Ship on the Thames

 

It didn't look like this, but a) it should have done, and b) this is the way anyone would paint it. 

I've been reading Tom Ang's Photography: The Definitive Visual History from Dorling Kindersley. (Superbly printed in China.) Early photography was far more painterly, mainly because of the longer exposures. The film types and lenses also created a softer look closer to an 'accurate' painting, than today's ultra-sharp lenses and 20+ megapixel cameras. Somewhere in the middle were the Glory Days of 35mm Black and White - which is nowhere near as sharp as we think it is.

The adjustments I've made to this are deliberately painterly. I'm starting to think that maybe the default settings on my X-E4 need changing. The catch is this: some changes seem to trigger a bunch of processing in the camera to create the jpeg, as I found taking photos in Mile End Park using someone's Kodachrome-emulation settings.

Epping Forest Pond (Reduced Glare Version)

 

With glare it's just a Meh landscape. Like this... it has real presence.

Mile End Park - Glare vs No Glare

This is a little corner of Mile End Park. The weather was overcast, and the light was diffuse. The X-E4 saw this...

... but my camera was tricked. Deceived. As were my eyes. We didn't see what was there, we saw what was there behind the glare-y, diffuse light. The photograph below is a lot closer to what was really there. What we would have seen if the light was clear.

The light in this photograph seems to be coming from the left-hand side of the photograph. Probably half-a-dozen of those big movie lights.

Across Blackheath Redux

The image a modern digital camera takes is not what the eye sees, and it's not "what's there", it's what the camera takes given the parameters you've told it to work to. In this photograph, it shot to get good detail and light int he sky, and the land and buildings followed on behind. Play around with the light variables in Photos, and the sky remains remarkably stable, while the buildings and grass get more or less clear and visible. On the day, the light was diffuse, but the Heath and the buildings weren't dim.

Within a dull-looking photo there may be a really neat one hidden by cookie-cutter development and printing. Ansel Adams said that the photograph is the script and the print is the performance. A chunk of the work of photography is taking the photograph, but another chunk is making the print. What makes the snap-shot aesthetic is its refusal to use the printing process to bring out the image. I've been a snap-shot guy for a long time. (Maybe all those hours trying to find a guitar tone is changing the way I think.)

Anyway, here's a re-print of one of the photos I took about nine months ago (it feels like at least two years) and thought was a bit dull.

Much more interesting.

Joy-Rides at Epping Forest

A recent trip to Epping Forest found us passing by a collection of joy-rides. The sky was half-overcast and the light was diffused. I took some shots anyway because... "this sure is a bizarre sight in the middle of this s**t" as the movies says.

Both shots are cropped. There is a lot more sky in the original, and the camera weighted accordingly, so that the land is darker than one would want.

I twiddled around with the light settings in Photos. Cranking the Exposure up brought everything up, but turned the sky grey. Instead I cranked the Brilliance and Brightness up, which gave much the same effect but kept the sky blue. Then I took a little Saturation out and cranked up the Vibrancy for the colours.

The trees have stopped being a lumpy dark green mass and now have shape and texture. So does the grass. The colours are slightly lighter. The overall effect is a little bit post-card-y. But it's a useable image. The original is just Meh.

Man Up and Use Photoshop

I like taking photographs when there's a clear blue sky.

Partly because clear-blue-skies are nice, but also because the light is good.

When the sky is lightly covered with clouds, there's a lot of glare.

Light coming from all directions, indistinct shadows, watered-down contrast, washed-out colours.

A haze over every pixel.

Makes a photograph of anything look dreary, in the same way that clear blue skies make a photograph of anything look attractive.

I'm sure that the old-school film pros had a trick or two for making a decent print out of such photographs.

We can do it way more easily with even something as simple as Photos.

I have been (braces for honesty) too darn lazy to do so. I've disguised that laziness behind a theory of photography-as-realism, aka "Photoshop is cheating". Painters have been cheating since the moment they put colour to canvas. So it's time to get some decent photos out of what I've been doing this year.

Starting with this.

Yes, I know. Vignettes are supposed to be really naff.

But this looks really good.

And I used Photos.

Garageband Hesitancy

There's a school of thought that says we should record everything we play. And listen to it afterwards.

After all, we write down everything we write, right?

We paint or draw everything we... um, paint or draw.

It's only music that gets treated like that Eric Dolphy quote: When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again. That was true about jazz improvisation in the 1950's and early 1960's, but by the 1980's everyone was recording everything through the mixing desk. If you don't have a mixing desk, just plug your phone into some power, and record.

So I need to pick up my guitar, plug something in to something, hit record and play.

And from what I read, the way to go is via iOS, not from the laptop. Laptops are for mixing, not recording, so it seems.

Simple, yes?

There's a reason I'm watching so much YT.

Right now, I will do anything... pull weeds from between the stones, clean my bathroom tiles, read the Telegraph Online...

I've even been through my photos for this year and and tweaked them.

Anything... to avoid having to get to grips with setting up Garageband, and step up to recording what I play.

Any ideas why?

I mean, aside from being old and not wanting to learn yet another darn piece of software with accompanying skills.

And yes, I know Garageband is for starters, and that's the point.

I haven't even started. So no Ableton Live for me just yet.