Having offended the cat owning community (actually, I belong to it too) at Christmas, it’s time to revisit that arena of outrage with another for Easter. One of the feline felons, mindful no doubt of the time of year, obligingly brought in this rabbit (or part of it) the other day. Probably the same rabbit we saved from Gitzo Longsocks a month ago. The two younger cats (near identical brothers) have been ear marked for a pair of slippers when the time comes.
Just back from scoping out the Dutch island of Texel for a tour I’m leading there with Charlotte in May (11 – 14) for Northshots. Thanks to my friend Erwin Christis for making the arrangements for this recce and his company during it.
It’s looking very promising for bid photography with avocets and spoonbills close to the road and some ridiculously tame brent geese (although they will have left by May).
The conditions were “challenging” for photography but you know, there is no such thing as bad light, only inadequate Photoshop (or here, AlienSkin Exposure 4!) skills.. Check out he Texel 2012 album to see the top shots. And here is the link to the tour – there are still 2 places left.
So, I’ve dallied with Facebook. But you know what? I still MUCH prefer the interface of the good ol’ WordPress blog, the fact the pictures aren’t sharpened for me and the way it feels like a much more substantial platform. But there is no doubt that Facebook has the potential to reach people who aren’t currently finding this blog (you are a select bunch of people you know!) so, until advised by more savvy social media types (hello Clay!) am going to keep on posting here and putting the link on my Facebook pages. I’d do it with the right plug-in if I could get it to work but it doesn’t.
I’ve a backlog of topics to post, but let’s get things rolling again with the first of several pictures from our recent Northshots tour to Senja in arctic Norway. It was a really lovely group of guests and I was even able to shoot some material myself for my Nostalgia for Snow collection. Please like my Facebook business page, if you like it!
These first three images are in a gallery, so click to see the uncropped version.
During my life I’ve turned my hand to many things from (during my farming days) drain construction, ploughing, simple machinery design and bus driving to (during my photographic career) tour guiding, lecturing, book writing and image making. But it has come as a bit of a surprise even to me to now be involved in a chocolate making business. Charlotte, of course, is the driving force behind this but I am making myself useful as a photographer and copywriter (as well as occasional kitchen hand when the orders get too much for her to handle alone.)
The ways things are now, I reckon that the demand for photography is less reliable than that for chocolate so I’m happy to invest some time to get the enterprise going. In time, I’m hoping that Charlotte’s chocolates will become a patron of the photographic arts….
We’ve put up a Facebook page and would be VERY grateful if all of you already on Facebook (eh, I’m not quite there yet) visited the Charlotte’s chocolate page and perhaps even liked it! Thank you.
I have never made a secret of the fact that I prefer the company of children…though the age range can vary from 0 -90. Most of my friends are, like me incapable of ‘growing up’ anyway and refuse to suppress enthusiasm for the world around them even when it makes life’s bores feel threatened. There is an air of perennial childhood about them!
Investigation in progress...if it moves I'll magnify it!
Easyjet’s version of the ‘heavier than air’ machine has carried me from Umbrian snows to the UK and a chance to spend time with grand daughters Tallulah and Orlaith. Tallulah at 2years and 8 months talks nineteen to the dozen and is a delight to be with. The whole world is hers to discover and we have walked in parks and beach combed…the latter has long been a favourite pastime of mine.
I brought her a magnifying glass from Italy – one of those with integral LED illumination and everything gets examined in detail now she knows how far away from the subject to hold it. There is no fear, just wonder, when she follows worms and woodlice!
I was sharing grandfatherly pride with Peter Parks a few day ago – his grand daughter Robyn is that bit older and a great companion to her naturalist and film-maker grandfather. She came home from school to tell her Mum she had held a spider and touched a snake…mum suggested it was not good to tell fibs. An indignant Robyn has the evidence in the form of a picture with a tarantula on her cardigan just beneath her chin and also one catching the act of stroking a large snake…
So different from children I have seen scream as they reflect their parental irrationality passed on when it comes to spiders and other creatures. These little folk give one hope they really do….which is why I think Backyard Naturalists, MYN and ReWilding of childhood are so important…
Tell you what, my time spent with misses Tallulah and Orlaith O’Donnell is a delight…I can read bedtime stories until we all fall asleep….just have to remember which voice I have used for which character, though Tallulah reminds me
Wildscreen has launched this creative communications competition to raise awareness amongst young people in particular about the animals and plants affected by climate change. Entrants are asked to choose a climate change mascot, whether it be the polar bear, koala or emperor penguin, and let their creativity run wild! They can paint, draw, sing, knit or even rap, embracing their creativity to come up with an innovative and exciting way of engaging others with climate change, with the very best entries being showcased on the ARKive website.
Visit the Create Climate Change Challenge page today for more information!
