Spring whisk

click photo to enlarge
My culinary skills are of the lowest order. The fact is I have no interest in cooking. However, I must say, lest anyone thinks that I don't do my fair share in the kitchen, that my dishwashing skills and my application of them are second to none! I can be found after most meals, arms plunged up to the elbows in suds, bringing the shine back to the china and the gleam back to the stainless steel. I do involve myself in the preparation of meals, but only in a small and menial way. Setting the table, getting things out ready for the cook (my wife), and the odd bit of food preparation do come my way. As does the occasional dose of tedium. Preparing fruit and vegetables for freezing is one such task. But the worst, by far, is whisking the egg whites when a meringue is being made.

I know that in many households an electric whisk is used for this purpose. In ours, a manual spring whisk is pressed into service, and after it has been used I always end up with an aching forearm. Why don't I automate the procedure? Well, we've applied cost-benefit analysis to the matter and decided that an aching arm is a small cost compared with the benefit of not having to buy, store, get out and put away yet another electric gadget. And, importantly, the manual whisk produces less washing up.

It was when I'd come to the end of the washing up after an evening meal that I noticed the spring whisk lurking in the drawer. The kitchen lights were making the coiled metal throw sharp shadows, and I made a mental note to try and get a photograph out of its interesting shape. When it came to it I got two, both of the bulbous spring, one shot from each direction. They are the latest images in my "kitchen sink" collection.

For anyone with a kitchen sporting the latest in gee-whizz electrical whisking technology, and who has no idea what a spring whisk is, here's what the complete article looks like.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

(Photo 1 & 2)
Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Soup, condensation and home-cooking

click photo to enlarge
There was a time, during my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, when I sampled a range of the tinned soups that manufacturers placed before us. Some of them tasted fine, but others were pretty gruesome. I had a liking for pea and ham, and some cream of mushroom soups were quite palatable. Chicken soup was usually pretty dire, I recall, and oxtail soup wasn't far behind. However, the worst was probably tomato soup. The recipe in those days included quite a bit of salt and sugar, and it was this combination hitting the back of your throat that you remembered from a bowl of tomato soup, rather than the flavour of the fruit.

These days the only soup that I eat is prepared at home, and it surpasses shop-bought soups in the way that home-made bread eclipses the industrial flour-based product of the superstores. Quite a few of our soups are made with produce from our vegetable garden. They are prepared in batches, some of which is eaten at the time of preparation, and the rest frozen for future consumption. Yesterday a batch of tomato soup was made using fruit we'd grown that had been frozen. Today's photograph shows the condensation clinging to the underside of a plastic lid resting over the container of that soup as it cooled down before it was closed and placed in the freezer. The rounded shape is a small, shallow dome moulded into the centre of the lid.

I've said elsewhere in this blog that one of the pleasures of macro photography is its capacity to reveal the interest that is all around us and is so frequently overlooked. The condensation on this plastic lid on the work-surface of the kitchen, illuminated by the wall cupboard under-lighters, is not an obvious photographic subject. However, for one such as myself, a fully-paid up member of the "kitchen sink" school of photography it is bread and butter!

For more "kitchen sink" subjects see here, here, and here.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro, (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f5
Shutter Speed: 1/5
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: Off

The "Kitchen Sink" photographer

click photo to enlarge
A couple of days ago I was reading a piece by a photographer. It was reasonably interesting until I got to the part where he mentioned the importance of "finding your own voice". At that point I gave up on him, because it's something I've never been able to take seriously. The idea of developing until you create your own unique and identifiable style is promulgated by those who like to see themselves as the gatekeepers of the higher levels of photography - bodies such as The Royal Photographic Society - as well as by many photographers, photographic critics, and writers on the subject. For those who aren't familiar with this concept I discussed it briefly in a post in early 2008. Here's what I wrote then:

"This idea is adapted from fine art criticism, and goes something like this. When you start out in photography you take snaps, then as your interest and skill grows you re-create technically sound well-known genre (some would say cliche) images, and finally, if you make the ultimate leap, you produce artistic, original images each including an element of a style that you have created: your work becomes recognisable by your particular "signature".

I don't rubbish this theory lightly, or from a position of ignorance - I have a lifelong interest in art, the history of art, and photography, and even have academic qualifications in these areas. I am scathing about it because, whilst it might be a theory that can be, retrospectively but artificially, applied to many painters and photographers, and it undoubtedly does accurately describe the progress of others, it is nonetheless very easy to find eminent practitioners whose career zenith involves producing very disparate pieces of work, for whom the idea of a single identifiable "signature" style is anathema. It is not a "one size fits all" description of a photographers development, nor should it be held up as a model to consciously emulate.

The other week, as I was reading about Britain's "angry young men" in David Kynaston's "Family Britain 1951-57," the seed of an idea was planted that has a bearing on on what I've just written. The novelists and playwrights of that period, people such as John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, Terence Rattigan and Alan Sillitoe, were seen as producing work rooted in anger, alienation, the feeling of being an outsider, and this phrase was coined to describe them. I recalled that in the 1960s the angry young men's view of the world, and the low-key, domestic and provincial subjects that they addressed in print, was transferred to television plays that became known as "kitchen sink drama". And that phrase strongly resounded in my head. Perhaps, I thought, I could find my own voice as the "kitchen sink photographer"! After all, I'd already started down that road with the triptych that I posted on the last day of 2009. That very same evening, as I washed up the dishes, my second "kitchen sink" image appeared before my eyes. I'd splashed some water on a metal tray that had the residue of olive oil on it, and as the two liquids fought each other, the light bouncing off the water's irregular convex meniscus, I saw the shot.

So, when I burst upon the photographic scene as the chronicler of the drama, light, shade and essential dampnessness that is the kitchen sink, you'll know that I've succumbed to that dreaded theory, I've finally "found my own voice", and I am condemned to photographing nothing but soap suds, gravy stains and pan scrubs. Until that disconcerting day arrives you'll have to put up with the usual mixed and motley rubbish!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2
Shutter Speed: 1/30
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On