Staircase, The Hub, Regent's Park

click photo to enlarge
Wherever I go I come across Hubs. By that I mean buildings that have been given that name, presumably to, in some way, describe how they are the focal point of one kind of activity or another. In recent years I've been to Hubs in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and London, and I know of others. Some have been training venues, one was a gallery, one a medical facility, another an educational establishment. Clearly this name has attractions for organisations but one can't help but wonder how much confusion is caused by its popularity. Most recently I visited a Hub that was a new building built into a mound, topped by a cafe, that serves as the focal point of a number of sports facilities in Regent's Park, London.

This particular Hub was a quite utilitarian building, designed of materials that could cope with muddy, sweaty, athletic people who were using the lockers, toilets, cafe etc. Fortunately the architects had an eye that went beyond utility and the building incorporated a particularly interesting central staircase that connected the ground level (actually below ground level) with the cafe at the top of the mound. Glass, steel, concrete and plywood combined with the well-lit top of the building to create sinuous lines between the two floors - an attractive subject for a photograph.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Staircase, The Hub, Regent's Park, London
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 15mm (30mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Photographing staircases

click photo to enlarge
Photographers seem drawn to photographing staircases in the way that painters paint bowls of fruit, and perhaps for similar reasons - it is a very three-dimensional subject depicted in two dimensions. Architects put a lot of work into staircases and over the centuries have come up with many variations, some ornate, others utilitarian. The wrongly named spiral staircase (they are almost always helicoidal) must take the prize for the most photographed design, and I've taken my share of examples of both elaborate and simple construction.

Any staircase that involves a change of direction (called in this instance a "return") gives a photographer a strong set of lines and a visual route through an image, and this must lie at the centre of its attraction as a subject. Handrails, balusters, newel posts, wall stringers, lighting etc add further elements though the most important is often people using the staircase. Today's example was taken in a relatively dark staircase at Tate Modern in London. Here I liked the contrast of the flat dark areas and the subtly shaded lighter areas as well as the line created by the lighting under the handrail and the fact that the colour palette is nearly all in the area of browns and beiges.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Staircase, Tate Modern, London
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/30 sec
ISO:6400
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Staring at stairs

click photo to enlarge
When I looked in my edition of the Oxford English Dictionary I initially couldn't find the word "stairwell". But, after a bit of digging, it turned up towards the end of the "stair" entry. The definition was as I imagined, namely "the shaft containing a flight of stairs." It seems to be one of those words that is slowly falling out of use, being replaced by "stairs" and "staircase", neither of which properly describes the architectural space, but rather the structure for ascent and descent that it holds.

I was pondering this word as I processed my photograph of a glass-walled stairwell in some Hull offices, a shot that I'd taken during the early evening on my last visit to the Yorkshire city. It occurred to me that I had to - wait for it - "stare well" before I took my photograph, but that no one in the building took the slightest bit of notice of me. That was quite a contrast with what happened when I took an early evening photograph of a glass walled building in the private public space that is "More London" a couple of years ago. On that occasion a security guard came out and asked me to stop taking photographs. I thought then, as I thought when I took the photograph in Hull, that anyone who doesn't want to be photographed inside the building in which they work really shouldn't choose one with glass walls. If you inhabit a goldfish bowl you can't complain if people stand and look at you or take photographs, especially if the land outside is public space. Besides, doesn't an architect, in designing in this way, seek to both satisfy the practical and aesthetic needs of the client and offer the locality a building worth looking at? And can we be blamed if we look - or take photographs? Those in this office certainly seemed untroubled by me taking shots from nearby and further away. Would that London offices were as accommodating!

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 80mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/80
ISO: 1000
Exposure Compensation:  -1.00 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Pubs, hotels and vanishing customers

click photo to enlarge

Anyone who lives in England or who visits on a regular basis can't help but notice the decline of the English pub. At the end of last year they were closing at a rate of 25 per week as large pub operators and privately-run businesses decided there was over-capacity and that many establishments were unprofitable and never going to be able to produce a profit. A combination of cheaper alcohol from supermarkets, the ban on smoking in buildings open to the public, the tightening of everyone's belt following the banking crash and the increased competition for discretionary spending has resulted in many closures over the past few years. Boarded up buildings can be seen in villages, towns  and cities across the country. This is nothing new of course. A hundred and more years ago even the smallest English village had a pub, and often not one but two, three or more. That was a time when beer was safer to drink than"Adam's ale" i.e. water. Most of these didn't survive the changing circumstances of the twentieth century. What is different about today's closures is the scale and the short period of time over which they are happening.

