1: The Pictures
Black and White
1: blak (adj) – of the very darkest colour owing to the absence of or complete absorption of light; the opposite of white
wʌɪt (adj) – Of the colour of milk or fresh snow, due to the reflection of all visible rays of light; the opposite of black
Many and Few
3: ˈmɛni (adj) – a large number of
4: fju (adj) – a small number of
Smooth and Rough
5: smuːð (adj) – having an even and regular surface; free from perceptible projections, lumps, or indentations
6: rʌf (adj) – having an uneven or irregular surface; not smooth or level
Still and Moving
7: stɪl (adj) – not moving or making a sound
8: ˈmuːvɪŋ (adj) – in motion
High and Low
9: hʌɪ (adj) – far above ground, sea level, or another point of reference
10: ləʊ (adj) – located at or near the bottom of something
Broad and Narrow
11: brɔːd (adj) – having a distance larger than usual from side to side; wide
12: ˈnarəʊ (adj) – of small width in relation to length
Diagonal and Round
13: dʌɪˈag(ə)n(ə)l (adj) – (of a line) straight and at an angle; slanting
14: raʊnd (adj) – having a curved shape like part of the circumference of a circle
Continuous and Intermittent
15: kənˈtɪnjʊəs (adj) – forming an unbroken whole; without interruption
16: ɪntəˈmɪt(ə)nt (adj) – occurring at irregular intervals; not continuous or steady
Light and Dark
17: lʌɪt (noun) – the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible – & dɑːk (adj) – with little or no light
2: Notes on the Pictures
Black and White – Something totally white or totally black would simply have been absenses, rectangles of #000000 or #FFFFFF respectively. Against the white of the online ‘page’, ‘White’ is merely very pale grey. The main difficulty in taking these was getting the exposure to the point where white was ‘white’ rather than mid grey without blowing the highlights and for black to be ‘black’ while retaining some sort of variation…
Many and Few – Good examples of the need to seize the moment and take the photograph rather than storing ideas away for another day. I spotted a perfect ‘Few’ on my way to work one morning but didn’t have time to take the picture; the next day a second agent had been engaged and the shot was no longer there. I ended up finding a different single sign, and made the picture posted here of it. Likewise, the day after I took ‘Many’ one of the signs, and with it the single cluster of signs was gone; a few days later there were only four.
Like ‘Black’ and ‘White’ I suspect ‘Few’ makes less sense on its own than it does twinned with ‘Many’.
Smooth and Rough – I took a few tryouts (I dind’t have a tripod with me, but wanted to see what it would look like with different lenses) for ‘smooth’ at a point when I intended to use the black and yellow tape for intermittent. As soon as I had it downloaded onto my laptop, I realised that the way the light bounced off the metal floor made it made a better candidate for smooth. Now I see how pitted the surface is in places and how the edges of the plates don’t quite sit level where they join in a conscious division of the frame, and I wonder if maybe it isn’t that smooth after all. Although of course, in the most part, it is…
Rough had been going to be a stretch of lumpy, uneven pavement gridded diagonally by the shadows of some railings. Then, one evening on the way home, the road round the corner was closed because of a burst water main. The pipe had been fixed, but the road-surface had not yet been made good. I was five minutes later home than I’d intended.
I like the was the yellow of the tape and the orange of the barriers stand out in the individual pictures as well as adding a further level of clash between the two images.
Still and Moving – ‘Moving’ is the only photograph in the assignment that wasn’t taken ‘for’ it; rather I was taking photographs of people’s reflections in the (rather unusual) puddle and the LOOK RIGHT sign on the road when people started moving through the frame. The effect worked, and I started thinking about a suitable ‘Still’ to pair with it.
‘Still’ is the only image that has been cropped heavily from a landscape formatted photograph. The portrait formatted version had too much foreground and didn’t have and of the cloudy sky; I didn’t like it, but didn’t remember that ‘Moving’ was already set as landscape and, anyway, I thought I was going to use one of the pictures of the couple seated on a bench with a barbecue for ‘still’ (see the contact sheet). This therefore is the only picture I would automatically replace with another if the assignment was going to be printed – there just aren’t enough pixels there to allow a print much larger than 8 inches on its longer side.
