baldysblog.co.uk

I started writing this blog in November 2007 but its content tends to be more political than personal so about a year ago, I set up another blog with the intention of that being both more personal and intimate. However, for a whole number of reasons, I was just far too busy to maintain two blogs and since have been even busier in ‘doing up’ the house, I therefore decided to close the second one down.

However, the handful of entries whilst not great prose or great ideas, do cover the period up to my Mother’s death and beyond so, in that sense, are most certainly ‘personal and intimate’. In many respects, whilst people commenting and ‘following’ my blog is not that important to me, every entry in some way, is a snapshot of where I am or was at a given moment in time and relative to some ‘issue’. It is not a conventional Diary but perhaps more of a Journal as in recording a journey so below and in sequence are those entries in two long blogs.

White Egg, White Paper – Posted September 14th, 2009

To get this blog off the ground, I thought that I would start with a story I have told before but has a direct resonance with my circumstances today which because of looking after my 89 year old Mother who is now housebound, means that I cannot travel very far or leave her alone for long periods of time. So instead of being able to dash here or there and photograph large areas of the County or specific places and features, I’m rather limited in my scope at this time.

But as with most things in life, sometimes “blessings” often come disguised as problems and it is the ability to see how an apparent negative can be converted into a positive that is important because limitations frequently help concentrate one’s efforts more effectively.

The Story

Back in the early 1960’s I was a 17 year old at Kingston Art School doing a Fine Arts course in painting although along the way I single handedly “discovered” Sculpture which I thought better for me ! In charge of us for basic training were a couple of young Tutors both of whom were good chaps and had a series of “loosening up exercises” for us to do. Looking back I can see that their objective was to break down any preconceptions that we might have had and to open up our minds and increase our awareness.

Although I can remember pretty much all of these “gambits” some of which with modifications, I have subsequently used in management situations over the years, my personal favourite was always, “white egg, white paper”. The exercise was to paint a white egg sitting on a white piece of paper, what you might call a “highly restrictive” exercise, why not just paint the whole canvas white with a roller ? In fact it isn’t quite that simple.

The paper may be white but it has a texture, the egg also is white but three dimensional and therefore catches the light across its surface as well as casting shadows from the ambient lighting conditions. I cannot remember there being any pure white left on my canvas by the time I finished, shades of grey and ochre maybe, very little white but what there was – was a 2 dimensional description of a 3 dimensional object with a highly restricted colour palette. And what is the relevance of that one may ask across these many decades ?

Another More Recent Reality

Every morning I go for a bike ride and the complete “circuit” is probably about 5 miles at most. I go along the sea front until I reach the mouth of the River Brue and then along the dyke which is part of the flood defences until I reach Highbridge when I turn around and come back via the same route in reverse. The purpose of this is to take some exercise but it is also connected with my interest in photography which mixes well with cycling, something catches your eye, just stop and take some pictures.

Below the dyke along the Brue is a small flood plain which contains 6 crab ponds that fill up once in a while when there is a very high tide and where Egrets, Herons, Ducks, Moorhens and Terns fish plus there are some reed beds. This is not a big area, at most a quarter of a mile deep and less than a mile in length but it is currently my most favourite place to take photographs. Between the light, the state of the tides, winds and the seasons, the place is in constant motion and although I am photographing very much the same thing from a similar angle, it is never quite the same.

There is also another advantage, you get to know your “studio” very well and where the best shots are to be had under differing conditions. It has also introduced me to Egrets and Herons, the latter a great favourite of mine because they are just so magnificent. In a sense it has made me more visually aware and therefore perhaps, better able to develop my skills by keeping my eyes open for “things along the way” rather than just concentrating on that days destination. It’s an odd thing but without realising it consciously, I have now reached a stage where I can see the picture before I have even raised the camera to my eye.

Another Check, Another Advantage

Over this Christmas, between Christmas things, my Mother’s needs, the weather and me getting a re-infection in one of my legs which means wearing sandals (in the snow !), I haven’t been able to get out for my rides. This frankly at this time of the year may not be a great tragedy, I really don’t like shooting at above 400ASA anyway !

However and as my aim is to produce prints, it has forced me into doing something I kept meaning to do but had consistently failed to tackle over the past year – prune, rate and catalogue the thousands of pictures I already have which is proving an interesting and productive exercise. I have rediscovered a few “gems” that I had completely forgotten but also in looking at my work over the past 6 years, I can see how much I have evolved plus, I can identify quite a number of technical errors I made in the past.

