Category: photography
Scanning
Having worked through my old digital images, I’ve begun to sort through my transparency photographs.
I shot on transparency film exclusively for a number of years at the turn of the century: most were mounted and scanned, but as I shot more print film and then moved onto digital capture, I left transparency film by the wayside. I have quite a few rolls to go through.
Shooting on 35mm and medium format film, I found the images on transparencies, especially when projected or on my light-box, to be full of gorgeous detail and light. However, my scans never quite measured up to what I saw “live”. Furthermore, on Kodak’s beautiful Technical Pan film, a single scan pass didn’t do justice to all the detail held therein.
After chancing by an article in the Guardian, in which a photographer talked of scanning his images for highlights, shadows and mid-tones before layering them in photoshop, I changed my scanning technique. I made three scans of each image for the bright areas, shadows and “normal” areas then looked to how I could best combine them.
The internet is full of tutorials on this, but I found the most comprehensive (and understandable) ones gave pointers on using image>apply image with layer masks on Photoshop. After recording a few steps, I worked through the scans pretty well. As to the results?
Fitzrovia Square
I’m currently working through some donated rolls of 35mm film on my rangefinder: black and white print film. In time, I hope to be working through more 35mm and medium format film and I’ll be trying more scanning and blending techniques to display them.
Prints of the City
A few years ago on a walk along Baker Street, I snapped a photo with my phone camera of the sunlight in the morning mist. I was so surprised by the light that I returned the following day to photograph the sight and the light again with my Fuji X Pro-1.
Baker Street
During my computer cleanup, I came across this image again, along with a number of others I took in the Regent’s Park and Baker Street that morning. I loved their light, mist and timelessness, and the responses to them on my Instagram feed.
I took a number of photos of each shot: I put four of the better versions of the social media uploads together as prints, which I have placed on sale on my Etsy page. These image represent a look at London that I enjoy: showing a sight that could exist at any time in the past few decades, even with modern shop fronts, clothes and cars; a period view of the present.
London can be viewed in so many ways: as an historical city; as a financial city; as a place of politics and protest; as a place of culture. In my prints, I want to reflect all these different Londons and perhaps show new ones.
My Etsy print page is at: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/BurningDetails?ref=ss_profile
The deep dive
I’m currently amping up my photoshop skills.
There have been two projects so far; both to do with layering. They have been fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, but also totally necessary in order to make the images I am ambitious to create.
I have been inspired by such photographers as Ilina S, Erika Tschinkel, Sabina and Zhang Jinga, who all suffuse their images with an air of the fantastic, with their use of subject, composition, lighting and post production. Their images and technique remind me of the painstaking work of special visual effects teams in film making.
My rudimentary efforts so far make me think of how one can know when an image is “complete”. I’ve never been able to work that out in my writing, editing or darkroom work. The idea that creative work is never finished but abandoned comes to mind.
Maybe such knowledge comes from knowing how to best use the tools, which is what I’m learning now. Tutorials abound and I’m practising regularly.
New Light through Old Windows
To clear space on my computer, I’ve been going through every file to find RAW images. Thorough searching has turned up a plethora of files, containing RAW images from as far back as 2010. I’ve been editing them and exporting them to jpeg files and the space cleared has been phenomenal.
Tower bridge in 2014
I’ve learned a lot from this process. My image editing speed has risen and I’ve become more organised in my photo collating: over the years, files have become organised by date and place, rather than subject, titles, moods and whatnot; I hope to find an ideal filing system in future, but for now, my filing has never been more organised.
The main aspect I’ve learned is in my ability to edit an image, especially when I come across photographs that I have edited some years previously. Like shining new light through old windows, my editing vastly improves on what I have done before. I’ll be printing some of these new images soon.
This last aspect has left me wondering about when an image is complete. I must have felt that I had done a decent job editing some years ago, only to supplant those efforts more recently. How may I edit those photos in a year’s time? How do I know when an image has been edited enough? When will a photograph be “correct”? And what is a correct image? One that represents an event with perfect accuracy, or one that lives up to one’s personal memory or expression?
