OffTheNet

Feelin' wuff. Bad head.
Back soon(ish), when I'm feelin' a wee bit better.

In the meantime, here's Rachel to brighten your week.

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A little something

That you might find interesting.



Mike Figgis on Life Captured from Lifecaptured on Vimeo

Nude, naked and everything in-between

“To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen by others.”
John Berger

“Is Richard photographing naked women again?” asked my mother-in-law disapprovingly a couple of weeks ago. She asks this question periodically in the vain hope that he’s given up photography.

“Yes he is, and by the way, the ladies in question are nude, not naked,” I corrected sternly.

She looked at me blankly. “What’s the difference?” she asked.

Hmm. Good question. We talk about nudes a heck of a lot in the photographic bloggie world. Technically nude and naked are synonyms. They both mean “without clothing.” However there are fundamental differences between the two, depending on how or when you use them. It’s all dependent on your state of mind, you see.

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HoneyB

In common usage, nude is used in an artistic context. I don’t advertise myself as a naked model because that would sound vaguely rude. I would describe myself as a nude model. The implication here is that nude has no lewd connotation. It sounds classier, innocent, untainted by sexual intent. A nude is seen by others as a beautiful man or woman who exudes confidence and self-knowledge. If you pose nude, you are sure of yourself, at one with your natural body shape, you are not ashamed of being unclothed. Au contraire, you revel in it, you are using your beauty and confidence for the higher purpose of creating art. Nudes are therefore elevated to a higher level, a representation of immortality. In ancient Greece, nude statues of Goddesses did not represent ordinary females, rather they depicted super-women. The emphasis was on perfection and form rather than an individual’s characteristics or physical sexuality.

On the other hand naked has more of a personal edge and implies a more carnal element. If I left a note for Rich saying, “Come upstairs, I’m nude” he’d assume I was in the studio waiting for a shoot, but if instead I wrote, “Come upstairs, I’m naked” he’d zip-up to the bedroom quicker than you could say “hot, nekkid and juicy.” See what I mean? In this context naked has a more erotic feel to it, a naughtier and more forbidden element. It certainly doesn’t imply art.

Whether or not we sexualise it, I do think that the word naked can be somewhat disturbing because it reminds us of our own mortality and our limitations. Used in a non-sexual and more innocent context, it reminds us that we were all born naked, vulnerable and frail, not only physically but psychically unprotected too. Think of the phrase “the naked truth” which means stripped of bias or exposing the reality of a situation. When we are naked we are laid bare, the mask is taken off and we are our real true selves.

Now let’s consider another example:

This afternoon I may well go outside to do some gardening. As it is warm outside, I will doubtless be weeding the garden whilst stark naked. As I’m not currently in the best ever physical shape, I’ll be letting it all hang out. It won’t be pretty. Later on I might take a shower, pour myself a glass of chardonnay and hopefully nip upstairs to the studio for a shoot. I’ll then point my toes, suck my stomach in, assume a sultry expression, try not to drool, and pray that Rich is genius enough to rustle up a photo which portrays me as the gorgeous nude model L-von-B which I’m certainly not “in real life.” At no time will I be wearing clothes, but both scenarios are very different because both the context and the intent are different. The first scene is the truth (me in the garden, naked, personal, the individual body stripped bare), the second is a manufactured fantasy image, almost inhuman, where I am just a model, an object of art rather than a person, a mere tool used to convey an artistic message of light, form and (cough) perfection. Thanks to the photographer’s abilities, I am transformed from an ordinary flabby mother of three into something other than I really am.

IMO, this profound charge between these two states is primarily a psychological development. As Donald Kuspit said in The Troubling Nude, the transformation from nakedness into nudity is “a spiritual change…the naked body conveys the state of the soul before the change, the nude body conveys its condition afterwards.”

If by now you’re getting a bit bewildered by all of this, don’t worry, you’re not alone. This highly important and life-changing debate has been discussed by the finest minds for centuries, and modern scholars are still arguing about it. Nude v. naked sure sounds easy enough when you consider my garden/art-nude scenario above, but sometimes it’s not quite as clear-cut as that.

Now let’s all take a moment to consider the following vaguely glamoury image of the boobalicious HoneyB.

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Honey's Beautiful Boobies

(Aside: yes I know you’re all shocked right out of your chairs right now, and I do understand your amazement as this is clearly not our resident artiste’s usual tasteful B+W fine-art style, but Rich did take it I assure you. What can I say? The man has hidden depths. Or not, as the case may be.)

