Landscape 2 visits Oz

Last year we went to Switzerland for the summer and I took a summary of the exercises with me to help me find lots of interesting subjects for them. I determined not to do that this year as on reflection I feel the holiday shots eventually came to dominate my whole approach to the course – not least because they stopped me working through the exercises in a roughly linear way. However, I’d be fibbing if I suggested that while I was shooting away on this year’s holiday that I didn’t think about the exercises, so I thought I’d capture the best of those here. Another thing I’ve not done is trawl through the 1400 or so photos I brought back from Melbourne/Perth for images that would meet the needs of exercises I’ve yet to attempt – that just feels like cheating, and effectively removes any chance I have of developing as I work through the course.
A couple of Horizontal vs verticals (project 2) to kick off then:

         

Both these shots were taken from the same seat at a coffee shop in Federation Square in the centre of Melbourne, and both were originally taken at the same focal length. With a subject as obviously vertical as the one of the tallest residential buildings in the world (and one of only 7 buildings with more than 90 storeys) you might expect that vertical framing was the obvious option, but at this distance I think the foreground is somewhat distracting. I acknowledge that I could perhaps have chosen an angle that did not include all the cafe clutter, but this is a holiday photo and I was trying to capture a sense of being there as well.  Whatever, I much prefer the horizontal composition where I have removed the street level clutter by framing and used the canopies to provide some further internal framing (they also served to blot out some of the very bright clouds and so reduce overall contrast). I also think the red/blue contrast adds something of a warm feel of the image.

Next up in this project set are two shots of Wadjemup Lighthouse on Rottnest Island – both taken at the same exposure.

          

They both suffer a bit from dramatically receding verticals which were difficult to avoid because the lighthouse was on the top of a steep hill, which meant I had to angle the camera upwards quite strongly. I wanted the large bush in both so I had to step back a bit for the vertical shot, which made the verticals worse – as a result I again prefer the horizontal format despite the verticality of the prime subject. As an aside exposure was also a bit of a trick given that I had a brilliant white subject in full early pm sunlight.

Finally by way of complete contrast a pair of shots taken at Waratah Bay where the vertical component is entirely natural – a dramatic rainbow:

       

This time I’m clear that I prefer the vertical composition as the horizontal version loses some of the drama by reducing the overall size of the coloured section which is the focus of the image.

Moving on to one of my favourite formats – the panorama (projects 3 and 4). The Eureka Skydeck offered an un-missable opportunity for this shot of Melbourne, built from 3 horizontal 4:3 format shots at the 14mm end of my standard zoom (28mm equiv), and covering a horizontal angle of about 120 degrees.

I particularly like the contrast between the cathedral and the surrounding buildings and the sudden transition from the low-rise of the suburbs to the high-rise of the business district. A similar transition can be seen in these iconic (or is that cliched) shots of Perth taken from the Kaarta Gar Lookout in Kings Park. The first of these is a four shot panorama (again using horizontal 4:3 format shots) covering around 100 degrees, the second is a crop from my 7mm wide angle which I tried to get as close to the collage version as I could in terms of composition so that i could compare them directly.

A close inspection reveals that the collage version is slightly more ‘natural’ in terms of perspective – the large building on the left in particular is distorted in the 7mm version, and more of the foreground is included (not all of which is down to the crop). These were challenging shots because I didn’t have a tripod or a bean bag, and the fence I was using to rest the camera on was subject to erratic vibrations from the other people admiring the view. I rested the camera on folded scarf to try to minimise some of these, and overall I’m quite pleased with the result – although for the highest quality a tripod is clearly an essential. I have one more shot in the series from nearly the same viewpoint which also addresses Project 7 – Figures in Landscape.

This is another shot at 7mm which tends to increase the apparent distance of the city from the viewpoint – the distortion can be seen in the two figures on the right – but their addition adds a human touch to an otherwise impersonal shot. Even though they are tucked away in the bottom corner attention is drawn to them by the fence line, and then the tendency is to follow their eyeline to the distant city. I’m not quite sure how well this works as a composition – I can’t help feeling that despite their small size the figures are too dominant.
As we left the viewpoint we got a variety of other views of the city through the foreground planting which provided opportunities for a range of additional compositions (Project 5: Interacting subjects and Project 6: Different framing).

     

The second of these two shows very well how moving a couple of hundred yards can provide a very different feel to essentially the same view. The characteristic grey-green of Australian foliage combines with the colour of the sky and buildings to provide a cool feel to the image, and the contrast between the foreground and the background is very marked. It begins to get close to my feelings about Perth being a very modern city simply dropped into an alien Australian environment. On a related theme of interacting subjects and different framing cities give plenty of opportunities for this – as these shots of the Bank West tower in Perth and the Eureka Skydeck in Melbourne show.

      

         

Each of these has a different feel, presenting the subject in a different light, and they also make significant use of converging verticals to establish an effect. (Project 8 Using Perspective). As a final shot in this post I thought I’d add another shot from the Skydeck which stands the idea of receding verticals on its head – literally. In this last shot taking looking down from the top of the tower the verticals recede to the bottom of the picture, giving a real sense of vertigo and height to the image. It’s interesting how this seems more natuiral looking down than it does looking up.

Alnwick Castle Magic - Fountains

When we were in Northumberland at the Bank Holiday we promised ourselves we would return to Alnwick Castle to see the gardens in full bloom, and hopefully in warmer conditions. Well yesterday was that day. From a purely photography viewpoint I was quite looking forward to it because I felt the formal gardens – particularly the main fountain and cascade – would lend themselves nicely to the early exercises – and so it turned out.
I’d tried the obvious shot of the main cascade at our earlier visit – albeit without the fountains playing – and it illustrates my thoughts above perfectly:

The cascade is a very modern feature designed by Belgian landscape designers Jacques and Peter Wirtz as part of a £42million revamp of the gardens In format it seems much older being a very formal design which appears to have been laid out to accentuate the effect of perspective. The hedges close in at the top, the ‘waves’ of the sides of the cascade get smaller as they recede, and the fact that it is on a slope adds further to the impression of distance. The people add some handy scale and a bit of life to an otherwise still image, and the kids tractors add a final colourful and slightly surreal touch. This shot was taken on our first visit. This time round I thought I might try some alternatives. The view from the top if anything gives a better idea of the scale of the feature – although the relatively wide angle of the lens makes direct comparison with the first shot difficult.  The second view from the bottom with the fountains in full flow is taken at the same focal length, but oddly the effect seems to be the opposite – the fountain seems relatively compressed front to back, with the surrounding hedges seeming quite enclosing – not sure I understand this.
       
The people in the ‘looking down’ photo clearly enhance the perspective – the couple in the ‘looking up’ are partially obscured by the water drops so that they really don’t contribute to the image. As a passing observation – it seems a bit of an omission on my part that I don’t have a more distant shot of the fountains in action – I’ll have to remember that for the next visit.
After this I went looking for a shot that might portray the fountain rather differently and came up with this angle looking up through the arches formed by the water from the fountains on the right:

Not quite sure if this works but it does have a number of the key perspective tools in – there’s diminishing perspective from the steps and the vertical fountains, at least implied diagonal lines from the right edge of the fountain and possibly the intersections of the arches and a kind of aerial perspective from the fact that the water spray obscures the far end. I tried this shot in vertical format as well, but I didn’t feel it worked as well – in particular I think the narrower format meant that it was not possible to include full arches from the water which reduced the effect of looking through a tunnel. There are no doubt dozens of ways this cascade can be photographed, all leaving slightly different impacts - in a family visit it is difficult to exhaust or explore those aspects as fully as you might like though – so time to move on.
As well as the main cascade the garden has a section full of unusual water features, many of which are made of stainless steel and so reflect and distort their surroundings – giving alternative perspectives to them. This one for example was shaped like a giant mushroom with an upside down cap – with surface tension making the water run down the outside, and the stainless steel surface producing an image with a varying vanishing point that depended how close to the edge of the visible section the reflected subject sits.

Viewed with the opportunities of hindsight and reflection (no pun intended)ait speaks perhaps of the way memory operates – with the photographer/observer foregrounded – and the surroundings having less and less importance – the whole slowly washing away with time.

The next two shots, taken in a different feature, show similar effects which remind me, at least in part, of shots taken in a mirror ball. Again the scratches, fading and strange vanishing points could be read as references to failing memory of a location or time, although in these examples the vertical distortion of the people is perhaps much harder to read.

  

The good thing about a landscape like that at Alnwick Castle is that there is so much variety on display. The view from the main terraces of the castle looks out over what I assume to be the River Aln, which runs through a suspiciously manicured landscape.

  

I was hoping here to catch what I had observed on a previous visit – someone walking in the landscape - and this lone do walker helpfully obliged. Although very small I feel they do catch the eye, and provide a measure of scale which even our background understanding of the size and shape of mature trees does not effectively convey. At the same time they are sufficiently small that the scene is almost timeless – it might well have looked like this 50, maybe even 100, years ago (tree size notwithstanding). By featuring primarily vertical objects the viewpoint also works reasonably well in portrait format, and given the layout of the trees might even work in square format. The landscape itself is quintessentially British – the varieties of green, the fields and the mature oaks ticking all the cliché/symbol boxes.

Another example of using a figure for scale is here, where the impression of solidity and massive is significantly increased by the diminutive figures on the lawn. I think this picture says more about why this particular castle has remained largely unscathed by history than any other I have taken in my two visits here.

