June 2015 – Tales from Wild Wales

One afternoon last winter I felt a moment of panic. I was reviewing work in progress on my exhibition – Bird/land – and realised I had broken the back of it. There would soon come a time when it was complete.

Now, six months later, it really is ready. Since my return from France in early May I managed to get a picture of ringed plovers at Ynyslas which, combined with four other wader images, makes a nice set of five ( a quintych, perhaps?). A couple of days later it was a real bonus to find a pair of oystercatchers with a nest about three yards from a hide at Ynyshir (see above). I’ve also spent many, many hours patiently checking and adjusting every image (more than 100 of them) individually. Within each of the thirty-five works the ground colour of the images need to match. So much time spent sitting at my desk when I would rather have been outside……..

Last week I went over to St Harmon near Rhayader where Andrew Jackson is printing and framing the exhibition for me. I was very happy with most of them and he kindly agreed to reprint a few which weren’t quite up to my rigourous (and probably quite arbitrary) standards. I picked them up yesterday and they will be delivered to the gallery on Monday morning in time to be hung for the exhibition opening on Saturday June 27th. For background on the project see this post.

Bird/land consists of 35 works, many of them triptychs, in which birds and their surroundings are both integral to the images. Within each work, the images are linked by species, location, or aesthetic considerations, or sometimes all three. Each image is in panoramic format. There are also two single images.

Subject matter extends from house sparrows at a National Trust teashop to migrant dotterel on a Welsh mountain-top. In this way Jeremy Moore explores his twin passions for wildlife and landscape in every photograph.

For each work sold a donation will be made towards the reconstruction of the hides at the RSPB’s Snettisham reserve in Norfolk, which were destroyed by the storm surge in December 2013.

Bird/land is at MOMA Wales, Machynlleth, Powys, from Saturday June 27^th until September 19^th 2015.

Jeremy Moore will be giving the annual Halstatt lecture at MOMA during the Machynlleth Festival on Wednesday August 26^th.

Bird/land has been supported by the Arts Council of Wales.

I’ve added some of the works to my website, so log into that to see them and click on the Bird/land gallery. Or click on this link .

Why the panic that I experienced over the winter, then? Not happy just to get the thing over and done with? As a photographer I thrive while I am working on a specific project. It gives me the impetus to keep moving forward. In years gone by I was happy just to be exploring the world with my camera, but there’s no doubt that with age and experience that inner drive fades away. So will there be a huge gap in my life? You bet there will be.

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Purple heron : what an amazing creature!

I can’t have been the only photographer to have recently received junk email offering…..”Always have amazing skies!”. It goes on –

“With the killer App for Sky Replacement and our new Skies and Clouds Collections”

“With […………..] sky replacement is no longer like Rocket Science”

“Add Skies III and our amazing new Drag and Drop Cloud Formations and the skies the limit on creativity!”

“Two New Bundles to SAVE on so you’ll never have Dull Skies Again”

It goes on and on in this vein. I find it terribly depressing. The graphic designer could thus, for example, adapt a poor quality landscape image by adding a sky downloaded from a software package. No photographic skills required whatsoever! Likewise the amateur (or professional) landscape photographer wanting short-cuts to dramatic photographs. It has until recently been difficult to incorporate stunning skies into landscape images without stunning skies being present in reality. Doing so in the days of colour film would have involved a very high level of printing skills indeed and it is probably fairly safe to say that it had rarely been done successfully. In the brave new world of digital photography much of the work involved has been already been done by the software designer.

But this kind of approach does more than make life easier for those wanting short cuts to great landscape images. It devalues photography in its most basic sense. By its very nature a photograph has documentary qualities. I don’t mean to confuse “landscape photography” with “documentary photography” here. But a photograph – any photograph – is an interpretation of a slice of reality. It is rooted in what the photographer saw through his/her viewfinder. So a landscape photograph automatically has documentary values. The very best have both aesthetic and documentary qualities in shed loads. If the photographer has added a spectacular sky – even one of their own – that link between reality and image has been lost.

Many photographers argue that all photographs are “fake” to some extent and that therefore anything goes. In my opinion this just does not hold water. I agree that the photographer makes selections and interpretations at all stages of the process. They might use film or digital, a jpeg straight out of the camera or process a RAW file to their own satisfaction. They might use a 10stop ND filter on their DSLR, a smartphone or a pinhole camera, colour or black-and-white. By making these choices the photographer interprets their surroundings in different ways. But there is a quantum leap between that and getting a sky from elsewhere – their own library or a software program – to combine with their own image to produce a result.

If it were possible (and necessary) the photographer would physically move a minor irritant (rubbish, for example) from the foreground of a landscape image before pressing the shutter. But if not I don’t really see a problem in cloning it out at the processing stage. I’m not that much of a purist. But it is at this point we enter a very grey area indeed. Where does one draw the line between “processing” and “manipulation” – the acceptable and the unacceptable? Personally I’m happy to clone out anything which on another day might not have been there: a walker in a red cagoule, or white van in the distance, for example. Others draw the line elsewhere. But there is a line. It may well be that advertising photography is artificial through and through, and maybe we should expect that. If there was a line of telegraph poles running through a landscape, though, I badly need and want to know about it. Every picture tells a story and a manipulated one can tell quite a different story. It could be the difference between a real wilderness and an inhabited landscape in this example.

For more thoughts on this subject see this post.

On the other hand I have no philosophical problem with improving my images at the processing stage where necessary. The more I use Lightroom the more I learn what it is capable of. I was recently introduced to the adjustment brush by my correspondent David Clegg and how useful is that? How could I have managed without it, more like! During the latter stages of my Bird/land project I was able to use the adjustment brush (rather than the radial filter) to select the bird before making minor changes to its exposure or contrast, for example. So much more effective! See the purple heron image above.

More on Bird/land very shortly, by the way……..

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Month: June 2015

Bird/land

Every picture tells a story.