Blea Tarn by Colin S Bell

You’d be forgiven for thinking this site has recently become fixated with the Lake District in general and Blea Tarn in particular. You would be right, as I have felt rather that way since the two weeks I spent up there in November and especially since the morning when I had the place entirely to myself.

That day it all came together – after an hour’s drive I was there for dawn, rolling mists and autumn colours reflected in the tarn’s still surface – and apart from a single dog walker it was all mine, mine, and not another photographer in sight. Funnily enough, once the fog eventually lifted and the breeze picked up, I moved on to nearby Slater’s Bridge and did immediately walk into a pack of 10 photographers with LPS’s John Gravett. John had first introduced me to the tarn’s photographic potential and often takes his guests there, so that morning I’d been a lot luckier than I’d thought. Much as I can be sociable, and know I can  remove other photographers afterwards by pretending they’re dust spots, I am more of a lone hunter and it was a rare privilege to have the place all to myself.

Since then I’ve been itching to get back. Each time I go to the tarn I explore two or perhaps three angles, move on after two or three hours, feeling the shot’s in the bag – and then kick myself for not having spent the whole day there. Next time I’ll take sandwiches and try not to heed the Drunken Duck’s siren call calling me for a lunchtime pint.

For a small area, it’s got so many alternative viewpoints and I was struck by Colin S Bell‘s one here – not least that before sunrise he managed to resist the temptation to set up his tripod down by the tarn’s edges. Lots more on his site.

Adam Burton‘s Lake District pictures contained some lovely angles on Blea Tarn. And while here he’s talking about the Langdales in general, I rather feel his comment could apply to this one little spot.

This iconic location is probably my favourite part of the Lake District.  As long as the weather plays along, a photographer could easily spend a week and more photographing the Langdales and never get bored.

Having recently spent a couple of weeks up in the Lake District, I obviously can’t get enough of the region and was thinking about places to go next time. So I found myself browsing one or two sites until I came across John Parminter’s viewlakeland.com which has some lovely scenic work both of the Lakes and Scotland.

This is one of my favourite lakes, Wastwater, but taken from an angle I’d never seen before and which really expresses the power of those impressive scree slopes along the other side.

Peter Gabriel’s new album New Blood just arrived – yes, I do still buy CD’s and no, I don’t want to download compressed mp3 files for the same price – but for the last week or so he’s been trailing the album on his site and as well as lapping up the new versions and the interviews about the songs there was a strange graphic and it was only with the arrival of the CD that I could find out what it was. I’m sure it would have made an impressive LP cover back in the day….

Well, it turns out to be a photograph, of an embryonic stem cell on the tip of a needle, and was taken by retired scientific photographer Steve Gschmeissner from Bedford using a scanning electron microscope which magnifies subjects by up to a million times. Not much about him online though, apart from a stock library and his spiders and other insects.

[Update] Steve has contacted me to say he now has a web site at theworldcloseup.com.

[Update] What do I think of the album? OK, I’m a big fan (since c 1974!) and you may well wish to discount my views on that basis alone, but I don’t always like what he does and I’m not generally a fan of older rock stars kowtowing to classical music. Too often his great songs and vocal performances seem let down by overwhelming backing music – “Here comes the flood” from his first solo album was much better in its pared-back versions with Robert Fripp, on the greatest hits album, or here. “Red rain” is another example, and while it does work on “So” it’s much better when he just sings it with a piano. It is on New Blood too, and for me it came close to being lost in the wall of sound produced by a 45 piece orchestra, but it just about works. The same with “Intruder”, although in this case the music seems to echo a thriller soundtrack and suits the subject. On the other hand, when the orchestra is held back it’s really successful. There’s also an adventurous re-engineering of some of the songs, with hints of Steve Reich on “San Jacinto” and the full orchestra only comes in at the inspiring climax of “Wallflower”, my favourite track on the album where you really hear the character in Gabriel’s increasingly-coarse voice. Conclusion – one of the more immediately enjoyable of Gabried’s later albums.

