Monday, 7 May 2012

Another photographer & website to explore

Take a look at the work of Martin Munkacsi  - go to http://www.all-art.org/20ct_photo/Munkacsi1.htm for this and the work of other photographers.

Simply amazing that such work could be carried out in the early 20th century, capturing life with art in a manner which few could achieve today, with the most rudimentary of equipment.  Just proves that equipment doesn't make the photograph, in fact with so many of these images, its the very softness of the images, sometimes blurred, which gives them their atmosphere - I feel that so many of todays' digital images are just too good, too sharp and sterile. At the Gloucestershire gallery 'wildlife in art', they have a mural sized painting of a tiger, precise in an amazing level of detail, equal or better than any digital camera could achieve today. Its stunning, and I guess its art by virtue of it being painted and its sheer size. But is it artistic? Same goes for photography.

Its a bit like my image recently shown in Warwickshire life (http://warwickshire.greatbritishlife.co.uk/article/picture-this--james-crockford-photography-competition--shortlist-40502/), to me the attraction of my image is that it looks like a painting rather than a photograph.... biased of course!



Monday, 23 April 2012

Warwckshire Scouts and Beavers St Georges Day parade

The day after the Shakespeare birthday parade, we had the annual St Georges day Scout parade in nearby Warwick. St George is the patron saint of the scouting movement and hence the enphasis on celebrating this each year. This also coincides with the birthday of our local village scout and beaver troop. With my son in the parade, it was a good opportunity to go along to shoot the occasion.

Coming the day after the Shakespeare parade, it was a good opportunity to learn the lessons and modify my technique accordingly. The close up shots clearly worked the best, although it would be better not to rely on a telephoto lens (70-200 on a DX SLR). It was also clear that the .jpg files from my Stratford shots were often overexposed, even when shot on manual, and that they were quite intolerant of highlight overexposure. So for the Warwick event, I shot in RAW, aimed to underexpose and use a combination of the telephoto and an 18-70 zoom.

This event only ran over a couple of hours and so I didn't get the chance to get so many shots. I still took over 200 though....!

Here comes the band
Practising the Beaver salute.
Be prepared for the speech.
The music starts.
And we're off...

Past the dignitaries

To end with the pride of having taken part.
...and the relaxing after.

Shakespeare birthday celebrations 2012 #2

Continuing from the previous post...

But in the end, the English weather took over and everyone went for cover....

...and the nobles went home.
All that was left was for the barriers to come down, and the cars to reassert their control....
Only the banner indicates what came before.... until next year.

Shakespeare's birthday celebrations 2012

In support of my OCA course, I negotiated a day off from family to do some street shooting in nearby Stratford, to coincide with the birthday celebrations of Mr William Shakespeare.

The images try to tell the story from the start of the day, through the celebrations and onto the big clearup at the end. The weather was great, (nearly) everyone was in a fun mood and it turned out to be a good day.

So here goes....

....there's a party being planned.
Falstaff is plotting something.

The streets are being prepared.
The boys from the Shakespeare's school (King Edward VI) are gathering with flowers to join the parade.
The crowds are gathering in expectation.
And everyone was getting a view....
But some were not amused!
Now for the party
Happy Birthday Will.


We even had the Chinese join in...
But I didn't know wheelchairs wer around in the 15th Century....
The queen was looking happier...
... as was the Lord and his Lady.
... appropriate for the students of King Edward VI'th.
The afternoon was taken with a variety of relaxing activities, including recitement of some of the Sonnets from on board the chain ferry across the Avon. It all seemed entirely appropriate for the occasion.....

More to follow in next blog (Google upload times getting excessive)

Warwickshire life shortlist!

Just a quick blog to say I've been shortlisted for a competition in Warwickshire life magazine. Still waiting on who the winner is.... wait and see!

Take a look...

http://warwickshire.greatbritishlife.co.uk/article/picture-this--james-crockford-photography-competition--shortlist-40502/

Tuesday, 17 April 2012

Checking out the work of others

Whilst I haven't referenced the work of others a great deal in my blogs, I do take a great interest in the work of other photographers whom I admire. These generally tend to have a travel photography bias, something I also enjoy.

Here's two which I have a particular interest in.

Steve McCurry is a long time photographer, most famous for some of his images taken in Afghanistan and elsewhere. I attended one of his exhibitions in Birmingham and was struck by the familiarity of the images shown - they're like household names, a testament to the wide use his images have been used for over the years. I also love the combination of colour and composition which he manages to exhibit, in equal measure, in his images. Lastly, I enjoy reading the his blog, and the various quotes which he picks out - its therapy during a busy day in the office to realise there is another world out there.
http://stevemccurry.com/blog

Timothy Allen is featured in this months' Professional Photographer', again a travel photographer and one who is generous in sharing tips and ideas.
http://humanplanet.com/timothyallen/

Hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Fossil Hunting - Assignment 5 draft

This isn't mean't to be my final assignment, more a dry run, taking advantage of our recent holiday to Lyme Regis and the 'jurassic coast', home of a multitude of fossils.

