where are you taking me?
Dear Sheddists,
travel and journeys feature frequently in both dreams and nightmares. In the photograph above I wanted to capture that elusive sense of passing through landscape at speed.
I have a beautiful book called, 'Imperiled Landscapes' by Lynn Butler. She's an American who takes many of her photographs with a hand-held camera whilst out riding in the country. As a result the pictures are blurred and abstract, leaving lots of space for viewers to construct their own narrative to the images.
I don't subscribe to the view everything has to be pin-sharp for a photo to be interesting. To the contrary, sometimes images can seem flat and lifeless without an element of movement.
I took the photograph above whilst I was a passenger on a journey to Norfolk. The weather was overcast and grey. Rather than detracting from the image I was after this actually re-enforced the atmosphere. Poor weather seems no excuse for putting the camera away!
I set a slow shutter speed, looked ahead for interesting objects in the landscape and took photo after photo. On occasion I deliberately shot low into the road, on others I included more of the sky.
The motion blur has created a series of muted, abstract images. Some remind me of David Lynch's films, others of batik fabric. But what do you think?
Best regards,
electrofried(mr)
entrance
Dear Sheddists,
I did say it may not be pretty.
The first two photos in my 'Dreams and Nightmares' project are decidedly masculine. They feature sharp, straight lines, gloomy repressed emotion and totemic male imagery. The key image today is female. It is about soft feminine curves and dreams of dawning adulthood.
Our eldest
grandson was on a sleepover last night and I discovered the results of
an early morning nose-bleed on on a roll of tissue paper. It got me thinking. I found it a struggle to capture the image I had in mind and I make no excuse for showing the development of a creative process in the series of photos below.
It's not something talked of often, but there is a key rite of passage for a girl - the arrival of her first period. The photographs I took today are an attempt to capture the dreams of a girl as she passes from child to adult.
I am conscious many may see this photo as crossing a line - especially as I am a man. However, there seems no good reason for this to debar me from commenting on such a crucial and special time in a girl's life. I am, after all, the father of two lovely daughters, both of whom have made a successful transition into adult life.
The photos were taken with a mixture of ambient light from the bathroom window augmented by a side fill from my mobile phone. I particularly wanted to accentuate the folds of tissue paper, which take on the form of a budding rose.
Some of the shots feature light flooding through an opaque frosted window. The emotion I seek to convey here is escape from the safety of home and entrance to the challenging, big world outside.
Yours as ever,
electrofried(mr)
stop
Dear Sheddists,
here's the second of my 365 photos project.
I wanted to create an ambiguous scene, something capable of asking questions of the viewer, such as ...
Has the man parked the car or crashed?
Where has he come from and where is he going?
Is this the scene of a crime?
I used a combination of artificial lighting for the shot - the internal lights of the car, its headlights and a security light at the front of the house. The camera was mounted on a tripod with a long exposure and a timing setting.
In some ways it reminds me a little of the work of Weegee an American press photographer of the 1930s and 1940s who specialised in scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death.
Again, to illustrate the creative process I'm also showing some other shots I took on the night using motion blur to create a more ghost-like feeling.
Yours as ever,
electrofried(mr)
masked
Dear Sheddists,
I'm delighted to say my photography class has started up again. This time there's a much larger group but it still retains the friendly, sharing atmosphere that made last term such a joy.
We met for the first time yesterday evening and talked about getting motivated to take photos. Our superb course tutor, Kate Green, suggested nine top tips...
1. Always have a camera with us.
2. Maintain and heighten our sense of awareness.
3. Make the normal extraordinary.
4. There's no time like the present!
5. Keep an 'ideas log'.
6. Train our eyes to see the light.
7. Experiment and venture outside our comfort zone.
8. Stay on top of our processing and editing.
9. Annotate our pictures and capture the creative thinking and feelings behind them.
A number of us signed up for a 365 photos project, one a day for the next year. I've decided to call mine, 'Dreams and Nightmares'. It's something I've been thinking about for a little time now. I can't promise the photos will always be pretty, but I do hope they will be thought-provoking.
I know I can take reasonably competent portrait and reportage photographs. Family and friends, music gigs. church and the Villa are all favourite topics. However, I was challenged at the end of last term when Kate showed us some work by the American photographer, Gregory Crewdson. Rather than finding things to photograph Crewdson creates fantastical photographic tableaux in the manner of a movie producer. It's well worth clicking on the link above to learn a little about the creative processes that lie behind his works.
I don't possess the skill, the imagination or the budget to create and shoot such scenes but I have been thinking about how I could do something similar on a much smaller scale. I'm particularly drawn to photographs of an ambiguous nature, open to different and potentially conflicting interpretations.
The photograph above is the first in my 'Dreams and Nightmares' project. It's a simple shot combining a blue shirt and a mask I acquired whilst attending 'The Drowned Man' an immersive theatre production by the Punchdrunk company.
So by way of explanation, here are the techie bits first. I shot the photo using ambient light from a bedroom window. In order to make the picture more atmospheric I used a wide aperture and under-exposed the photo by -1.7.
Now for the creative process and the feeling I wanted to create. The shirt and the mask symbolise the face we put on when we get dressed. We use clothes to create an image, be it a business suit, a party dress or a simple pair of jeans coupled with a well-worn t-shirt.
In the photograph above the shirt and the mask appear to morph into a face. It's a psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia, in which we project images onto something we see by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists. A good example is the regular sighting of the face of Jesus in a rich and highly diverse variety of foodstuffs! In my shot of the day the edge of the mask and the collar of the shirt combine to produce what looks to be the jaws of a face staring out of the gloom.
Just for good measure, I've included two earlier shots I took on the way to creating the final piece.
Yours as ever,
electrofried(mr)