Now if you can tear your eyes away from Honey playing with her…er…mighty mammaries, let me leave you with this burning question. Bearing in mind the relevance of context and intent, is she naked or nude?

The Nekkid Bloggers

Work is light at the moment. Too light. You can always tell when our day-job business isn’t doing so well because I start waffling away like there’s no tomorrow. Rich finds blogging stressful but I find that it is a distraction from the pressures of real life. On rare occasions when I write what I feel is a real cracker of a post, it can even give me an adrenaline rush that’s nearly as good as sex (yeah, I'm weird that way.) Rich says I’m addicted (to blogging, not sex, although the poor chap is ever hopeful.)

Sometimes it hits me just how much of our lives we’re all giving up to post this stuff. In short, blogging is bloody hard work. In the same way a photographer will seek to realise his creative vision from a seed of an idea in his head, the same birthing process applies to writing a blog post. In both cases you have to create something from nothing. The seed is ugly, crude and inelegant at first, but then it grows and after the umpteenth re-write it suddenly crystallises into something coherent, and at that point I know it’s ready.

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"Seed" (Yeah, I know, I'm kinda like a giant pink blob, but I like it)

The average life-span for a blog is currently 8 months. Boggling I know, but over 95% of blogs are over by the time this milestone is reached. Thankfully I mainly follow the remaining 5 percent. The blogs that Rich and I enjoy, usually have similar longevity and posting patterns and we now know many of the blog authors so well that they have become friends.

If you’ve been regularly blogging several times a week for more than a year then you’ll know enough about the cycles of blogging to recognise when a fellow blogger is experiencing a bit of a downer. It’s inevitable that bloggers sometimes experience some degree of existential angst, particularly with art blogs because artists typically pour all of their emotions into their art forms, and IMO blogging can be just as much a creative artistic process as painting or photography. Such moments of self-doubt are actually a form of “blog depression” and most blog authors experience it at some point. Sometimes I too get so lost up my own ass that I just can’t write any more and I want to delete the whole bloody thing. Of course the bloggie pressure is just imagined…I’m taking it all too seriously and losing my sense of proportion. (Rich usually gives me a good kick up my big blobby pink butt when that happens.)

Absolutely everyone questions their blogging at some point. Am I becoming boring? Do I have to constantly produce new and different content to keep people interested? Should I have a blog makeover? Am I posting the same as everyone else? Why aren’t more people commenting? Was it something I wrote? Am I fat? Do I smell? Is anybody reading this crap? Shall I give up?

When you reach that point, congratulations, you have finally reached the zen-like state of Bloggie-Self-Enlightenment. It’s important to question oneself, otherwise how will your blogging grow?

The harsh reality is that yes, you might be lucky enough to have hundreds (even thousands) of regular readers. However don’t kid yourself. You are nothing more to most of them than a tiny little free T.V. entertainment channel. Because you run a rude, nude blog, very few of them are ever going to admit to reading your pornographic filth (which it isn’t of course, but I bet most of their wives wouldn’t share that assessment.) Thus although your hits might be off the scale and your readers might love your writing and images, only an extremely small percentage of them will actually leave comments. This means that nude bloggers actually have a much tougher time than other regular bloggers, and you will need to be more determined and self-assured than ever in order to keep going in the face of the deafening silence of the blogosphere. Just remember that ultimately it doesn’t really matter if anyone is reading your blog or not. You need to do it for yourself, otherwise you’ll just go stark raving crazy and your blog will eventually consume you (in fact there’s a strong probability that this will happen anyway.)

As for how long your blog will last, some blogs die young, some age gracefully. Which will you choose? My own recommendation is to stay in it for the long haul. Once you get past the initial couple of years, you really start building something, and by that I mean not only a philosophy and style particular to your own blog, but more importantly you start to make friends and create a real community. And when that happens, your life will be rich indeed.

As for myself, when I get a bit disillusioned with the whole caboodle, I take a step back and refer to the very helpful Manual On Blog Depression. If you’re a long term blogger, go ahead and download the pdf here. Consider it the equivalent of Aunty Lin giving you a blob of homework. And if you don’t recognise yourself somewhere in there over the last few years, then I’ll buy you a beer.

Photographers are forever, not just for Christmas

A couple of nights ago my four year old daughter and I were browsing Vogue together in our lilac scented bubble bath (because girls just wanna smell yummy) and we decided that we would ask her father for a nice big diamond each for Christmas (couriered via Father-Christmas-Express, naturally.) After all, girls love sparkly things, and what better way to demonstrate a guy’s lurve for his favourite laydeez than by buying them the ultimate symbol of love and devotion?

