June 2010

Saturday 26th

First of all apologies for my long absence. I've had a few months of struggle when equipment failure at just the worst moment combined with struggles with harsh light and, lets be honest, simple lack of inspiration have left me somewhat unproductive. I think this bad phase is over though. A few breakthroughs have propelled me back into activity and renewed my love for the medium.

Photographing using vertical format with a wide angle lens

I've always had little success when photographing in vertical format with a 35mm camera using a 35mm lens. The composition never seemed to 'click', always felt incomplete, never said what I would have liked it to say.

I think this generally happens as you get more and more wide-angled. Basically gravity means that our world is set out in horizontal layers and that this is how we see the world - our heads pivot more comfortably from side to side that up and down.

In a funny way it's quite stimulating to have these sorts of blind spots and blockages: they're like maps on which 'terra incognita' is marked. You know where the unknown lands lie – you just don't know what you will find when you start exploring them.

Well, my exploration has begun, I feel. Resolving these sort of problems essentially boil down to learning to accept and use whatever is being offered. I'm starting to accept that 'awkwardness' this focal-length/format combination offered and have started to make use of it in my compositions. Maybe I should concentrate over the next few weeks on print some of these negatives to give you an idea of what I mean.

I showed some rough scans of some of my successes to the photo club. The response was one of interest. I had explained beforehand how I'd been struggling and someone, after the show, asked why I felt I'd been struggling as the photographs didn't show any sign of difficulty, which was encouraging. Of course the answer was that they had seen my few successes and not the 100s of failures, or the 1000s of times I'd turned my camera vertical and felt that what I saw just didn't work.