Joined up Pictures has moved to a new home. It is now an integral
part of my new website, grahamdew.com, where you will be able to find high resolution
galleries, new work and the blog in one location. Please click here to visit.
Is it possible to capture the pleasure of walking in the countryside that in some way conveys the sense of travelling, the journey? Can this be done photographically other than a specific snapshot of some point en route?
I’ve been wondering about this recently and trying some experiments of my own. Last year I read Robert MacFarlane's hugely enjoyable and popular The Old Ways. It is a book examines the pleasure and culture of walking, of journeys made through the country. Words can convey a palpable sense of movement and journey as they offer up a stream of mental images and ideas.
David Hockney produced some fabulous high-definition moving video joiners taken on a slowly moving Jeep for his Bigger Picture show at the RA in 2012, but unlike his photo joiners, this technique is probably beyond the scope of anyone who isn’t David Hockney.
The most effective images that describe the narrative of walking are the work of Noel Myles. Because every cell in his Still Films is shot from a different viewpoint, his pictures are inextricably linked to walking. It is an essential feature of his images that hold the viewer’s attention.
As I have been experimenting with layered images recently, I have been playing with the idea of a sequence of images that when superimposed would convey a sense of movement along a path and through the woods. The first image at the top of this post was taken a couple of weeks ago one bright evening. Frames for the picture where taken about half a metre apart, with small adjustment to the zoom to maintain the size of the path in the middle ground. I’m not entirely comfortable with the ‘Zoom’ effect that this has produced.
A Walk in the Woods 2
For my next attempts taken a week later, I had the multiple layered work of Idris Khan in mind. His compositing of Bernd And Hilla Becher's houses and water towers used the repetition and reinforcement of near identical compositions. So in these two later images I shot frames every time the view was reasonably similar, often tens of metres apart. I feel that these pictures are not as successful as there is a lack of strong shapes. Maybe this might be more effective later in the autumn. But I’m not going to wish the summer away. With the fine weather it’s time for more experiments and more subjects.
The Folly at Farley Mount (from all points of the compass)
I have been out doing a lot of experimental photography, which has been both fun and interesting.With a new computer and the latest versions of Lightroom and Photoshop I have plenty to think about and work on. More new work to come shortly.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is simply stunning. It
would take a couple of hours to walk around if it were empty. As it is, it is
packed full of many of the most significant works of art from every part of the
world, every genre and of every age. The advice we were given was to focus on
just one period or style. Of course, one wants to look in detail, as well as
experience the scale of the place. So to experience the breadth of the museum,
we first took a tour to introduce us to the The Met, and another to look in detail at
some of the impressionist and post-impressionist works. Both tours were led by
experienced, knowledgeable and passionate guides that brought the works to life
and made us hungry to go explore further afterwards. We only had one day
available on our whistle-stop tour of NYC, but came away with plenty of reasons
to go back again sometime in the future.
For all of the towering glass and steel in Manhattan, visiting Liberty Island, the Statue of Liberty and then Ellis Island is profoundly moving. To think of the millions who travelled from old world poverty and persecution to new world hope, and would have seen this statue as they travelled through this fountain-head of America. They would have looked upon Liberty as a symbol of their hopes and dreams and their new homes beyond. Some 80% of all Americans have a relative who passed through Ellis Island; it is an amazing story of how a country grew to its pre-eminence today.
On the web, it is good form be generous with your attribution. So this is how I came to make these pictures...
I've enjoyed staring out of the window on my rain commute to Portsmouth over the past few weeks looking up at the still bare trees that line the route. As the train speeds by one gets a good look at the three dimensional nature of the tree as it relatively rotates. And as I've enjoyed this vision I've wondered about how I might try to capture this as a photo. For a long time I've been an admirer of the multiple exposure photography of Chris Friel, and I've thought that I might try this method to capture the trees. Friel is also an exponent of long-exposure, intentional camera movement images. I've tried this before, and I've not really enjoyed it. As soon as you hit the shutter you are shooting blind. Getting a good image is largely a matter of serendipity, and it's all a bit too much hit-or-miss for me. His multiple exposure images are made in-camera, but my G3 does not have this feature so I've not really given the method much consideration.
Willow, North Walls Park
Recently I was on Amazon looking for books about artisitic inspiration and so had a browse through Amazon's suggestions. I ended up buying two books by Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work, which I've enjoyed hugely. Looking on Kleon's blog I came across the joiners of David Hockney that I know well, and the joiners of Pep Ventosa. So browsing Ventosa's website I found his gallery In the Round, which was the inspiration for these new images.
Hawthorne, North Walls Park
I think that there is a lot to explore in this technique. All of these images were composited in Photoshop as 16 bit tiffs and then edited in Lightroom. I like the way the background is de-emphasised, and how the image contains elements of different times and viewpoints. I need to experiment with the amount of movement and the number of frames. Early days; I have lots of ideas to explore...
