Autumn dead heads

click photo to enlarge
The pattern of life slowly emerges as you age. From early punctuations, such as birthdays, holidays and Christmas, more are added with each passing year - a new school year, new college terms, a new house, your children's birthdays followed all too rapidly it seems by their departure as adults, then, in later life, the passing, with ever greater frequency, of people that you know.

As a background to the milestones of our human lives there are the constantly changing seasons. You are taught about these as a child, and you understand them at a literal level. However, it's not until you have more than a few decades under your belt that their rhythm becomes an integral part of your life. At least that's how it's been with me. When I was a child I felt the seasons. As a youth, a young man, particularly when work became one of my main focuses, I lost that proper feeling for the different times of year. Since I stopped paid work that has returned and assumed its rightful place as one of the pleasures of my life. I've said elsewhere in this blog that I relish every season's differences and am daily thankful that I live at a geographical latitude that has clearly differentiated seasons.

I gave thanks again the other day as I went about one of my early autumn jobs - collecting in a bucket the fallen crab apples and the cast-off begonia blooms. I was drawn to the faded beauty of dead heads a couple of years ago and posted a picture then. I noticed it again when I piled so many begonia flowers on top of the crab apples that I completely hid them from view. The natural vignette provided by the shadow of the rim of the bucket made the yellows, oranges and reds radiate one final, passing glow, and I recorded it in this photograph.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 122mm (183mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6 Shutter
Speed: 1/200 sec
ISO:140
Exposure Compensation: 0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Attracted to the insignificant

click photo to enlarge
It's happened to me more times than I care to remember. I'm out photographing something large and eye-catching when my attention is drawn to something small and relatively insignificant, something that I hadn't noticed until I got into position for the sought after shot. And that relatively insignificant subject produces a photograph that I like much more than the one I originally had my eye on.

My previous post, of Tattershall Castle, is a fairly routine piece of photographic reportage. The light is OK, the composition works, the content is reasonably interesting, and the shot is different from many of this subject because it's taken in winter when the building is out of use, rather than in summer. But it's not the sort of photograph that I'll look back at, ponder or seek to repeat and improve upon. However, when I was standing on the outer wall of the moat I noticed below me the skeletal remains of plants that had grown up through the water. Initially I thought they were umbellifers of one kind or another, but I now think they must be something else. What attracted me was their pale, winter-blasted stalks and seed heads against the deep, shadowy blue of the water. Then I noticed that the plants were throwing reflections on the surface that were dark doppelgangers. Looking through the viewfinder I liked the sharp, scratchy lines against the dark background and I ended up taken rather more shots of this unimportant subject than of the historic and significant pile only a hundred yards away. Which, I suppose, takes us back once more to the Aaron Rose quotation I mentioned last month.

Reviewing the photograph on my computer I was reminded of a photograph I posted in April 2012, one that was languishing in the vaults, that I plucked out and used. It shows willow branches and twigs over water. Its a shot that sits quite nicely alongside today's, and would look even better with a third to make a short series or triptych. I must look out for something suitable.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 37.1mm (100mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/125 sec
ISO:400
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Fading tulips

click photo to enlarge
There is a great temptation in photography to shoot beautiful subjects when they are at their most appealing. Landscapes, women, babies, cars, sunsets, you name the subject and you'll find  numerous photographs showing them at their best. The light, the sky, the pose, the backdrop, every detail will be in place to show the subject off off to dazzling effect.

It's even more so with flowers. In fact, though it's reasonably easy to find, say, good landscapes where the weather is grim and conventional beauty has been discarded in favour of the stern beauty of nature in the raw, just try and find a flower photograph with blooms past their best and I guarantee you'll struggle.

Painters have long known the different kind of beauty that can be seen in fading flowers, a muted attractiveness that is hinted at or remembered rather than displayed openly before your eyes. It was this effect that I sought when I photographed the tulips shown in today's photograph. But, it hasn't quite worked out as I wanted. Why? Well, if you are unfamiliar with what tulips look like at the peak of their perfection you might think that the flowers in this blue glass vase are just rather fine blooms that natural spread their petals in this rather attractive way. The fact the flowers are fading, are past their best, are naturally shedding their petals and are soon to be just stems isn't necessarily obvious, and even if it is, there remains a beauty that isn't particularly tinged with a feeling of imminent demise: there is still plenty of deep colour in the petals and little sense of the faded beauty that I sought to capture. So, I've kept the flowers and I'll try again when their petals develop brown edges and their decline looks a bit more terminal!

Addendum:Here are the same tulips two days later (Fading Tulips 2), the petals rather more wrinkled and curled,the colours more muted, a hint of brownness about them, but still not everything I envisaged. Having reflected further on the matter I've concluded that I chose the wrong colour tulips for this exercise. It would have been much better to use dark red or dark purple. In fact, any colour with less brilliance than yellow would have suited my purposes. A lesson learned. Perhaps next time...

Addendum 2:
A final shot (Fading Tulips 3), three days after the first one, and one day after the second. Still not quite there. It's definitely the basic colours of the tulip that's wrong for the photograph I'm seeking.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm macro
F No: f11
Shutter Speed: 1/4 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -1.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: Off

Faded flowers and Charles Rennie Mackintosh

click photo to enlarge
The reputation of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) has never been higher than in recent years. It's difficult to go into a bookshop, a "craft" store, or a jewellers without coming across his name. Books, brooches, posters, mugs, picture frames - it seems that his Art Nouveau designs can adorn just about anything. And yet, this decorative work, as exemplified by the stencil patterns he used in the Willow Tea Rooms, Glasgow, is only a small part of his ouvre.

Mackintosh studied at the Glasgow School of Art, and in the 1890s he painted, did graphic work and metalwork that showed Art Nouveau influences he'd probably picked up from reading The Studio, a publication which began in 1893. However, his name really came to prominence when he won the competition to design a new building for the Glasgow School of Art. His was a thoroughly modern conception that was influenced by Voysey and Scottish baronial architecture. It mixed the sharply rectilinear with the fluid lines of Art Nouveau, and deeply influenced continental, particularly Austrian, architects. Mackintosh went on to design other fine buildings and furniture. However, he was a man who alienated customers and fellow architects alike, and in 1913 he left his Glasgow practice and moved to Walberswick in Suffolk, where he concentrated on his paintings. During his time as an architect he had painted flowers, and in Suffolk he threw himself into this work, producing wonderful images of, principally, wild flowers in a combination of pencil and watercolour. He later went to live in Mediterranean France, and in the final years of his life painted landscapes and cut flowers in vases.

This latter work came to mind a few days ago when I was in a Leicestershire church. On the octagonal font cover, lit by strong light from a nearby window, was a vase of hydrangea flowers. The person who had placed them there had carefully selected a variety of coloured blooms - pink, blue, purple and white. But, the colours were fading fast as the flowers died. Their slow decline from bright, cheeriness to a pale memory of what had been, reminded me of the poignant beauty I once saw in a Mackintosh watercolour of 1905 that depicted faded roses. With that inspiration in mind, I took this photograph.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 6.3mm (30mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.2
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 320
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On