Rich was surprisingly vocal regarding the reasons why Father Christmas would not be supplying our present of choice. As I recall the words “money,” “broke” and “unrealistic” were used a lot. The Fluffy laydeez went to bed mightily disappointed that night.

Because I’ve always been spoilt and I invariably get what I want (even if I have to wait for it) I did not give up so easily. I really wanted that diamond, and it had to be real and pretty sizeable too because only anything over two carats would signify “forever.” I mean there’s just no point if it’s not genuinely hewn from real diamond rock by impoverished and exploited slaves in Sierra Leone, smuggled via the illegal black market and purchased lovingly off Ebay for $999. Only the bottomless corruption of the conflict diamond trade can equate to true love as your stunning jewel sparkles merrily on your finger. You are wearing not only a symbol of ultimate devotion, but a slice of suffering and exploitation. What girl could possibly resist?

Hmm. After reading about the horrors of the diamond trade, I don’t think that even I could ask for real diamonds, which is really saying something considering I’m a accountant/ex-lawyer and thus by definition I have no discernable morals at all.

Not one to admit defeat so easily, after much internet research I’ve subsequently hatched a cunning plan.

The solution?

Artificial diamonds.

Yes, yes I know what you’re thinking. Tacky, tacky, tacky.

Not so my dear friends because...behold…the latest artificial diamond technology will tenderly gather up the sacred ashes of your dearly departed and transform them into a rock the size of your choice.

Ooh, what a fabulous idea! And as we all know when you’re talking about men, size is everything. The bigger the size of your dearly departed, the bigger the rock. Portly men clearly offer the greatest potential when considering your future art-piece. Worried about ethical issues ladies? No problem I assure you. It’s merely the recycling of your loved one into a unique work of art. Surely the ultimate in green ethics? Preserve your husband, save the planet.

And think of the potential to honour your beloved hubby. Imagine how your best yummy mummy friend will congratulate you on your latest stunning rock which you are proudly showing off at the Saturday night dinner party. “Where did you get that fantastic ring, Meryl? It’s huge!”

“Well, funny you should ask that, Alice. Actually it’s Bert. You know he died recently. Very sad. He looks more beautiful than ever in the afterlife, don’t you think? And just look at his size! He’s at least two and a half carats now, you know. Jeez, I really loved that man ‘o’ mine and now we’re together again for all eternity. Guess that’s what marriage is all about.”

The moral of this story? Watch what you eat, and whatever you do, don’t upset the wife. You never know, she might decide that you’re worth more dead than alive and realise that diamonds can indeed be forever.

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A tempting Christmas pressie for all you laydeez out there? (Click to enlarge)

The Death of the Digital Camera?

Yet another post celebrating all that is gloomy in the world this week. I'm embracing my inner doomsayer and really going for rock bottom. Pessimists rejoice!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve heard it all before...

Photography is doomed. It only has a few years to go before some new-fangled techno-gadget replaces it. Zzz…You’re all bored with these type of predictions by now right? You’re still complacent and content in your own little arty world where the Camera is King, and it’s going to be eons (or at least after you’re dead) that another technological revolution comes along which renders the digital camera obsolete.

If this is your honoured opinion, I totally respect that and I’ve no desire to ruin your happy place. So please don’t read any further. For those of you who are feeling courageous, even hungry for change, let us now consider a couple of groovy new inventions which, although they are not completely new genres of tools in themselves (aka camera replaces paintbrush), they still make me seriously worry that the days of the digital camera are numbered.

Let’s first consider the low end of the market: The camera as a tool of the consumer. Here the camera acts as a tool to record life, e.g. family photographs, street and travel photography. The technology is on a vertical development curve here. Digital point-and-shoots are doubling in their capabilities every two years or less. A really good 8 megapixel point-and-shoot will set you back a few hundred quid at most, and my latest Fuji (bought last year) has already been superseded by a new model. In the next few years, these humble point-and-shoot toys for plebs like myself may well become obsolete. Why have a camera for snapping the kids when your mobile phone can do it for you?



Yes I know, mobiles have lousy cameras (no matter what their megapixels) but consider the Samsung i8510, which comes with an eight megapixels and a flash, and boasts that its image quality and colour are so good that consumers would struggle to tell the difference between a photograph produced by a regular 8mp digital camera and the Samsung. Best of all, it is a top-notch mobile phone with Sat Nav, 8gb storage space for music and high speed internet access. The camera can even detect when people in the picture are smiling.