Unsurprisingly, there were plenty of opportunities for colour in the gardens. I found a selection of shots that feature greens, colour contrasts and spot colours. As I observed previously, the easiest answer to getting strong colour in a UK landscape is to rely on flowers – many of which will be foreign to our soils – and where even those that are native have been cultivated to enhance colour over many decades. Given the formal nature of the gardens at Alnwick it was no surprise to me that I had a choice of material:

                 

Given the dense nature of the planting it was possible to pick our some quite interesting – even eye-watering – colour contrasts. It was also relatively easy to pick out a range of greens and some nice examples of spot colour. Even the castle walls offered some opportunity, although it would have been easier to exploit with a longer lens. The relatively overcast day certainly helped with some of these shots, reducing the opportunity to burn out the relatively bright colours.

Conclusions

The sheer number of usable or relevant shots I took during this visit highlight the benefits of knowing what I wanted to shoot – in this case specifically shots for some of the early exercises – and understanding where I might find them in the chosen location. In other words it underscores the importance of research prior to pressing the shutter.

The other thing I’ve taken from this analysis in particular is the variety of readings and meanings that can emerge from a relatively simple set of shots, in this case from the relatively abstract thoughts about memory that the reflections prompted through to the evocations of history produced by the shots with people in them.

And finally…

I wouldn’t want to end without acknowledging that taking photos can be fun – so here are a couple that really don’t fit into this module, but underline the thought that it pays to keep your eyes open and take your chances. The first, of my daughter, was taken through a film of water pouring from one of the water features, the second is a result of simply experimenting in Lightroom with a shot taken from yet another of the stainless steel fountains.

I wish I’d had the time and the courage of my convictions to ask for volunteers for a series of portraits of strangers through the water.

  

Stitched Panoramas–Perspective, Scale, a bit of the Sublime and some Seasonal weather.

My hard drive is littered with collections of shots I took specifically for stitching into panoramas, but I seldom bother once I get home, generally for the simple reason that they’re difficult to view and a pain to get printed at any size that does the subject justice.
In the light of this exercise however, I decided to re-visit them, take a couple more to stay with the spirit of the course and turn them into something viewable. My rather ancient copy of PSE2 gave up at this point so I downloaded a copy of Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor (ICE) which is an excellent little program capable of stitching directly from ORF (Oly RAW) files, and making a pretty reasonable job of it in the process.
Here’s one I took this Sunday morning of Clacton Pier:

Not the most exciting photo in the world, but pleasant enough, even so. I’ve cropped it to improve the balance, the 2:1 aspect ratio suits the subject, and to complete the scale there are a couple of people on the RHS. To give myself the headroom to crop it I shot with the camera in portrait format. The sky is interesting rather than dramatic, the perspective seems reasonably normal and the feel is almost intimate.

By contrast the following shot has a rather more ‘photographer as observer’ feel to it. Taken from the 13th floor of the Metropole Hotel in Interlaken, the lack of foreground distances the photographer from the subject, and the obvious scale of the background adds a dramatic touch.

At this point perspective is altered quite dramatically. On a screen at normal viewing distances I doubt it has an angle of view of more than 10-15 degrees, compared with the 100+ covered by the shot. I’m fairly clear in my own mind that this isn’t an issue. In spite of the visual compression, the 3:1 aspect ratio, the familiar scale of the buildings and the sweep of the road on the left all add up to a shot that talks of sweeping vista, which is the impression you get if you’re stood where the photographer (me) was at the time. The buildings in the middle ground balance the grandeur of the mountains so that there is no feel of threat – or the sublime – in this image. Not so the next:

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In this shot there is a sense of standing on the edge and facing a huge range of mountains – which we are - the Eiger is in the middle. To me this hints at the sublime, but the problem is that the depth of the image is now so small that it would have to be displayed very large indeed to get the full effect. Even printed about 8” tall (about the limit of the resolution available from the camera I used for the shot) the final photo would be more than 4 feet long.

One solution would be to take the shots with the camera in portrait mode to give more depth – in this case that would still maintain the distance between the photographer and the scene as there was little foreground to speak of, but I can see it might spoil the effect in places where there was lots of foreground. I also think that additional sky would help the effect by reducing the containment of the mountains by the frame.

So what happens if we stand the usual use of panoramas on its head and use them in confined space?. Well first off the become more difficult to assemble as minor differences in level can result in significant changes in perspective. In this next case it resulted in a bit of a mismatch at the bottom of the pool which required me to add a patch over the assembled panorama – but setting that aside, the panorama has played real tricks with the apparent space. This was really a rather crowded fairground scene, but in the photo the opposite appears true.

This seems a somewhat unlikely visual illusion given that I have squeezed around 180 degrees into a much smaller viewing angle. I guess it comes from the fact that I have effectively ‘unwrapped’ the view and presented it on a flat surface, and the eye/brain is fooled into thinking that I’m looking at a vista. I can see a similar effect in this photo of a rather tatty garden fence which is made to feel somewhat larger and more expansive than the reality.

Not quite sure what to make of all this at present. Creation of space on a 2d surface interests me as a technical exercise, and tinkering with apparent perspective in this way seems to be one approach to manipulation of space, if not creation of it.