My talk on the photos I won the WPS Intermediate Print Comp with
I gave this talk yesterday, here is the details. I didn't remember everything, but I think it was OK.
Good evening. People often ask me how I make my photos look the way I do, so I am briefly going to run through my entries for the Intermediate Print Competition and tell you a little about why I took them and what it was that caught my eye.
Volcano: a fantasy
This was my first entry and, unlike the rest, wasn’t taken this season. It was called ‘Volcano, a fantasy,’ because it was both a volcano and a fantastical composite of two photographs. The volcano was shot in Hakkone, Japan on my honeymoon in 2007, on a powershot A540, because my DSLR had broken.
I love the atmospherics in this photograph. I tried to bring out in the toning the confusion that results when you try to separate the vapour from the clouds. I chose this particular frame as I liked the way the strong diagonal of the mountain-side and the rocks leads your eyes across the frame.
The tree was not originally in this photograph. I had another picture of this volcano with a raven perched on one of the rocks, and I thought it was much better with some non-silicon based interest, so I added the tree. I placed it there so it seemed to be gesturing to the line of the mountainside behind it.
Volcano original
This is the original shot. We were breathing sulphurous fumes, which I didn’t find disgusting at all. Smells are only disgusting if they’re associated with something foul, and since I have never come across off-eggs, sulphur doesn’t remind me of that. Instead, it reminded me of being in the lab, which, while it might be arduous, isn’t gross.
Which was just as well, because behind us was a café which sold a local delicacy - that of hot eggs hard-boiled in the volcano’s waters, where the sulphur made the shells turn deep black. You smash them, enjoying the visual contrast between the shell and the egg white before eating them with a bit of salt.
Tree -- 2008
And this is the tree. I love the minimalistic work of Micheal Kenna. If you’ve not seen it, his photographs are square and laid out on zen principles, sort of photographic haikus. His work can be said to belong to the wabi-sabi aesthetic, the main ideas of which are that nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect - a perfect attitude for photography.
So, naturally, I wanted to repeat his photographs of Hokkaido in the snow. Not having had the chance to go to Japan in the winter, I did this by climbing up St. Catherine’s hill at the first sign of snow. This photograph was taken on my second attempt. I headed out at 7am when it snowed two winters ago and wandered around until I realised I was in the early stages of hypothermia due to not really being well prepared.
Square-topped tree in colour - 2008
This is another photo I took that day, I was still trying to work the zen aesthetic and you’ve seen photos from this trip last season. It doesn’t say quite what I wanted it to say. So this year, when the snow finally fell on Winchester, I knew exactly where I was going to go and what shots I was after.
Square-topped tree - 2009
And here’s one shot from that day. This ended up as my second competition entry. I was up pre-dawn and I looked out at the snow, it was falling and not stopping, so I drank a cup of tea. I then decided that sun-rise wasn’t going to be pretty, and that I needed light for the type of photo I was after, so I drank another cup of tea. I then decided that I needed the snow to stop, I was about to make more tea when I realised that although falling snow was cold and bad for visibility, it would make sure that my skies would be white, that there would be no footprints and that the kids wouldn’t be out with their sleds.
So, I trudged up St. Cat’s hill, duel-wielding my DSLR and a canon S70 compact. This photo was taken on the DSLR with a telephoto lens. It is much, much closer to what I wanted to achieve and I’m pretty happy with it. I quad-toned this and serendipitously discovered that using grey as one of the inks made the leaves have that delicate look. I prefer toned black and whites to monochrome, as you have more latitude to trick the viewer’s eye into seeing the photograph as you perceived it.
Square topped tree original
And this is what the camera saw. As you can see, in a blizzard, just after dawn, there isn’t much light to speak off. Also, there wasn’t enough snow to cover all the plants so I did some heavy cloning to remove all the scrub.
Entry 3: Copse
I had spent a few hours wandering around St. Cat’s hill. The wind was leaching my body heat, so I escaped into the copse to shoot pictures of trees covered in snow. To my mind, these sorts of photos remind me of photos of Russia, as never in my life had I seen as much snow fall as I saw this winter.
