The other night we watched a DVD of ‘The King’s Speech’. Throughout the film Bertie – unwilling King after his brother abdicated – struggles with a stammer and the need to make frequent public speeches. He’s eventually helped by a very unorthodox voice therapist and in the final scene, he has to give a speech anouncing Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, with Logue (his voice teacher) in the background silently coaching and encouraging him. It’s a touching scene, and the background music is a piece I’ve always loved – Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, 2nd movement. Putting aside the irony of using music by a German composer in this context, it’s made me ponder about music and about film on a number of levels.
If you saw a film with and without the music, it would surely be two different experiences, and that makes me wonder if the lack of sound in still photography is one of its drawbacks (or one of its advantages?). Although I know very little about music and wouldn’t consider myself any kind of enthusiast – in the sense of buying loads of CDs, going to concerts, and so on – I do find it affects me on a very deep emotional level. Often, when I leave a film, it’s the ‘background’ music that stays with me, long after my memories of the film itself have faded.
Although this is surely true of many people, there are many others who don’t even seem to notice the music used – my husband, for example, rarely registers the music and he’s much more of a music enthusiast than I am. There is a possible explanation for this: if you’ve ever studied or read anything about NLP, you’ll know that we process our experiences through our senses and that one of these senses is usually dominant in any one person. (of course, we use all of them, but we tend to favour one in particular) Taste and smell are difficult to work with, so NLP limits things to the three major sensory channels: visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic (feel/touch). Unsurprisingly, given my passion for photography, my dominant sense is visual, with auditory some way down the scale. However, Dawna Markova wrote about how the less dominant sensory channels can access our unconscious and our emotions more easily – it’s as if they have a direct path in there, without having to be sifted through our intellect or consciousness.
It may be this that creates such a strong link for me between emotion and music. The day after I saw the film I thought I’d like to hear this piece of music again but without the associated scene. I found it on Youtube and clicked play. Suddenly and without warning, tears were streaming down my face. For a few moments I couldn’t understand what was going on, but then I remembered that at the time I’d first discovered this piece of music I was deeply unhappy in a difficult marriage, but one that I hadn’t completely given up hope on yet. The music has always sounded like a combination of huge sadness overlaid with hopefulness to me, and this is what I felt at the time. I’d played it then, over and over and over again, and hearing it now was vividly bringing back the abyss of unhappiness I was falling into at the time. There are other pieces of music that act similarly on me: for example, I love Philip Glass but find his music so disturbing, in some way that I can’t articulate, that I simply can’t play it very often. In this instance it isn’t linked to any particular experience, there’s just something about the music that gets to me.
Going off at a slightly different tangent, the video I found on Youtube enthralled me in a different way again. It’s a graphic version of the music that creates visuals of each instrument and note. I’ve never been able to read music, although I tried to learn many times, but seeing it made visual in this way gave me an appreciation and understanding of this piece that I never had before. It seemed to me I could ‘read’ it in a way I never managed with traditional notation, although obviously traditional music notation is visual too (and, in fact, imparts more information than this format does). I’ve always found I need something visual in order to be able to listen properly; if I try to listen to a radio talk my mind just wanders off on its own path and I miss most of it. But give me a related image or chart or something to look at while the talk is going on, and I can keep my attention on it.
Getting back to photography, something I’ve seen suggested more than once is to put on headphones and play music while you photograph, allowing the music to guide you in any way that feels right. I’ve never tried this, but it would be an interesting exercise to play several different types of music while photographing in the same place, and compare the results. We often rather foolishly try to separate out the senses when we talk about them, but in fact the input from each sense strongly influences the others. Still photography lacks sound, and usually, tactile presence, limiting its input to one sense only. Does this also put limits on its power to affect us?
Still catching up on my backlog of images. These ones are of the Tacita Dean film in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London. For non-UK (and perhaps non-London people too), Tate Modern is housed in what used to be an old power station and it has changing art installations in what was the turbine hall.
I don’t know much about Tacita Dean; I knew the name before I went but not a great deal about what sort of things she’d done. This film is projected onto the back wall of the turbine hall, which is a huge area and the film is equally huge and therefore has quite an impact when you see it. Dean refers to it as a visual poem and that seems like a good description to me; I wouldn’t really know what else to make of it, although I did enjoy it and watched it through several times. The images and colours are constantly changing and very compelling. I’m not sure I have a great deal to say about it – certainly nothing very erudite or knowledgeable – but if you’re interested, there’s a Guardian article here that’s quite interesting. And if you’d like a look at the film itself, youtube has several versions of which this is one – complete with playful children.
