Framing the view

Currently working my way through Malcolm Andrews “Landscape and Western Art” – and a fascinating read it is too. Chapter 5 – Framing the View rubs shoulders with a couple of issues I’m currently mulling over.

One is purely practical – the exercise on the “compression” effect seen when using longer telephotos in a landscape setting, which overlaps with his discussion on theatrical set design which uses 2-D stage flats to give the impression of 3-D scenery. My “Playing with sunsets” post a couple back makes use of that effect, and it can also be seen to some degree in these shots taken from a hill to the west of Cockermouth.

  

While the clustering of 2-D flats in these images makes it unlike a stage set in that there is nowhere for the actors to stand the visual effect is still quite strong. A quick search through my Flickr photostream shows that this isn’t an effect I use with much regularity there are a couple of other locations relatively near home where I could use it to good effect.

In the same chapter there is a discussion on classical advice about needing to choose a scene which can be taken in without turning the head, and the use of internal frames to help achieve that limitation. This appears to be out of consideration for the principle view – which would change as the head moved. I have to say that is one of the attractions of panoramas for me – that except at small sizes you basically have to look at the photo – you can’t take it in in a single glance. One of the illustrations used is Train Landscape, 1940 by Eric Ravilious – which shows a view of one of the many White Horses carved on the southern downs through the three separate windows of a period train carriage. I can’t help wondering is the triptych effect might be of use in defeating – or at least giving the impression of defeating – single point perspective, by fooling the brain into thinking that the 3 separate images were in fact continuous.

Playing with sunsets

The light across the Solway was rather interesting last night so I couldn’t resist of shot or three of the pre-sunset sky and scenery . |There was a very slight mistiness which seemed to catch the sunbeams and fill the middle ground with light, while the gaps in the cloud produced some striking lighting effects on the water. Just for good measure, whatever the mistiness was, it also enhanced the aerial perspective. These have been variously abused in Lightroom, although in the two colour shots I’ve done nothing to change the colours, only the relative contrast and exposure.

 

 

 

I quite like the differences which result from relatively small changes in framing and the somewhat larger changes in focal length.  I also like the thought that despite not being an obvious subject for black and white treatment these images feel quite effective to me. A couple of these were taken through my back bedroom window – the others from a field behind the house - and all were taken within about 15 minutes of each other. Changes in the position of the sun and the cloud structure reduced the interest significantly after that.

One question I need to think about more carefully and write up here is why I like these 2:1 format crops. Looking back at my archive it’s not something new – although now I have the excuse to experiment I’m doing it more often.

A visual sweet and sour

This is a little personal project I set myself, inspired by Assignment 2 – which I’m nowhere near ready for yet. One of the things which struck me most about Perth was the strong contrast of very modern architecture with something much closer to Victorian (which it may well have been). These shots are a reaction to that – they were all taken within about 15 minutes of each other, and within a few dozen yards of the junction of Hay Street and William Street.

     

     

My favourites are the 1st, 3rd and 5th with their crazily receding verticals playing havoc with natural perspective. Not sure I really understand why but I’ve always found this kind of treatment attractive, and I’ve always been interested in the visual contrast between old and modern buildings. Maybe it’s a kind  of safe ‘rebellion’. The ‘How to’ mags are full of tips on how to avoid receding verticals, but I feel that they add a kind of wild dynamic which captures the feel of modern buildings and vibrant cities more effectively. The same is at least partly true for the contrasts. They enhance both the old and the modern – a kind of visual sweet and sour that captures the cosmopolitan feel of the city.

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.

  

Seasons and Colours

A number of the later projects leading up to Assignment 1 are about colours – strong colours, soft colours, colour themes, colour contrasts. One thing is immediately apparent on a trip out with a camera to deal with these – the text isn’t joking when it says strong colours are hard to find in the traditional British landscape. Particularly at this time of the year, green is the predominant colour, whether in full luxurious Technicolor, or rather more muted:

  

A quick look at a colour wheel will show that the contrasting colour for green is red, and it’s at this point that the seasons begin to intrude. Ask anyone to name a red flower and the answer ‘Poppy’ will surely be high on the list, as will ‘Rose’. And there’s the rub – red roses and poppies are not find in the wild, in my neck of the woods, at this time of year. The next best bet is red-violet or red-orange – at which point Campion comes into its own:

In relatively soft light, so that the colours don’t burn out this combination can fizz – yet at the same time, in the flesh they look rather muted and delicate. A rather softer contrast, with a bit of acid yellow thrown in for seasoning can be found down on the dunes where the gentle lilac of the Burdock forms an almost harmonious mix with the green and yellows – in spite of the relative positions on the colour wheel – again this is helped by the relatively soft lighting.