The origins of this latest image in the series of conceptual pictures for 2020VISION came about almost two years ago when the team was knocking about ideas for illustrating carbon sequestration and the importance of bogs in this respect. The idea of digging holes to bury bags of C’s was a close as we came to anything at the time and the idea went on the back boiler until recently when, with deadlines looming, I got myself into gear.
Sometimes the words come first, sometimes the image – which I then struggle to find the right words for. In this case, it was the former. I decided to take a literalist approach and with generous support from other members of the 2020V management team (thank you Mark!) wrote a large cheque to have these giant polystyrene letters cut and transported from Bournemouth. They have been used for only this shoot so far but there are lots of other photos to be made with them (please note, Mr Business Manager.)
I had located a spot of a local boggy bit of moorland a couple of days before that would allow me to photograph the children against the sky in late afternoon once the foreground was cast into shadow. I needed drama and pain.
As it turned out, this was the warmest afternoon of the year so far (Paul in NORTHERN ITALY, please note!) with temperatures getting into double figures and the sky anything but menacing. Nevertheless, with Charlotte’s assistance I set up on 135 cm rotalux just out of shot to the left, then a couple of undiffused Lumedynes behind Iona and to the right of the 2. I set the exposure to darken the sky and provide the main lighting from flash. Just as I had the balance of right, Iona’s friend, formerly supporting the O threw up (off set) and we had to recast, with Charlotte replacing James as the arms coming out of the heather.
“Our Carbon. Their burden”: I think it’s a pretty self explanatory indictment of the legacy we are leaving the next generation. The least can do is to preserve the peat bogs we have left and reinstate these already damaged.
On Sunday I did what I do far too seldom – I went out with camera just for the hell of it. It is what I used to do once upon a time – speculative photography, recording anything which struck me as a potential image. Well, it is why I got mad on photography in the first place…
San Quirico Castle looking towards the city of Orvieto, Umbria - two miles down the road from home.
Most of us who have made photography a profession have had to face the reality that, in making a living, one has to do a great deal that would not necessarily be the first choice. It is like that with anything one does for ‘love’ – art, music included… yet, so keen are we to follow our dreams that we seldom stop to think whether we want to forsake that element of ‘love’. What you can do is work to optimise that and we all have various ways of doing that by taking on other related work – books, running tours and courses immediately come to mind.
The view on looking out of the window showed tracks - made and followed on return passage by our local foxes.
Just once in a while it does us good just to go out and do ‘taking photographs’… not one of these is for a competition or publication in anything. We just enjoyed walking through the snow well the bits where it had been cleared for the cross country stuff was heavy going. It will all go soon and whether we shall see such heavy falls in the future who knows. None of our friends can remember a metre of snow and drifts of several metres…
Home is where the soup is....
hedge shadows...
One of the few things left here by previous inhabitants - a wheel, buried under metres of brambles
And the snow got thicker and lunch got further away.....
The 'fosso' or ditch forms a border to our terrain...our moat!
Sno-cat
Tyger, tiger none too bright…puzzled by a ground so white.
This stuff be where it should nae ought ter.
I can’t believe its frozen water.
Apologies to William Blake
It must have been around 1.00am this very morn that I woke with a bright shaft of light coming through one of those many cracks where my renovated shutters do not quite reach the window frame. A full moon was reflected from the snow-covered fields and I saw a small, but deliberate, form scuttling along a path below head down, pelt fluffed up – a badger teenager confirming the tracks I had seen a few days before.
view from an Italian window - nice and warm inside!
One positive thing about snow at Podere Montecucco is that we get to know just who our neighbours are…foxes, porcupine and badger, then there are the squirrels that almost black continental race of the red with those recognisable ear tufts. Fortunately no beech marten for they get up onto the roof and overturn the ‘coppe’ those roof tiles that have not changed since Etruscan and then Roman times.
Italy is even more chaotic than normal for it first snowed about a week ago, inconveniently since I had ordered a load of planks to be prepared for the next ‘creation’ from ‘Gepetto’s’ workshop. Since then there have been further heavy falls and subzero temperatures: winds from the NNE (origin Russia, cooled a bit over the Apennines and then heading straight for us. We have tried clearing but footprints quickly fill and a small bulldozer has not been on our list of priority purchases! Even Rome is under snow.
the thought of a warm stove makes dragging the sled easier... orioles will nest in those poplars, hard to believe !
With a distinct degree of prescience we left the car near the main road … 300 long, footslogging metres through drifts. In the event, it took two hours of energetic digging to free it from its niveous shackles to get it ten metres!