If this camera phone does what it says on the tin, why on earth would your average consumer want to go and buy a regular digital camera?

O.K. now all you proper photographers out there are going to quite rightly say that there’s a heck of a lot more to picture quality than mega-pixels. What about the lens quality? What about the sensor (which is presumably tiny)? And I grant you that this specific model won’t be remotely as good as your 8mp digital SLR for those two reasons alone, even ignoring the fact that there’s a lot more to taking a good photograph than lens, sensors and megapixels. However this new technology is young yet. Just think what camera phones are going to be like in…say…five years time? What about ten? My bet is that your average Joe Blogs won’t be buying digital cameras any more. He’ll be using his phone instead.

But you’re not the average consumer. You are professional artists. So no worries, right?

Well Rich (who is a total gadget freak) has recently become very excited about Red One. If you haven’t heard of it, then prepare to be vowed. Red Digital Cinema’s new toys can shoot up to 4K (shortly to be 5) which is the same resolution as 35mm film, and the current best model has a 12 megapixel sensor (and is being upgraded rapidly) which is capable of capturing up to 60 frames per second. And yes, these aren’t traditional cameras, they are camcorders, but heck they are so light and compact that you couldn’t tell. Photographers and movie makers both love them, and the image quality is so darn good that they are being used by the likes of Peter Jackson.



Why should you worry about capturing “the killer shot” in a shoot, nailing that one definitive image that captures “the decisive moment” when you can just film the entire shoot to the same quality as your regular SLR? You can then create all the photographs you ever want, or re-live the entire shoot in infinite variations as many times as you like. It makes getting as many great photographs as you want completely trivial.

"Aha," you say, "but what price for this revolutionary new art-tool?" Less than the price of a digital back Hasselblad, and falling all the time.

So, my dear favourite photographers out there, are you still complacent about cameras remaining your primary tool with which you will capture images? How long before cameras as you know them are rendered obsolete? Will high definition cinematography replace the digital SLR as the tool of choice for professional shooters? If I were a betting person, I would lay odds that it will, and sooner than you think too.

Money Mayhem

What has a front has a back. The bigger the front, the bigger the back.

Macrobiotic theory

Sorry folks, no photography today. I know, I know, this is a photography blog, not an economics blog. However I’m a money-woman by trade, so I’m just sitting back today and watching the financial world collapse around my ears. So far the FTSE 100 has fallen 5% today. The Dow Jones is about to open. Things are going to get pretty nasty.

Hot on the heels of Fred and Fannie, Lehman’s could be enough to trigger a catastrophic economic collapse, similar to Black Thursday which triggered the start of The Great Depression. Am I being overly alarmist? Well, that rather depends on how the US Government reacts to this latest crisis.

Barack Obama commented that the Lehman bankruptcy posed "a major threat" to the US economy. Of course he blamed the Bush administration's economic philosophy and said, "This turmoil is a major threat to our economy and its ability to create good-paying jobs and help working Americans pay their bills, save for the future and make their mortgage payments." No kidding, Barack. Really? So how are you going to fix it, eh?

One thing’s for sure, the fallout from this ongoing financial turmoil will be huge. Socially, financially and politically, the world will never be the same again.

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Althaia contemplates the latest banking collapse

Photographic Politics

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Today's model bears a remarkable resemblance to Ms. Palin. Just look at that sexy pout!

On the whole I try to stay out of politics, both internal (within the photographic community) and external (in the wider governmental sense.) However, whilst observing The Greatest Fishbowl On Earth, I can’t help but notice that most American photographers appear to be Democrats. Not all of course - I know a few who love McCain - but on the whole most photographers (and models who admit to a political persuasion) appear to openly be Obama-lovers.

Often political leanings are explained by geographical location, but I don't think that explains the trend, as you’re all widely splattered across the U.S., plus you all come from very different backgrounds. It can’t just be that most of Americans are sick of Republicans because your two parties are said to be neck-and-neck in the polls according to our UK media. So it must be something else.

Why do photographers prefer Democratic principles? Is it because of your artistic natures that you’re all libertarian-orientated? What is it specifically about Democratic policies which capture your loyalties? Personally, if it were me, I’d vote for anyone who promised free national healthcare, but that’s just me, and I guess we all have our individual views of what is important in our little fish tanks. As with photography, politics are entirely subjective.

Please forgive my ignorance but those of us looking in on The Greatest Fishbowl seek to understand the little fishies within. After all, the future of the world is at stake, and it might just be the collective political power of the photographic vote which determines the entire future of our planet.

