GAA in Munich

As I turn my thoughts towards my next course, most likely Social Documentary, I need to start engaging with the community around me and build some relationships that might develop into opportunities for prolonged projects.  One group is the Munich Gaelic Sports Club, the "Munich Colmcilles".  My long time friend and neighbour is a leading figure in the club and has invited me on a couple of occasions to photograph tournaments, a great chance to experiment with Sports photography, not something I do very often.

Recently an opportunity came up to promote the club and participate in a global GAA activity.  The brief was to take a photograph that juxtaposed the Gaelic players against the city they lived in.  A first glance this sounded quite easy, but it was not so.  The first challenge was getting enough people to show up and spend 2 hours on a hot Sunday afternoon being prodded into position in front of Munich's landmarks.  The second was, what landmarks?  Munich is a very attractive and historical city, but it has few significant landmarks that shout Munich.  The stadiums at the Olympic Park or the new football arena were possibles, but too far out of town and isolated. Having selected a few possible landmarks the further issue was to photograph the players in such a way that they were not too prominent, but equally not invisible at the bottom of the frame.

 The initial plan was to pose people in small groups in front of major landmarks.  The first is the town hall, nice photo, but not very informative

Another idea was to use the blue and white flag of Bavaria and the Lowenbrau brewery to contrast with the blue and white of the team uniform.  This one is better, but might create issues with the GAA as they are trying to downplay advertising of alcohol at games

This one is possibly even worse, but then again the Hofbrauhaus is the most famous Munich landmark.  The problem is that it is not terribly photogenic.

An alternate strategy was to have the guys actually do something with a ball.  The first of these is primarily interesting due to the tourist standing in the background, she must have been puzzled. 

This is the best of those we took, the two guys jumping for the ball frame the 3rd in the background and the ball is clearly visible in the sky.  It could be improved, the ball is too high in the hot, but given limited time and a group of people desperate to get to the beer garden this was not bad.

When we finally got to the beer garden we took the obligatory shot of the team in front of the Chinese Tower, the band stand for the beer garden.  

Was a fun day and nice to have couple of Mass glasses (1 litre) of beer afterwards.  I think with more planning and better direction of the people involved we could have done better.  I only found out an hour in advance that we were going to do this.  

Longer term it was good to support the club and Niall in particular.  They are a fun group and in need of promotion which I can support through photography.  In return I hope to be able to do some more candid work to document the people involved and how an Irish sport is finding recruits amongst the German population.  I have no expectations from this, it is simply good to support the club and get involved.

Back from Borneo

It is good to be back writing my blog.

May was only the second month since September 2009 that I did not post an update to one of my OCA blogs.  2 weeks traveling and then a couple of weeks extra time away from the OCA have recharged my batteries and renewed enthusiasm that was beginning to flag.  The OCA has transformed my life, providing an all consuming hobby and a sense of purpose outside of my career.  However, it is hard work, I have to keep reminding myself that I am studying for a degree not a simple correspondence course in Photographic technique.  I am doing as much or sometimes more work each week than I did when studying for my first degree in Mathematical Physics, granted I was a lazy git back then.  The big difference was that I had a 3 month break each year when in full time study, a luxury I no longer enjoy.  I have contemplated taking a break from the course for June-September, but the truth is I wouldn't know what to do with myself.  In the end a 1 month break was just the ticket and something I need to do once a year around my vacation.

Back to that vacation, how did it go and what did I achieve.  When I set out this year I was very conscious of wanting to apply artistic thought to my underwater photography, but at the same time try and kick back a little and enjoy the holiday.  In previous years I would spend 8 hours a day preparing for and completing 4 dives, then spend at least 2 hours downloading 300-400 frames to evaluate and edit.   This year I abandoned my laptop and took instead an image tank that connected to my iPad.  Instead of 4 dives we did 3 and typically shot 50 frames versus 100 per dive.  Downloading and a brief look took place in the bar over a chilled beer.  MUCH BETTER!

Another reason for taking fewer shots was that I spent far more time underwater thinking about what I wanted to shoot and how I was going to shoot it.  I went from being reactive to proactive.  This is nature photography, so chance played a large part, however, I still could predict from the dive site what I would encounter and prepare accordingly.  I had two overriding objectives, the first to portray the underwater environment as I see it and to place the animals I found in their environment.  Much underwater photography is highly stylistic and formulaic, photographers have adopted a small number of popular shot styles and then done them to death.  It is a little like an underwater camera club session, cliches abound. There are two current trends:

1. Use of a fisheye for wide angle, distorting reality, but allowing very close up shooting
2. Extreme macro, producing ever more detailed images of the strange animals that inhabit the reef.

Both have their place, but are being done to death.  I consciously tried to step away from this and do my own thing, not always successfully, but on the whole I am pretty happy with what I achieved.

My first goal was to capture the reef and the incredible beauty of Sipadan.  This is very much harder than it looks as the dynamic range of the scenes can be immense especially when the surface is present.  I balance this by using flash guns to provide some fill light, however, it is very easy to blow out the highlights.  The challenge is a maximum sync speed on the flash of 1/250s.  Typically I shoot in Aperture priority, however, when including the surface I had to move to Shutter Speed priority which risked a very small aperture and then losing the flash - I could go on, it is hard to do, but when it works...

Another priority this time was to portray the act of diving

Turning to the animals I encountered, their environment was key, I wanted the viewer to have a sense of where they lived and the threat they faced.  This is not always so easy, most of the following shots use a 60mm macro lens, which does not have a terribly large field of view when shooting at 50cm from the subject (pretty much the maximum effective working distance for the strobes in water).  A further challenge is that I wanted the world to look real, which meant blue backgrounds, i.e. what you expect to see underwater.  This means a wide aperture, much beyond f/8 and the background would render nearly black, precisely the type of stylized imagery I wanted to avoid.  Again keeping the shutter speed below 1/250s became a challenge, but with a macro lens a much more workable one.  Low apertures bring other problems such as making focus far more critical and also the flashes illuminate more of the water and also the crap that is in the water. Thank goodness for the spot removal tool, tedious but essential.

Having said that close up was not my thing, I could not resist a few goes at portrait shots:

On the whole I feel I met my brief and have around 150 good images that now need to slim down to around 100 shots that will become part of the book of the trip.  One reason all of the aspect ratios are the same in this post is that I plan a very strict format for the book retaining a horizontal 3:2 aspect ratio for the included photographs...

New York - Looking Back

Back home now after a fabulous 4 days.  I am just now getting a chance to look at the photographs I took and reflect upon the experience I had in New York.  I took around 800 shots across a wide range of subject matter. Indeed this was the challenge of being in New York, it is visually arresting, everywhere you look something is happening, colour, form, interaction, juxtaposition, pattern, impact, perspective; the city is a perpetual assault on the eye.

When I planned the visit, I was thinking Gerry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz, when I arrived I rapidly found myself in Alfred Stieglitz territory and then Gursky raised his head.  The problem I had was simply too much material triggering too many thought processes.  4 days is enough time to smell the place, to photograph it would take a lifetime, even if only considering a tiny element of what the city has to offer.  In the end I became overloaded and sank into a touristic torpor simply clicking away at whatever mad sight came next. But, hey, this was meant to be a holiday, not a photographic marathon, so I went with the flow hoping that among the many frames I exposed I would get a few that would stand up and be counted.

The first impression, simply turning the corner from our hotel was the vibrancy of the place, this was inspired by Meyerowitz's street level images contrasting the dark shadows of the street with the blasts of colour from the buildings

Wearing my street photographer hat I really was spoilt for choice, this is the best image I captured, colour and movement.

Another photographer whose inspiration I brought with me was Joel Sternfeld and in particular his study of the the Highline.  We dutifully visited the raised railroad, now a linear park stretching 15 blocks.  Early on a Sunday morning we were among the few out and about:

One of the more bizarre incidents happened on the way to the Highline the day after we went to the WeeGee exhibit at the International Center for Photography.  A blood trail led across 4 blocks, weaving in and out, sometimes just a trickle occasionally a splash.  I thought it might just be a nose bleed, but the amount of blood contradicted that theory.  Perhaps some crime, maybe the ghost of a man with a Speed Graphic lurked in the alleyways:

I mentioned Stieglitz at the beginning.  The view from our 37th floor room brought me to that mode of thought:

Very reminiscent of the images he made from hotel and apartment windows in New York.

I will be returning to my New York photographs over a few blog entries to come.  One decision I made on arrival was to conciously work on 4 of the upcoming projects in the course:

Re-photograph a known photo, well not hard in New York.  This was an early shot in developing a sequence leading to attempting to rephotograph one of my favorite historical images, did I mention Stieglitz.

Using a wide angle lens for near far juxtaposition

Using a telephoto to compress planes

And finally picking scenes from a landscape - did they mention an elevated position.  Well here is my starting point, again shot from my hotel bedroom window:

An amazing and totally enjoyable weekend.

Tulips - A week later

After much musing on the fleeting existence of life and in particular its expression through a tulip, I am drawn once more to consider the way that a photograph can capture a moment in time.  A photo is a frozen expression of what once was and can never be again, immediately sad and yet with the passage of time gaining a warm glow of reminiscence and perhaps nostalgia.  Serious photography seems inexorably drawn towards the fringe, decay and often destruction take center stage in the photographic contemplation of life.  Yet we strive among the chaos to find beauty and order.

Two weeks ago the perfect form and silky colour of spring tulips caught my attention resulting in a sequence of almost dream like photographs delving deep into the detail of these flowers.  A few days later the blooms have fallen and their shape begins the transformation of decay.  At this stage a few flowers entered a brief period of new exuberance, a comment on one of these photos compared them to Henry Matisse' "Dance".  Truly they did seem to have the life and swirl portrayed in this great painting:

It is almost as if with the end approaching the flowers made one last attempt at there former glory.  Within days all was gone, the petals shriveled and the colour darkened to a sickly purple

The dance of life had come to an end, still strangely beautiful, but melancholy.  Each tulip came to an end in a different way.  A single bloom retained its shape and slowly shriveled in upon itself, like an aging actress desperately clinging to former beauty, but surrendering to the wrinkles of time:

The colour echoes the excess of rouge that feebly attempts to mask what we can all see.  Two other blooms died a similar way, but without the symmetry of life

Now part of some landfill on the edge of the city, these once fragile flowers will only ever live on as pixels on my hard drive and perhaps as a print to decorate the walls of somebody trying to make sense of the passage of time.

Tulips

Over the years I have tried to successfully photograph a tulip, yearning to capture it's essential beauty in colour, shape, and form.  My houses walls are plastered in the outcome of these exercises, decorative photos that brighten a room or corridor, but somehow miss the mark.  I have tried printing on gloss paper, on water colour paper, shot individual flowers and bunches.  Somehow I never quite achieve what I want, yet I continue to strive.  I think the problem largely comes down to defining what I am trying to achieve, that essential "Tulipness" that will define forever a tulip.

My recent thoughts about how death permeates photography are best represented by a tulip, a bloom that one picked has a few days of glory before the petals fall and the bin beckons.  During that short period I can capture that unique flower and attempt to preserve it's delicate colour and texture.  This weekend was another go at the tulip conundrum.  I wanted something very soft, but without a huge amount of work.  Guess I was feeling lazy after days tromping around in the snow.

I decided to shoot with a black background using a macro flash system attached to the lens of the camera

A back cloth and the very localized flash has prevented the background intruding into the photograph and I have managed to capture colour and contrast.  Using f/2.8 I have minimized the depth of field, but failed to generate an image of softness.  I really need a white background for this style of shot to work, which would need studio lighting to achieve.  These were shot with a 100mm macro which means that I must shoot pretty much the whole flower as I am limited to 1:1.

I switched to a 65mm macro, a rather special lens that enables 1:1 to 5:1 magnification on a full frame camera.  This is not the easiest lens to use as focusing at a fixed magnification requires moving the camera or subject, there is no conventional focus ring on the lens.  I have a macro rail, so that can be readily accomplished.  Enough of the technical and onto the intent.  I wanted to lose the overall structure of the tulips and look deeper into the colour and texture of the petals, in particular in the way they overlap. At 3x - 5x magnification I captured the following

I have left behind the domain of shapes and entered a world dominated by colour.  In each image a portion is in focus, but at f/2.8 and high magnification there is almost zero depth of field.  In a sense I am exploring the landscape of the flower, these images can only be seen through this lens, as I move the camera up and down I enter the folds of the petals encountering new textures and colours.  I feel these photos get much closer to my emotional response to these flowers, an abstract view of a fragile colour field.

The city skyline

Taking a walk across the city to do some exploratory work for the Winter component of my portfolio I came to the summit of the Olympiaberg.  It was just before sunset and the light was starting to drop.  Sadly not a good time of day to capture images for my portfolio, but a great opportunity to reach for my telezoom and shoot a few city skylines.  The first is a conventional juxtaposition of the city against the Alps in the background.  The illusion of the Alps being close to the city is slightly present, less haze would make the Alps almost grow from the suburbs.  This is a shot frequently used in publicity for the city and one that deliberately misleads a potential visitor into believing that Munich is literally in the shadow of the Alps.

A lower viewpoint can also help to further this illusion.  This is a great example of the distortion of truth that photography can be used to deliver.

Alternatively sometimes all you want is a little beauty, panning the camera around to the West I captured this shot of the Zugspitz rising above Munich.  Here all that matters is colour, form is secondary, although I have framed the image so that the building complements the bulk of the distant peak.

Taking away form altogether, shooting into the sunset yielded this picture.  No comment, just glory in nature.