Self-expression under Lock-down

My preferred locations under normal circumstances are remote, sparsely populated where I can be alone, calm, and able to experience the moment rather than just record it. In such situations the aspect of the scene which triggers my making an image are, 20% by Forms (as in Formalism), 40% by perceiving anthropomorphic Relationships (between elements in the scene and or with the viewer) and 10% are driven by a Recognition of another photographer’s work.

The corona virus lock-down stopped my field trip to the Shetland Island and limited my photographic range to the city of Edinburgh. However, I have been able to find remote, unpopulated, and quiet locations within the city, such as business areas, brown–field sites and, now empty, tourist locations. But how, if at all, has this changed the images I produce? Are my images still being triggered by the same characteristics?

The above, empty carpark image was triggered by the Forms perceived in all those rectangles. But later I also perceived the sense of threat coming from the surrounding, Triffid like trees being held back by the hedge. The Forms, the flat lighting and the simplicity give a sense of calm which attracted me at the time, it was only later, during image review, that I noticed any Relationship between the viewer and the implied threat from the trees.

This is very much a Recognition image, inspired by Lewis Baltz. Like the carpark it was the simplicity and strength of the Forms that I first noticed. Even after later review this image remains purely a Form image with no Relationship narratives being apparent to me.

Here a Recognition of Lewis Baltz and R Adams’, New Topographic style of image was the trigger. However, there is also a strong Relationship aspect coming from the family of self-isolating trolleys, corralled and well away from everything else.

Here is another image that was triggered by Form, the three strong bands of colour going across the scene.

However, Relationship tropes such as exclusion & power/ subordination are still strong drivers, as the viewer is being excluded from whatever activity is going on beyond the fence. Note the tyre tracks veering away from the fence as if someone else was also discouraged by its presence.

This is an example of Isolation emphasised by the geometry (Form) of the path. That all the seats are empty, facing the same way, towards the viewer, and not towards each other, seemed an appropriate metaphor for a time of self-isolation. With the phone mast behind as a reference to the most practical way to avoid the current effects of isolation. The mast, being behind the seats, again appears to isolate anyone using them from potential communication.

The next two images are about the strange things people sometimes do to their own environment.

The above is an obviously deliberate arrangement of plants but in the middle of a green area that was formerly a football pitch. Why? Who decided to arrange this tree and grasses in such a tight formation in the middle of this open, recreational area?

Above, this uncollected, largely dog waste has become almost monumental when set against the bush and centrally placed. Whereas the first of these images indicates someone who cares about the location, whether or not others agree with what they have done, the second image demonstrates how little the dog walkers and others respect or appreciate their area.

Charlotte Square in Edinburgh is the regular location for the Book Festival and looks here as if the grass has still not recovered from last year’s festival. Additionally, the building behind is under repair. The statue seems to be unaware and ignoring the chaos around, much like those who organize and benefit from the tourism that damages the very thing that attracts people to Edinburgh. It feels like a suitable metaphor for both lock down and my other concerns.

I had never seen the Carlton Hill monument without people before making this image. With most of the grass gone, trampled by tourists, it is another metaphor for lock down.

Conclusions

So how has lock down changed my photography?

My perception of Relationships between image elements and or the viewer is the trigger of 40% of images when taken at my favourite, remote locations. However, in the city, Relationships are never more than a secondary image trigger with Form being the most common, followed by Recognition. I believe this is because, in the city, however quiet it appears, I cannot become sufficiently Mindful to fully engage with the subject matter and so perceive potential Relationships. This is because I can never feel invisible, I am always aware that people are nearby and might disturb me. Secondly, I am travelling on my bike and must always be conscious of where I have left it. Hence, I cannot move around free of other concerns. Finally, again because of the bike, I do not carry the tripod that normally slows down my processes and thinking, allowing me to become fully absorbed in the moment.

However, I do enjoy the emptiness and almost post-apocalyptic atmosphere that I can find around the city today. It brings me as close as possible to my teenage imaginings of what it would be like to be the last person on earth. At that age such a prospect was actually attractive, but not any longer.

