selection of my images and judiciously rearranged the furniture, I’d be sorted. So, earlier this year I started looking into getting involved.

I perused the SAW website and found that I needed to become a member of the organisation by paying the appropriate fee – about £90 per annum for an individual, as I remember. There were committee meetings to attend and various other flummery, but it all looked straightforward in essence. I worked out a budget of £200 - £300 and a couple of days off work, and got quite excited about the idea.

It wasn't until I read through the arrangements for SAW 2013 – fortunately, I did this before joining or making any prints - that the whole thing hit the buffers. It transpired that a decision had been taken to limit participation in this year’s event to - sorry, to"highlight" - artists groups. No particular reason was given for this, but as I wasn't about to go off and find a group that was in need of a photographer, that was the end of the idea. There were other things that needed my attention anyway, so the whole thing was forgotten.

But not quite. The episode set me thinking about issues of access and inclusion in this sort of event and the arts in general.

In the past, membership of artists groups was socially controlled by gatekeepers – guilds, academic institutions, funding bodies and the like – who limited access to the skills, materials and especially the means of distribution by which art could be made and disseminated.

Recently, digital technologies have undermined this control. Ubiquitous computing, cheap or free applications and broadband connectivity have allowed individuals to create and disseminate their art in a variety of media with little or no reference to other artists or their appointed representatives.

Of course, the public debate about these issues has been dominated by artists’ inability to monetise their work in the digital age, and there are some real issues here, such as the weakening of creators’ rights to suit the purposes of big tech like Google.

However, if you consider that the majority of artists don’t earn their living by making art, then the underlying issues of control and access suddenly assume more importance. The fact is that most artists are more profoundly affected by the blurring of boundaries between themselves and their audience brought about by digital production, than the inability to sell their work for a reasonable price – which most of them could never do, anyway.

This, I think, is why there are so many festivals and other cultural events these days. Artists, faced with the failure of their gatekeeping mechanisms in the virtual space, are trying to shift the battleground back into the physical domain. “Curating” a festival and inviting your mates to take part helps to re-delineate boundaries between yourselves as a group and the audience - to reclaim the power to bestow the designation of “artist” - giving back some of the social control that the internet has taken away.

Bringing the discussion back to SAW, I should say that I have no idea why they chose to limit participation in the way that they did – there may be perfectly valid reasons. And in any case, I'm not suggesting that someone sat down and thought “Right, how do we keep the hoi polloi out of our arts festival?” But it does form part of a broader picture of arts politics in the digital age.

Also, SAW is part funded by the District Council using public money, so as a Council Tax payer I think I have a reasonable expectation that it won’t be allowed to turn into someone’s private arts club.

It will be interesting to see if, in 2014, SAW returns to allowing individual participation or if that drawbridge has actually been raised for good.

This image is another from our visit to the National Botanic Gardens of Wales in September. The post title is adapted from a Tindersticks album of a similar name.

I Speak My Brains III

So, why are there no a-mount announcements? It’s been a while. The fact is that Sony is making a roaring success of its other cameras. The NEX range is one of the best-selling in the mirror-less space and the recent CyberShot RX models – the RX1 and the RX100 - have been very well received (I don’t get the need for the new RX10, but I’m sure it will sell well).

However, all of these are consumer cameras - the pro market has remained largely indifferent to Sony, sticking with Canikon and leaving a-mount looking increasingly like an encumbrance. Sony has quietly shrunk the a-mount line-up down to four models – the A58, A65, A77 and A99 – removing the entry level models as that market has been cannibalised by NEX. This does rather call into question Sony’s decision to purchase Konica-Minolta as a route into the market as the business they now have owes little to this now-defunct brand.

There is one fly in the e-mount ointment, though. I don’t see the third party lens support for it. All of the major players make a-mount versions of most, if not all, of their lenses, but the choice for e-mount looks somewhat less extensive.

Okay, I know that Zeiss make e-mount lenses, which is fine if you have deep pockets, but my Sigma macro lens is good enough for me and a fraction of the price of its Sony or Zeiss counterparts.

Assuming I have the choice, I’d want to see much more third party support for e-mount before I adopt it.

The image above comes from our return visit to the National Botanic Gardens of Wales. I'm not sure what type of flower it is. Again, my Tamron super-zoom was pressed into service in the absence of my Sigma macro lens.

