Pattern Recognition?

Forter Castle, Glenisla

There's a school of thought that says the best way to improve your photography is to spend ages looking at the type of photographs you like and try to figure out why that is. That was the way I progressed, mainly looking at books by some of my favourite photographers.

My own belief is that the process hard wires the brain to recognise patterns that appeal to us. We don't so much as go out to copy what we've seen but, rather, we recognise compositions or elements that we instinctively know will produce the kind of image we're looking for.

It's looking for that Aha! moment when something clicks. That something is the ringing of a bell that says "you've got what you need in front of you right now". I suppose it works a bit like face recognition software.

The print scan above is of Forter Castle in Glenisla. It was only when I was looking at it the day after I printed it that it set that little bell ringing. It didn't take much thinking to bring to mind Fay Godwin's shot of Corgarff Castle, near Tomintoul. Her picture below, scanned from the book Land, wasn't in my thoughts consciously when I photographed Forter Castle - but unconsciously? Who knows.

There is a similarity, though, to the two images. It's not just the placement and scale of the castles that do it. Although the buildings are clearly the subjects of the photographs, they both occupy no more than a tiny fraction of the prints' real estate. For me, it's the feeling of remoteness and the sense of depth in the composition.

The print itself didn't present any difficulties. I'd initially thought it might need grade 2.5 as the photograph was taken on a pretty dull day. But the first test strip showed that this was a bit harsh. Sort of Technical Pan over-agitated in Rodinal. So I dropped down to grade 1.5. You can see the difference between the test strips below with the softer contrast giving a much better impression of what the day was like.

Below are two small test prints I made at approximately the right exposure through grades 1.5 (left) and 2.5. With the harder grade there are very few tones between black and white. The softer filter also increases the aerial perspective by recording the castle in a lighter tone.

This was the first negative I'd printed from the Zeiss Super Ikonta IV's Tessar lens and very nice it turned out to be. The film was Tmax 400 developed in D76 1+1 and the print got a 15 second exposure at f8 on the Philips enlarger (80mm Minolta CE Rokkor lens) with an extra 15 seconds for the sky and a little edge burning around the bottom and lower right edges.