The idea of the post is to tell the story of fossil hunting, the anticipation leading through to the search and hopeful sucess, before reviewing the end result. As always, I was shooting with the family in tow, so the opportunity to concentrate on the artistic merits of the photography was limited. As I say though, this is something of a dry run.


All along the route from the campsite, clues about the sea were in evidence. Here there is the directionality from left to right (towards the sea), indicated by the yellow lines.

But more specifically, some of the housenames give further clues as to what we might find on the beach....


And so to the beach. The fossils are embedded in the cliffs and get revealed at high tide when the waves erode the cliffs. The scale of the cliffs are significant (some of the highest along the south coast) and completely dwarf the hunters. And yes, practically all these people are on the hunt for fossils.... I particularly like the woman in white walking across the foot of the image, somewhat akin to the mane in Cartier-Bresson's image of a man walking through the scene (http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=cartier+bresson&view=detail&id=6059C76A38DF9D87ACD8C5E3746560753E208BDB&first=31&FORM=IDFRIR)


Of course there are a lot of stones to choose from....

... when this is all we expect to find. This is an amonite, probably more than 80 million years old is less than one inch across and hard to spot!


One thing I didn't realise is that fossil hunting is not without risk. The base of the cliffs are a mixture of mud and shale which is unstable. Despite the warnings, these people were hunting close to the base of the cliffs which can, and do, collapse without warning. The appeal is that they might find fresh fossils undisturbed, but in practice these fossils are often not fully formed, still being semi-formed impressions in the mud.


So after a long day on the beach, we made our way back to the campsite to study what we'd found, and start the long process of preparing the specimens to reveal their full beauty....


....if only they were all this obvious on the beach!


Saturday, 18 February 2012

Photography

As pointed out by my tutor, I've been remiss at going to galleries and viewing other peoples' photographs. This highlights a couple of points:-

Living in rural Warwickshire, the nearest galleries are in Birmingham, but in practice all the action is in London, or perhaps the national photography museum in Bradford with a number of shows at the Fox Talbot museum in Lacock. So getting to galleries on a regular basis is not easy to achieve.

The second point was highlighted in this weeks' AP magazine, that the 6 billionth photograph has just been uploaded to Flikr, almost one for every person on the planet!

Now clearly, a lot of imagery on Flikr isn't of the calibre of what we've been taught to be 'great', as defined by the masters of the genre, such a Salgado, Cartier-Bresson, Bailey, Steve McCurry etc..., but with 6bn to choose from, there are a lot of superb photographs to look at.

So what distinguishes the millions of good photographs from the ones which make it as iconic images?

This is something which came up at my recent photography workshop in the village - I compiled a powerpoint of some of the iconic photographs ever made. The vast majority were news or current affairs related in one way or the other. Then there were a significant number of fashion, film and music album cover related images. Of course, these get massive exposure via newspapers and the internet, helping to bring them into the public consciousness.

Of those 'fine art' photographs, in the main, the group of people attending my workshop had never seen any of them, unless they regularly read the likes to National Geographic or the photographic press. So despite these being excellent images, they generally didn't make it as iconic images.

The one thing which did make the iconic images stand out is the time when they were shot, a kind of golden age of photojournalism from the 1930's to the 1980's, when photography was done on film and the number of serious practitioners were finite. Now of course, the number of images to choose from is almost limitless.

So in this case, where's the best place to view other peoples' work?

I can review the 'masters of photography' in books, a number of which I have only shelves at home. However, increasingly as technology moves on, the style of photography has moved on and the artistic scope has increased massively. For instance composite images, multi-exposures, post processing and HDR techniques have resulted in images which were simply not possible in years gone by, and yet still offer an artistic style which cannot be ignored when studying the medium.

Then as mentioned, there's the likes of Flikr. Here the problem is different. Yes the images are catalogued in various ways, but its hard to understand the collective message and style that any individual photographer is trying to communicate. Of course with 6bn to choose from, my comments are clearly a hopeless generalisation!

Then there are the living photo-libraries such as the images presented on the Magnum website. By their own admission, their glory days are fast receding, but the organisation is still responsible for cutting edge imagery from around the work in the present day.

However the unavoidable truth from all this is that with so many photographers out there, any attempt at studying contempory imagery is bound to skim the surface of what's out there.

All this has led me to reconsider photography as a medium to study. Yes, its always fun to checkout the latest gadgetry - that's the primary purpose of the photographic industry after all. But when looking at other peoples' images, I find I can only relate to them if they are directly linked to my life and experience - fantastic images of, for instance, somebody's dog, whilst I can appreciate the attention to detail and artistic flair, are of limited interest.

Is this good or bad? Am I just too insular and unwilling to take on new ideas, or is this a great incentive to create my own images, shots which have a direct interest to me and those who share a common interest. I guess there's a bit of both in there.

