Pictures at an Exhibition

Caught Feather, 2011

I will have a small selection of my photographs on display as part of the Arena Photographers exhibition held in the Gallery at Salisbury Library. The show runs from October 6^th through to 27^th, with a private view held on Friday 5^th 18:00 – 20:00. Please come along if you can.

Sunset Dandelion, 2010

We have enjoyed a good relationship with the library who have regularly give us the opportunity to display our work every couple of years. Hopefully we continue to deliver a good range of images that are of interest to the general public as well as other photographers.

Floating Leaf, 2009

This year I have put together a set of six images shown here on the theme of ‘ephemera’, using feathers and leaves as motifs for impermanence and fragility. I guess I have been thinking about these ideas a fair bit over the last couple of years.

Fallen from the Sky, 2010

As I’ve mentioned before, I think a picture does not really exist until it has been printed. All the pictures on display have been printed on Fujicolor Crystal Archive Digital Pearl paper. By using a metal oxide coating on microscopic pearl mica pigments, these prints really sparkle and look very nice indeed, giving the image a lovely depth. Well worth the extra expense I think. All but one of the prints were taken on my Panasonic LX3 compact. Yes, we all know that large sensor cameras give the best quality, but it is still impressive to see just how good a print you can get from the LX3 if you stick to ISO100 and shoot in RAW. Each print image is 292mm square, and at that size the resolution is just fine, with pretty good dynamic range.

Wet Leaf, 2012

One of the final things I had to decide upon was the pricing of the pictures. Pricing! How do you decide? The sales and marketing answer of course, is the maximum you can get away with, whatever the purchaser is prepared to pay. In this country, and in non-metropolitan areas in particular, that price might be very low indeed. Especially if you are not a well-known name. Especially if you are a digital worker and don’t use some arcane process to make your images. Especially if the viewing public have decent cameras themselves and would rather have one of their own creations put up on their wall. So I price my pictures to cover my costs, and I’m very gratified if someone should want to have picture of mine to place on their wall.

Winter Seed Heads, 2010

I have always believed that if you are making pictures that are of any value at all, then the work needs to shown publicly. That is why I still take part in exhibitions, as well as give talks, have a website and write this blog. Putting on exhibitions can be expensive and time consuming, but it is a good discipline. It forces you to produce top-quality work, to pay attention to the printing and finishing, and importantly, make sure that you have a body of work that works well together when hung on the wall. And you might just find that there is someone out there who likes what you have made.

Telegraph Hill Revisited

Telegraph Hill 1, 2003

In the recent post about the joiner I made of Telegraph Hill  I mentioned that I often visit that location to take pictures. I guess the attraction is the uncluttered geography, the big open skies and the quality of light.

One earlier visit was in 2003 when I made the picture above. At the time I was shooting black and white film and then scanning it. By then the darkroom was long gone so I used XP2 as it was easy to get processed. It was also easier to scan using the automatic dust removal facility of my Nikon scanner. This picture started life as a conventional 28mm wideangle shot. When it came to editing in Photoshop I chose to work it up into a high contrast image as I often do when there is hard lighting. I wanted to get a greater feeling of space and give a greater emphasis to the cloud. To do this I extended the canvas of the picture, changing the aspect of the image from the standard 3:2 of the 35mm negative to 1:1. I then gave the sky & forground a ‘porc’ – the inverse of a crop – and used the transform tool to stretch the sky up into the extended image space. The trees were protected from the transformation so that they remained in scale.

Telegraph Hill 2, 2003

Around this time I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with straight monochrome images. I wanted images with a greater richness and emotional content than monochrome, and its conventional toning palette could offer. So the final image was hand-coloured using the colour gradient tool for different areas in the print. Since then virtually all my images have been shot in colour, only very occasionally switching back to monochrome or hand coloured monochrome when the picture warrants it.

Telegraph Hill

Telegraph Hill, September 2012

To the east of Winchester there is some wonderful high ground known as Cheesefoot Head. It is not grand or that high, but just has a nice feeling of space and long large views of the surrounding countryside. On the road out there your attention is caught to the north by the impressive Matterley Bowl, a huge natural amphitheatre where Eisenhower addressed the troops prior to D-Day. You would probably miss a small wood to the south. The map says that this sits on Telegraph Hill, but few people know this place by name, as the hill is not on a footpath and given over to the plough apart from the thicket of trees at the summit.

I often return here to take pictures, particularly when the light is good and the sky is ribboned with cirrus clouds. A couple of weeks ago the weather was just this, so I rushed off as soon as I had got back from work. This time the fields were striped yellow and brown from the brushing of the combine harvester that had recently taken in the wheat and I wanted to make a feature of this in my picture. There were some lovely high clouds above which I knew would work well too in a still movie type joiner. I photographed the field every time I cross the boundary of an ‘up’ and ‘down’ sweep to emphasise the lines left in the field, holing the camera higher and a at a steeper angle for the two closer foreground rows. This has the effect of creating a superwide but natural perspective for the final composition. All the cells were shot using the 45/f1.8 Olympus lens.

The original picture was imagined and shot as a 9×7 rectangle with some spares. When it came to the edit the composition worked better when reduced and reordered to a square. All the compositing and tonal adjustments were done in Lightroom, which I now use in preference to Photoshop for creating regular grid joiners.