The down-turn in the fortunes of the pub has been mirrored, perhaps to a lesser extent, by hotels. The rise of mass foreign holidays in the 1960s on the back of increasing incomes and cheaper air fares made a big dent in the custom that English hotels received, and over subsequent decades this only increased. So this sector of the "hospitality industry" has suffered too. The recent economic downturn has offered some relief with more people indulging in "staycations", and the swapping of a stay in a country hotel, travel lodge or seaside resort for a fortnight in Spain, the Dominican Republic or Thailand. But hotels also have a long history of closures, with many buildings being unable to adapt (or be adapted) to modern needs and standards. I wonder if that was the fate of the Stamford Hotel in Stamford, Lincolnshire. This large building, begun in 1810 and completed fifteen or twenty years later after a period of inactivity, looks more like a Georgian Assembly Rooms with its giant order of Corinthian columns in antis. Its scale looks incongruous on narrow St Mary's Street and today it is subdivided and occupied by a number of small businesses. Looking at this Francis Frith postcard it appears that it was still functioning as a hotel in 1922. When did it stop trading I wonder? On a recent day in Stamford I passed through the building, taking this photograph of its fine cantilevered stone staircase that is lit by windows and a glass-topped lantern above.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm
 F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/50 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Stairway to the past

click photo to enlarge

Stairways make good photographic subjects. They offer complexity, strong forms to use in a composition, leading lines, visual routes through the image, a stage and frame for people, metaphor and much more.

This photograph was taken in the stair-well that links the floors of a museum. The translucent glass of the windows and below the hand-rail allowed the silhouettes of the people to be seen to good effect. However, as much as I tried to get a shot with people just where I wanted them, they never quite arranged themselves as I would have liked. This is the best of a fairly quickly taken group of photographs.

Thinking back I recall posting another shot taken in a museum stair-well. On this occasion, however, the motivation was the semi- abstract nature of the composition and the shades of grey that a black and white conversion produced.

photograph and 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: 160
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

These boots are made for blurring

click photo to enlarge

The best way to improve your photography is to take photographs. Even when you feel no inspiration, are disatisfied with your output, and can't see an image to save your life, keep taking photographs. As I've observed before, in time the shots will come to you without you having to chase them.

Another strategy that you can adopt is to set yourself a target or project. This blog is part of my ongoing attempt to improve my photography. The simple fact of having to come up with frequent images that are good enough for you to present to the world without feeling too much shame or embarrassment, is an excellent motivator. It has made me search for images in places where I might otherwise not have looked, and consider styles of photography that don't come naturally to me. Ultimately it has driven me into a range and type of photgraphy that I feel comfortable with, but which is fairly wide-ranging. And, it has helped me to understand what I am doing when I make images.

But, sometimes you have to be a little more specific. In recent months I've made a conscious effort to try and photograph more contre jour subjects. Many of what I consider to be my early successes came from this approach and I felt I'd neglected it in the past couple of years. I've done some, but perhaps not as many as I would have liked. Recently I've given some thought to motion blur shots. My most recent iteration of Best of PhotoReflect (version 5) has a section with this title. It was always my intention to mine this seam for a while and fill out this category. However, I've done precious few such shots since I put it together. So, that's my latest aim - more motion blur. Today's photograph is the first of my recent attempts that I'm sufficiently happy with to post. It shows booted feet ahead of me as, with my companions, we ascended some steel stairs at Tate Modern in London. I liked the colour, repetition, simplicity and interesting blur of this shot. We were on our way to see the latest work to fill the old turbine hall, the gallery's main space -it is Ai Weiwei's "Sunflower Seeds" - and I found it an underwhelming experience. Of which more later!

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 67mm
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/4
ISO: 3200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Summat an' nowt

click photo to enlarge

When I was growing up in the Yorkshire Dales the phrase "summat an' nowt" could often be heard, frequently as a dismissive term. "Ay lad", a grown up would say, "I saw that programme last night on t' telly. It were a bit o' summat an' nowt." The literal translation of the phrase is "something and nothing", and the meaning leans heavily towards the final word of those three. "Devoid of substance" is too grand a conversion, but that comes pretty close to what most users of the phrase intend.