High and Low – ‘High’ took 3 goes to get right: the first had loads of reflections on the glass, so I gave up and remembered to bring my circular polariser the next day; then I didn’t have enough time to hang about waiting for someone to pause in the right position at the bottom of the converging lines and the glass awning, far enough from the edge of the frame, then the third day I got it. A good example of taking too many digital photographs, before arriving at one that works. ‘Low’ was relatively easy, once I’d worked out that framing the spire through the trees’ branches gave as good an idea of it being ‘up’ and ‘beyond’.
Also, of course, ‘High’ could be ‘Low’ and ‘Low’ could be ‘High’, but I decided to go with them titled this way round as it then became a reference to the camera’s (or rather my) viewpoint and – as such – could possibly do something to puncture shift puncture the purely literal, realist meaning of the pair of pictures, shifting them from the iconic to the indexical…
Broad and Narrow – I tried a variety of narrow lanes off Oxford Street before deciding that the one used here worked best. To make the space between the two buildings less, I used a 16mm lens, the widest lens used in any of these. Then, realising that ‘Broad; needed some context in the form of something that would express itswideness, I first tried lying under a pylon and shooting up, but it just felt enclosed; then I tried the side-on shot here and liked the way that wires stretch out in a balanced and symmetrical way form the central pylon, puncturing the edges of the frame and giving the idea of the picture being wider than it actually is.
Diagonal and Round – I’d seen the spire in the gap between a cafe’s two spans of awning and thought it would make a good picture. It then took at least 4 goes to get it right. Problems were caused by the way that if sunlight did not directly strike the cloth of the awning, either they were a mucky brown or the sky was completely overexposed; the sun only fell in the right place for an hour or so around lunchtime, and it wasn’t alway sunny at that time – a dull sky still was horribly overexposed. Then, once that was sorted, I discovered that you only got enough spire if you moved back from gap and compressed the image with a long lens. Eventually it was sunny, and I had my 70-300mm zoom with me. It would have been good to have added a tripod into the mix, but that’ll have to be notched up to experience…
It took so many goes to get ‘Diagonal’ right, that when I noticed yesterday that it should have been paired with ‘Round’ rather than ‘Curved’ that my heart sank, but I determined to find a definition of ‘Round’ which would fit Curved. Sorry. Next time RTQ! Also, I like ‘Curved’ – a pleasant and quick break from the stress of the sequence of composition shoot and like the inverted triangle of rhyming blue sky echoing the steeple of All Souls.
Continuous and Intermittent – On the way back to work after lunch one day, I noticed how the ‘give way’ lines at the end of Riding House Street were a lot less regular than most. ‘Intermittent’, I thought and also rather liked the way people looked, crossing the road. After a false start with a pedestrian crossing further down Regent St (on the contact sheet) I settled down and framed up the shot that’s used here and then had a bit of a wait for a single person to walk into the empty space at the left of the frame. I’d intended to do ‘Continuous’ with a bicycle skirting along double yellow lines, but then noticed how nicely continuous the cycle lane edging was where the road ran down hill to the bridge of the Lea that takes you to Clapton. I shot uphill and downhill, and decided that the downhill run worked better with its long inverted V almost as far as the vanishing point, even though it meant that instead of having a cyclist going away meant they were travelling in the same direction as the pedestrian in ‘Intermittent’.
Light&Dark – just the one exposure, properly exposed for both the light and the shaded parts of the image and with a nice variety of shapes created by the battered slats of the venetian blind.
3: Technical
All pictures were taken with a Nikon D50 using a variety of lenses with focal lengths ranging from 16mm to 300mm apart from ‘8: Moving’ which was taken with a FujiFilm x-20. ‘8 Moving’ was cropped to the same 3:2 aspect ratio as the other landscape format pictures. Post processing was carried out in Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 (mainly removing spots caused by my dirty sensor) and Adobe Lightroom 5.
4: References
All definitions and pronunciations from Oxford Dictionaries
Simon Chirgwin's Learning Log 