KT Lindsay: "Photography Born of Purpose". Oxford Artweeks 8th-15th May.

I have spent a huge amount of time recently preparing a collection for an exhibition I'm putting on for Oxford Artweeks. Artweeks is a brilliant annual visual festival held throughout Oxfordshire where local artists and crafty types open up their homes and studios to share their art. Over 400 exhibitions are made freely accessile to the general public, and this year I am one of them!

It's been an experience drawing together a themed collection and a lot of research was done on where best to get the prints from (Ilford) and how to optimize my prints for the best possible results. Mounts had to be custom measured and made (picturelizard.co.uk) for the frames I ordered (cargo.com), bios written and picture plaques authored and made (using foam board). It's all being hung tomorrow and I can't wait to see it!

The collection I have chosen to display is predominantly a series of black and white landscapes to illustrate the theme of conservation, the need to preserve and protect parts of our planet that have been and will continue to be under threat by our own actions. The collection is thus 'born of purpose', a compulsion to create images that tell the story of people and places in slivers of time that may be lost. Seeing the prints together, physically, for the first time will be incredible, and I hope to inject a bit of femininity into what is largely a male dominated area of photography.

All prints are available for purchase in limited edition of 10 from the exhibition venue or via my website.

My exhibition joins those of a number of my colleagues, other closet photographers, jewellery makers, and painters and will be on display from the 8th-15th May at 13 Banbury Road, Oxford.

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Photograph featured: Pine in Profile. Yosemite National Park, CA. 2009. 10 x 15 inches. £45.

Never Tell Them

A play by Stuart Lee is using a piece of my digital art for its playbill and is now on show all over Oxford in the lead up to the 2010 OxFringe Festival.



Never Tell Them
Winner Oxford Playhouse Short Play Competition 2008
Wed 24th - Sat 27th March, 9.30-10.30pm, New Road Baptist Church, Oxford
Tickets: £8/£6 from http://www.wegottickets.com/ (search 'never tell them')
Part of the OxFringe Festival, 2010

Alternative Port Meadow

Graze

version 1.


version 2.

Burning the sky and dodging the horses to add some drama

version 3.

Slightly subtler effect, as suggested by The Brentford Taylor. I made the sky into a new layer and adjusted the levels and curves, then blended it into the original using the 'multiply' blending option. Rather than use the dodge tool on the horses I brightened the foreground.

~ Port Meadow, Oxford

Things I noticed whilst sauntering up Abingdon Road

Made in Oxford Exhibition

Just over a year ago I blogged about a fantasy that someday one of my photos would be on an exhibition poster...looks like dreams can come true!

The Radcliffe Camra: Alternative Photographs

Unseen Oxford

It's not all dreaming spires. Yesterday I went on a photography walk with the Oxford Photographic Society. The walk took us through Jericho, by the canal down to Botley, and then to Christ Church. Whilst the splender of the Oxford colleges is always impressive I think I've become a bit immune to their photographic opportunities and I prefer the grittiness of the bits the tourists don't always see. I've blogged about Jericho before, it's not the first time I've attempted to capture it. I think the idea of 'unseen oxford' could be a good project to keep working on, one I started a while ago but haven't really pursued. More photos from the walk can be seen on my Flickr page.







See my That Sweet City Set for more Oxford Photographs

The Radcliffe Camera

Spring has sprung

After missing out on the photo opportunity afforded to me by all that wonderful snow last week at least I manged to have my camera returned to me in time to catch the first flowers of spring. This photo was taken yesterday in the Oxford University Parks.

Let it snow

Yesterday it snowed in Oxford. Actually it snowed quite a lot. People were snowed in and couldn't get to work, all the state schools were shut, the traffic disappeared. Oxford city became littered with snowmen, the college buildings adorned a fluffy coat, snowballs flew through the air whilst from the walls of Exeter and Brasenose colleges students engaged in a full scale snow battle. Everyone went out to play, flopping onto the floor to make snow angels, skidding down hills, making footprints, laughing, joking, and giggling like children. Wondering down to Port Meadow we were met with a sea of whiteness, breathtakingly beautiful, a snow lovers paradise. Oxford suits the snow, it turns into a fairytale.

I am still kicking myself for leaving my camera in Birmingham last weekend so I have no photographs of yesterday and now the snow is turning to slush. I took some pictures with a mobile phone and will see how those turn out once transfered onto a computer, but I'm not holding my breath. Luckily the flickr community has provided more that enough momentos of yesterday's winter wonderland for me to blog!