See The shot that nearly killed me, a Guardian special report where war photographers talk about their profession (not sure that’s the word). There are some horrific pictures and lots of comments like “I’d just finished a master’s in photojournalism and thought I’d go to Pakistan to cover the elections.” or “This is the last picture I took before I got shot”, but probably the most shocking words were from João Silva who continued taking pictures after stepping on a mine:

I’ve spent enough time out there for my number to come up. I was one of the few who kept going back to Iraq. People think you do this to chase adrenaline. The reality is hard work and a lot of time alone. Firefights can be exciting, I’m not going to lie, but photographing the aftermath of a bomb, when there’s a dead child and the mother wailing over the corpse, isn’t fun. I’m intruding on the most intimate moments, but I force myself to do it because the world has to see those images. Politicians need to know what it looks like when you send young boys to war. If it’s humanly possible, if the prosthetics allow me, I’ll go back to conflict zones. I wish I was in Libya at the moment, without a shadow of a doubt.

Via @Russian_Photos (Jeremy Nicholl)

Also see Inside Sarajevo: A photographer’s tale by Anja Niedringhaus who photographed in Sarajevo (pictures here).

Last night I found myself watching an excellent documentary on BBC4, Last days of the Arctic, and thinking Ragnar Axelsson’s excellent b&w work seemed familiar. It’s mainly about his pictures showing the fast-vanishing farming communities of his native Iceland and the hunting people of Greenland, but it also covers other areas of his work (he’s a press photographer) such as last year’s volcanic eruptions. Here’s his web site.

The programme’s well worth watching if you’ve access to BBC’s iPlayer or there’s an extract on YouTube.

And his work was familiar – mentioned here back in 2006.

I’m not sure if Photoshop.com’s Spotlights is new (via) but it’s a good excuse to link to Carl Warner again as he is one of the featured photographers and is interviewed here about how he creates his wonderful food pictures:

The whole junk was then placed on a large tabletop covered in Pak Choi, which is a Chinese cabbage leaf, and this formed the turbulent waters of the seascape. Once dressed, this set formed the largest part of the image and covered a tabletop of about fifteen feet at the back to four feet at the front and around nine feet deep.

I wanted to capture the feel of that low golden sunlight that breaks through after a storm has passed, so I used a warm tungsten light source with minimum fill in light. For the sky I used kai choi to become the swirling, slightly spooky and mysterious looking cloud formations. The leaves were shot separately to form the second element of the composite, which were assembled later in Photoshop.

Carl Warner’s web site is here.

Enjoying an excellent pint of Hesket Newmarket‘s Catbells at Buttermere’s Fish Inn this afternoon – reward for a walk round Crummock Water – I had last month’s Black and White Photography with me.

It’s not the magazine it used to be, which is why it’s taken me weeks to get round to reading it – but luckily I happened to open it at a double page spread with Larry Louie’s gorgeous picture of Djenne mosque.

The following page had other pictures from Mali and also some from China and I made a mental note to see if he had a web site. He does, here, and there’s lots of wonderful black and white work.

I suspect you’ll enjoy this link.

There are some lovely impressionistic black and white images on Jonathan Luckhurst’s site, many looking like they’ve been printed (in the darkroom) through cloth or a mesh to provide a timeless, dreamy effect. From the crowds, one can only guess many were taken in India but place is deliberately obscure:

To do this my images must be anonymous. Anonymous in location and anonymous in human identity. I am extremely selective about what I photograph, avoiding landmarks and visual clues as to where the image was taken. As much as possible I show the human form as a distant figure or as a dark silhouette; cultural and racial identities such as skin colour, dress and manner become invisible. This is crucial.

I was originally drawn to Jonathan Andrew’s web site by a link to his pictures of WW2 concrete defences but his other landscape work really caught my eye. When you’ve seen a lot of landscape pictures I feel you tend to accompany a new set of images with “ah, Iceland”, “hm, has to be Scotland”, “yep, Dolomites”, “aha Borrowdale”. So it’s even more enjoyable when the comfy familiarity of recognising old friends is brushed aside by pictures like this which make you wonder where in the world they were taken. In this case, it’s certainly not an over-photographed location. In fact, I doubt I’ve ever seen any pictures taken in Montenegro.

