Forgotten skills?

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Rachael

I am a member of a camera club and often enter images in their competitions. One night I entered this image, called “Floral Fireworks”. It did very well, earning me 10 out of 10. The judge was complimentary but she assumed the blurring had been achieved in Photoshop. In fact, this shot was, apart from a small crop and the frame, straight out of camera. The blur is simply the result of using a wide aperture (f2.8) and focusing on the centre of a cup shaped bloom. The petals, being nearer the sensor than the centre, are soft.
I think Photoshop is a powerful and effective tool and I enjoy using it. But I wonder whether it has caused us sometimes to forget what can be achieved in camera? For me, the most powerful tool of all is understanding how my camera works. What do you think?

Bee fly

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Rachael

The subject of my natural history post for this week is the bee fly or bombylius major. This bee-mimic is common in my part of the world (Southern England) in early spring.

Its rather imposing appearance can lead people to assume that it is dangerous but it cannot harm you: that long proboscis is merely a very efficient nectar guzzler. In fact, I think the bee fly is rather cute. Just me, perhaps.

They certainly look quite cute on the wing, with their spindly legs flying out Superman style from the chubby body. However, while they may not be harmful to humans, they have a sinister life cycle if you happen to be a bee.

This bee mimic lays its eggs by the nests of solitary bees. When the larva hatches, it uses a crown of spines on its head to batter its way into the cell of the bee pupa and slowly sucks the pupa dry.

Afterwards, the gorged larva pupates and finally emerges in its final form by battering its way out of the cell.

Needless to say, I have not been able to take photographs of the full life-cycle, just the disingenuously cute, fluffy fly.

For some more (and frankly better) pictures and two poems (yes!) about bee flies, visit my friend Giles Watson’s Flickr photostream. The second poem (which treats the life cycle) appears in a comment there.

PS Some of the images appear pixelated here. They do not in the files I uploaded. If anyone knows what I’m doing wrong, please can you help? It’s a shame for them not to appear their best.

Quotography

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Rachael

“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption.

I decided to have a go at the Quotography challenge on Nick Exposed. Each participant submitted three quotations. Then they were jumbled up and we were sent three from someone else with the challenge to photograph them. I can’t claim a great deal of success. I only did two of the quotations I received and one of those is best described as developmental. This is the best.
The problem with this quote was that ‘Hope’ as an abstract concept can be represented by almost anything. My team mate, my eleven year-old daughter, and I agreed that we didn’t want to photograph a flower, or a landscape, or any other random thing simply because its beauty might suggest hope. We wanted to represent Hope more specifically. My daughter, a fan of myths and legends, suggested the story of Pandora’s box, in which hope is sometimes described as a white butterfly. I liked the idea of using a living thing to represent hope as it tied in with the last part of the quote, and having it emerge from incarceration in the box also suggested the movie from which the quote came. Luckily, I owned a suitable box and I had some shots of a white butterfly taken last year. We lit the box from within by placing my iPhone inside with the torch app enabled. In a dark room, with tripod and self-timer, I photographed the box, and then enhanced the light effect and added the butterfly and a texture in Photoshop.

Rescues done

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Rachael

A couple of years ago we spent the weekend at Climping, near Littlehampton in West Sussex. On the west bank of the Arun at Littlehampton we found this old RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) lifeboat, gently rotting on the shore. I have always been interested in the story of the lifeboats and their crew. If you’re not from the UK, you may not know about this organisation staffed entirely by volunteers who freely give their time and risk their lives to save those in peril on the sea. The bravery of these men and women over the centuries is remarkable. I can’t believe no-one has made a blockbuster movie about them yet. I wonder what stories this boat could tell if it could speak.

La Belle et la Bête

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Rachael

I thought that this tree tunnel at Pagham Harbour in West Sussex had a slightly fairy tale feel. When I edited the shot I was inspired by Jean Cocteau’s iconic film, La Belle et la Bête (1946). I wanted to create a black and white that captured something of the aesthetic of the film. It was just an experiment but fun to do.

Have you ever taken or edited a photo inspired by a favourite movie?

Leap of faith

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Rachael

A tiny spider pauses…

…before parachuting away on a strand of silk.

Feeling waspish

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Rachael

There are many different types of wasp in the UK. The one we all know is the common wasp (above), the ruin of many a barbecue in summer and autumn. I call this shot, “Mirror, mirror on the wall”.

Common wasps are social wasps, living in colonies. There are also many different types of solitary wasp, that dig burrows and, very often, have a parasitic life-cycle, such as the wasp in the next picture.

Your eyes are not deceiving you; this wasp is indeed pulling the legs off a spider! It is a type of spider wasp of the family pompilidae. (Identification for an amateur is not straightforward but I think this is probably pompilus cinereus.) They find a spider, paralyse it with their sting, and drag it back to their burrow. Then they lay an egg inside the spider. Once the egg hatches, the larva eats the spider alive, from the inside out. Sometimes, if the spider is too big for the burrow, the wasp will pull its legs off. The expression, “feeling waspish”, takes on new significance!

Some wasps have an elegance about them, like the slim-waisted society belle below. Hence the expression, “waspish figure”.

