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.

Experiments In Light

Note to readers: Sincerest apologies but this post is strictly off-limits to anyone called Dave. Go on, shoo! It's for your own good, you know. Please do return to this quality internet publication on Thursday, when the normal Adoradaves Service will be restored. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

Stephen Haynes once asked me why Rich never photographed nudes in our garden. As some of you will already know, we have a woodland garden which has been beautifully landscaped by yours truly and looks pretty bloody marvellous, even if I do say so myself. Photographers who have visited here in the past have often declared they would gladly kill to have such a beautiful natural habitat in which to shoot nudes, and they often try to encourage Rich to go forth into the woods and make art. They’re wasting their time of course. I think he’s only ever photographed me in the garden twice, and even then he took his studio lights. Truth be told, Rich doesn’t do nudes ‘n’ nature. So the question you’re no doubt asking is: why does he limit himself in this way?

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One problem is time. In order to create a natural landscape shot, the natural light is either correct for the best shot (time-of-day and weather permitting) or there’s no point in taking it. However Rich works such long hours that he simply doesn’t have time to wait for the lighting conditions to be right, and so he prefers his studio where the lighting conditions are always perfect because he creates them. This may change with my purchase of an off-camera flash for his birthday, and I may yet be able to drag him outdoors, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. One off-camera flash is no substitute for the vast light show with which he usually operates, and let’s be honest here, for Rich photography really is all about the lighting, so much so that the subject (very nice though she is) is pretty much secondary.

Rich is a control junkie, it’s his nature, and so he maintains strict (almost obsessive) control over all aspects of the shoot. He doesn’t let the model free-form and then run off a series of shots hoping that one of them will be perfect. Rather he shoots carefully, precisely, and thus each shot takes ages to set up. His style is not that dissimilar to Edward Weston in that he photographs by carefully recreating a preconceived image in his head and spends ages moving the model ever-so-slightly in order to get the correct shot, even if this means shooting less photographs per shoot than other photographers seem to. Each shot must be as close to perfect as he can get it before he will press the shutter. Because he originally trained as a physicist, his thought-patterns are very precise and ordered. His photographic style therefore reflects the way he thinks and the way he creates his art. Each shot is a controlled experiment in light, a recreation of the picture in his head.

Secondly there is also the matter of personal taste. Rich does love capturing a beautiful landscape, but (and I would like to state categorically that I do not agree with this) he likes the viewer to be able to drink in the beauty of a scene without the distraction of a naked woman in it. He feels that if he photographed a nude in our beautiful woodland, for example, the focus would be on the nude. She would be the focal point of the image and the landscape would be secondary, a background, whereas Rich feels that the scene itself should be primary in a landscape shot. One of his favourite expressions is “Why ruin a perfectly good landscape by sticking a nude in it?” Incidentally, this is also deliberately designed to irritate both me and his favourite nude photographers who shoot outdoors (dry British sense of humour you see) so don’t rise to the bait, folks.

To Rich, nudes and landscapes are two different genres. For him, they don’t mix. The beauty of the nude form, another example of the wondrous talents of Mother Nature, is best reflected under controlled conditions so that the fusion of light and form create an art-piece in itself, without distractions like a background scene. The blank setting of a studio creates a psychological distance and removes the requirement for a background story. The only story which matters is the light itself as it caresses the perfect form. Nothing more is necessary. No emotion, no deep meaning, nothing more complicated than the beauty of light on flesh. Such images seem to resist psychological interpretation and yet the sensuality of the light itself does reflect a certain depth in the same way that Weston’s pepper wasn’t just a pepper because Weston’s use of light transformed it into so much more.

Rich seeks the mastery of light one day, to bend that light to his will and thus create beauty. To him, this is the essence of what his art is about. This may sometimes seem to others to be a rather narrow interpretation of the wonders of Mother Nature, but who are we to argue with a photographer’s creative vision?

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Images are of Alexis Summers, posing very elegantly on our pouffe cushion.