By way of a contrast the bright yellow of these cereal field weeds lifts them from the relatively muted background of the ripening crop in spite of the relative closeness on the colour wheel.

Returning to a more manicured landscape makes the job a little easier – domesticated flowers are usually brighter – and variegated shrubs increase the range of greens quite dramatically. In the first of these the range of greens is extended by the mix of shade and evening sunlight. In the second, a dramatic colour contrast has been achieved by the simple expedient of shooting against the sky:

          

A similar effect can be obtained – without the colour contrast - by shooting with the light behind the plants. the transmitted light lifting the colours dramatically. One of these in the wild the other in the garden:

                  

Both of these last two also make use of sharpness and colour to add depth to shots in which there is actually very little physical distance between the subject and the background.

What would I have found at a different time of the year?

A good question. At least in my part of rural Cumbria, spring would be typified by an even greater range of greens as the various hedges and hedgerow plants started to produced new leaves – yellow still predominates as a flower colour – Wordsworth wrote about daffodils for a reason, but in the areas that used to be woodland (or in woodland itself) the blue of bluebells would be a key them. In the open fields the contrast between oil-seed rape and the sky would also offer some dramatic, if well used , opportunities for colour contrast.

Predictably, in the autumn browns, reds and oranges will predominate – but the blue of sloes, and the blacks and reds of blackberries and haws offer some relief. Yellow would be found on birch leaves and similar and close inspection might even find a red toadstool for variety. Sadly, for the most part, winter is like a colourless version of autumn, although in frosty conditions we could rely on robins and yellowhammers to brighten the garden alongside a few exotic imports – if nothing else.

Cliché or symbolism?

All this raises an interesting question in my mind – are bluebells, hedgerow flowers, autumn leaves and robins clichés? Or are they easily read symbols that give us clues to the timing of the photos and pictures that feature them? If the timing of the shot is important for the message does the inclusion of one of these reduce the shot to cliché and render it worthless, or is their inclusion a legitimate tool for telling stories? At the risk of giving away my interest in all things Japanese, haiku make use of such symbols all the time, as does much traditional Chinese/Japanese painting – is their worth reduced as a result? Have we come to deride these things as cheap and obvious because we have lost some of the link with the world around us - as a self-defence mechanism because to many of us they are – with a few limited exceptions such as robins - no longer obvious?

Perspective

Perspective – it’s an interesting concept. A dictionary definition is “a technique for depicting volume or spatial relationships on a flat surface” and as a starting point that doesn’t seem unreasonable. perhaps the most interesting part of that definition is the use of ‘a’ rather than ‘the’. It is clear that there are a variety of ways in which this might be achieved.

The tradition Western approach is based on a perception of physical reality in which the viewer is effectively at the centre of the image. Objects further away appear smaller (which reflects the simple physics of seeing), and often fainter or less distinct – again reflecting the physics of the viewing experience – atmospheric haze, limitations of eyesight and so on. We are so used to this approach that we seldom think about it – it’s how the world appears to us, so any photo that produces the same effect is “realistic” and any that doesn’t is odd.

As explained in the course notes, in this model similar sized objects closer to the camera appear larger than those further away, and lines converge towards a vanishing point. But in reality that is not true. Similar sized objects are exactly that – their size does not vary with viewing distance. And parallel lines most certainly don’t – in traditional geometry – meet at infinity. They don’t meet.