So am I going to make more of an effort to get out to galleries and study a broader range of work on the internet and in books, yes of course. But although I may be limited geographically in what I can go and look at, I am in fact overwhelmed by a near infinite number of images to choose from!

Tuesday, 31 January 2012

Combrook altar frontal - assignment 5 OCA

The church in our village of Combrook is much loved by the community. The building dates back to the 19th century, although a religious building has been on the site since Norman times. It was built as the church to serve the workers at the nearby Compton Verney estate.

The inside of the church is generally quite plain, but it still contains hidden gems, particularly in the stained glass and features in the stonework.

A project was initiated in 2011 to create an altar frontal in needlecraft. This was to be the first project undertaken by the newly formed Combrook Art and Craft group.

This is a major project which will take up to two years to complete in its entirety. For the purposes of this OCA assignment therefore, it is only possible to record the start of this project, although as a personal project, I plan to follow its development and record it as a historical record.

Photographically, it is wide ranging. The inspiration for the project comes from elements of the church and locality. The materials used represent a wide range range of textures and colours. Then there's the human element of a group of people working together on a shared endeavour.

Sadly, one of the central people in the group passed away over Christmas, so this project will inevitably become something of a memorial to her.


Combrook Church, England.

Ths is the classic view of the church, taken mid afternoon  with the sun face onto the front of the building. Compositionally, its biased too far to the left and could benefit from cropping on the right side. Additionally, it would be good to have a point of interest in the foreground.

Colour wise, the image is unmodified with only minor adustments in Photoshop.

Generally a fairly unremarkable image, though a tighter crop could make for a more dramatic opening shot....



This second image is simply a record of the thoughts behind the project. Its not artistic in any way, only the coloured cloth in the background giving any hint at the creativity to be captured in the frontal.

Lighting wise, the only consideration was to use diffused light to prevent any highlights on the (laminated) paper.




To anyone who visits the church, this shot captures two key elements of the building, namely the candles on the end of each pew, and the stained glass window in the bell tower which is a key element in the altar frontal.

Compositionally, the two elements balance each other, though the white of the candle is perhaps a little high in the frame (and would benefit from being lit!).

The shot was taken on a dull day, metering for the light passing through the window, using a hotshoe mounted flash to illuminate the candle. Some light from other windows can be seen on the lower right corner behind the candle. Ideally, the other windows would have been blacked out, with the flashgun taken off the camera to give a more three dimensional look to the candle.




Here, the key point is symmetry. The existing plain altar frontal is seen, under the window which provides one of the key compositional elements of the frontal design.

Contrary to the current vogue, this was not a 'HDR' image, but rather a heavily manipulated image exposed for the stained glass window. Up in the roof, the quality of the image is clearly very poor, a result of the electronic noise, amplified by Photoshop in an attempt to give some detail in the shadows.



This is a closeup of the altar frontal foor tiles, another inspiration for the design. Again, symmetry is the key to this design. The lighting was by means of an off camera flash bounced onto a reflector to try to avoid highlights. This wasn't totally effective - in hindsight I needed multiple lights to illuminate the floor from different angles, each with a diffuser. With the time available, this was not possible, but I would like to reshoot this image.




This is one of the smaller stained glass windows, and perhaps one of the most beautiful in the church. Its a balanced flash image, metering for the glass whilst filling in the stonework with an off camera flash. Again, the light isn't completely even over the glass, mainly due to the uneven illumination on the back side of the window.




A similar problem of uneven lighting affects the carved wooden seat in the church. Once again, it was illuminated by off camera flash, bounced off a reflector, but again causing a highlight off the wood which I was trying to avoid.

Again, its very much a 'record' shot with little artistic interest.




Finally, here are the organ pipes, again suffering from uneven lighting. The exercise of taking these shots was a good illustration of the difficulty of getting uniform illumination.






With the elements used for inspiration, I switched to illustrating the design and creative aspects of the project, even before any patchworking started.

Here is the paper design for the new altar frontal, itself created by hand using elements from the church as inspiration. The complete design is somewhat larger - this is barely one quarter, but I wanted to focus on the shape of the window and the draughting tools used.

The lighting is from both sides, although the key light is from the right side. Both lights were diffused to avoid excessive highlights in the erasing shield and compasses.



The new frontal will be a patchwork of material, chosen for their colour, texture and durability, an important aspect in something which it is hoped will stand the test of time.

I'd like to reshoot this image, using a more carefully selected range of materials, and perhaps some of the tools used to cut and sew them together. I'll aim to get this done this weekend.




Ultimately this project is about a group of people coming together to create a piece of artwork for the community. When the group next gets together, I would like to capture some images of the group at work and add them to the blog. Until then, this is my wife working at home.

The lighting is provided by a table lamp from the right side with no modification, intended to give some directionality and a sufficiently high shutter speed to avoid too much blur.

Compositionally, there is a strong diagonal in the image, formed by the edge of the table. One side is my wife, the other, one part of the patchwork.





In the coming days, I hope to add more images to illustrate the project.