Photo Shoot: Works Party

For my sins, I am now recognized as the "guy with the expensive camera" at my office.  For the last 3 years this has translated into my being assigned as the official photographer at an annual joint party.  I work for HP and specifically help to manage the relationship between SAP (A large German Software company) and HP.  This relationship is managed as part of HP's enterprise business and drives over $2B in revenue for HP, so is treated with care.  One aspect of this is an annual get together on the evening before the US thanksgiving holiday, just three weeks after the end of HP's fiscal year.  This is one of the few days in the year when we can guarantee an escape from the perpetual conference calls with the US, so makes a good time for us to relax and party.

Well, when I say us, that is everyone except me, this is one of the most stressful evenings of the year, as not only am I tasked with taking photographs, but also with printing them on demand for the attendees, well I work for HP, so a big part of this is to show off our technology.  So for about 5 hours I alternate between taking photographs and importing them into my PC and then printing.  Careful workflow is critical here.  I import all images into Lightroom for a few tweaks and then print batches.  In the mean time I prowl for more photographs. Sadly this year, I was also quite ill with a fever and so struggled to keep up the momentum during this gig.

The biggest challenge is working in fairly dim mixed lighting.  For this reason I stuck with two lenses an f/2.8 24-70mm zoom, standard lens for such work, and a 135mm f/2 for a little sniping.  I have used a 70-200 f/2.8 in the past, but it is heavy and hard to use in a tightly pack room.  The first thing I did was to decide upon an image quality strategy.  I did not want to produce harshly lit flash dominated photographs, they are unflattering and not greatly different from what can be produced with a pocket camera.  However, not doing so would mean using the ambient light in the rooms I was working in, a mixture of strip and tungsten, with a distinctly yellow cast.  I compromised by exposing for the ambient, but adding fill flash, bounced off the white ceiling of the rooms.  To try and even things up a little I shot a grey card and used that exposure to set a manual white balance.

Interestingly, most people were more than happy with the slightly yellow cast on the images as this warmed up their faces.  I also suspect for many people this was a rare occasion to have their photo taken by something other than a camera with a fixed flash sitting right next to the lens.

This was very much a "People Aware" situation.  The hardest part was that people really did not want to be photographed and it was quite difficult to get agreement.  The people attending had also been at the party before and had already been pestered by me for photographs. After a couple of hours, I stopped hunting and basically worked on a request basis, which seemed to be a good compromise, plus by this stage I was really quite ill and starting to fade badly.

However, this was an interesting introduction to an element of photographic reality, money comes from this type of commercial gig and although banal helps to fund the artistic side of the endeavor.  I did not get specifically paid for this, but was on company time, so technically was being compensated for my work.

I have selected the best of the images, see what you think:

First of all the set up

Portraits, some candid, some posed:

Then group shots

And finally a rather strange one.  The team managing the HP Germany relationship with SAP wanted a team shot to put in a newsletter, so I obliged:

However, they forgot one person and by the time they remembered he had left.  I had a photo of him, he is the guy on the left of this picture:

So Photoshop to the rescue:

One of the few semi-pro gigs that I do each year.  Always a useful learning experience and a reminder that making a living as a photographer is not all about selling art works, there is a lot of hard graft to provide the freedom to be an artist.

Photo Shoot: Autumn in the Englischer Garten

Finally a crisp cold morning on which the temperature dropped below zero.  I headed out at dawn hoping to arrive in the city park just as the sun started to clip the tops of the trees.  I did not want to carry a tripod and so pre-dawn twilight images would not really be an option.  My goal was to try and capture the affect of the low sun on the landscape, especially the trees about half of which are now in full autumn plumage.  Another objective required a freeze to cause mist to rise from the warmer waters of the streams running through the park.

These images are unashamedly pictorial and represent another exploration of my personal feelings about landscape photography.  Do I have the interest to pursue a year long course and am I any good at this genre of photography?  I fully accept that I have no idea about the styles and techniques of landscape, but I still need to feel a spark of interest or intuition before committing money and time.

