Composition Improvements

Composition doesn't just end when we click the shutter button. Far from it, I'll often crop images at home if I see a picture within the picture. Besides, not every landscape or subject we shoot will fit the aspect ratio of our cameras. As a lot of you who've been on workshops with me will testify - I have a dislike for the 3:2 aspect ratio and will often find a 4:5 crop within the images of the participants on my trips. But I thought it would be really cool to discuss some further ways of helping 'refine' a composition once you have something finished and ready to let the world see as it were. Often, when we think we're finished, there's perhaps room for some further improvement.

So let's look at this image I shot on Eigg:

I'm a big believer in 'balance' as well as symmetry in my compositions, and I will go to great lengths to emphasise this to participants on my workshops. Often finding 'flow' in a composition. In the image above, those of you who have read my 'Simplifying Composition' eBook will know, contains lots of S-curves in the frame. But what about balance? I feel the image sits well and that there is an equal spacing between left and right object, but if we flip it horizontally, what happens?

Our minds interpret this flipped version very differently. In fact, I now feel there is far too much space on the right hand side of the frame. There seems to be an abundance of rock that's not doing much on the right hand side of the frame, so I want to crop it:

Ahhh, that's better. My mind isn't going banana's any more about that abundance of rock on the right hand side of the frame. I feel my life is much more on an even-keel and my compulsive-obsessive-personality can now rest (for a few minutes at least anyway)  ;-)

So now we've cropped the right hand side of the frame, how does the image look if we revert it back to the original rotation?

The image still works, and if I compare it with what we started with, I feel i've made it a little more balanced, tighter too perhaps, which isn't a bad thing, but overall, I feel what I have now is an improvement.

As with all things, vision, artistic sensibilities, taste - it's all subjective and with photography, there is often compromise involved. Perhaps the final crop has less 'breathing space' to it. But I do feel that there's much more balance between left and right.

Ultimately, flipping images vertically can allow you to spot imbalance in your compositions and they allow you to notice things you weren't aware of when the image was flipped the right way round. Just don't over-analyse it: if the image works in the first place, then maybe that fine-tune-crop may be a crop-too-far.

my first book

Just back from my Skye workshop. So i'm a wee bit tired, but the trip went well. I'm almost done writing the first draft of my very first hard bound book.

I'm hoping to have it released next year, but thought that I might release an e-book version of it before then (maybe for Christmas). The book will contain 40 images culled from my portfolio containing a mixture of landscape and portraiture from Easter Island, Patagonia, Nepal, India, Portugal, Iceland and of course Scotland.  I think it would be nice to release it as an eBook, but the idea is that it will come out as a nice coffee-table edition - roughly around the size and dimensions of an Vinyl LP. I'm hoping to release it as a strictly limited edition run of 3,000 copies, with the first 500 accompanied by a tipped in photo of the front cover image.

Anyway, for those of you who are Ansel Adams fans, you've probably noticed that the title is identical to his. This is in part homage to him, and also because I think it's a great way of representing what I do, under a first edition book.

Congrats to Darren

Just after posting about Dudley's win under the 'classic view' category for Photographer of the year award, I got an email from a good friend of mine Darren Ciolli-Leach, telling me that he also won the 'urban view' category. So contrats Darren!

Darren shot this image at the Ratcliffe on soar Power station, the very same place that Michael Kenna has photographed extensively over the past 20 years.

Anyway, once again, congrats to you Darren.

Bete Giyorgis (the church of St George)

Such is the wonderment of software, I was able to set this up as a scheduled task. So although I'm not here to post this, my little wordpress blog has done it for me. Here's a photo of Bete Giyorgis (the church of St George). It's one of my favourite places. The church is tiny, but it has been hewn out of the rock, not built inside a rock pit, but is actually part of the entire rock.

Each morning I'd make my way here, with the hope of finding some subjects to position in front of the church. I caught these three women sitting at the top near the ledge looking down into the pit where the church is situated. But I caught one of them standing up and moving off. I love the symmetry of the three figures. They are a diagonal line starting in the lower left corner of the frame and rising towards the top right of the frame.

After Blue

I thought I'd end today's posts with a non-blue image on my blog. So here it is. Off to bed now.... and I'm away this weekend and then away to the Isle of Skye to do a workshop on Monday for a week, so this is maybe the last post for a while.

Silverfast Sucks

I know I'm trying to scan negative films, which most scanners / software aren't too happy doing from time to time. But why does Silverfast keep producing blue scans? I've set the guide markers, I've told it that the film is a negative film, I've chosen Kodak Portra from the Negafix window, and still... it gives me a blue scan. But only sometimes, and when it diverts to giving me a blue scan, the only way to stop it from doing it is to tell it the film is a positive, revert back to negative, go through the whole preview scan and then touch wood, it might, just might give me a non-blue scan. I should also point out that the preview screen gets it right every time. I have a nice preview with good positive colours, and a crappy blue scan for my troubles.

Why is some scanning software so flaky? You shouldn't have to do certain things in a certain order to make things work. The software should *stop* you from doing the wrong things and take care of the other stuff.

