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The Photographer’s Eye

In case you've never read it ( if not, why not?! ) you can read Michael Freeman's classic The Photographer's Eye on Google Docs now. It's one of my favourite books on photography, clear concise guidance on how you think and approach compositional concepts. Sure you can copy other's photos verbatim but you'll be limited to shooting only what they've shot, without some the compositional concepts you will falter when new situatiuons arise, as the old saying goes "Feed a man and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.".

Google Docs link - The Photographer’s Eye

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LPOTY - Reflections on Rejection

So quite a few disappointed posts yesterday. I find writing cathartic so I'll close a chapter with a few paragraphs.

So I was denied yet another entry to the hallowed halls of the LPOTY. It's odd as I have mixed feelings which is different from previous years. At one point it was the be-all and end-all for me, the first 3 years of trying and getting rejected hurt badly. Then I had 2 years when I made it and then another year when I was rejected back in 2016. That felt like a serious kick in the teeth, it really hurt. However I had a couple of years so I can't complain, I've been luckier than most. Sure yesterday's email is a little bit of a disappointment but over the years you suffer so much rejection for various reasons that like the vacuum cleaner salesman of yesteryear, one more door slammed in your face doesn't make much difference.

Personally I feel that looking over the images of the last few years, the competition has changed. They're very, very picky now, more than ever before. They know what works, they know how to build the collection they want. They've had to learn a lot of lessons about how to make a good selection that will appeal to a broad audience but at the same time generate lots of interest. National competitions are not cheap at all, they cost thousands and thousands to run and take weeks and months of people's time to run, so you don't run one on a whim and when you do you have to go full throttle and make sure it pays for itself.

They've moved more towards a more fine-art style of image, ligher toning, more abstract and sometimes moodier. 5-6 years ago I would put money down that most of us ( who know each other through UK landscaping ) would get something to the shortlist and often further. However these days they need to appeal to the Sunday Times reader ( a crude generalisation I appreciate ) , the person who is likely to buy a more abstract style fine-art landscape for prints in order to keep the comp in the public eye. Most of us are happy just capturing the UK in our own way. I count myself as someone who captures images in a rather crude way, when I compare my images to others I see my landscapes are quite harsh, saturated and some might say basic but it's my style and apart from small changes to as I learn I won't change it to suit others. I'm not a fan of my own images in print but my monos make far better prints than my colour images, especially my urban images and we have 90% mono prints on our walls at home. Which is an obvious clue why what I do no longer suits what the LPOTY is looking for. It's no one's fault, no one is to "blame" and I have no animosity, it's just life we all part ways when things don't quite work as well as they used to. I'll be perfectly honest, outside of the bragging rights to say I got in when I did, it never resulted in a single sale or request for an image so it never offered much apart from an ego boost. I have some prints in those hallowed books, they can never take that away from me.

I think a little bit of reflection and analysis is good, you take stock, size up the "what, where and why" and you decide your next course of action. I haven't entered for the last 2 years and I thought I had something good stuff that might work this year but in restrospect maybe I should have taken a good long look at the last few years entries and I might have seen my landscapes are more "common fare" and not quite suitable anymore. It might sound a little bitter but it's genuinely not, things change and we have to adapt and understand this in order to ensure we keep on our own paths. I'm genuinely quite happy to know that I tried hard, I'm proud of what I do but I have different goals these days . I hope that's a sign of maturity and growth.

I'll finish up with the most sensible attitude I've found out of all this, it was from Richard Hurst and echoed by Justin Minns and a few others, "In the grand scheme of things it doesn't mean anything.". We're still all going to get up today, back to work and tomorrow we'll all head again and do our best to capture the images we want, and we'll do it in our own styles that we've honed over many years simply to express what we feel we've seen. We'll capture the UK as we see it and I think that's the best way and only way it should be, do it and do it your way, not the way others expect your images to be.

