Sunday Gardening

I spent this afternoon gardening and was hoping to take my camera with me to catch any inspiration … unfortunately it poured with rain for most of the time so I was stuck in the greenhouse, taking cuttings and potting up young plants. Given that my greenhouse isn’t watertight, the rain was hammering on the roof so hard it felt like it was trying to break the glass and the drips were multiplying exponentially, I decided to leave the less-than-waterproof camera back in the house.

So this is one I took earlier …

“Heart of Fire”
Close-up of one of the huge blooms on my Benfica amaryllis – the colour has proved really difficult to capture effectively but I think this is a reasonably good result

Stuck indoors :-(

This morning dawned bright and clear with brilliant sunshine, blue skies, a few hazy clouds and a gentle breeze. I SOOOO want to be out with my camera, exploring, experimenting and enjoying myself …

… instead I’m stuck indoors at the computer, ‘on duty’ in our Gallery until at least lunchtime while The Artist is out painting. Even then there’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to get out this afternoon because he may well want to go out painting again after lunch…

I don’t think the Gallery is going too be busy in any sense of the word – the weather and the coming & going nature of holiday Saturdays will see to that. So I shall just have to knuckle down and get on with those tutorials that I’ve now completed downloading from the T189 website in .avi format to replace the Flash ones that didn’t work properly.

These are some of the results of the ‘ageing an image’ tutorial using Elements:

I spotted these arum lilies on sale, displayed in a bucket of water, at the gate of a farm, during a recent walk. I thought they would make a good subject for an aged sepia image.

This is the circular granite Coastguard Tower standing atop Telegraph Hill, the highest point of St. Marys at a shade under 170ft, in the company of the Decca navigation mast and various radio dishes and antennae for transmitting telephone calls and TV signals (yes, we’re still firmly analogue here – and NO cable!) . It probably DID look like this a hundred years ago!

This was taken on an unexpected sea journey back to the mainland after the May half term week with my daughter because fog had grounded the helicopters. Scillonian III came into service in May 1977 so she definitely wasn’t around a hundred years ago!

This is a typical scene on Scilly – a punt drawn up above high tideline and turned over to prevent it filling with rainwater. I liked the diagonal composition with the lobster pot on one side but I couldn’t quite get the angle I wanted. This one is a candidate for the ‘blurring the background’ tutorial in Elements, I think.

Now back to Elements and the tutorials …

Feet … meet ground …

Yes, it’s been one of ‘Those’ days today – up earlier than usual, getting stuck into work two hours ahead of schedule, lots of running around, galloping up and down stairs (four flights …) and barely snatching half an hour for lunch. Even this evening hasn’t panned out as arranged (no studying or T189 tutorials) and I’m conscious that I still have quite a lot of catching up to do over the weekend. So I haven’t even touched my camera today and it’s sitting alongside the computer looking rather forlorn. It’s the first day in quite a while that I haven’t used my camera.

The weather hasn’t been conducive to taking photographs anyway because we’ve had lots of heavy showers, however the skies have been very dramatic. The torrential downpours speak of thunderstorms in the vicinity although we’ve not seen any lightning or heard any thunder. Right now we have towering ominous steel-grey clouds marching ponderously over the northern sector of the sky but overhead it’s a pale clear blue and the birds are all still singing loudly in the trees.

It’s Midsummer’s Day so tonight will be the shortest night. It never feels like this is the halfway point of the year because July and August are still to come…. but then, I’ve always preferred spring and autumn to summer

Hopefully tomorrow will present more fruitful opportunities for using my camera … the agapanthus are beginning to come into flower and I fancy trying to get some abstract close-ups of those intricate blue flower heads.

Activity 7.3.4 Visual Narrative

This particular activity is causing some anguish for students of T189 because of a perceived discrepancy between the instructions and the illustration of the concept on the website. The instructions actually say ” Spend up to one hour taking three images which, when displayed consecutively, tell a story” but the example, displayed above the instructions, shows a single image sliced diagonally into six sections, each illustrating one frame taken as a man with a rucksack on his back jumps from one rock to another.

