Let there be light....

This morning I was woken by a stream of glorious light coming through my bedroom window. It felt like summer as I lay and let the rays warm my skin. I rushed out (at which point I discovered it wasn't actually summer and instead it was rather bloody cold) to buy props to take pictures of in my new "natural light" bedroom studio...came back with love hearts, flowers and a cup cake (?!), then spent the next hour or so chasing the sun around the house and it darted between the rooms (to much amusement). Nothing outstanding was produced but the light was lovely, I wish I could bottle it!





More can be found in my Flickr account.

On Photography and Politics

The most political decision you make is where you direct people's eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in day out, is political...And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being, is to show him, every day, that there can be no change.

-- Wim Wenders, The Act of Seeing

My latest faves on Flickr

It's been a dark month it seems!

The Flower Eater

One of two versions I did. The other can be found in my Flickr account.

Detail from both version

Photography of the First World War

I have just noticed that this has made it to no.2 in Flickr Explore which is my highest ranking photo ever! I work a lot with WW1 poetry and images and I took this photo of a toy soldier reconstruction of a trench in the Flanders Fields Museum. The stretcher instantly made me think of Isaac Rosenberg's poem "Dead Man's Dump", a poem that I consider to be one of the most brilliant poems produced during the First World War.

I think the photography of this particular war is a very interesting topic. Of all the arts it was photography that failed to capture the battlefields of 1914-18. But I think of the subject - the sprawling mess stripped of colour and shape, literally nothing. Photography can not visualise emtyness. What was left was empty or perhaps it is more accurate to say what was left was full of emptyness. As Nash said "the void of war". Painters like Nash captured it better with thick paint, pigment heavily saturated with ocre and umber, a modernist representation of the swelling turbulent mass of the battlefield. May be this was because a more abstract medium was needed to try and capture the almost uncapturable nature of the war.

Photographing babies

I had visions of taking photos of my friends' 5 week old little mite, her fingers clasped around dad's finger, gazing intently into the camera, tiny little toes....twas not to be. Babies wiggle a lot, babies don't like flash (which is understandable seeing as she can't see much yet and then this big flashing light frightens her), babies need to be cuddled in comfortable positions. I came up with the idea of having dad wear black as he held her to give a good black background, and hiking up the ISO and exposure to capture her whilst she slept without a flash. I'm quite pleased with the results, but of course they can't capture how adorable she was really. I hope she'll like them when she's older.

Orange

Paris photography

I was in Paris at the weekend, and a bit depressed that I was so uninspired in terms of photography. A city of lovers and culture, but pictures...not for me. I don't know, may be it was the time of year, or that I went to the wrong places, or that Paris just kept her soul well hidden, but I didn't come up with much. I think I prefer to set up photos rather than take pictures of things that already exist, or have a kind of project in my head. I like to fall in love with the idea of a potential picture, love the subject, not sure that I liked Paris enough last weekend to do a portrait of her.

Red Shoes, White Stockings

Lately I've been really enjoying playing with photoshop and learning how to do things "properly" - like converting photos into black and white using the channel mixture and fade to colour commands and playing around with curves, saturation, sponge, burn, dodge, tools. I took this photo today and I'm quite pleased with the "retro" kind of fashion photography look however the original photo had items in it I didn't want so I "tried" to remove them. However my skills at replicating background colours and textures aren't quite there yet (you can see the texture of the wall change if you look closely). Please point me towards a decent tute if you know of one!

---UPDATE---Thank you so much to those at the digital photography school who actually downloaded my phots, weaved magic, gave me excellent instructions.... and voila!! All in the space of a few hours of me posting, fantastic!

Below you can see the original, my post-processed, and postprocessed with the help of the DPS-ers.