Dungeness: Black and White

Back in April I met up with a couple of fellow camera nerds, comrades from the 365 Project, for a trip down to the south coast. We were going to Dungeness, somewhere I had long wanted to photograph. I had looked into going there before but without a car it is prohibitively difficult; public transport doesn't best serve such areas. And they can't really be blamed, its own promotional website describes Dungeness as 'bleak and desolate'. This wasn't what was on our mind, however, as we headed progressively south. The weather was wonderful, one of the first truly beautiful days of the year. Sadly, it didn't last. By the time we had arrived the cloud had solidly set in and the exposed nature of the area left us open to a biting wind that soon left my ears stinging. Undeterred we set off to explore.

Anyone vaguely into landscape photography in the UK will be aware of Dungeness as a location unlike any other in the country. Basically it is an enormous bank of shingle, the largest on the continent. At a glance it is as bleak and desolate as advertised but upon closer inspection there is actually a lot going on. It is a part of a vast nature reserve that is particularly important with regard to bird and plant life, in fact it is home to one third of all the plant species to be found in the UK. There are also two nuclear reactors, Dungeness A and Dungeness B, the first of which has been shut down and the second of which is due to be so in 2018.

Although from a comfort perspective this was not going to be the most wonderful afternoon, from a photographic perspective it was pretty much exactly what I'd hoped for. It was Dungeness at its gloomy best. What little colour there already was had been further muted by the grey clouds and so tones and textures became ever more important. There was always going to be a lot of black and white conversions in post processing after this trip. A little tip, even if you fully intend to end up with black and white pictures it is generally a good idea to originally shoot in colour and then convert to black and white. This gives you a lot more options after the event in what type of black and white you want to apply and, of course, in staying in colour if you so choose.

The main photographic focus are the numerous abandoned fishing boats that sit just above the high tide mark in every imaginable stage of decay. There are a few where it's actually difficult to tell whether the boat has been left for dead or whether it's still a living, breathing boat; and then there are others where all that is left are the ribs of the hull and a few warped planks like the skin on the corpse of a rotting whale corpse. There are also tiny little railway tracks and wheelhouses that, once upon a time, were used to haul the fleet up and down the beach. The tracks can provide leading lines to help guide the eye around a carefully composed image.

I'm going to post a second Dungeness article full of colour images, there were a couple of occasions where having a splash of vibrancy was the right path to take. Our final path led Rachel, Christin and I to a local pub where we could warm up and refresh before the long drive home. I'm very happy that I finally made it down to Dungeness, it was a photographic and social success; I highly recommend it to those with a bleak streak running through them.

Quintessentially English

Atop the Captsone

A few weeks ago I had the absolute pleasure of giving a friend away. No, not at some sort of charity car boot sale; it was at her wedding. She had had the good judgement to get married at Tunnels Beaches in Ilfracombe, Devon. Not only is it a fantastic venue in which to get married with views out to the Irish Sea and your very own private beach to explore, but the town of Ilfracombe itself is a very picturesque one. Having spent 6 hours on a coach getting there after work I was keen to get out and about the next morning. As luck would have it my hotel was just opposite the Capstone, as locals call it, or as you and I might, the big cliff thing.

Freshly fueled with eggs and bacon I charged up to the top as fast as my little legs could carry me where, at the summit, I was rewarded by fantastic views in all directions. To east and west were views of the coast and cliffs, and to the south all of Ilfracombe was laid out before me. The terrain is hilly and the bulk of the older part of town nestles in a valley running parallel with the coastline; some newer developments have followed the valley as it kinks south. Very little land is wasted, the hills are steep and so many streets are terraced, clinging to the sides of the slopes as the terrain permits. The result is lots of little blind corners, narrow alleys and sudden inclines that frequently put me in mind of the time I spent in south Wales as a child; which shouldn't be so surprising given the two are only separated by 30km or so of water. Indeed, the hotel played Welsh radio in the dining room, which rather threw me as I hadn't undergone the normal mental preparation I would customarily go through before returning there. Also at the peak was the statue in my photo at the top of this post, although I'm afraid I must confess that I have no memory of why it is there or what it represents. I can say that it does a good job of conveying the energy and movement that is so evident atop the cliffs there.

The Landmark Theatre, at bottom left, tends to polarise locals; they either love it or hate it.

My time in Ilfracombe was short but very pleasant. I have been to that part of Devon before and will happily return again in the fullness of time. I don't get to the coast as half as much as I would like which is a shame because the UK is blessed with hundreds of miles of beautiful coastline. I must make sure I don't neglect it so in the future.