I think this is probably a type of digger wasp. This one has a damaged wing, which is why it stuck around long enough for me to get a shot off. Do not be fooled, however, by its stylish gown and slender grace. If my identification is correct, this beguiling debutante is parasitic too; the female lays its eggs in flies. Waspish in appearance and intent.

Cycling, Chesterman Beach

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Rachael

“… a mile of warm sea-scented beach”

Robert Browning, ‘Meeting at Night’ (1845)

Chill out, it’s only a photo

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Rachael

This week involves a lot of train travel and, as the reason for the travel isn’t very nice, I have treated myself to some photography magazines. I only read these intermittently. I often find ideas are repeated and sometimes advice is quite frankly wrong (more on that in a later post). But sometimes there’s something new, a nugget of helpful advice, or a source of creative inspiration, and it is good to put the brain on hold every now and then and just soak in the visual goodness that you get from lovely, large images in a glossy magazine. However, I was a little taken aback by a vein running through all three magazines, namely the tendency to rant along the following line: “why I am a proper photographer and you are not”.
In one magazine, in particular, the bete noir was people who buy expensive pro-level cameras, open a Facebook page and then call themselves photographers.

This same article included the frankly nonsensical and now rather overworked expression: ‘If you have to use Photoshop to make your photos look better, then you should think about whether you’re worthy of the title photographer’. This is actually a bit like saying, in pre-digital days, if you have to dodge and burn in the darkroom to make your photos look better, then you are not a proper photographer. Does this make sense to you?

But all these moaning minnies (or michaels, in fact) got me thinking about what is a photographer? Is it someone who makes their living from taking photos or anyone who has ever taken a photo? Or something in between? And does it matter if an amateur has a Facebook page called Joe Bloggs Photography on which he shares his images, enjoying his hobby and perhaps giving pleasure to some viewers? Are viewers, as one writer suggested, no longer capable of discerning the good from the bad because we are saturated in images or are we perhaps not quite the Philistines he suggests?

I have some sympathy for pro-photographers who find their income eroded by amateurs who are willing to license their images for low fees or even just a credit. But none of the columnists mentioned that. In the end, when I had stopped imagining epistolary remonstrances to the editors, I decided that I had just two words to say to these writers: chill out! Photography is fun, and I think it’s good that more people now enjoy taking and sharing photos. You don’t have to look at their Facebook pages if you don’t want to. But if you do, you might just find that one or two of them have taken some pretty good pictures. And, if they haven’t, the virtual exit is only one mouse click away.

What does the word “photographer” mean to you?

Grizzlies

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Rachael

In Summer 2010, we spent three weeks in British Columbia, Canada. The standout highlight of the trip was the three days we spent at Knight Inlet Lodge in Glendale Cove.

The floating lodge is deep within Knight Inlet, one of the many huge inlets that serrate the coast of this beautiful province. It can only be reached by float plane or boat.

Like most visitors to the Lodge, we travelled by float plane from Campbell River on Vancouver Island. Living just outside London, England, we don’t get to travel this way very often so our stay was off to an exciting start before we’d even arrived!

The views were superb despite the weather; it rains a lot here.

On arrival, after a short introduction to the guides and resident dogs, we were soon in a boat out in the Cove scouring the banks for signs of bears. Although we were too early for the salmon run when bears gather in numbers to fish and can be watched from hides, there was a good chance of finding some foraging on the shoreline.

We saw some mergansers, a kingfisher, several curious seals and a loon before a call came over the radio to return to base immediately; bears had been spotted near the lodge!

I wasn’t prepared for how breathtaking it was to see these wonderful creatures in the wild.

We watched this female, ‘christened’ Bella by the guides, and her three cubs as they foraged along the shoreline. Although we were separated by several feet of water, I felt very aware of my proximity to this powerful mother, who would not hesitate to defend her cubs.

We would be lucky enough to watch Bella and her cubs several more times during our stay as well as two other grizzly families. Wildlife abounds in Glendale Cove; we also saw a black bear and some black-tailed deer.

There were many bald eagles and herons as well as numerous smaller species of bird, including swallows who nested in the eaves of the lodge.

Not to be outdone, some smaller mammals shared the limelight. We saw mink on the shore and the lodge was frequently visited by a cheeky band of river otters.

For a change of pace, we could bear-watch from kayaks.

Or go on a guided forest hike. Here, my town-bred daughter can’t quite believe I am letting her stir her hot chocolate with a twig!

The evenings were spent socialising in the bar or enjoying entertaining and interesting talks by the friendly and knowledgeable guides. We had read on Tripadvisor that the food was great but it was even better than we expected.

Knight Inlet Lodge is a founding member of the Commercial Bear Viewing Association of British Columbia (CBVA). The CBVA campaigns to ban the currently legal trophy hunting of grizzly bears in British Columbia. Watching these magnificent creatures in the wild, I could not imagine ever being able to shoot one with anything other than a camera.

It was a privilege seeing these animals in their natural habitat. To be able to share an experience like this with my children, and to hear them talk about it still, is even better.

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Yearly Archives: 2012