As my initial intention is to concentrate on no more than 5-10 images a month, plundering my own ‘back catalogue’ makes some sense where there are quality shots to use as part of my jumping off point.

My Photography -Posted January 6th, 2010

From when our children were very young, my former wife and myself took lots of pictures of them growing up but with the sort of rather cheap and mass produced cameras available then. Sometime during the late 1970s, I became interested in photography rather more seriously when a friend of mine lent me a rather battered Yashica Mat roll film camera.

It was a Japanese copy of the classic Rollei twin lens reflex camera so much beloved of the Wedding Photographer. It took Roll Film 120 which gave you 12 pictures or, 220 that gave you 24 which were ‘huge’ negatives that were 6cm x 6cms square, but it was the start of a journey for me.

The Yashica Mat

The particular camera my friend lent me, he had bought second hand whilst at Art School and it was pretty battered. These are purely mechanical cameras, all cogs and spindles so when this one jammed as it did occasionally, you peeled the leatherette back, undid some screws, opened it up and freed it all. It was marvellous fun. A 3.5 fixed lens 1/500^th the fastest shutter speed and no correcting prism in the viewfinder so when you looked down into it right was left and all quite confusing, you often panned a shot in the opposite direction as a consequence !

Later I got into 35mm cameras but even so on a business trip abroad in the mid eighties, I managed to pick up a brand new Yashica Mat and that led me into developing my own Ecktachrome transparencies at home so that I could see on the day the pictures I had taken. Even now having given away all my wet film cameras some years ago, I still have my Yashica Mat although I doubt that I will ever use it in anger ever again although I probably should.

Then a Divorce

In 1987 I went through a divorce and whilst I taught my youngest son photography and many years later, he is a very good photographer, the financial pressures and basic survival meant that for about 13 years, this much loved former hobby of mine lay dormant. However in a very odd way, it became revived when I was offered a chance to live and work in the States during 2000.

It wasn’t a lack of funds that held me back, by the early to mid 90’s I had recovered financial equilibrium, it was that my life had changed and I had got out of the habit. However, as I was going to the States and had a whole number of people I would keep in touch with on a personal basis via email I decided that I would buy a digital camera so that I could include pictures in my mails to ’share the experience’ as it were.

Digital cameras were making their appearance then, quite expensive and not too many pixels but 640 x 480 was all I was interested in and I bought a Fuji which was very good and quite stylish, it was also small and fitted in a belt pouch.

A Trip to New York

Whilst based in the USA and living near Chicago, I had to visit various of the Company’s regional offices and one of them was in New Jersey so I got to spend a weekend in New York. The full story behind that I wont repeat, it is in an article on my other blog site if you are interested but basically it was a kind of personal pilgrimage: http://baldysblog.co.uk/2008/09/11/911-%E2%80%93-my-grand-daughters-birthday/

However and what came out of it photographically was a “reawakening” to photography again and a realisation that I needed better kit. So at Christmas 2000 when I was home for the holidays, I went out and bought my first digital SLR camera, a Canon D30 which boasted all of 3.3 mega pixels and cost me over £2,000. To put that into today’s perspective, that same amount of money would easily buy me a Canon 5D with some 21 mega pixels, how things move on !

Getting Used to Digital

When I finally moved back to the UK, I ‘positioned myself’ and rented a flat near Heathrow Airport, parallel to the runways rather than under them because my Father who was my Mother’s carer was showing signs of failing health. Being close to the M4 meant that I could easily get down to Somerset whilst at the same time being in striking distance of where the work was.

Although it may seem totally odd to write, the most difficult thing to get to grips with, coming from a wet film background was that you could take as many pictures as you like providing you had enough memory cards. I overcame that one by walking or riding across to the South Runway and photographing aircraft as they took off or landed.

The second big lesson was storing and organising all of the resulting pictures and after losing a load through a hardware failure, running proper backup strategies !

The Turning Point

It was really only from 2004 when I moved down to Somerset that an important turning point was reached and that by the oddest of circumstances. One of the first things I had to do was takeover walking the dog twice a day, a large chap called Jack who became my “Buddy”. He liked sniffing everything so we came to an arrangement, I would wait for him whilst he sniffed, he would wait for me whilst I took pictures, it sort of worked out for both of us.

Looking back, it was moving down to Somerset and the circumstances I found myself in that led me to develop my photographic ability as an outlet and counter balance to some of the other things that came with the territory.

