Green Gallery

MS Johanna

2012-01-31T14:47:00.001Z

My working practice seems to have the construction of an image as an inherent part of it. This picture of the MS Johanna in a gale at high tide wrecked on Hartland Point was constructed from 4 photographic frames taken over a 10 minute period. I made 54 separate RAW images from a fixed camera viewpoint between 09.31 and 09.41 on December 16^th 2011. The finished print reflects my memory of the place and of the experience of being there at that time.

The key reason for needing to combine frames for this image has to do with the limitations of the camera. Our eyes instantly focus as we observe a scene so that the foreground, middle and background appear all in focus to us. To achieve this depth of vision I am forced to use a very small aperture in the camera lens and compensate this with a slow shutter speed. But my memory of these terrific waves breaking on the quay is of that frozen moment when they reach their zenith before they come crashing down again. To capture that moment I needed to use a fast shutter speed and compromise that with a wide aperture which made the background, and the all important shipwreck, out-of-focus.

Other reasons for combining frames in this image was the sky which I was able to make more like I saw it by exposing it for less time and making it darker. The aperture in our eyes alters automatically; as we look at something lighter it closes and as I have found in many dark caves the aperture opens and in time the rods in the eye take over from the cones. I also chose a frame where the MS Johanna was both visible and light enough to make out against the background cliffs.

It had always been my intention in the planning of this photograph that it should be a combination of the wind, storm, high tide, waves, the wreck of the Johanna and to include a stretch of the Hartland cliffs as a setting. Although I shot 126 photographs in total within a ½ hour period I had done this with the goal of this one image in mind.

As a comparison I’ve included a picture made last summer of the same shipwreck.

Heavy Weather

2012-01-30T17:50:00.002Z

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about shipwrecks and lifesaving in preparation to my Graveyard of the Atlantic exhibition this April. This title has become an inspiration to me. The North Devon coast has approximately 10 shipwrecks every mile but most of them don’t stay around for too long. One of the oldest still visible is the Sally of Bristol wrecked in 1769 on the beach at Northam Burrows. But you don’t have to photograph a shipwreck to evoke the Graveyard of the Atlantic. So I’ve been out in all weathers (except sunny and fine) trying to show why this coast got its name.

The photograph above was made in the early morning light, high tide in a gale at Hartland Point in December. The MS Johanna, which was wrecked here 400 metres from the lighthouse (which is behind me) can be seen in the far distance. More details about this image can be found on my blog post MS Johanna. This is not the kind of weather you would want to be out at sea and it is easy to imagine how easily a ship could go down especially in the days before modern navigation; once a sail has been torn or a rudder broken you’re totally at the mercy of the sea.

Heavy Weather, a new set of images to supplement my cave photographs, will be at Schooners Cafe in Appledore from Saturday 11th February.

I have a new series of photographic workshops starting with an Introduction to Digital Photography on Saturday February 11th. The complete list is as follows:

Photographic Workshops in Devon, Winter 2012

Introduction to digital photography 10am - 5pm - £50
A practical days workshop learning to gain control over your camera, shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, flash etc, setting it up for optimum quality under any given lighting, and making better pictures through composition. Numbers limited to a hand-full.

Saturday 11th February in Bideford
Saturday 25th February in Barnstaple
Thursday 1st March in South Molton
Thursday 8th March in Bideford

Half Day Intro to digital photography 2.00pm - 4.30pm - £25
A 'sit around the table' workshop to get to know your camera better. You'll learn about shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, flash and setting your camera up for optimum quality.

Wednesday 22nd February in Bideford
Wednesday 14th March in Barnstaple

Painting with Light 6pm - 9.00pm - £25
An evening workshop celebrating the dark nights of the Winter. You'll learn how to make 'long exposure' photographs using coloured lights, flames, sparklers and hand-held flash.

Sunday 12th February - Northam Burrows (Westward Ho!)

Photographing your own Artwork 10am - 5pm - £50
I have a wealth of knowledge and experience of photographing 2D artwork, jewellery and ceramics and I'm willing to pass this on to artists eager to improve their own image making camera skills. Although this workshop is for a small group (max 5) I also offer it on a 1:1 basis for ½ a day for the same price.

Wednesday 15th February in Bideford

Introduction to Photoshop 10am – 5pm - £50
Opening an image file and adjusting levels, contrast, brightness and colour balance. Rotating, resizing and cropping an image. Placing an image or images into a new file. Using layers and history. Participants will need to be computer literate i.e. use a computer on regular basis and understand the basic controls. Small group (max 4).

Thursday 16th February in Bideford

Intermediate Photoshop 10am – 5pm - £50
Using tools, masks and filters to manipulate your image. Tools used in this session are: marquee, move, lasso, magic wand, eraser, paint bucket, eyedropper, hand and zoom. Making a contact sheet and using batch production. Adding type to your image. Participants will need to be computer literate i.e. use a computer on regular basis and understand the basic controls. Small group (max 4).

Thursday 15th March in Bideford

The Stone Hole

2012-01-15T11:04:00.002Z

The Stone Hole, Woodhouse Eves, Leicstershire

Over the Christmas break I visited my family in Leicestershire, where I spent the first 20+ years of my life. I love the countryside there. Charnwood Forest is an area where granite sits proudly in outcrops on the surface and there are always plenty of native deciduous trees. There's also lots of hiking opportunities and this snap* was from one of those on Boxing Day.
This cave is a place I know from my childhood. And it's a place my dad knew well as his school and the church where he was a choir boy was minutes away from it. What kind of influence might a place like this have had on my young mind? Looking at it now I was surprised to see such familiar colours from the slate greys to the orange tinge from iron deposits. The shape was also very familiar and this is probably because 'The Stone Hole' was once a mine, and is very similar to ones I have explored at Combe Martin at home in North Devon.

This early 1900's image was found whilst I was trying to find the name of this cave. I was stuck by the fact that it was a commercially available postcard and that there is a group of well dressed people in it. I sometimes feel I was born 100 years too late! I've seen similar Victorian pictures of landscape where people are picnicking, studying, rockpooling and enjoying for it's wildness whereas now those same places are our toilets and rubbish tips.

*for my fine-art images I would take considerable time, use a tripod, shoot sometimes over 100 photographs, spend hours (possibly days) processing the frames and constructing the image to my memory of the place. This really was a snap-shot with compromises on camera support, iso, aperture etc.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-22T10:03:00.000Z

O Little Town of Bideford © Dave Green 2011

I usually try something out of my comfort zone, challenging or off-the-wall as a Christmas Image. This year I got playing with an iPhone app called CamWow. My iPhone3 doesn’t give me anything like professional photos and this app downgrades the image size to 320 x 427 pixels, which is about the size of the screen on the phone. The effects aren’t new, there’s nothing that you couldn’t do in Photoshop; however with CamWow you can see the image manipulation in real time as you use the camera. The line drawing effect I used for my ‘card’ worked particularly well in the dark where it changes night to day and the world through the camera-phone’s ‘viewfinder’ is cartoon like. The software also has a remarkable way of getting a sharp picture under very low light; it seems like it waits until the camera is still to make the exposure.

The small images were butted up to each other in Photoshop layers afterwards and colour was added sparingly.

Have a wonderful, safe, merry Christmas and do something creative in 2012.

AONB SDF

2011-12-12T17:33:00.002Z

North devon with the AONB area highlighted

I’ve just been awarded a grant towards my Graveyard of the Atlantic exhibition at the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island, April–June 2012 and somewhere in North Devon in 2012. The grant was applied for from the North Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) Sustainable Development Fund. The photographs in the exhibition are all from within the AONB and will do well to promote the North Devon Coast and AONB in Bideford’s twin town in North Carolina, USA. The exhibition will be supported with explanatory text and maps and illustrated talks and workshops.

I was invited to show some of my photographic work to the director of the North Carolina Aquarium during an arts networking trip in 2010, and from this meeting was invited to exhibit there in 2012. Graveyard of the Atlantic is a phrase used to describe both our rocky shore and the 200 mile long sand dune barrier island coast of North Carolina for the vast number of ship wrecks each have sustained since the Middle Ages. North Devon’s relationship with North Carolina stretches back to the first ‘lost’ colony planted on Roanoke Island by Bideford’s Lord of the Manor Sir Richard Grenville in 1585. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in this relationship with the twinning of Bideford with Manteo and in North Devon as the source of America’s first English Colony. The display of constructed photographs and text of North Devon’s coast, emphasising its harsh rugged beauty in stark contrast to the sunny, sandy beach associated with North Carolina; will be the first time many locals and visitors have seen the North Devon coast or in fact a rocky shore.

After June it is planned to move the NC exhibition to the Elizabethan Gardens on Roanoke Island. If you would like to host this exhibition in North Carolina, Devon or further afield please email me here: info@greengallery.co.uk

Keyhole Cave, Hartland

Winter Workshops

2011-11-21T13:44:00.003Z

Photographic Workshops in Devon, Winter 2012

Painting with Light on Westward Ho! Beach

Email info@greengallery.co.uk to reserve a place on a workshop

Introduction to digital photography 10am - 5pm - £50
A practical days workshop learning to gain control over your camera, shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, flash etc, setting it up for optimum quality under any given lighting, and making better pictures through composition. Numbers limited to a hand-full.
Saturday 7th January in Bideford
Tuesday 24th January in Bideford
Saturday 28th January in Barnstaple

Half Day Intro to digital photography 2.30pm - 5pm - £25
A 'sit around the table' workshop to get to know your camera better. You'll learn about shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, flash and setting your camera up for optimum quality.
Wednesday 11th January in Bideford
Monday 16th January in Barnstaple
Saturday 21st January in Bideford

Painting with Light 6pm - 9.00pm - £25
An evening workshop celebrating the dark nights of the Winter. You'll learn how to make 'long exposure' photographs using coloured lights, flames, sparklers and hand-held flash.
Sunday 8th January - Northam Burrows
Sunday 12th February - Northam Burrows

Photographing your own Artwork 10am - 5pm - £50
I have a wealth of knowledge and experience of photographing 2D artwork, jewellery and ceramics and I'm willing to pass this on to artists eager to improve their own image making camera skills. Although this workshop is for a small group (max 5) I also offer it on a 1:1 basis for ½ a day for the same price.
Wednesday 18th January in Bideford

Introduction to Photoshop 10am – 5pm - £50
Participants will need to be computer literate i.e. use a computer on regular basis and understand the basic controls. Small group (max 4).
Saturday 14th January in Bideford

Workshop gift vouchers are always available for that special present for those people with new cameras so that they'll get to know them better!

More workshops will be added later, please let me know by email if there's a photographic workshop you would like that I don't offer at the moment and if there's a location that I don't offer.

