A Small Theory

People observe the colours of a day only at its beginning and ends, but to me it is quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands if different colours. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darkness. In my line of work, I make a point to notice them.

Death, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

A bit of music and fashion...

I've been too busy over the past few weeks to day any photography or digital imaging, work stuff. I've also become quite obsessed with the prospect of buying my first DSLR (planned adoption end of March the pennies permitting!), so much so that my poor old camera has been snubbed the more I read about Nikons and Canons which do not only have super-sonic image stabilisation, bags of megapixels, and an ISO bigger than 400, but will also walk the dog and give you a foot massage at the end of the day!

I shouldn't have been so harsh on my poor compact Olympus however. After being inspired by Portishead on Jools Holland, a crazy model who takes photos in designer clothes stores' changing rooms and armed with the magic of photoshop, it and I managed to produce some decent pictures.

This one is called "Can't anybody see", a lyric taken from Portishead's track "Roads". It's a bit of a juxtaposition with the model's bright clothes and plain background, she can be seen but no one sees her, see can see but she chooses not to look. There are also a few other lines in the lyrics that make sense with this picture, about internalization and being alone. Her clothes and pose are strong, but her own composition is not.



To begin with I had very strong preference for this picture to be in colour, however I tried it in monochrome and really like the high contrast effect (below). I've entered that into this weeks Digital Photography School Competition on monochrome.

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