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.”