No pressure though.

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Angel fish and sharks. Pretty but deadly. Both species will eat each other given the chance.

Incidentally if you want to read about Life In A Fishbowl (the photographic variety – nothing to do with politics) photographer Dennis Camp has a wonderfully soothing new blog by that name here. Wise words, beautiful landscapes, portraiture and the occasional fish.

Yet Another Example of Rip-Off Britain

Well, we’re alive.
Alive and pretty angry.

But what is so bad it has upset the Fluffies you ask?

Introducing the new Canon EOS 50D 15.1MP Digital SLR
And what a beauty she is!



US price for body only: $1,399.95 US Dollars on Amazon.com

At today’s exchange rate, this makes the equivalent UK price £796 uk pounds sterling. Woo hoo! A bit tight for the budget, but do-able I guess.

Now let’s see if we can find it on Amazon in the UK.

UK price for body only: £1,199.99 uk pounds sterling on Amazon.co.uk (equivalent US price $2,110 US Dollars)

Why is it we live here again?

The Fluffy House of Amityville

I woke up this morning, went downstairs and discovered the walls were bleeding alien blood.

No kidding. Bright green goo was leaking out the electric light sockets and dripping down the walls. This resulted in me rushing around the house at warp speed screaming, “The house is possessed! We’re all gonna die!” (I must admit I’ve always harbored a secret desire to do that, so it was strangely satisfying.) The kids were unmoved, and Rich ignored me. Alas, yet another normal day in the Fluffy household.

Anyhoo, Rich dissected the sockets and discovered that our prehistoric wiring was coated in some sort of ancient insulating glue, which was slowly dissolving and leaking down the walls.

I’m not convinced. It’s because I stepped inside a church for the first time in three years last Sunday. It’s a sign, I know it’s a sign.

Of course the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gets turned on tomorrow. That might have something to do with it. Coincidence, or are we all doomed?

Maybe we’re all gonna get sucked into a black hole, as Stephen suggested.

If indeed the end is nigh as my walls seem to prophesize, I'd just like to say that it’s been great knowing you folks! So long and thanks for all the fish. I’m gonna spend my last night on earth getting drunk and having sex.

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Toast and Honey are the condemned man's ideal final meal

(Rich says he’s not going to dignify this superstitious nonsense with an answer and he’s refusing to be associated with such utter tosh. Apart from the sex bit – he seems quite keen on that.)

See ya tomorrow.

It’s a Man’s World

Another whopper of a post. You'll need alcohol for this one. I repeat: Do not attempt without being suitably plastered or you’ll ever make it to the end.

Last weekend we went to a Hogwarts Schmooze-up where parents were able to meet and greet the top professors and the eminent school governors. They were very interested in meeting Rich in particular, the fact that he was an internet entrepreneur and a photographer highly impressed them and they were very keen to give him their business cards. It was noticeable that no-one at any time asked me what I did for a living, no-one offered me a business card, and although they were happy to talk to me about the kids, I was treated as a wife who was there merely as an extension of my husband. Lordy, I thought such sexist stereotyping went out with the ark, but apparently not. I’ve never been a trophy wife before, so this was an entirely new experience for me. Clearly careers are for men not women, and I should just stay home and knit.

And then I got to thinking. Does such sexual career stereotyping extend into the photographic world? Now I’m not talking about modelling here, I’m talking about the artists who create the images. So I did some research and what I found astonished me.

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Apparently 90% of photographers are men, and a paltry 10% are women. And what is even more interesting is that this 90/10 split applies to ALL areas of photography, not just photographing images of people. The evidence is unanimous, female photographers are always in the minority, regardless of photographic genre. Landscapes, fine-art, travel, glamour, fetish, fashion, whatever, it’s a man’s world. Even readerships of photographic magazines (excluding women’s magazines and fashion) show a clear 80% male/20% female divide.

How so?

To me it’s a mystery. Why are there more male photographers than female? I don’t believe for one moment it’s because magazines are sexist when choosing photographic submissions. The majority of editors I’ve come across are strictly equal opportunity motivated, and they are genuinely delighted to receive submissions from women. So why aren’t there more Annie Leibovitz’s out there? Yes we all know the famous names such as Diane Arbus and Tina Modotti, to name but two, and there are thousands more talented published female photographers of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are in the minority. Maureen Gallagher of Lenswork observed that although MFA programs show a 50/50 split between men and women, once the Masters degree is done very few female graduates stay the course end and up doing photography for a living.