Some recent comments about my workshops:

"I've had a quick look at the feedback forms from Saturday - all of which were excellent - so it sounds like it was a very successful day - WELL DONE!!"
Tilly Clark, Burton Art Gallery and Museum

"Thank you very much for an enjoyable day, I feel I learnt a lot in a short time and spent most of the evening and next day taking pictures!"
Dion Mantell

"Thanks for a really enjoyable day – do you have any other courses planned? All the best"
Alan Mead

"Great to see the pictures - surprisingly good viewing them now!!! Really enjoyed the day, thank you"
Gill George

"I just wanted to say thanks for a great day yesterday we learnt heaps. I am sure when we take photos in the future they will be much better."
Jenny Smy

"Just to say many thanks for last Friday it was really helpful and enlightening."
Wendy Allan

Coastwise

2011-11-15T14:15:00.001Z

The audience for Coastwise talk

Last Thursday I talked to Coastwise, a local collective of like-minded people brought together by North Devon's coast. My talk was about getting the best out of a digital camera for the naturalist. I was a little apprehensive as I don't have the best gear or patience for 'wildlife' photography but I shouldn't have been. They were thrilled to see my own work about the wild coast and seemed to get a lot from my talk about digital cameras. They had lots of questions which I managed to answer. What a lovely bunch of people who meet in the spring and autumn at Barnstaple library 9.45am - 11.45am on Thursdays.

Portraiture and Lord Snowdon

2011-11-14T19:30:00.002Z

Sophie, Richard and Alan learn about the digital camera, photo ©Gill George

I led a nice little portrait workshop at the Burton Art Gallery at the weekend. The workshop was put on to coincide with the In Camera...Snowdon exhibition which continues there until Christmas Eve. It was an education for me to use Snowdon's photographs of the British art scene from the 1960's until the '90's as inspiration for the day.

I knew little of his work and had been put off by his reputation until it was thrust on me.What a fascinating exhibition. At first it is a set of well made portraits of people from the art world, some of who I'd heard of, some who I felt I knew well, and many who I had no idea about what-so-ever. I found it very refreshing that many of subjects were not 'famous' artists; some of them had bit parts like John Bratby photographed, with coffee in one hand and cigarette in the other, hunched over his son sleeping in his cot; some of them were coming to the end of a long artistic career with little recognition like David Jones in his one roomed bedsit near the end of his life and then there were art dealers like Helen Lessore photographed starkly on a lumpy bed in her gallery. Every picture told a story and if you get to see the show it is worth reading through the catalogue to find out why people were photographed in the way that they were.

I was intrigued by a picture of Roger Hilton, a name I associated with bright colourful semi-abstract St Ives paintings from the 1960's and '70's. The portrait shows him drinking from a whiskey bottle and this fills the frame. Surely I thought, he can't simply be remembered for this? Reading the catalogue he probably is, by those that knew him. In the same year as the portrait 1963 he was awarded the John Moores Prize and his acceptance speech was "Give me the cheque, you look like a decaying oyster..." and at the dinner afterwards an elderly alderman, already ill, was so shocked by Hilton's drunken rudeness that he collapsed and died at the table.

Dion Mantell ©Alan Mead

The workshop started by optimising the digital cameras for portraiture followed by some time spent looking at Snowdon's photographs. We then used the essence of his approach to make portraits, in pairs, somewhere inside the gallery. Snowdon's approach is often simple, rarely using flash or studio lighting and most of his portraits were made with a wide angle lens rather than the typical portrait lens which is longer than standard.

My biggest worry was that one or more of my eight students would refuse to be photographed but every one was very giving and they all made a good job of the assignment.

After lunch on camera flash was put into the mix. I demonstrated how flash could be turned down and used as fill-in to either lighten shadows or brighten the subject on an overcast day. This new knowledge was also put to the test with a different partner. By the finish at 4pm every student had produced something of merit.

Graveyard of the Atlantic

2011-10-05T18:35:00.002+01:00

Summer came at last to the South West of England, right at the end of September for 6 days. Fortunately it coincided with the autumn equinox which brought the best spring-tide of the year, and even more fortunately I had some time to make the most of it. I saw very little of the sun as I spent my time in achingly cramped positions, in small caves for hours on end, suffering for my art! I’ve had the title of my big show in North Carolina on my mind ‘Graveyard of the Atlantic’ a title both North Devon & Cornwall share with the coast of North Carolina. I was hoping to find some of the debris caused by the tail end of the last couple of hurricanes come tropical storms that came out of the west Atlantic, causing so much destruction and flooding on the NC coast and in Bideford’s twin town of Manteo on Roanoke Island where my show will be. A couple of very productive days were spent firstly at Combe Martin and Watermouth, then at Bedruthan Steps near Padstow.

To give my blog readers a taste of what’s coming and an insight into my practice I’ll describe how I took the frames which make the image above. This is just a quick thumbnail image, automatically made from very small copies of the originals, so that I can see, visually, that spending time on the photograph is worthwhile.

I was unfamiliar with Bedruthan so I took a while walking up, down and around the beach, or beaches, as there are many separated by headlands of jutting out rock. I was racing around because I wasn’t sure how long I would have at before I would be cut off by the tide and I wanted to get as much raw material in that time as I could. The cave would have been easy to get into if I’d been a 5 year old boy, so I needed to crouch right down and find a patch of wet sand to sit on near to the back. The thing that had really attracted me to this miniature world was the wall of frayed ropes and fishing net hung like a veil from a crack in the side of the cave. This had to feature prominently in my image and so I shifted around with my camera until I found the best composition taking into account rope wall, entrance shape, reflection of light etc. Taking no chances I packed a bigger kitbag than usual with 2 cameras and a couple of lenses. I ought to confess that I need to get my prime camera fixed as it has an auto-focus problem and there’s a speck of dust in the lens. So it was a case of going ‘old school’ literally manually focusing an old, but good quality, fixed focus 50mm f1.4 lens from my old Olympus SLR. That ought not to be difficult, but it was because there’s no ‘split-screen’ focusing on a DSLR and I couldn’t open and closed the aperture automatically, so it all had to be done, painstakingly, manually. I have to use the screen, rather than the viewfinder here, because it's so dark so my process each time my camera angle is adjusted is: open aperture manually on the lens, make shutter speed faster so that the image on the screen isn't way too bright, focus lens ring, close aperture down by 4 stops, slow shutter speed back down to where it was, fire the cable released shutter. Exposure was the same, labour, intensive manual process. With the camera firmly fixed to a tripod every frame was shot in RAW, using a cable release, with iso at it’s lowest (100), aperture closed down to f11, shutter speed was sometimes as slow as 8 seconds and many of the views, pieces from the whole, from this fixed point camera had to be shot many times with different exposure, points of focus and with various fingers, thumb and palm of the hand used to prevent flare coming into the lens from the light source directly in front of me; the mouth of the cave. I started photographing at 11:46am and at 12:08 had completed the 66 separate frames which will, fingers crossed, eventually make up one image. I had been intensely taking photographs for 22 minutes, add on the time it took to get into the hole, find the best place to set up my tripod, unpack the bag etc, I had been cramped inside for a good half hour and I could really feel my legs and the brightness of the sun when I emerged afterwards.

a contact sheet of all 66 images shot in 'Rope Wall' cave

Finding the subject matter and shooting the frames is just the start of a very long process. Each RAW file was then adjusted and saved as a HQ jpeg. A copy of these files was saved into a new folder and each of these was shrunk in dimension by 25% and saved as a lower quality jpeg. The image at the top was automatically generated through ‘photomerge’ in Photoshop CS5 from a selection of the frames that I shot to give me a thumbnail, a suggestion, of what the final image might look like. If I like what I have at this stage, and I do, I’ll take it on to a finished image; but this will take a good day’s work on the computer which can be saved for a cold, wet, winter day. It will, however give me a digital file that can be printed high quality to make an image as big as 2 metres high.

Ghost Story

2011-09-27T12:14:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure if anyone was paying attention, I know I wasn't, when I posted the news about my Ghostcards exhibition at Walter Henry's in Bideford.
Last night I eagerly showed an old friend my new work saved to my phone; enlarging the image above I realised the ghost had disappeared. I had the wrong picture on my phone? or did ghosts really disappear? I put it down to me adding the wrong file to the slideshow, but then today, looking through the pdf download which accompanies the show I had the same ghostless image! Now, to date, there have been 103 people looking online or downloading this pdf, did anyone notice? I'm sure you're all too kind! So I had a look at my blog; the first picture - it was also ghostless here...And on the homepage of my greengallery website. Am I worrying too much?
Anyway, to make amends, here's 'the Rose of Torridge' with the ghost of Rose Saltern herself in the doorway, feeding the seagulls. It's a little bigger than the ghostless one so you'll now be able to see her (un)clearly.
As a footnote I should say that Ghostcards will remain at Walter Henry's until the end of October but has been relocated to the front window and the wall opposite the sales desk.

Workshop in Bude

2011-09-21T21:52:00.005+01:00

I spent today doing a workshop with some lovely students at Budehaven School in Cornwall. Just thought I should share their enthusiasm for photography in this post. After an hour and a half talking about mainly my work in caves on the North Devon coast and relating it to Ansel Adams who they'd been studying we took a walk down to the beach via the canal. Almost immediately they were on the floor, up trees, lying on their backs, finding weird and wonderful camera angles and really seeing their surroundings in a new light. These are a few examples of how they were working.

Ghostcards ..... and new workshop details

2011-09-01T10:34:00.022+01:00

Ghostcards is at Walter Henry's Bookshop in Bideford, Devon, part of Bideford Bay Creatives 'Culture Show', throughout September and October 2011.

Throughout Dave Green’s art practice, presentation has been very important. Mounting has always been clean off-white, museum grade, archival, double thick board cut with a neat 45 degree aperture. Frames which used to be hand made, out of high quality hardwood, are now generally shop bought but made of solid oak. There’s an old adage that if you use the right materials to present your work they complement and do not distract from the image. This new body of work however is a big departure from the norm.

The ‘Ghostcards’, a label coined by Mercer University professor of history Dr Erik Klingelhofer on seeing this work, are multi-layered artworks where not only the image but the frame and mounting reflect a fluid state of both past and present. This work is no longer a two dimensional picture which can be reproduced at infinitum, it has three dimensions when we include the often, oak Victorian frame with guilt inset, and one could argue that they have a fourth dimension as a sense of physically looking back through time is also evident in all of the work.

This work originated two years ago through a commission from Beaford Arts to make a new piece of work from an image in the Beaford Old Archive. This piece was ‘Still on the Beach, Appledore’. A month later another image was added ‘Greenwarren House’, this time made as part of a photographic residential at Beaford Arts which is based in Greenwarren House. These two images already show elements common through Dave’s other work, stitching photographic frames together to produce a combination print, time exposure, painting with light and added a new one, the work of another photographer responsible for the inspiration for the new image and for the original ‘ghost’ image held within it.

June 2011 saw more images realised as part of the Bideford/Manteo Postcard Exchange shown at the Burton Art Gallery. Beaford Arts again generously helped with the free use of some of their Old Archive images. The current show is the first to use the antique frames Dave has been collecting over the past year. Ilfracombe Harbour epitomises the use of the Victorian frame as this particular frame held the original black and white image which inspired this piece.

Free pdf download to accompany Ghostcards: www.greengallery.co.uk/ghostcards.pdf
For larger images go to: www.bbcdevon.org It may take a while to load!