And the Future…

Today I have a couple of decent camera bodies, a comprehensive choice of lenses to use with them and all the software, reference materials and hardware I need for now. I am delighted to have made the past choices that I did and feel that in some way, I am poised to take my photography both forward and further than even I envisaged a couple of years ago.

I am not sure just where this will lead me, conventional ’seaside views’, I think not, not even conventional photography, I feel that it will be more a case of my photography being the starting point, my cameras more location sketch books with the studio work more if not as, important in producing the end result. In simple terms as I start this journey, I am excited and at 64 years of age, as wide eyed as any child entering a wonderland.

A Different Start to 2010 – Posted January 12th, 2010

Right now between Toe (in-growing and me sandals wearing), Mother (currently in decline), Weather (snow and ice), I can’t get out to do my morning rides but that is okay because it is giving me some catch up time on essential tasks such as cataloguing and reviewing photographs going right back some 10 years.

In early 2002 I lost a whole bunch of pictures through a hardware failure and having no proper back ups which was disgraceful for someone with an IT background. I then turned to Adobe Album and evolved a directory/save structure which survives to this day in basic principle based upon a “Date Unload” directory although the tools I use are now different.

Some Background

I am a long time user (mid 90’s) of Adobe Photoshop which is an amazing tool for all kinds of digital image manipulation and as an aside, a story: I got my first copy of Photoshop bundled with some hardware, it was called the LE version which stood for “Limited Edition” and if I remember rightly, didn’t even have “Layers – eeeekkk…!” However and in those days, Adobe allowed you to do an upgrade to the full product from LE which I did and what a magnificent cost saving move that has become over the years ! However, as I am someone who does every upgrade, not too bad for Adobe either !

Having had a data loss failure, I looked around for a suitable “organizational tool” and found it in Adobe Album. In those days all I was looking for was a simple catalogue system that showed thumbnails of the picture and allowed ‘tagging’ – pictures of Fred, all the tagged pictures of Fred appear as thumbnails…any processing or image manipulations were done in Photoshop, Album was just a catalogue that had an internal database plus on my setup, an external drive backup.

The Change

This was fine until 2004/2005 when I started experimenting with RAW files rather than JPEGs and at this point, Album became less than useful to me because it couldn’t do RAW. For those who don’t know, RAW is a simple concept: All digital cameras do JPEGs and all digital cameras are mini-computers so, you take a picture as a JPEG and the camera makes lots (generally very good) guesses as to the circumstances when the picture was taken and discards all other visual information as it does so.

RAW on the other hand is what it sounds like, the raw visual information before the camera processed it and ‘made guesses’ so that within certain limits, on a computer you can change that same picture quite dramatically using the right software and most importantly, have all the visual data to work with.

To Start With…

I used the software supplied by Canon with my cameras plus, Adobe’s RAW viewer/editor which initially, wasn’t that good for reasons beyond their control. As a consequence, I looked around for alternatives and came across a product produced by a small Danish company called Pixamantec and their editing software RawShooter and bought a copy for about £50 and delighted to do so, it was excellent. In fact, it was so excellent that Adobe bought the company and incorporated much of their technical approach in their “Lightroom” product.

That turned out okay for me because as a registered user of RawShooter, I got a copy of Adobe Lightroom for free so, I now use Adobe Lightroom which is now in version 2+ is a great tool and puts me on upgrade pricing. There are things that I do bitch about with Adobe but the one thing that I don’t is their upgrade pricing which is the way thing should be, a generous discount set against a “new licence” price.

Importing into Lightroom…

My going back in time and we are talking, tens of thousands of images, I am reviewing, editing, rating or deleting before bringing them into Lightroom’s database for long term storage and retrieval. This alone is an amazing journey in many ways that reveals both the good and the bad pictures from the past but also makes me aware of the range of materials and subjects that I have to work with for the future, far larger and more diverse than I remembered.

I am a long time user (mid 90’s) of Adobe Photoshop which is an amazing tool for all kinds of digital image manipulation but I also use Adobe Lightroom because it is designed for working photographers. When you have a memory card with +100 pictures on, you just want to download them on to the PC and back them up as quickly as possible whilst you flick through each one at full screen size to see which are the “keepers”, which to delete immediately and which are “possibles”.

When I first started taking digital pictures, if it was in focus, I kept everything but not these days I am more stringent than just focus, it has to be worth keeping so ploughing through my ‘back catalogue’ is highly useful in terms of dumping the crap. Bear in mind that if these pictures were “family and friends” only, you would keep even the crap but the majority of my stuff is far more diverse.

