Alan Blacklock (1946-2010)

Kia ora tatou:

Last Wednesday night my good friend Alan Blacklock passed away, after a long battle with motor neuron disease.

Some of you will know him, and those of you who read the comments on the blog posts will have known him as the OSG. I can now safely reveal that OSG stood for Old Scots Git  (it was his idea!). His curmudgeonly comments were much appreciated.

I first met Alan on the initial Wedderburn Workshop in 2007, and we quickly became mates. OK, we smoked too much and drank too much single malt when we were together, and sometimes the truth seemed to slide conveniently by us, but that is what happens between friends. Continue reading »

Kia ora tatou:

The books are on the water.

Out There South will be here in Aotearoa in a couple of weeks.

Chris Morton and I are going to have a launch in Auckland on August 26, at his place on the North Shore.

You are ALL invited!

So, if you have time, do come along, have a drink, see/buy some prints and get a signed, discounted copy of the book.

Most of the guys will be there.

And for those of you wondering what it is like, here is some teaser text….

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Cottages and cloud, Wedderburn-Sony NEX-5, Handheld Twilight mode

Kia ora tatou:

Those of you who have done my workshops know that I often ask you to do some..ummm..gentle visualisation exercises, such as the Phone booth one. I still meet students who remind me that I put them in a phone booth for an hour and asked them to make 60 different photographs. usually there is a degree of approbium….

As part of the Winterlight workshop I take them into the Black Forest, a small area of exotic forest outside Naseby, usually on a cold, dark winter afternoon, and ask them to write a letter to a friend describing what they are feeling. They have one hour for the exercise: 35 minutes to write in their visual diaries what they are experiencing, and 25 minutes to come up with a single image which talks to what they wrote. the following day the group share the images and text. There is method in my madness: I want them to slow down and learn to hear what the place is saying to them, to involve all their senses and respond to that. This is critical in landscape photography if we are to speak with our own voices and document that conversation between the landscape and us ( in that order!) so often I see the photographer’s ego shouting down the landscape rather than a response to it.

Here then, are a series of passages and images from this year’s groups. Names withheld.

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Kia ora tatou:

I am happy to admit it: I am anal about the technical quality of my landscape photographs. Come to think of it, I am anal about the technical quality in all of my photographs. The end result of what is probably an unnatural preoccupation with technical quality has led to a restless and relentless urge to make pictures of ever better quality. I suppose at this point I should be rather apologetic, but I have no intention of doing so.

In the last few weeks I have returned to the landscape and expressing what I feel about my own country. It has led to revisiting my artist statement and thinking about whether that really holds true for me. It does.

Living in the country should make it easy to develop a vision of the landscape, and I suppose the way it does. However, living beyond the city limits and living in a pristine and beautiful environment can lead one to becoming a little blasé about what is around one and, worse still, perhaps not acknowledging the blessing and the way that I should. It is too easy to take things for granted. Fortunately, my obsessive preoccupation with technical quality ensures that I try to keep pushing the boundaries.

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Kia ora tatou:

11,000 photographs, 6724 kilometres, 17 days, eight guys.

And now it is done.

Last  April Chris Morton from Auckland and I, along with six other guys, set out on a big adventure. We drove some of the fiercest four-wheel drive tracks in the South Island, got lost, got stuck, and saw places most people never will.

Now we have written a book about it. Published by Craig Potton Publishing, it will be out in bookshops in time for Father’s Day. Chris and I shared the photography while I wrote the narrative.

If you love the mountains and being out there, grab a copy.

We hope to do  few launches here and there, including Auckland…

Ka kite ano

Kia ora tatou:

In keeping with my policy of trying to vary what I write, and include images which have little or nothing to do with the post in question, some things I need to share:

1. Practice what you preach. For ages I have blogged on about backing up data to avoid the nasty event when your hard drive crashes. Last Sunday my copy of Hard Disk Sentinel shrieked at me that unless I did something about it, the 1TB drive with my landscape photographs on it was about to fail. (I wondered what the weird clicking sound was….) The drive in question contained all my landscape photographs, 150 000 of them. In a panic, I shut down, removed the drive and sent it away to be replaced ( hopefully, along with all my data). It turns out that it was a glitch in the system and the drive is fine. Yes, before you say anything, all the files are on MyBooks in my safe. But it would have taken me a week (at least) to put them all back.  Strikes me the $NZ49 which HDS cost me was well spent…. Continue reading »

Kia ora tatou:

Of late I have begun to think about format and its significance again. One format which has always fascinated me is the panorama and its practice. It is a topic I discuss at the Winterlight Workshops, one which is, of course, devoted to the question of landscape photography. Contrary to popular opinion, there is madness in my method, and method in my madness.

