Crappy Snaps

It's a splendid thing that kids have embraced film for stills. They love it. And the trendiness of the medium ensures that one more generation will be properly aware of the physicality of photography.

One inevitable drawback at the beginning of any photographer's use of film, the learning days, is that one or several frames on each roll may be blank or fogged. When there was only film, all the processing shops, particularly the high street ones, knew this, and charged per print. If you had a blank frame, you didn't pay for a print of it (although some unscrupulous operations would try this one on).

However, if a kid takes the 120 roll from his Diana into Snappy Snaps, about the only high street print shop left, he will be told that he has to pay for a print of every frame, whether it's been exposed or not. Even more curiously, if the film turns out to be completely blank (forgotten to take the lens cap off?) they will generously only charge just over 2 quid. If it has exposed images on it, the developing alone will cost around 9 quid. The cost to them has been the same, properly exposed or not. If you want prints (see above) it's around 15 quid.

All this will do is tell the kids that they've unwittingly taken up a very expensive hobby, and send them back to their point-and-shoot digitals. It's as if Crappy Snaps want to look cool but can't be bothered to do the work associated with it.

New Prune

Going for a walk at the Hermitage is synonymous with exposing a frame or two, but this time the Nikon was spitting incomprehensible error numbers at me and the Fuji's battery was flat; its charger has not yet found a safe place to travel and so had been left behind.

I walked without a camera and saw a hundred and one shots I would have liked to take. The time of year is fast approaching when it's unwise to be without a camera at any moment: the sun sinks lower, giving off warmer colour and more interesting shadows, the trees put on their gold and bronze while opening their curtains. The landscape changes shape and colour, the smells change.

There was no frustration in the process, rather, a calm excitement. Reminders of unfinished business (anything to do with landscape is always unfinished) were everywhere. Some could stay unfinished (I no longer think that that an extended panorama, electronic or rolled-up-print, of the brook would be of any interest to either myself or anyone else) and some could be happily welcomed back (reflections of sunlight off the surface into dark corners come back into their own as the sun dips and glows).

Above all, it was an almost-forgotten pleasure just to look. Capture, in its usual form, was not there to halt the process. I do retain two of the potential images in my mind's gallery. This will become a problem at some future moment when the image continues to burn brightly long after I have forgotten that I never actually took the picture. I will search my hard drives high and low for it and in the process will accidentally discover taken images which I had forgotten. These will either be rescued from the darkness of the archive or will lead to new photographic forays. Whichever, the act of not taking photographs on one day will certainly lead to more and better on another. It's like pruning, cutting back growth in order to encourage more.

I shall take more pruning walks in the future.

old chestnuts in spring?

In the park today I came across these two objects, lying in the middle of the path, with no sign of an owner.

They had prompted a series of super-fast movies in my head, detailing alternative possibilities for the story connected to the shoe and the sock. I noticed that others appeared to be doing the same thing and so began to photograph their reactions.

Not everyone noticed them.

Then I stopped, because the thought that had entered my head seemed more pressing than making the pictures.

What if it had been me who put them there?

It's a very similar question to the one that landscape photographers ask themselves: if I move that branch out of the way, am I somehow cheating?

And then I became cross with myself, because it seemed as if I was making the same mistake as the viewer who says "Ah! But you've used Photoshop on that" as if there were some contract that comes with every camera, stipulating that all pictures made with the machinery must be a 100% honest and accurate record of what was there.

I suspect that, if I had put the shoe and sock there, I would have felt a duty to show deliberately some kind of knowingness in the images. Photographers like Gregory Crewdson have made careers out of single questions such as this, questions which non-photographers regard with deep suspicion and at which photographers groan inwardly. It seems a simple enough question but it isn't.

get back

Going to a heritage visitor attraction in the UK is visiting a museum, no matter what the owners and managers might say about living history. There is no real connection between the presented heritage of the past and the evolving heritage of the present. They are separate worlds.
At first glance this seems also to be the case in China but it doesn't take long to realise that there's a connection here which is lacking in the West. Although every town and city appears to have its own version of Chinatown, as if it were San Francisco or Soho, it soon becomes clear that the front melds seamlessly into the back. Once more, the old rubs shoulders with the new. 

In Zhu Jiajiao cranes tower behind preserved roofscapes while an old man playing an Erhu on a stone bridge sits on a soft laptop-case as a cushion.

On the narrow streets beside the canals, thronged by Chinese tourists, live chickens change hands for the daily meal.

This is one of the many places where the damage created by the Cultural Revolution is being repaired in front of our eyes. But the living heritage is somewhat different. The New China is rising in front of you everywhere, several revolutions happening simultaneously on every side, but predominantly the industrial one with its insatiable demand for more and better communications.

I've rarely seen a better example of form following function to create beauty than the soaring highway interchanges. They can be sen better in a video taken from the new bullet train, which I'll post later in edited form. Of course, many of these skyways have been created at the expense of the destruction of old agricultural villages. Inhabitants are moved to new high rises built nearby. Is their life improved or just changed? Too many told me that it was improved to credit the idea that this is just propaganda.

Shanghai 3

There's a very clear awareness of heritage but a refreshing control on potential excesses of its showing. The Merchant's House is remarkable; but it would only take one or two more to make a bof blasé. The attention to detail becomes the norm very quickly. It's exhilarating finding that the fractals of detail go all the way down to invisible.

And then I start to notice the tones. They have this familiarity to them. I think I know what it is. I take a shot to see if it will translate.

It does.

These are the processes.

I notice that the dark to light contrasts alternate down the view. It looks designed and the design looks familiar, but not in this form. It also looks as if the haze might be being taken into account in this design, as if it's being used to to put a perspective-enhancing grad onto the perceived image.  How would it look in the tone country of Black & White?

The detail of the foreground leaps out, while the background still retains powerful shape even in its reduced contrast.

In the eye-brain complex, one of the foremost tools is edge detection.  There are identifiable sectors of the brain which perform this vital function. In the hyper-fast computation that gives us the the illusion of seeing, edges are primary structure.

Photoshop, being rooted in the wet darkroom and the seeing eye, has an edge detection filter. Within the limitations of doing only that, it helps to show what an extraordinary skill good draughtsmanship is.

And the edges have it. The pattern that now emerges so clearly is an evenly processed derivative of a photograph. No tuning is necessary. When a blue filter is applied, a creditable facsimile of Willow Pattern types appears. The plates are not an idealised fantasy but a clear and accurate representation of an amazing construct, designed precisely for this circular appreciation.

More on environment and medium later...

Shanghai 2: not to scale

Scale is the consistently disconcerting element in China. In Shanghai, it's the scale of the buildings, their size, their height. It becomes hard to read when they're massed together. It's said that there are more true skyscrapers (whatever they are) in Shanghai than in the whole of America. Century Avenue is currently the home of the big boys.

How big? Numbers won't do it. This series of images may go some way to illustrate the enormity. They are taken from the 83rd floor of what is currently the tallest on the block.

Finally, an artist's impression of the new tower which will become the Big Daddy in a couple of years.

Question: did the artist see himself in a helicopter or in an as-yet unplanned trumping tower?

Warning: this present is from the past.

I couldn't blog from China. Google and the authorities are having a spat. Google is being pompous with grown-up words like human rights which it doesn't quite understand, China has just turned its back on a petulant child.

This means that anything I write about China is not from there, just about there. I'm here now, just in case you thought I was there, and then feel affronted when you discover I'm not. Some things may appear to happen before other things when they didn't and vice versa.

I do hope that clears things up.