Mono Month!

Here we go again. I normally do the blog after the monthly meeting of the Caterpillar Photographic Society but I’ll write it up the night before, just for a change.

The assignment for this month was “Black & White” and I started off with a couple of ideas in mind. The Chess set was the first thing that sprang to mind with my second idea being a Zebra crossing photo.

Playing with myself.

I got the wooden chess set from the playroom cupboard and after a few months of inactivity it was a bit dusty. I placed all of the pieces in their starting positions, without needing to check on wikipedia first, then snapped around it a few different angles. From an overhead view to the king and queen point of view photo none seemed to look “nice”. I moved the pieces around by playing with myself, ie. taking a turn for White and then Black, so that they could be in legitimate positions. Then I tried a few more frames around the new layout of pieces. The only relatively decent shot I got was off the Black Knight in a shallow depth of field but it was not what I wanted. The depth of field was created by having the f stop set at 2.2 on my 50mm prime lens.

Active August

August was a busy month for our household, I’d got a week off to go travelling to London with the family and this is just what we did. Of course, the camera comes with me almost everywhere now so I should have no excuse for missing out on any image. The trip started with a Sunday Lunch at the Pre in St Albans with my brother and his family followed by a night at the Holiday Inn in Hemel Hempstead.

Murder On Zidane’s Floor

This is where I noticed the corridor on the second floor reminded me of a scene or two from the Jack Nicholson film “The Shining” where Danny Torrance rides around the horror filled Overlook hotel seeing visions of corridors of blood and murder victims. To get this shot I had to shoot three frames 1 stop apart and then using Photomatix I tone-mapped them together and finally imported into Photoshop for the final transform into a grey-scale image.

I had to take the three photos as some of the ceiling areas needed stopping down to pick up the detail as the lights were burning them out a bit and the shadowy areas needed a stop up to pick up the details. Ok I think but there’s a certain something missing.

Imperial Bore Museum.

The next leg of the journey was into London where we stayed at a hotel in Waterloo, just opposite the Imperial War Museum, bound to be a great place for some vintage looking kit that would suit a black and white image. Not so, after we’d allowed the girls to go and do something less boring, the boy and I went a wandering around this menagerie of menace. Everything is just too close together to get a decent picture, even when using some of the nearby objects it still didn’t look like a picture I’d be happy with. I did get a picture of an old Chevrolet that I thought might pass but after checking when I’d got home, I pretty much discounted it.

Tate Modern was next on the Southbank of the Thames and after witnessing the Unilever Series piece of live art by Tino Seghal, we found the galleries of sculpture and art. I  found this place weird, wacky and wonderful. Some of the items in here ranged from pure bizarre to brilliance. How some of it is considered art is very confusing but I guess if it gets you into the artists mindset then it works.

I took a large number of photos in here and only got told off once for my flash strobing, I’m very careful usually about ensuring I don’t ever set the camera to auto but somehow it managed it and the flash did a pre shot strobe for exposure setting. Some of my faves in the Tate are the “Lament of the Images” where two tables of light face each other before the top one descends to close out most of the light. It was very tricky to grab that image as it was hand-held and pitch black in the room apart from the illuminated tables.

The next image I liked from this set was a series of concentric circles called “Small White Pebble Circles” a piece by Richard Long which fitted with the black and white theme really nicely.

There was also a piece in neon tubes on the wall called Violins, Violence, Silence which lit up a very dark area of the gallery, A guy was stood directly in front of it and the picture didn’t come out right so I retook it but by this time, he’d moved and wasn’t in the right place for the picture, his silhouette wasn’t as I was expecting.

Eschercalator

My last short-listed picture from inside the Tate was a simple one of two people on the escalator, I took a few of this with a lot of people on it and even one with a small kid walking up the down escalator, much to the annoyance of some of the descenders. This was the best of the bunch and I like that they have their arms in a similar place. After looking at this picture I decided that flipping it 180° and having it “upside down” worked well as the steps at the bottom of the picture look correct and when you travel up the photo the two visitors seem to be standing on the face of the step instead of the top. I like this as it makes me think. It’s a sort of Escher effect, not that I’m comparing myself to that legend of course.

Next was a tour around the capital by open top bus and then a bit of walking about. The Original Bus Tour saw us travel around the streets of London taking photos on the move, two of the many photos I took made it into the short-list set for inclusion in the august submission. One of these was the Tower Bridge with the Olympic Rings hanging from the top gantry. While it’s an iconic structure with an iconic logo being worn on it, it doesn’t strike me as an iconic picture. Not in black and white anyway. With the colour of the rings and the sky in the background it’s a nice photo but altered to black and white it seems to lose much of it’s vibrance.

