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

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.

My iPhone has mysteriously become full of Other. I’m not sure what Other is besides being orange and therefore distrustful, but I’m going to have to find out since I don’t seem to have much room for anything else right now, and I want to put a few songs back in. Googling reveals that it might be something to do with interrupted syncs and that the only remedy is for a full restore which is obviously a pita and hopefully avoidable.

I’ve just turned off all music playlists, mail accounts, contacts and calendars in iTunes and re-synced, now Other has grown to 4.83 GB.

Whatever it is, it’s hungry.

So after having deleted pretty much everything in the iPhone, I was still left with a growing and hungry Other, no space and nothing in the phone. After a bit more searching on iphonefaq, I came across a piece of software called iPhone Explorer which I downloaded and ran. Lo and behold there was a load of stuff hiding in the iPhone’s music directories which in theory shouldn’t have been there since I’d erased all the music. I brazenly deleted the lot and reclaimed most of Other for my own purposes.

I’m now resyncing the iPhone with a load of music selected by iTunes and will see if I haven’t b0rked the device by fecking round with its directory structure. (In the old days I used to use ResEdit on a live OS 7.x so I’m used to, em, tinkering).

We’ll see if Other comes back.

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.

mua: Eleanor Magan | model: Davina Brennan | photographer: Hugh

Some more from the make-up student and model sessions. Here’s Davina, burning up the screen. Taken with the 85mm at f/4, really getting to grips with this lens, and since it’s on a crop frame camera, it’s effectively about 120mm and I can back off a little, be physically a little further away and not be up the model’s nose. Distance is good. But so are close ups.

mua: Ingrid Deegan | model: Sarah Nugent | photographer: Hugh

I’m generally blown away by my latest two pieces of camera gear, a Nikon flash – SB600 – not the newest or most expensive for sure, but it’s an amazing piece of kit all the same and then there’s the Nikon 85mm f/1.4 ais, an old lens which takes really nice pictures. See above.

The whole concept of measuring the amount of light through the lens is a tad overwhelming, as I understand it, the flash fires off an imperceptibly close second flash to actually make the exposure, while the first gets the camera organised to make a good exposure. I think I need a second SB600 and a bunch of wireless triggers … I’ve been adjacent to the whole experience of lighting for years but it’s only relatively recently that I’ve moved from the domain of natural light to what’s going on up here in this portrait. I suppose I haven’t complete;y grasped the bull by the horns in that I’m using a few static lamps here in addition to the strobe. I f you look closely you’ll see three catchlights in the model’s eyes, a dead giveaway. In fact I’ve read that some photographers go to the trouble of obfuscating their subjects’ catchlights so as not to give away their lighting secrets. Not me.

The 85mm is a monster, weighs a ton and is a cranky old lens – manual focus and when you can get it in focus, gives great results. Using it above at about f/4, so it should be coming into its own round that stop. I’ve been wondering whether I should send it off for a spot of maintenance, the focus ring is stiff which may be due to too much grease from a previous user. Maybe.

I’ve been reflecting a bit about the process of taking photos and what I end up doing with them. The photo above was taken on the last day of the year, December 31st, on Inch Strand, Co. Kerry on a blustery, miserable day with bad light and a strong wind. I like the picture but all of a sudden I’m wracked by guilt (wracked I tell you ) by the amount of underhandedness it contains. First off, the original image (below) is incredibly flat and uninteresting, so I messed it round a bit in my photo editor of choice, and because I’m slightly a mathematician and therefore fan of the Golden Section, I’ve cropped the image above to conform to that. Secondly, and this is way more underhand, I repositioned the horses and riders to adhere to the Rule of Thirds. You can see that I’ve moved the riders relative to each other.

Being also a fan of TV, an industry close to my heart, I’m beginning to draw an analogy between the underhandedness here and the smash hit TV series FlashForward, what if the manipulation I made in my photo editor actually happened in Real Life? The space-time continuum would be rightly Shanghai’ed. We’d all be screwed I tell you, missing metres and seconds out of our lives, without the lovely FBI Special Agent Mark Benford (Joseph Fffffiennes) and Dr. Olivia Benford (Sonya Walger) to save us. Ponder on it.