But the cameras were cold and taking longer to get each shot, my fingers were cold as I wear fingerless gloves to operate cameras, so I decided to go home. Heading out of the copse, by sheer chance, I managed to not walk across the meditation maze out front, even though it was the shortest route to the path home. I’m in the habit of looking behind me for photo-opportunities, saw this one and snapped it.
I had gone up the hill to get the zen isolated-tree photo I’d pre-visualised and attempted before, but this photo was chance.
Personally, I think this photo would be better and more balanced if I had taken a few more steps back so I could have gotten the whole thing into a square crop, but at the time I was too tired to think of something like that. And anyway, I didn’t have much time as only a few minutes later, some guys carrying straw for the sheep walked straight across the maze.
In my view, this photo is all about the balance between the half of the photo containing the detail of the trees and the half containing only virgin snow.
Copse Original
And this is the original. As you can see, I didn’t need to clone anything out. The only thing I did was convert it to monochrome, tone it and add a vignette to keep the picture in the frame.
This was taken with my S70 point and shoot, a camera I like because it has 35 mm wideangle, so if you crop into the square, you end up with approximately 50mm square format.
To my eyes the snow-storm light was pretty monochromatic, my DSLR reckoned it was blue and my point and shoot thought the light was pink.
Entry 4: Five trees, quadtoned
This was my fourth entry and was taken the week before the photos I’ve just shown. The weather forecast for that Friday was that it was going to drop an immense amount of snow over the south-east of the country, so my husband and I, who were due at my dad’s in London, headed up on Thursday. I spent about eight hours on that Friday photographing the snow in London. We were lucky and returned while the trains were still running. Passing through Basingstoke there was another blizzard going on, but Winchester had nothing more that this scrubby, thin, iced-over snow.
Nonetheless, I went for a walk with a friend up to Barton Farm to take misty photographs of nothing, which we succeeded at, and I made him cut through River Park. Since I’ve taken up photography, I’ve tried to get a good photograph of these five trees; I’ve shot them bare, I’ve shot then with yellow leaves at sunset, I’ve shot them with spring growth at dawn and it’s never worked. Here, because of the mist, I could get the trees and nothing behind them.
I think the interest in this photo is the comparison it invites between the five similar trees, the eye moves from one to the other, taking them in first as a group and then as individuals. I also dodged and burnt the trees so they were reminiscent of fans. That’s the beauty of photography, black and white photography especially; it allows you to express a similie visually. And why not make a tree like a fan?
I had problems with the composition of this photograph:
Five trees, mono.
First, I liked the five trees with the little one on the end. I also like the father and his two sons, though I think they would have been better had they been further to the right. I even liked the sled trails in the mud at the front and I spent ages cropping this photo to try and say something with it. In the end, I decided that the simpler photo of just the five trees had something that the other versions didn’t have.
Colour original
And this is what my camera said it looked like on the day. Yuk. That is apparently in colour.
Fifth entry: Ronin: Tomorrow my master I will avenge you
This was my fifth entry and was also influenced by Japanese culture, but in a quite different way. My husband and I do kenjitsu, which is the Samurai sword fighting art. To me, this is obviously a photograph of someone holding a sword in martial arts garb, but the judge didn’t get that. Looking at it with the eyes of someone who doesn’t know kenjitsu, I could see his point. He also stated that this photograph was posed, it wasn’t, I managed to capture my husband looking reflective and moody because that’s how he was feeling that lunch-break.
Colour version of Ronin
The colour version shows a bit more of what was going on. I was going to title it ‘Ronin: tomorrow my master I will avenge you’ because I like coming up with silly titles for people to read out. But, somehow, I’d forgotten that I needed to turn up early to fill in the form and the organisers were really nice about it, so after that I felt I couldn’t give them such a silly title and I just went with ‘Ronin’.
A Ronin is a masterless samurai, technically, if a samurai’s master is killed, he is supposed to seek revenge, then kill himself. To live on is dishonourable, although some did, of course, and they turn up in martial arts flicks and manga. In the black and white version I thought that Oli’s pensive look suited the over-the-top title, and the guy in the background, I thought, was either the ghost of his master or a watching, judgemental samurai.
Original
And this is the original. As you can see, I removed one of the other sword-fighters from the background. I applied some photoshop techniques to ape plastic camera effects by adding distortion and saturating the colours. Recently, I’ve been playing with a holga, which is a plastic-lens camera and I’ve also been trying to take aspects from that aesthetic and apply it to my normal photographs.
