Everything you can imagine...

…is, according to Picasso, real.

Early on in my photographic journey I realised that the hyper-processed almost-too-good-to-be-true landscape shots were, in fact, too good to be true. No thanks, not for me.

I loved the approach I found in creating more abstract works, or seeing a landscape and then allowing it to permeate my imagination, perhaps to cross-refer with an image I had seen in a gallery and then let it do its work. Technology allows some of this to happen; certainly the software to manipulate images, colours and textures as well as to capture multiple images in a way that can then be easily processed. Technology has to remain the tool, not the solution.

My most recent camera is made from wood, and I have found new vitality in sticking a roll of HP5 into my Ondu pinhole camera and setting off for the mud flats of the Severn Estuary or the trees and landscapes around.

I have added a new gallery to my site for some of the resulting images.

My first go at Solargraphs

Last winter I came across some Youtube videos about Solargraphs (most notably this one https://youtu.be/7n3iBW8SkXA, although I opted mostly for chopped tomatoes than beans).

This in turn led me to an amazing collection by Al Bryson http://www.al-brydon.com/solargraphs

I spent some time around the winter solstice making eight Solargraphs of my own and placing them in locations around a farm and woodland. I then waited six months for the results.

My big concern was how easy it would be to scan the resulting images. For these long exposures a sheet of photographic paper is used behind the pinhole, and this is light sensitive. I didn’t know how the process of scanning them would work. I need not have worried as a simple scan (300dpi) seemed to produce good enough results, and not impair the paper before the scan had finished.

What I hadn’t considered was the design of the tin can pinhole camera. Three of my eight had a significant amount of water in them by the end of the six month exposure. A couple of them also had light leaks. Of the eight, five have produced images of some interest, the remaining three are fascinating but don’t have any sun trails to show.

Processing the images was as simple as the video suggests. Photoshop does a great job of inverting the image and then come colour correction and split toning in Photoshop or Lightroom can take place quite easily.

I am going to rethink my design and work on a more precise and smaller pinhole, as well as trying to make the capsules more water and light-proof. I had been trying to work out how to make smaller units as well - I liked the idea of being able to hide them in plain sight in a more urban environment.

I am now posting the resulting images in a separate project on this site.

Kyffin Williams

There’s a fabulous documentary about the Welsh painter Kyffin Williams currently on BBC iPlayer.

Discussing his prolific landscapes painted up in the mountains of north Wales he describes how for the first 25-30 years of his painting career he would lug paints and canvas up the mountains to capture nature as it lay before him, but then he started to take sketchbooks and watercolours instead because he wanted to use his studio as the place where he could use the sketches to

interpret the landscape, and not record it….

My photographic journey (part ii)

I fell in love with photography again as a result of rediscovering Cartier-Bresson and wanting to find a way of capturing something of the flavour of the places we were visiting on our travels. Few things beat a good black and white street shot from a European capital.

Whilst exploring around street photography I also found on YouTube some landscape photographers, Thomas Heaton in particular, and by watching and emulating I started to enjoy being on the top of a hill as the sun set.

Some of the aspects of landscape still enthralled me - the exploring and the solitude, but also recording the light in a panoramic landscape image, although the huge quantity of over-processed shots on sites like 500px and getting to some location that one has researched and worked on, only to find it is the one place everybody else has been for that one shot of a place does become a bit dull after a while.

And so I was puzzled to find myself in the Tate Modern in the summer at an exhibition that I had selected because it was pretty much the only thing on, showing abstract paintings and photographs in close proximity. That sparked my imagination in a new and surprising way, and led me to explore another way of making an image…

My photographic journey (part i)

The first photograph I saw which made a real impression on me was Brett Weston’s beautiful ‘Canal, Holland, 1971’ which was in a photography magazine I came across in my late teens.

Probably around this time, but here my memory is little more vague, I became aware of a two photographs by Cartier-Bresson; the man jumping over a puddle outside the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris and the view looking down on a street with a passing cyclist from Hyeres.

At the time I was given an Olympus OM 20 35mm film camera for a birthday and I loved to shoot with Kodachrome 64. I still have that camera, and it still works, but my photographic output declined rapidly once I had left University.

That is, until….