I have also been wondering more about how I use editing programmes. I recently wrote about taking a deeper dive in using Photoshop: part of that deeper dive concerns thinking about what kind of images I want to create. There are many photographers I follow: snappers, artists, portraitists, fashionistas; they all have their own way of looking at their worlds. They all worked towards their particular view, so in my new photographs, I hope to experiment towards a view of my own.
Trailer
Fluid trailer from Burning Details on Vimeo.
My micro-budget feature, Fluid, was screened one morning at the Rich Mix cinema in Shoreditch, London to an audience of cast, crew and friends. It was the last step of an extraordinary year-long adventure, in which I’d written, produced, directed, photographed and edited a science fiction film with a crew of professionals and non-professionals: fuelled by enthusiasm, a low budget and hope, we completed this film to the best of our ability. I had never felt more fulfilled.
My wish was to see a project through to screening and, while it didn’t make it into the festivals I entered, I considered it a rewarding project that taught me a great amount about filmmaking. There’s much I wish I could have done differently, but that’s for the next film.
As part of putting the production to bed, I wanted to make a trailer for it. Friends who come with me to the cinema know how much I love trailers and I wanted to do the same for this film: as an exercise it was as eye opening as making a feature.
When I was at college, I met a musician who told me of his experience in editing down an album track to release as a single. I kept thinking of this as I ended Fluid down on iMovie; trying to distill the essence of the film, its story and themes from 75 minutes to under two minutes. Many notes were written before I edited a single image.
On completion, I shared the trailer with the cast and crew: their responses were positive and I’m pleased with the result. But I’m left with one nagging feeling: I want to do more. I want to tell another story. I want to make another film. Onto the next.
A writing adventure
The finished product
It started with a tweet.
Earlier this year, Amaa_Official tweeted some advice to creatives on writing an instructive ebook. Her thread broke down the stages into manageable chunks, from choosing a subject, through writing, to presentation, sale and promotion.
I’ve written books before as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge, but I had never thought of doing something like this, so I set to thinking of a subject to write about. Of all the subjects I considered, I chose photography: an interest I’d pursued for years, in which I had wide experience with cameras, shooting and printing.
On looking through my photos, especially the digital images on my computer, I decided to focus on landscape photography. I thought about subjects to cover and the images needed to illustrate them and set to work, writing the ebook on Apple’s Pages and editing the photos in Adobe Photoshop. While doing this, I uploaded old landscape images of mine on social media, with posts trailing the forthcoming ebook.
A little over 5000 words later, with each of the ten chapters illustrated and formatted, I used Canva to make a cover design, adapting a free cover, which I then reduced in size using a trial of Adobe Acrobat. Once I’d placed it on my product page in Gumroad, I linked to the sales image on my social media.
I hesitate to finish with, “and that was all it took!” The process took months: page formatting was difficult; I agonised over the cover. But on the first day I launched the book, it began to sell.
This has been an extraordinary creative venture and one I’d like to repeat: I’m currently thinking of subjects to write on. Thanks to those who have bought the book so far, Amaa_Official, AlyssaColeLit and all those who tweet advice on ebook writing and promotion. Sharing this book has been a pleasure.
A deep dive
Over the past few years, I’ve learned to use Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom Classic to edit my images. My use has been rudimentary, but has served me well so far, but I wanted to take a deeper dive into these programmes, especially Photoshop, so I’m following some tutorials.
The photographers I really admire have all encouraged photographers to learn about lighting and post-production: I start into the former when I finally acquire my first lighting set up; as to the latter, I need to be using post-production more effectively.
Up until now, I’ve used Photoshop for tweaks such as exposure, white balancing and little else. I have done the odd experiment, normally following a tutorial from Amateur Photographer magazine to the letter, but little on my own. All the while, I have looked at other photographers use post production to manipulate their work into art as well as representation. I’d like to try this.
The tutorials I’m following are a deep dive into post-production. At the moment, I pay for Adobe’s photographer package; this may change in future as I learn more.
Some tutorials have touched upon making a “vintage look” on new photos. I have family photos from decades back that are vintage: they were taken to the best of their photographers ability to represent the event depicted. I feel the same way about the photographs I take now, but I am inclined to use post-production more effectively for interpretation as well as representation.
I dare say that I was reluctant to try any new techniques as I was trying to get my images as “in camera” pure as possible. But I realised that I made choices on how I photographed something on film and once in the dark room, I definitely made choices on how to print it. What I’m doing now is simply the digital version.
I’m three tutorials in so far. Whether I use all I’ve learned is yet to be seen, but it would be a dreadful waste of this resource if I didn’t have some idea of how to use it more fully.
An optimistic year
Thanks to finding a cache of files, I’ve been editing some digital photos from years gone by. I am currently working through images from 2012.
This year holds a number of memories for me, but chief among them was my involvement on the periphery of the London Olympics. Working in road traffic control at Transport for London, I was part of a large team that kept traffic moving during the events. We’d prepared for it over the previous years across departments and with the police, the military and countless stakeholders. The delivery was an intense, enjoyable and comradely experience.
One day in the lull between the Olympics and Paralympics, a number of us were sent on a site visit across the various Olympic sites. We travelled to the Excel Centre, Queen Elizabeth Park and North Greenwich, returning to work on the Thames ferry, from where this photo was taken.
It’s strange looking back on this time, the Olympics events and especially its opening ceremony from today. The opening ceremony’s celebration of West Indian immigrants on the MV Empire Windrush, as well as the UK’s National Health Service stayed in the memory (along with a Conservative MP’s dismissal of it all as “multicultural crap“.) 2012 felt genuinely optimistic.
In the years that followed, we’ve had Nelson Mandela’s death, the Ebola epidemic, the rise of Daesh, earthquakes in Nepal and Italy, the Camp Speicher massacre in Iraq, the Paris attacks, the Grenfell Tower fire, the Syrian Civil War, the Windrush deportations, the Hong Kong protests and this current pandemic: events that have shaken whatever optimism I may have felt to the core. Looking back on that opening ceremony, I wonder how valued the NHS really was, or if my optimism back then was in a bubble, or just a foolish response to a manufactured event.
These and other intervening events have revealed how we have valued some people over others and how we’ve valued economic systems over people. For instance, the current rise in estimation of key workers has been significant: what happens after this pandemic will be telling. Will we give our venerated teachers, bin men, street cleaners, carers, deliverers, postal workers and retail staff decent pay, conditions and contracts, or return to the denigration of their work and workforce? I hope for the former option: such a change is something to be optimistic about.
My City, Our World
Earlier this week, I visited central London to take the last new image for my urban landscape photography ebook. Now, I’m social distancing as directed and as I look at the images I took, I’m shocked at how deserted the city looks.
Pavements are empty, traffic is sparse, shops are quiet. This city has changed.
As this pandemic runs its course, the changes will remain in place for some time. I’m full of questions. I wonder how photography will capture this changed city: in the expressions of its inhabitants; in the state of its high streets; or in its service workers?
Right now, there is speculation that London may be locked down. How will this be recorded? Will there be a definitive image?
In addition to staying safely distanced, I will be photographing as much as I can. I want to record this time. I wonder how others will do this? We shall see.
Files
I’ve spent the past fortnight gathering images for my guide to landscape photography ebook. In the process, I’ve found myself rifling through both physical and digital files for images to edit and use to illustrate it.
It’s been a long task: I’m working through two hard drives full of images, most filed by place and date. A large minority are not. At one point, I found a large file of untouched images. At another, I lost about a month’s worth in a mistaken purge (I imagine they’ll turn up again).
On the physical side, negatives, prints and slides taken over previous decades are in envelopes, files and folders and boxed within various crates in the loft. Their contents have been listed but not properly catalogued: finding particular prints and slides has been time consuming.
As the photos are collated and arrangements are made to take new images to complement them, I wonder what method of cataloging I can do in future to speed up such a process, or at least allow me better knowledge of what photographs I have? Definitely one to research in future.
Burning Details 
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