mercredi 20 octobre 2004

Shadow of Man Keep the sun over your shoulder... Snapped out of a depressing day after talking to a photographer friend in the UK... thanks Marten! Looking after my wife who has MS is fraught with difficulties only some of the time - after around fifteen years of dealing with it the initial difficulties meld into normal everyday life so it has to be a real problem that gets me so frustrated and feeling helpless - today she has caught my cold I caught from some guys in the local bar... and she looks as if she is close to giving up the fight. I've seen it before, though, and I think by the weekend she'll be eating again and have some colour back in her bony cheeks... I hope anyway. I took the quickest route back to clearing my head with a 10k blast on my fixed-wheel vélo... a fraction under twenty minutes at sixty years of age wasn't bad after being sidelined for a few days with a runny-nose and headache. What surprised me was the intensity of the setting sun (and the 21 degree C temperature). I'd clipped into the pedals at 6-30 and just out of town the setting sun blasted into my vision for the last ten minutes before it sank below the undulating horizon. For a few kilometres I could hardly see the road so it was head down whilst listening out for vehicles coming up behind me whose drivers would also be having problems with vision and seeing me. And I was reminded of the sun in my eyes in the 1950s. I can't remember as a child the number of times I heard my camera-toting parents utter words something like, "You've got to stand over there so I have the sun over my left shoulder," but it was fairly often. Never mind that the instruction sheet with the Box Brownie took pre-emptive care of the failings of the camera lens' lack of coating to prevent flare... what about the subject's eyes which were always screwed up turning their little boy's face into a grimace on every recording of a picnic or trip to the seaside! As if sand and midges on the sandwiches weren't enough... you were forced to squint to indicate how happy you were at being dragged away screaming and kicking from your school pals and their fun and games which usually spelt trouble for someone else on the receiving end. But that was Rule No.1 of Photography in the Old Days... to keep the sun away from the camera lens come what may. Of course times and technology change so nowadays we can shoot directly into the sun with many modern multicoated optics with nary a worry about flare spoiling the photo. There is generally not a lot to be recommended about full-frontal lighting outdoors unless it is soft and diffused through hazy cloud... nice for pastoral landscapes and the like. However, side-lighting adds modelling and dimension and brings out textures on surfaces. If the sun is at a right-angle to the camera position the modelling will be strong... the further round to your own camera position the weaker the modelling becomes, so at around 45 degrees it will be pretty good too as it was with the above image of the steps leading up to the portico of Chiswick House, a Palladian Villa on the outskirts of London. I use this image to illustrate what my parents often used to say to me as a child when they were taking my photo... then, as here, the sun was over the photographer's left shoulder. Using a wide-angle 21mm Super-Angulon on my Leica I saw my wavering shadow on the closest stone plinth... and so waved to myself. One click and I had a slightly odd image that has sold more times than the straight images of the famous house and it has been used by Agfa for publicity and at exhibitions. I suppose it goes to show you can have a bit of fun at your own expense and it will pay off even more so in the long run. 9:15:14 PM    comment []