WHAT?!?!!

An upsetting moment yesterday: having been to the fakes show in the Sainsbury Wing, it seemed churlish not to steer my young companion towards my favourite self-portrait (Rosa, see above - or is it below?)

It wasn't there.

Apparently, it's gone to Dulwich. I'll track it down and make sure it's still on view - it would be criminal to lock it away.

selfish portraits

The self-portrait is an odd one. Why do we do it? There's the constantly-seeking-artist reasoning, which says that it's a good way to try out techniques without damaging a precious sitter. Then there's the the no-nonsense self-promotion angle, and, finally, pure vanity. The painting I've been back to see more times than any other is the self-portrait of Salvator Rosa in the National Gallery.

Fot those too young to have learned the Latin at school, a loose translation of the board in his hand reads "Either put up or shut up". (Literally: "Either stay silent, or say something more interesting than silence.")

Why do I find myself drawn back to it so often? Well, he certainly looks cool in that grumpy artist way. And the extraordinary resemblance to Jose Mourinho is not uninteresting. But it's the hold he has from over all those years: standing in front of the canvas, there is a real sense that he is there, in a way that rarely comes across in portraits. There are other portraits in the same room; all of them, in their own ways, are wonderful but none has that same immediacy. There is a distance, something between the viewer and the sitter.

That something is probably the artist, and that would explain the draw of the self-portrait: for once, he's not there to get in the way.

The self portrait we see most of today is an unusual one, in that it's a sculpture, or many sculptures. Anthony Gormley's pieces are all based on models of himself. Even so, they're not really self-portraits in the traditional sense. They are more akin to Hitchcock's appearances in his own films, the placing of the artist in the frame as an everyman. Gormley's frame is the whole wide world, and you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be a whole new chapter in the story of the self-portrait as a result of his work.

Here, then, is my own Gormless Self-Portrait.

moving no.2

The water's at its best for photographing when there's lots of it. This time of year is better for rebuilding the dams. That doesn't mean snapping stops.


No. 2 dam had to be moved - it was undermining the tree roots to too great a degree. I wanted to try something which would give more horizontal momentum to the water, building a narrow, but relatively deep, channel in before the fall. That way, it might be possible to push the water over several edges, moving forward. I didn't think I'd be able to see if it worked properly until we got good rain (which still hasn't happened.) Conveniently, the water company chose that afternoon to let some water out of the reservoir at the head of the valley. The horizontal momentum thing seems to work.


Elsewhere, I've been filming clouds on a Flip HD and speeding the videos up, to try and show the dimensionality of clouds. Here, the time-lapse is going in the other direction, taking a frame from a Nikon D3 every 30 seconds.


The look of the water, once it starts moving, is achieved by using my favoured shutter speed for this kind of water. Even though the exposures are 30 seconds apart, the flow still shows. I'm not keen on that milky look, favoured by camera clubs the world over. It's quite pretty, but it doesn't look like water.


The changing direction and quality of the light gives away the fact that  the video spans two sessions, before and after the England-Germany World Cup game (remember? 1 - 4). It was a comforting place to be in after that uncomfortable encounter.  I've left all the frames in, something I want to look at further, using time-lapse. I suspect that there's another form of verity video in there somewhere. I've left the white balance and aperture on auto, but, again, I'm going to play with that a little more.


(It's HD, so full-screen's good...)

Village Fate

Down in the village, the dragon of democracy has been unleashed. I decided to take a stroll through the leafy streets and watch the sideshows.

There are plastic elephants sprouting all over Westminster's parks and gardens, no doubt queuing up to get into the smoke-free rooms where the deals are fragmenting. The floors of those grandiose buildings must be bowing under their weight right now.

In the alleyways and passages, the permanent residents are tidying up for the new tenants, whoever they may be.

Meanwhile, the old tenants carry on with their business, a weary look dominating their faces.

The reptiles are feeling hurt: we didn't do what they told us to do, and they're not used to that. Some try to cover up the fact that we still have a government,

while others (like the Yellow Bellied Turncoat) chatter to each other in a meaningless way about subjects on which they have as much information as a passing pigeon.