The Lomo Effect

Well it's been a few weeks so I thought I'd better come up with something for the blog and, so, I've investigated the Lomo style of photography and come up with a little guide on how to take a bog standard snap and give it a bit of the old Lomo magic. 

For those of you that haven't heard of it I should probably describe what the Lomo style, or Lomography, actually is. I guess it's actually two things; one of which is easy to define, the other of which isn't. The easy one is the physical look of the photos; there tends to be a vignette (darkening at the corners), the colours are very rich (due to the use of slide film and the common practice of cross processing the negatives) and the quality is generally low with blurriness, poor exposure and even light leaks frequently featuring. Most of these properties, normally avoided at all costs by most photographers but sought out by the lomographer, are down to the very low build quality of the lomo camera. Think 1980s, Russia, plastic.

The element that is more difficult to pin down is the style and composition. Perhaps a good place to start would be with the motto of the movement: Don't Think, Just Shoot. Although it could easily be confused with the motto of the American military it is actually a style encompassed by The Ten Golden Rules of Lomography as laid out on their website. These include such adages as Take Your Camera With You Everywhere You Go, and, Lomography Is Not An Interference In Your Life But A Part Of It. Basically, they try to encourage you to break every traditional rule of photography that ever existed. The Rule of Thirds would be anathema to a lomographer. I highly recommend a look at their site to get more of a feel for this unusual brand of photography; you'll probably either like it or you wont.

The question is: how did such an odd, counter-intuitive and niche movement even get started, nevermind become an international phenomenon? It all started as recently as 1992 when a group of Viennese art students came across an old Lomo camera whilst on a tour in Prague. They found it in an old camera shop and used it in a very casual kind of way, often not aiming, shooting from the hip and generally just mucking about. Upon returning home and developing the film they were charmed by the "unique, colourful and sometimes blurry images" that were produced. Interest amongst friends and family rapidly grew and the following year they founded a society in honour of the strange new camera. The camera in question was a Lomo LC-A Compact Automat, produced some ten years previous in the USSR. The build quality of the device was.... well, there was no build quality; but this leant itself perfectly to the students shooting style.

There was a problem, however; with the fall if the USSR also came the end of the production of the camera and the prospect of a ready supply of the student's new favourite toy. Undaunted, the students flew to St. Petersburg, where the Lomo factory was located, to make a deal for tax breaks so as to make it economically viable to continue production. They successfully got the special permission required from the mayor of the city, a very amiable and friendly chap, one V. Putin. The rest, as they say, is Lomography. Production has since shifted to China and production continues to this day; the future of Lomography seems secure and Lomo cameras remain cheap and affordable for all to try. The film is now the increasingly expensive part.

But what if you don't want to faff about with film and developing and such like and just want to create the same effect using your existing DSLR and a bit of canny processing? Well, I'll show you how - so long as you intend to use Adobe Elements, although many applications are broadly similar these days. Those of you not interested in the technical parts can just skip to the pretty picture at the bottom.

The picture we're going to start with is no great shakes. The exposure isn't great, I should have got my neutral density filters out, the sky is overexposed and there's some lens flare; but as we're aiming for the Lomo style none of this should matter, if anything it'll help. So there are two main things we need to do here; create a vignette and achieve a cross-processing effect by increasing saturation and contrast. There is more than one way to do each of these steps including just clicking through the guided Lomo Camera Effect wizard, but where would the fun be in that?

There are two easy ways to create a vignette. The first is to simply go to Filter>Correct Camera Distortion and use the sliders in the vignette tool, which are normally used to remove a vignette, not to create one. I'd normally go for somewhere around -40 to -50 but it's totally up to you.

The second way is a little more involved but gives you more control. Take the Lasso tool and, having selected a feathering level of, shall we say, between 100-200 pixels, draw a vaguely circular shape in the middle of the photo. Again, we're not aiming for perfection here. We want to alter the outside of this circle not the inside and so you need to click Select>Inverse. Now create a Levels layer and slide both the shadows and the midpoint markers to the right a little, this will add to the vignette effect. I actually prefer to use a combination of these two methods to make my vignettes.

That's the vignette sorted but now we need to work on the distinctive colour palette of lomography; again, there are a couple of ways to go about this and I like to use a combination of each. First up: colour curves. Click on Enhance>Adjust Colour>Adjust Colour Curves... (yes, it really does have the three little dots after it). Here you are presented with a straight diagonal line on a grid. The left hand side of the grid represents dark colours, the left hand side highlights, and the middle is the midtones. There are several preset options available but you can also drag the points on the line to warp it. Moving any given point on the line either up or down will make the corresponding band of colour more or less intense. We want to make the curve look like an S; this will have the effect of making the highlights brighter and the dark parts darker, i.e. increasing contrast. If your line looks something like the one in my example below then you're on the right track. Press okay when you're happy with the effect achieved.

