the post-mortem…

What I expected:

More of my usual stuff (botanic gardens, macros) with a bit of a theme behind it, brought together in a collection. I thought I’d have a few of my usual type wanderings around the bots, then spend most of my real effort in putting the book together – layout, text, etc. and come out with something quite visual, and well polished.

What I ended up with:

A collection of images taken with the Holga lens of the city (Dublin) shot during lunchtimes and just after work, with just a single page of introductory text, and arranged fairly simply on a letterbox format page.

What I learned:

When I try to put constraints on my ‘muse’, it behaves like a stubborn mule and refuses to go anywhere at all. I have to loosen the reins and let it go where it wants.* This is where the fuzzy month came in handy for me because I had been rearing to go but ended up dithering about for a week, after a bit of a false start. And life intercepted halfway through, so I needed to make use of that extra week at the end. I also went to a few parks and gardens intending to use that stuff as well, but it became clear during the editing phase that the project was really about the city streets rather than those areas, and that cut my pool of potential images to less than half. I struggled to meet the 35 image limit.

I think my original project idea – about the life in the botanic gardens, is suited to a longer term project. I think that idea requires more consideration and careful editing to become more than a collection of pretty flower pictures, which it would probably become, if used as a subject for SoFoBoMo.

I also learned from this specific project that starting with a fairly new subject/area, I could barely scratch the surface and begin to understand what it was about in that one month period. At the same time, it’s a good thing to do with a new idea because it gives you a bit of drive to start getting into it as much as possible, and is fairly intensive and focused. I think it provided me with a bit of a foundation, in a useful format, that I can come back to as a reference guide and build on in the future.

*Interesting/scarily close correlation between this and the ‘Elephant/rider’ analogy used in The Hypothesis of Happiness by Jonathan Haidt

I was rewarded with:

A new approach to photography. The requirement for a large pool of images to draw from made me shoot nearly every day, and not using my macro lens (which is slightly bulky) made my camera much more discreet and portable. It meant that I was doing photography without having set out to do it. I hope there’s something that came through from that, into the images, and also had a longer term effect on my shooting habits.

General thoughts:

I did like the fact that I didn’t see anyone else’s finished project, until I was actually done already. I *will* be doing it again, when I can anticipate a quiet month, and an inkling of a new project idea – regardless of any official, organised group efforts – I would just pick a month to suit myself and work away on it quietly. I also think that if you were to do it a few times, with a pdf as the final result rather than going all the way to P.O.D., it would provide a) good inspiration to work on a small project in a fairly intensive way, or make a start on a bigger project with a bit of a bang and b) make the process of producing something ready for print a familiar one, so you’d be more inclined to do it for a bigger, longer term project – and also to be more confident about the minutiae of carrying out such a task. I do see a ‘best of’, portfolio type book in my future, and that’s in the back of my mind all the time I’m talking about SoFoBoMo in general.

I hope this rambling maybe helps out someone who might be thinking about doing it next time around, or even that someone who has done it this time might pick up on something I said and think “hang on, that applies to me too and I hadn’t noticed before”.

shooting blind

Not a positive post today :(

I’m finding that it’s a fine line between post hoc rationalisation, and understanding what you were actually doing with an image/series at the time.

I’m looking at this city stuff I’ve been shooting for SoFoBoMo and trying to figure out what I’m doing with it. I made the decision to shoot intuitively and not think about a ‘theme’ or ‘project’ during the process, and now my conscious self wants to make up all sorts of impressive sounding reasons why I like crumbling walls, rusty fences and broken windows. Every time I try to figure out what I was responding to on that intuitive level, my brain steps in and recounts various snippets of art talk from blogs and magazines I’ve read in the past. It’s a frustrating conflict, feeling like you’re fighting within yourself, trying to bring something to light that doesn’t talk in words and disappears at the slightest provocation to perform on demand. No wonder artists developed the concept of a muse – a shy but tricksy creature, contrary and capricious, refusing to work under pressure and deserting us at the worst possible times.