I Speak My Brains II

In the past I've been deliberately obtuse about the reasons why Sony have had to develop a new lens mount for their mirror-less cameras – but I do understand, really. It’s because the flange distance on the a-mount lenses is prohibitively large and would have driven up the size of the camera bodies, thus negating one of the main benefits of a mirror-less design.

[Canikon have this problem as well, which is why their mirror-less offerings eschew their long established standard lens mounts.]

The A7s are currently the world’s smallest full frame cameras, smaller even than the Olympus OM-D, as Sony are keen to point out. However, the current drive for smaller and lighter bodies can only take them and their competitors so far – what then?

I guess that I'm looking to Sony to start innovating in terms of form factor. Despite all the advances of the past few years, cameras are still basically a box with a lens on the front, a screen on the back and some buttons on the top; surely, with the mirror and the OVF gone, we can do something different?

This image comes from a return visit that we made to the National Botanic Garden of Wales in September to see the IGPOTY exhibition that was running at the time. I found this mushroom on one of the nature walks. Without my tripod or remote release, I had to put the camera on the ground and use the self timer to make the image. I should also say that I was using my Tamron super-zoom as my macro lens was being repaired. Despite all these factors, I think that the resulting image is passable. 

I Speak My Brains

Over the next few posts, I'll record some of my thoughts about the direction that Sony Imaging is taking, then we can determine the level of my prognosticative powers. To start with, some reflections on the designation of the new full frame cameras announced last week.

First, a quick recap of my understanding of Sony’s naming conventions. 

A + 3 digits = DSLR; 

A + 2 digits = DSLT; 

A + 1 digit = full frame(?) mirror-less(?); 

The higher the number, the higher the spec of the camera, with A9** being the top of any particular range.

Confusingly, the same number doesn't designate cameras at the same price point in different ranges. And I don't get why two very different cameras - the A7 and A7r - are given similar designations. And how are upgrades to be designated? With the three and two digit nomenclature, this was easy, but with a single digit you have to go to mark numbers, which would be a new departure for Sony.

Whatever, designating the new cameras as A7s leaves room in the range for a higher spec A9 - and an A9r? -  model. What would that be like? A full frame, 48 mega-pixel mirror-less model, perhaps?

Anyway, the image above is the final one from the last batch that I made prior to my Sigma lens breaking. Its another of a rose from our garden - I was experimenting with black backgrounds at this point, which I've get to return to.

Sony Day

Yesterday was a big day for Sony's Imaging division. They announced three new cameras, amongst them not one, but two full frame e-mount models - the third being the RX10, which amounts to a £1,000 bridge camera with a big sensor.

Anyway, back to the e-mount cameras, the A7 and the A7r. The two share the same body, although the internals are quite different. The first has a 24 mega-pixel sensor with a hybrid autofocus system, but the second is a 36 mega-pixel monster, optimised  - if you believe Sony - for image quality, without a low-pass optical filter to improve resolution further.

Along with the cameras, five full frame - designated FE - Zeiss (aka expensive) lenses were announced, with more to come next year.

Its interesting to note that, despite the fact that the A7s are effectively NEX cameras, they attract an Alpha designation. Apparently, Sony are bringing the two brands together. Now, I find the Sony camera range confusing enough as it is and I'm a fairly assiduous Sony watcher. In my view the whole range is likely become a hotchpotch of a-mount and e-mount cameras that will be incomprehensible to a disinterested observer.

Despite all this and my previous ranting on the subject, I find myself really wanting an A7r. Body only, one of these babies comes in around £1,700. And I'd need a new lens kit, so the whole lot would set me back the better part of four grand. So, that's not going to happen then.

Above is another image of a rose that I made with my now rather sorry looking Alpha 77. Enjoy, if you can bear to be without the additional twelve mega-pixels.

Cold Roses

Another rose from our garden. I've posted images of roses from this bush before - the flowers are dark red, probably my favourite blooms in the whole garden. 

The bush is quite leggy, so some of the flowers are above head height and difficult to photograph. I'd have been happier if the camera had been level with this one rather than below, resulting in the slight upward angle that I've had to use, but needs must and all that.

My previous post, "Acuf Rose" was named after an Uncle Tupelo track, off their final album "Anodyne". The track took its name from the music publishing partnership of the same name and features the lyric "Name me a song that everybody knows / I'll bet you it belongs to Acuf Rose." 

This post takes its title from a double album released by another alt-country luminary.

