Pinhole Landscapes - Take 2

I recently uploaded some scans of various pinhole landscapes but hadn't actually printed any out. You can see some of them here and here. I spent a few days in the darkroom the other week and was surprised to see how well the prints turned out. They have a richness, drama and depth of tone completely lacking in the scanned negatives, which now look rather flat in comparison. Of course, looking at an actual print and looking at something on the screen is a completely different experience, but I had never really thought that there would be such a wide discrepancy between a scan of a print and a scan of a negative. Or perhaps it just demonstrates that my darkroom skills are superior to my Photoshop skills!

I now feel encouraged to continue developing my darkroom work and to expand my pinhole photography repertoire, perhaps exploring the urban landscape. I might even try colour......

RIP Lone Tree

This morning I went out walking on one of my usual routes - I hadn't been this way for some time and the going was heavy. Over two grassy sheep fields, is another large arable field which has a lone tree in the middle of it. The field had been ploughed over the winter into huge furrows and I felt momentarily disoriented as I scanned the horizon for its familiar outline only to find it missing! I felt sure I had made a mistake - perhaps the tree had been in another field after all. But as I walked round the edge, it became clear to me that it was definitely no longer there. Perhaps it blew down in stormy weather or more likely it was removed by the farmer to make ploughing easier. It had always been a landmark which showed the direction of the public footpath across the field, usually hidden by crops or ploughed up in the winter. No longer will it be there to point the walker in the right direction or to offer a bit of welcome shade on a hot sunny day. Another small change in the landscape, probably not noticed by many but sadly missed by me.

I have taken many photographs of this tree over the years, with various assorted cameras and in all seasons. Here is a selection.... RIP Lone Tree!

Trees have feelings too

Some images from earlier in the year, when I began photographing trees in the landscape. I came across a number of trees which had suffered injury or disfigurement in some way or other - branches amputated or broken off, tangled up in barbed wire, initials carved in the bark. Looking out for trees with some sort of special appearance or characteristic and assigning them similar traits and feelings as human beings experience - stoicism, pain, solitude, patience, optimism, resignation, companionship, ageing - I began to see them as a metaphor for the human condition. They stand in the landscape, together or alone, young or old, healthy or diseased facing the vicissitudes of life as we do.

These initial studies were shot with the Hasselblad - I deliberately opted for a camera with a square format as I wanted the images to be considered as portraits. I was originally quite disappointed with the results using colour film - perhaps it is the fact that the overwhelming effect is of dull brown and green, but it has grown on me over the months. Black and white might be more suited to the subject matter though, accentuating the form and texture. I will need to experiment with the same shots in monochrome to compare.

Life through a plastic lens

Rifling through my cupboard full of cameras, I picked up my long-neglected Holga camera last week.  It was so long since I had used it, that I didn't think to check, took off the back to insert a film and immediately saw that there was already one in there!  Luckily the film wasn't spoilt as I straight away put the back on again.  However, instead of the colour film I thought I was shooting, it turned out to be black and white. When shooting black and white you tend to more aware of light and shade as opposed to pleasing colour compositions, so I was quite surprised to find that most of the images I shot that day had turned out well.

The film used is 120 roll film with the same square format as the Hasselblad but there the similarity ends. Whereas the Hasselblad lenses produce pin-sharp images, the Holga is a cheap plastic camera with a plastic lens.  The look of the images is soft and blurred with a distinctive dark vignetting in the corners. It has two settings - sunny or cloudy - and 4 distance settings so there is very little scope for control.  I love the look this camera gives to images and somehow it is so much more satisfying using it than trying to emulate the look with digital filters or phone apps.  Obviously it is a lot more effort - instead of just uploading the images onto the computer, the film has to be processed, dried, scanned for display on screen or printed in the dark room.  But I reckon it is worth it, so will be using it more frequently from now on.  

More images taken over the last few years with my Holga can be seen here

Elegy for the tree

Our native trees are under attack.  There has been much in the news recently about the deadly fungus which attacks ash trees and has now been found in this country in the wild.  Other trees are threatened too - oak, horse chestnut and larch are all subject to debilitating disease.  This is on top of the ravages of Dutch Elm Disease in the 1970s which so changed the nature of the English landscape and virtually wiped out the elm tree.  

On a recent walk through some local woodland I came across a huge tree blocking my path - not a victim of disease but uprooted by high winds. It lay like a soldier in battle where it had fallen, its roots exposed to the air, its limbs already amputated for firewood by some enterprising neighbour. One magnificent specimen that took years to reach such a size is loss enough and leaves a gaping hole in the landscape. It is hard to imagine the resulting devastation to the countryside if all the threatened trees are wiped out. A world without trees does not bear thinking about.