I feel quite lost. How do you fight through those (impressive sounding but completely false) justifications your rational mind puts in the way of understanding what your ‘muse’ was up to? I feel like I need to understand, to tie up loose ends, or to move on to another level. I’m disinclined to keep shooting ‘blind’ like this, with no clues as to what I’m doing and where I could go from here.

trusting my instinct

The first weekend in April I headed up to the Botanic Gardens, 100mm macro in hand, ready to go for my ‘cycle of life’ type project for SoFoBoMo. I’ve been up there a million times, in all seasons, and never fail to come home satisfied. I like to think of it as my ‘spiritual home’. It’s the place I go when I need to get in the zone, to rejuvenate my photographic eye.

I couldn’t get in the zone. I couldn’t even find the zone. I had this pressure of shooting with a purpose, for a preconceived end result in the back of my mind and it nagged away at me and wouldn’t let me relax enough to get on with it. I had to concede defeat.

So, I decided that I may have to take advantage of the fuzzy month and start a week or so later, with less pressure. Next weekend came along, and I headed out to a forest, taking a slight change of tack towards more of a nature – wood/water/stone type project. I shot more than I usually would in one day, and came home to find that I had only a couple of keepers at a push. Uh oh. I may have to abandon this book project entirely.

Then, my new lens arrived.

I had been playing with a friend’s lensbaby, which was great fun and took away all the seriousness and most of the awkwardness in pointing my camera at people. Their reaction to this thing (that looks like it could land on mars) is pretty good for a casual portrait atmosphere, and you can’t be too serious when you’re using it, describing to people how it ‘smooshes’ their head about! I also loved using it in the city, on architectural details and bending tall buildings with the mad perspective shifting. But the results looked too lensbaby. A little contrived, and overdone. My new lens takes a second glance to realise something is amiss - it’s slightly less conspicuous. The novelty of having to tape it on to the camera body adds a definite element of quirkiness, but once you get used to the focusing (go into macro mode by simply unscrewing the front part and holding it in front of the body!) it’s surprisingly tactile and intuitive. I always forget which direction to twist my 100mm macro to focus closer – but with this, I know I just have to unscrew it!

Even more surprising were the resulting images. A couple of test shots out the office window had me cautiously anticipating the results, and a wander around the buildings out back (I work in an ex-army barracks museum) elevated my mood to distinctly excited. I expected the novelty to wear off quicker but honestly, everything I shoot with this thing surprises and delights me. It’s surprisingly sharp in the centre (considering it’s made of plastic of course) and what it does to the light in the soft areas around the edge of the frame, I find incredibly pleasing. It’s given me a certain amount of motivation in purely shooting things to see how they come out, but it’s somehow turned my attention from the usual nature macros to streets and buildings, walls and doors. I get the inclination to shoot those often, but the results had always disappointed. Now, I tentatively think I may have found a match between subject and treatment which works well – well enough, at least, to allow me to explore the subject much further.

The other thing that I wondered about was just what I’m trying to do with these city images. I can’t deny the instinct to shoot those run down corners of the streets and buildings, but it bothered me that I’ve never known why, and my disappointing previous attempts stopped me from pursuing it any further. Something clicked when I read Doug’s blog this morning saying that sometimes you can work on a project and be halfway through before you even know what you’re actually doing, and it seemed to fit with a thought I had last week about how maybe we have a sort of channel than opens between our source of creativity and our tools, which allows us to make work we don’t necessarily consciously intend, or even understand at first – but makes more sense after we get into it, and live with it for a while. I think of it almost like a path that I can’t see when I try to look where it goes, but if I don’t look, I can stay on it and see where it takes me. It’s all very ‘Through the Looking Glass’ :)

Maybe my SoFoBoMo book should be called ‘Through the Looking Plastic’, hehe…

different kinds of meaningful

It’s almost like those discussions about style that do the rounds every once in a while, wondering about meaning in photography. I suppose it’s something you naturally consider once you get to a certain stage in your own photographic development (ugh, pun definitely not intended) and start to consider what it’s all about, maybe you feel like you want to move on to a new level of sophistication and do more than just make something that’s aesthetically pleasing. I’m basing this scenario mostly on myself but I’ve noticed hints here and there that others are having the same experience.