I took the opportunity of being freed from making another set of doors to build a sled…ingenuity reigns here with the top deck a slatted wooden planter we had inherited from friends long returned to the UK. The bandsaw, with its new blade, whistled through timber offcuts and something ‘sturdy’ was brought into being. It has to be substantial for although it has pleasure potential the sled is for getting provisions from the car – and that includes full gas cylinders of about 50kg per piece laden. I still ‘affectionately’ remember carrying them through the snow in the good ol’ days of our first winter here when most windows had no glass and boasted a double skin of heavy gauge polythene sheet – highly recommended, by the way, it ain’t pretty but…
Our neighbours maintain that if you have “pane, olio,vino e legno” (bread, olive oil, wine and wood) then what more do you need? We have a wonderful Norwegian woodburning stove that makes winter feasible and that warms our large upstairs living-room…heat percolates to some extent into a network of bedrooms but we have another solution to nighttime warmth. In an effort to create a bathroom, we blocked off the last two metres of a 12m living room…well. we would hardly miss them! At the gable it is 4.5metres to the roof and up there we built a balcony, meant as a retreat…it is the warmest place in the house. Two cats have learned to climb ladders, such is the ‘magnetic’ attraction of the space.
the management regrets to inform that luncheon will not be served outside today...
Many friends who installed gas heating never use it for it is some six times more expensive than in the UK and bills soar astronomically in this low-wage economy. Funny how cold weather produces an urge to make soups and stews in me and chocolate cake in Lois’ case. It is only another 8 weeks or so until the nightingales arrive (6 to the hoopoes) and then the orioles, bee-eaters and others. The delight of hearing those little olive songsters is soul-stirring and they keep us serenaded day and night for some three months – it is a joy, and a part of the cycle of life here. I miss them like hell when they go.
Seeing that badger filled me with relief that the MWGs (morons with guns) have not blasted every lifeform into its constituent molecules. The season finished on 31st January and with the Italian economy on its knees there have been fewer hunters. We seem to have reached an ‘accord’ with most who probably (rightly) regard me as an irascible nutter (after all this is Nutter’s Hill Farm – Podere Montecucco – as I have mentioned before!) and it is not worth spoiling a day’s bird murdering with a confrontation in Italian with a foul-mouthed Welshman who is not in the least intimidated by them.
I have a very good accord with a local hunting guard (guardia caccia)and he has helped greatly though we have one persistent problem with a man who comes onto our land and has fired at the house several times. When approached he is aggressive – though he has thus far refused to come back and ‘chat’ without his pump-action shotgun… Friends who have tried to mediate tell us he is strange, very strange and always has been since childhood. There is a psychological ‘test’ for those who want a gun licence but doctors never refuse for to do so would mean losing a patient and his family and friends. Surprisingly, having a psychotic with gun roaming around (and at night, too) with no regard for the laws does not make us feel too easy. The problem I have is that I hate the fact he can decimate birds and animals on my land and stay within the laws. I have the deep privilege of being the guardian and cannot turn away – I am not built like that.
One hopes that with a new government, free of the ‘psychodwarf’ (an ‘affectionate term for Silvio Berlusconi), things might change. Italy merely has to uphold the laws (did I say that…mad fool) set down in the European Parliament. Those who drafted them allowed exceptions to be made for ‘tradition’… Italian hunters have driven a bus through the laws for the trapping of millions of tiny passerines for ‘gourmet’ dishes.
Gin & tonic with icicles, a house speciality!
I long for spring: before the snow set in I saw a few first orchid leaves…friends In the far south say they are out already. I like snow in its place…forming a backdrop to my wide-angled shots of mountain flowers or with crocus flowers emerging. I realise that is heresy to some of my friends from the ‘north’ but I am a Mediterranean softee who has made a specialisation of the flora and fauna of these parts.
And it does not help that the power supply of a LaCie hard drive has collapsed… I hope that is all it is for, although things are backed up, the software used has left much to be desired. I’ll say no more for those hovering Fates are for the tempting… I was sent a replacement but the power indicator would not come on: faulty goods, laugh – I nearly died for I had to trudge 2km to meet the courier and then back… From internet comments it seems that LaCie spoiled the ship for a ‘haporth of Chinese made tar.
Lois has gone to Orvieto and will be bringing two gas cylinders back…the sled is down there waiting for its ‘reindeer’…ho, ho ho, bloody Rudolf Davies, yet another role to play in life in the madhouse. One can never say that life here is not varied in its demands…
Memories are made of these ...
Guest post from José Carlos Robles. NB
Both Google Translate and I got involved in this thoughtful post; I hope that I have come out on top in helping to get José Carlos’s ideas across.
WHY DO I TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS?
para J C Robles
About a year ago, the Spanish nature photographer José Benito Ruiz asked me, “Why do you take photographs.” I think his question wasn’t a comment on my photography but it got me thinking all the same. I just didn’t know: I was floored. I think, however, I may be getting closer to some answers now.