Photographic Workshops in Devon, Autumn 2011

Introduction to digital photography 10am - 5pm - £50
A practical days workshop learning to gain control over your camera, shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, flash etc, setting it up for optimum quality under any given lighting, and making better pictures through composition.

Tuesday 27^th September in Bideford
Saturday 1^st October in Barnstaple
Thursday 6^th October in Exeter
Tuesday 11^th October in Torrington
Saturday 15^th October in Tavistock
Tuesday 25^th October in Bideford
Friday 28^th October in Exeter
Thursday 17th November in South Molton
Saturday 19th November in Bideford

Photographing your own Artwork – 10am – 5pm - £50
There has been a lot of demand for this workshop on ‘Photographing your artwork' over the summer. I have a wealth of knowledge and experience of photographing 2D artwork, jewellery and ceramics and I’m willing to pass this on to artists eager to improve their own image making camera skills. Although this workshop is for a small group (max 5) I also offer it on a 1:1 basis for ½ a day for the same price.

Saturday 29^th October in Bideford
Tuesday 22nd November in Bideford ... more dates to follow!

Painting with Light - An evening workshop celebrating the dark nights of the Winter. You'll learn how to make 'long exposure' photographs using coloured lights, flames, sparklers and hand-held flash.

Thursday November 10^th Northam Burrows 6pm-9.30pm - £25 … more to follow!

Special: Intro to Digital/Painting with Light - An afternoon into evening workshop celebrating the dark nights of the Winter. A practical workshop learning to gain control over your camera, shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, flash etc, setting it up for optimum quality under any given lighting, and making better pictures through composition. This is combined with photographing under low light where you'll learn how to make 'long exposure' photographs using coloured lights, flames, sparklers and hand-held flash.

Saturday December 10^th at Westward Ho! 2pm-9pm - £50

Introduction to Photoshop - Participants will need to be computer literate i.e. use a computer on regular basis and understand the basic controls. Small group (max 4).

Thursday 3^rd November, 10am – 5pm - £50

Workshop gift vouchers are always available for that special present and with this in mind I'll be offering some workshops after Christmas for those people with new cameras so that they'll get to know them better!

More workshops will be added later, please let me know by email if there’s a photographic workshop you would like that I don’t offer at the moment and if there’s a location that I don’t offer.

Detritus

2011-08-16T17:45:00.007+01:00

I’m sometimes blinded into thinking that our beaches are relatively clean. The places I go are exposed to such a punishing surf that little detritus is left. Sometimes there’s a fishing float, tyre or rusting side of a ship lodged permanently into the back wall of a cave but the rocky shoreline can appear scoured clean with every tide. Westward Ho!, my local sandy beach also fools you into thinking that litter is a thing of the past. That is until you see it at the end of a summers day after the holidaymakers have gone. On-shore-drift makes a fine job of moving the crisp packets, beer cans, and discarded beach toys down to Saunton Sands and the fortnightly spring high tide makes a good job of finding the neatly hidden plastic bags and polystyrene cups pushed into holes on the pebble ridge or held under a stone. We’ve learnt to recycle so well now that we even crush up the water containers so they take up less space. I’ve even heard visitors ask why there are no bins on the beach having no comprehension that at high tide there is no beach; but this doesn’t stop piles of rubbish being neatly stacked together as if to say “We believe this would make a good place for a bin!”

How difficult is it "take your rubbish home with you"? Another question would be "Is anyone ever prosecuted for dropping litter?” I’m sure we could find a few cases but how about “Has anyone ever been prosecuted for letting a helium balloon fly off, or a lantern for that matter?” I will end up on a beach eventually.

At least this cream bottle served a purpose as a useful floating home. I threw it back into the sea so hopefully these goose barnacles survived!

Song of the Surf

2011-08-03T22:00:00.005+01:00

I went home to visit my parents recently and I was reminded of an image that has been with my since as far back as I can remember. It’s a print of a painting called ‘Song of the Surf’ by Ed Mandon. I expect it was a popular print in its day, that being the early 1960’s. I remember often looking into this picture of the sea. Not the pretty turquoise blue of Cornwall or Greece, or the palm tree lined sun bleached cove, the peaceful relaxing sunset or the family snapshot of children paddling in the shallows; no this was Mandon’s deep green sea, wild and free, the waves endlessly crashing in my mind, a vast living breathing entity. The sky, a cold yellow with the threat of rain. It’s a picture that has influenced my subconsciously for a long time. I remember once on Marconi Beach, Cape Cod, I ran down the beach towards the sea and the waves as the holidaymakers ran in the opposite direction, fleeing (as if for their lives) as huge thunderclouds gathered over the ocean.

I’m a lot closer to that deep green wild enticing sea now living in North Devon. And getting closer to it in my own work. ‘Song of the Sea’, it certainly calls you; maybe that’s the point, maybe it’s song and call is at its loudest when the sea is in its foulest mood and perhaps that is why the coast here is the ‘Graveyard of the Atlantic’.

Adventures on an Ocean Kayak

2011-07-17T22:00:00.008+01:00

Inspired by a day I spent last year photographing Sarah Adams for the catalogue to her show at the Maas Gallery in Cork St, London, I promised myself that in 2011 I would get a kayak so that I would be able to experience and photograph the North Devon coast at high tide and access places impossible for me to walk to at low tide. I’ve done a little rowing before as I had a small wooden boat moored on the mud banks of the Torridge minutes from my house; and I’d done a bit of kayaking in Manteo, North Carolina in Mayor Jamie Daniels double sit-on kayak. But it was the thrilling experience of paddling out to sea in preparation for and on the day of the shoot with Sarah that really excited me about the possibilities.

I bought an bright yellow Osprey sit-on Kayak just over a month ago and have been taking it down to the ‘East-the-Water’ boat ramp as often as possible. This access to the river is minutes from my house and is made swiftly on a shopping trolley conversion. Paddling up and down the river with and against the tide is relatively easy but good for building up experience and body strength. Kayaking in the sea is a different matter entirely.

The first time I tried paddling through the surf I got thrown out of the kayak all the time, especially when paddling into shore with the waves behind me; it was the equivalent of a bucking bronco whose only intent was to have me thrown off into the water. With more experience this got better but I think a good rule here is: if the sea is good for surfers then it’s bad for kayaking!

My first ocean kayak with intent to make some pictures was a couple of weeks ago at Combe Martin. The sun shone and the sea seemed quite calm, just after high tide, with the waves crashing close to the shore. I wore a wetsuit, lifejacket and a pair of old Keens; my camera and tripod were packed into a dry sack with a towel and strapped to the rear of the kayak, I attached my self and the paddle to the kayak too. I was all set to paddle off, sat in the kayak in the seas shallows, adjusting my back support I took my eyes off the surf for a split second and I was rolled over with no apology. I took this as a warning that you can’t relax for a moment, even in small surf as it will throw the kayak over any chance it gets. I got back in, ignoring the comfort and support of the seat back and paddled with all my strength straight at and through the waves at a right angle to the shoreline; not slowing down or taking my eyes of the surf until I was passed them in the relative calm of the undulating waves.

Giving a small promontory of rocks a wide berth I traversed to the right until from out at sea I was looking into the mouth of a cave I had called ‘Silver Mine, Combe Martin’ on a previous photo trip on a low spring tide. I could see that the back of the cave was clear of the receding tide although it’s entrance had a thick wall of surf. This was what I wanted, what I had seen in my mind’s eye, so with little hesitation I paddled as fast as I was able in a straight line for the mouth of the cave. I hit the pebbly shore at speed leaning right back to help the kayak ride as far into the cave as possible. I climbed out quickly and dragged the kayak to the back of the cave.

The view from here was awesome. All of my senses felt heightened as I observed this familiar cave’s entrance being pounded by the surf and sunshine shining through it from behind. Sometimes with a big wave the walls of the cave would slightly darken, then for a split second, was bathed in an incredible refracted, diffused light as the wave eclipsed the sun.

I dried my hands on the still dry towel and set up my carbon-fibre tripod in the shallow water, attached my camera and made a series of images, exposing the dark inside walls of the cave for a lot longer than the mouth and the incoming breaking waves.

This sketch (above) is the first of I hope many images that I’m hoping to get to make along the North Devon and Cornwall coast at high tide. It’s made from a selection of 60 original frames, and is far from perfect in it’s present state, but I wanted you to see a direction that I’m heading as I’m really pleased with the power and fury of the surf and the way it gives a sublime beauty this coastal landscape. Below is the second sketch image of the cave next-door which I refer to as 'Lead Mine, Combe Martin'.
All I had to do then was to get back to the beach at Combe Martin…..

Photographic Workshops 2011

2011-06-17T11:51:00.006+01:00

I have a summers worth of photographic workshops and some…

Introduction to digital photography; a practical days workshop learning to gain control over your camera, shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, flash etc, setting it up for optimum quality under any given lighting, and making better pictures through composition; is offered on the following days:

Tuesday 28th June in Bideford

Tuesday 12th July in Bideford

Saturday 23rd July in North Devon

Tuesday 26th July, during the Watersports Festival in Bideford

Saturday 6th August in North Devon

Thursday 11th August, at the start of the Folk Festival in Bideford

Saturday 3rd September, part of Culture Show in Bideford

10.00am - 5.00pm - £50

Photography on the Rocky Shore is offered on Monday 15th August in North Devon 10.00am - 5.00pm - £50

Making the most of a Spring Tide this workshop gives you the opportunity to explore part of the North Devon Coast when the tide is at its lowest. You'll get to learn about my practice that has been dominated by the photography of sea caves over the last 5 years. You’ll also be encouraged to make your own personal response to this landscape.

Especially for artists and crafts makers I’m again offering my workshop Photographing your own Artwork on Wednesday 17th August in Bideford 10.00am - 5.00pm - £50

I have a wealth of knowledge and experience of photographing 2D artwork, jewellery and ceramics and I’m happy to pass this on to artists eager to improve their own image making camera skills. The first part of this days workshop will be spent learning how to optimise your camera for best results; then you'll experience photographing your own work and this is followed by some basic enhancing on a computer to make your images look like the original. One of the best things about this workshop is that I’ll show you how you can make professional looking pictures in your own house without having to invest in a new camera, lots of new equipment and computer software.