You also have to look at it in practical terms such as storage. I am paranoid so I have pictures on my main editing PC, a local external USB drive with a copy plus a further copy on a network drive but there really are no prizes for backing up crap so dumping it is GOOD plus, you will be surprised just how many duplicates you can end up with and getting rid of them is like weeding the garden.

Lightroom Itself

Lightroom has in-built, a number of good image correction/manipulation tools so providing the pictures were correctly focused in the first place, the chances are that you wouldn’t need to use Photoshop unless you were aiming for montages or layer work and the other more complex results that only Photoshop can deliver.

Unless I get really lucky, by and large I probably unload the memory cards from my cameras every 3 days or so and then each may contain 100 pictures or so and this is where Lightroom really pays off because it can import, convert to DNG and do an automated back up all at the same time all of which must be a Godsend to a professional such as say a Wedding Photographer doing two or three events in a day !

Photography and Memories – January 20th, 2010

Quite a few years ago, I attended a seminar on “Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic” which was about a method of creating computer programs that “learnt lessons” in a similar way as we human beings do. Artificial Intelligence, is Arnie coming ?

No actually, a very useful tool for solving certain kinds of problems but, a million miles away from “Terminator”. In fact in order to emphasise this and put this technology into a proper context because he had a mixed audience that ranged from Programmers to Sales People, the Presenter made a point of discussing the actual Human Brain and memory which was quite an interesting exercise too…

Short Term Memory

I will leave out some of the really interesting bits and just focus in on Short Term and Long Term memory because in terms of creativity, there is a relevance. By the way, short term doesn’t mean remembering where you left your glasses !

It was a very relaxed atmosphere so he got various people to try and describe the difference, in their opinion between short term and long term memory and frankly, it was a great gambit for a presenter because he got everybody smiling, involved and all in a good natured way.

What the answer is came down to (yes, big simplification coming), is that we all live our lives on short term memory and in this context the “truth” is highly questionable because of how it all works and he gave a good example. Suppose at the age of 44, you ‘remembered’ something that happened when you were 14, you would imagine that your mind goes straight back 30 years ? Apparently not, it goes back to the last time you recalled it.

If the last time you recalled it was when you were 34, your memory ‘references’ that version which in turn came from the previous time you recalled it at say 24 and that version relates not necessarily to the actual event, it depends apparently upon the trauma involved originally.

As a Doorman/Bouncer

I do not come from a computer literate generation so in my 40’s when I decided to get retrained, I needed a job that fitted in and got one as a Doorman in the West End of London which funded me through 3 years. I am no Rambo, at 5′8”, clearly so and therefore I kept my venue clean and sweet through being pro-active, good natured but totally prepared to deal with the “physical bit” if required but not too frequent if you are on top of the job.

Trust me on this, you never ever want to work in a place where people go to get ‘tanked up’ and then look for a fight, that is for idiots. Good nature and tolerance (they still have to go home if wrong) and physical safety for customers so that they can have a good night out, equals a very profitable venue. But however hard you try, there will always be odd situations where you have to deal with, possibly normally good people, physically and ‘close problems down’ very quickly because given sufficient alcohol, bad behaviour can be contagious.

The point is, if you have an “incident”, not only do you deal with it at the time but you will have to “package” it as well for other people. Perhaps because I made sure that public incidents were rare, when one happened, there would be many regular customers saying things like “I heard that…” To which your reply would be something like; “Well you know how it goes, too much…and we can all get a little emotional…”

Reality

All ready from the “get go”, you are detuning a situation, minimizing it for the benefit of the guy who pays your wages and your customers but, where is the truth ?

Apparently you can only access your Long Term memories emotionally and this can be triggered by a sound, smell or anything that takes you back to that time and moment so that you “feel” that past reality over again.

Photography

I don’t know if the above was interesting but finally, it brings me to where I started from and it is that experience that I wanted to share because as in my previous post, I am still “Pruning and Cataloguing” my past pictures and have so far, not quite got to January 2005 so, quite a way to go until today yet !

However and from that experience, what a wonderful journey it is proving to be and symbolic of this is my dear old friend “Jack”, my Parent’s dog who I took over in 2004 when I first moved down to Somerset. It was only about two and a half years that I had him as my “Buddy”, obviously I knew him before because of visiting but this was different, up close and personal in a rather unique way although, not totally to do with just him but looking back, I suspect that he knew more than me right from the start !

But in the end, looking at my pictures of him, I can both see and feel him plus remember where I was at that time and that alone and regardless of the “quality” of the images, sort of makes the case for taking pictures far more than ever I could do in words alone !