And that's it.
Good evening. People often ask me how I make my photos look the way I do, so I am briefly going to run through my entries for the Intermediate Print Competition and tell you a little about why I took them and what it was that caught my eye.
Volcano: a fantasy
This was my first entry and, unlike the rest, wasn’t taken this season. It was called ‘Volcano, a fantasy,’ because it was both a volcano and a fantastical composite of two photographs. The volcano was shot in Hakkone, Japan on my honeymoon in 2007, on a powershot A540, because my DSLR had broken.
I love the atmospherics in this photograph. I tried to bring out in the toning the confusion that results when you try to separate the vapour from the clouds. I chose this particular frame as I liked the way the strong diagonal of the mountain-side and the rocks leads your eyes across the frame.
The tree was not originally in this photograph. I had another picture of this volcano with a raven perched on one of the rocks, and I thought it was much better with some non-silicon based interest, so I added the tree. I placed it there so it seemed to be gesturing to the line of the mountainside behind it.
Volcano original
This is the original shot. We were breathing sulphurous fumes, which I didn’t find disgusting at all. Smells are only disgusting if they’re associated with something foul, and since I have never come across off-eggs, sulphur doesn’t remind me of that. Instead, it reminded me of being in the lab, which, while it might be arduous, isn’t gross.
Which was just as well, because behind us was a café which sold a local delicacy - that of hot eggs hard-boiled in the volcano’s waters, where the sulphur made the shells turn deep black. You smash them, enjoying the visual contrast between the shell and the egg white before eating them with a bit of salt.
Tree -- 2008
And this is the tree. I love the minimalistic work of Micheal Kenna. If you’ve not seen it, his photographs are square and laid out on zen principles, sort of photographic haikus. His work can be said to belong to the wabi-sabi aesthetic, the main ideas of which are that nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect - a perfect attitude for photography.
So, naturally, I wanted to repeat his photographs of Hokkaido in the snow. Not having had the chance to go to Japan in the winter, I did this by climbing up St. Catherine’s hill at the first sign of snow. This photograph was taken on my second attempt. I headed out at 7am when it snowed two winters ago and wandered around until I realised I was in the early stages of hypothermia due to not really being well prepared.
Square-topped tree in colour - 2008
This is another photo I took that day, I was still trying to work the zen aesthetic and you’ve seen photos from this trip last season. It doesn’t say quite what I wanted it to say. So this year, when the snow finally fell on Winchester, I knew exactly where I was going to go and what shots I was after.
Square-topped tree - 2009
And here’s one shot from that day. This ended up as my second competition entry. I was up pre-dawn and I looked out at the snow, it was falling and not stopping, so I drank a cup of tea. I then decided that sun-rise wasn’t going to be pretty, and that I needed light for the type of photo I was after, so I drank another cup of tea. I then decided that I needed the snow to stop, I was about to make more tea when I realised that although falling snow was cold and bad for visibility, it would make sure that my skies would be white, that there would be no footprints and that the kids wouldn’t be out with their sleds.
So, I trudged up St. Cat’s hill, duel-wielding my DSLR and a canon S70 compact. This photo was taken on the DSLR with a telephoto lens. It is much, much closer to what I wanted to achieve and I’m pretty happy with it. I quad-toned this and serendipitously discovered that using grey as one of the inks made the leaves have that delicate look. I prefer toned black and whites to monochrome, as you have more latitude to trick the viewer’s eye into seeing the photograph as you perceived it.
Square topped tree original
And this is what the camera saw. As you can see, in a blizzard, just after dawn, there isn’t much light to speak off. Also, there wasn’t enough snow to cover all the plants so I did some heavy cloning to remove all the scrub.
Entry 3: Copse
I had spent a few hours wandering around St. Cat’s hill. The wind was leaching my body heat, so I escaped into the copse to shoot pictures of trees covered in snow. To my mind, these sorts of photos remind me of photos of Russia, as never in my life had I seen as much snow fall as I saw this winter.
But the cameras were cold and taking longer to get each shot, my fingers were cold as I wear fingerless gloves to operate cameras, so I decided to go home. Heading out of the copse, by sheer chance, I managed to not walk across the meditation maze out front, even though it was the shortest route to the path home. I’m in the habit of looking behind me for photo-opportunities, saw this one and snapped it.