"Summat an' nowt" is a phrase I associate with photographs such as today's, or shots like this beach scene, this crow, and this number and boat. They are images that have a small amount of a not very interesting subject and a seemingly large amount of very little. "Something and nothing" is the phrase I've heard used a couple of times to describe such photographs, and when I do my Yorkshire-raised mind supplies the vernacular version. And yet this kind of minimalist image frequently provokes longer and deeper thought on the part of the viewer than does a nominally more interesting subject such as a landscape, portrait or architectural shot. There's not only the "why" of it to consider, but the spare composition invites attention too, and the space concentrates our attention on the details of the "subject". Take my chair on the stairs at Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire. Is it about the chair? Is it a record of this part of an old, mainly ruined building? Neither really. What interested me here was the arrangement of lines in the frame's rectangle that are anchored by the chair. This photograph of part of a school building was also taken mainly for the arrangement of lines. Something else I liked in today's photograph was the washed out, muted colours. There's nothing in the photograph that jumps out and grabs you, everything is calm, still, serene. But not entirely devoid of substance I hope.

photograph and 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: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Fydell House, Boston

click photo to enlarge

I don't watch a great deal of television so my observations on the medium are not as well-informed as they might be. However, it's my feeling that one of the mainstays of recent years - the house makeover programme - seems to be in fairly steep decline. Apart from the grinning presenters with their mock bonhomie and ill-timed, over-exuberant hand gestures, can there be anyone who is lamenting the passing of this drivel, the audio-visual equivalent of food bulking agents?

Unfortunately the pressing need to find programme formats to fill the ever increasing number of channels means that equally tawdry replacements are already filling the airwaves. As I scan the listings looking for the odd film or two I come across such titles as The Great British Bake Off, Come Dine With Me, and Jedward Let Loose. The synopses of these programmes suggest they are every bit as mind-numbing as those they replace, and to call their underlying ideas threadbare is to imply that there was something of substance that has been worn out in their gestation: the fact is they are completely bereft of any redeeming features. And then, lurking in the listings, sandwiched between the soaps, I came across what must be the successor to the house makeover series. It is called DIY SOS, and as far as I can make out involves "experts" helping a DIY householder who has ruined his property (perhaps by following the ideas in an earlier house makeover programme!) to put it to rights. Televisual tripe it may be, but even I can see that the concept is brilliant: you devise programmes to encourage viewers to trash their houses whilst thinking they are making improvements and adding value, then you come up with another series that shows these poor saps being helped to sort it all out.

I was reflecting on these things as I photographed the staircase of Fydell House, Boston. This early eighteenth century building, possibly by William Sands of Spalding, is one of the town's finest. Its main staircase has walls and ceiling decorated with plaster moulding and stucco panels and it is lit by a tall, arched window. It occurred to me, as I gazed at the two hundred year old decoration, that doing a job well and sticking with the original design long enough for it to have passed the point of being "out of fashion" and to have become plain "old", is much better than frequent cheap makeovers designed to show how up-to-date you are. I used the LX3 for this photograph, and applied a sepia tint to a black and white conversion.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2
Shutter Speed: 1/60
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Enduring buildings

click photo to enlarge
I've always thought it odd that in the distant past, when people had a less sure grasp of history and time, that many buildings were built to last "for ever", whereas today, a time when we can map previous centuries in great detail, and look forwards in a way that our ancestors never could, we often build with no thought about tomorrow. Go to any trading estate and look at the brick and steel "sheds" that are being thrown up to house a business that might occupy it for ten or twenty years (if they're lucky). Or observe what has happened in central London, and many other cities, where Victorian buildings were torn down in the 1960s, replaced by concrete office blocks, which were themselves replaced in the 1990s by taller, glossier structures. This isn't the whole story, of course, but it does happen very often, and one has to ask why.

