1: The Pictures

Black and White

Many and Few

 Smooth and Rough

Still and Moving

High and Low

Broad and Narrow

Diagonal and Round

Continuous and Intermittent

Light and Dark

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

At the start-of-course chat with my tutor, Dave, we talked about putting additional constraints on this exercise, which seemed like a good idea. Thinking later, I also thought it would might also help if I established some extra contrasts between the two pictures of a pair and one way of doing this would be to choose two locations where all the pictures would be taken.

So, one picture of each contrasting pair has been taken in the area around Oxford Circus, representing the area I move in when I am at work and one has been taken in Walthamstow, the area where I live and am not at work. I don’t think it’s made the contrasts any more contrasty, but it did impose a discipline on the exercise and will have had an effect on the subject matter.

Further to this, each pair has one picture taken in landscape format and one in portrait (cropped down to a ratio of 5×4, following the advice on page 15 of The Photographer’s Eye (Freeman, Ilex Press, 2007) that vertically, 3:2 can seem “a bit extreme” due to a tendency to ground the subject nearer the bottom of a frame, regardless of orientation; also, I reckoned that there would be less of an onscreen clash of picture size moving from one image in the pair to the other). This meant that for at least the first picture of each pair, I had to take one in portrait and one landscape.

Lastly, I had hoped to get some sort of further technical contrast between pictures such as one taken with a wide lens and the other with a long lens or one stopped down and the other with the lens open. I didn’t manage to stick to this one for many of the pairs but I didn’t worry too much about it.

Then, to help come up with ideas for the pairs, I made took a library card for each contrast and jotted down ideas for either or both concept, as I thought of them, or saw things which might fit. I tried to use things that already existed rather than needed some degree of setting up, spotting things that illustrated the state I was looking for rather than making something for the effect. Some of the pairs, I rejected outright as I couldn’t get beyond some very obvious idea into something more interesting (sweet and sour was one of these); others went through several iterations of an idea before one came up that stuck and was photographable (many and few started as a busy tube carriage and an almost empty one before I spotted the cluster of 6 “For Sale” signs on my way to the tube; then it took a bit longer to find a single sign somewhere in town) and others moved from one pair to another (the yellow and black hazard tape on the metal floor was originally “intermittent” and only become “smooth” after I’d taken some test shots and seen how the metal reflected the light in a way that suggested a high degree of polish).

Once I had 3 or so of the ideas in place I began taking photographs, getting them onto my laptop and then – usually – doing one or more re-shoots. Very few of the pictures submitted were right first time, or even first shoot, although I think I got a better hit rate as the Assignment progressed and the deadline got closer.

As I went on, I got better at planning shots and having the right equipment with me for the first go – the early pairs (High and Low, Diagonal and Curved)  went through numerous iterations as I took in a different lens, or a tripod, or a polariser on the next day and the next; for the later ones (Rough and Smooth, Intermittent and Continuous) each picture was taken on shoot one after I had worked out what I needed to fit into my bag before I went out that day. If I can carry this on to the rest of the course I will have gone a long way towards eliminating the  (ultimately) non-productive hours I have spent on this part of the course, easily exceeding the 80 estimated in the introduction…