Pictures from: Lawrence OP, The Ewan, Spigoo, Hyperplane28 and Daveybot

Planet Bodleian

Planets!!! Lots of fun! See Dirk's Photo blog for an easy tutorial.

Christmas at the Covered Market

It's a macarbe olde world in Oxford's covered market. Built in 1771, after the academics, aristocrats and religious leaders complained so much about the revolting conditions of the market stalls on Oxford's streets, the covered market houses all the food produce stalls and shops Oxford has to offer. The salty tang of seaweed and fishing vessels mingle with the secnt of roses and lavender, the aroma of freshly baked pies, pasties, the sharp smell of marinating olives and the stench of Oxford Blue cheese. The mustiness of the second hand bookshops, the snippity snip of the barber's shop, the gleaming jewellry stalls, the tea shops, the market houses something for everyone. Buskers move amongst the tight allyways, drawn to the crowds. Over the hum created by the busy shoppers you can hear the sounds of an italian soprano or the harmonies of a barber shop quartet.

Christmas time is especially magical. Trees adorn the ceilings, ready for stall assistants to hook down with a long pole, truss up with twine, and deposit on your shoulder for the journey home. The Butchers stalls groan under the vast weight of their displays - plump pink turkeys plucked clean save for a ruffle of feathers around their neck, hang infront of every shop; venison, rabbits, pheasant, plump porkers and the occasional Highland deer clad in a coat of coarse gray-brown hair swing from huge hooks. It's how meat is meant to be seen - organic and real. Holly adorns every surface and lights twinkle from the ceiling. The shopper is transported back to Victorian England. Friendly, congested, facinating, vulgar, anchient yet cosmopolition, stimulating all of ones senses the covered market is one of Oxford's real jewels.

More pictures of the covered market can be found in my flickr gallery.

Back to the meadow

I've already blogged a few photos of Oxford Port Meadow but today I returned there to take some photos with the Oxford Photographic Society.

The OPS is one of the top ten photographic societies in the UK. It has been going since 1889 and it's a great opportunity to boost photographic skills. It hardly costs anything (£32 per year) and is far less time consuming than any evening course. The society offers a mentoring scheme, instructional saturday walks, photo-tutorials, competitions, and monthly feedback meetings to discuss your photos. Everyone is really friendly and so helpful. It was a glorious sunny winter's day and there were lots of rowers out on the river and docile horses to pet. I really enjoyed myself and learnt a lot about shutter speed and aperture and all those fiddly little settings on my camera that I don't have a clue about. I must admit though I did get lens envy seeing the digital SLRs and telescopic lenses that the professional photographers had. I have to submit my four best photos from the trip to their website but I'm not sure which ones to send in, I don't feel that any are particuarly exciting but please feel free to vote! The better photos I took are tagged with OSP1 on Flickr.

Creative commons licence does some good!

Just recieved an e-mail. Small blush of pride!
------------------------------------------------------------
Hi KT Lindsay,
I am delighted to let you know that three of your photos with a creative commons license have been selected for inclusion
in the newly released second edition of our Schmap Oxford Guide. Clicking this link will take you to a page where you can:
i) See which of your photos have been selected for inclusion.
ii) Learn how we credit photos in our
Schmap Guides
iii) Download a copy of the guide, complete with your
credited photos.
Please enjoy the guide!


Best regards,
Ali Moss,
Managing Editor, Schmap Guides
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Something for Everyone

Time for a bit of promo. Something for Everyone is the new album from Ben Walker. Revolving around the theme of naïvety and miscommunication it weaves together a mixture of songs that really do strike familiar cords with something everyone has experienced at one time or another. This album works fantasically well as an Internet album, accompanied by a clean crisp website. The generous guy is giving all the songs away for free, quote - because, until I invent an amazing new system of collective ownership, it just seems right - end quote. Each song has its own web page with some commentry by Ben, the lyrics, and best of all a quirky picture to accompany it.

My favorite tracks on the album are "making eyes" and "without you", mostly 'cos I like the lyrics. I think "i call it me" has great accoustic riffs, but I also love "the cutest fish in the sea" in a smiley-ahh-Beach-Boys kinda way. And frankly the concept of "oxford by the sea" should be made a reality.

Good one Ben, I like it! Will spread the word.

Boat dwellers, horse dealers and alchemists

It's a watery, raffish, amiable, trickster-like world of boat dwellers and horse dealers and alchemists. The character of this part of Oxford is very ancient, quite unmistakable, entirely unique. (Phillip Pullman)

I love the curious world of Jericho and the Oxford Canal. It's a window into another existence quite separate from the pomp and circumstance of the academic buildings and university streets. It still has a fairytale feel to it, but a darker, more sinister one that gives you goosebumps. You can tell that ghosts prowl the terraced streets of Jericho.

