Early One Morning

Tuesday Morning

I get up early. No, whatever you're thinking, its earlier than that. God knows what I do with my time, cos I don't get into work all that early. 

There is an upside, however. Twice a year - March and September, say - I get to see the sunrise on my way to work. Flexi-time means that, if you stop and get your camera out, you do so on your own time and haste is never conducive to good photography, but at least you're there and it's always an option.

Earlier this year, I started a new job, which meant a new commute and a whole new set of scenery to take in. My new journey is longer - about 30 miles as opposed to 15 - and more varied - the levels, the Mendips, the Bristol conurbation - than the old.

The image above is my attempt to capture some of that variety in a single shot. 

Our Broken Workflow

My digital workflow is broken. I can still process photos, but only just. How this happened is a salutary story regarding the pitfalls of relying on free software.

A few years ago, I got fed up with Adobe and their business practices. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a freetard. I fully accept that Adobe has every right to make a profit on it's intellectual property. But…

I shoot in RAW format because I've read all the magazine articles telling me that it's the Right Thing To Do. I used to use Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) as a Photoshop plugin, to perform the conversion. This worked fine until I upgraded my camera. Then, I needed a later version of ACR and guess what? To run the new version of ACR I needed a later version of Photoshop.

Now, there is no technical reason for this; Adobe has hardcoded a check to stop later versions of ACR running with earlier versions of Photoshop simply to force users to upgrade. And that was a big ask when I'd just spent all my hard-earned cash on a new camera. This is especially true because, as a photographer, I don't get much out of the newer versions of Photoshop. The version I was running was fine for my needs, but I was being made to buy a costly upgrade.

But what could I do?

Well, what I did was to opt out of the Adobe consensus and adopt GIMP as my photo editor.

For those of you who don't know, GIMP is a fully featured photo editor which is free to download. If you haven't tried it, I recommend that you do, and then try to justify your next overpriced Photoshop upgrade to yourself.

But what about RAW conversion? Wasn't that the deal breaker with Adobe in the first place? Fortunately, there is a GIMP plugin called UFRaw, which works much like ACR with Photoshop.

So, for a couple of years Ive been happily working away using freeware throughout my photographic workflow. All the images that I've posted on this blog have been processed in this way.

However, two things happened recently that disturbed this halcyon situation. Firstly, I bought a new camera. Then I upgraded to GIMP 2.8.

The second of these issues bit me first. As soon as I'd taken the upgrade, UFRaw stopped working. I was without my usual RAW conversion facilities for a couple of weeks until I had chance to surf for a solution. Happily, the GIMP user community came up trumps and a quick reinstall of UFRaw later, I was up and running again.

But not for long. When I imported a file created on my new camera, I realized that it had a nasty colour cast and was actually unusable.

To be fair, I had an idea that this might happen before I bought the camera. UFRaw hasn't been updated since April 2011 and uses an old version dcraw, so I wasn't all that surprised, really.

OK, I thought, I'll install RAWTherapee. I'd auditioned it a few years ago before choosing UFRaw on the basis of its integration with GIMP and I knew it was a good piece of software.

But no! RAWTherapee won't install if you have less than 2Gb of RAM on your PC. I'm using a five year old machine, and only have 1Gb, so no joy there. I have to say, as an ex software developer, I find this to be a very strange choice. Normally, you state the minimum system requirements for a piece of software and then let the user take the consequences of ignoring them.

So, I've been forced back on the conversion software that comes in the box with the camera, which is a bit of a let-down to say the least.

I'm left waiting for an upgrade to UFRaw (come on, guys!) to solve the installation issues and incorporate the latest version of dcraw. In the meantime, I'll probably audition some other freeware converters, Scarab Darkroon being the most obvious choice. If anyone has any other suggestions, they'd be most welcome.

PS: the title for this post is a weak pun around the name of Icelandic miserable-ist beat combo Our Broken Garden. Check them out if you're in need of a wallow. 

Other Voices

Recently, friend and former work colleague Ian Dart got in touch. Ian is an accomplished photographer - despite the fact that he's gone over to the Dark Side (i.e. he shoots with a Nikon) - with his own style and an eye for the shots that I always miss.


Ian's partner, Kate Rattray is a very fine mosaic artist who has contributed many pieces of public art, one of which is currently on display in Wells - its the swan outside the solicitors office in the market square, if you happen to be visiting.


There's a link to Ian's flickr feed and Kate's website in the new "Other Places to Visit" section of this blog and I recommend that you give both look.