#LPOTY

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The Joy of Infrared Photography

Infrared photography is similar to HDR in that  it divides the photographic community. Some love it and others utterly dislike it, personally I love any genre in photography that offers to expand your opportunities to learn more about the craft.

I've always been fascinated by monochrome imagery, our family albums are stuffed with mono images. My parents didn't have a lot of money so they shot mostly black and white and even processed their own photos in mono as it's slightly easier than printing colour photos in a darkroom.

Alexendra Palace, London

When I began seriously with black and white digital photography it was very hard and I learned that one of the most critical things you must do with mono photography is do a lot of study about artistic composition and the interplay of light over shapes. I spent weeks reading, learning and testing my understanding of composition by way of black and white photos. It was one of the most valuable things I have ever done within my photography, to spend time trying to understand the fundamentals of what helps to put an interesting image together. Simply learning to see the world in terms of light acting over forms has pushed my understanding far more than anything else I've done. I began to understand why mono photography is not just colour conversion, it's so much more fundamental than that.

Several years of shooting mono and I decided to dabble in infrared photography. I'd seen that it's mostly monochrome or at the least has a very severely limited palette applied and being so closely linked to standard black and white photography I gave it go. I bought the classic Hoya R72 screw in lens filter and I spent around 18 months trying to understand IR photography. I was limited on what I could do, I had to shoot 2 minute exposures on windless days and it was all red on camera but it gave me enough to get begin to get an understanding about a world we can’t see. . Here was a form of photography that automatically shot mono images but somehow didn't in quite the same way a simple colour to mono image conversion offered.  Infrared is a monochromatic world hiding just underneath the colour world we live in and take for granted.

Brompton Cemetary, London

When it came time to upgrade my workhorse DSLR I took my old Canon 5D Mk2 to infrared conversion shop ( Protect Photographic in Sussex ) and had them fit it with a standard 720nm. It’s a costly procedure and not one I’d recommend to everyone unless they’ve had a chance to play with an IR camera or use a IR filter to see if they like IR photography. I have to say that having a fully converted IR camera has opened up an incredible new world of opportunity. I’m now free of the tripod and I can shoot at standard speeds and apertures.

At this point this where all the years of shooting and trying to understand mono imagery paid off in spades. IR photography is basically mono with the added twist that light and form behave in incredibly unexpected ways. Sure there's the standard stuff that everyone knows, leaves reflect IR light and stone absorbs it, but it's so much more subtle than that. As you throw yourself into IR photography you learn quickly that different types of foliage reflect varying amounts of IR light, waxy leaves reflect more than more course varieties. Certain types of stone and steel will reflect varying intensities of light. Discovering these sorts of subtle variations over the course of several months has been amazing. Photographer Justin Reznick said that the most wonderful thing about IR photography is that you often don't know from shot to shot what will happen due to the nature of materials and how they interact with IR light.

When you head out to shoot with IR you will generally go out on a sunny day to maximise your chances of getting the most IR light coming from the sun to earth, sunny days with a little cloud are good as it will offer some nice variety in the sky as the blue sky will turn black and the cloud will stay white against it. You want to head to places that have some foliage and some harder made made or “man-worked” materials and to this end one of the great places to learn more about IR photography is a graveyard! Not everyone’s cup of team I know but graveyards are quiets so you’ll be left alone to shoot. They have a good mix of materials both natural and “man-worked” and, without wishing to sound crude, nothing much moves around in a graveyards, the residents, fixtures and fittings are standing put while you shoot!