I had gone up the hill to get the zen isolated-tree photo I’d pre-visualised and attempted before, but this photo was chance.
Personally, I think this photo would be better and more balanced if I had taken a few more steps back so I could have gotten the whole thing into a square crop, but at the time I was too tired to think of something like that. And anyway, I didn’t have much time as only a few minutes later, some guys carrying straw for the sheep walked straight across the maze.
In my view, this photo is all about the balance between the half of the photo containing the detail of the trees and the half containing only virgin snow.
Copse Original
And this is the original. As you can see, I didn’t need to clone anything out. The only thing I did was convert it to monochrome, tone it and add a vignette to keep the picture in the frame.
This was taken with my S70 point and shoot, a camera I like because it has 35 mm wideangle, so if you crop into the square, you end up with approximately 50mm square format.
To my eyes the snow-storm light was pretty monochromatic, my DSLR reckoned it was blue and my point and shoot thought the light was pink.
Entry 4: Five trees, quadtoned
This was my fourth entry and was taken the week before the photos I’ve just shown. The weather forecast for that Friday was that it was going to drop an immense amount of snow over the south-east of the country, so my husband and I, who were due at my dad’s in London, headed up on Thursday. I spent about eight hours on that Friday photographing the snow in London. We were lucky and returned while the trains were still running. Passing through Basingstoke there was another blizzard going on, but Winchester had nothing more that this scrubby, thin, iced-over snow.
Nonetheless, I went for a walk with a friend up to Barton Farm to take misty photographs of nothing, which we succeeded at, and I made him cut through River Park. Since I’ve taken up photography, I’ve tried to get a good photograph of these five trees; I’ve shot them bare, I’ve shot then with yellow leaves at sunset, I’ve shot them with spring growth at dawn and it’s never worked. Here, because of the mist, I could get the trees and nothing behind them.
I think the interest in this photo is the comparison it invites between the five similar trees, the eye moves from one to the other, taking them in first as a group and then as individuals. I also dodged and burnt the trees so they were reminiscent of fans. That’s the beauty of photography, black and white photography especially; it allows you to express a similie visually. And why not make a tree like a fan?
I had problems with the composition of this photograph:
Five trees, mono.
First, I liked the five trees with the little one on the end. I also like the father and his two sons, though I think they would have been better had they been further to the right. I even liked the sled trails in the mud at the front and I spent ages cropping this photo to try and say something with it. In the end, I decided that the simpler photo of just the five trees had something that the other versions didn’t have.
Colour original
And this is what my camera said it looked like on the day. Yuk. That is apparently in colour.
Fifth entry: Ronin: Tomorrow my master I will avenge you
This was my fifth entry and was also influenced by Japanese culture, but in a quite different way. My husband and I do kenjitsu, which is the Samurai sword fighting art. To me, this is obviously a photograph of someone holding a sword in martial arts garb, but the judge didn’t get that. Looking at it with the eyes of someone who doesn’t know kenjitsu, I could see his point. He also stated that this photograph was posed, it wasn’t, I managed to capture my husband looking reflective and moody because that’s how he was feeling that lunch-break.
Colour version of Ronin
The colour version shows a bit more of what was going on. I was going to title it ‘Ronin: tomorrow my master I will avenge you’ because I like coming up with silly titles for people to read out. But, somehow, I’d forgotten that I needed to turn up early to fill in the form and the organisers were really nice about it, so after that I felt I couldn’t give them such a silly title and I just went with ‘Ronin’.
A Ronin is a masterless samurai, technically, if a samurai’s master is killed, he is supposed to seek revenge, then kill himself. To live on is dishonourable, although some did, of course, and they turn up in martial arts flicks and manga. In the black and white version I thought that Oli’s pensive look suited the over-the-top title, and the guy in the background, I thought, was either the ghost of his master or a watching, judgemental samurai.
Original
And this is the original. As you can see, I removed one of the other sword-fighters from the background. I applied some photoshop techniques to ape plastic camera effects by adding distortion and saturating the colours. Recently, I’ve been playing with a holga, which is a plastic-lens camera and I’ve also been trying to take aspects from that aesthetic and apply it to my normal photographs.
And that's it.