The Constant Search for Significant Form

Curtain Rail

What do you do when the shape of a shadow is more interesting than it's content? If you're like most photographers, you'll do whatever it takes to show those little features buried in the darkest tones and ignore the contribution the solid negative space might make to the image. Well, it wouldn't be a "fine print" otherwise, would it? The idea of the fine print is a difficult mantle to cast aside even though I now think it holds back more people than it liberates.

Shadows, at least some of the time, just aren't that interesting. They're sometimes low contrast areas that add little to the content of a print. Highlights, on the other hand, really make an image for me. It's one of the reasons that I've shot nothing but Ilford XP2 Super for more than 20 rolls. The "grain" in an XP2 negative mainly shows in the dark tones of the print whilst the highlights show hardly any at all and are capable of great subtlety and nuance.

Bird on a Wire

So I'm feeling more confident these days about waving the single digit in the face of shadows - not all the time, obviously, but where the shape is right and contributes something to the overall image. I'm not speaking about inadvertently under-exposed empty shadows that are a failure of technique but the deliberate decision, where it merits it, to dispense with those tiny flecks of texture in the low EVs.

There's a photographer on YouTube whose videos are quite interesting even though his presentational style is a bit too "Watch with Mother" for me (anyone younger than about 60 can think "children's TV presenter" instead. Anyone younger than about 25 should Google "television" to find out what that is). The point is that he seems to obsess about shadows and sharpness whilst showing photographs that hardly set the heather on fire. His real life photography might be stellar but I can only go by what he presents.

Telegraph Pole

Unfortunately, I see a lot of results like that from people who spend most of their time lurking about in the shadows. It seems to go with the territory. Yes, I know there are exceptions and when they occur the results can be spectacular. John Blakemore? But as brilliant as Blakemore's work is, when I close my eyes and think of photography it's much more likely to be a striking Bill Brandt image with big black areas I see rather than one of John's ethereal landscapes.

Highland Church

In a comment to a previous post, my photography pal, Phil Rogers, said I'd gone "all graphic" and there is a quite a lot of truth in that. I suppose I was just getting a bit fed up producing photographs with lots of tones that didn't really do that much for me. I take photographs as a creative outlet and not really to record scenes or events with the highest technical quality I can muster and as I've grown older that distinction has become more apparent to me.

The Highland Church above, for example, could have been all nice, gentle tones but it was a stark scene and that's the feeling I wanted to capture so I made the scan more contrasty than I might otherwise have done. There are a lot of film photographers who rely on scanning and even they are sometimes infected by the "preserve every tone at all costs" philosophy of the fine print merchants. They're so wary of "clipping" any tones at either end of the scale that they often end up with very flat looking images.

Forums can suffer from such hand-wringing as well. Perhaps someone will complain that he can only see one gnat's bollock in his print and wants to know how to release the other one from its tiny shadow. Cue a plethora of suggestions to cure the malady with little examination of the merits of exposing the concealed bollock. 

There's even a wee row on the never rowdy The Online Photographer site about the subject (albeit regarding a digital image) after someone reproduced a photograph by blog owner Mike Johnston with contrast more to the taste of his Flickr critic. Mike was none too pleased and people have been pitching in with their own take on Mike's lower contrast image versus the punchier alternative.

Ideal Home, Kenmore

Garden Pot

Gutter

Leather Chair

Regular readers might remember I'm not a great fan of artspeak and I suppose the title of this post falls into that category. But I'm happy to include it here because it sums up perfectly what my photography is all about now. This quest for significant form is the photographic holy grail for me and it means paying more attention to the important tones in a photograph and less to the often minuscule details hidden in the shadows. 

I mentioned in a previous post that it's meant a greater concentration on the 35mm format and the Olympus IS-3000 "bridge camera" I talked about briefly has now become my walk-about camera. It's got program, autofocus and matrix metering and I'm not ashamed to say that's exactly how I use it. I can concentrate totally on what's in the viewfinder and it's all very liberating. It was £25 very well spent. I've scattered some fairly recent images, one or two from the Olympus, around this page to give you an idea of the kind of pictures I'm aiming for. Some succeed, some fail but all art involves a large measure of failure so I'll carry on regardless..