I took loads of photos, but of course I had my usual problem of hand-holding in a very dark space so many of them were too blurred to use. You could go and sit – or walk round if you liked – in the hall itself and there were lots of children racing around and having fun interacting with the film. These were the ones that made for the most interesting pictures; partly because of the interaction, but also because they bring home the sheer size of the projected film.
And finally, this man was just sitting at the side of the hall in the darkness, totally absorbed in his ipad. This photo is hopelessly blurred because of the slow shutter speed I was forced to use, but I kind of like it anyway.
Buy the The SLR Sloop at the Photojojo Store!
Just seen this rather nice camera bag on Photojojo. I get so tired of every camera bag I see coming in black only, or at best some other dull and uninteresting colour, don’t you? This one’s a bit expensive though – I should think the first person to produce something like this at a more affordable price would clean up………….particularly if it didn’t involve shipping from the US.
We’re now approaching something that might be considered normality, whatever that used to be. We have several functioning rooms and there are only about a dozen boxes left to unpack. I have a study to work in even though it currently looks like somewhere that’s been burgled by a thief with a grudge, and a computer to work at even though it’s not yet connected to the internet. It’s a very old computer, so it doesn’t have a wifi card and I’m sitting here with the desktop in front of me and the wifi-connected laptop to my left. Putting anything online involves the patience of a saint, as all my photos are on the desktop and have to be put onto a USB key and thus transferred to the laptop for posting. It shouldn’t be too tedious, but when you have an elderly desktop computer that doesn’t like to use all its USB ports at once, thinks everything I plug into it is a camera, and prefers to keep one or two of them for specific purposes known only to itself, it can get a bit trying at times. An additional trial is that I have to wear my glasses to see the desktop screen, and I have to take them off to view the nearer laptop screen. I’m at that age…….
I’m going back in time a little today. I’ve barely been able to think about photography for the last two or three weeks and it was only yesterday that I found some time to start editing the back log of photos. A week or so before I left, I had a private tuition session in Canterbury. I nearly always enjoy teaching, but sometimes you get a client that you hit it off with really well and the whole thing turns into great fun for me too. Mark turned out to be an absolutely lovely person with a great sense of humour, and I enjoyed our session so much that I really felt quite bad about charging for it. I shouldn’t be given money to do something I enjoy, surely? An added bonus was that, in contrast to most folks, he was more interested in the creative side of photography than the technical side, and that’s where my own inclinations really lie.
Mark had an interest in architectural photography so we paid a visit to the Cathedral. It was one of those lovely sunny winter days and the light was streaming through the windows inside. I don’t usually take many photos when I’m teaching, partly because I feel my attention should be fully on my client and partly because I can’t get totally into things unless I’m on my own. This time, though, I got so inspired that I took loads of shots and I’m pretty pleased with quite a few of them. It was a lovely last visit to a place that’s always inspired me. I expect I’ll be back there again some day, but for now these shots are my final memories of it (and yes, I did give some extra time to compensate).
The photo at the top is a composite. If you know your British history, you’ll know that Thomas a Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. Having read a bit about it, I think he was behaving rather badly and asking for trouble really, but it’s still a nasty thing to happen. The quote in the title is attributed to the king at the time – shamefully I can’t remember which one; it might have been one of the Henrys – who didn’t really expect this sort of action on the part of his knights and ended up crawling through Canterbury in a hair shirt as penance. (It’s not great for your image to have a priest murdered in his own cathedral.) Becket’s name is engraved in the floor at the spot where it happened, and above it there’s a rather spectacular wall-mounted sculpture of three swords. I wanted to put the two images together in some way, but couldn’t do a diptych as the shapes of the two images were so different. Eventually, I took a close-up of one section of the sculpture, placed it on top of the image of the name, and then blended the two together. I’m quite pleased with the result as this isn’t the kind of thing I do often. The image underneath is a bigger one of the wall sculpture.
In the same area there’s a small chapel with a wrought iron screen and door. I didn’t think you were allowed to go in it, but an attendant came up and asked if we’d like to go inside. I don’t particularly like crucified images of Christ, but I did like the way this one was spotlit.
After looking at it for a while, I thought that what I liked even better was the top half of it, so I cropped it.
I also loved the fancy ironwork of the gate and the shapes of the windows that closed it off from the rest of the Cathedral.
And here’s a selection of other shots I took as we went round.
Now this is a place called the Dark Entry - I always think it sounds like it’s something out of Harry Potter. The story goes that Nell was a cook to the canon of the Cathedral and had taken rather a fancy to him. However, she suspected him of having a lover and, in a fit of jealous rage, poisoned his food and he died. Her punishment was to be walled up alive in the Dark Entry, where it’s said she haunts it still. Anyone unfortunate enough to see her ghost will die shortly thereafter. It’s a good story……………..