The Real Deal

If you want to see how flower photography should be done (stifled sob) - and to see a properly designed website, although a little more commentary would be nice - you should check out the work of Annemarie Farley here.

Acuf Rose

After the ranting of my previous post, back to some actual imagery.

This is, obviously, of a rose from our garden. We have several bushes, this particular one is pink. I struggled to make decent images of these flowers all summer and ended with only a couple that are passable, of which this is one.

"I Remember California" took its title from a track by REM, from their major label début album "Green". This post title has a very general musical connection, but it has been used as a track title as well.

Sony and Swear

When I bought my first DSLR, back in 2006, my instinct – and I base all my technology purchasing decisions on instinct - was to go with the entry level Nikon – the D1000 or whatever it was at the time. However I let my father persuade me to buy a Sony Alpha 100. To be fair, he was picking up some of the bill as a birthday present.

Recently, I've begun to doubt the wisdom of that choice. This is unfortunate, as the cost of changing camera brands is high. In my case, I have three a-mount bodies, one kit lens and two third party lenses, plus various accessories such as remote releases and the like. This may not be a vast amount of kit, but I don’t have that much in the way of cash (or time, for that matter) to devote to photography which is, when all’s said and done, a hobby.

So, what’s the problem? I'm not unhappy with the cameras – far from it.

The problem is Sony’s strategy around their two lens mounts, a-mount and e-mount. When e-mount was first introduced, it was exclusively on the mirrorless NEX cameras. At the time, I tended to see these cameras as a bit of a distraction, as I was already bought into a-mount, and I've never been good at seeing which way the wind is blowing with regards to technology or anything else. I couldn't understand why Sony would go to the expense of buying Konica-Minolta and then developing their own lens mount anyway.

However, the mirrorless camera market has boomed over the past few years, although slowing slightly at the moment, and the NEX brand has been one of the best-selling in this space. At the same time Sony has failed to make an impression in the professional market with its high end Alpha cameras.

Sony has therefore put a lot of effort into developing its NEX range – whilst, some might argue, neglecting the Alpha range. Numerous NEX models, with increasingly high specs have been introduced, until this reached its logical conclusion. When the Alpha 77 was released, alongside it was a mirrorless version – the NEX7 – essentially the same camera, at the same price point, in a different form factor. Meanwhile, the top of the range Alpha 9* series has seen only three models since the brand launched several years ago.

Perhaps I should have seen the next step coming, but as noted above, I've always been poor at predicting tech trends. Anyway, it now appears that Sony are going to introduce e-mount entry level DSLRs – in fact the A3000 has already been announced - and that these will probably replace the a-mount models at the low-to-medium end of the range. Alpha mount will become Sony’s high end, pro spec format.

That’s great, but I won’t have pro-spec money to spend when I come to replace my Alpha 77.

In contrast, Nikon and Canon have the same lens mount for all their DSLR cameras, from entry level through to the flagship pro models. So the upgrade path is relatively painless – and for that matter, so is the downgrade path.

[To be fair both Canon and Nikon have introduced mirrorless models with lens mounts that are incompatible with their DSLR ranges. But these have been me too offerings which have failed to challenge NEX and micro four thirds cameras in this space. And there is no suggestion that Canikon are going to replace the lens mounts on their entry level models with ones that are incompatible with their pro-spec cameras.]

To further confuse the issue, there are rumours of a full frame NEX camera to be announced shortly – this will leave the a-mount looking increasingly like a minority interest for the well-heeled. This appears to be another case of a company chasing new customers whilst forgetting their existing ones.

So, what do I do? Stick with a-mount and hope that it doesn't die too soon? Give up on it and go e-mount (bearing in mind that I find the NEX cameras pig-ugly)? Or abandon Sony altogether in a fit of disgust at the way that they treat their existing customers? In theory, the decision point is a few years away, but I'm thinking of buying a new macro lens and my instincts say that an a-mount lens may be a waste of money…

I Remember California

Despite the fact that my macro lens has been returned, I'm still working through the last batch of images that I made before it broke.Of those, this is the last of image of a Californian poppy that I'm going to post, and appropriately enough, its of a seed head, the end of the life-cycle.

Previous post title: California Stars is a song recorded by Wilco for the first Mermaid Avenue album. This was one of a pair of albums that they made with Billy Bragg - of all people - which took lyrics from an archive of unrecorded Woody Guthrie songs and set them to music written by the recording artists.

This post borrows its title from another politically engaged American band's oeuvre.