I’ve also got a couple of workshops at the Burton Arts Gallery in the autumn. On Friday November 4^th I’m running a Pinhole Photography course through NSEAD especially for art teachers and on Saturday 12^th November I’ll be running a Portraiture workshop there with reference to the Snowdon exhibition which will show in the gallery.

the Changing Landscape

2011-05-23T21:38:00.004+01:00

I went to a conference recently and learnt about the changing landscape. I think of the term often in my own practice and I wondered if it might be a reference to environmental changes; climate change, deforestation, destruction of wilderness, the ever expanding suburbs, sea level rise and the erosion of our coast which is paramount in my work. Alternatively it might have been in a ‘then and now’ context like the much inspiring work of Mark Klett making new landscape photographs from the same place as an historical photograph from 100 years ago or more, using the same focal length of lens, same angle of view, same time of year, time of day etc and adding the original historic black and white image to the new colour one to demonstrate how that landscape has changed through time; the image below is by Mark Klett. This use of the changing landscape is also becoming a major part of my practice as I explore and research the history of where I live in North Devon. My most recent work uses old postcard images from the Beaford Old Archive as a basis for making new work. My intention is to bring the ghosts of the past to life by leaving literal ghost like images from the old pictures in the new photographs. These will initially be show as handmade postcards in the Bideford / Manteo Postcard Exchange in the Burton Art Gallery, Bideford, Devon and the Dare County Arts Gallery in Manteo, North Carolina during June 2011. Below is Northan Village / Northam Town from this work.I have been reading Richard Louv’s ‘Last Child in the Woods’ and it had occurred to me that the changing landscape referred to how children don’t play outdoors anymore. The landscape of nature with trees to climb, meadows to run in, mountains to conquer and secret caves to explore has been changed to flickering screen to passively sit in front of at best get a second-hand audio-visual of the landscape outside.
However, it seems that ‘landscape’ is becoming a rare word in ‘art speak’ today, with its original meaning and context. The changing landscape in the conference I attended referred to the economy and essentially how art institutions will have less money in the future.

Grand Sky

2011-04-26T22:48:00.005+01:00

I've been over in Tucson AZ seeing friends, enjoying a holiday and playing with a new camera. I got an Olympus Pen EP1, so that I can keep a small camera with me all the time which should be good enough to take a professional picture. We'll see! It performed extremely well under the hot desert sun. The pictures here are, in some respects, examples of where it isn't comparable to the E3, however let the camera talk finish there.
These are both night photographs from the rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night. What a fantastic sight, it's really unbelievable just how many stars there are. I'm used to seeing stars in North Devon where light pollution is minimal, but here at the GC, 7,500 feet higher, you feel you can touch them. I remember feeling disappointed that I wasn't going to see a full moon whilst in the USA, but no moon, in some respects, is better.
The light on the canyon wall in the photo below comes from dimly lit Bright Angel lodge, a mile away. I was also amazed at how much a little light can make in such a dark place. Even my small, LED torch (flashlight), could make a huge difference. One would have thought a place as wild and pristine as the Grand Canyon could restrict their lights to the floor and the inside of buildings rather than lighting places miles away. I guess light waves are much like sound waves; you shout to someone across a room 30ft away, but when you shout on the rim of the Grand Canyon those waves travel 12 miles and reflect of the North Rim wall and travel 12 miles back again as an echo less than a second later.
I'm reliably corrected by Paul Madgett, thanks Paul: "sound travels at around 1100ft/sec at sea-level (though a little slower at higher altitudes) - ie roughly 5 seconds for a mile - thus any echo from a shout across the full 12-mile width of the Canyon would take about 2 minutes - if you were hearing an echo in less than a second, this must have been from nearby canyon walls on your side of the Canyon. Light, on the other hand, at about 300,000km/sec would take less than 1/10000 sec to "echo".

On the wall at the RWA

2011-03-11T18:13:00.002Z

I didn't get to the opening, but Mike Bentley took this photo of my work on the wall ate the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol.

Baggy Point, North Devon

2011-02-22T10:53:00.009Z

Baggy Point, the headland on the east of Croyde in North Devon derives its name from bag, meaning hole or cave. The headland is full of caves, and February’s extremely low spring tide lured me to explore Baggy Hole. Kester Web, knows this coast better than most, and encouraged me along with Mark (brother of one of Kester’s old friends) and Matt, who we found climbing down a rope to the rocky beach. The photograph of Baggy Hole, above, was made from 75 separate frames, then stitched together in Photoshop.

The image above is the quick sketch and is very much work-in-progress but it shows how heavy threatening and foreboding the place is. It's no wonder that there have been tales of ship wreck, smuggling, mermaids and secret passageways associated with Baggy Hole. Eventually after a few days at the computer I'll have an image that can be printed high quality 150cm wide. I like to get a sketch made soon after taking the original photos so that I know I have the whole image and because I never quite know how it's going to look. Often I'll only get this far deciding that compositionally or aesthetically it just isn't working.

On the left is the secret lake made from exposures of up to 6 minutes long. This is a treacherous coast and accessing these hidden places can only be done in the right weather conditions and on the lowest of tides. Also a little rock climbing knowhow, a rope, harness, carabiners and sling are important for safety. You wouldn’t want to be stuck in these places with the tide racing in.

Baggy Hole is the largest of the sea caves in Baggy Point. This was our first destination and involved a slippery descent down a little used fisherman’s track to the beach, a scramble over wet boulders; then a climb up, over and down a ‘camelback’ of rock to another beach, the entrance to the cave. The cave, unseen from the cliff path, is huge it’s entrance must be 50ft or higher and the distance from front to back must be 100ft + but I’ll get these confirmed and update once I know. I just wanted to get as far into the cave as possible and see the full extent of the cave from it’s dark depths.

There’s little point in trying to explain how to get to Secret Cave, I’ve been there before and I still couldn’t find the narrow entrance that you slide down feet first, even though I’d been led to within a couple of feet of it. This place is truly special, everything you might want of a cave, lot’s of passages, a huge skylight, opening to the sea with small beach, and a large lake-like rock pool. You might want to live here if it didn’t fill with 30 feet of water twice a day. This image shows the scale of Secret Cave with the skylight top left.

Midnight Again!

2011-02-15T14:29:00.002Z

Mike Bentley and I were out again at midnight on a 3/4 moon, fuelled by the contemporary jazz of Phronesis who had just played at the Beaver in Appledore (and on CD in Mike's car). The night is a tremendous time to made pictures, just to be in that dreamworld is phenomenal; even though the temperature had dropped to 3 degrees there was a warm glow to be felt from that cold moon. The dream started as we walked along the road to Sandymere Beach and a herd of horses came the other way; one after the other with coats on for warmth, they seemed to pass like ghosts, hardly noticing our presence. Longer exposures brought star trails this night and the addition of a large white, slow moving cloud, gave us the magic we'd hoped for. My tip for the day/night is to buy some reflective or transparent tape for a tripod leg because I got into a bit of a panic trying to find my camera at the end of an 8 minute exposure and started running into the surf of the incoming tide. Fortunately I snapped out of it before I got too wet. the camera and tripod were high and dry, well just!

From Source to Sea

2011-01-30T10:57:00.013Z

There is much demand for photographic workshops in 2011. This week has seen me at Budehaven School in Bude, Cornwall introducing digital photography to some 15/16 year olds, including being interviewed by them. They were a tremendous bunch of students spending 2 hours on the bitterly cold beach making some very good pictures of the natural and man-made landscape.

Clockwise, 1st & 3rd by Colin Rowland, 2nd Frank Whitehead.

Then at the weekend I had similar weather for a workshop ‘Making the Most of your Digital Camera’ at the Burton Art Gallery and Museum in Bideford. This was based or inspired by an exhibition of the watercolourist Shelia Hutchinson whose exhibition ‘From Source to Sea’, first shown in 1951, was in the gallery. The wonderful image above of Bideford and its historic longbridge is from the exhibition. Unlike Hutchinson who took the train, cycled and hiked the length and breadth of the Torridge Valley in the late 1940’s with painting gear in her backpack; we were restricted to just over 1 hour’s time photographing Bideford’s quay, river, bridge and quaint streets. The morning was dedicated to understanding the digital camera, shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, file size, exposure etc then after lunch the photographs were made. It was an exhilarating day, it was amazing how much was learned the proof of which was in the prints, 2 each, the participants made and exhibited in the Burton’s Gallery, by the end of the afternoon. The images will be on show until 4th February.Workshop photographers: Janet Millen, Ian Penrose, Colin Rowland, Norman Tuck and Frank Whitehead

Turning Night into Day

2011-01-25T15:04:00.007Z

On January's full moon, Mike Bentley and I went down to Clovelly and onto Black Church Rock at Mill Mouth. The night was unbelievably clear with a huge, bright, full moon. We'd brought torches with us but hardly needed to use them. Walking down the track at 9pm was an eerie experience as, without warning, roosting pheasants would fly, startled, out of trees and old misshaped oaks would spread contorted shadows over the path ahead. At one stage we had to traverse a fallen tree, it's trunks width being equal to our height.

The forest had managed to keep the frost at bay but as we got onto the beach the pebbles were suddenly very slippy. Moving down the beach, ice soon turned to water and still further to dry stone thanks to the breeze. Travelling over a rocky shore is always dangerous and I wouldn't recommend trying it at night to anyone, the harsh moon light confuses any spacial awareness, the shadows blacker than black.

Black Church Rock was magnificent in this dream world, our photographs describe the colour far better than the rods in our eyes. The landscape format picture above is of me taking the portrait format, by Mike Bentley. I believed I could see well in this light but to give you an idea of the amount of light the photograph above was 400iso, f2.8 and 1 minute exposure; the limits of my camera without my (broken) cable release. It's noticeable from the image that the horizon isn't straight - seeing to compose is so difficult and focusing complete guesswork. Even focusing with torchlight or with the camera flash is impossible with this dark rock.The colour in these pictures is amazing though. The reflected daylight and harsh shadow is evocative of a hot, bright, summers day. However the addition of a coloured light in the above photograph and the stars in the sky do much to question this assumption.

Royal West of England Academy

2011-01-18T19:25:00.009Z

I have had two photographs selected for

The Open Photography Exhibition at The Royal West of England Academy in Bristol. They have been selected from 1700 entries from across the South West. The Exhibition opens on the 20th February and runs until 5th April.

New Year's Resolution

2011-01-05T22:02:00.004Z

Every year I always make an image of some sort for a Christmas card. Sometimes it’s a physical card, sometimes an ecard, sometimes an animated gif; but these have never appeared on my blog.

Therefore my New Year’s resolution is to make a post of my Christmas image for the record and so that anyone viewing this blog who hasn’t received a Seasonal Greeting from me may get one. This image, taken during the switching on of the Christmas lights in Bideford was an experiment with Photoshop CS5’s HDR capability. Rather than combining images with a range of exposure, I combined a variety of the same exposure but with different parts of a laser show, people in different places and all of this at a slow exposure which blurs a lot of the movement. It isn’t a straight HDR either because that combined image was then merged with a couple of others taken from the same place, and some of these were made through intentionally adding some movement to the camera mid-way through an exposure. I’m really pleased with the result because it makes a very disappointing display, from a spectator's point of view standing in torrential rain, into a real light spectacular.