My main reason for including it – apart from the story – is for the spectacular tree shadow you can see through the archway. We went through and took loads of shots of this. This was one of those occasions when I think the shots worked better in black and white, so I converted them. The building behind is part of King’s School, a very old fee-paying Canterbury school that dates back to the early days of the Cathedral.
Another day, another drama. This time it was a fairly serious gas leak, leaving us without heating or hot water on one of the coldest nights of the year. And, as our brand new kettle only worked for a day before deciding to trip all the electrical switches every time it was put on and we’d been using the (gas) hob to heat water on, this involved an urgent outing to buy another kettle and a hot water bottle. Still, it’s all sorted now and I’m nice and cosy writing this. And…..I’m sitting at my desk in my new study. It’s still a bit messy and I don’t have internet up here yet, but it’s a room I can work in.
I wrote here about the difficulty I had in making a final selection of photos for one of my course assignments, and in the middle of all these domestic crises I got my tutor’s report back. It was very favourable on the whole: ‘Assignment 3 has required you to produce a series of landscape pictures with a common theme. I feel that you have succeeded in going beyond that in producing a cohesive sequence, with its own narrative and a life of its own as a set of images’. I’m very happy with that 
He did add that the colour balance in a few of them was a bit on the blue side (nos 1,5 and 6 if you’re interested – counting across and down). Looking at them now I can see what he means, but I remember deliberately trying to bring out the green and blue tones in the bricks and stonework. I still like that effect but perhaps a better way would have been to mask the leaves and adjust the colours separately. He also felt the contrast on the last one was a bit strong, something I’d felt myself but it was a very bright sunny day when I took it, unlike most of the other shots.
As several of you asked me to let you know what my final selection was, I’ve put them above. I ended up removing several that didn’t fit for one reason or another, and adding in three more that I felt worked better.
We’re here, we managed to transport two cats and two rabbits here without too much trouble, and the house is liveable in – just. There are boxes everywhere, piled above head height in places. I’m appalled at how much stuff we have, and that’s after giving our home a fairly serious decluttering about a year ago. There’s something almost obscene about the sheer quantity of things we possess when you see them all boxed and together in one place. Much of it is books, which I don’t mind and don’t place in the general category of clutter, but an awful lot of it is bits and pieces that ‘might come in useful one day’, but probably won’t. I’m thinking if that day hasn’t come in the past year or two, it probably isn’t going to.
The problem is that we had a loft full of this kind of stuff and there isn’t any accessible loft space here, or even a garage to put it in, so it’s all in the living space at the moment. There are some things I’d planned to get rid of anyway and wanted to sell on ebay, but they do need to have a home in the meantime that keeps them out of our way. We also have things like a washing machine that doesn’t have anywhere to go because the rental property already has one – we don’t want to get rid of it because when we buy again we’ll probably need it. And our old home had a couple of huge storage cupboards, which we don’t have here, so space needs to be found for their contents. We’ve looked at various options, including commercial storage, but that’s way too expensive so we ruled it out and have now concluded that buying a large garden shed combined with some radical culling will probably solve the problem, and we can take it with us when we go – which is all fine, but we still have to buy the garden shed and erect it and until we do we’re going to have to live like this.
My study is still a mess and full of – yes – boxes. I’m writing this on the laptop at the dining room table (which is in the living room because the dining room is full of boxes!), but am hoping to have located my computer again by tomorrow and to have a small space cleared round my desk that I can work in. I’ve really missed my blogging and other online activities and can’t wait to get back to doing some photography and writing again.
This all sounds rather gloomy and it’s certainly not meant to. I’m actually as happy as a pig in clover – I love the house, which is full of light and air (or will be when the boxes go), and I like the area. I’ve not had time to explore yet – I’ve hardly left the house since we got here – but am looking forward to this immensely. And since I rather like organising and tidying, there’s a lot of satisfaction to be found in unloading boxes and deciding where things will go.
Before I go, I think our removal company deserves a mention. Darrell, Gordon and Martin were absolutely wonderful – they worked tirelessly to pack us up and move our stuff, stayed unfailingly cheerful, considerate and helpful, and didn’t even complain too much at having to carry yet another box of ‘Gilly’s books’ up a steep flight of stairs. If you live in Kent and are thinking of moving, I can thoroughly recommend Jordan & Jarret.
These boxes are just the ones holding the books that were in the loft; there are about two to three times as many that came from the main part of the house!