Sigma in Successful Lens Return Shocker

My Sigma 50mm lens has been returned, repaired. I have to say that Sigma's customer service has been rather good. 

I set the lens via Royal Mail and it was delivered to their facility at 10am the following morning, according to the parcel tracking information. By 2pm, I had an email from Sigma acknowledging receipt. A couple of hours later, I had a repair estimate and I sent the authority to proceed that evening, which they acknowledged the following morning.

Then things took at bit of dip. Ten days went by before I emailed for a progress update. Fair enough, they responded the next day and I now have the lens back in my possession. And I've been charged what was estimated. 

So all in all, its a thumbs up from me for Sigma: good comms, acceptable turn-round time, charges as estimated. 

California Stars

In a first for this blog, I've chosen to post two versions of the same image on the basis that I can't decide between them. Above is the mono treatment, below the colour. I think they both have their charms - feel free to comment on which you prefer.

In other news, this blog has reached a milestone of one thousand page views. Its taken over a year, so its nothing to crow about, more a case of perseverance in the face of indifference than anything else. I have noticed that posting anything with a vaguely American theme causes a surge in the number of hits, so these poppies have helped move things on a bit.

The previous post was titled after a song by Luna, once described in Rolling Stone magazine as "the best band that you've never heard of", which is a ringing endorsement, if ever I've heard one.

This post has another popular music themed title, with a roundabout link to one of the previous titles in this series.

California (All The Way)

This is an image of one of the Californian Poppies that we had growing on the riverbank at the back of the house earlier in the summer. Photographing them open is the devil's own job, because they close up as soon as the sun goes in. The specimen pictured is actually closing up, so I was having to work quickly.

Yet again, I couldn't come up with a suitable mono treatment, so I'm presenting it here in glorious colour.

Anyway, the post title is another music reference, this time with an indie rock theme.

The previous post - Windfall - was a reference to the Son Volt song of that name, from their first album "Trace", which is a truly great driving record. Yet again, Mr Dart sussed it out.

Windfall

So, here we have the first image that I've posted which has been processed through my new workflow. The main difference is that I've done away with UFRaw, and introduced RAWTherapee. In practice, I still have to process my raw files to tiff and then import them into GiMP, but the RAWTherapee interface is so much nicer than UFRaw, which hasn't been improved over the years that I've been using it. Presumably the developers have been too busy hating Microsoft to bother with reworking their UI.

Anyway, back to the image itself. This is of a poppy that we found growing in one of the troughs at the front of the house earlier this year. We left it to see what would develop, and were glad that we did. The thing was enormous - about three feet tall when I made this image. We've harvested the seeds, so we should have a few more next year.

The title of this post is a reference to the fact that this is a windblown plant, but it's also a suitably obscure music reference (clue: think alt country). Anyone who spots it will get an honourable mention on this blog.

The title of the previous post is a reference to an album track from Sonic Youth's "Murray Street" album. Props to Mr Ian Dart for spotting it. 

Sympathy for the Strawberry

We've just returned from a week's holiday in Rhodes. However the rhythms of my photography don't neatly align with those of the rest of my life, so this image is one of those processed on my old laptop using UFRaw. It will, however, be the last of these.

As to the image itself, it was taken well over a month ago. The strawberries that we had in pots on the riverbank have been over for a while now. 

As an aside, if anyone can guess the obscure alt-rock reference of the title, they'll get an honourable mention in the next post on this blog, when the answer will also be revealed and I'll finally get round to posting an image produced by my new workflow.

Good News, Bad News

Good news first: I now have film in my MTL3. Not Tri-X - Ilford HP5 Plus 400 - but film none the less. I was wandering past a branch of Jessops, popped in and that was all they had. I've been taking some happy snaps so watch this space for news of the result - I haven't actually established that the camera is working yet.

The bad news: my Sigma 50mm macro lens has developed a fault. The focusing ring has jammed such that I can't focus any closer than 0.6 m, which is pretty useless for a macro lens. A return to works job, I'm afraid and no more flower images in the meantime.

Oh well. The summer garden is almost over and I do have a fair few images backed up which will hopefully tide me over until my lens is fixed.

The Last of the Jasione

I'm still working on my old laptop, still using UFRaw. I have a couple more images from this batch to post and then I'll make the move. However, this is the last image of the jasione that I'll post - at least for now. They're still flowering, so its possible that I'll make some more images of them.

