This week’s second exercise involved pairing up with a classmate and devising a brief for each other that should take no more than a couple of hours to complete. I paired with Simon Johnsen.  I provided Simon with the following brief:

I am interested in places over time and my major project is about that mainly. For your brief, I would like see what you do with this concept and would like you to pick a place in your village that has either a distinct change in appearance or activity level through the course of a day. Pick a perspective you find most interesting and photograph that place at different times of day and or night in the course of one day, or over several days as you can fit it in. Prepare a small series of at least 3, and as many more as you wish or have time for, showing how that place changes in time.

Simon provided me with the following brief:

I want to see how you adapt to a loss of control so I want a set of 12 shots, you have to pick a starting point, walk in any direction for 5 minutes, stop and take a photo and then carry on walking, you have to make the shots as diverse as possible but try to create a narrative through the series.

I was pleased to get this brief and a bit intimidated at the same time.  I know I have rarely gone into a photo shoot with a prescribed outcome let alone an outcome that included a cogent and cohesive narrative.  I wrestled for a couple of days about where I would go to enable me to capture diverse images and be able to put them together in a narrative while being constrained to having to move a particular amount of time between images. One of my classmates (who shall remain unnamed) I could find a place I liked, walk around in a circle for 5 minutes and take another photo and that it would meet the letter of the brief.  True enough perhaps, but I thought it didn’t meet the spirit, and I was looking forward to the challenge of doing something other than nature photography and trying to tell a story.

I choose to go to a town about 30 minutes away from my home that I knew had a concentration of visually interesting places in reasonable proximity to each other.  It is also a town with a rich historical background and which is known for at least two very prominent affiliations; horses and atomic energy.  Aiken since it’s founding has always been about horses.  Founded by railroad men, it became known as the Aiken Winter Colony and the wealthy, primarily from the North East, came with their horses to enjoy the temperate weather.  Currently, there are 72 different equestrian disciplines being trained in the Aiken area.  Even though for this project I chose not to focus on it, the second area for which Aiken is known in the Savannah River Site, which is home to a nuclear power plant, but more significantly was one of the principal nuclear weapon design and production facilities throughout the Cold War.

While I have been to Aiken many times, and was generally familiar with the town, this project took me to specific places I had not been before.  It turned out to be a journey of discovery for me too and I hope I have been able to reflect it in the work I produced.  It is entitled, 5 Minutes to Somewhere, and here is the link where it can be found.

5 Minutes to Somewhere

https://spark.adobe.com/page/lPygM8eMXN19v/

The first of the exercises this week was to post an image that was captured by accident or was a mistake somehow, but that in the end was an image that held some interest or value

I was shooting photos from my deck with my 600mm lens when I noticed reflections in the windows of the wood behind the house.  To my eye the reflections were clear and intriguingly patterned, but the windows were just inside the minimum focal distance for that lens. When I downloaded the images, I was quite surprised at the stick creature running through the wood that appeared in front of me as I had not seen that shape with my eye when capturing the image.  Though abstract and far from the crisp realistic images for which I usually strive, I found the result hauntingly beautiful.

Quite interestingly when I designed and built this house, I found  slab of granite that I thought was the most amazing piece of natural art.  It is 5′ x 8′, weighs 750 lbs, and hangs on the wall of my dining room.  I was attracted to this particular piece of stone because of the colours, the striking veining that made it a Rohrshach test, and the particular image I saw when I looked at it.

The similarity to the reflected image is quite remarkable.  Chance; serendipity; my life is punctuated by aliens or woodland creatures?  No matter, I glad they are here for whatever reason and by whatever means.

Do you see chance as a key part photography? To what extent does it play a role in your own practice? How might you develop your work by embracing change or making new opportunities? What arbitrary parameters might you impose upon yourself to expand the creative possibilities of your own work?  

These are all questions asked in this week’s lessons.  In my practice and throughout most of my photographic experiences I would say chance and serendipity have played and continue to play a significant role.  I have always and still do shoot almost exclusively out of doors.  That alone introduces one of the biggest factors of chance, the light.  Is it there, what is its quality, am I in a position to use the light to its best advantage?  Yes, it is possible to preplan and to position oneself where the angle of the light is optimized, and watch the weather forecasts with the hope of getting it right, but in the end whether it all comes together is a matter of chance and beyond the control of the photographer.

When photographing wildlife, there is a great measure of chance and serendipity in play at all times.  Again planning a preparation can improve one’s chances, but in the end it is just a matter of chance whether something, anything, you might want to photograph will show up, and if it does whether it will be in a position that allows a good image to be captured.

I don’t find that I am at all fussed by these elements of chance and serendipity.  I have  always been drawn to the interactions of colour, light and patterns.  It is to an extent, a basic biological phenomenon of vision, but a talent to recognize in a timely manner the significance in any given moment.  For a photographer it is essential to be able to recognize those instances quickly and have the skill with one’s equipment to take advantage of the opportunity.  I believe this to be true whether one is doing street, sports, nature, reportage and likely other genres of which I have yet to think.

The concept of boundaries is an interesting one and deserves thought and discussion.  Art Morris, in his book The Art of Bird Photography and in instructional videos he has done, suggests when photographing birds to confine your field of intention to a 15 degree wedge in front of you with the sun directly behind to get the optimum lighting conditions for good bird photographs.  I find in areas I work frequently that set up is often difficult or impossible to achieve, and that I as a consequence endeavor to cover too broad a field of intention.  I think it might be wise to slow down, be more patient at times and accept that for the truly remarkable photograph, I might need to wait longer for the subject to come to me and the light to be right.  I think sometimes I have succumbed to the desire to get the shot, but as I have become more skilled, I need slow down to a degree and work to get the best shot possible.

I also believe I have been operating principally on the self imposed constraint influenced by so much of the wildlife photography I have seen over the years of creating portraits of birds.  This is true also because I never gave much thought until now of contextualizing my work and only sought to take good photographs as stand alone objects.  Now that I need to consider context, I am beginning to realize there may be other ways to tell a natural history story and the portraiture is only one piece.

MORRIS, A., 2003. The Art of Bird Photography. 1 edn. New York: Amphoto books.