I’m feeling sad. So many goodbyes, although I’m grateful that many of them are really au revoirs. Up till now I’ve mostly felt excitement about the move, but as we get closer and closer to the big day I’m becoming more and more aware of what I’m leaving behind. Each day brings another ‘last time’ for something, and usually some sort of goodbye to someone. Yesterday my hairdresser hugged me after my last appointment with her – I have to say that that’s a first Yesterday evening we went for a last meal in the restaurant where we had our wedding reception, and they gave us double portions of everything (I’m still feeling stuffed) and big hugs as we left. Everyone has been so lovely, and it’s brought home to me how many wonderful people there are in my life.
I’m excited - very excited – about moving, but for the moment I just have to let the sadness of what’s being left behind percolate through. I want to get on with it now; I’m tired of goodbyes. And although I’ve been loving the social whirlwind of trying to see everyone before I go, I badly need a few days spent quietly, on my own.
It will probably be a week or so before I’m back here; I’m taking a little break to do some packing, and I don’t know exactly when I’ll get hooked up to the internet again after the move. They’ve promised the day after, but you know how these things go……..wait for me, won’t you?
The cottage we stayed in last week was converted from a farm building and this circular window was in the bedroom. It was positioned low down, the top of it being just below hip level in the wall, so when you woke up in the morning you could look right out while still lying down. I want one of these!
A little photographic tip: I used fill flash here to balance the light outside with the relative dimness of the room.
We’ve got a place to live! Not the one I wrote about in my last post – after making us wait two and a half days for an answer, they refused to remove anything at all from the property. We might have given in on the cupboard junk and the stuff in the shed, but there was also a tatty old sofa and a bedframe which apparently weren’t going anywhere either, and which we didn’t want – we have enough tatty old junk of our own…… Since there wasn’t even a garage to stash them in, we decided to walk away and start again.
That left us with one day to find somewhere (yikes!). Out of six possibles that I found online, three were gone, two weren’t ready for viewing, and we managed to arrange a viewing on the sixth one for the next morning. It was well over budget, yes, but it was lovely – clean, fresh, full of light, ready to move right into, and with a huge garden and in the place we most wanted to be. By lucky coincidence, the owner was there and we could ask him directly if he minded pets rather than wait till the agent phoned him, he phoned back, the agent phoned us…..you know how it goes. We took it. We’re sorted. Let’s talk about photography again.
We took a leisurely drive up the west side of the Wirral coast one day, and came across some paragliders having a high old time. I tried, but none of my shots were up to much; I wasn’t quick enough, and most of the paragliders are about to disappear off the side of the photo like this fellow.
As the light fell, there was yet another wonderful sky.
I also tried taking this in portrait format just to see the difference, but it doesn’t work nearly so well. It’s interesting to see how the longer horizontal lines above give a far more restful, tranquil feeling than the more upright composition.
It was getting too dark to see by this time, so we turned for home. Next day we carried on from where we’d left off and ended up in West Kirby, which has a marine lake. A marine lake, in case you don’t know (I didn’t), is a very large, ‘fenced-off’ area of sea where people can sail, windsurf, canoe, and otherwise indulge in watersports, presumably in more safety than they would if they were out in the open sea. I’m not sure I like the idea myself, being cooped up with large numbers of people doing the same thing in a relatively small space, although it’s probably good and reassuring when you’re learning. What I did like was that there was a path running round the edge, and you could do a walking circuit of the whole thing – about two miles, all round. From a distance, it almost looked as if people were walking on the water.
Those of you who know me well may be surprised to see me produce a black and white image. I felt the coloured version didn’t really work – the colours were dull and didn’t add a lot. I’m not a huge black and white fan, so I played around to see what else I could do with it. I came up with these sepia and blue versions. I like the warmth of the sepia; not so sure about the blue, although the mood it creates is more true to how it felt at the time – it was a cold, damp, windy day. Maybe it’s just a little too blue? It is interesting to see how much a change of colour changes the feeling.
There was a break in the cloud for a few moments, and a brilliant shaft of light shone down onto the water. There was only a moment or two to catch it, and the contrast in light was just too much for the camera (and me) to deal with, but I do quite like how it turns the two small figures into ghostly shapes.
Finally, back on dry land, I saw this torn and tangled bunting blowing in the wind and liked the contrast of the bright colours, and the warmth of the pavement stone, against the cold greyness of the sea.
This has got to be one of the most spectacular sunsets I’ve ever seen; I was just mesmerised by it. It had everything, from fiery oranges and blacks to softer blues, pinks and golds, and I haven’t enhanced the colours at all. I rarely see a sunset where I’m living at the moment, as it’s so built-up here, but every evening in this holiday cottage we were treated to amazing skies. Not all were as exciting as this one, but every evening produced a new delight and a half-hour spent sitting in this space with a cup of tea, watching evening fall. Even better, our new house (more later on that) is just up the coast a bit, and this view is at the end of our road. You may be seeing rather a lot of sunset images in the next few months…….