I have read many times that photography rests on three pillars: ISO, aperture and shutter speed. That composition could be codified into the rule of thirds. But this reductionist formula left many unanswered questions. And so began my exploration. Along the way I have met with Niepce and W. H. Fox Talbot, Peter Emerson and Stiegliz (with his equivalence theory), not to mention Ansel Adams and visualization, and more recently Minor White. Later, my focus turned to Degas, Sorolla, the French Impressionists, Mondrian, Bierstadt, Whistler, Velázquez and Vermeer, and others. Add Dondis’s syntax visual theory and some writings of Walter Benjamin and my mind was at bursting point!
Meanwhile, I was still taking pictures. One dawn on the Reef of the Sirens I framed up the stone monoliths emerging from the sea and stood back to enjoy the scene as I waited for the light. Then a strange sensation swept over me, almost like becoming part of the scene itself, utterly absorbed. Just then the stones were struck by the sun and the picture was completed. The moment was past. Months later I experienced the same sensation at El Campello (Alicante). And with that I made a splendid discovery: the enjoyment of beauty is a stimulus to the heart and mind.
The power of the triangle
In a chat with Niall Benvie I told him about my thoughts on it. He used the word “Trinity” in response to an email in which I talked about my ideas. The triangle – the first shape that can be formed from the union of straight lines- embodies what I now think of as the essential elements of photography. In this case, we’re not talking about ISO, shutter speed and aperture but instead about mind (intellect), heart (emotion) and sharing (humanism).
Intellect.
Peter H. Emerson claimed that we are all born mentally blind. Image formation in the brain is little more than a chemical process mediated by intellect. That’s a bit depressing! Minor White said: “When searching for images, the photographer’s mind is blank. But that’s not the same as an empty void. Rather, it’s actually a very active, receptive state of mind, ready to latch onto an image pre-formed in the mind.” His words were a revelation to me. I was not alone and the sensation of connection with place and subject I had experienced at the Reef of the Sirens began to make sense.
We need, on an evolutionary level, to observe and to learn through those observations. Photography gives me a mechanism for processing these observations and a medium for interpreting them. Through it I can direct my curiosity about the world and my engagement with it.
But these observations are not, cannot be objective – the images reflect as much about my view of the world as the world itself. They are emotions in two dimensions.
Emotion.
“Art is the affirmation of life”, Stieglitz said. Life is emotion. Tears, laughter, anger, calmness, joy, sadness, despair, hope, nostalgia, joy, disappointment, love, lust, hate, joy, sadness, passion, indolence, folly, serenity – intense words which find their way into the description of powerful photographs. When the photographer tries to remain hidden behind a coldly objective representation of the world, we sense the photograph lacks heart.
Of all the emotions felt by humans, laughter and joy, the positive energies, are the ones I want to provoke through my photography. Scientific studies even suggest that the optimistic live longer. Laughter is a uniquely human trait and is all the more intense in company. And that leads me to the final part of the trinity: Humanism.
Humanism
“Friendship” was the first word I chose for this last point of the trilogy. The hero of the film “Into the Wild” when dying at the end of his journey wrote in his notebook: “Happiness does not exist unless it is shared.” Hallelujah! As social animals we need each other. And we given expression to those feelings of attachment through photos. Indeed, photographs of our family are one of our most precious possessions and the ones most sorely missed after a house fire. But to photographers, the expressions of our lives and loves, of our connection with and view of the world – our photographs – are almost as precious. They are evidence that we have led interesting lives, that we were are individuals. And just as powerful as the need to create these emotional records is the urge to share them.
There care many reasons why we want to share our photos. The most disappointing is merely for congratulation or judgement. Who puts a price on Art? Who asks what was in my mind when I shot a picture? Human have evolved and progressed through cooperation and this sensibility probably extends today into a wish to share our view of the world too. Humanism is all about belonging and recognising the benefits of being part of something bigger. It is about a set of values that transcends love or friendship – values embodied in the notion of society. The Royal Spanish Language Academy defines humanism as a critical attitude based on an integrated human values. Honesty, tolerance, respect, sincerity, friendship, altruism, solidarity, simplicity, loyalty, optimism, confidence, values that should inform our photography.
The end of the journey
My photographic journey is one towards the convergence of these three strands. And it is not a solitary one. The company of friends, photographers and enthusiasts that I meet along the way, take me close to my goal, make it possible. Photography, then, for me is: INTELLECT, EMOTION AND HUMANISM. The process of seeing and making the picture becomes a collaborative process when it is shared: it no longer is just about “self”. Creative energy is generated in this sort of environment, energy that itself feeds into our relationships and sense of well being.
I’ve tried – and I admit, struggled, to answer José Benito’s question properly. But I am not alone in struggling with that age-old question – what is art? But I want readers – especially non-photographers – to reflect on the fact that photography is as challenging and creative an activity as any other artistic pursuit. When practised with passion, it is not a mechanistic process. I like to believe that photography makes me a better person, more aware of my world and my relationships with others.
So, now I ask you: why do you take photographs?