I would also recommend increasing the saturation, this will help to achieve the cross processing effect that is so synonymous with the Lomo style. To do this you can either click on Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Hue/Saturation... or simply click on the button with the diagonally divided circle on it on the right hand side and select Hue/Saturation... Use the slider for Saturation to give your colours a bit of a boost. For a 'normal' photo I wouldn't want to push this much past the mid teens, but for the Lomo style you can probably get away with numbers in the 30s, 40s or even higher depending on the photo.

In the same way that you got your Hue/Saturation... layer you can now select a new Brightness/Contrast... layer. Here, I wouldn't say that the Brightness has to go one way or the other, this really depends on what look you want to achieve with any given individual photo, but I would recommend increasing the contrast a little.

Lastly, I would say it's worth while putting a Fill layer in. To do this, select Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Colour... Call the new layer whatever you like or leave it as the default and click Ok. This should default to a layer of pure black and you will completely lose the picture you have so carefully created. Fortunately it is only hiding behind the black layer and we now have to blend the two together to reveal the finished product. Click Ok again. At the top right in the Layers panel you will have a drop down box with various different blending options; I would recommend Soft Light or Hue or Saturation and an Opacity of something like 30-50%. This should really help bring about that cross processing look. Cross processing, by the way, is where you develop film using non-standard chemicals. There are two main film types; standard 35mm and Colour Slide film. Each of these sets has their own chemicals used in their development, C41 for 35mm and E6 for Colour Slide film; however, lomographers noticed that you can get some really cool results if you swap these up. As I understand it the more common option is to use Colour Slide film and process it with 35mm chemicals.

That's about it. With any luck you should now have a photo worthy of the annals of Lomography, or at least something that looks a little old timey; you can see my effort below. None of the techniques I have mentioned here are set in stone; indeed, that would go against the whole freestyle notion that made Lomo popular in the first place. The idea is not to be constricted by the traditional norms, to break the rules and not to worry about the consequences. As Rule #10 of Lomography says: Don't worry about any rules.

Review of 2013....

Soooooooo, it has been rather a long time since my last post. This has been due to a number of reasons, partly laziness, partly lack of inspiration and frustration with the 365 Project, and partly because I have been in Romania for the last 3 weeks and internet connections there were few and far between. I will finish off the 365 Project, I have a bunch of photos on the back burner that I need to process and get written up and I will try to have that done by the end of the month. For now, I'm going to do one of those lazy Review of the Year posts with some of my favourite pictures from 2013. I won't include any from the period I haven't posted yet, you'll just have to be patient for those.

In 2014 I will be going back to my usual format of a post every fortnight or so. I think this gives me time to get some decent photos together and the words to go with them. I think the daily requirement of the 365 Project ultimately lowered the quality of what I do here, which was one of the reasons I became increasingly disenchanted with it. However, this does not foreshadow the year ahead, I am optimistic and enthusiastic about the blog for 2014. I have had 70,000 hits so far which is orders of magnitude more than I ever expected and so thank you to everyone who takes time out of their day to see what I've been up to. I'll try to raise the bar.

The last 12 months have been the most traumatic and difficult of my life, much of it self-inflicted, but there were certainly some good times too. Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me this far.

Gargoyle from inside the Natural History Museum, January.

View from Westminster Bridge, January.

Chain in Vienna, March.

St. Marco's piazza, Venice, March.

Venice, March. 

 

Parliament Square, London, May.

Pocketwatch, May.

Parliament Square, London, May.

 Dead flower, July.

 Olympic Park, September.

365 Project: Photo 353

Finally! We're back on the road! This was sunset as seen from a German autobahn. Our unplanned and lengthy stay in Brussels ended at lunchtime today when we picked the car up from the garage. Unfortunately/stupidly we had a bit of a run in on Saturday night on the outskirts of the Belgian capital. Our driver hadn't noticed that the turn at the top of the slip road we were leaving the motorway by was a right angle. He valiantly tried to make the turn anyway, at 60mph, but failed. We mounted the curb destroying the tyre and the wheel and damaging the suspension. This was at about 2am and, would you believe it, there wasn't a local garage just waiting to fix it for us. I won't go into details here but two and a half days later we're back on the road. Only 30 hours of driving to go!!

365 Project: Photo 336

The view from the train back down to London. I love the flat landscapes of east Anglia.

