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.