Condemned

2010-11-10T10:55:00.005Z

It’s been a while since my last post. Most of September and the whole of October were spent in the States, accompanying Sadie Green on her Winston Churchill Travel Award www.sadie-green.blogspot.com where I documented her journey of discovery tracing the export of North Devon pottery from the 17^th and 18^th centuries. I was also representing Bideford Bay Creatives www.bbcdevon.org in Manteo NC supported in part by a Networking Artists Network go-and-see award; developing a relationship between Bideford and her twin town Manteo through the arts. Whilst there I was posting to the www.bidefordmanteo.blogspot.com

One of the similarities of both towns is their geographic settings as naturally sheltered harbours. Bideford 3 miles up from the Atlantic Ocean on the tidal River Torridge and Manteo on an island in the shallow Roanoke Sound 5 miles west from the thin, fragile, Outer Banks spit than shields it from the other end of the Atlantic Ocean. My photographic work in North Devon has been primarily in the sea caves along the rocky shoreline. The Outer Banks of North Carolina is 100 miles+ of sand, called, like our North Devon coast “The Graveyard of the Atlantic”. Both places have this unenviable title because of the 100s of wrecked ships on NC’s treacherous sand bars and our rocky reefs.

Global Warming, Climate Change and Sea Level Rise with the expected greater frequency and magnitude of storms will only add to the graveyard. The irony is that it makes great pictures. Whilst in North Carolina I spent many a late afternoon walking the Atlantic beaches and the closest to Manteo's was at Nags Head; here wooden houses, now condemned for living, seem to have been built on the beach. Whether this is a sign of climate change or of Man’s stupidity or both is unclear, but as is often the case with buildings they look their best just before they die.

A note on the photographs: The last 2 images in this post were taken by the light of a full moon and distant street lighting. Exposures were 1 minute long.

Pinhole Workshops

2010-08-05T12:58:00.009+01:00

There seems to be a lot of demand for Pinhole Workshops this year, either that or I'm in greater demand, either way is good. I've just completed a days workshop at the Dartmoor Life Museum in Okehampton, a wonderful place full of nooks and crannies where you discover treasures of the past.

The miracle of photography is experienced in its most heightened form through a pinhole workshop. I’ll never understand how I completed a National Diploma in Graphic Design and a HND in Photography without being taught about the pinhole camera. It wasn’t until I started teaching full-time myself that I learned about this subject. The amazing thing is, as my 7 students learned yesterday, that you start the day with a shoebox or biscuit tin and after about an hour using only black card, scissors, tape, a square of black plastic and a pin, you can make a usable camera.
Guessing the exposure takes a little longer (unless you do some complex maths), because every camera (or box in this case) has a different size, or distance from the pinhole to the paper negative (traditional photo paper). Fortunately, with everyone using the same pin, the ‘lens’ diameter is the same. Considering that the only adjustment to exposure was time, 3 of the 9 cameras made in the workshop made acceptable paper negatives at the first shoot. After another couple of tries everyone had a good exposure. Keeping the cameras still, through exposures of between 1 and 8 minutes with a little wind around, proved to be the next challenge. And the final challenge was getting an interesting image. The image below is a pinhole photo of her mum by a 5 year old called Ophelia and has the quality of Julia Margaret Cameron.

My next pinhole workshop is on Saturday 4^th September at the Plough Arts Centre in Torrington and is for anyone over 14. Please get in touch with the Plough to book a place.

Back Photographing Bands

2010-06-16T21:17:00.009+01:00

Peter Bruntnell our local North Devon singer/songwriter, who tours with his band nationally and internationally, is responsible for organising and mc-ing Monday nights at Lilico's in Barnstaple, part of the North Devon Festival through June. He'd asked me if I'd take some pictures, here are some of them. Pete's the one with the blue head.

Photographing musicians is always an interest of mine, especially in this type of intimate venue. Here I was essentially sharing the stage with the band, trying my best not to stand on the guitar leads, occasionally adjusting the levels on the mixing desk when prompted.

There's a similarity here with my cave pictures. I'm usually in a cramped uncomfortable position, I tend to shoot into the light which is extremely high contrast and the light level is very low compared with daylight. Unlike a cave where I can use a tripod and shoot at 1 second and 100 iso, here I'm restricted to in excess of 800 iso and shutter speeds between 1/15 and 1/30 sec, hoping to allow some movement but keep a sharp, clear, facial expression when the opportunity arises.

around Combe Martin

2010-05-25T21:54:00.006+01:00

Most photographers will look forward to sunshine, the weekend, or a time of day like sunrise or sunset. I look forward to the full moon and the new moon and note these in my calendar. A day or two after these moons heralds the highest and lowest tides, or spring tides, which occur every fortnight. A spring low tide, which always falls around 1 or 2pm in North Devon, gives me access to places at the waters edge that would be impossible to get to on any other day or time; places which are often totally hidden under the waves.

At the end of April on such a tide I went to the Combe Martin coast where the following images come from. The inspiration for the trip was an old postcard of Briary Cave at Watermouth. Postcards of caves are rare, this being the first I’d seen, and although I’d photographed this cave before I find that every time I explore a space the image comes out differently. Often this is because of that ever changing tide, light, season and the wave action on the interior of the cave.

The Combe Martin area has a very long history of mining. These 2 images were former mines, which probably starting out as caves before they were mined for silver, lead or manganese. They’re accessible, like many others, from the beach. The interiors of these ex-mines are often are usually rougher and more textured than a cave which is carved out by the force of waves throwing boulders against it’s interior.

This was a rich day’s photography for me. Usually I’d be lucky with one good result, but here I have four; and there were three other failed attempts also. These four images where made from 121 separate photographs in total. The overcast day and wet cave walls helped with the balancing of highlights with shadows. I was forever using bits of my hands as a shield to prevent light flare spilling into my lens, which nearly always points towards the light.

Three of these images will be part of my exhibition at Schooners tea and coffee shop in Appledore for their Visual Arts Festival 3^rd – 6^th June. I’m really exited about being a part of the festival which has an appropriate theme of ‘Coastline’ this year. If you’re reading this and want to know more you can download a flier at the following link: http://www.greengallery.co.uk/invite.jpg and come and chat with me in Appledore.

The image above is from a huge cave very near to Briary Cave. The headland seen through it is Great Hangman the highest sea cliff in England.

Potted History of Bideford

2010-05-01T15:48:00.007+01:00

I’ve got really interested in history since living in Bideford; its history is heavily tied up with Art and

America

, two of my biggest passions. Bideford prospered in the 17^th and 18^th centuries through trade with new American colonies (it helped to set up) importing tobacco and exporting pottery. In the Autumn I shall be accompanying my wife Sadie on a research trip, sponsored by a Sir William Churchill Travel Award, to North Carolina and Virginia. She’ll be finding out where Bideford’s pottery went and making contact with artists, arts orgs and networks close to Bideford’s twin town of Manteo on Roanoke Island. For more information about her trip follow this link:

I’ll be looking out for visual similarities and differences between the two communities and environments. I’m hoping to find traces of North Devon in the old sea port towns, did our ships ballast, alien rocks and plants, get dumped on the beach, was it used as building material? Was anything else exported at the time, ball clay etc? I’ll be listening out for traces of local dialect with Devon words or pronunciations. Appledore smocks? I’ll be doing the same when I get back home, are there common place things here in North Devon that originated from the USA which we’ve forgotten about through generations since they got imported.

Also, in support of Sadie’s research, I’m photographing pottery. I started examining this craft when I was commissioned to photograph the ‘kiln in the park’ firing just before Christmas 2009. I’m now keen to make a good documentary record of potters who are still making slipware and using the sgraffito effect with red clay and white slip carrying on the tradition of North Devon pottery.

‘Bideford Pottery’, a family business of Harry Juniper, his son Nick and daughter Sue is the only pottery in town making pots instantly recognisable as North Devon ware. Everything is made by hand in a similar way to how it would have been done in the 17^th century. So far I’ve been photographing Nick throwing mugs and a pitcher and also decorating the jug. Close by is the studio of Doug Fitch, another young potter with a huge respect for the local tradition who even sources local clay which he digs out. Doug also has a collection of old pots and shards from the time when pottery in this area was as big an industry as it was in Staffordshire. The images in this post are the start of the documentary which I intent to take with me to North Carolina to share with the arts community and potters in our twin town Manteo and throughout the State.

Teaching and Learning

2010-04-20T22:11:00.008+01:00

I’ve just had 2 very busy days teaching, but what joy it is simply being physically tired rather than mentally drained.

This was a two-day residential at Beaford Arts Centre, teaching 12-14 year olds photography. It’s part of a programme that Beaford puts on for ‘gifted and talented’ pupils. Caroline Preston, who runs the Beaford Education Programme, and I led the course.

We started with a group exercise matching digital camera terms with symbols; this was a way of breaking the ice as the ten children were from all over Devon, some of them knowing no one else on the course. They did surprisingly well with only one matching pair the wrong way around. We use these symbols all of the time and quickly get used to what they do or represent but forget what they stand for.

Next we all converted one of the bedrooms into a giant pinhole camera. Three of the pupils blacked out the windows as I spent some time with individuals and their cameras making sure the set-up was optimised for biggest size and best quality and, looking towards the evening’s exercise, whether they were able to make a long exposure of 1 second or longer. With a large square hole, approx 4cm across we could see a very out-of-focus image on the wall. Caroline had a great idea to tape sheets of drawing paper onto the walls. I then demonstrated how an aperture works by gradually making the large hole smaller and smaller; the image on the walls became darker but also more in focus. As our eyes adjusted to the dark, after about 5 minutes, we were able to see the outside world, up-side-down, on the walls, floor and ceiling of the bedroom. The children found interesting parts and started to draw what they saw onto the paper using charcoal sticks. It was impossible to ‘see’ what you had drawn so there was a certain amount of faith involved in believing the image would be there once the light was turned on. I talked camera obscura, Aristotle (who wrote about this phenomenon 2,500+ years ago) and related it as best I could to its use to artists prior to the invention of photography. I also took a whole lot of 1 minute long exposures capturing the image and blurred artists in colour – the image to those inside the ‘camera’ looked black and white because the ‘rods’ were being used in our eyes instead of the ‘cones’.

When the light was turned on I was astonished at the masterpiece that had appeared on the walls; an up-side-down sketch of the church, trees and walls that made up the external view, were all there seamlessly drawn on the paper taped to the walls.

We had been given the opportunity to paste life-sized ‘joiner’ images onto a stark metal container that sat outside at the back of Greenwarren House (which houses Beaford Arts). This is related to the constructed images I do myself through, amongst other themes, the cave images of the North Devon Coast. I started teaching the making of full-sized joiners of people when I was working in a school on Tucson AZ where the only technology I could rely on was a black and white printer and some small digital cameras. The pupils split into groups of 3 or 4 and came up with ideas of how they, individually, would like to be seen on the container’s walls. Some wanted to play with scale and perspective, one fancied the idea of levitation and others thought of hanging from the roof or doing a handstand against the side. I gave some technical and artistic advice to help make the images work and they were off creating their art.

The photographs taken were quickly downloaded and printed out as contact sheets so that small joiner images could be made as a template to see if the life-sized one would work. At least half of the children retook their photographs after this stage, some of them making a number of sets to make sure one of them would be to their liking. Once finalised these were printed off on a black & white printer each photograph being a full A4 page in size. The white edges were trimmed and quite some time was spent joining the separate pages together with masking tape.