365 Project: Photo 301

I took this one out of the window of a bus on my phone and then HDR'd it up a bit.

365 Project: Photo 288

A pleasant sunset stroll along Hampstead Heath, my first visit there in a very long time. Taken on my phone and cropped, hence the graininess.

365 Project: Photo 238

I've always had a bit of a thing for lone trees in verdant, green pastures. 

365 Project: Photo 235

The theme today was Local Landscape. This landscape isn't local to me, it is in north London, but it is local to a couple of my friends that have just bought their first place. It's, erm, a fixer upper, shall we say? I've been helping them and their family completely gut the place in preparation to have some works done and then get it decorated. It'll be a long slog but totally worth it in the end, especially if they have a pleasant view like this to greet them on their way home each evening. Good luck guys....

365 Project: Photo 212

Personally, I couldn't give a rat's ass about the Olympics but I gather people find these buildings inspirational, which is handy for me because the theme was Inspiration. I just liked the pretty clouds.

365 Project: Photo 172

I'm on a boat this weekend for a stag do, cruising the canals of the Bath area. This is the back of a beer garden that abuts the river, a very pleasant place to quench your thirst. The theme today was Vines and I figure there are some in there somewhere.

365 Project: Photo 169

The theme was Pastoral and this is a shot from near Bath. Very peaceful; apart from when trains plough through. This was taken from atop the Avoncliff aquaduct.

Mystic River

About a year ago I went on a little expedition to photograph the deer in Richmond Park, one of my favourite parks in all of London. Depending on your viewpoint the weather was awful. It was bitterly cold and and a heavy fog hung over the entire area throughout the day. This made the deer more difficult to spot, as visibility was below 50 yards, and any chance of nice bright landscapes non-existant. On the upside, it gave the Thames an ethereal quality that was quite magical. Another positive was the way that the branches of trees were highlighted due to the contrast with the overcast sky. I have always been fascinated by the intricacies of how branches grow; the journey, both physical and temporal, from green bud to mighty trunk. I did a module at uni on plant developmental genetics and it was one of the most interesting courses I've ever had the pleasure to do. For those interested, it's all to do with shoot apical meristems.

It was a touch on the foggy side

As you can see, the fog was substantial.

Richmond Bridge

Richmond bridge is rapidly approaching a quarter of a millennium in age and is still going strong. Thanks in part to a solid original design and partly to a sensitive widening project carried out in the 1930s so that it could cope with the increase in traffic. The upstream half of the bridge was completely dismantled, each brick being saved and labelled, the centre portion extended and then the original facing rebuilt. A single lane on the downstream side was kept open throughout the project.

I could edit these photos to make them clearer, increase saturation and contrast and remove some of the smothering effects of the fog but I've decided to leave them as is. As they are they do a much better job of conveying the scene as I saw it that day; cold, dank and quite beautiful.

An artist I met on the riverbank

This is a chap who will be known to anyone that regularly walks along this portion of the river. Say hello if you see him, he's very friendly and an excellent painter.

The war memorial had recently been adorned with its sombre wreaths of remembrance and I took the opportunity to emphasise the colour of the iconic poppies. To be honest, this didn't take much in the way of editing, it was a dark day indeed.

365 Project

Okay, I'm going to do it.

I'm going to do one of those 365 photo projects I've heard so much about in recent years. On a basic level it involves taking at least one photo every day and sharing it online. On a less prosaic level it means forcing yourself to try and get creative every day, to look for something interesting in the mundane, to come up with something different than the last even when the characters have remained the same. From what I understand, until you get into a decent pattern it's actually quite a difficult thing to do and, so, with that in mind I'm going to be realistic about this:

• Not every photo will be great, or even good. Some will be blurry, some will be under exposed.
• Although I intend to take a photo every day I won't necessarily post it here every day; I'll probably batch them a bit.
• There are lots of lists online that can provide guidance and inspiration for days when the creative juices just aren't flowing. I'll probably have a look through several of these for hints and tips.
• I'll likely take duplicate photos that are very similar to each other. Expect to get very well acquainted with my living room and commute to work.
• At some point I will probably want to quit. I'll try not to.

So, starting today, I am going to come up with 365 posts each with its own little photo of something from my day. You'll be pleased to hear that I won't bother tweeting and facebooking about it every single day, we'd all get pretty tired of that pretty quickly; I'll maybe just do a weekly or monthly round up. I shall still be doing my usual photography posts and, hopefully, as I heal up and get more mobile as the year progresses I'll be able to take more higher quality pictures again. I'll also be carrying on with the more scientific and sceptical posts that I started recently, in fact yesterday I started work on what will either be a series of posts or one very long post on one of my absolute, all time, most infuriating topics: chiropractic. But that's for another time.

