Monthlies
Hello again and welcome to April the month of tax returns, summer weather and showers!
As the month of March has passed us now, thought I’d take this chance to do an image review (yet another one I hear you hey!!!)
As previously discussed, I went out to shoot this specific image for the monthlies rather than seeing what I could capture on my travels, slight departure from now but a return to past endeavors which is an interesting process to be involved with.
So, for the word ‘Spring’ I thought about stricter representations as my last monthly image was a little abstract from the usual fair. Thinking about what Spring means and how you represent it, and to me daffodils represent the spring like no other.
Probably a combination of my Nans favourite flower and a symbol of growth and resurgence after the long winter of the last two years, also they looked particularly lovely established by the fact that we have just recently been bathed in beautiful sunshine, so I wanted to include a bit of the weather in that.
As ever with NP, thought I may do it a bit differently, had an idea of capturing movement and with a 90’s resurgence thought I may introduce flash blur back into the current repartee, it’s a technique that I used many times in the 90s, album covers, club shoots and fash-spreads as well as more than one portrait benefitted from this technique.
I knew I wanted daffodils, blue skies and flash blur in the image, but how to shoot?
As it’s so sunny and I needed the long exposure/slow iso treatment, I needed a neutral density filter to compensate for the abundance of light, autofocus is a must as didn’t want to get my knees dirty and my squat game isn’t what it once was…I never makes images while looking through a small screen so the live view technique wouldn’t work, not that it would with a minus10nd filter on the lens anyway… As always I wanted to shoot this in camera, as the idea of photo(shop-ing) this type of image left me a little cold, so off we went out to make this image.
Won’t tell you how many looks I got in my local park as I made these images!!
That’s the technique sorted, guess that leads us to the why.
I’ll be honest I wasn’t sure why, think it was a combination of wanting to create something visually interesting with a reaction against a usual way of shooting flowers (which I think has been done before but can’t find the specific artist.) and the idea of making something specific all appealed to me.
Looking through the hundred images I shot from various angles, I’ve selected a few in total all of which are slightly different but appeal to me in different ways, they all been tweaked in photoshop (but not created via it) so I’m now left with a choice and the question of why that specific one.
Here’s the images:
If I had to decide one from the set it would be number 2 and that’s the closet to the initial idea but I think number 7 is my favourite. Having this many images and the content I think is a little bit of a nod to editorial restrictions (that wouldn’t work well in black and white comment I can hear calling from the editors desks of the past..) bit of colour that I believe works well in whatever format and size, a thank you to my Nan for her input into my life and a fulfilment of the brief, the word ‘spring’
There you go. Thank you for reading, let me know any thoughts, critiques and stuff at the usual channels.
Usually, we have an image to accompany the text but as this is all about the image then we’ll have some text to accompany the image. Here is a quote I keep returning to in my research practice by one of my favourite photographers and recently mentioned again by Stephen Shore:
“I only wanted Uncle Vernon standing by his own car (a Hudson) on a clear day, I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on the fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium, photography.”
Lee Friedlander
Thank you.