Mirror Mirror

The second of the bus pictures was an unusual view of Eaton Mews South with it’s strange entrance porthole and typical London Street Sign. The one thing that I like about this photo is the way the dominant sign instantly draws your eye but the big hole in the bottom right of the photo makes you refocus your view and travel under the archway. In the picture are the usual contents of a South London Mews but the thing that caught my eye in the picture was the round mirror. In this you can see back towards the camera and the archway that you’ve just virtually travelled under.

Smoke gets in your Eye

Before leaving the Big Smoke to travel to Windsor for some fun with plastic bricks we had a walk around the area where we were staying and the London Eye is in the vicinity so we had a ride on that in the evening when the city was lit up. The P mode of the camera was not playing the games in the capsule so I changed to the TV mode and set it for the slowest shutter speed I could get away with before the movement of me in the bubble made a blurry picture. None of the pictures I took in the Eye were short-listed for this assignment but a couple are ok’ish. When we exited the capsule and headed for the Aquarium I looked up and took a shot of the wheel, lit from all around with a black sky behind it. I like this photo, for a hand held shot it’s ok and pretty sharp. I took this photo with the shutter open for 1/6th of a second at f3.5 and an ISO of 1600 which is where it’s graininess comes from I guess. I like it but there’s something there that’ I’m just unhappy about, not satisfactory enough for submission.

Off to Windsor we went and after checking in at our B&B for the night we went for a stroll around the town and up by the residence of HRH Queen Elizabeth II, Windsor Castle. There was a terrific sky that evening and I managed to capture it in a picture of the building by using the old Auto Exposure Bracketing and had it set to 1 3/4 stops apart for three photos. Then I merged it together upon returning home and tone mapping it for the required effect. Still not a brilliant photo but hey-ho.

Fire-duct (Viaduct?!?!?)

Later in the month we were to visit Warwick castle but the weekend before that I decided to continue another effort of light painting. This time, as mentioned in the previous blog post I’d found a bridge suitable for my task. Ironbridge,a World Heritage Site in the Telford area features the worlds first Cast Iron Fabricated Bridge and stands across the River Severn. My brother Gaz and I did a bit of guerilla light painting here and we were surprised when there were no police officers present. I’m not sure it’s illegal to do what I did but I’m pretty sure the police would have frowned upon it.

After setting my Canon 500D up on the bank of the river and doing a couple of test shots I took my steel wool and whisk (see previous post) to get on with it. I climbed upon the fence and started spinning my whisk. We grabbed a few photos and some turned out quite well but the fire in the images needs it’s colour to be of impact, adjusting the palette to monochrome didn’t seem to work. The pictures we took before at Atcham bridge also seemed to lose impact once desaturated of colour.

Knight Photography

The last stretch now, Warwick Castle was our destination and there we experienced some really good attractions and shows. I got a few decent photos here but only two that I thought could go well into a black and white category. There’s one picture that’s an HDR composite of the castle from a river bridge that I really like and then one of a jousting knight with his lance raised for the scoring blow on his opponents shield.

This photo was realised by using Tv (shutter priority mode) and setting for 1/20th of a second shutter speed. I panned the camera with the movement of the horse and rider to get the motion in the image as I did in the Transport blog post. I quite like this photo but the impact of the colourful horse clothes, if that’s what they’re called, is lost as soon as it goes mono.

Final Selection

Out of all the pictures I’ve posted here or linked to, I’ve selected three to short,short-list. The Eye, The Knight and the Eaton Mews. Which one would you choose? Leave a comment if you have an opinion on this.

I’ve chosen to submit the Mews photo as it is of most interest to me and I think it makes a more entertaining picture with it’s strange point of view into this London street.

Wish me luck tomorrow night!!

To summarise then:

• Photos that look good in colour may be completely unsuited to mono. Surprising how much difference it makes.
• Don’t get stuck on your ideas, give them a good shot but if it’s not working move on.
• Learn how to do low-light photos hand held. It’s not always practical to carry your tripod with you.
• Learn about Av (Aperture Priority) mode and Tv (Shutter Priority) modes on your camera.
• Don’t buy a round of drinks in London, it’s extortionate!
• Choose a photo to submit that you like, then you haven’t compromised and you can feel happy.