What is happening to these young women photographers after they earn their degree and enter the photographic industry? Do the majority quit to raise a family, or maybe they become teachers instead? Or do these young female photographers become so quickly disillusioned with “the biz” that they then decide on a different career path? Gallagher wondered if this was due to the fault of the university courses themselves? Maybe they lack the proper marketing-based training to enable these women to make it in “the real world” as successful photographers? Or perhaps the problem is that the industry is too competitive and male orientated. I know from personal experience just how difficult it is to succeed in a male orientated profession and you have to demonstrate a certain type of ruthlessness and aggression to get ahead and become “one of the boys.” Perhaps female artists are more sensitive than balshy accountants like myself, and thus are not able to be emotionally hard enough to make the necessary personality adjustments in order to compete. Is female nature the main reason for why these women abandon the photographic profession?

I do believe there’s some truth in the psychological gender stereotyping argument. Perhaps the reason why so many landscape photographers are men, for example, is due to the fact that men are thought to be inherently more anti-social and find it easier to be alone. Biologically human females are hard-wired to be more sociable in groups, so is this the reason that female photographers decide to teach photography and/or prefer to shoot mainly portraits, still life and culturally orientated themes? Obviously this genre classification is not exclusive, and no-one should take offence here. I’m not trying to be sexist, I’m just trying to find some answers. I’m analysing statistics, generalising wildly and there are always exceptions to every rule, the more the merrier – indeed, let’s challenge stereotyping whenever possible because how else can you bring about change?

Lastly there’s the important matter of market forces to consider. Of course the vast majority of photographic models are women because the industry is driven by consumer demand. Most glamour and nude photographs are looked at by men, so it follows that most models are women and most photographers are men. The industry is simply responding to heterosexual stereotyping. People like to photograph what they find attractive and beautiful, and thus is follows that there are more male photographers photographing chix than women. Again, this is the essence of human nature. Glamour, fetish and nude photographers love women and being with them, otherwise they wouldn’t do what they do, but how much of that is because the models are obviously attractive and sexy and how much of it is because they genuinely find it easier to relate to being with women rather than men? In the end, it always seems to come back to human physiology and psychology before anything else.

So that’s it then. Whether or not you become a working photographer is all down to different hard-wiring between men and women. You only spend your life as a photographer if it’s in your nature to do so, and what genre you choose depends on your gender and sexual orientation.

Is it really that simple? And if so, how can we change the 90/10 split and should we even try?

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Images are of Althaia

All comments welcome here folks. Don’t be shy now. Put aside your political correctness and sock it to me. I’m seeking the truth, no matter how unpalatable we laydeez might find it.

And then there were two

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Baby Daughter Photo from the archives, used to demonstrate selective colour to Rich's camera club a couple of years back. It scared them.

The kids went back to school last week. All of them.

Their mother and father had been eagerly anticipating that first precious day for nearly five long years. Oh to be with each other again, just the two of them, no longer parents. Finally Father and Mother could once more be husband and wife, photographer and model, artist and muse. They were going to take the day off and spend it in the studio...er...makin' art together. Yes indeedy they had been planning that day for what seemed like forever. It was going to be glorious.

Child No. 1: Oldest Son’s first day at senior school, year 9.
Casualties so far:

One pair of shiny new sneakers, stolen.
One pair of spectacles, lost.
One padlock (for school locker) hacked, apparently due to the fact it was too complicated to open so only brute force would solve the conundrum.
One I.T. information technology lesson, missed, as Oldest Son went to D.T. lesson instead (they looked remarkably similar without aforesaid spectacles which were, of course, still missing.)
One soggy Oldest Son, drowned in river after first rowing lesson. They were practising capsizing. The Hogwarts professor declared that he had never seen a pupil demonstrate such a natural aptitude for falling overboard.


Child No. 2: Second Son’s first day in year 6.
Casualties so far:

Nil.

From this we conclude that Second Son is remarkably competent, self-assured and capable of locating and protecting his own possessions. An accurate assessment. He organises the rest of his family with super-slick efficiency and Oldest Son (who has a typically vague and ethereal artist-type personality) is totally lost without him now that they are on different campuses. Second Son is now spending large chunks of break-times texting his older brother, all messages beginning “hav U remMbRD…” This technique appears to be working so far (Mother crosses fingers hopefully.)

Child No 3: Daughter’s first day in Reception class.
Casualties so far:

Mother’s sanity.