I understood the assignment instructions to mean that I had to take three (or more) images narrating a progression of actions or situations. But many students have interpreted it to mean producing one image comprising several shots of the progression. Since this isn’t actually demonstrated in any of the tutorials, it has left many students feeling lost and frustrated because they don’t know how to go about it using the Elements digital darkroom.

Of course, the gurus and detectives of the T189 conferences were quickly onto the problem and came up with various suggestions and instructions involving opening multiple images, tiling, cascading, resizing and so on. So there is an interesting mix of images being put up on OpenStudio. You know, you could get seriously bogged down in Elements trying to learn and use some of these effects!

When you upload your three narrative images to OpenStudio there’s a good chance that the three won’t be displayed consecutively anyway – if a lot of students are uploading at the same time, which is often the case in the evenings and at weekends, then there may be two, three or more other images between your three. I think this is probably why so many students are attempting the three-in-one approach.

I’m trying hard not to get hung up on some of the more complex tasks. This week’s recommendation is a total of up to five hours ‘in the field’ taking photographs and I can’t see me getting anywhere near that! But I have successfully completed the tutorial to ‘age’ a photograph and now have some very nice sepia images of Arum Lilies, boats, coils of rope and Coastguard Tower. So I am making progress

Comfort zones

Having been treated to breakfast in bed this morning by The Artist (since the weather was horrid outside and he couldn’t go out painting), I tentatively brought up the subject of T189 and the concept of ‘comfort zones’ which we discussed for some time over mugs of tea.

I explained that I had come to the conclusion that photographing people was definitely outside my photography comfort zone. Apart from immediate family, where I tend to use photography as a sort of visual diary, I very rarely point my camera at people unless they are a reasonable distance away. The complications and implications of photographing people, especially children, has been discussed in the T189 conferences. It was felt that female photographers were more accepted when it specifically came to photographing children whereas male photographers found themselves subject to considerable suspicion. This is sad because children are fantastically photogenic.

Personally, I dislike having my photograph taken and I know The Artist feels the same way. This is despite me having taken quite a few photographs of him painting ‘en plein air’ with his easel, small adjustable sun brolly, Tilley hat and rucksack. He hates the ones that show his face and much prefers the ones taken at oblique angles that cast his face into shadow or obscure it completely. (This is not to say that he is ugly – on the contrary, he is handsome and distinguished with strong features, pepper-and-salt hair and beard, and ready smile ….)

Not that I’m going to be photographing people today because the weather is wet – in fact, it’s just started pouring down again – and there are very few people out and about anyway. So it’s a morning for getting on with Gallery tasks while The Artist is restocking a local outlet that sells his giclee prints and our range of cards.

I feel a cup of coffee calling me ….

Week 7 Assignment

I’m finding this one quite challenging because it requires me to step outside my ‘comfort zone’ and approach photography from directions I’ve never taken or even considered before. There are three activities included in Week 7 and the Assignment comprises six images but not all from the same activity.

So the first activity is:

Composing images in the frame to alter their meaning

Spend up to 2 hours taking photos using composition conventions such as framing, anchorage, juxtaposition and mis-en-scène. Can you create an impression of a false reality for the viewer? For example, can you make something look like it is happening when it isn’t? Or can you, for example, make one person look much taller than another? Remember that in this activity you should not use the digital darkroom to manipulate your images!

How much control over the representation of truth do you have with your camera? 

The second activity is:

Visual narrative

Spend up to one hour taking three images which, when displayed consecutively, tell a story. It could be a simple one such as people waiting at a bus stop, people getting on the bus, then the bus departing, or it could be something far more subtle or complex. What is important is to succinctly frame the key elements of the narrative. The aim of this task is to enable you to develop an awareness of the communicative aspect of your images [...]