David's Jasione

Another image of a jasione flower - this one is from earlier in its lifecycle than the previous post.

I've finally bought myself a new laptop, which I'm in the process of setting up. Its a much more powerful beast than the eight year old machine that I'm writing this on and this will probably be one of the last posts written on it. 

I've installed RawTherapee on the new machine, so this will also be the swansong for UFRaw. It will be interesting to see what difference this new setup makes to the images.

PS: Thanks go to Ian Dart for the title of this post.

Jasione and the Argonauts

This is an image of a jasione flower. No, me neither. We have them growing in pots at the front of the house. I've no idea where they came from, I assume that my wife must have bought and planted them, quite possibly when I was present, but I have no memory of it.

They appear to have a fairly complex lifecycle - a blue flower morphs its shape a couple of times before developing into the green seed head which appears in this image. I have a few images of the earlier phases, which I may post over the coming week.

The Name of The Rose

"Peace" apparently.

I've been trying to make images of the roses all summer, and failing. This is the first that's been worth posting.

Praktica Update

The idea of resurrecting the Praktica has been niggling away at me. So, I tracked down a replacement for the PX625 battery, courtesy of Maplin. And the exposure meter still works, so the idea lives on - the next step is to get hold of a roll of film and make some exposures. There's a Kodak shop in Keynsham - no, really - so Tri-X may not be out of the question.

More of this soon, I expect. 

In Clover

We have an L-shaped lawn that runs across the front - East - side of the house and round the North side. The lawn at the front is relatively new, laid when we remodeled the garden after our son was born. The side lawn is older, essentially untouched since we moved in.

A couple of years ago, I decided I was going to improve the quality of the side lawn, which was full of clover, moss and weeds. So, I instituted a regime of regular cutting and feeding and I bought an electric lawn rake. And the lawn responded to all this TLC and I got rid of most of the moss and clover.

Last year of course, it all went backwards. Regular trips to Liverpool meant that the garden was neglected. But this year, I was going to recover the situation, until my lawn rake broke and I managed to electrocute myself trying to fix it.

Anyway, the clover is back, with a vengeance. Above is an example, the image made in a rush because I was just about to mow the lawn again. This meant that I broke my usual rule and made the image when the sun was out, which is how I achieved the high contrast that I like about it.

Dad's Gone to Iceland

We've just returned from another weekend at my father's house in Liverpool - probably one of the last as the building work going on there is nearing completion. However, I made this image on the previous visit in early June. 

I don't know what it is with builders, but as soon as they move in your garden turns into a building site, no matter what they're actually doing, inside or out. These Icelandic poppies are growing everywhere amongst the other weeds and long grass at the back of the house. 

Anyway, I managed to take five minutes out to take this picture. I didn't bother to take my tripod with me so I had to shoot hand-held, hence the shallow depth of field. And I couldn't make it into an acceptable monochrome image, despite concerted efforts, so I present it here in all its full-colour glory.  Nevertheless, I'm reasonably pleased with the result.

Return of the Osteospermum

As promised, a return to posting my garden photography.

I was fairly happy with the image of an osteospermum that I posted a few weeks ago. However I didn't have a satisfactory image of a whole flower, so one evening I decided to return to the subject.

Anyway, you may remember that I mentioned that the osteospermum grow in pots on the west side of the house. When I got round there, the sun had already set, or at least dropped behind the White Horse (ah, the romance of it!) and the flowers had closed.

I made a few images anyway, the one above being the most successful. I still don't have the image I was after, so I'll probably have another go round this before the end of the season. 

Praktica-L Photography Part II

One thing that I omitted to mention in my last post, is that there was a roll of film in the camera when I found it, which I extracted and took for processing. I had absolutely no memory of what might be on the film, so there was a fair degree of anticipation in waiting for the results, which came back on Thursday. So, what did I find?

Well, the film stock had aged badly with significant colour shift. Also, only twelve of the twenty-four frames had been exposed. Of those, one was an out-of-focus shot looking out of the window of my bedroom at my parent's house - the sort that you take when you're winding the film on at the start of the roll; There was an image of my parents in a formal garden somewhere; Several images of a family party, probably to celebrate the birth of one of my cousin's children; And three images of some friends at Holt's Field, one of which is presented above.

(By coincidence, Holt's Field is behind Sudley House, which I've written about in some of my previous posts.)

