Hugh_C's blog about food, photos, music, video editing & other lesser codologies

Pictured above is Sophie Merry, dancer, model, mover extraordinaire, subject to a bit of experimentation with the new Bowens kit I picked up the other day. Used above is a single 500 head at about 1/16th or thereabouts into a 60cm square softbox. Need to learn this kit.

So I decided to go off and do a course in advanced photography, never having done much in the way of formal training in this career other than just going out and doing it. Early days in the course but it’s looking promising. I think the challenge of having to do assignments is, erm, interesting and what you’re looking at above is the fruit of my first assignment – to go out and shoot a portrait-style image which conforms to certain criteria. This may be a little too wide to conform to portraiture, but I like it on a few levels. First, it looks like Ben is enjoying himself, second, I like the proportions of the tiny people/lighthouse/giant child landing from the sky and third I like the perspective.

I’ll update here how the assignment was received.

I’ve been doing this beauty gig for over a year now, since April 09 or thereabouts on and off, and it looks like I’ve shot or post produced just about 28,000 items, one of which is Anouska above. Not your typical beauty shot maybe, but I like it. I hasten to add that the beauty stuff I do doesn’t generally have a manky frame  posted all over it, but I thought I’d take a bit of artistic license in this case. Anouska is a wonderful model but she’s also a great photographer, her stuff can be seen here on flickr. I wish I had her youth and talent.

Anyway, yeah, 28,000 items is a lot, I suppose about a half of them are technically usable and of that? Maybe 10 percent artistically usable.

Got to work on that ratio …

So there I was, waiting, waiting, waiting on the border between Togo and Ghana, some trifling piece of paperwork was not quite right and we were waiting in our vehicles in the 42°C heat. No joke I tell you when the tempers are a bit short anyway. So I decide to get out and have a bit of diary time under a tree, a bit down off the road and away from the confines of the car. This involved hopping down from the road, a drop of about a metre onto a slight incline. Down I went, landed a little awkwardly because the landing surface was a little inclined, but no problems. No pain. Sat under my tree and curmudgeoned away while the sun beat down and petty officials finnicked* over a scrap of officialdom.

Time passed and it was time to get back in the vehicle to be sent to some other distant office to stamp some unstamped scrap of paper and to dish out backsheesh to one of the local constabulary. Grease the cogs as it were. Off we went, feeling a slight irritation of the foot but nothing much. Visited the distant office, got stamped, greased the locals, back in the car. My foot was beginning to thrum at this stage, but not in the rhythmic sense. More than an irritation, less than a pain. Eventually crossed the border into Ghana and by now the foot was beyond the pain/thrum threshold, it was full on sore.

We reached our destination in Ghana by and by, whereupon we were to get out of the car. At this stage the foot had transcended the sore and entered into the realm of throbbing and was a lot swollen too. I hadn’t associated the discomfort with my ungraceful landing onto the incline. Sudden onset gout I ask myself? (A bit like Henry VIII my sister was quick to point out, too much of the good life or too many wives!) But no it couldn’t be gout, I only have the one wife and I don’t drink that much. Well … not really. Anyway, the foot, I couldn’t put the blighter to the floor, really I couldn’t. Too sore to step. Feck!

Luckily for me I was travelling in the company of Dorothy Smith, who I’ve known forever, who also happens to be an ardent homeopathist. She was packing a full kit, as it were and she plied me with non-lethal doses of homeopathic stuff to help with the stress and soreness. She’s great Dorothy is. The foot wasn’t quite ballooning at this stage but was righteously swollen. I suppose all sorts of scenarios were going through my heat-addled mind at this stage – had I not noticed a snake-bite? Had some foul parasite entered into me and laid millions of eggs?

It was only later that it occurred that it might have been the ungraceful (disgraceful?) landing in Togo. Laid up the following day in the hotel, unable to move too far or too quickly, so I read a biography of Maradona to get myself in the mood for the World Cup. A few days after that and I travelled back to Dublin and went straight to the medics for x-ray and diagnosis. I was told by one Dr that there was a slight chip in the first metatarsal and by the Radiologist that there wasn’t.

I believed the Radiologist.

My foot is much on the mend after two weeks and I’m walking mostly without a limp. I still have just the one wife and life is pretty good, but not in the sense of the good life (Henry VIII) if you know what I mean. No?

*I worked with someone whose name was an anagram of finicky freak. Honestly I did. She was.

Hell’s Bells! I’m not sure if what I’m about to try to articulate is a dichotomy or not but here goes …

Here I was last night, taking a few snaps of the very tall & beautiful Alyson above when I thought to myself: actually I’ve very little to do with this image, here’s the girl and her makeup artist, she’s doing her thing, they’re doing their thing and I’m just an observer, recording the event. Now the quality of that recording might be interpreted as artistic endeavour, but I’m not sure. Maybe I’m just good at working the camera and positioning it the right place at the right time with the right amount of light, maybe it’s because the clumsy schtick I babble to cover my nerves mollycoddles them into a sense of avuncular comfort and therefore a decent performance. Or maybe I have something indefinable called an Eye and know how and when to press the buttons to get a good looking picture? So many questions, so few answers. Why do I resort to Yiddish and me a Goy?

So is photography art or a science or both? Are they overlapping qualities?

I think there’s no distinct answer. A bit of both in reality. Although I have no particular training in photography other than my sister lending me her camera when I was about 15, teaching me what shutter speed meant and trusting me with it to the extent that I went off to some festival or other in England and took a load of photos. The camera returned intact. I figured out aperture myself. The technical side comes easy to me, I have that sort of brain for the most part, but also I have the confidence now to convince people I know what I’m doing. This amuses me (and others) no end.

The development of Eye comes with time, it’s not something you can book learn. There are guidelines I suppose but if you stick to them all the time your stuff becomes sterile and dull. I’m still searching for the Eye, maybe I have part of it but it’s an evolving thing, an evolution mirrored in the zeitgeist except I’m probably twenty years after the fact. So far after the fact that it has probably come back into fashion again. Lucky me!

I come back to this place for fear that one day I won’t find it, or my hips will let me down or worse. There’s a compulsion about it, a need, a vacuum. I’m drawn inexplicably and each time it’s the same, the rush of young river, white noise of water, susurrous on old rock, dank air hitting the back of the throat. I’m drawn again.

Self portrait in blue.

I’ve been lucky enough to experience a bit of growth in the photography area which is great. It has got me thinking more about lighting in general and strobism in particular, and the upshot of this thinking is that I’ve acquired a second strobe used in this picture above. It’s a Nikon SB-800 which complements my SB-600. The thinking behind this is that I could have enough power to light any person/small group of people in pretty much any location. I’m portable

I’ve also been talking a bit to the models and subjects of a lot of the stuff I’ve been doing recently and as an exercise, I’m imagining myself and imaging myself as they see me. When I’m on the job, this is what they see: a rather large white-haired guy poking a camera into their face, trying not to be intimidating. It’s fun, I’m enjoying myself and hopefully the subjects are too.

You can assess the beauty stuff yourselves by clicking this link.