The images here were all taken hand held with my Canon 5D2 and image stabilized 24/105mm f/4 lens.  In all I captured around 150 frames over an hour, starting just at sunrise.  I have chosen the 9 images that interested me most, selection is simply based upon my own sense of the aesthetic, I have no idea whether they are good or bad.

The first image was taken before sunrise as I walked into the park across the bridge adjacent to the Chinese Tower beer garden.  I am becoming more interested in the muted colours of the landscape rather than the fiery blaze of sunlit autumnal foliage (last years obsession).  I think this is partially due to becoming more exposed to work of other photographers and a desire to present a more thoughtful image.  Fire has its place, but so does ice!

Within the park there is a small hill, the Monopteros, that offers a superb vista through the park and onto the spires of Munich's churches.  Surely this was designed very carefully at the time the park was laid out.  Through the middle of the frame runs a stream from which mist is rising.  The first shot (@ 24mm) tries to capture the depth of the scene and is then followed by a zoomed in (@ 105mm) image taken from the same location.

The blue-green caste of the grass is caused by the coating of ice on each blade, which I suspect is reflecting some of the blue of the sky plus transmitting the green of the underlying grass, anyway I really like this affect.  I also tried to capture this just as the sun illuminated the buildings, but before it started to burn off the mist and ice on the grass.

Walking from the hill into the middle ground of the second image (actually taken earlier) the following image is of the stream running through the park and the mist rising

Having dispensed with the "landscape" I now turn to the trees, which were my original goal for getting up so early.  Prior to the sun rising the soft light of dawn  presented a pastel toned world

Once the sun arrived the world changed dramatically and I discovered that silhouette might be more interesting than foliage

OK, these image are more fire than ice, however, the goal was one of exploration and this was a very interesting discovery.  The sun light was reflected strongly by the ice covered grass, providing the stripes of yellow light across the frozen ground.

In shade the world remained pastel

My final selection is an attempt (failed) at trying to create an autumnal image with some depth of field and stronger colour

Conclusions?  First of all I like being outdoors, I always have and when prodded properly am an enthusiastic hill walker, so being out in the dawn light was invigorating and gave me a chance to do some photography and still be at my desk by 9am.  Autumn, interesting, but not in direct sunlight, I prefer cloud or pre-dawn light, the dramatic Autumn foliage shots might grab attention in glossy magazines, but I think they miss revealing the real colour and structure of the trees, Pastel is the way forward for me on this topic at least.  Landscape, the jury is still out, the Landscape course would work for me if it is not too pastoral, I live in a city and cannot easily get out into the countryside, but then again there is a landscape only 30 minutes walk away as today proved.

Photo Shoot: Oxfordshire Landscape

Last weekend I traveled to my family home in Oxfordshire, probably for the last time.  My father died two years ago following complications in what should have been routine surgery.  He was a physicist, turned artist in retirement and my influence in many aspects of my life.  The fact I embarked on this course is, I believe, largely a reaction to his early death and my desire to do something more with my life.  Mortality makes one think.  Since his death my Mother has continued to live in the house our family has called home for the past 32 years.  We moved there when I was 14 and since then this 300 year old Cotswald stone cottage has been a sanctuary and comfortable place to escape from the pressures of work.  

However, it is far to large for a single person and some of the spirit departed when Dad died.  Subsequently Mum placed it on the market and sold it in a couple of days.  She has bought a two bedroom flat in Oxford, much smaller and right in the heart of this beautiful old city.  I went home to sort through my Dads books, dividing them into piles for recycling, Oxfam donation, Mum to keep, and me to keep.  This was hard, especially throwing away books that had sat on shelves for 30 years, books carry much of the personality of a lived in space.  But, old textbooks are of no use and better to recycle into new books than to carry around as a dead weight. I also found a few very interesting art and photography books, some of which will be used in this course.