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I found a derelict cottage on the island of Scalpay and, like many other photographers who travel to the Outer Hebrides, I was drawn to make images of it – but why?

Of course, there are multiple reasons, from pure documentation of the scene through to voyeuristic attempts to spy into someone else’s former life. Personally, I am not a documentary photographer. I am not interested in reporting or politicising the scenes I photograph. My interests lie in evoking stories, capturing the moods and emotions I feel when I am making the image. This places me more towards the voyeuristic and I do certainly feel a frisson of excitement whenever I am privileged to see into such buildings and start to imagine its former occupants. However, that excitement only exists for the duration of my time at the location and the resulting images have little, long term, interest for me.

Considering 3 more images taken of this Scalpay cottage I now realise I can have several different and unconnected motivations for making images at a single time and place.

This first image, below, is of the “voyeuristic” kind. I think I can safely presume others have been into this room since the original owners or tenants departed. I can’t imagine the residents would have left drawers open or a shoe on top of the cupboard. However, the placement of the chair looks as if its former occupant might have just got up and left the room. At the time of making it is this kind of story (albeit, far-fetched) that interests me most. Where have they gone? Did they know they would not return?

This second image is entirely different. It is not about the people who lived there. This photograph is about the loneliness and abandonment of the cottage itself, as if the cottage was sentient and able to look into the distance, to wish for company and a better life.

The third image could be read as a story of decay. Yet, at the time, I saw this as a graphical image of shapes and colours. Is wasn’t about the decay as such but the arrangement of squares and rectangles and blues and reds. I was particularly drawn to the shapes of the tattered curtains echoing the rust of the corrugated steel sheets. It is an image of design, not narrative. Design and form have long been key attractants for my photographic imagination.

So, in the ten minutes I was at this location, I managed to take 4 images, each of which has come from a different motivation and or emotional connection to the subject. I was aware, at the time, of why I took each image but not of the differences in why each was made.

Perhaps, if I was the kind of photographer who knows exactly why they want to photograph at a location, maybe has a plan of what they want to achieve, or even can pre-visualise the final images, I might be more consistent. However, I am not. I arrive at a scene and then I respond to the scene, the conditions and my mood. Consequently, the resulting images are more about me than the subject. I make (landscape) photographs to record my own responses to the time and place. The landscape itself is merely a very good catalyst for my imagination and emotions.

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I visited Skaw, Unst on 3 separate days in 2018. This paper looks at the different compositions taken across the 3 days looking at why I have classified them as Successful or Unsuccessful. It is a technique for trying to try and understand why I become motivated to press the shutter.

Starting with my definition of what makes a “successful” image. It is one that:

• Excited me at the moment of taking.
• Still excites me weeks, months later.
• Is an image where I believe I have perceived something unique, that I am seeing or interpreting the scene in ways no-one else has done before.

All the images, except one, were taken on the first 2 days. Day 3 was spent attempting to improve on previously tried compositions. However, probably due to a lack of careful and critical review of the results from day’s 1 and 2, the third day did not improve upon any of the earlier compositions. The same mistakes were made!

Here are a couple of “successful” images from days 1 and 2.

The one image from day 3 that was different and “successful” came from a new location, previously unseen. This is it.

Over the 3 days, 62 different scenes were photographed. I had removed all bracketed and the almost identical, repeat compositions from the selection. Then classifying these 62 images against my “successful” criteria gave the following results:

• Successful = 21
• Unsuccessful = 41

One thing to note it that the hit rate for successful images versus rejects on this field trip appears to be significantly higher than on earlier field trips. Previously, I would have expected around 10% success rate whereas here it is 34%. Perhaps I am becoming more unconsciously discerning about my choices of location, my selection of subjects and of compositions.

The 41 rejects consisted of the following:

• Poor Composition – 30
• Technical issues – 3
• Too Documentary – 5
• Too similar to others – 3

The technical issues were all due to insufficient depth of field for that particular composition. Focus stacking should have been employed but I failed to check the image quality at the time. I was too impulsive, too keen to move on to the next scene!