Ethiopia work resumes

So I've just started scanning images again. This one just popped up on my preview screen in Silverfast and I'm quite taken with it. Just keen to share it with you.

I find scanning quite exciting. Because I'm dealing with negatives, I'm never entirely sure what's on them until I've loaded them into the scanner. I do like contact sheets, but they're very expensive to have produced here. I bought a Canon 9000F flatbed to help me produce some contact sheets, but I can't seem to get it to work with negatives, and my patience for trying to wrestle with some hardware or software issue is rather on the thin side. So I'm just happy to work on a tray of 4 images at a time.

Where do you get your inspiration?

Last night I did a talk for a photographic club in the Scottish borders. It was a great night and I got asked a really interesting question: "Do you get inspiration from other sources such as music?".

The answer of course is yes. I know that I get my inspiration from a lot of music. I'm not exactly sure how this happens, but after thinking about it on the way home, I've come to the conclusion that anything creative starts of as a form of dreaming in the mind. We imagine what we want to create and it is our imagination that is at the core of creativity. I feel that what happens when I listen to music that I find emotive is that it fires my imagination, and that in turn gives my mind 'exercise'.

What I mean by exercise is that I believe a lot of us were used to imagining things when we were young but as we got older, and the real world has encroached upon us, some of us don't exercise our imaginations so much. Paying bills, keeping schedules, driving cars, negotiations, whatever, the humdrum of life can stop us from escaping into an imaginary world. I believe that we need to escape into our imaginations - it's completely healthy, but for some of us, we do it a lot less as time goes on and fall out of practice.

Listening to music, escaping into a good book, daydreaming - they all exercise our imaginations and this in turn, helps us when we want to be creative. So yes, music inspires me in many ways and it creates emotions in my mind that I often 'feel' when I'm out there shooting.

So what inspires you? Or more specifically, what sort of music are you listening to at the moment? Do you find your mind escaping into a different world while you have your headphones on? Is it the same escape when you are making images?

I'd like to hear your view.

I'll start.

Q. What are you currently listening to?

Stina Nordenstam - slightly unsettling, but in a very good way. AIR - atmospheric Lambchop - emotive, melodical, songs that lodge in my brain and lyrics that take me somewhere else. Ali Farka Toure - hypnotical Steve Reich - music for 18 musicians in particular - very hypnotic and takes me into a different space.

Q. Do you find your mind escaping into a different world while you have your headphones on?

Absolutely. Music is the soundtrack to my life. I am rarely without music.

Q. Is it the same escape when you are making images?

Similar. I feel I listen to music that has atmosphere and that's what I try to do with my photography.

Q. Do you find it easy to escape into another world or is your life so busy that you seldom get that chance?

It's always been very important for me to daydream, escape into another world through music or photography. Life without this escape would be terribly dull. My life has had to be balanced between art/creative activities and scientific/organised activities. A friend of mine says I seem to have a good balance between both and find it easy to move between both realms. Not sure if that's true.

So what about you?

Muchaw

I'm away for a few days. In the meantime, I thought I'd post a photograph of my guide from my trip to Lalibela.

Muchaw is a Deacon of the Orthodox Church. He was an amazing guide, got me into places that I wouldn't have had access as a normal tourist, showed me around Lalibela, and of course, lent me his rather large size 12 trainers when my own shoes got stollen from outside one of the churches of Lalibela (I've never seen someone look so shocked, dumbfounded and embarrassed at the same time - personally, I thought it was very funny).

Pictured in the background is the rock hewn church of St George. It is in my opinion, the most stunning piece of architecture in Ethiopia. So much so that I asked Muchaw one day why there were no tourist souvenirs of it.  I wasn't surprised when the very next day he arrived at my hotel with two replicas of it - one made of local stone and another made of wood.

Someone, somewhere, had been up all night working away at making these models in the hope of  a few Ethiopian Birr.

If you are thinking of going to Lalibela, then you can contact Muchaw at muchaw2007@yahoo.com

Meskel Day

One of the benefits of having your own guide, who happens to be a Deacon in the church, is that you get access to areas that the ordinary tourist does not.

So it was with my trip to Ethiopia. I'd been speaking to Jake Warga - who has produced an excellent podcast about Lalibela available on YouTube, and he recommended I get in touch with the guide he used.

So it was, that I ended up on the day of Meskel, situated around 2 feet away from the Lalibela cross, right in the heart of the celebrations, while all my newly found friends from my hotel stood on the periphery looking in towards the celebrations. I distinctly remember catching eye contact with them and exchanging a dialogue through our eyes which went sort of like this:

them: is that you Bruce? How did you manage to get down there into the heart of it all?

me: yep, it's me, I feel like I'm on display to everyone and the world here, but I can't help find it crazy that I've managed to find myself in such an amazing vantage point.

I'm not used to feeling smug. I'm not used to feeling I have the upper hand. It was a strange situation to be in. But it did allow me to make photographs of the men who were dressed like kings on Meskel day.