Once it was dark, the evening of the first day was dedicated to ‘painting with light’. We started off indoors, in a controlled space where everyone could try photographing the same lighting technique, like hooping a coloured torch around on a string or drawing around a body, giving someone wings etc. the children soon got the hang of it and were leaving their cameras on self timer and making various light patterns and shapes all at once. We then went outside, Caroline and I had a few ideas for images but they were hardly needed as the group of pupils came up with idea after idea and were allowed to run with them. Around 10.30pm we lit the blackened interior rooms of the house with various swirling colours and photographed it from the garden; after this we set about writing ‘Beaford Arts’ as we just had enough participants for the letters. This image is a combination of both ideas exposed for 1 minute each and combined in Photoshop. We got back indoors at 11pm and wound down to 11.30pm doing a little editing and enhancing of the images produced. The morning of day two was spent finishing off the joiners then using wallpaper paste to fix them to the container. This process was very forgiving as many an artwork fell apart at the last minute to be rescued with glue on the wall of the container. The collective result was awesome and hopefully, after the joiners are varnished, will last for at least the rest of the year.

For the rest of the day the ten children were split into two groups. One learned about traditional photography, made famous at Beaford by James Ravilious, through making photograms in the temporary darkroom. The other group enhanced and edited their night photographs and learned various digital imaging techniques. They then swapped.

Parents arrived at 4pm and were treated to a tour of the inside of the pinhole camera with charcoal sketches, slideshows of images on the children’s laptops, drying photograms, two exhibitions, one of James Ravilious’ work and one of my work, and the container outside full of joiners of the children.

Home Start Window - Bideford

2010-04-08T11:09:00.008+01:00

I continue to get support from Home Start on Bridgeland Street, Bideford to dress their window and inside wall with images. This gives then something interesting on their wall to discuss and a partial shield from the stares of passers by, who hopefully look at my canvas instead. There is a 6 week turn-a-round of pictures, so the one above will be there until late-May.

Home-Start is a voluntary organisation offering support, friendship and practical help to families at home with children under 5. Home-Start recruits, supports and prepares volunteers who are parents, grandparents or have parenting experience to visit families who are under pressure.

The current print on canvas is of a place very dear to me that I visited recently on my birthday. It is Black Church Rock, Mouth Mill, North Devon. If Black Church Rock was in the USA there would be a car park at its trail head and an interpretive board explaining it geological history and deconstruction. This is an amazing piece of natural land art close to our foremost visitor destination, Clovelly; yet I’d be surprised if even 1% of it’s visitors ever experience it. This is one of the easiest parts of our wild coast to get to. A gradual walk down a stone track from Clovelly Court will take you all the way to Mouth Mill; and once on the beach a glance to the right is all that’s needed to see the spectacle.

Black Church Rock, as the name suggests, is constructed of very dark rock and the 24 photographs for this image were taken at sunset when there is a golden glow to the arches in high summer.Tthe rock face was exposed for longer than the sky to emphasise the colour it takes from the setting sun. The images were ‘stitched together’ on a computer using Photoshop.

Last of the Dark Nights

2010-03-28T16:44:00.006+01:00

It was great to celebrate the end of the long dark nights of British Winter Time with a ‘Playing with Light’ workshop on Westward Ho! Beach. Apologies to anyone who, after seeing the centrefold in the North Devon Journal, had come down to Westward Ho! hoping to witness a light spectacular and missing us. I started the workshop in the warmth of the Waterfront pub, over a coffee, discussing the merits of various long exposure photographers and explaining various technical considerations for the camera. We didn’t get onto the beach until about 7.45pm where we made our way away from the lights of the village and far down the beach to the wetter sand near the sea. Even at this remote spot we attracted a couple of groups of teenagers who had been spending the evening playing around the pebble ridge. Both groups were keen to engage in our activities the first group of I think 6 had read the Journal’s feature and had come specially to get involved. The image above was made through a 50 second exposure each of the workshop participants and the teenagers had torches and Mike Bentley and I added some flash into the shot. Any of the people who participated in the making of this image can click on it to get a larger version for printing out.
A couple of weeks ago I ran a similar course at Spacex in Exeter. Here a lot of image making was achieved in one of their gallery spaces. It was designed for video art projection, blacked out with black curtained walls, so it was perfect for light graffiti. The image above was made by Claire Gladstone and describes the process through the 30 second exposure; the running around with torches swinging on string and flash fired from the sides at a low angle. I’ve cropped the image below because that to me is the part so totally full of life and colour.

I’ll be doing more night photography during a Beaford Arts residential over Easter and look out for the Bideford Bay Creatives Night Light Extravaganza which will hopefully be happening at the Westward Ho! Potwalloping Festival for the late May bank-holiday.

Good Publicity

2010-03-26T11:26:00.001Z

“All publicity is good publicity” has a nice reassuring ring to it but I’m always a little nervous and excited when the press are interested in what I’m doing. Rosanna Rothery and her photographer partner Jon Bowen joined me with others at the end of last month for a ‘Playing with Light’ workshop. I was expecting the journalist to sit quietly in a corner observing and making notes and leaving after she had enough for her story. I was so wrong! Rosanna was an active participant in the workshop on a cold dank winter’s night on Westward Ho! Beach. You’ll see her in the Journal’s feature top right with angel wings. This particular image was made using 3 pairs of torch swinging hands, Sadie and Janis stand directly behind Rosanna, and a flash was used to freeze and correctly expose her against the night sky.

The main picture features three teenagers who had come down to the beach to see what was going on, attracted by the bright lights. They were very enthusiastic to get involved and this image of 30 seconds had a few of us scribbling with torches behind their backs, giving them saintly halos and adding a little white light on their faces so that we can see who they are. The Superman poses were chosen by themselves.

Here’s a link to the full article from the North Devon Journal 25^th March 2010: www.thisisnorthdevon.co.uk/news/Learn-paint-light/article-1937602-detail/article.html

2010 Photographic Workshops

2010-02-28T14:04:00.000Z

When I started leading photographic workshops last year I thought it would just be a summertime thing that tourists to North Devon might enjoy, boosting their photographic skills and knowledge whilst on holiday. I hadn’t anticipated just how many local people wanted photographic instruction or that I would have already had two successful workshops this year; with two more ‘painting with light’ type courses in my calendar:

Tuesday March 16^th 5.00pm-9.00pm at Spacex Gallery in Exeter

On Saturday 27^th March 6.30pm on Westward Ho! Beach

I have been a fan of night photographers for some years now, inspired by Troy Paiva, William Lesch, Mark Klett and the Nocturnes ‘fellowship’ often based in the desert regions of the USA. Theirs is often a purist image, black or dark blue skies, moon and star trails, old abandoned ghost towns, romantic idyllic places to get away from the heat of the day to. Here in England a clear sky without light pollution is rare, weather is unpredictable and the winter night is cold.

Over the last couple of years I have also been fascinated with the experience of being out at night, far away from the lights. Walking without a torch, on invisible footpaths, sometimes your guide being a slight gap in overhead trees, dark grey as opposed to black, which you use for direction. Your spatial awareness vastly diminished and relying of the rods in your eyes to see a world in monotone.

Photographing at night can be like painting on a blank canvas, adding light, colour, texture and form to a desaturated scene. The whole process is very photographic. Where there is no light we can open a shutter for ever without a single photon of exposure. As soon as we strike a match we have an exposure. Making an image from light is such fun.

Interesting and Unexpected

2010-01-05T15:41:00.000Z

What an interesting and unexpected end to the year, I was inundated with photographic work. My interest in a photographic job seems to have a direct relationship to its difficulty, photographing in the dark, extreme high contrast, unsociable hours; often visually stimulating but people ask “can you take photographs in this?” I’m a firm believer in ‘if you can see it, you can photograph it’ in fact I’d go further than this, I’m not really happy unless the photograph is better than the reality remembered.

One of my challenges was the documentation of a firing of Bideford’s community Kiln-in-the-Park. This was a joint project from the Friends of the Burton and Appledore Arts. The brick built kiln, which must be 20ft high is a rare example of such a large wood fired kiln in the UK. I was there whenever I could be from the building of the fence to enclose it, loading with hundreds of tiles and harvest jugs, lighting at 7am and bringing up to in excess of 1000 degrees c, to the grand opening almost a week later. As I obviously couldn’t be there 24/7 I had to anticipate the most photogenic moments in advance and get a general documentation of the process. One of the highlights was to be a flame out of the top of the kiln which sometimes happens so I made sure I stayed around as the temperature rose to it’s critical heat.

There was talk in the potting fraternity that if they didn’t work with clay they would all be pyromaniacs and there were many photographic examples of a fearless love for flames. The two pictures here are of Doug Fitch who has his own slipware blog: http://slipware.blogspot.com/

Another challenge was photographing the alternative physical theatre company Jammy Voo http://www.jammyvoo.com/ They had been working on a new play at Beaford Arts Centre and needed documentary/publicity pictures. Their play writing is quite improvised, the script to start with may not even have a beginning, middle or ending, so their time together as a company, who live in various parts of Britain and Europe, was spent developing their characters and the play. There seemed to be a days worth of photography to fit into the ½ day with each new scene or location needing me to think on my feet to try and make the images say something about a play I knew little about. But it was quite a buzz and hopefully the final pictures made from merging 2 or 3 together will show the essence of the play.

Past and Present

2009-10-31T09:38:00.000Z

Since the last post I’ve had another opportunity to combine the present with the past through the Beaford Arts ‘Old Archive’. I was recently involved as an artist in a Beaford Arts residential for ‘gifted and talented’ year 9 pupils. It was hoped I could lead a ‘drawing with light’ exercise in the dark evening as the residential was loosely based on the ‘big draw’ national incentive to get people drawing. Rather than simply reiterating the previous residential I chose to also include the combining of the past with the present.

A mysterious Old Archive image of Greenwarren House (which now houses Beaford Arts) was found. Mysterious because there is no information attached to it except the description: “Old view of Greenwarren House with different window heads and stucco and 2 horses and riders.” There is no date or reference to the riders, horses or dog in the picture. Technically I should have composed the photograph before dark to have obtained the same angle-of-view and comparable lens length. However the only real discrepancy is to the left of the house where the old stable block isn’t lined up but the advantage of this mismatch is that you see a photo-collage made on a previous residential pasted on a door.

The children, after making some long exposure night photos themselves, made light patterns with a number of coloured torches, drawing or painting with light in the darkness. Afterwards they had the opportunity of learning how to combine the old and new images in PhotoShop.

My final image is a combination of 2 ‘drawing with light’ exposures of 1 minute each plus the original ‘Victorian’ photograph. I’ve tried to photograph the present both actually, the house as it is in October 2009 with reference to art being made in the photo-collage seen on the door and metaphysically; children learning through art seen by the light traces and sometimes ghostly images as they move through time. I’ve also made reference to the past through the old windows and doors seen through the bleached out windows of the present and the trace image of the old building’s chimneys, flowerpots, garden sculptures and the 2 riders on horses and dog.

'Old Archive, Contemporary Responce' continues at Boston Tea Party in Exeter from 3rd of November follow this link for more information.