A couple of the comments on another post touch on the subject, and there are little elements coming together from other blogs, books and articles I’ve read recently that are starting to form a clearer picture. Unsurprisingly, I don’t think there’s a clear answer, or solution.

The clearest philosophy I could conceive of is that if you shoot what you genuinely care about and have an interest in, the work you produce is far more likely to mean something. To you. And there’s the sticking point. You can rarely, if ever, control what your finished image means to a viewer. (I’m covering no new ground here, of course, but that was never really the point.) I must admit though, at this particular stage in my own development, I’m not too concerned about the viewer as an external influence on my photography – for good or bad, it’s how I feel. Logically and theoretically this would mean that if I’m making images where all I care about is what they mean to me, I could go down a path which leads me away from making fulfilling and accessible images and end up with an inflated sense of my own importance, not having the tempering effect of the opinion of others - but I don’t think it’s harmful to go at least a little way down it, for a certain time, after having done nothing but listen to, emulate, and try to please others since the beginning of my interest in photography. What I do hope is that it will allow me to get a sense of working without the constant urge to seek approval from others, and get closer to what is authentically me.

I’ve been struggling with the concept of introducing meaning to my images by the process of thinking of something, then going out to make a photograph that conveys (or attempts to convey) what I was thinking. But the whole palaver seemed forced, awkward, difficult and more than a little contrived. It reinforced my opinion that I work best when reacting directly to what’s in front of me. I’ve conceded that while people can infuse their images with meaning this way, it just isn’t right for me, and trying to force myself to do it just makes me unhappy. While I can appreciate others’ work of that nature (those plastic surgery equipment shots of Cara Phillips spring to mind), mostly what I react to in my own photography and in that of others are the ‘low-level biological sensations’ that aren’t necessarily based on concepts and ideas. It’s purely visual pleasure. What I’m fighting against at the moment is that purely visual pleasure is somehow not worthwhile, that it’s easy, that it’s the photographic equivalent of jingly jangly pop music.

It does occur to me, though, that there’s another approach. On a recent trip to the botanics I pulled back slightly from the macro shots, and started to include the environment. I noticed that I was drawn to shooting the rear of flowerpots (a new fetish, maybe?!) through glass where you could see the side not intended to face the audience, as well as the old glasshouses no longer in use, with the odd abandoned cactus and creeping ivy. I became more interested in the structure of the glasshouses and how it sometimes reflected and sometimes mirrored the structure of the plants inside. I tried to get a feeling for the atmosphere of the place when the sprays came on and the sun cut through the humidity and made the place feel almost like a church or temple of some sort (whether the heat affected my mental state I can’t say)… Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that I wasn’t conscious of changing my approach. I did it instinctively, and when I got home and looked at my shots I knew there was something going on there. And something tells me that it only happened because I’ve been there so many times, because I was in a particularly receptive state of mind on the day, and because I wasn’t trying too hard.

I’m glad I’ve chosen to base my SoFoBoMo project on the same place. I just have to hope that I don’t get bogged down and put myself under pressure to feel that again, so that I can be receptive to whatever comes to me next time. I think there’s a middle ground of meaning to be found.

SoFoBoMo - and then what?

I think it’s easy to forget in the build up to this that it was generally intended as something of an exercise - the fact that you’re shooting all the images within the space of a single month (or less, depending on how long you need for processing and editing) has a good chance of limiting the quality of photography in it. Or, to avoid the suggestion that 35 great images can’t possibly be taken in a single month which is probably untrue, the focus of the project wasn’t necessarily going to be about the quality of the images themselves. If that were the case, we’d be more likely to be doing SoFoBoYe instead.