Cropping Conundrums

Apologies if I come across as an idiot newbie in this post, but that’s exactly what I am, so I’m relying on you splendid chaps to put me straight.

It is one of photography’s fundamental truths that most photographs do not appear at their best straight out of a camera. To make your photos look better, they usually require some element of “fiddling” before they’re finished. Now fiddling fascinates me, the photographic type I mean.

Rich reckons I’ve developed a dangerous mental condition known as “cropping obsession.” Alas, no whipping involved, I’m talking about the compositional kind. I’ve been fascinated with composition for a while now, and have been analysing it in excruciating and torturous detail (torturous for Rich, not me, because he has to answer my endless questions) and my life is now lived so much according to The Rule Of Thirds that it’s creeping into everyday life. I’m even placing the focal point of my cakes off centre [birthday candles must never go in the centre of the cake, as this shows lack of imagination and a bland composition. As the primary focal point of the cake, the candles should appear off centre at one of the line intersections, but don’t forget to carefully crop your cake for maximum compositional effect. My kids were not impressed. Their cake was wonky.]

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Anyway, in order to study how best to crop my photographs, I’ve been studying everyone else’s (i.e. yours), and asking Rich to explain why the photographs in question have been cropped in that way. It seems to me that cropping is of critical importance because it controls what the viewer sees. Cropping shifts the focal point of the photograph and thus changes the whole mood and subject of an image in order to convey to the viewer the message you are trying to achieve.

Now I thought good composition was simply a matter of cropping the subject to fill the frame, plus cropping out obvious distractions, and that was pretty much it. But alas it’s not as simple as that. Cropping is an art-form in itself, as important as the compositional rules you follow when you are actually taking the shot. Get the wrong crop, and the photograph is ruined, the message is lost, and what could have been an outstanding piece of art becomes something I look at and think “what exactly is the point?” I guess I simply don’t understand why some of you learned photographers out there decided to crop your photographs that particular way. Although it is perfectly possible (in fact it’s highly likely) that some of the more “arty” of all your cropping techniques which I’ve been moaning about recently are, in fact, correctly cropped and I’m just so darn stupid that I’ve missed the entire message of the photograph.

As to the eternal question “why crop that way?” there appears to be major online debates as to whether you should follow the Rules of Cropping, and indeed, whether or not those very rules exist to start with. As with all aspects of photography, there are times to follow the rules, and times to break them. I just wish I knew what the bloody things were in the first place. I’ve got to learn to follow them first, before I can break them. When is it O.K. to amputate a leg, and why is it acceptable (even preferable sometimes) to chop the top of a model’s head off? Shouldn’t the viewer be able to see the whole head?

So it appears that it’s all subjective (quelle surprise!) You can crop any way you want to make the composition look its best, but what you classify as your “best” is not necessarily what I would have chosen. To put it in terms that a writer like me will understand, cropping is like writing a sentence that's too long. Do you want to edit out a few words without changing the meaning of the sentence? Or do you want to use the very editing process to change the original meaning because removal of certain words results in a completely different story?

Anyway, I’ve now become so lost in my own composition that I’ve become mightily confused by the whole thing, and I’m now getting very cranky. Rich is getting so fed up with me analysing his photographs and suddenly appearing over his shoulder when he’s post-processing pictures, that he now hides when he’s finishing off his work, and last week a model told me that he’d deleted some pictures on camera as “Lin will have a go at me if I’ve chopped part of your arm off.” Oh dear. Clearly I am a Cropping Monster, and my enthusiasm is bordering on scary.

So if anyone else wants to volunteer as guinea pigs (not gerbils) for me to…er...pump them for their secret cropping techniques…all willing victims/advice would be greatly appreciated (by Rich as well as me.)

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To crop or not to crop? That is the question.

Images are of HoneyB. Rich was kind and patient enough to explain the reasons he cropped them this way, largely because I refused to give him any chocolate cake unless he complied. The new Photographic Learning Tool: Photography by Blackmail.