Perhaps it is associated with the free maket short-termism that was responsible for the financial turmoil of the past couple of years. Certainly the building booms of the City of London have mirrored the periods of financial growth. But there is something else at work too. Our society hasn't been sufficiently concerned with producing quality in the built environment. That's as true with commercial structures as it is with factories and private housing. If the past teaches us anything it is that the buildings that survive the bulldozers are the ones built in the right place to high standards. Many argue that old buildings are difficult to adapt to new uses. That is true in some cases, but it's surely overstated.

I was mulling this over on a recent visit to Somerset House in London. It was built in 1776-1796 by the architect, Sir William Chambers, and further extended in the nineteenth century. It is generally regarded as the first purpose-built offices in the capital. In its early days it housed the Admiralty and a variety of other public bodies. In the nineteenth century much of it was taken up with the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths, as well as the Government School of Design. Then, in the twentieth century the forerunners of the Inland Revenue occupied a large part of the site. Today the Courtauld Institute of Art is a major tenant, including the Courtauld Gallery (which I had gone to see). The changing use of this large building is testament to its quality and location, two factors that have ensured its survival and enduring use. Long may it continue.

My photograph is a shot taken looking over the ornate hand rail and iron balusters of a stair-well in the Courtauld Gallery. The blue paint and cold, natural light made a good complementary contrast with the orange/yellow of the artificial lighting, and the receding stairs and curves, with the people below supplied the composition.

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: 400
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A light, stairs and abstraction

click photo to enlarge
Abstraction in painting involves either taking things from the real world and depicting them in an unreal but recognisable way, or using two dimensional elements such as colour, shape, line, etc non-representationally. If you go to any gallery that includes a reasonably large and wide-ranging selection of post-1900 paintings you are likely to see examples of both these approaches.

In photography it is easy to create images that follow the first method. One can see why, since most photography involves depicting the world around us in one way or another. However, it is (in the main*) not possible to make photographic images the second way because, for the camera, the elements of two dimensional representation, such as pure colour, do not exist independently of objects. They can be introduced using image editing software, but then we have moved into that grey area where digital painting meets photography. As I've said before in this blog, for me the term semi-abstract best describes what photographers do in this sphere.

Today's photograph is my most recent work in the semi-abstract genre. It shows a wall light that illuminates a stairway in a large building. I composed my shot by tilting the camera until I'd got what I considered to be a dynamic but balanced composition of three basic elements - grey wall, black steel support and stairs, and blue sky through glass. My adjustment placed the orange light towards the bottom in the grey wall, and also included its reflection in the black, giving some necessary interest in that region of the photograph. Why do I call this semi-abstract? Because the arrangement of shapes, lines, colours, tones, etc is the primary motivation for the image, and the light, stairs, metal, glass and sky are necessary incidentals.

* deliberate camera flare, and a few other methods can be seen as image making using elements that are not based in the real world

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.2
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.66EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Staircases and status

click photo to enlarge
The staircase in today's photograph isn't the grandest that you will see, but it certainly isn't the meanest. The curved, cantilevered stone steps, the polished hardwood rail ending in a tight volute, and the strong, steel balusters suggest the sort of stairs that might grace a small Georgian or early Victorian house. In fact these particular stairs are in a large house, parts of which date from the 1400s, and the rest from just about every century since. And these are by no means the main stairs: rather, they appear to be the servants' stairs, linking the kitchen and other domestic areas of the house with the very grand first floor rooms.

Staircases have long been used to give a house stature and distinction. The humblest houses usually have a straight flight. Those that wish to appear a step up (pun intended!) from such dwellings usually contrive to have a quarter-turn staircase i.e. with a right-angled turn part way up, sometimes with a quarterpiece (a small landing). Dogleg staircases, where the steps turn sharply back through 180 degrees are often found in slightly bigger houses. However, the dwelling of desire aspires to stairs that curve, and in so doing give a graceful "catwalk" for the owners and their guests. So, quarter winding stairs, geometrical stairs and wreath stairs are popular. The biggest houses with very large entrance halls will often feature a variation of the double return stairs.

What this modestly elegant stairway, for use by the servants of the house, says to anyone who sees it, is that the owners of this house are people of consequence because even the domestic help has stairs of distinction. I took this shot not only for the strong form the handrail gives to the composition, but also for the subsidiary shapes of the balusters and steps, and the fine colours of the pieces of stone, illuminated by winter light through a nearby window.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 12.8mm (60mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/13
ISO: 400
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On