On flow

I started writing this post in early June (yes, 7 months ago!) in the middle of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. I had read an article in the Black+White Photography magazine some moths back that made me think about abstraction and breaking the rules of image composition, and of achieving a balanced histogram, with the right level of midtones and highlights and shadows. This post is the result of a forced attempt at breaking some of those rules. I hope I was successful but I will let you be the judge of that.

In looking for a topic and connecting thread — a focal point for this lockdown project — I first spent a couple of weeks before the summer searching through hundreds of images in archives dating as far back as 2006. This was fun (and as a result I added “organise photo archives” to my todo list).

I started by searching for photographs with flowing water as I had just shot a few such images while on a walk the week before starting the project. As a theme, flow was sufficiently generic and allowed me to be more flexible with the post-processing techniques I wanted to try, whilst still keeping things deliberately abstract. I also wanted to try and break the more conventional limits of balance, contrast and exposure. Not having the distractive nature of colour seemed like the natural way to go, thus the choice for converting all images to black and white.

With all this in mind I found myself closing up on the edges of photographs, on seemingly uninteresting areas, instead of the usual sitting back and looking at whole images. I used and abused the crop tool in the development stage, directly on the RAW files, without worrying too much about what an extreme crop could mean in terms of detail and pixellation on the final processed image. Some of the crops exclude more than 95% of the original image and have quite a lot of grain as a result. Once I was happy with the cropped images, I hid the histogram from view and used a similar approach with contrast, exposure, hue, etc. experimenting with taking these controls to the extremes.

The result is this visual essay On flow in 16 images. It was fun to do and a very good use of a few lockdown long afternoons and evenings. Click the button below to see the whole gallery.

— FTD, Dec 2020

“Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun’s melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him.”

— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

In Flanders fields

On a business trip to Belgium a few years ago, I was privileged to visit Ieper (Ypres) and other towns, villages and World War I sites in Flanders. I was lucky to have been guided by a good friend who not only lives in the region but also has immense historical and technical knowledge about the Great War. Having the right person around made this a very worthwhile experience. This was a trip I had wanted to do for a while and ended up exceeding expectations.

We started with a morning visit to the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917 in Zonnebeke, which I strongly recommend, and then went on to visit other main WWI locations, including the Tyne Cot Cemetery, on the road from Passchendaele to Broodseinde, designed by Sir Herbert Baker and John Reginald Truelove. The Tyne Cot Memorial on the north-eastern boundary of the cemetery commemorates nearly 35,000 servicemen from the United Kingdom and New Zealand who died in the Ypres Salient after 16 August 1917 and whose graves are not known.

In the afternoon we visited the Langemark German War Cemetery, north of Ieper. During World War I this was mainly on the German side of the frontline and is now one of the largest German war cemeteries in the west, with more than 44,000 casualties buried here. I was impressed by how different it is in its architecture from the allied war graves and cemeteries.

“Started as enemies, finished as friends, we are all as equal as each other, but innocent at heart, we appreciate your sacrifices — Rest in peace”

— A message left by students and staff of Ivybridge Community College, Devon, UK, on the central memorial stone of the Langemark German War Cemetery.

After an early dinner, our day in Ieper ended with the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing. This moving ceremony takes place every day at 8.00 pm under the Reginald Blomfield's triumphal arch, designed in 1921. This is now the mausoleum that honours the Missing, who have no known graves. It was the closest gate of the town to the fighting.

This was back in June 2017 and before leaving Edinburgh to Belgium I decided to travel light. So, stupidly, I did not take any of my cameras with me. I asked a friend in Belgium if I could borrow his camera for a day — a Sony A230, not bad, but not my Nikon D810! I decided (stupidly, again) to shoot JPG instead of RAW, as I was not familiar with the camera, which later limited my ability to post-process and get the most of the images I made.

It was a mild spring day with mostly clear skies and very strong wind, not ideal conditions for outdoors photography. However, as some of the photographs were taken indoors focusing proved not an easy task in the darker museum halls. I set the camera to ISO auto mode, adding a lot of grain to the darker images, which in my opinion resulted quite well in some cases.

It took me more than 3 years to publish this post and images. I often find that it helps not working on photographs immediately after I take them. After a photo trip I usually upload all photos from the camera to my archive and don’t look at them. I will then come back and work on them after a few months (often more than 3 months). This helps me get the images out of context when I’m post-processing, and focus only — or mostly — on composition and the graphical content and visual impact. I was in London last weekend so expect a post on that 3 years from now!

I used the ON1 Photo RAW 2019 image post-processor to convert all images to black and white and add a few more simple edits, such as enhancing tone, dynamic contrast and light vignetting, with results that I feel convey the spirit of the moments, although I’m not 100% happy with all the results. With only a couple of exceptions, I didn’t do any local adjustments.

You can see these and more images related to this post as a separate gallery by clicking the button below.

— FTD, Feb 2020

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”

— John McCrae