Category: The Enigma of Time

Another idea I had was that I could show the effect of time in my images by using the most important tool I already had – my camera! The longest exposures I had done so far were those of about 5 seconds of the moving water in the last shoot, but I wanted to challenge myself even further by trying to capture the stars in the night sky. I knew that this would involve a much longer shutter speed and of course my tripod, and that maybe it was a big challenge with a chance of failing, but nevertheless I wanted to give it my best shot, and I had always aspired to take beautiful photographs of the stars and the wonders of nature!

I did my research before the shoot and found out that an exposure of around 20 seconds or more would be ideal to capture the light coming to earth from the stars. With this in mind as a starting point, I was then able to figure out the correct aperture and ISO based around this. I chose another local location called Tegg’s Nose, as I knew this would be the perfect place to access by car with a sturdy car park to place my tripod, and is probably the closest place to home away from the majority of light pollution and therefore safest to access in the early hours of the morning, when the sky would be the most clear and the majority of lights would be out as people slept. The biggest challenge I found during this shoot was focusing the camera; I experimented with both autofocus and manual focus, but it was impossible to find a star to focus on with my camera facing vertically upwards towards the sky, and the sky completely black on the viewfinder. To resolve this, I faced the camera towards the hills where I could still capture the night sky and the stars in the top half of the image, with some landscape and nature in the bottom half and the moon as my main focal point. This gave the images some foreground interest, adding depth and layers so there are more elements for the viewer to see and keep them intrigued. Although most of my images were out of focus, it was fun to keep experimenting and figuring out how to resolve the issues that I faced. I attempted to use the car headlights and the torch on my phone to find a focal point, but unfortunately these did not work. Next time I would take along a speed light to illuminate the elements in the foreground. I was also advised by Dave while editing and printing post-shutter that the gradual change in colour along the horizon line was in fact caused by light pollution from the nearby towns and city of Manchester, and that the reason the printed versions with an orange/red colour temperate were of poor quality with lots of noise, was because the red colour channel holds more noise. Whereas the prints with a blue colour temperate were a lot clearer with vastly reduced noise, because the blue colour channel does not hold noise in the same way. This was very useful knowledge to apply to the printing process and any future shoots of this nature.

Next, I wanted to try photographing moving water again for this assignment, as I really like the white, ‘cotton’ type effect that is produced when photographing moving water with a slow shutter speed, and one of the main areas of photography that interests me is landscapes and nature, therefore I wanted to improve on my last attempt.

This time I took a walk in my local town of Bollington in search of a river called Ingersley Vale and the waterfall that I had read could be found up there. I thought that this could be a wonderful photo opportunity, especially now I had learnt the importance of a tripod when shooting moving water and how it would give me a clean, crisp background in the areas with no movement, as hand holding would not be sufficient enough. Walking along the path, I found a “waterfall” but with nothing more than a trickle of water! And so I continued my walk to find something way more powerful; later coming across the vale and the river flowing through the luscious green Cheshire fields. I set up my tripod near the bridge as this was where the water seemed to be flowing the fastest, and I thought the bridge could also become an interesting element in the images. I experimented with shutter speeds between 3 and 5 seconds, way longer than the 1/8th of a second that I tried using on my first shoot in Eyam. This gave me much more motion blur in the water, closer to the effect that inspirational photographers such as Liza Dracup had achieved in their work, which is what I was after. I experimented in different points along the river to find the most successful place, incorporating the trees, bridge and surrounding nature to add more depth to the images. My images are below:

A few days after the Blackpool trip, a travelling funfair was set up at my local train station, an event which happens annually and the children and adolescents in my town always look forward to it. I couldn’t believe my luck and thought this would be a brilliant opportunity to shoot the movement of some rides that I didn’t have chance to do in Blackpool! I decided to do the shoot once it had gone dark because the light trails would make the movement and the passing of time in the image much more prominent, in comparison to the photos I took in Blackpool in the daylight where the movement was more subtle in the image and may not be noticed in some of the images without being pointed out. Unfortunately luck wasn’t exactly on my side again, as the selection of rides was quite small and poor, with most of them being packed together so there wasn’t much room to get a good angle for the images, or there weren’t enough lights on the rides to visualise the movement and accomplish my vision. There was also a large police presence due to an incident with some adolescents, and so I had to keep my distance and shoot the tall swing ride that was there as the main subject. The event was popular with a busy main road located opposite, meaning it wasn’t safe to put up my black tripod in the dark, so I took some handheld shots and tried to make the best of the situation. The bright, colourful lights look effective against the black sky, however it was hard to capture the movement because I couldn’t lower the shutter speed enough to capture it effectively. It was however productive to try and shoot in low light conditions and helped inform me how the exposure must change in such conditions. With such little luck shooting rides and attractions, I decided it was time to photograph other subjects that may give me a more successful outcome.