At times it was all too much and I needed to get out for a breather, so I used my time there and the excellent weather as an opportunity to do some photographic exploration.  The house is in a small village nestling in a shallow valley, surrounded by fields and containing some 12/13th century buildings that were formally part of a monastery, so potentially good subject matter. I also wanted to try my hand at a little landscape work, not my usual chosen subject, but one I may have to deal with at some stage during the course.  First of all this is the view from what was once my teenage bedroom, a 180 degree panorama rather badly stitched from 4 handheld portrait shots:

Notice how the cables do not join up, however, it is a good illustration of the village environment and a view I have enjoyed for 32 years.  The road in front of the house should be a straight line, this is a very distorted view!

Rather than present individual photographs I have organized the images created into themed contact sheets each with 9 images.  The photographs were taken using a Canon 7D and either a 10-22mm wide angle zoom or a 17-55mm f/2.8 image stabilized zoom.

My first study concerns the placement of the horizon within the frame and the different textures of the fields that form the foreground.  I also found the starkness of the wire fences contrasting with the sky quite interesting.  The emptiness of much of the landscape was quite striking, although the angle of the camera and my own placement could quite easily transform a shot from a pastoral study of the folds of hills and tree lines into a bleak desert.

Another feature of this landscape was the recently plowed fields creating a strong contrast between the brown earth and the green of the surrounding field edge, left unplowed to act as a footpath.  The different shapes that this created form my next study.  Once again the placement of the horizon is a key feature, but in these images it is the curve of the field edge that is the dominating structure.

Within the complex of the fields are a large number of areas that can best be described as heathland, containing long grass and scrubby trees.  The next study focuses on the trees and the hedge lines that divide the fields.

The dominant structure in the village is a huge medieval Tithe Barn, built around the 13th century and the main reason anyone comes to the village.  As kids we used to play here, nowadays I use it as a photographic playground.  Weather is critical for photographing the barn as the  stone really glows in the sun and it is important to balance the barn with the sky.  This time the weather was kind and the light reflecting from the barn was well balanced with the sky enabling a good balance. In these images I have tried to emphasize the triangular forms created by different perspectives and how the barn sits inside its own local landscape.

My final panel deals with multiple subjects and is a catch all with a few images of the village from inside and outside the family home.  Danes Cottage - our home is the house covered in the red Virginia creeper in the top middle. The bottom row has a few more "landscapy" shots, badly done and not at the best time of day for such things:

As well as creating the contact prints I also took a more detailed look at three frames.  The first is a close up of a hedge row, a complex matrix of interlocking branches.  I had seen some images of this nature by Lee Friedlander and wanted to attempt something similar:

In a rare departure from colour I also processed this image into monochrome, enabling me to push the contrast far further than with the softer colour image.  I still do not like black and white imagery, especially digital B&W, processing a colour image as black and white for some kind of artistic effect bothers me.  However, in this case I prove myself wrong as the B&W image is much stronger, it places focus on the structure of the content rather than the colour.  Maybe I will one day cross over to the dark side, although if I do, I want to do it with film and pull out my underutilized EOS 3.

Another image that really struck me at the time of taking is the following landscape, taken looking up a hill.  This is very reminiscent of the recent photographs taken of the surface of Mars.

My last image is a conceit, I found just 3 poppies in a day of wandering.  They sat in some long grass on a gentle slope.  Placing my camera on the ground and pointing upwards:

I like it, but it is a little picture postcardy!

So, landscape photography?  I enjoyed taking these image, walking through the fields and taking pictures actually made me look closer at the fields than I have ever done before.  My approach and the images taken are very structured almost geometrical, straight lines and strong shapes, or are very busy such as the hedge rows or trees.  In the image set I find myself drawn to structure and form, looking for detail.  I am almost repelled by the "painterly" approach, the creation of misty landscapes holds no interest.  I enjoy looking at such images, but am not drawn to make them.  This is the first time I have purposely gone out to photograph the landscape, rather than simply shooting interesting things that might include a landscape element.  Do I want to do the landscape course, MAYBE?