Traditional Western perspective solves a particular set of problems – how to represent what the eye sees from a single viewpoint, how to show 5 sides of a cube from a position on the 6th side. It is well suited to bound books which display single images in a limited space. But there are other problems it doesn’t solve. For example, how to illustrate a view seen from a moving viewpoint – for this western or linear perspective requires movies – essentially rapidly changing single viewpoint images which fool our brain into believing we are moving. It also restricts our ability to communicate the passage of time. This is not really an issue in painting, where we can choose elements to tell a particular story – but as several philosophers have observed a photo is literally a moment in time.

Enter axonometric perspective – the type favoured by Chinese/Japanese culture until their contacts with the west, and perhaps even the west until the Renaissance or thereabouts (c.f. the Bayeaux Tapestry). If you are reading a scroll, which you continuously wind on, losing the RHS of the image and gaining new LHS with every passing moment then single point perspective doesn’t really work. True you could paint an extremely wide panorama, but the limit is a 360% rotation rather than linear movement and if you wanted to see the whole picture you would need a very wide wall or a magnifying glass.

Distant objects become vanishingly small and foreground objects distort quite oddly – in short you start to lose some ‘realism’ because this isn’t how our eyes see.

The Chinese/Japanese solution was to use a set of rules in which parallel lines don’t meet at infinity and an object in the foreground retains its relative size compared with something of the same size in the distance. To western eyes this is quite strange, but it means that as you unroll the scroll you are not fixed to a single viewpoint- so you effectively walk through the image.

A third approach – also adopted by eastern cultures - was to simply vary the viewpoint. The benefit of this system is that it allows the artist to produce a single image (as opposed to a scroll) which creates the impression of a moving view point, allows the artist a choice of which elements to emphasise by painting them ‘larger than life’, and still retains something of the visual effect of normal sight from the various viewpoints. It is this technique, combined with the convention of simply placing more distant objects higher up the painting which creates the slightly disconcerting effect of traditional oriental wall hangings.

In western art similar concerns about how to create space on a flat surface appear to have influenced the Cubists and, much more recently, David Hockney

In my written blog I have analysed one of these paintings - "Landscape with Waterfall" by Tsunenobu, an artist of the Japanese Kano school. I can’t post a link as I can’t find it on the web but the effect is like an extreme version of the compression produced by a very long lens.  Interestingly it still makes use of aerial perspective and sharpness, with the more distant objects increasingly indistinct. Use of colour is not an issue as it is an ink drawing on a sepia ground, but there is also limited use of diminishing perspective within the individual elements of the overall painting.

To my mind a clear benefit of this approach is the ability to represent time in a single image. It is not necessary for every individual element to have happened, or be visible, at the same time. Because the image has become a temporal narrative it allow the portrayal of, for example, all four seasons in a single image – a regular oriental motif which is emphasised by the use of symbolic elements – cherry blossom, geese, mist etc. Although this is not unusual for painting,  photography has until recently been fairly solidly locked into traditional perspective by simple physics. Some , such as Duane Michals have sought to push the boundaries of this by using shots in short series. Digital techniques, however, allow the opportunity to combine multiple viewpoints in a relatively convincing manner, to give something of the feeling of an oriental wall hanging.

The image on the left is my first attempt to address some of these issues. It is, admittedly, a bit of a cheat as, the waterfall are from Iceland and the other two shots are from Switzerland, but at this stage I am simply exploring the technical possibilities of this approach to a landscape photograph.

It certainly manages to capture some of the feel of a town in the foothills of the Alps, and I would like to think that there is the sense of a journey for the waters from the snow fields at the top to the wide rivers at the bottom.

In Zen Buddhist terms – which informed a lot of Japanese art in particular - I think there may also be a reverse reading, from bottom to top, reflecting the nature of the struggle to move from the relative comfort of the lowlands to the airy open peaks of enlightenment. Certainly that is captured in the painting I was trying to imitate, although I make no real claims for that in my attempt.

There are a number of themes which I would like to explore which emerge from these initial thoughts, including:

• the use of panoramic photography to illustrate four seasons in a single image, which is something I’m already thinking about for my portfolio
• the use of multi point perspective to capture a narrative about a particular location
• other ways of capturing time by still photography.
• the impact of very wide angle panoramas on perceptions of space
• the use of multi-point perspective and collages to capture an idea of space or a space.

I may well come back to revise this post, but for the meantime I simply wanted to capture my early thoughts on these matters for later reference.