A walk in the rain

If you are caught unprepared by a sudden rainstorm, you should not run foolishly down the road or hide under the eves of houses. You are going to get soaked either way. Accept that from the beginning and go on your way. This way you will not be distressed by a little rain. Apply this lesson to everything.

Hagakure: Way of the Samurai

Paraphrased and shortened to “It’s only believing you can stay dry that makes walking in the rain unpleasant” this is one of my favourite sayings. Even as a teenager I liked walking in the rain. It saturates all the colours, and highlights all the greens you find in the countryside and at the same time adds a sort of mistiness to more distant things. It also keeps people indoors, which means you can get lost in your own thoughts. And these days I don’t do it often enough.

Which is why, on a drizzly evening earlier this week I thought it was time I should try it again.

   

I’m slightly red-green colour blind, but not enough for it to stop me enjoying the variety of greens I can find in the local hedgerows, and the mix of damp days and warm sunny days we’ve had over the last couple of weeks means everything is growing like a rain forest. I feel there’s a project for someone better informed than me to photograph every variety of grass in the UK.

Oddly enough, water is a key feature of walking in the rain. Running down the drains, running down the road and simply lying on the tarmac offering the opportunity for perspective bending reflections.

  

I’ll have to be honest I’ve cheated on the last shot and turned it upside down.

As if the hedgerows weren’t enough the nature patch next door has its own range of greens, from the fresh blue-greens of the pine trees to the lush greens of the swampy bits.One thing this fairly simple exercise has shown me is how sensitive the overall tone of the image is to the white balance in these circumstances. If I use the cameras automatic setting I end up with a relatively cool finish as in the three photos above, whereas manually setting the “cloudy” option in Lightroom gives a rather warmer and more verdant feel to the end product.

    

My final couple of shots are about transition, as the plants move from attracting insects to producing seeds.Again the white balance makes a significant difference, but having tried  a variety of options I definitely prefer them as displayed here. In truth, looking at the range of images here I think I have a slight preference for cooler shots overall.

   

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?