I've resisted the temptation to improve the image, so that you can see that my assertions regarding the poor standard of my photography at the time are true. I've managed to get the exposure right, but the focus is a bit soft, the framing is all to cock and the depth of field was probably left to chance and ended up being a bit deep for a portrait. 

Anyway, the internal evidence suggests that these images where all made around twenty-five years ago. But the scary thing is that I've still no memory of making any of them. It makes you realise how much of your life disappears, forgotten into nothingness. 

Do any of the people in the photographs remember then being taken any more than the photographer? I expect not.

This photograph also illustrates the immense subjective emotional charge of photographs. To most viewers this is just a photograph of three blokes sitting on a wall, failing to enjoy the experience of being photographed. To me, its a window into a long forgotten summer afternoon many years ago.

Anyway, enough maudlin navel gazing, normal service will be resumed with my next post.

Praktica-L Photography

We're still sorting through stuff that's come back from my Dad's house. Amongst everything, I found my old film camera. It was bought around 1981 or 1982, when we had a bit of money left over from my grandparent's estate. We changed the family car, getting rid of the old Ford Escort Mk I estate and replacing it with a Morris Ital (Big mistake. Huge), and bought ourselves some luxuries. I can't remember what my Mother got as part of this spending spree, but my Dad bought an Olympus OM10 and I was given a Praktica MTL3.

The Praktica was made in East Germany - by the feel of the thing, in a factory that made tractors for the rest of the year. It's agricultural in a good way though - Don McCullin's Nikon F1 famously stopped a bullet, the Praktica feels like it could stop an artillery shell.

The camera is - almost - entirely mechanical. Only the light meter requires electrical power, which is provided by a single PX625 battery. As far as I can make out, it is in working order and I do have the urge to lay my hands on a roll of Tri-X and try it out. However, this is probably the engineer rather than the photographer in me doing the thinking.

At this point, its customary to say that I learned everything that I know about photography whilst using this camera. And I could say that, but it would be untrue. The sad fact is that I made very few decent images - and no good ones - with the Praktica. 

I put this down to a number of factors - for instance the whole business of acquiring a skill was that much harder in the days before the internet - but ultimately the immediacy and creative control of digital imaging are the things that have made the difference for me. Waiting for a bunch of disappointing images to come back from the lab sapped my enthusiasm pretty quickly. My Dad didn't persist with his Olympus, either.

Anyway, having found the thing, I had the urge to make some images of it, so out came the light tent and the results are above. I was aiming for a 'product shot' vibe - I think that I had some vague idea that there was some humour to be had in presenting an object with it origins in a factory in the Eastern Bloc in the manner of modern consumer iconography. And there's the whole post-modern thing about photographing a camera.

In the same vein, I love the fact that there is a screw head just below the 'MLT' model ident - I can't imagine a marketing department allowing that in this day and age.

The other thing that I notice is how plain the back of the camera is, compared to a modern dSLR. However, the overall look is ironically very similar to the Olympus OM-D.

As a parting shot, I would note that I couldn't have made this image with the Praktica, which is the crucial difference between then and now from my perspective.

Always the Wallflower

Another image from the spring garden, this time a wallflower. We always seem to choose to grow really leggy plants which are the devil's own job to shoot in even the slightest breeze.

I don't know if I've said this before, but I don't shoot cut flowers. Every image that appears in this blog is taken in situ in the garden. This gives me the maximum choice of subject, but limits the time available for photography to late evening - most of the garden is in full sun all day - and reasonable weather - which is to say calm and dry. And I often find myself climbing about in the flower beds getting scratched half to death. 

Shooting pot plants is so much simpler, as the last three posts demonstrate.

Chive Talking

There are some chives in a terracotta pot at the front of our house, which are currently flowering with a bright purple, spiky bloom. Their logs stems make them the devil's own job to photograph in even the slightest breeze.

So it took me a while to make this image - I'd like to think that the blurring is due to my creative use of depth of field, however its probably down to the thing swaying about so much.

What Rhymes With Osteospermum?

Sternum, I guess.

We have some pots on the riverbank at the back of the house.That makes it sound like something from an E M Forster novel, which it isn't, but I digress.

Recently, we've managed to spend a couple of weekends at home and that means only one thing - gardening. So these osteospermum arrived to supplement the under-performing strawberry plants in the riverbank pots. This is where I made this image, on a glorious summer evening a week or so ago.

The garden is actually at its best at this time of year and I have a whole load of images which need processing, amongst which there will hopefully be some which are worth posting, so watch this space.