Myself and one of my peers were discussing our assignments and we both decided that Blackpool would be a brilliant location to take some photographs for The Enigma of Time assignment. With the seaside resort typically being very popular with tourists, we figured there would be many photographic opportunities to capture movement; my initials plans were to put up my tripod along the promenade and capture the many people walking along the seafront, with the camera on a slow shutter speed to achieve motion blur with the background staying sharp. I also wanted to capture similar images of the fairground rides and attractions in motion along the piers. Another reason for choosing Blackpool in particular was that we were both inspired and intrigued by the work of Martin Parr and his satirical images of working class people enjoying their holidays at similar seaside resorts, and we also wanted to capture the essence of British seaside resorts in our images and maybe even experiment with a similar documentary style to Parr.

So on 18/03/19 we caught the train to Blackpool North station and embarked on our seaside photography adventure. Having kept an eye on the weather forecast the week before, we were disappointed to find that when we arrived it was raining – hard – throughout the entire day. This was concerning because we had planned our shoot and didn’t want to damage any of our camera equipment, but also because there was hardly a soul around or along the promenade, which was an essential ingredient for the images we wanted to capture! We decided to begin by exploring one of the indoor amusement arcades for photo opportunities while keeping ourselves and our cameras dry. As soon as we walked through the door of the well known Coral Island amusements, we were greeted with an ideal ride for me to photograph for the kind of images I was after. Although I was nervous to set up my tripod in a public place, I set up my equipment facing a children’s train ride which had an interesting angle as the train went up an incline in the track. I was conscious of appearing strange from photographing a children’s ride, but my intention was for the train to be considerably blurred so none of the children would be identifiable anyway, and would have explained this had anyone asked. Typically once my equipment was set up, the few families that were around had moved on and so I had to wait patiently for another person to board the train. During this time I took a few test shots to find the appropriate exposure and focal length. It was difficult at first to get the timing and focus right, but after a while I think I managed to get some successful images. The only downside was that surrounding the ride were lots of obstructions such as signs, other attractions and pillars within the structure of the building, and so when editing these images I made a tight square crop to remove any distracting elements in the foreground and ensure the viewer’s focus would be on the motion blur of the train. Once I was happy with my shots, we moved on around the arcade; I decided to try and capture the movement of a classic British arcade game, the 10p slot machine, but the movement of the tray of coins was only quite small and the images didn’t look particularly effective. Due to the small number of people that were around, not many of the other machines were in action or seemed like they would provide an effective image, and so we took a break to think about what to do next. During this time I took a moment to take in my surroundings and my thoughts turned to Martin Parr; a couple with a young child appeared nearby and I quickly took the opportunity to take a candid photo of them enjoying the amusements, improvising by using the top of the machine behind to keep the camera steady as I didn’t have enough time to set the tripod back up before they moved! I didn’t want to seem invasive and so I then turned around and saw another person playing on the slot/gambling machines towards the adults area, and quickly snapped a picture of that side of the arcade, too. Then I realised I had just caught two juxtaposed images – one of the family side and one of the adult side – and thought that this would be an ideal context for a constructed image/multiple exposure!

After visiting a number of other arcades that were either completely quiet or the rides weren’t suitable for an image, we took a walk along one of the piers to see if that area was any more lively. Unfortunately it was just as quiet, but looking over at the iconic tower, I noticed the road along the bottom and thought I could possibly capture an interesting image of the dominating tower, with the movement of the cars passing below it. And so I set my tripod up outside; the exposure needed to be completely different here as the sky was very bright and overcast, compared to the darkness of the arcade, and so I spent a while experimenting and trying to get the shutter speed right. I got the shots but from my position it proved difficult to get the road in a prominent position within the composition while also getting the tower in shot, and so the images don’t really point towards the intention of capturing the movement of the cars unless you look closely. I then tried to get another image of moving cars by pointing the camera towards the exit of the pier, where the road could be seen with a stereotypical sign featuring a donkey hung above the doorway, and caught a couple of shots of cars driving past, almost illustrating the people leaving the resort under the sign saying “thank you for coming, see you again soon!” With the elements being against us, this marked the end of our trip and any more photo opportunities; although the shoot wasn’t as successful as we anticipated, I have been able to practice using my equipment and capturing movement, become more confident with photographing in public, and caught a couple of images that I think could be effective with some editing post-shutter.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Probably the most successful image from the shoot, with a tight crop focusing on the ride itself

