#93 – Bird with Man – 1 October 2017
So many stories within this image. The gull is towing the man; you see him skip along the surface, in the next moment he too will take flight. Man and gull are trading stories and experiences; the gull is astounded by the muddlement of the human mind and is exiting as quickly as possible. The man is draining the life force from the gull as humans are wont to do. The gull is a figment of the man’s imagination as he meditates. The man is a figment of the gull’s imagination as it surfs the wind. Man and gull are completely unaware of one another, and also of me. There is no me.
#94 – Rock watching Storm – 2 October 2017
There are photographers who love making images in the rain. It does sound adventuresome, because there you are striking out and claiming ground everyone else is fleeing. This is heady, exactly and precisely until you are already completely wet and there are blurry streaks across the front of your lenses (both camera and eyeglass). I read advice to use umbrellas clipped to tripods or ample ponchos that cast cover over everything. But on my beach, wind always travels with rain, so none of this works. There are two options. One is get very wet. The other, employed here, is to sneak out, quickly make the image, and duck cleverly back inside before the rain begins.
#95 – Tranquility Bay – 3 October 2017
I am not a morning person. I crave a long ramp after waking up to achieve nominal functionality. There are very few sunrise attempts in the entire year of the imageaday project. I admire photographers who get up in the middle of the night and drive through the cold dark to set up in time at their favorite pre-dawn and sunrise locations. I also experience pain just imagining doing this. Photography is for fun, so I’ll stick to the occasional sunset. Commitment does not imply suffering.
#96 – Paint By Numbers – 4 October 2017
These five images (#93 to #97) are all made at the beach, more or less at the bottom of my street. I’ve said this earlier: there is nothing better than having a spot at or near home to visit every day, and to photograph repeatedly at will. Rarely will one do your best, or experience the best of someplace, if its new. New places fool one into thinking there is something special going on because they are … new. It is by getting to know a place well that it reveals its special selves to you and allows you to draw deep from it and from yourself.
#97 – Three Musketeers – 5 October 2017
Now you may be thinking, “I have no beautiful spot near my home. You, Martin, lucked out with your beach.” I am lucky. But even beauty and my beach is not automatic. The sand tries hard to look grey. All of the rocks in the water are artificial fill, also grey. The land side is parked cars and residential clutter. One end is a municipal incinerator. Dogs rule, which is great if you are a dog photographer, but not so much when dogs are lolling around your composition. I am not complaining, just noting that I have to tease the best out of the beach. I am still learning how to. It is like all places. With familiarity the beauty of the place reveals itself, and with your camera you learn to echo it back. Or your paint brush, or your guitar, or your words or silence.
#98 – Rough Sea – 6 October 2017
This is chipped paint on a wooden porch railing. It’s been repainted in different colours over the years, and the layers are peeling back and blending into a seascape. I made this with an extension tube (literally a little section of tubing that repositions any lens further out from the camera body, and allows it to focus much closer than normal). The next day I decided I’d go back and do it over with a tripod in order to dial in a deeper depth of field (more of it in focus, which necessitates a longer exposure, which necessitates tripod). But though I knew exactly where I took this, and though I tried long and hard, I could not recreate the composition. Magic of one moment.
#99 – Late Sun – 7 October 2017
October was the fourth month of the project and, looking at these images again, I see improvement. Thank goodness! Practice, they say, makes … well not perfect, ever, but better. I am glad that works. Principally, the improvement is in composition. Understanding what makes an image that works. Understanding, when looking at things, what might translate into a successful image and what, regardless how wonderful it may look to the eye, will not. Or even better, getting an inkling of how to unlock an image from a scene, even though none presents itself at first blush. The discipline of this project is very good practice.
#100 – Omens – 8 October 2017
Scan down this and the next three images: the city is looking a bit sinister. I did not set out to make or capture darkness. Perhaps, then, these images are a reflection of my state of mind during the week they were made. I surely made these with some form of deliberation – no conscious planning, but also not accidental or unintended. When making images I am engaging in dialogue with the self, in non-verbal and likely non-conscious ways. It’s a self-learning experience, but I might not even know it at the time. So what was going on?
#101 – Deliberation – 9 October 2017
Well, to answer the question posed above, this was the year of my mother’s decline leading to her death. We weren’t talking dying yet at the point these images were made, but I am sure we could feel it coming. And there certainly was, out in the open, the struggle that was day to day life for her and by extension a bit for all of us around her. I’m pretty sure none of these thoughts were consciously occupying my mind when I made these images. I very much have them actively in mind as I reflect back now, on the other side of the timeline punctuated by her death.
#102 – Balance – 10 October 2017
Why call this one “Balance” if it is the third in the sinister city series? Balance is Ruth’s title for this image. She sees a group of objects in a state of frozen suspension that is not physically possible. But all of the objects have found a way of being here. Ruth says: “only Martin actually knows how the big block is suspended in the sky facing off against the sun, to the rest of us its improbable, some kind of magic.” (If you must know, I was holding it up off-frame with one hand while operating the camera with the other.)
#103 – Red Bit – 11 October 2017
In the old days very few photographers processed colour film. Too complicated. Most of us sent it to a lab, and got back an envelope stuffed with negatives and 3×5 inch prints. If you wanted to achieve lighting like this, you had limited control. Yes, you could deliberately under-expose when you made the image so the blacks are black rather than grey. But you were still subject to the default settings of the automated lab printer as to how it then “compensated” to “fix” the “mistake” it saw on your negative. So you might have had to go back with special instructions, or give up. Today: easy as pie to control it all in camera and/or in the computer. Freedom through technology.
#104 – Please Give Me A Kiss – 12 October 2017
So far this month we were (mostly) on the beach, then in the city, and now a series from the ravine. I didn’t go out and make an image every single day for the imageaday project. I went out and (if all went well) made a bunch so I had material to post for several days. That way there was no crisis if I simply couldn’t swing camera-time for a day or two, or on days where nothing I came back that seemed worth posting. There were only a couple of times where I was “out of stock”, in a total panic, no good path forward. Somehow, I managed to stumble through.
#105 – Garden Trinity – 13 October 2017
I mentioned right at the beginning that I am on a quest to simplify, and this is an example of success. This is a three.
#106 – Ant Man’s Hideout – 14 October 2017
The next three images, taken very close up with an extension tube behind the lens (extension tube: see #98 above for an explanation), are about a fairy tale world. Macro (close up) photography on the forest floor is like swallowing Alice’s pill, becoming very small, and then exploring that vantage. It is a kind of “surprise” photography. You don’t look at the scene and glean a composition and set it up to make it into an image. You troll through the undergrowth at ground level, and trip the shutter when strange and wonderful things suddenly reveal themselves.
#107 – Grimm’s Tale – 15 October 2017
The old one ran through the forest in his nightgown, this way and that, dodging mushrooms and snagging twigs. He needed to put distance between himself and the beast. His body heaved and ached. All his life he had run from the beast, and the beast had always found him again. How could this be? It was hopeless, it was relentless, it was exhausting. So he sat down on the forest floor, and gave himself over to his fate. The beast approached. The beast loomed. The beast opened and lowered its cavernous mouth over the old one’s tiny body. The beast gave him a gentle lick and was gone.
#108 – Hood Ornament – 16 October 2017
See what I mean about magic revealing itself as you troll around? A little colour intensification in the computer is all I did to this image after seeing it in the viewfinder and squeezing the shutter release. In the centre, do you see a little fox/ferret like face looking to the right, or a beaked chickenish head looking to the left? There’s another, larger, mask to the lower right. This is the forest floor!
