Photographs - Ann’s
I know I don’t do this often enough, because I’m sure everyone wonders what Ann’s images of these places look like. Ann doesn’t believe me when I say folks are probably as interested in seeing her photographs as they are mine. I’ll occasionally throw in an Ann image because it helps move the story line and I, for some reason, don’t have a photograph of the particular place. But usually, getting her to send me her finished work so I can post it on the blog is like pulling teeth. Your own. Without novocaine. It’s really hard to do. Though of course, Ann isn’t stubborn about it. Not at all. Not in the least. Maybe I better move onto another topic before I get into big trouble.
The first week or so back from the trip was like the way it often goes, “I’m so disappointed. There’s nothing but crap there. I can’t believe how bad I am. Am I wasting all our money on camera gear? I felt so good about making these pictures when I took them, but look at them!” And no, I am not exaggerating. I’ve felt that way too on occasion coming back from a trip, though Ann is quite the master at it.
But as the weeks wore on, she was increasingly at her computer looking at, evaluating and eventually working on images. In time she had a selection (a good number of images I would add) of pictures that she was taking her time to develop. Over time, she became not so disappointed (I certainly wasn’t in what I was seeing). They weren’t crap (far from it). They were proof that Ann is not a bad photographer (which I’m pretty sure she’s not convinced of yet). I think they’ve at least persuaded her she hasn’t wasted money on camera gear (I think). And yes, she was finally feeling better about images she felt good about while she was making them. So here is a good number of them, pretty much in the order they were taken.
Our first real photo session was on the day we arrived in the UK. We walked down a hill to a river, and then back up. The scene from the roadway was lovely. I’d selected for myself images from the walk back, where the sun was breaking through the clouds. Ann prefers one of the images from the way down, where the skies were more heavily overcast and the gentle light more subtly sculpts the landscape (yes, you’ve seen this image in the Animals post - that doesn’t take away from the photograph’s effective melding of the man-made structures and the landscape).
That image was followed by one at the bottom of the hill, where we realized that recent rains were going to thwart our desire for gentle waterfall photographs. As with my images from that session, the difficulty of the time needed to render the water pleasantly and the effect of wind meant something had to give - the image shows movement in some of the branches (though not really noticeable unless you look). Ann still isn’t fully satisfied with the subtle branch movements in this image. Regardless, it was the first of many images during our trip of rowan trees and their red berries.
I also found a couple of Ann’s photographs from the workshop with Simon Booth to be interesting. As I explained, he worked with her a lot more than me (we had only the one macro lens), which was the way I thought it would go since Ann was wanting to expand into this very intimate landscape realm in a way she hadn’t before. They made this image while I was making my image of the rocks and lake at Blea Tarn. It’s a good example of both the precision needed for these types of images, and the fact that depth-of-field is extremely shallow (and the reason they invented focus stacking). I just find it fascinating the things you can discover if you change your viewing scale in nature and carefully look to see what is there.
Another of Ann’s images from that workshop is just as lovely. You’ve seen this image from the Shooting the Shooter post, as well as where they were set up to make it. Simon several times spoke about qualities of light you can get when photographing into the sun and through a subject, applying it in more traditional image-making as well as with close-up images like here. He of course (he’s an ecologist by profession) knew precisely what type of fern this was and what the black nodules are called.
The next of Ann’s images comes from our initial foray at the Isle of Skye. In the Trips blog post I mentioned that Ann had found the perfect mound to set up - and it was just large enough for one person and a tripod. This image shows why it was perfect, with the separation from the grasses in the center and the shoreline to the right. It allows the water in the foreground to weave through the image and play off the dark shadow areas above.
One should never underestimate the role luck can play in making an image. A couple of days later on Skye was the one we spent about an hour in the rain waiting for the sun to come out (it never fully did). Well, on our walk to those falls, Ann had set up for a photograph the grasses, bog leading to the rocks by the hidden creek, mountain off in the distance and the stormy looking skies. Fortunately, the skies opened up just a bit, more to cast light on the distant valley, but just enough to highlight the foreground grasses and add some lens flare to liven up the image. I wasn’t so lucky given I was about 100 feet further down the path and pointing off to the right - I didn’t even know things had opened up behind me. And then it was gone about as quickly as it appeared and didn’t reappear for the rest of the day.
As I explained in the Trips post on Skye, our pull-out stop by Uig was, in a word, magical. The conditions were ever-changing and almost unreal. Like me, Ann had quite a few worthy images to choose from. Several of her images, and the one I like the most, includes the fish rings in the bay. Still, she had several images to select from given the ever-changing cloud conditions and, just as importantly, how that played out in the reflections in the water. To me, this image is simply captivating, providing a real mix of the real-world with just enough atmosphere to make you wonder if it’s fantasy.
Next was Glencoe. As usual, Ann took advantage of our one day with nice light to take a much broader landscape image than I did. My somewhat similar photograph was taken from the shoreline visible in the foreground here. I’d set up, made a photograph during a small break in the clouds and then moved myself out of the way for Ann to make an image. Well, we had to wait for a good half hour before the clouds broke and gave her this lovely image. Hoping for the same great light, I hustled back down to my location (my camera was still on my tripod) and . . . waited another half hour for the next, less dramatic, breakthrough of sunlight. That’s landscape photography for you.
Here is another example of Ann’s ability to see the larger landscape whereas I wind up shrinking my focus into a tighter composition (in this case it was the waterfalls and rock creek bed). That’s why I don’t really call myself a landscape photographer - my natural inclination is to focus on details. Ann, however is a landscape photographer, and these two photographs are perfect examples of how she manages to see a way to capture the essence of a landscape in a photograph.