The third activity is:

Exploiting conventions                                                                                                                                                               Consumer magazines use photography very powerfully to make us desire things. If you spend time looking at different types of magazine (for example travel, fashion, food, cars, wildlife, outdoors, hairdressing and beauty) you may notice that each category has its own conventions of the genre such as framing, angle, lighting, mis-en-scène, etc. Look through some different types of magazine and note the conventions of genre that you see. Spend up to 2 hours taking some photos that consciously exploit the aesthetic conventions you have observed.

I need to sit down with a big mug of tea, a notebook, and mull this one over, I think …

A story of attitude

We don’t normally open our Gallery on a Sunday because it’s supposed to be our ‘Day Off’ but, of course, when it’s your own business, the rules fly out of the window on occasions. So this morning was mostly sunny and The Artist went out to complete a watercolour painting he’d been working on. Apart from a brief shower of heavy rainspots, he was OK and returned at lunchtime feeling reasonably satisfied with the result. Anyone who knows an Artist will be aware that they are never fully satisfied … they always feel that they could have done this better or tackled that differently … you get the picture? (sorry, awful pun!)

After lunch it was heavily overcast but not raining so we decided to open the Gallery as there were quite a few people walking past along the beach path. The Artist was doing some framing and I was studying in the office. We were pleasantly surprised by a visit from a lady and gentleman who stayed with us in the final year of running the guest house (we’ve now got self-catering). In the meantime the rain set in, the walkers all hurried home to get dry and I made a big pot of tea so we could chat.

During the course of the chat, we got talking about photos and cameras because he said he’d forgotten to recharge the battery of his videocam so it had gone into a sulk half way through a boat trip to the Bishop Rock Lighthouse this morning. He then opened the rather nondescript carrier bag he’d put on the counter and produced a large, black, heavy ….. FILM camera! Not only was it a film camera but he was shooting using a BLACK AND WHITE film – sixteen shots to a film, he told me – and every one had to count. I was amazed! He had to buy his films from a specialist supplier and send them away to a specialist developer for processing.

He mentioned that he’d been a member of his local camera club since the late sixties and had thousands upon thousands of photographs and slides. He didn’t mind being called a ‘Dinosaur’ by other (presumably younger) members of the club as digital cameras became more popular and he still stuck to film. But, sadly, the atmosphere in the club soured towards the older members who still preferred film and he said he’d left, hinting at some quite unpleasant and hurtful exchanges.

I found that extremely sad because I’m sure almost everyone involved in T189 would be fascinated to browse his collection – a rare treasure in these days of instant digicam results. He bemoaned the fact that he’d gone into Jessops and asked the young male sales assistant for empty cases to transfer some of his slide transparencies into (I can’t remember the exact term he used) but he drew a complete blank – the assistant had no idea what he was talking about. So he just shook his head and left the shop.

I felt privileged to have been able to talk to him and wished they could have spent longer with us, but they had to walk back to their hotel when there was a lull in the rain. However they said they planned to visit again in a couple of years time and I hope to be able to chat to him for longer then.

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You know, I still have the old Agfamatic 126 cartridge film camera that I took to Canada in 1973 when I was only a teenager …

AgfaPhoto – Wikipedia

Mine is the middle one in the panel of three images on the right – the Agfa Agfamatic 300 Sensor. I have about 500 photos taken with that over the nine weeks that I was in Canada. Unfortunately they’ve changed colour and faded quite significantly over the past thirty four years despite being kept in photo albums in a dark cupboard.

Kodak’s 126 film cartridge

Although the photos have faded, I still have all the original film negatives. Maybe one day I’ll choose the best and get them printed properly … if that is still an option.