Finally this was also an exercise in irony coupled with a deep melancholy and sadness.  I suspect that this is the last time I will ever visit my family home and walk through these fields or visit the Tithe Barn.  Strange that this is also the first time I have made anything like a serious photographic study of the surrounding countryside, finding great interest in what lay within this small patch of countryside.

Photo Shoot: Munich Olympic Village

Munich's olympic village is sadly most famous for the 1972 terror attack on the Israeli team, however, it is a fascinating piece of urban landscape.  Following the 1972 Olympics the village has been converted into apartments and a student village.  The area is at first glance a concrete jungle, but closer inspection reveals a comfortable living environment with terraced apartment buildings offering large balconies covered in green plants.  There are no cars, all traffic follows underground driveways beneath the housing.  The strangest aspect is the guiding pipe system in which what appears to be an above ground water system painted in different colours acts to guide people from location to location.  I presume this was built to enable easy navigation through the vaste complex for athletes with multiple spoken and written languages.

My goal in going there to photograph was to scout out a possible location for Assignment 4 in the People and Places course. However, I am also interested in the deadpan aesthetic of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, and to a lesser degree Martin Parr.  Their approach to photographing vernacular almost banal subjects elevates ordinary scenes into art forms.  This is not an attempt to recreate their style, but my goal is to photograph this area with view to recording what is there as it exists.  Few people inhabit these photographs as it was a weekday afternoon and my focus was more upon the interactions between the architectural elements of the village.  If I select this as the basis for Assignment 4, my return visits will include the people.

The village is a predominantly grey environment with small accents of colour, I have boosted the colour in post processing  to emphasize this property.  These were slightly more technically challenging photographs than I usually take as I elected to work with a 24mm tilt shift lens in an attempt to correctly reflect the geometry of the architecture.  A tilt-shift lens is manual focus and each photograph is complicated by the need to determine the aperture prior to shifting the lens.  I did not take a tripod, generally needed when using such a lens and so judging horizontal positioning of the lens was difficult and some of the images ended up with slightly strange perspective.  All of this had the effect of slowing me down and forcing me to consider carefully the framing and exposure of each individual shot.

When arriving at the village the first impact is the overwhelmingly monochromatic nature of the space, releaved by attempts to add colour

Another noticeable aspect is the multi-layer environment, with roads running underneath the buildings, visible only occasionally.

The most striking feature, though are the raised pipes with different colours indicating routes to different parts of the village.  Here a Chinese restaurant nestles beneath a cluster of pipes

Turning around another set of pipes carries a different routing and perspective

The next photograph presented itself to me as soon as I walked down the ramps, with the intersecting triangles and the symmetry of the yellow pipe and apartment building behind it

These steps led down to the student village an area of small concreate blocks each with a baclcony on top and small windows on the sides.  The students are encouraged to paint the environment as they wish and the small windows serve not to allow light into the building but to act as showcases for works of art, each flat having an installation.  The village is very bare at present, 3 years ago a large party became a riot causing substantial damage and requiring a rebuild of the village:

On the day I was there the sky was blue with light fluffy clouds, nice, but I think the village would look better with an overcast grey sky further darkening the mood of the place but enabling the splashes of colour to stand out more.

Walking away from the village and looking back from a small hill overlooking the area:

Heading back towards the subway I passed the BMW museum, another monument to glass, steel and concrete, Germany really loves grey.  However, in front of this stylistic and vastly expensive building was a bright pink ice cream stand, completely at odds with the aesthetic that BMW wanted to present.  Reflected in the glass above the ice cream stand is the Olympic Village I had just left and this stands as the final image in my selection here

This will not be easy place to characterize, many different communities co-exist here and some are openly hostile to outsiders, however, there is a wealth of opportunity to juxtapose the colourful  lives of the inhabitants with the bleakness of their homes