Daughter’s first ever day of school didn’t start terribly well when she realised she couldn’t wear pink (Madam only ever wears pink, which is a VERY IMPORTANT principle of fashion, so she often tells her Mother.) An hour’s tantrum later and Mother finally managed to prise Daughter into an unattractive navy-blue shroud and deposit a weeping, pathetic clingy little girl into a big, scary classroom. Mother then spent the day maxing out on cappuccinos, consoling other weeping mothers (also parted from their little dears for the first time) in Tesco’s, having a nervous breakdown and worrying herself into an early grave about how her paralytically shy Daughter was going to cope with her first day in a class-full of total strangers.

By the time it came to pick her up, Mother was a gibbering wreck. Of course Daughter bounced out of class radiantly happy, having had the most incredible amount of fun EVER, so all of Mother’s biting her nails down to her elbows and caffeine-induced-paranoia were totally unnecessary.

Mother then went home, fielded several frantic phone calls from varying sons who couldn’t locate each other so they could rush to catch the imminent train home (how Mother was supposed to fix this from twenty miles away she really had no idea. She politely suggested they should try phoning each other, rather than her) and then placated Father who was ranting about a) a noxious customer who had tortured him for every second of the entire day, and b) how he couldn’t find a live mouse which the cat had brought in and let loose somewhere in the house. Mother then poured herself a large gin and tonic and passed out cold on the sofa for an hour.

And that was the story of Mother and Father’s first precious day alone together for five years.

Alas no steamy photographic art session.
Still, there’s always next week. Mother and Father are not holding their breath though.

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Live for the day. Manga your child.

Stop Press Update: Today there is a very bad smell emanating from Father’s computer. He strongly suspects that the aforesaid mouse crawled into the system base unit, promptly died of fright, and is now baking slowly. Father no longer wishes to spend any time today finishing Mother’s latest photographs, as apparently they stink. (Honestly, you couldn't make this stuff up.)

Visions in cruciferous art

Where hunger + art = beauty+ form.

Lin is on a diet. Lin is starving. Lin is obsessing about sexy nekkid veggies again. Yeah, I know….you’re all frantically clicking the X button and vowing to come back in a few days time, but bear with me for a moment. (It gets hungrier, I promise.)

Whilst drooling over tonight’s dinner, it occurred to me that veggie porn is in fact an instrument for learning more about photography as well as about new and interesting ways to stuff your gob. Natural unprocessed food is a thing of beauty. Yeah I know you might experience your deepest artistic creative vision whilst gazing on the carbonated rectangle that comprises your instant ready-meal lasagne, but I’m talking about something much more profound that that. I’m talking about how gazing at your pert, firm, ripe, luscious veggies really teaches you to see.

Photography is often regarded as an instrument for teaching things, a way of discovering something new. A good photograph shows you something you hadn’t considered before, it reveals a new truth that you didn’t previously know.

Nature photographs illustrate my point perfectly. Consider a totally groovy photograph like the following piece by Weston (who else?) Doesn’t it just blow your mind? This might be lost on many of you, but personally this gives me a high nearly as good as the warm and fuzzy glowing feeling I get after boozing on one of bt’s mojito recipes.



At first I mistook it for an elegantly draped piece of cloth. I mean – wow! That looks like a fashion shot which could easily grace the pages of Vogue. Initially when you look at it, you don’t realise what the subject really is because the photograph is deliberately ambiguous, at least when seen from a distance. When you study it a bit more closely and you realise it’s a cabbage, it is that element of surprise is what makes you go, “Cool!”

This element of trickery, or teaching your viewer to see something new, is what draws us in to the photograph, and makes us linger over its beauty. It’s human nature to try and figure out what something means, and it is precisely this element of surprise which makes this photograph such compulsive viewing. Weston wasn’t like the rest of us, he could really see the hidden form in nature, and it was this ability to capture on camera the very different way he perceived the world, which made him a Master of Photography.

Of course Rich has a smidgen of a way to go before he reaches Weston’s standard, but he hasn’t let that deter him. Veggie art still has a lot to teach the amateur photographer. We all have to start somewhere after all. I mean, who hasn’t gone to their fridge in a moment of photographic desperation and picked out a pepper and tried to photograph it? C’mon…admit it, we’ve all done it. It’s part of the photographic learning process you know. Today a pepper, tomorrow a nude. Everything is a fine art photograph if you know how to look at it properly.