Of course everyone has their own motivations and a lot of people are choosing projects that are incredibly well suited to being shot in their entirety within the timeframe of a month. I’m looking at it with my own situation in mind though, where if I was to create a book that I’d want to produce and possibly market in some way, I’d be more concerned with what’s in it and probably want to choose from my archives. But that’s where the beauty of this thing, as an exercise, comes in - because you’re forced to take a whole new set of images for it, there’s none of that baggage connected to the shots you’ve taken in the past and have a ‘relationship’ with. In some ways, it makes the thing harder, but in others it also gives you a kind of freedom you don’t have when the stakes are higher, and a chance to iron out the technical quirks in a less pressured environment.

So, say the month is over, I’ve shot, edited, processed, page-layouted (?!) and produced a pdf. I’ve learned about the mechanics of putting a book together, basically. The real challenge is to put that experience to good use and produce something that I’ll want to keep, or market, or share. Something that I do think represents me as a photographer, either as a larger portfolio, ‘best of’ type thing, or another project. Now that’s a scary project! Hopefully the SoFoBoMo will take some of the fear out of it though, and I think that’s what it’s for…

more subject matters

I’ve just read Ian Roberts’ Creative Authenticity and it’s given me loads of thinking fodder. I don’t necessarily agree with all his opinions as set out in the book, but I don’t like to let that stop me from taking something useful from it anyway. Even if I don’t agree with something – that’s a starting point for thinking about it, forming my own opinion on it, and being better off all round, so there’s certainly no harm there.

It seemed more tricky, though, when I found other areas of the book that struck particularly true to me – but I feel like there’s a slight conflict between them. As an exercise to get the most out of the book (I tend to skim when reading and can lose the benefit of a lot of the material from skipping over it too lightly) I underlined particularly interesting/useful sections as I read, then after finishing the whole book I went back and tackled each section in turn, copying it into a notebook and replying to it, sometimes adding my own thoughts, sometimes relating it to a more specific experience of my own, sometimes just translating it into my own language to really get a feeling for what it means.

I got to the section which discusses subject matter, and found two separate points that seemed to resonate at a fundamental level with my own thoughts. He talks about how we can find awe in the mundane and everyday subjects that surround us, how our feelings towards these subjects, if we can distill the essence of them, simplify and translate them onto paper through our work, it will show in the final product. Our relationship with the subject and our feelings towards it are more important than the subject, per se. Bang on (as they say in Glasgow). That’s just how I feel. I’ve always had a problem with boring pictures of amazing subjects being held up as photographic triumphs, and frustrated with people who say they need to go to a rainforest and hunt down an endangered species of frog for an interesting shot. You’ll find me in the back garden with the weeds, thank you very much. It’s a conclusion I’ve only just been reaching of my own accord recently in fact – your relationship to the subject, whatever that is, is far more important than the subject itself. So no matter what you shoot, it has to be important to you, in some way. You have to make a connection with it. But… I also agree with a point Ian makes further along in that same section:

“When looking at paintings, most people are distracted by subject matter. But subject matter is really just an armature to hang the blue and the green on to, to place the abstract shapes on, like notes of music.”

If I see a beautiful shade of blue/grey/silver, and a gorgeous texture, I don’t care if I’m actually looking at the weatherproofing on the side of an old building. I’ll shoot it, and be happy that I’ve made a good image. Now, how does that relate back to the previous point about having a relationship with the subject? I don’t care about the building, or the materials used to seal it, beyond their visual attraction as someone who appreciates colour and texture. Does that mean the resulting image is always going to be boring? How can it have any authenticity if I have no connection to the subject, beyond that visual appreciation? Is this what results in pretty, but empty pictures? The chapter in the book does go on to talk about how music is the most abstract art and the visual arts sometimes aspire towards that abstraction that music enjoys, in having no separation between matter and form. I wonder if it’s inherently near-impossible with such a representational art as photography?

I think that’s going in a scary direction that my mind isn’t ready for on a Friday afternoon!

a quickie

Just a little quote from Creative Authenticity by Ian Roberts - in the fifteenth ‘chapter’ he talks about “Finding poetry in the everyday” and says this:

We can be more moved than a small intimate landscape or a still life of two cherries than by a huge painting of the Grand Canyon.

Look at the header of this blog, and maybe you’ll get a wee chuckle out of it. Or maybe it’s just me.

disconnection

There was an interview with Laura Letinsky that I read sometime last week. She’s one of those photographers that has me interested, then the rational part of my mind kicks in and says “hang on, it’s just a plate of leftovers on a dirty tablecloth” and I struggle to take it seriously. Whatever I think of the actual photographs though, something in that interview must have been churning around in my subconscious because a few days after reading it, something she said started to nag at me. She made a reference to the disconnection between the photography by other people that she appreciated, and what she was producing of her own in her early days of shooting. It sounds like it was a bit of an epiphany for her – and it’s something I’ve hummed and hawed about in the past but never really focused on, but now somehow it seems important for me to understand before I can move on with my own photography.

Obviously, there’s going to be a difference between how you view your own photographs, and those of others. You have a connection with your own simply because of the act of having taken them - yes, I’m stating the obvious, but I think it’s important.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about putting distance (of time) between yourself and your photos to try to reduce that connection, to improve your objectivity in editing them. But I’m not sure if trying to pretend that you’re not looking at your own work is going to be entirely positive – especially if you do your processing after this point. I think there’s something to be said for editing and processing when you still have that connection to the event, or place, or moment in your mind – if you wait until the memory has faded, do you still have a good gauge on how you felt at the time and which of the images represents that best, or how to process them to put it across? After that, I think you can do a second round of editing that tries to separate the actual ‘good’ stuff, in a larger sense, but that’s a different kind of editing.

I went slightly askew there… Getting back to viewing your own pictures vs. viewing someone else’s: you have an inescapable connection to reality in looking at your own stuff – no matter how abstract the image, you were in a real place, taking that picture. You can’t deny that no matter how beautiful the scene might be, you know that there was a stinking great electricity pylon just to the right out of the frame, or that blurry bit of blue in the bokeh isn’t a flower but a plastic bag, and the magical forest path is actually in a public park ten minutes from your city centre office. If those were someone else’s images, you imagination would fill in the gaps with much less mundane, much more interesting/magical/meaningful information. But what does it mean? Does it mean that you are never going to enjoy looking at your own stuff as much as that of others? (Bearing in mind that I’m being a little selfish in my definition of what we like to look at, or indeed what we’re trying to do with out photography) Does that change your inclination to shoot? Does that change your motivation to shoot something in particular, or in a particular way? Is the goal really to bring the two in line?

I think there are two issues here actually. One is to do with how you judge/approach/view your own work, compared to that of others. The other is to do with the difference in themes or subjects or meanings between what you shoot, and what you like to view. I don’t tend to coo over flower macros. I am, however, fascinated with images of forests, suburban night scenes, and recently have been really interested in those images by Cara Phillips that tackle our perceptions of the beauty industry. So why don’t I make pictures about those things, too? Is it ok to be both a photographer and a critic – and have two entirely different tastes?

I’m not done with this. I need to think about it some more…

questions you didn’t know you had to ask

The SoFoBoMo projects seem to be gaining momentum in the blog circles, even though we aren’t actually going to actually do the thing until April - but there’s plenty of planning and speculation doing the rounds nonetheless. It’s sensible, obviously, to try and get as much of the mechanics sorted out before the actual execution of the thing, to leave as much of that precious month for shooting and editing as possible.

So, I started to throw a few pictures together from last weekend’s trip to the botanics, to get a feel for layout, design, editing, sequencing and the likes. And it would seem that every step is heavy with consequence - you ask yourself questions, and end up answering them with more questions.

The only two definite parameters are:

It will contain at least 35 images.
It will only contain images made during April.

So, a fairly fundamental starting point:

How many images do I want to show per page, or per spread?
How much text do I want to accompany each image?
Where should the text be in relation to the image?
What size do I want the book to be?

My two-hour crude mockup session using just Word brings yet more decisions to be made:

What kind of white space do I want to use - do I want to print right to the edge of the page?
How will I deal with positioning a mix of landscape/portrait/square cropped photos on a landscape/portrait/square page?

I visited a bookshop at lunchtime, and another after work so that I could see how it’s done professionally. It seemed that there were two definite camps - the Ansel Adams books all had tons of white space, with a simple caption under each, and everything was centred on the page. Then there were a few other, well, fairly forgettable examples that had full bleed pages with the odd smaller image on a left hand page. The former were slightly stuffy, obviously attempting to have the pictures tell the story but in some way the repetition made it easy to skip through. The latter, from memory were mostly colour, and despite the quality of the individual images just didn’t seem to put across a feeling of overall quality, I tried not to judge on the print quality either, just the design and something about them just didn’t work for me. I’m reminded of the difference between a shop where everything is hanging with plenty space to browse and see the different items, and somewhere with a sale on that just has a mad jumble and everything’s fighting for attention to the detriment of the overall experience.

There was another example, some travel photography book, and it wasn’t a big fancy hardback and didn’t have luxurious silky paper - but it was something in between the two types above. Goldilocks would be proud - it was just right. There were some images printed up to the edge of the page, on just one edge, giving plenty space on the other sides. The design was coherent enough not to be jumbly, but there was enough variation that your eyes didn’t get used to the pattern of where the image was on the page and flick past.

A quick look on the cheapest publishing option, photobox.ie, gives a similar option for their photo books - page spreads with one large image to the right and maybe a couple of smaller on the left page. I’m wondering if it’s the book layout equivalent of selective colour wedding bouquet pictures though, it’s all great and modern for 6 months then by the time the amateurs are doing it, it looks cheap and tacky. I wonder if there’s a way to use it in a more classic, understated way?

There’s also a little voice in my head encouraging my crafty inclinations, and prompting me to look up DIY bookbinding. Allowing for complete production in-house (literally) it would have a real handmade quality, and maybe take away from some of the pretentions attached (in my head at least) to an art photography book. I then caught myself wondering how one might fit 35 images onto a concertina type book, and where to get a sheet of card long enough… Uh oh.

progression

I’ve been ticking over my mind in the background about something to concentrate on as a project for SoFoBoMo in April. I was concerned that 35 images of what, in all likelihood, would end up being flowers may get a little repetitive rather than cohesive. I also cringed at the prospect of having to apply similar processing to all images since I tend to react to each individually when I’m working on them.

Then, during the week a friend told me about a project in which he wants to investigate the possibility of communicating with images. He started a flickr group where we are, still tentatively, playing a sort of ping pong with pictures. As I searched for something to post in reply to a beautiful papery-petaled-ghostly-white-flower-on-black image and ended up finding an instinctive response in something entirely more vibrant, I wondered about how, in the space of only three pictures we went from creepy to ghostly to vibrant.

I do have a memory of a flicker of a thought I had last week about progress, and hadn’t managed to grasp it and make it into anything substantial. I had previously thought of documenting progress on a larger scale in terms of time - in the sense of exploring growing things, after being inspired by a) the hints of new life at the Botanic Gardens and b) Jamie Oliver’s garden (yes… again!) and was determined to make it a year long project on whatever I could coax into life on my balcony in a pot! But now, I’m thinking of something growing, but more in the sense of being reactionary, developing, organic in a different way. And something that’s on a short enough time-frame to work on for SoFoBoMo.

Straying from the idea of a strict visual theme is also the gist of this post on 40 Watt, which helped the thought process along a little. Feels like my eyes and mind have been opened to a whole new realm of possibility…