Tate Modern, London

Shooting IR you must have the camera calibrated with the correct white-balance it’s not critical but it certainly makes shooting a lot easier if the conversion shop have set up your camera with a custom WB to ensure that the shots you see on the back are not vibrant red but more a light rusty colour tone with a touch more contrast than mono images. This will help to see the monochrome potential as you shoot. You mustn’t shoot towards the sun. Normal cameras will simply flare and blow out, as anyone who’s seen the latest batch of movies will know lens flare is very trendy but that won’t happen on a IR camera, all you’ll get is a nasty, dirty “splodge” in the brightest area of the image if you shoot towards the sun. Infrared is about looking for the effects of IR light bouncing off and being absorbed, so look for bright lit scenes that are at least perpendicular to the sun, ideally 180 degrees away from the sun. Try to find a mix of interesting materials and this is where you black and white training comes in. If you have a good feeling for how to compose a scene in mono then you’ll find it very easy to think in infrared, they’re quite similar and often IR will be processed to be an inversion of what a black and white scene looks like.  Big leafy trees with nice dark tree trunks set in open grass with maybe a headstone or two, these are absolutely perfect for IR photography, just thinking about a scene like that gives me goosebumps!

A lytch-gate, Norfolk

Once you’re comfortable with a simple static scenes head into more dynamic locations such as city centres where you have lots of man-made materials and people. People of the ghostly IR world are a strange bunch, they appear like like albino people, white hair, porcelain skin and often blue clothes which I didn’t expect, something in cotton or nylon materials seems to reflect blue!

I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what IR photography can do but I’m looking forward to taking it more bizarre locations like the coast, trying some long exposure ( 45 secs plus ) work, my normal landscape type operations but applied to IR.

My journey is only just beginning!

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Quote of the Day

“Every image is a triumph of perseverance.” - David Noton

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Peckham Rye Park, London, UK. @PeckhamRyePark @visitlondon @VisitBritain @secret_london

Prints and canvases available of this and many other images at my website www.syxaxis.com

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Summer canal, England

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Ashridge Wood, UK

#wood #nature #dawn #mist #flowers #bluebells #landscape #forest #beauty #mystical

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Actitivities

Last couple of weekends have been amazing, I've found that missing spark. Went out Friday, Saturday and Sunday last weekend shooting in London must have pulled almost 30 keepers. Another couple of busy weekends coming up. Out tomorrow night shooting after work, Saturday morning back into London. Then it's home and off to the seaside with whole family.  Sunday up early and back into London again. Next weekend I have a colleague coming over from our Zurich office, he's over for an extra night so we can go night shooting in the capital. Then Saturday is the famous Pride march in London, should be good for some interesting characters and something I've wanted to shoot for years. Racking up shots and filling in gaps, making hay while the sun shines before it's time to knuckle down to some writing.

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Thoughts on the LPOTY

I was flicking through the rules on the LPOTY site for 2018, it's been about 2-3 years since I last bothered looking for various reasons but I have some stuff collected over the last few years. It's gamble, £35 to potentially get kicked in the creative "crown jewels" when you're not picked! Ha ha!

Interesting when you read the guff, "Anyone can win. Enter your favourite pictures now. You could be the 2018 winner!". Then you think for a minute how f**king hard it is to shoot original and quality images that even stand an ice-cube-in-hell's chance of getting into the short-list of these things. Heck, it's hard enough to satisfy yourself that you have an interesting image some days, let alone have 2 secs to convince a complete stranger you know what you're doing with a camera. It costs shedloads to run these competitions and they need to big it up to get as many people through the door as possible, but it's not until you really study what it takes to make the cut that you realise how hard photography really is.

I know LPOTY is not the be all end all but it's one of those events in the UK photography calendar that draws lots of interest, even at £35 is still bloody good value compared to a lot of other competitions, still not convinced my fragile creativity needs a good kicking though! Ha ha!

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Beginnings...

Lots of discussions over the last couple of weeks about pushing my photography up a notch. After 10 years I think I finally have enough satisfactory material to consider putting some on sale in various formats. I'm not looking to make much but I think there's a couple of quid out there to be made selling "punter art" to people. After seeing what is being sold in IKEA yesterday, I'm sure I can find a few people interested in what I do. A long , long way to go but it's not just me this time, it's two of us working it, the first step is going to be the hardest but every journey has to start with one.