Actually I jealously guard my peppers (tonight’s ratatouille you know) but I’m slightly more footloose and fancy-free with my brassicas, so here’s a much less-talented and predictable example of veggie porn:

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A Fluffy Cauli

It is of course a cauliflower (steam florets lightly for 20 mins and then mash - dee-lish!) Now is this not one of the most beautiful vegetables you’ve ever seen? Mother nature is both superlative artist and perfect mathematician. Maths, art and food are all expressions of beauty, inexorably intertwined. Just think what Weston would have done with my cauliflower fractals. Makes me slightly fuzzy even thinking about it.

So what is the message in this rambling nonsense?

Well, I say to thee, go forth and photograph yummy veggies or nude women, either will do. They both represent shining examples of the exquisite form and beauty of mother nature’s finest creations. Look at your subject. Squeeze her sweet juicy flesh, feel the way the light caresses her sensual curves. Really look beyond what an ordinary person would see and discover just how sensual this object is. Is she not the most exotic, erotic, aesthetically perfect thing you’ve ever seen? Now try to use your most excellent photographic skills to capture what you’ve just seen on camera, whilst still maintaining that element of surprise. Your objective is to try to show reality from a different perspective, to captivate your viewer and make him really see as you do.

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Ivory Flame

Mmm…all these brassicas are making me starving. Time to cook my beloved object of beauty for dinner (the vegetable I mean, not the nude.) It’s a crying shame but it’s gotta be done. Can’t let art get in the way of stuffing my stomach you know.

Food + art = fully satiated nude.

Yum.

Help me. My Finger Is Getting Sore.

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You’ll all be pleased to hear that I’ve been merrily snapping away on my camera during my week off (sorry I can’t bring myself to call it “photography” – I’m really bad.) In fact I’m snapping so much that I’m filling up the memory card at a frightening speed. However I’m beginning to suspect that this clicking-diarrhoea is just plain wrong. It’s so fundamentally different from the way Rich shoots that I just know it’s not the right way to photograph. Quantity seems to be inversely proportional to quality.

As I’ve blogged before, Rich shoots very carefully and precisely. He never ever uses burst mode and sets each shot up in excruciating detail, Westonesque-style, making sure everything is correct down to the last detail before he presses the shutter. He’ll shoot precious few images in a three hour shoot, but practically every one is pretty darn good, in my opinion. This is largely helped by the fact that when the model moves, he makes sure she moves very slowly, so he captures minute changes and subtle nuances in her expression.

Unfortunately ordinary mortals like me simply can’t work that way. Over-excited four year old kids don’t exactly respond to “please can you kindly lift your head, sit up straight, point your toes, and put your right hand on your leg, now hold it, hold it…” Instead they hurl themselves around yelling “I’m a pretty pink flying angel-cat-lady!” and unless you’re heavy on the continuous shooting, there's no way that you'll ever get that split-second melt-in-your-mouth expression that you’re looking for.

I think part of the problem is style. Studio nudes are more stage managed (I won’t call them contrived otherwise I’ll be heading for a marital rift rather sharpish) whereas the “stuff of life” is more of a recording of an event that is already happening, a sort of photographic reportage. To my mind, when you’re shooting a moving subject, you’re trying to capture a story that is unfolding, and most of all you’re trying to capture an expression, a single moment that is the high point of the scene and will sum up the entire story in a single frame, what Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment.”

But how can you be sure you’re not going to miss it? What happens if you get distracted for an instant? Surely you have to keep compulsively pressing that shutter as quickly as you can, because how else are you going to be sure you’re not going to overlook that moment? After all, it’s not as if you’re going to be able to wind the scene backwards and photograph it all over again. Once it’s gone, it’s too late. How can you be sure you’re not going to hesitate at the wrong moment, blink or simply think you’re recorded everything you need, only to stop shooting and seconds later miss the very picture you were looking for?

Of all the art-forms, it is only the photographer who has to capture his entire message in a split second. As Cartier-Bresson observed, photographers are dealing with things that are constantly vanishing. They have to intuitively perceive and record an exact moment in time, and only if the shutter is released at the decisive moment, will they get that indefinable “something” that they were instinctively looking for.

I’m not sure if this decisive moment is discovered through skill, judgement, chance or sheer bloody-minded perseverance. Is it better to shoot slowly and carefully like Rich, or err on the side of caution and shoot thousands of shots, microseconds apart, in the hope that one of them will turn out the way I want it?

If anyone has any guidance, please do let me know, before I turn into a compulsive, trigger-happy shooter with an aching finger permanently welded to the shutter button.

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Images are of Lou-Lou searching for her own decisive moment (and if you think I'm showing my truly terrible snapshots here, "you've got another think coming" as my mother used to say.)