Woodland Afternoon

Another chance to get some good shots yesterday (today too for that matter except I am busy pretty much the whole day). I now probably have enough RAW material to work with (upwards of 1200 shots!) and really need to get down to post production and selection. I'm really pleased with the newer 'abstract' material...so most of the final submission of 12 to 15 prints will come from the later material...and maybe, if we keep getting light like this, from shoots yet to happen over the festive period. As my friend Simon says, a good time to work in these outdoor locations whilst others are tucked up indoors!

Reflections

On the crit yesterday. It was encouraging to see that there was a fair bit of work floating around and the atmosphere had picked up a little. A sense of gritty determination to pull something worthwhile out of the bag was evident and some of the results were quite startling. I showed a number of contact sheets with a wide variety of pictures on them from half a dozen sessions on site and quite a lot of post production work. Inevitably the more recent efforts seemed to attract the most interest and they are the most 'abstract' of the work to date. I'm mildly resistant to this - I started out wanting to engage the medium in a 'purer' form but on one level it makes sense to use what I know so I'm putting aside my initial thinking and trying to work with, rather than against, the grain.

Anyone Out There?

I occasionally wonder...however as it's getting on towards Christmas...I'm posting the ecard here that I'm sending out to one and all. Professor Paul Hill, our Course leader reckons it was taken in Alsop en le Dale and if anyone should know he should. I don't think anyone can have tramped the Peak around there more than Paul. Off in a moment to the last crit before Xmas and, more significantly in terms of this blog, the hand in point for the first semester of this second year.

I think, I hope, that I am making some progress towards something coherent in terms of a submission. I'm pretty settled on format and draft contents - I even have chosen at least three of the images for inclusion. Beyond that I simply need to focus, visually and conceptually, to ensure I can present something both visually intriguing and intellectually clear. Simple! or not...

If in doubt prevaricate...

I'm struggling to put together a coherent text to accompany the pictures I have been making since September (well actually before that even...) so today I have been prevaricating. At least it was sort of to a purpose...a mail arrived requesting 'hard copy' for next week's final crit of 2009...so that is what I have been doing. However at our last session it was recommended that I produce some contact sheets so that is what I have done.

And glory be it's been something of a revelation! Normally I select down to individual pictures and print them off, I guess I'm something of a secretive bugger really (years of working alone in the studio), but this is helpful and shows a little more of the process going on. In fact it shows a real sense of the development of the idea and maybe, just maybe, will feed into the commentary in a very positive manner. So now I have no excuses left and will reluctantly leave this forum and address the blank screen that is currently the commentary... Here's one of the 'try out' images...a long exposure at twilight...that looks way too much like so many other current photographer's so thats a direction ruled out!

Start Making Sense

Is it good or bad that everyone seemed just a tad in the doldrums at yesterday's session? I guess that this point in the semester, the calendar year and the season it might be expected. It certainly isn't a particularly enervating time to be shooting in the great outdoors - which is precisely what a number of us are doing. Even the guest speaker - our first of this year - the inestimable Brian Griffin, who usually does a pretty lively, rather funny and scatological gig seemed to have taken a rather wistful turn of mind for the occasion (I think it might have been the 'academic' context!).

It's also getting to that time when you really do have to decide what you are trying to do with the work for the first hand in time only a few days into 2010. And I guess that is weighing on all our minds. Reflecting on it afterwards I feel it's a measure of the quality within the cohort that there is such a strong sense of want amongst us in terms of saying something distinctive, if not (whisper it), original, that is keeping us from resolution. A long winded way of saying we are not easily pleased. Given the number of young students I've seen over the years who seem very happy to run with their first, slightest idea this is actually pretty healthy!

So; time to knuckle down and get stuck into some serious thinking, action and revisionism...

Out And About

Following on from a trip to Saltaire, to see the Hockney material there, I spent a couple days hosting an old friend on a visit to our home at the weekend. It was good to take a few steps back from the immediacy of taking and processing images from the woods. Although that said, the Hockney material gave an opportunity to think about my subject matter from a much more direct visual perspective that will be helpful as I move forward with the final construction of the 12 to 15 images that the course demands of us for January. It is frightening how swiftly the time slips away in this second year of the programme - if anyone who comes after me and wants to take any pointers ever reads this - be very aware that you need to hit the ground running in the September if you are to progress effectively!

Today I took more time away from the development of the project and as I drove north up the Derwent Valley I reflected ruefully that it seems at present that every time I do so the light that day seems especially beneficial. Today was no exception and the clarity of light as I drove towards the Peak was truly marvellous, but no matter I was off to the East Midlands Arts in Rural Areas Network Conference at the Level Centre in Rowsley. Given my current interests in terms of my photographic practice this seemed very much like the kind of event I ought to be at. In the event several presentations did give me good opportunities to both reflect on the work I am doing and to network with others who might either be interested in collaborations and/or exploitation of the outcomes. Two speakers in particular - John Newling and John Fox, although coming at the issues from very different perspectives (and utilising quite polarised means) both touched upon the pivotal big questions that face us all now and that - albeit in a way that is different again from either of them - I hope my project can similarly address in its final conception. So a day that very much was not at all wasted albeit that the light suggested I be elsewhere!

On another tack I am increasingly drawn towards utilising video as a component in the body of work that will eventually result - in part this is a reflection of the viewing of several video works that were on display at the Venice Biennale earlier this year and also those that the artist David Claerbout showed in London this past summer (and that I have written about here before). Some ideas simply beg to be subjected to the temporal - something a couple of my colleagues have been playing with (using Powerpoint and Animation) - and this snippet from a piece by the Australian artist Shaun Gladwell ties together aspects of my own current concerns and those expressed at the EMARAN event earlier today...

Trying It Out

I've been over to the wood earlier this week to try out my filter stick. It's a handsome object if I say so myself - fashioned from the finest offcuts lying around the house and lovingly 'clarted' together with cheap screws and a few tacks topped up with lashings of some old sadolin I found in the garage! At the moment I'm using some cheap acetate that was accidently flashed through a photocopier back in the nineties as the inserts - it gives a curious flared quality to the images that have resulted. I wanted a device that would in a manner distance the viewer from the images and make them less overly indexical. Marrying this to the strong compositional thrust that I am now being far less coy about using I'm thinking they ain't turned out too bad... So I'm printing up several of the cropped results - I'm booking a tutorial for next week to see how the tutors feel about these pictures and I'm putting one up here too.