John Malooof struck lucky when he bought a box of old negatives at a furniture and antique auction. They turned out to be by a nanny called Vivian Maier and consisted of 100,000 frames from the middle of the last century depicting Chicago and her travels:

…I met with two of the people Vivian was a nanny for in the 1950′s and early 1960′s today. They gave me some information that contradicts what I heard from other sources (this source is accurate). But, all in all, she is still somewhat of a mystery, even to them.

Vivian came here from France in the early 1930′s and worked in a sweat shop in New York when she was about 11 or 12. She was not Jewish but a Catholic, or as they said, an anti-Catholic. She was a Socialist, a Feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person. She learned English by going to theaters, which she loved. She wore a men’s jacket, men’s shoes and a large hat most of the time. She was constantly taking pictures, which she didn’t show anyone.

There are some excellent pictures at Maloof’s site and also here. There’s quite a range, from high society and figures such as Salvador Dali through to pictures of the poor and homeless that echo the dustbowl photographers of the 30s. Now they’re in a Chicago exhibition. Lucky he didn’t just sell the box on eBay, isn’t it?

Keith Laban says his “background as a painter and illustrator has inevitably influenced my photographic work” and he has some lovely images on his site. Many seem to be from a few places in Greece, but I was particularly keen on his shots of Abinger Roughs, just south west of London.

Just enjoyed looking through Chris Palmer’s site which include lots of very imaginative landscapes such as this one from Iceland. I particularly liked the Fields and Ice galleries.

I’m not sure that I have a style – maybe that’s something you can decide once you’ve looked at my pictures.

That’s a pretty good philosophy, don’t you think?

Congratulations are due to Antony Spencer for his wintry picture of Corfe Castle in Dorset, which has won him this year’s British landscape photographer of the year. A well-deserving winner, a curved lead in line composition balanced by lovely subdued colours and shapes in the sky, and unlike some previous winners – and perhaps the otherwise-excellent breakfast and steam engine shot that won the young prize – Spencer’s picture is also without doubt… a landscape.

Sadly for the other winning photographers, their pictures aren’t readily available but are hidden behind the Times’s paywall, but you can see some here , here and here. Also read Tim Parkin‘s views.

Robin Whalley is a “self taught Landscape Photographer living in Saddleworth near Oldham. He draws his inspiration from the industrial and rugged landscapes of the North of England.” I was enjoying his shots of the Lake District, particularly as I’m planning on getting to Wastwater (shown here) very soon, but also check out his Torres del Paine, Patagonia, Chile. One day….

Never heard of Prague-based photographer Tono Stano before, but there are some wonderful black and white figure studies at his site. Particularly good are those under studio works – make sure you click the numbers under each strip of thumbnails.

Via the excellent Iconic Photos.

Matt Stuart is a London-based photographer with a great eye for the quirky and amusing. While he uses digital for his commercial work, he walks and shoots a couple of rolls a day on a Leica MP.

Thanks Pieter.

Nils Jorgensen‘s photography seems to be mostly round London and in streets and other public places, but he can make wonderfully-funny images in places as ordinary as this ticket machine on the Underground.

I really enjoyed looking through this site – a great eye for the hilarious.

Maciej Dakowicz is a Polish guy who ended up in Cardiff doing a PhD and started photographing the local night life in his wonderful Cardiff after Dark series.

It’s great stuff – a bit like Weegee meets Graham Smith’s Middlesbrough pub in colour – and I imagine not easy to photograph without getting your head kicked in (always a good objective). I’m not sure it makes you proud to be British, though.

Picking one of David Eisenlord’s pictures from Iceland seems appropriate right now – though we may soon be heartily sick of being downwind of the land of fire and ice. I could equally well have picked something from his wild places of the west of Ireland.

The images are hand coated platinum/palladium or gum over platinum and for me have a lovely a timeless quality – a memory of when we could still fly to Iceland, or anywhere.