the Changing Landscape

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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.