After realising that the bouquet of roses I bought were rather cliche for the Objects of Desire assignment, I decided to use what I already had and try out an idea for another assignment: photographing the same flowers in the same position as they aged, and placing the new and old images side by side to show the ageing process and how time affects everyone and everything in the world, slowly decaying nature. This could be described as “enigmatic” because it is mysterious and interesting how time affects everything differently and at different rates; the lifespan for flowers, for example, is a lot shorter than the average human lifespan, and time affects flowers and nature at a much more rapid rate.

I chose the photo from the previous shoot that had the most impact on my peers to replicate for this experiment. Using my home studio with the same background roll and the same red velvet material from the previous shoot, I did my best to replicate the entire set-up as closely as possible and place the flowers in exactly the same way, photographing from similar angles. I opened the original image in Lightroom to view the metadata to set the shutter speed, ISO and aperture on my camera to the same settings as the last one, to get the closest possible exposure. It was hard to remember the positioning of the lighting the first time around, but I experimented with it until I got a similar result. Of course it was hard to get everything exactly identical, but I’m happy with my efforts. Due to the nature of trying to recreate one particular image, there isn’t as much noticeable variety between images as they needed to be shot from the same angle and same composition; the differences are more subtle such as tiny lighting and angle adjustments.

At this point, the flowers were around 10 days old and had opened up beautifully into large roses with soft petals. One particular yellow rose near the middle of the bouquet had begun to turn brown; this was when I decided I would allow the flowers to continue to grow for a bit longer, with the hope that more of the petals would turn brown as they aged and demonstrate the ageing process even clearer.

Further development (20/03/19) – I gave the flowers another week to continue the ageing process; although the petals didn’t turn as brown as I had hoped, the flowers were evidently past their best and were wilting and losing their shape and colour, meaning the element of time is still clear in the images. These images were again shot in the same environment with the same exposure, as closely to the previous two shoots as possible. I also took a few close-ups shots to see more clearly how the flowers had aged and changed. I think if I was to use these for my final submission, the comparison between the first and last image would have the greatest impact and show the largest time frame. Perhaps the middle shoot isn’t as relevant as it makes the ageing process look slower, more gradual and less effective, whereas the beginning and end give a bigger impact when comparing side by side as there is a more drastic change.

After being inspired by Eugene Atget and making the decision to photograph historical locations, I embarked on a trip to “The Plague Village” of Eyam to document the village’s dark history of the Plague or “Black Death.” After the disease was brought to the village from London in a piece of infected cloth in 1665, villagers selflessly decided to seal themselves off from the rest of the country and the outside world to avoid spreading the deadly disease to others, and the village still tells this story to this day. There are many plaques and boards detailing the story and the methods used to contain the disease, as well as monumental landmarks including the ones I visited and photographed, such as: the Plague Cottages where the victims of the disease once lived and modern families now inhabit; the Church of St Lawrence which dates back to Saxon times and features an eighth-century Celtic Cross and churchyard; and an old traditional Sheep Roast, plus many more attractions such as the museum which were unfortunately closed when I visited. I used my Nikkor Micro Prime Lens with a wide aperture to create an effective, shallow depth of field and focus on certain parts of the image, such as the “Plague Cottage” plaques to explain the backstory within the image and give some context.

Afterwards, I visited the nearby village of Castleton and took a stroll along a lake, capturing the moving water using a slow shutter speed of about 1/8th of a second, and balancing the camera on the stone wall to minimise camera shake. I also took the opportunity to photograph some dandelions with a shallow depth of field which were inspired by Atget’s photographs of flowers in a similar style.

Here are the original images:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Next, I narrowed down the most successful images and edited them in Camera Raw, ensuring none of the highlights or shadows were blown out with the clipping warnings, adjusting the exposure and straightening any horizontal or vertical lines that needed tidying up. Below are the final images: