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.

Brick Lane By Night

Last Saturday night I joined up with the people from London Photo Walk to go on an all night solstice walk. We covered about 23km over 11hrs or so. It was a long but extremely rewarding night and I look forward to doing it again next year.

Given that this took place all through the night exposures were all very long, generally 15-30 seconds. It was also quite difficult to even know exactly what you were pointing your lens at as it was so dark in some of the back alleys and so composition wasn't always straightforward. This meant that over the 11hrs I only took about 100 photos; but there was a definite benefit to this. It was a bit like shooting with film, you were forced to put a lot more thought into what you were doing. If you pressed the shutter at the wrong time then you wasted half a minute of your life, which may not sound like much but it is quite the motivator when the wind is blowing at three in the morning.

As I said, we covered a lot of ground that night but the four photos in this post are all from the ever fascinating Brick Lane; one of my favourite streets in the world. Endlessly interesting and always full of life I have spent countless hours walking it's length, generally in the dead of night, but this was the first time I had ever taken my camera with me. I think it paid dividends. It isn't very difficult to make great art look good and obviously street art lends itself to street photography, something I normally struggle with.

Except for the fox, each of the pictures here have undergone quite a lot of post processing to bring out the best in them, or, rather, conceal the worst in them. These pictures were quite busy and messy to start with and mostly what I have done is to crop them down and remove colours to hopefully simplify them and make them easier on the eye. The shot below is a great example of where the original exposure wasn't up to snuff. There was different coloured crap all over the floor, the edges of other artworks to either side and and some unattractive lintels over the top. I cropped out most of all that, made it black and white to remove the distracting colours and then just allowed the reds and yellows to come through to keep it simple. Hopefully the result is a more satisfying picture that allows you to focus on the graffiti. It's a cliche but less is often more.

The First Ever X-Ray

There has been a picture doing the rounds online lately that piqued my interest. The picture is supposedly of the first X-Ray ever taken. This is exactly the sort of thing I love to look at as it ticks several boxes on my What Makes An Awesome Image Checklist (we all have one); it looks cool, it's old, it's of scientific interest. Specifically, the picture is of the bejewelled hand of the wife of Wilhelm Roentgen, Anna Bertha Ludwig. A more German name you couldn't hope to find. You can see the picture on the right here.

As you can see, I wasn't kidding, it is  a cool picture; but then X-rays are inherently cool. It's a shame we only really get to see them when there is something wrong with us. The days of them being a fairground sideshow are long gone which, given how bad for you repeated exposure can be, probably isn't such a bad thing. Even today there is something captivating about seeing 'inside' ourselves, it's like seeing a picture of a nebula from deep space; it's universally captivating, an experience fascinating to all. Indeed, Frau Ludwig is quoted as having said, "I have seen my death!" Considering how interesting we still find these images more than a century later I can't imagine how shocking it must have been in the winter of 1895-1896.

So far so awesome. But a few days after I first saw this picture I came across another photo (at left), very similar but slightly different, also claiming that it is a copy of the first X-Ray ever taken. Well, they can't both be the first so I decided to try and get to the bottom of it.

A quick Google image search revealed that there seems to be a number of these hand X-Rays all saying that they are the first ever taken; so how to go about pinning down the true culprit? Let's start by going over what we know for certain. No one is disputing that Roentgen was the first to use X-Rays to produce images or that his wife regularly helped him out in the lab. They were working at Wuerzburg University in Bavaria where Wilhelm was a Professor of Physics. In late November 1895 he was experimenting with various new pieces of equipment produced by such luminaries as Heinrich Hertz and Nicola Tesla. Specifically he was seeing what happens when you pass a current through vacuum tubes. One of the tubes had a window cut out of it but this was shielded by a little cardboard screen to stop any light escaping. However, even though no light could have been shining out he noticed that a nearby piece of cardboard painted with barium platinocyanide had a dull light upon it. Like all good scientists he set out to test this phenomenon more thoroughly. He set up the experiment again but this time making certain that the hole blocked by cardboard was absolutely light proof beforehand. Seeing the same effect again, and noticing that it only occurred when he passed electricity through the system he concluded that he may have discovered a new type of ray. He called it an X-Ray, X as in the algebraic term for unknown, i.e. an unknown Ray. The moniker stuck in much of the western world although there are still plenty of places where they're still called Roentgen Rays, and the resultant images Roentgenograms. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? The significance of the barium platinocyanide turned out to be that it is impermeable to X-Rays, which is why it glowed when struck by them. This phenomenon has been put to good use to develop the barium swallow technique. This allows you to see real time video of an X-Ray and uses the barium to help highlight internal structure.