Of course, not all of Ann’s photographs are grander landscapes. Still, even when photographing more intimate images, Ann seeks to include more context around an image, giving it a sense of place, like with this rowan tree. Compare that to my image of the same tree from Trips - Part 3, which is a tight-cropped square image of the tree.
Despite our heavy cloud cover, inability to see mountain tops and inability to see anything in the main valley half the time, Ann made her fair share of landscape photographs while in Glencoe. Whether of waterfalls . . .
. . . or ponds, she consistently manages to make photographs that conveys a sense of place - a phrase she uses - while also creating lovely images.
At one point Ann and I had a long discussion about growth and progress in photography. I like that about Ann, she asks lots of questions and we get into some very interesting conversations. In that discussion we talked about fundamental technical knowledge, skills and judgment related to developing images, and seeing. The image below involves all of them. First Ann needed to see the image and the potential for this landscape to make an effective image. What to include and/or exclude in the image - this was not simply a “point the camera at a pretty scene” type photograph (I know, I was there and didn’t see the potential of the image). Ann then needed the fundamental technical skill to get the exposure time needed to render the water the way she wanted it, while also giving herself the depth of field needed for the branches to be sharp throughout the image. Last, because the base exposure did not render the scene as Ann had seen it (read: the photograph lacked much of the character of the place when Ann made the exposure, again, I didn’t see how the RAW file could be successfully developed, though Ann said, “I still like it, I may work on it a bit.”), Ann had to develop the image to bring out the qualities that had attracted her in the first place, and as St. Ansel would put it, “correcting mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships in nature.” The end result is . . .
Ann is certainly growing as a photographer, constantly striving to improve and to expand the types of photographs she makes. From the workshop with Simon Booth to learn about effectively photographing subjects from a very close distance, to reaching for the longer telephoto lens to capture subjects off in the distance, she keeps working at it. Part of the learning process is experimentation and, while many experiments wind up as failures, others do not.
Then again, that doesn’t mean that Ann abandons all of her old tricks - like taking a photograph from the inside of a warm vehicle while I’m outside doing things in the cold.
One of the things I enjoyed when looking at Ann’s images was how many photographs were made with our point and shoot Baby Leicas. Certainly her images from the Borrowdale Morning Walk show that to be the case.
She consistently creates images that are engaging for the eye and that also give a sense of the environments we explored that morning. No small feat on an overcast day with a point and shoot camera.
Looking through her images, I can understand why she made each of them in the same way I can understand why I made each of my images.
And I must say, I think her woodland images from that morning were consistently better than mine. This is but one example.
Ann was also successful during the workshop, although I’m pretty sure she had a much harder time than I. The reasons were several and quite understandable - I think I was able to brush off the shock of not having Joe Cornish as one of the leaders better than her (he is her favorite photographer); the election results were downright depressing (for both of us); and the very different environment of moving around with a crowd, operating on a schedule not your own, and hopping from one place to another was disorienting compared to the way we normally work (here, my early experiences of doing photography jobs and photographing in very different contexts helped me out). Still, that doesn’t mean Ann didn’t make some incredibly lovely images.
Once Ann settled down in a place, she usually found her images, which was often very different from what others (myself included) were making. That’s Ann.
And even when things were not working out quite the way Ann thought they would (Ann’s focus was on the lower, green tree . . .), she still managed to make an interesting photograph.
And she even managed to make an effective photograph where I tried, and failed (again, by including a broader landscape view than I’d taken with my . . . failed . . . effort).
I (and Ann) joke about how I can approach a location, see something, and then go into laser-focused mode and not let anything distract me from the image I want to make until I’m done. What we rarely talk about is that once I’ve made my image, I often walk over to where Ann’s at to see what she’s discovered while I was in my little cocoon. Like the image below, it’s usually something fascinating.
And sometimes Ann will call me over for a bit of technical advice (usually just to confirm that, yes, she has it right). In this case, it was whether I thought she had the right shutter speed for the image. She’s still not sure she did, but I think it’s spot on.
The thing I’ve learned about Ann’s photographs is that they often don’t follow traditional norms about what a photograph should be like, which makes it easy to not immediately appreciate them. But I’ve learned that they’re worth taking the time to examine because, often, they grow on you, slowly revealing their qualities until you suddenly appreciate what’s there. They’re not always eye candy, but they consistently reward the effort of study.
And then there are the periodic happy accidents. I remember this morning. I, naturally, had a much narrower view than Ann’s and I thought, “Oh . . . Ann is gonna hate that!” when the exterior light on the island turned on. At first Ann disliked the image. But the more she (we) looked at it, the more interested we became in the reflections it cast on the water (the movement itself having a wonderful quality). In the end, this was the most interesting of the images from that session.
Ann also has this wonderful knack of realizing when an image should be in black and white. It’s never a, “This doesn’t work in color, so let’s make it black and white.” It’s not something she does often, but when she decides to look at something in black and white, it’s usually spot on. That’s what happened with the image below. The lower half of the image turned magical when she did. The upper half took quite a bit of work to look right (again, fixing God’s tonal value mistakes), but she figured it out (with a little help from her teacher).
The last of the images I grabbed was from our trip to see Hadrian’s Wall. Ann’s photograph isn’t of the wall, but of the abandoned mine where we parked. I think it was the best of the photographs we took that morning.
That’s it for Ann’s work. There’s more, but I can’t post everything.
So despite her concerns about the lack of quality images when we first got home, I can say that the trip to England and Scotland was just as productive for her as it was for me. Merry Christmas!