As you move towards the canal, away from the trendy bars and resturants of Walton Street, walls start to crumble and weeds weave inbetween the iron gates and the cracks in the pavement. The sky is dominated by the romanesque tower of St Barnabas Church (1860), built in concern for the spiritual welfare of the new community which was developing around the university press.


The canal itself is a centre for a large community of people who live on boats. The setting is not far from the picture of gypsie boat-dwellers that Phillip Pullman paints in His Dark Materials Trilogy. One thing I love to do is to walk along the towpath and see the curious little alchemy boat yard site - wonky old buildings, rickety-looking stables that have been there for over 100 years. And, people use them, and work them - it's a useful place. Sadly it looks as if the boat yard is going to be wiped out in a bid to build 47 luxury flats which would earn up to £2m instant profit for British Waterways. I don't think the ghosts would be very happy with that.

The true glory of Jericho however is Oxford's most ancient, and most beautiful monument - Port Meadow. Older than the university and any building in Oxford these 400 acres of common land have never been ploughed and are home to a population of grass, thistles, ponies, cattle and geese. Every year a medieval custom takes place where the Sheriff of Oxford, and his followers, drive all animals off the meadow and into a pound. This is supposed to be a 'top-secret operation', so that owners without grazing rights cannot remove their animals at the last minute and escape a fine. But most years, news leaks out and many animals suddenly vanish before the Sheriff's arrival.

References
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1282810,00.html

At the Fair

I popped out to take some pictures of St Giles' Fair this evening. The St Giles' fair is held every year for 3 days starting on the first Sunday after St Giles Day (1st September) and has been going since the 1780's - getting bigger and more rowdy each time. I must admit I'm not too keen on fair, mostly because it's right next to where I work and my office, being on the ground floor, always ends up smelling of hot dogs and fried onions before Tuesday. And of course there is the repetitive squeals and disco fairground grooves drifting in. . .but hey I'm a fan of tradition and it's a real Oxford institution.

The fair was set up on the first day I started my job five years ago (happy anniversay to me!). Then they had a big wheel which was great! It went high above the spires and college rooftops of Oxford and you could see into all the hidden courtyards and secret gardens that the university keeps all wrapped up away from non-scholars eyes. There hasn't been a big wheel since then, which is a shame. All the rides seem pretty fast and topsy-turvey now which I just don't have the stomach for. But that is forgetting the "Galloping Horses" carasol which is really beautiful. At the start of the fair it receives a time-honored blessing from the local priest!

Any ways, I took lots of pictures that I've put in my Oxford Portfolio on Flickr. They aren't as good as I was hoping to get, it was just too crowded, but there are some nice colours and moving slow shutter speed attempts in there.

That sweet city with her dreaming spires

This is my first attempts at playing with shutter speed and aperture. I wanted to try to capture movement. I'm getting there with the focused foreground and blurry background but having a little trouble vice versa. These photos are a nightmare to take. I wanted a typical Oxford shot - "cyclist in front of the Sheldonian" but Broad Street is so busy at the moment, full of tourists and red buses it's hard to pan with the movement without something else getting in the way.



This is one of the first photos for my Oxford Series. The city is such a great place to photograph with its ancient colleges, hidden alleyways and secret gardens. I've heard it described as a "scholars fairy-land", which is certainly one side of the city. The city that the tourists see, the city that the university students holed up in the comfy colleges see, the city that exists in novels and poetry. But there is another much darker side to Oxford. Alan Human puts it perfectly:

At the lowlife end of Oxford there's three basic scenes. There’s the loony scene, there'’s the drugs scene, and there's the ordinary down and out scene, which is the street scene, having no money. They do overlap, but they are distinct scenes. On the loony scene you get snapped up by the loony industry - the mental health industry - and they never let you go once they've got you. They supervise your life at some level or try to. You'’re in a scene where youÂ’re always mixing with loonies. The drugs scene does partly overlap, because some loonies turn to drugs to keep their experience within bounds, to block out the bad experience. I don'’t do the drugs scene at all myself. The down and out scene is the kids between 16 and 25 who are homeless and so on. They get a really bad deal because they get an income of about £25 a week I think, and they'’re expected to keep themselves in cigarettes, food and shelter for that.

I am going to attempt to capture all of Oxford, not just its veneer. Its people, its grime, and its real beauty.

References
Title from Thyrsis a poem by Matthew Arnold.