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Frozen Narratives 102

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

I have watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

Roy Batty (Blade Runner)

In many ways, at certain times, I suppose I feel like the rat Ratatouille in the movie. Sometimes I really feel as if I am running backwards and forwards along the shelf, while the enraged chef aims his throwing knives at me. At one end of the shelf, I am a classic documentary photographer, trained in the old ways which are nearly 2 centuries old, in love with a medium for its own sake. On the other hand, at the other end of the shelf, somewhere past the knives quivering in the wall, is a space where Photography as we know it is undergoing a metamorphosis, where tradition has little relevance and a new paradigm is being born. Where everything has been altered by the power of PhotoShop.

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What NEX(t) ? The new Sony Nex-5- a field trial

Blinded, Cashel Mall

Those of you who have been keeping up with the play will know about the new market which has opened up in the camera scene. Panasonic and Olympus opened the game with the four thirds format. First there was the BSLR (Baby SLR) with the Olympus E-600’s and the Panasonic G-1.  Then the game heated up. Olympus fired a broadside with the Pen EP-1 & 2. Panasonic returned fire with the GS-1, both of which were aiming for the rangefinder ground inhabited by the M-series Leica and the Voigtlander Bessa. Technically cameras in this category are known as EVIL ( Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens).

The  photographic market place has seen a revival of interest in photography, because cameras of this type, quite simply, make it fun to be a photographer. And make serious photographs in the process. To date the Big Three (Canon, Nikon and Sony) have held out, but now Sony have entered the battle with the paradigm-shifting NEX-3 and NEX-5.

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Troll-pilgrim

Kia ora tatou:

Now that I am back, de-jetlagged, downloaded and transferred, and the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise ( BOTSE), also known as my workspace, is at full warp factor, there are things to be shared.

1. You didn’t hear it here, but……the newsletter of a certain NZ camera club ( no names, no pack drill)  advertised that anybody coming (oops!) to the next  meeting could expect to see X put on a mounting display for the club. One can only guess at the degree of audience participation…which reminds me of a standard Best Man’s joke I heard many times ( I photographed 800+ weddings): Have you heard the joke about someone asking for a photograph of the bride and groom, 4 by 6, mounted?  They replied that the best they could do was one of them holding hands…
2. Continue reading »

Kia ora tatou:

For those of you who use it, Lightroom 3 was released today.

If you are using the Beta version and have it set to check online for updates, it will automatically offer you the option to upgrade online from LR2 for $A124.

Those of you using LR3 Beta have until June 30 to upgrade..

Blimey! With CS5 it is turning into an expensive year….

Almost all the photographers I know and respect have a prime lens somewhere in their kit. It is one of those things that are just what you want when you want it. But there are other reasons for using a prime lens. So prime lens, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

In the Beginning, before the zoom lens, there were only prime lenses.  Zoom lenses did not appear until the mid 20^th century. You may be interested to know that most of the designs for prime lenses were formulated in the late 19^th or early 20^th centuries and, apart from advances in glass and coating technologies, have remained fairly true to their roots to this day. The Planar design is a standard and a classic. When zoom lenses first began to appear, most serious photographers stayed away, because the optical quality was…well…diabolical. My first zoom lens, a Soligor 70-200 4.5-5.6 was the perfect portrait lens, distinguishing itself by being supremely soft at all apertures and all focal lengths. Its optical qualities would have made Claude Monet happy.

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Of all the traits which I think are vital to being a documentary photographer, I think an unhealthy curiosity or, simply put, sheer nosiness, is core critical and fundamental. Shyness isn’t necessarily desirable either. And you can only do fly-on-the wall for so long. In the end you simply have to poke your nose in.

I had been driving past it for the last couple of weeks.

There, on my right or left, depending on which way I went around the square, was a dusty marquee sitting by itself on a dusty square of dirt in the middle of town. Its faded blue and white stripes told of years of use and a degree of neglect. What on earth, I asked myself, was a marquee doing in the middle of Smitville?

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Views, Wilderness

Kia ora tatou:

1. As many of you who are Facebook friends will know, I came to South Africa this time to get married to Heather and the ceremony took place in the labyrinth where we met last year. If you are interested, you can see some photographs here.  I know that some of you want to know, so the answer to your question is: She is South African, an actuary by trade and experience, has been an investment portfolio manager and currently is involved in health economics and policy, working on South Africa’s attempt to introduce a National Health scheme. She is also a qualified Ayurvedic medicine practitioner and has considerable training in homoeopathy and a love of Chinese Medicine.  Her website is here.  Heather and I will be travelling back to Hanmer at the end of the month. She has yet to experience a New Zealand winter, let alone one in the mountains…We will be essentially vagrant (or  vagrantly essential) for the next week, so if any of you email me, please don’t be offended if a response takes a few days to come.  It will be an as and when possible situation.

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Turn to Jesus, Willowmore

Well she walked up to my quarterlight
and she bent down real slow…
She said “Son, what are you doing here?
On your journey ‘cross the wilderness
from the desert to the well
you have strayed upon the motorway to Hell

Chris Rea- The Road to Hell Part 1

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Albert Camus

It seems to me that towns fall into one of three categories.

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