Kilve at Christmas

Kilve, Boxing Day 2011

Another landscape that I've struggled with for a number of years. Just to prove that I'm versatile, its a coastal landscape this time, although we're still in Somerset, at Kilve. The beach there boasts exposed rock strata not dissimilar to those found on the more famous Jurassic Coast.

Over many years, we've fallen into a Boxing Day routine, verging on becoming a tradition. Desperate to get out of the house, in the afternoon we drive down the coast, park by the tea rooms and walk along to the beach.

There, its always cold, usually raining and generally a bit bleak. I fiddle with my camera, everyone else gets bored and fed up, so we walk back the car and drive home in time to continue the sedentary pursuits and overeating that we'd ventured out to get away from.

Boxing Day 2011 was no different. Myself, my wife, son and father drove down there and behaved much as described above. Unlike previous years, when we'd taken the coastal path, we decided to make our way down the beach. This was a foolish undertaking, given that the "beach" is strewn with large boulders and we were trying to negotiate them with a four year old and an octogenarian in tow.

So we gave up as it started to rain, but not before I made the image above, which is the only halfway decent shot that I've ever taken of the place in our many years of going there. If you use your imagination, you can see the above mentioned rock strata in the foreground.

On the way back up the beach - which took a while - I made this image of my father, which now seems significant and prophetic. 

At the time though, he was just getting a bit fed up with the three of us prating about risking broken limbs on a public holiday and decided to set off back to car as soon as he saw us returning.

I suspect that our Boxing Day tradition may fall by the wayside -  for a year or two at least.

Winter Sun on Shapwick Heath

Winter Sunshine on Shapwick Heath, 22nd January 2012

I've been trying to photograph the landscape of Somerset for a number of years now, without much success. I've come to the conclusion that this is because, at some fundamental level, I don't understand this countryside.

I should say that Somerset is very different to the landscape that I grew up with and the ideas that I received about what constitutes natural beauty.

I come from Liverpool and spent my childhood and youth living in an urban environment. Family holidays were spent in North Wales, Scotland and the Lake District. Grandeur - at least the British version of it - was the aesthetic that I was taught.

Those landscapes still speak to me. I hadn't been in any of those environments for a number of years until I visited Cumbria late last year whilst working and I was surprised at the strength of my emotional reaction. This was underlined when I found old holiday snaps in my Dad's house, recently.

Back to Somerset and a walk in the Shapwick nature reserve on a sunny day in January, during which I captured the photograph above. Perhaps it was just a fluke or maybe I'm beginning to get the place, but I think that this image is different to my previous efforts and signposts the way forwards when I come to point a camera at the flat, open spaces around here.

Munari Schunari

Recently, I read "Design as Art" by Bruno Munari. Now, one of the things that I find really irritating is when I buy a book which purports to be an original work by the author, and it turns out to be reprinted journalism or other "collected writings". And so this volume turned out to be. My chagrin wasn't lessened when I found out that Munari stated his central premise (that form should follow function) in the first few pages, then proceeded to reiterate ad nausiem.
Munari was also a terrible futurologist. I soon realised that any sentence that started "The home of the future will have..." would end badly. If he had been correct, we would all be living in traditional Japanese style houses, projecting coloured patterns onto our walls for entertainment. Thank God we invented the interweb.
However, tucked away in one of later chapters was a description of how to create Moire patterns using grids of squares or other geometric shapes. Munari wrote about using transparent slides and an overhead projector, but the thought struck me that these patterns would be very easy to creat digitally using an image editor.
So I had a go and the process turned out to be quite addictive. Three of the best patterns are shown above. They're not very original - there are probably countless hotel lobbies with floors tiled just like these, but experimenting is fun and distracts me from some of the other stuff that's going on in my life.
I'll continue with this until I get bored and/or run out of inspiration and I may post some more patterns if they're presentable.

The Lesson of Landscape

Burnham-on-Sea, February 2010

Photography has taught me that the same moment never happens twice. This may be self evident to most people, but it was in attempting to photograph the landscape that I understood it at an intuitive level.

You may think that the scene that you're photographing is pretty prosaic and that, if you don't get the shot this time, you can return and take it again.

Wrong.

The photograph above works because of the way the clouds mirror the curve of the beach. That won't happen again, and if it does, I won't be there to see it.

The name of this blog is a corruption of the saying that "you can't step into the same river twice". You can't capture the same light twice.

I find this thought comforting when I'm following my usual routine and one day feels much like another.