Now, Herr Roentgen was a prudent man and he soon suspected, quite correctly, that these new types of rays could be potentially harmful. It was only the following year that Madame Curie started her work on uranium (which Becquerel had noticed gave off a similar kind of ray as the X-Ray but it did so of it's own volition, it didn't need an external source of power to be produced. He had discovered radioactivity). Therefore it seems unlikely that he immediately ran into the next room and said to his wife, "Here, Anna, stick your hand in there love and lets see what happens." Indeed, it seems that the first deliberately produced image was that of his own hand, but this was just a temporary one that changed as he waved his hand in front of the apparatus. It was in the coming weeks that he had the bright spark of putting photographic film in the way of the rays. Perhaps it was at this stage that he asked the missus to raise her hand for science, we can't be sure.

What is self-evident, though, is that one of the above photos is in perfect sharp focus and the other is a bit of a fuzzy mess. Which of those is more likely to be the first ever deliberate X-Ray? The fuzzy one also has a Wuerzberg University stamp on it. Given this it seems reasonable to say that this one predates the other, and indeed any of the others I can find online. In which case I'm going to put my nickel down and say that this second picture is likely to be the oldest, not necessarily first, X-Ray ever taken.

The rest, as they say, is the history of science. The potential uses of Roentgen's new rays were quickly grasped. Within just a year there was a radiology unit set up in Glasgow and patients have been reaping the rewards ever since, especially once the potential dangers were realised and accounted for. Roentgen never patented his new idea, believing that it was a technology that should be available to all the world at no cost. A noble act that led him to bankruptcy and a Nobel Prize, the first ever one for physics; he donated all the prize money to the university. And, in 2004, element 111 in the periodic table was officially renamed Roentgenium in his honour, a vast improvement on unununium and no mistake.

Lest We Forget....

Pretty much everyone in London must be aware of the various commemorative public art installations that have been happening over the past few weeks to mark the centenary of the First World War beginning. With the passing of Harry Patch in 2009 this conflict did truly become history; he was the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches of western Europe. It is now only through books, documentaries, films and other second hand sources that we can learn about what is sometimes called The Great War.

I'm not sure a war should ever be called great. Whilst there are certainly circumstances where it is worthwhile to take up arms to defend an ideal or way of life I don't think that we should necessarily glory in it. War should be a last resort, a terrible necessity carried out only to the extent necessary and only when no other option remains. Was the First World War one of these occasions? I honestly don't know. I've read conflicting views on this and am not qualified to make a judgement. I'm not sure that anyone is. I am sure that we must make sure nothing like that ever happens again and that is why installations like this are welcome. Each ceramic poppy in the pictures here, and I have by no means covered them all, represents a fallen soldier. I don't know how many there are, many hundreds of thousands. Too many.

The same as the first picture but original colour

365 Project: Photo 224

This photo didn't quite turn out as I liked but it's not too terrible. I was walking through Westfield and just emerged from under a bridge when the extremely high contrast caused by the sun caused me stop in my tracks. My phone was not altogether capable of capturing what I wanted. I also wonder if I should have cropped the top a little.

365 Project: Photo 219

This is a close up of a sculpture installed in the cafe of the Serpentine gallery in Hyde Park. You literally have to climb through it to get your coffee and find a seat.