The Compositional issues were:

• Composition too busy, too many objects included, resulting in a messy image.
• A lack of visual interest in the composition – it’s just dull, certainly not spectacular, it is little more than a record.
• Subject too big in the frame. This loses the sense of space, isolation, and calm that (I now know) I want to achieve.
• The subject leaves the frame on one side (see below). This is similar to the above issue of lacking space, isolation, and calm. This is less of a problem when the “Trigger” for the image has been Design, the key content is “Shapes”, or the overall effect is 2-dimensional.

This image is neither one nor the other. It lacks both content and compositional interest, so it was rejected.

• Lack of separation or insufficient intrusion of subject across background boundaries. For example, when the roof line of an object is in line with the background hills or does not cross over the horizon sufficiently. These failures result from poor checking of the viewfinder or review of the image at the taking. It is just carelessness.

For example, the image above. This could have been a good image if only I had paid attention to the roof line of the hut and its relationship to the distant hills. A lower viewpoint or a slightly closer position would have corrected this.

Often, I take multiple different versions of each scene. Am I taking insufficient care when re-composing images?

None of the unsuccessful images had been triggered by my “Intuition”. My intuition is the implicit knowledge that a composition will work without my understanding, at the time, why it should do so. The majority of unsuccessful images were triggered by my “Belief” that an interesting composition was possible but, obviously, I failed to follow through in finding either the narrative or the design content I was expecting.

Design was a trigger for 13 images, but these all failed to live up to expectations.

Conclusions

I know I am an impulsive photographer. My primary reason for making an image is to capture my immediate emotional reactions to the time and the place. However, my emotional, expressive self is far better at making “successful” images than my conscious self! Impulsiveness means I quickly perceive a composition that interests me, but then fail to carry through on the technical (focus, depth of field, etc.) or to be sufficiently rigorous with on-location review and correction of the resulting compositions. When I do spend time, on-location, analysing the image, I can then find the changed photograph becomes deadened and missing my initial feelings of emotional connection. Perhaps this is because my conscious, analytical self has taken over from my emotional self.

I also have a short “excitement” span. Skaw is a particularly large location with many subjects to capture. That is why I felt inspired for a full 2 days in 2018. Yet, by the third day I was struggling to find further images. Another visit to the same location in 2019 was particularly disappointing and no new images were found, nor old ones improved upon. I believe my conscious knowledge and prejudices built up over the previous 3 visits had blinded me to perceiving further, new possible subjects and compositions. I understand this is contrary to many other photographers who find they become more creative, seeing greater possibilities the more often the visit and the longer they stay in one place.

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Intimidating? Impossible? Here’s how.

Before we get started, this is all in the context of offering an image for critique from a group of other photographers. I’ve written before (Critiquing others to improve your photographs and I know WHAT it is but WHY did you take that photo? both on the Nick Prior Photography website) about the value of critique as a way of getting better. Here I want to offer a simple structure to get you talking about your picture before letting other people loose on it.

Actually, before talking about a picture, we need to select one in the first place. For a critique to offer something useful to you, it would be better to choose a photograph where you explicitly set out with something specific in mind. It will be so much easier to talk about. You’ll not learn so much from the the superb accident!

Start with some context

It is sometimes really hard to know what to say when you talk about your picture. That can often be a result of acting intuitively when pressing the shutter release. Take this as an example:

Blue flowers** at Edinburgh’s Botanical Gardens (**That’s all I know!)

Where do you start? Nice colours? Actually that’s not a bad place to begin. The objective that afternoon was to photograph colours in the Botanical Gardens, concentrating on complementary and/or adjacent hues. You really could begin by talking about wanting to capture the nearly adjacent blues and greens.

Describe what’s in the picture

Sometimes, when you talk about your picture, just describing out loud what you’ve got in your image is sufficient to indicate where you might go next with it. A quick description would concentrate on the blue flower and green background, possibly naming it, and stop there. But there’s more to it.

There are in fact at least a dozen discrete blue flowers in the frame in varying states of detail and focus. There is rather less green stuff in the background, and none of it is in focus. In fact there is very little of the image that is really sharp – just one or two wispy fronds on the very top of the main blue flower, and a couple of spots on a couple of the others. And nothing else.