Working from the Beaford Old Archive

2009-10-01T13:56:00.000+01:00

Recently I was asked to choose an image, any image, from the Beaford Old Archive http://www.beaford-arts.org.uk/index.php?id=5 and respond to it in a creative way. I had to limit my time to 3 hours, although this time restraint was creatively interpreted. If you want to see this image framed and hung on a wall, you'll find it alongside other artists interpretations of Beaford Old Archive images, at the Boston Tea Party Cafe in Barnstaple, North Devon, during October and then it travels down to a cafe of the same name in Exeter.

Old Archive image chosen: ‘On the beach, Appledore c1890’ (ref. b08514)
Contemporary response titled: ‘Still on the beach, Appledore 2009’
I’m drawn to pictures like this, they fascinate and excite me. They talk of a recent past, where our North Devon ports were full of sailing ships, importing tobacco and exporting products like our sgraffito slip-ware pottery to the Americas and all over the world. It’s surprising how few images there are showing scenes like this until they are compared to the modern day vernacular equivalent, the lorry park. I often catch myself imagining our rivers full of moored tall ships like ghosts of the past making a trace on our 21st century world. Walking on the quays in Bideford and Appledore I can feel the past, just like one can sense the layers of history in an old house.

This image from c1890 was most likely exposed onto a glass plate negative and printed onto light sensitive, fibre-based, silver-salt rich, photographic paper. It epitomises the worst attributes of the old silver based technology. Dust and hairs have left their white marks as they’ve stubbornly clung onto the negative at the printing stage; fingerprints have been left on the surface from the photographer who uses his hands to move the print from developer to fix but doesn’t clean and dry them properly; stains miraculously appear through uneven agitation, irregular fixing or uneven washing; more stains and marks are left from over 100 years of being passed from family member, to friend, to nostalgic collector. The photograph, like the image it holds, is a testament to the passing of time.

This image of Appledore’s shoreline is a fading reminder of it’s past. By this date our ports were little used, the railway had taken over transportation of goods although it hadn’t reached this village yet. Appledore here is a scant reminder of North Devon’s heyday in the Elizabethan era when ships sailed from here taking the 1st colonists to America and 5 ships under the leadership of Sir Richard Grenville left here to fight against the Spanish Armada.

We can learn a lot from old pictures, we can learn more from trying to re-photograph them. To place my camera where the original camera had be mounted I would need to dig up some of the car park today. The quay at Appledore has been raised and widened, quite considerably, although the part of the waterfront seen in this picture is relatively the same. New houses have been added and some of the original outhouses demolished.

The tide and position of the sun have proved to be my most difficult obstacles. From observing the shadow I estimated that the original picture was made mid-afternoon, and from observing where the tide was and it’s direction (or direction the boats are pointing) I estimated a couple of hours after high tide. To get the tide and sun like this I needed to make my new pictures around a neap tide, which I’d get every 2 weeks. Then, of course, I needed sunshine; something we never get on demand in North Devon. And finally 3 free hours, the allotted time for this commission, when all of the above were in place, to make my images and construct them together in PhotoShop.

I hope with this new digital image something of the view back, through the layers of time, can be seen.

Review in arts+culture magazine

2009-09-22T15:05:00.000+01:00

Dave Green's photo exhibition at the Tavistock Wharf revels in discovery of the North Devon coastline

By Heather Smith, on September 22nd, 2009 - from arts+culture magazine http://artsculture.newsandmediarepublic.org/

Dave Green, a Bideford-based photographer, reveals hidden parts of the North Devon coastline in his solo exhibition at Tavistock Wharf.

His work is a continuation of his childhood fascination with ‘looking for that elusive hidden rock pool teeming with life or being the first person to tread over the sand and discover a cave’.

Seemingly undaunted by tides, he continues to ‘discover’, squeezing his adult self into narrow tunnels formed by the pounding ocean and wedging himself at the back of sea caves. He documents his artistic endeavour using a digital camera. In Turbulent Passage, Baggy Point, North Devon 2008, a trail of sea foam on the smooth, untouched sand creates a feeling of isolation and imminent danger, but also wonder at being able to see something usually hidden from the human gaze.

In these meticulously-created Constructed Photographs, Green overcomes the problem of lighting in the cave that would result in dark, detail-less images by taking many different, long-exposure shots and stitching them together in Photoshop. The edges of his work are often left jagged, as if individual photographs have been placed together à la Hockney. The results are images that reveal the exquisite tones and textures of the rocks within the cave and pictures that have both depth and movement. The viewer is taken on a journey from the dark space of the cave to the glare of the outside light, the secret openings and slick, smooth rocks provoking analogies to birth and ‘the feminine.’

The biggest surprise, perhaps, is the way in which Green’s images manage to turn the most hostile and remote of environments into an almost comforting space.

Another highlight from the exhibition is the selection of camera-less images from the1990’s. Created by placing natural materials – seaweed, nettles and leaves – directly onto 5 x 7 photographic paper and using the action of sun, water, fixer and developer to form unique pictures, these ‘photograms’ have a surprisingly wide range of colour and tone. There is evidence of Green’s love of stitching here too as the smaller images are rearranged to create different ‘wholes’.

The exhibition runs until Saturday, September 26.

Communication with Bats

2009-09-20T12:56:00.000+01:00

I was making the most of the spring tide on Friday 18^th September and exploring a bit of the North Devon coast I hadn’t accessed before, via Mouth Mill, on the Hartland Coast. At low tide, midday, I found a shallow but very high cave under Windbury Head with 2 grand pillars of rock holding the cliff up at it’s entrance. The shallowness of the cavern meant I couldn’t photograph it from the back as I usually would so I snuggled up to the wall on the left-hand-side and started to make my constructed image, photographing the boulders at my feet first and moving along the floor and up the right-hand wall with my camera. As my Olympus E3 focuses it emits a high pitched sound; this sound attracted the bats, I’m assuming, as I made no sound and used no flash. The bats, (I’m rubbish at identifying them, bigger than those seen on the Tarka Trail South of Bideford, you could clearly see their ears!) 2 of them flew in formation around the inside of the cave mapping it, then back to the top, out-of-sight, then after seconds, came out again and flew lower down until they were within a few feet of me; then they were gone taking exactly the same flight path back to their roost. I had stayed still all of this time, happy to watch them, and didn’t take anymore pictures whilst they were flying; I was shooting at 1/10 of a second anyway so I couldn’t have photographed them. It seemed as though as soon as they had discovered that it wasn’t another bat making the noise they were happy to go back to bed. I finished taking photographs and didn’t see them again.

It’s unusual to find bats in these sea caves because at high tide the sea is well inside of them and the surf is pounding up the sides and back. In fact, it’s rare to find any life in these places because the environment at high tide is so violent, only the most stubborn limpet will cling onto these walls. However, in this cave, the ceiling was so high, a good 30 feet, and with plenty of jagged crevices to make a home for a bat. I’ve only found bats in one other cave in the cliffs here, and that one was always dry.

Workshops Up-Date

2009-08-09T23:26:00.000+01:00

I’ve just come to the end of two weeks of workshops for myself ‘greengallery’, Beaford Arts, the Plough Arts Centre and BBC Blast. It’s funny how it all comes at once; but good that I now have a week dedicated to only the Bideford Folk Festival.

Everyone seemed extremely happy with all they achieved through the workshops, and organisers too, with many sessions being over subscribed; photography seems to getting very popular!

The workshops have covered the whole spectrum of photographic genre and it’s whole history (and pre-history): chronologically I started with the pin-hole camera, at Beaford Arts with a ‘gifted and talented’ summer school residential designed for school children. The technology of seeing an inverted image on the wall of a darkened room through light entering a tiny hole was known over 2000 years ago and noted by Aristotle. Being inside the room and gradually seeing the image of the outside world reveal itself on the walls, as our eyes adjusted to the lack of light, was a great thrill; repeated again with adults two days later with just as much excitement.

Adult students on my weekend course made pinhole cameras from boxes and tins. This is an incredible process as the raw material is simply a box or tin, made light tight through the liberal use of black tape, made non-reflective inside using black paper or card and having a lens (hole) made with a pin prick in a piece of silver foil which is then taped over a larger hole somewhere on the box. Exposures are made through the pinhole onto black and white photo paper, held in the box with masking tape. Another square of black tape serves as a shutter. That’s all there is to it and this image was made after about 5 hours of the workshop. The image above was made by 'soon to be teacher' Natacha Withoft.

Images without a camera follows with the making of photograms or as Man Ray coined in the 1920’s ‘Ray-o-graphs’, the placing of objects on photographic paper, exposing them to light in a darkroom, then developing and fixing the image – this process goes back to the very early days of photography 1840’s when Fox Talbot and others made similar images on light sensitive paper. Daylight prints or chemograms were also made, a similar process but with no darkroom, and giving wonderful warm browns, pinks, purple and yellow colours, with occasional greens where the paper was fixed (slightly) first and silver where a build up of the metal occurred on the paper.

To carry on in a chronological order I could give you two examples of long exposures which relate to the length of time one might have had to expose film or plates in the 19^th century. One of my workshop titles for BBC Blast was ‘Action Photography’, and one of my methods for recording action/movement was to slow it down and sometimes use flash to freeze it within the same image; this image shows my Blast students photographing a dance practice with as slow shutter speeds as they could use. The process was taken to a greater extreme at the Beaford residential where, after everyone feeling really tired by 8pm we took stock for an hour then carried on outside to experience night photography. Give a few young teenagers torches and you need to do little directing to make some great images. Everyone got fantastic pictures, even those who had no control over shutter speed managed to make images by combining layers of light rings together. This image of the Beaford Centre and students was a 1 minute exposure using a tripod to steady the camera.

Another successful project during the residential was making a joiner similar to David Hockney’s images made in the 1980’s. Students were encouraged to photograph each other in situ around the building; making many images which were then printed out and joined together to make life-sized images. This one, slightly bigger than life, will be made permanent through wallpaper pasting the images onto the door then sealing it with yacht varnish.

Coming right up-to-date all of the BBC Blast workshops, the Plough Arts Centre and most of the Beaford residential were based around getting more out of digital cameras. Time was spent on all of these understanding the basics; aperture, shutter speed, focal length, ISO, exposure etc; setting the cameras up for optimum image quality and making more interesting and engaging images for any given subject. Using the past as inspiration to visualise the future.

Experiencing life inside a camera, a converted bedroom at Beaford Arts.

Fringe TheatreFest 2009

2009-07-09T11:36:00.000+01:00

I have been making documentary photographs since my time at College where this was my strongest work. I’m still very attracted to the tradition in it’s pure sense: shooting only under available light, being a witness to what actually happens rather than setting it up or manipulating events, being as ‘invisible’ as I could be so that my presence didn’t affect what happened, being objective, looking for ‘decisive’ moments, being open to the unexpected, anticipating what might make the picture and being amazed at what does make it.

The light was so low here that this image was made at 1sec exposure f4.5 and 2000iso

At the end of June, at the same time as Art Trek, Sadie and I photographed the Fringe TheatreFest in Barnstaple. We’d offered to do this as our way of supporting the festival this year (we were stewards in 2008). It became an interesting brief because we were unable to photograph any of the performances. There were no dress rehearsals so documentary was everything but the theatre performances.

It didn’t help that I had picked up teaching work in Tiverton which took me out of the Thursday and Friday daytime slots, and the weekend was spent at Broomhill doing my Art Trek residency.

There were 3 venues, the Baptist Church Hall and the Inn on the Square upstairs and downstairs with 21 different acts most of which did 3 performances. Most also did a ‘tech’ which involved anything from a full rehearsal with lights and sound to positioning a few lights in a 5 minute slot.

This kind of work though is very rewarding. I remember a restrictive graphics brief on a National Diploma course used to bring out better ideas than an open brief. Restriction brings us freedom, and there where lots of restrictions here both enforced and self imposed: imagine how dark a theatre is, then imagine there are no stage lights set up, then remember these are spaces that have been made into venues within a couple of days and you can start to appreciate how dark it was – the cameras rarely had an iso slower than 1600, shutter speeds 20^th of a second or slower, aperture wide open – there was also the hike from one venue to the next hoping not to miss anything.

Sadie did a great job on her own when I was unable to be there getting this wonderfull ‘Winograndesc’ picture of Janice Connolly as Barbara Nice from ‘Hiya and Higher’.

All of the photos can be seen on the Fringe TheatreFest Website: http://theatrefest.co.uk/pics.htm

Art Work made during Art Trek 2009

2009-06-30T13:49:00.000+01:00

The last two weekends has seen me demonstrating my process for making camera-less images, sun prints, chemical prints, daylight print, leaf works or whatever you’d like to think of them as. I did this for Art Trek, at Broomhill Sculpture Park near Barnstaple, North Devon’s open studios event at the end of June.

There was a lot of interest with over 60 people visiting on the last Sunday alone. I was making work throughout Art Trek, the image above being the best constructed image made over the first weekend. I used leaves and more from ‘throw-a-way’ plants and trees rather than some of the more cultivated ones planted specially in the gardens. This particular image was made using stinging nettles and dock leaves, traditionally used as an anaesthetic for the sting; these plants can always be found together and are like yin and yang, sting and anaesthetic, positive and negative complementing the traditional photographic process I was using.

Over the last weekend I made a few single 5x7 inch unique prints from columbine, elder, ash and foxglove (there may have been other leaves etc and included 2x slugs that got in on the act by accident). These I sold at £10 each once they were archivally fixed, washed and dried then mounted on foam board. I still have some of these left for sale for £10 with free p&p through Europe, it’ll cost a fraction more for the States. If you’d like one please visit my main website: http://www.greengallery.co.uk/pages/forest.htm

This is an example of a 5x7 inch unique print made during Art Trek 2009

Photo Workshops this Summer

2009-05-27T15:15:00.000+01:00

I’ll be running a lot of photography workshops/courses over the summer. Every Tuesday in June and July. The Morning workshops are designed as a basic introduction to digital photography; learning to gain control over your camera, shutter speeds, aperture, iso, flash etc, setting it up for optimum quality under any given lighting, and making better pictures through composition. The Afternoon sessions are based around photographing landscape and the natural environment. This workshop is designed for someone who has a basic knowledge of how to use their camera but now wants to experience the natural landscape in a personal and creative way.

On Wednesday July 22nd I’m doing a special one day workshop exploring triptychs and the constructed image. I’ll will be using historic and contemporary examples and sharing my own experience in this one day workshop. A basic knowledge and experience of using your own digital camera is required for this day. A detailed itinerary for the workshop will be available soon. See my website for details: http://www.greengallery.co.uk/pages/workshops.htm

Also I’ll be leading, with Caroline Preston a couple of residential courses, developing and exploring photographic techniques, at Beaford Arts. The first one’s for school years 9-11 and starts 10:00 Thursday 30th - 16:00 Friday 31st July and the second is for school years 6-8 and starts 10:00 Monday 3rd - 16:00 Tuesday 4th August. Details are here: http://www.beaford-arts.org.uk/index.php?id=21 also whilst you’re there check out my pages as a Beaford Artist: http://www.beaford-arts.org.uk/index.php?id=84 and: http://www.beaford-arts.org.uk/index.php?id=57 thanks to Jane at Beaford for these!

Talking of which I’ll also be having an exhibition of current work there during the last week of July and the first week of August. And I’ll be running some very special workshops for adults at Beaford over the weekend of 1st and 2nd August, I haven’t fully planned it yet, but think camera-less, so if there’s anything you’d like me to cover let me know; details will arrive here as soon as it’s all finalised.

Art Trek

2009-05-15T12:03:00.000+01:00

Suddenly I’m a lot busier than I was, fitting in 2½ days teaching at East Devon College in Tiverton, I’ve lapsed in my blog writing. Neither have I made many new images recently, of the large ‘art’ variety, as my best camera lens is being repaired. But I see this summer as a very creative time.

On Thursday 28th May I’ll be promoting Art Trek on the quay, under canvas, at the Appledore Visual Arts Festival. Art Trek for real starts three weeks later and I’ll be based at Broomhill Sculpture Park between Barnstaple and Muddiford making camera-less images. This will be the first time that I have used traditional photographic chemicals and paper for eight years and it will be fascinating to see what I can make from the leaves I find in Broomhill's wonderful gardens. This will be a taste of the Year of the Artist residency I did with an Arts Council grant in 2001. I’ll be next to the Broomhill Stables (which will house North Devon Art’s Square Picture Show) on the 20th, 21st, 27th and 28th June 2009.

Whilst preparing for this residency I came across a whole load of unfinished work that I made in 2001 at the National Forest in Leicestershire. I had been making so many new pieces during the Year of the Artist residency that most of them had never been constructed together and mounted; I had quickly moved onto other things in 2001. these ‘old’ new pieces will be shown whilst I’m at Broomhill, one of them will also be show in the Queens theatre Café Gallery, Barnstaple, during June.

I had hoped to do some workshops during the Tuesdays of Art Trek, but I’m now committed to teaching in Tiverton. However if the interest is there, I’ll be happy to do something like this later in the summer.

I bring these things on myself!

2009-02-17T18:28:00.000Z

After writing about how things change I was reminded of another current image, which will be in the Ruby Expo, which has changed - through my own mistake!

Atlantic Aperture (collapsed) was shown originally at Trelawney Garden Centre with Atlantic Aperture, shown one super-imposed on the other above. Following is the text that accompanied the two images:

We are living on the frontier of climate change here in North Devon. Our coast is living proof of historical changes through different heights of sea level and the comings and goings of Ice Ages. As the speed of change increases, so does the evidence. In the three years I’ve been photographing the North Devon coast I’ve seen caves disappear as their roofs have collapsed into the sea. This image is a combination of two that are in this exhibition; the original ‘Atlantic Aperture’ was shot in the spring of 2006 and the other was the same place one year later. This was an eight metre high tunnel, a passage from a small sheltered bay to the roar of the Atlantic, situated just west of Hartland Point and only accessible at low tide. Now, buried under a huge landslip, it’s only entrance is from the sea.

Anyway, I digress. I went to print Atlantic Aperture (collapsed) for the Ruby Expo, as they had accepted the image I had sent them as above, however, search as I might through my computer, external drives, back-up DVDs etc I could not find the image. So I resigned to making it again from scratch. Bizarrely after half a day of concerted Photoshop effort it turned out different, I believe better, than it was.

I’m not sure if there is a moral here. It ought to be ‘keep your workspace clean and tidy’, ‘file everything away in a methodical fashion’, ‘always make a back-up of your files’. But my loss is also my gain as the new construction from the original frames is better than it had been. Perhaps the moral should be all of the above plus ‘occasionally re-work your images’!

New version of Atlantic Aperture (collapsed), Hartland, North Devon 2009

How things change....

2009-02-16T16:52:00.000Z

I have four new works in the current North Devon Arts, New Year New Work show at Broomhill Art Hotel and five more in a two day group show at Holsworthy Memorial Hall over the weekend of 21st & 22nd Feb for the inaugural Ruby Country Art Expo.

Both of these shows demanded new work, the NDA’s had to have been made during the last year and the Expo’s the last two years. It’s always good to make new work and it gives me the impetus to look at all of my ‘work-in-progress’ and decide which ones I’m still drawn to and will look good, once completed, in the respective shows.

One of the images I chose to bring on from thumbnail to artwork was Hermit Hole, Grand Canyon, March 2008 (thumbnail on the left/above). This was originated from time based in Tucson in the winter of early 2008. This was the first trip I had hiked below the rim of the Grand Canyon and it was fantastic. A lot of compacted snow and ice at the trail heads but further down it got brighter and warmer. This image, made of 47 separate digital frames, was found on the Hermit Trail, hence its name. It was the edge of what would have been a huge waterfall after a good thunderstorm, but when I was there it was totally dry, but there were the odd pools of water left further down.

Here you see how the image has radically changed through the intentional reconstruction of the many photographic frames to make it as realistic and truthful as possible but without loosing its sense of mystery and place. There is a continual battle as I construct an image between the placing of each ‘jigsaw puzzle piece’ on my computer screen in Photoshop, making sure each piece is in the right place and at the right angle; with my memory of how the place looked and felt, bearing in mind that I am transforming a three dimensional space, a 180 degree, fish-eye view, of a place onto a two dimensional canvas.

A similar, but not so dramatic difference was noticed with an image for the Ruby show: Striped Wall, Combe Martin. I have taken to making a thumbnail of an image using Photoshop’s ‘photomerge’ to give me an idea if it ‘works’ or whether I want to pursue it any further. Photomerge is great for merging up to 5 or 6 frames together (so long as they have been taken on a similar plain and have similar tonal values); but to combine more than this successfully I have to make my frames thumbnail sized.

Another use for this thumbnail is as an image to send to a gallery etc for inclusion in a show or for a press release. Once the image has been accepted I have to put the real work in making the constructed image full size, in this case a file of 750mb to make a fine quality print of up to 1.5metres.

Green Gallery re-launch and revamp

2009-01-03T18:33:00.000Z

2009 brings you a totally new look website for Dave Green's photography, www.greengallery.co.uk . I’ve been unhappy with my current website for some time now; it had been built over many years with content added every so often. Now it is time to have a coherent look to my site with plenty of information as well as images to inspire, inform and hopefully start some thinking and debate.

This blog is like a New Years resolution that I haven’t actually made, but in essence launching a new website and a blog in the first week of January implies that I intend to keep both up-to-date through 2009 – let’s hope so.

I've added the video below to this blog as I'm having difficulty placing it within http://www.greengallery.co.uk/ Wren Music commissioned me last year as an ‘arts' worker and documenter of their junk band, Recyc, undertaking a funded project the ‘River Taw, from Moor to Shore'. This work, in collaboration with musicians Nick Wyke and Becki Driscoll and the 14-16 year old band members, resulted in a video made up of stills shot at 4 frames per second, illustrating their journey through the writing, making and performing of music inspired by the River Taw and the journey of the river from it's source to the sea.