Search terms used to find my blog

I’ve been exploring the WordPress ‘Dashboard’ and checked up on the search terms that have been used to find my blog. They made interesting and rather unusual reading:

Search Terms for 7 days ending 2007-06-17

• aqua-marina blog ou
• Maxtor OneTouch “system not found”
• t189
• the more you put in the more
• http://aquamarina.wordpress.com
• alphabet photography assignment
• Sesame Screensaver
•  wellies
• T189 blog

I was especially amused by ‘wellies’ and wondered what that particular searcher was looking for, as well as the Maxtor OneTouch error message which I’d mentioned in passing in the section about backing up.

T189-ers on Flickr and Britblogs

Just after lunch I successfully submitted my CMA for T189 through my OU StudentHome page. There’s only one CMA and it’s a twenty question multiple-choice affair with simple tick boxes to indicate your chosen answer. It’s worth 10% of the marks for the course and, admittedly, you don’t actually need it to pass the course but it seems daft to skip it. The deadline is Monday so I imagine there will be a few students submitting tomorrow as well.

Things are relatively quiet on the T189 First Class conferences front this weekend, apart from an ongoing discussion about whether you can pass T189 without using Elements to edit any of your images. Theoretically, if you shot virtually perfect images with your camera, this should be possible. However, even the best images can often be ‘tweaked’ by a little judicious cropping or ‘digital darkroom editing’ using Elements. I think the question originally arose because it was suggested that those students who had had almost insurmountable problems watching the tutorials and practising the techniques demonstrated, might be disadvantaged by this fact. On the other hand, I would imagine it’s perfectly possible to get so carried away with all the wonderful options offered by Elements that you end up over-editing an image. Perhaps moderation should be the keyword when preparing the T189 ECA?

Downloading the new .avi files from the T189 website is proving to be quite a long-winded process. I thought rather than ask for a new disk, I’d just work my way through the videos, download them to my hard disk and probably burn them to a DVD for reference purposes. I’m not surprised to discover that my download speeds have dropped significantly this evening, when there are probably a lot of other T189 students also downloading the videos. I’m lucky enough to be able to download during the daytime when the speed is much better. I’ve completed downloading tutorials for Weeks 1 – 6 inclusive so I just have 7, 8 and 9 to go. Already I’ve accumulated 1.5Gb of files in the New Tutorials folder so it’s a task that definitely requires patience!

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I’ve added a sidebar blogroll link to the first presentation T189 student group over on Flickr which can be found here:

T189 OpenUni 2007

It currently has 65 members and readers of this blog might like to pop over and take a look at our talented crowd!

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I’ve also joined Britblog which is well worth supporting and provides links to an amazing variety of British blogs:

Welcome to BRITBLOG: The Directory of British Blogs

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Plus a couple of my personal favourite blogs to add to the mix …

Berry Deep France

Cornish Dreamer

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Enjoy!

Words of Wisdom

Today, while browsing blogs, I came across a stunning image entitled ‘Patience’ with the following commentary by the photographer (I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting it in full here …) and it really struck me deeply.

As T189 has progressed, I realise that I often don’t take enough time thinking about a shot or assessing its potential- I’m often a bit short on time and have to grab the shot quickly almost in passing. The thought of having three whole hours to take a shot just leaves me speechless with awe and admiration. I really DO need to take more time over my photography.
Source Image Link

Truth be told, I still use the large format camera more than I thought I would be given the proliferation of digital cameras. It is so much easier using a small camera (ease of use, easy to carry, quick, convenient, etc), but what also gets lost is the patience factor. It’s like driving a Porsche. You don’t tend to drive it slow. So you miss out out on the journey. You become more interested in the car and the destination.

Recently I used my large format (4″x5″) Linhof for this shot. The fact of the matter is that using a large unwieldly camera slows me down (which can be a good thing in photography), become contemplative, and perhaps most importantly, enjoy the moment, the surroundings, and be patient. I waited 3 hours for this shot. Took me half an hour just to set up the camera down by the waterline.

I’m not sure I would have slowed down if I was using my Canon digital camera. I would have been more inclined to take some shots in less than ideal light conditions and then race ahead to somewhere else…………..

J Alan