Here, then, is photo 001 of my 365 Project. I went for a walk today to blast away the cobwebs from last night's celebrations and Primrose Hill in north London was the place to do it. I took this photo on my phone and Instagramed it up a bit so this isn't going to score highly on quality or looking natural, but hey ho.

1 down, 364 to go. Wish me luck.

Mekong and Markets

One of the larger branches of the mighty Mekong river

It's been a while but there has always been one last part of my trip through Vietnam that I wanted to write about. 

The final leg of our journey was in the south of the country, basing ourselves in Ho Chi Minh City we went on a two day trip to the Mekong Delta. Known as the rice bowl of Vietnam this is a very fertile region, as most deltas are, the river having brought rich soils and other detritus along for the ride from higher ground. After more than 3,000 miles of meandering from Tibet down through south east Asia this mighty river, the 10th longest on the planet, fans out over 15,000 sq miles of the country (see this image from NASA).

Once you stray into the tributaries this is how the Mekong looks. For miles. Endlessly.

This is one of those environments where the people that make it their home live almost semi-aquatic lives; there is no escaping the river. It impacts every aspect of their being. Pieces of actual solid ground are few and far between, especially nearer the coast. Raising your family, your livestock or your crops presents even more challenges than normal. People don't have cars here, they have boats; they don't go for a walk, they go for a swim. They say there is a period of the year when it doesn't rain quite so heavily as at others, but this river never dries. Picture vast islands of bamboo growing straight out of the water and you'll have a good idea of how much of this landscape looks.

If you look through the little windows you can see that this boat is stuffed to the gills with cabbages

What land there is has been aggressively cultivated in the last two decades as the Government sought to change Vietnam's status from a net importer to an exporter of rice, and it worked. Every bit of solid ground I saw either had a building on it or a paddy field thus highlighting the age old struggle between man and his environment. Less people in Vietnam now go hungry than they used to, but the Mekong has suffered and is not as large or diverse an ecosystem as it once was. Where the correct balance is on this scale of survival I couldn't say. It's easy to argue that this ecosystem should be protected from man at all costs but I'm pretty sure I'd strangle a panda with a tiger's tail if it meant my children wouldn't starve.

A slow day at the market

This aggressive agriculturalisation of the landscape has led to an influx of people from across the land. Historically the Greater Mekong region of South East Asia has been one of net emigration as a large population has had to do battle over very few jobs. In recent years though, the region has become one of net immigration as the demand for labour has increased. As the population has increased so the demand on local resources has seen a commensurate rise; in a land as fertile as the Mekong perhaps this doesn't seem like such a bad deal; the land is very fertile and can support many. But if there's one thing that we humans excel at it's finding ways to ruin a good thing. The laws of entropy are fairly unbending on this one, ultimately something will have to give.

Eels for dinner, anyone?

On the upside, one thing that all these people bring with them is their culture. Traditionally the hub of any town is it's market place in the town square. But what if the place you live doesn't have enough land to put a town square on? Easy, simply make your market float, of course. If you visit the Mekong then you won't have to wait long until you see one of their impressive floating markets; it seems that everyone just turns up with a boat load of produce, they tie a few examples of said produce to a big, vertical stick so that you can see what's being sold at a glance and then they just float around each other bargaining goods like traders the world over.

This woman pumps air into the bowl to keep her crayfish type creatures alive

Can Tho is one of the very few, what we would call, proper cities in the Mekong; it has a large freshwater port and is the major mercantile centre of the region. The large market that the town plays host to has been covered over in recent years to make it a bit more tourist friendly and it's well worth a look. Asides from all the exotic fruits like lychees (which I could do without) and dragon fruit (which is delicious) they have a good stock of live animals that you can buy fresh for a bit of home slaughtering.

That's a lot of lychees

It's difficult to imagine a river delta that just goes on for so long. I guess the closest thing we have to it in this country is the Fenlands; the unending flatness, the constantly waterlogged ground and ever present risk of flood. One of the things that I most remember the area for is that I finally got to eat some snake, snake curry to be precise. It was quite tasty, it sort of has the texture of pigs liver but a taste nearer to that of kidney. I recommend it.

My last photo here is one I have included because Sue really likes it. It's of her as she walks through the market of Can Tho. It has a nice simplicity to it but generally leaves me feeling sombre. Where is she walking? Why is she alone? As I took the photo I know that she was just trying to catch up to Eleanor and get out of the pissing rain but I guess that's the power of a photograph.