Here comes the sun

click photo to enlarge
The Beatles' Abbey Road album is a particular favourite of mine. Just about every song is a masterpiece, from the driving blues/rock of I Want You (She's So Heavy), to the chug of Come Together and the 1950s-inspired swoop of Oh Darling. For me the inventive brilliance and contrasts wrapped into the 16 minute medley of You Never Give Me Your Money, Sun King, Mean Mr. Mustard, Polythene Pam, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight and The End are the highlight of the album. However, I also like it for George Harrison's two contributions -the peerless Something and the only slightly less well known Here Comes The Sun.

I read somewhere that Harrison wrote Here Comes The Sun when he was staying with Eric Clapton, and it certainly has some similarities to Badge, the song they co-wrote for Cream. Incidentally, the chiming guitar part on the latter song is Harrison not Clapton, and the Abbey Road song features a guitar figure with a similar feel. For an English-born listener the title and words of this song perfectly summarise the feeling you have when, on a bright, March day you feel the warmth of the sun on your back, you take your jumper off, and you know that spring has finally arrived, banishing the unremitting cold of winter.

But, it's only February, and we have yet to experience that feeling. I'm not usually one who yearns, in the way that some do, for the arrival of spring: in fact I find lots of pleasures in an English winter. However, after this year's extra helping of frost, snow and rain, I too am ready for spring. In the absence of the real sun I thought I'd engineer it through a photograph of a single bloom from the vase of yellow chrysanthemums that curently decorates our hall. To give the flower a spring-like glow I lit it from behind and from the side, and put the LX3 on a tripod so that I could use a slow shutter speed and therefore a low ISO. When I compose a shot like this that has a very obvious compositional centre (the flower's middle) I really have a struggle to put it anywhere but the bottom left corner because that location seems so "right." However, on this shot I forced myself to overcome my predilection and put it towards the top right.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2
Shutter Speed: 1/4
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Photographic subjects

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A couple of posts ago I was waxing lyrical about the Beatles. My attempts at photo- graphing a mundane cauli- flower got me thinking about them again. Yes, really! At the end of 1967 the band released the single, "Hello Goodbye" with "I Am The Walrus" on the B-side. The latter song was a John Lennon composition, whilst the A-side was McCartney's, though as with all Beatles songs written by either or both, the writing credits feature both names.

When "Hello Goodbye" was released it seemed to me that it was a work through which Paul McCartney said to the world, "I can make a great song about ANYTHING!" And in those years you believed he could - even something as simple as a string of opposites. At a time when the great majority of popular songs were about love, romance, dating, etc, the Beatles were in the vanguard of the bands that were extending their subject matter into previously uncharted territory; and that sometimes included beautifully composed gibberish!

So, what has this to do with my photograph of a cauliflower? Well, I think there's a lesson for photographers in McCartney's "throwaway" song. Just as anything can be the subject of a song, so too can anything be the subject of a photograph. Moreover, a great photograph can have anything as its subject. It was with those thoughts in mind that I took a trimmed cauliflower some friends had brought when they came to dinner the other evening, and tried to turn it into - not a great photograph - but a reasonable image. My first shots were details of the leaves and veins, but I wasn't too happy with them. Then I tried for a large section of the vegetable, but once more rejected my efforts. Finally I placed it on a black background in a darker area with daylight coming strongly from one direction, and made images of the whole of the cauliflower. I was happiest with these. My final version isn't a great shot, but the curves, the veins, the near symmetry, and the way the light models the subject has produced something that I like. It also, for what it's worth, brings to mind the acanthus leaf that forms part of the decoration of the Corinthian capital in Greek and Roman architecture.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f3.5
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 400
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Number 9

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The trio of albums - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Beatles ("The White Album") (1968) and Abbey Road (1969) - for me, represent the summit of the Beatles' achievement. There are those who would say Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966), with hindsight, are as good or better than the later works, but, whilst they include some excellent songs, I think the subsequent recordings surpass them.

My recollections of those years is that Sgt Pepper burst upon us like something from another planet. The musicianship, invention, breadth, instrumentation, and sheer spirit of the work meant that it rarely left our turntables. In retrospect Revolver had pointed us in this direction, and other bands had dipped their toes in the pool that the Beatles plunged into, but the phrase that one critic used to described it at the time, "revolutionary popular music," wasn't an overstatement. And the question on everyone's mind in 1967 was, "How can they top that?" Well, in 1968, with The White Album they showed that there was no need to try. In that work they extended some of the ideas of Sgt Pepper, but also side-stepped into Anglo-American music's past. Affectionate Beach Boys parody (Back in the USSR), grinding blues (Yer Blues), music hall brought up to date (The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill), Noel Coward-like crooning (Wild Honey Pie), love songs, hard rock and the rest - not forgetting a clutch of George Harrison songs that are amongst his best - made it an album that revealed its subtleties only after many listens. And, just as Sgt Pepper had one song that probably didn't deserve its place on the album (Within You, Without You), so too did The White Album (Revolution 9). John Lennon's eight minutes of musique concrete influenced by Yoko Ono's regard for Stockhausen and Cage was worth a listen, maybe two, at most three. However, it sat very uneasily alongside works that bear multiple hearings. It would have been better if George Martin and Paul McCartney had got their way and left it off the album.

My mind strayed onto this subject, and I heard that EMI engineer repeating "number, 9, number 9, number 9", when I was deciding how to title the photograph above. It shows a marker (Number 9) at the end of one of the submerged groynes at Hunstanton, Norfolk, with, farther out, a distant ,small, sea-fishing boat. Its minimalistic subject, spare composition and limited colour range make this image as much of an oddity amongst my output as the track of that title is amongst the Fab Four's ouvre.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 64mm (128mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On