It is worth being a little bit forensic about this stage. Itemising what you’ve got is a good first step to get you on the road to examining whether you need more or less of it.

Get a bit technical

But not too much – this isn’t the time to get into f-stops and shutter speeds in detail. In this case I might talk about how I chose a macro lens to get close in to the flowers and exclude as much of the surroundings as possible. I had in the back of my mind the paper thin focus that would arise from this decision, and I wanted to see if I could get the effect of flowers arising from the blurred green depths like blue goldfish in a green pond. Or something.

Did it work?

Well, to some extent I think it did. I was successful in excluding most of anything that wasn’t green or blue, and the blue has enough in focus to be tantalising about what is left blurry.

What would I do another time?

Turn up on a day when the wind wasn’t blowing? Seriously, that was an issue that affected how I approached this picture. The flowers were moving around enough to make framing the shot somewhat haphazard. A tripod would not have made things any better.

So, given the circumstances, less blue, more green? It might have been more effective to isolate more clearly the blue flower. However, part of the reason why the pictures works for me is the hint that there was a mass of blue flowers. So many that I wasn’t able to exclude them all.

What do I want to learn?

So now ask for other people’s opinions. You can expect a range of thoughts ranging from the technical (“use a tripod”, or “how about focus stacking…”) to the naive (“very nice colours”) via more useful territory. In this case, useful would relate back to the main objective of capturing the colours. Enough blue? Sufficiently “in your face”?

You may find you have to be a little provocative when you talk about your picture so your fellow critics feel that have permission to say things that they may otherwise think you’ll find hurtful. Actually, that is possibly the best sort of critique response. Much more useful than the anodyne and content-free “Nice shot”!

This article was originally published on September 9th 2019 on the Nick Prior Photography website 

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Goosander Family

From late winter until early summer I spend a lot of my photography time on two of Northumberland’s rivers – the Glen and the College water – mainly to photograph the goosanders but also dippers, sandpipers and anything else that comes along. I am easily distracted!

Female Goosander with chick

The goosander is a fish eating duck that comes to breed on northern, upland rivers. It nests in holes in trees, so fast flowing rivers running near old hardwoods is an ideal environment.

Male Goosander 1

Identifying the parts of the river the birds use on a regular basis and are suitable for photography is the first step. I then build a temporary hide using branches with a piece of scrim netting thrown over it as near to the river’s edge and as low as possible to get that eye-level shot. The temporary hide bit is important, as the rivers rise in the Cheviot hills and the level can go up very quickly after heavy rain, washing the whole lot away, not so good if you spent a lot of money on a fancy portable hide!

Male Goosander 2

I like to get into the hide early morning before the wildlife really gets going and then wait, usually for several hours, which if you love wildlife as I do, is all part of the experience. The difficulties apart from the birds not turning up or getting spooked before they are close enough to photograph, are mainly down to the fact that you are trying to photograph a moving subject without it seeing you. Goosanders have been severely persecuted in the past and are very wary. They are also on what can be a very shiny surface, the river. The light reflected off the water changes constantly as the sun and clouds move, which can really fool the metering system of even the best cameras, so a move to manual settings is often needed to have any chance of avoiding over or under exposure.

Taking Off

The satisfaction I get from successfully photographing wildlife like this from scratch is fantastic and well worth any discomfort of lying face down on a cold river bank in spring!

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When it is walking, the head of the leopard stays in the same position relative to the rest of its body, while the legs are moving. So if you track the animal with your camera, keeping the focus on the head, then the head should be sharp and the legs blurred in the resulting image. The blurring of the legs creates the motion effect and is referred to as motion blur.

Since the camera is moving past the background as the image is captured, it also creates background blur. The extent of the background blur depends on both the shutter speed and the speed of the subject since this determines how fast you have to move your camera to track it.

By controlling the shutter speed, you can choose how much blurring you want and hence how abstract you want the image to be. The final look of the image will also depend a lot on the nature of the background and the light. I took the image of the leopard above at sunset when it was quite dark but there was still a strong pinkish glow.

The image below was captured a couple of minutes later, when the leopard was moving towards us rather than parallel to the vehicle. I had the same shutter speed of 1/13 sec for both. Since my camera was not having to move so much horizontally to track the leopard, the vegetation is not as blurred in the second image as in the first. So even with the same subject in the same situation and with the same shutter speed, you can get quite different effects depending on the direction of movement.

As you can see, slow panning results in more abstract images, where the subject stands out from the background. This style of image is something people tend to either love or hate. For sure, it takes you away from the record shot into what some like to call arty-farty. I prefer to call it creative photography.

In the following description of how to do a slow pan, I will continue to use examples from wildlife photography. But the same technique can be used to capture motion in any situation where the main subject of your image is moving. For example, it is often used in sport photography to capture the motion of people or vehicles.

It is important to note before you try slow panning that it is a high risk style of photography as typically you have to take a lot of images to get a few that work and are worth keeping. Also, it usually requires a lot of practice. It’s therefore probably not something you would try the first time you see a leopard. However, if you already had lots of leopard images, I would encourage you to try it. On safari, a good time to try it out is early in the morning or in the evening when the light is poor. The images above were taken around 6.30 pm when the sun was setting and it was really too dark to take a good standard image.

Below I discuss the camera settings before going on to give some tips on the capture process in terms of framing the subject and the panning action.

Basic Settings

Since you will want to control the shutter speed, you should set your camera on shutter speed priority (TV mode for Canon, S for Nikon) and put the ISO down to 100.

In the middle of the day, it may be so bright that your camera will not be able to set the aperture high enough to get a correctly exposed image when the shutter speed is low. As a result, your images will be overexposed. This will not be a problem as long as the highlights are not blown as you will be able to bring down the exposure in post-processing. In some cases, you might even like the high-key effect of the captured image.

However, if your images are too overexposed, then you need to find a way to stop so much light getting into the camera during capture. The best way of doing this is to use an ND filter, but if you don’t have one with you, there are a couple of other options that you can try.
On some cameras, it is possible to set the ISO to a value lower than 100. So it’s worth checking your manual and menu options beforehand to see if you can change the minimum value. If so, you can switch the ISO to the minimum value. In the case of my Canon cameras, I can it set it to 50.

Alternatively, or in addition, you can put on a polarising filter and/or an extender/teleconverter. This will often reduce the amount of light getting into the camera by enough to allow you to set the shutter speed as low as you want.

If it is very dark, it may be that your images are too underexposed and, in that case, you can either increase the ISO or opt to use the Auto ISO setting. This is actually the only situation where I switch my camera to Auto ISO.

You should also have your camera in what I consider to be the default for action photography, namely continuous focusing (AI Servo on Canon) and continuous shooting.

I use a single focus point (or sometimes the option available on my cameras of a single point with four surrounding active points). I think using a single point actually helps when tracking an animal as you can position the point on the head and then try to keep it there as you do the panning action. It does however require some practice if you are not used to working with a single active focus point.

Choice of Shutter Speed

The choice of shutter speed will depend on how fast the subject is moving and the effect that you want to achieve. For fast moving subjects such as a bird in flight or a running animal, you might start at 1/60 sec or 1/80 sec. This image of an eagle owl in flight was taken at 1/60 sec.

The image below of an arctic fox carrying a guillemot was taken at 1/25 sec. This was a situation where I already had my camera on slow panning settings to capture the arctic fox walking up the rocks at the bottom of bird cliffs. Suddenly, it spotted a guillemot at the water’s edge and ran really fast down the cliffs and grabbed it.

The question in such situations is whether you quickly switch your camera to another mode, or stick with slow panning. I chose to take the risk of sticking with slow panning. I ended up with lots of images to delete but a couple that I was really pleased with. As I said before, it is high risk photography, but when it works you can get something very different and special.

For a leopard walking, you might try something in the range 1/8 sec to 1/13 sec. For a very slow animal such as a rhino or elephant, you might go down to a 1/3 sec or 1/4 sec. This image below of a king penguin walking through a nursery of chicks on a beach in South Georgia was taken at 1/4 sec.

With experience, you’ll get to know what shutter speeds are good starting points for different subjects and situations. The important thing is to try different speeds.

I’ve seen tutorials where they recommend 1/15 sec as a default for slow panning, but they were assuming photographing cars in city streets. Clearly, in the case of motor sports, you would start with something much faster, say 1/200 sec.

You should take any recommended figures purely as starting points. If it’s a slow moving subject, you will have the time to try out different values and check the results. If it’s a fast moving subject, you might not have time to check your images, so it can be worth spinning the dial to experiment with different shutter speeds.

Generally, the slower you put the shutter speed below these typical values, the more blur you will create and the higher the risk. But sometimes it’s worth taking that risk and it’s certainly great fun to try a running cheetah or a flying bird at a very low value such as 1/20 sec.

Panning Action

Similar to actions such as hitting a ball in tennis or golf, you should aim for a smooth movement with a good follow through. Try to pick up the subject and lock focus on it early and then take a burst of shots as you track it. To get a smooth movement, you should move the whole of your upper body, turning your shoulders rather than just your wrists or arms. If you imagine a line between your shoulders, this means that your lens should always be perpendicular to that line.

Framing the Subject

Don’t worry too much about composition and framing of the subject while capturing. This is certainly true in the case of wildlife photography, where the movement of animals tends to be less predictable. It is common for photographers to be so focused on tracking the head of the animal that they don’t notice that the animal has moved in such a way that part of the tail is no longer in the frame. It’s better to zoom out to make sure that you capture the whole of the subject if that is what you intend. Then, assuming you get a successful pan, you can crop later to get a composition that you like. Of course, you may want to capture only part of the subject, for example the upper body of a person, rather than the whole person. But, in this case, it’s still good to give yourself some space in the frame by zooming out.

Final Remarks

Some people find slow panning easy, while others find it extremely difficult. The important thing is not to have too high expectations. Don’t expect every image to be good. Even professionals will sometimes end up with nothing worth keeping. I find I have good days and bad days.

But there are two sure things.

One is that you will improve through practice. Birds in flight are really good subjects for practising on because their paths of motion are less predictable than say cars or persons in a street. Also species vary in the speed and way they move. So you have to learn to vary speeds according to species and to quickly react to their changes in motion.

The second sure thing is that you’ll have fun!

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Here are examples:

Above the tall, powerful, new, turbines with their science fiction appearance seem to be marching across the high ground of the landscape. In contrast the old, worn fences look weak, low down in the scene and unable to stop the “progress”. This effect is enhanced as the turbines appear to be looking into the distance and to be unaware of the fences.

In the next image the turbines, whilst a similar size in the frame to those in the above image, do not appear dominant relative, this time, to the viewer. They are at a distance, looking at the viewer, almost hiding behind the shed, as if in a stand-off with, but not threatening the viewer. Somehow the viewer seems to be in control of the scene.

Both images are examples of a Power/Subordinate relationship within the image but demonstrate how changes in the composition can result in opposing relationships and narratives.

In narrative and relationship terms this image is a combination of the two above. The stone cross is looking powerful and, perhaps defiant in the face of the viewer. The ring of the Celtic cross appears to form the hands-on hips stance of a confident leader confronting the viewer. By contrast the power-pole in the background is timid, hiding behind the hill, not wanting to be involved. Its construction, being almost an inverse of the stone cross, lacks the confident stance. The third pole, on the left, is like a bystander present (to balance the composition) but not involved in the story.

This image was created because I saw the pleasing triangular shape formed by the rock and the 4 posts. However, once seen, I started to perceive a power/subordinate relationship between the confrontational looking poles and the small rock that seems to be shrinking into the ground. The cut-outs near the tops of the front two poles adds to the impression that these are in some way human. This image only works the way I describe because there is little sense of depth and the rock looks to be almost on the same plane as the posts.

Here the solid, concrete, WWII lookout post is high and looking out to sea, oblivious of the viewer. It is dominant and immovable. In contrast the viewer is low down looking up towards the lookout. Even although the lookout is not acknowledging the viewer’s presence this particular viewer feels the weaker but not necessarily threatened.