Everywhere on College Green hair is combed,

buttons are fastened, jackets are pulled straight: the lunchtime news slot is approaching.

While one chats, surprisingly, about the knowledge he can bring to Wembley over the relaying of pitches, round the corner they are enacting old Who songs.

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

It's all so-o-o tiring...

tilting at waterfalls

I've recently discovered the joys of the tilt/shift lens. Anyone who has worked with large-format cameras (head under a cloth) will know all about this. I haven't so I didn't, other than in theory. It took a little time to get my head round it: tilting gives the ability to move the bits that are in focus (the depth of field) into different areas of the image. It can have some weird effects, particularly when deliberately misused, such as making a real scene look like a model.

Its normal use is always in danger of delivering a look like a picture postcard. It's another example of the sophistication of the modern eye: we recognise visual clues even if we don't know their names because we are bombarded with them all day. 

This extreme focus control should put you in the picture. But it doesn't. It keeps you well outside, the detail once more contributing to alienation rather than inclusion.

Slowly, I'm learning where it will improve images, and where it won't. Usually the second is easy to do but useless, the first is difficult but rewarding.

Wave those flags

Of all the spring pop-ups, the one that gives me the greatest kick is seeing the Yellow Flags come back. They seem to have an ability to capture the light and re-distribute it in a way that no other leaf can do. Other iris variants shine like this, but not to the same degree. The difficulty, of course, is in the exposure, particularly now that it's so easy to fake in Photoshop. 

As the leaves flesh-out, I'll post some more...

Sisyphus

Photography can involve much repetition, particularly when practised without additional lighting. When the thing being photographed changes all the time, and even vanishes into itself, repetition becomes the subject. This is the case with the pictures I'm making from small waterfalls, dams in a brook built from stones and gravel.

Out of six built last year, only one survives (no.2, shown in the full moon the other night). While I would be lying if I said that this was always the intent, I realised two things as I began to build them. The first, an absolute principle when dealing with water, is that you can't stop it completely, only make easier for the water to go a particular way - through as much as over. The second was that, when the waters rose in winter, the dams would, most likely, be washed away. 


So I was prepared for the disappearance of what I had built, helped it along when the rains came by opening the biggest. As soon as the water found its new channel, it ripped the surrounding rocks away.


Rather than feeling a sense of disappointment, I found myself with the prospect of sisyphean pleasure. Roll that stone!


I began rebuilding a few days ago. This year, I will try to stop at 4 dams; if they get too close together, the waters rise all the way back to the previous dam, reducing the height of the fall and thus the effect of the whole. Patience is needed to do all this: it's tempting to force the rocks into place while the flow is heavy to create instant effect. They never last if you try that. It has to be done in stages.

The first layer has to be firmly wedged, but easily overflowed. That way, it quickly builds a ramp behind from all the debris (mud, sand, shale, etc.) which will form the base of the dam as it is built back and up. This is the only point at which I do attempt to make all the water go over. It's easier to do all this when rebuilding. The side piles, (shown here at no.4) crucial to protecting the bank from unnecessary erosion, are still there from last year. All that needs to be done is to re-connect them across the middle.


That's where the water will be encouraged to go, funnelled in to a narrow space so that the pressure from behind will force it over and through, producing the spouts and sprays I want for the photographs.


(You can see these over at the website.)


Looking at the water as subject, I've started to realise a few things about why it looks the way it does. When it churns, why does it look white, for instance?  Particularly in direct sunlight, the photographs show the reason clearly. Each droplet that breaks free has a property I remember from school physics - total internal reflection - and those reflections, pointing in every direction, are bound to pick up on the light source - the moon, the sky, the sun. 

Here you can see the water breaking over a rock (click for a bigger version): to the right, a smooth body of water gently reflects the light from its cohesive surface; to the left, it is impeded by the rough edge, and breaks into streams of droplets, each with its own internal reflections, all joining together to give that white-water-look. It's another form of fractals, those repeated patterns which lie at the root of so much natural beauty.