A Smaller Break

This is the last of these tulip images.

A Cleaner Break

Another image of that broken stemmed tulip.

A Clean Break

I liked this image better on the camera LCD.

There's a slightly unusual story behind this one. We have a small group of these stripey tulips at the back of our garden and I decided to make some images of them, using my diffuser as a background rather than faffing about with a piece of white paper. However, the diffuser is quite large and I dropped it as I was moving it into place, breaking the stem of this flower.

I was a bit nonplussed at this as I don't usually cut flowers in order to photograph them, but after a few minutes of fussing about, I got this into a pot and made a few images.

I did say that it was only slightly unusual.

I really thought this was going to be better, but I don't like the way the broad white stripe on the right bleeds into the background.

Chew Lip II

Another image of the stripey, striking tulip from our garden.

Chew Lip

Yet another image of a long stemmed tulip from our garden.

Black Tulip II

Okay, even I've had enough of this particular flower, so something different next time, honest.

Black Tulip

Another image of the same purple tulip, Unfortunately, there are more where this came from. Even worse, I may post some of them.

Tua Lipa II

Another image of the long stemmed tulip. A few more to come, I fear.

Tua Lipa

This image is one of few that approximates to the original idea that was in my head when I set up the camera. 

This long stemmed tulip was in a pot on our dining table and my plan was to accentuate the stem by photographing it from beneath. I used my diffuser as a backdrop, covering a window - this was a problem as the light was already going when I started, but it led to the nice soft quality of the image.

In all, this is everything that I'm trying to achieve with my "specimen images" of single flowers.

Below is a similar image, where the framing isn't quite right, so the formal properties aren't quite as strong.

Fifty Fifty Clown

After losing it slightly with my previous post, here we have an attempt pull things back with a slightly different take on the tulip theme. This time, the bloom in question is from our garden and the image was made hand-held using my Alpha 77. 

I'm not convinced about the out-of-focus petal forming the lower half of the image, but the upper half is fine, and fifty percent of anything is good enough for me at the moment.

Needs Must

Yes, I know, yet another tulip.

I've made loads of images recently, and all of them have been mediocre at best. Normally, when I download a set of images from the camera I have a fair idea which I'm going to use. I then whittle down that group as I process them to arrive at the select few that make it onto this prestigious blog. Recently, that number has shrunk from a few to none.

Maybe my standards have risen, but its more likely that I've been producing poor pictures.

So, I've been forced to fall back onto this less than scintillating image, accompanied by the sound of a barrel being thoroughly scraped. For the record, this image was made at Dunster Castle over the Easter holiday.

Canned II

Another image from the Cannington visit - I think this is also a tulip, but I'm not entirely sure.

Canned

The Easter weekend saw us paying a visit to Cannington Walled Gardens in the sunshine, where I made this image of a tulip. I like to think that this has a similar look and feel to that of last year's images from Tyntesfield, which is as close as you get to a house style on this blog.

Again, I was working with my Alpha 550 and again I found myself niggled by its limitations. In this case, I was shooting hand-held, using live view and holding the camera at waste level as I felt slightly inhibited about sprawling full length on the formal lawn. Back in the day, the live view implementation was considered to be amongst the best, but now...For one thing, you have to switch between live view and the OVF manually, using a switch that would be right at home on a tractor. The screen tilts, but doesn't swivel, so shooting in portrait format was almost impossible. And talking of the OVF, it has 95% coverage only, which means that extraneous things creep in at the edge of the fame, like that leaf on the left of this image.

<rant>As an aside, it strikes me that those people who go on about the superiority of an OVF over an EVF are camera snobs who have lashed out on top end gear with >99% OVF coverage and need to justify the expense. An EVF gives 100% coverage and is a real step forwards for the rest of us plebs.</rant>

I could go on, but I think that you get the idea - I suspect that the A550's days are numbered.

The Horns of a Dilemma

This image represents a dilemma of a sort that I'm facing with my flower photography.

On the one hand, I seem to be making more images, whilst fewer of them make the grade for posting here. This could be for one of a number of reasons. Perhaps my standards have risen. Or maybe I'm experimenting more and hence failing more often. Or it could be that I'm just spreading myself too thinly, not concentrating enough on each image.

Or maybe its because I'm not sure what I'm trying to achieve. This image, for example, is fine as it stands, but the whole process of opening up the lens and making something impressionistic seems just a bit too facile. On the other hand, I could have produced a nice clean image, which would have been too straight, a record shot with any obvious aesthetic qualities, despite being monochrome.

Oh well, never mind. I've posted images that I'm not completely happy with before and no doubt I will again. But I could really do with sorting out what I'm doing and why.

A Change of Tone

Those of you who've followed this blog for a while - I dunno, these people might possibly exist - may remember that I've previously posted a couple of experiments with toning images. Well, here's another.

I should say that my workflow still consists of freeware - specifically RAWTherapee and GiMP. I am vaguely tempted to build a Windows version of Darktable, but only vaguely. Even when you have the skills, building software on your home PC is an enormous hassle.

AF Free Zone

For some reason, I haven't mentioned the latest news from Sony, which is that my camera, the Alpha 77, has finally been replaced. The Alpha 77 II , or M2 depending on which blog you read, was announced on the first of May. 

Its taken the better part of three years for the company to get round to this upgrade, which as the name of the new model implies, is more of a tweak than a major revamp, although the new AF system is rather nifty by all accounts.

Anyway, I'll be soldiering on with my current model for the time being, so here's an image of a tulip made using manual focus. 

Pretentious, Moi?

Another image of those two tulips, this time without the pretentiousness.

Tulipe Etude #13

I have to confess to being slightly in awe of the lack of irony required to give images really pretentious titles like the one above.

A couple of years ago, I saw a magazine article featuring photos of horses entitled "Equus" which really crystallised this sense that the photographer was trying to say something along the lines of "Right, that's horses summed up. What's next?", which is obvious tosh.

John Berger, writing in "Ways of Seeing", makes the point that we shouldn't mystify art because in doing so we obscure the historical reality of the circumstances of its creation and dissemination. He was writing about oil painting, but the point is in many ways more relevant to photography, in relation to which writers routinely invoke the sublime to justify designating as art that which is, after all, the output of a mechanical process.

Wilhelm Flusser tries to get round this issue by arguing that photographic apparatus has the possibility of certain images encoded into it and that art is produced when the photographer exceeds or evades these to produce something original. I must admit that I haven't come to a conclusion about this line of thought, but it seems intuitively wrong to me. I guess that it depends on your views regarding the sanctioned role(s) of images and image makers in our society. 

That's not to say that photography can't produce art. However most if it, if we're honest, is craft, and there's nothing wrong with craft-work (or Kraftwerk, for that matter). 

Anyway, here's an image of couple of tulips. Enjoy.

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.

Tulip Three

Another image from the tulip session as promised in my previous post. Not as symmetrical as the previous image, not as pleasing in its formality, but I like the detailing on the petals. And the shape does lend itself to the square format, and the square format lends itself to images of flowers.