Here are 2 further examples:

Conclusions

This is a very anthropomorphic way to view images, but it comes very naturally and unbidden to me. The exercise has demonstrated how viewpoint, position in the frame, size, construction materials and the juxtapositions of elements and viewers can result in very different perceptions and meanings in an image.

The post What is Power/Subordination in images? appeared first on Fotobuddies.

I have noticed that some of my images, whilst superficially very similar, have quite different origins for their compositions. For example, these images, were both taken at Skaw on Unst on the same day:

The next diagrammatic version explains what I perceived more clearly.

The following image was conceived quite differently to either of the ones discussed above.

I saw this as a pleasing arrangement and alignment of the lines that connected the foundations to the derelict shed and the horizon. It is a consciously composed image where the reality of independent elements has been challenged by moving the camera until the separate components were forced to connect.

Here are further examples, from different locations, where I had an initial, short, almost two-dimensional perception of the scene that was then used to construct a final image from my memory of it:

Images from the same locations as those above but that were more “traditionally” seen and composed follow:

By “traditionally” composed I mean that I saw what looked like a pleasing arrangement of elements and moved around to achieve the final composition. There was no instant visualisation and usually little “potential narrative” to be developed.

“Potential narratives” as a source of composition will be discussed in a later blog.

Conclusion

The above demonstrates that even at a single location, on the same day, my motivations for making individual images can vary significantly. There are at least 4 different sources of inspiration from my day at Skaw on Unst!

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This title describes a situation where my initial impressions of a scene result (usually) in anthropomorphic narratives being applied to inanimate objects and their relationships within a scene. I then compose the image to emphasise the narratives I have seen. I emphasise these are almost instantaneous visions of relationships and potential narratives. These are compositions that I used to consider wholly intuitive until I started this research and began to unravel my motivations image by image.

In this image I had perceived a relationship between the power pole and the children’s slide. The pole appears powerful, upright and, with a high viewpoint, it appears attentive, as if scanning for threats.

The pole’s juxtaposition, relative to the slide (representing a child) made this scene appear to be of a metaphorical parent and child. The parent protective and observant whilst the child slide is bright, curved (stress-free) and enjoying itself.

This next image, taken at the same time as the Slide and Pole above, is all about the violence inflicted upon the hedge.

It was photographed head on, to give the impression of our facing a soldiers’ advance, as on a WW1 battlefield. The soldiers in the foreground have been mown down whilst the tall, strong trees behind (generals perhaps?) are untouched and focused above and beyond the ranks towards a higher purpose.

This is another image seen and very quickly taken because I knew (intuitively?) that there was a story here, in this composition. It was part of my BA (hons) final degree exhibition in 2011.

The painting is of an early, Lord Wraxall, creator of the 600 acre, Tyntesfield House Estate, near Bristol. His wealth and the building of the estate was funded by the import and sales of guano from South America. The house and estate are now owned by the National Trust.

My narrative for this image is founded upon Tyntesfield House no longer being the private home of a wealthy aristocratic family but having been turned, by the National Trust, into a zoo of objects for the general public to gaze upon. Instead of Lord Wraxall’s image being displayed prominently, in a way he might consider appropriate to his standing, it is behind a cord with his face is covered. Not perhaps a dignified situation for the former owner of the house. His image has been reduced to that of just another stately home object with its meaning removed for all except those few who take a direct interest in the history. For me this is an image about mortality, the triviality of our existences, whoever we are, and the world moving on regardless.

Another image where the composition was quickly formulated after perceiving some key factors about the location.

First, the rock colours and the conical piles reminded me of treasure. This idea was reinforced by the aggressive looking bulldozer, not looking at us, but appearing attentive, cowering behind its own little gravel pile. Is it protecting the treasure? The final elements that formulated the narrative were the tracks appearing from the bottom left. A few have ventured passed the “teeth” of the bulldozer but more have turned around, not risking annoying the guard.

Conclusions

These are fanciful, anthropomorphic narratives that work for me. I am explaining them here as part of my research, but I have learned that I should not normally provide viewers with such stories as this limits their own creation of narratives. Additionally, if the viewer rejects my interpretation, they may not go on to develop their own.

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