The Net of Heaven

The net of heaven
is vast, vast,
wide-meshed,
yet misses nothing

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (Ursula K. Le Guin's version)

Hugin and Munin

I've been playing a double game, recently. As well as looking for interesting variations on the "white walls" and "dark walls" themes, I've been making parallel sets of pictures using both an Olympus E-P1 fitted with the 17mm lens and a Panasonic GF1 fitted with the 20mm lens.

It has made an interesting comparison, and I may post something about the results soon. The main purpose has not been to discover "which is better", however, but to explore the different inclinations and tendencies of two very capable cameras. All cameras have personalities, and these two are very different. I've felt quite comfortable (and rather privileged) with one slung over each shoulder, like Hugin and Munin.











Hugin and Munin, of course, are the pair of ravens who -- in Norse mythology -- fly out over the wide world, gathering gossip and intelligence, and bring it all back home to Odin, sat on his shoulders.

[HYPERFOCAL MODE]

I'm about to discuss a pet digital photographic peeve of mine, but I'll try to avoid turning [RANT MODE] up to [HIGH].

Back in the days when I used film cameras, I would make extensive use of the hyperfocal distance, particularly in my landscape photography. Don't be put off by the name: it's perfectly legal (as Eric Morecambe used to say, "They can't touch you for it!"). It's a simple but very effective idea, which exploits a basic optical property of any lens, which is:

For any given combination of focal length and aperture, there is a distance -- the hyperfocal distance -- which, if the lens is focussed at that distance, has the unique property that everything from half that distance to infinity will then be in acceptably sharp focus.

Useful, no? For example, the old "standard" lens for 35mm cameras had a focal length of 50mm. At f/16, the hyperfocal distance for that focal length is about 21 feet. Set the lens to f/16, focus it at 21 feet, and everything from 10.5 feet to infinity will be in acceptably sharp focus. Guaranteed! No need to focus on anything in particular.

To make this easy, lens barrels used to be engraved with "depth of field" marks, so that if, for example, you had a 50mm lens on the camera and were using an aperture of f/16, you would simply line up the "infinity" marking on the focus scale with the "f/16" marking on the "far away" side of the DOF scale. Et voilà! Hyperfocal distance set!

Naturally, there is some pedantic quibbling about that phrase "acceptably sharp". This involves the positively theological concept of an "acceptable circle of confusion", and there are some lovely equations you can do which will deliver different hyperfocal distances depending on the value you supply for the circle of confusion, but this kind of focussing is always going to be an approximate business, and anyone seriously troubled by the size of their circles of confusion needs to start that search for a Life right away.

But that was then, and this is now.

Hyperfocal-ish... Don't know about infinity, but both
the near and the far fences are acceptably sharp

Digital cameras are amazing things. The sheer brilliance of the programming that underlies their functionality is mind-blowing. I used to be a "manual only" kind of guy. I'd meter off the ground at my feet, make allowance for subject brightness and contrast, and -- more often than not -- set the camera at the hyperfocal distance for my chosen aperture. But now... Set a decent digital camera to "auto" and it beats my judgement 99 times out of 100, in a fraction of the time it takes me to say "Hmm, let me think..."

But. The one thing that virtually no digital camera has, and which every digital camera could really use, is a [HYPERFOCAL MODE]. It would be so easy! Assuming the camera's software knows the focal length and aperture currently in use, why on earth can't it do a moronic little hyperfocal calculation, and set the focus accordingly?

I keep re-reading camera manuals to see whether I've missed it or whether they've called it something cute like [FOCOMAT] or buried it in the "scene modes" somewhere, but no. I believe some Ricoh cameras do have this feature. Even the crude three settings for "zone focussing" that used to figure on ancient film cameras (flower! / people!! / mountain!!!) could be handy.

Perhaps there's a technical obstacle? My suspicion is that enabling the lens to be focussed at an actual pre-determined distance -- rather than reactively to whatever is detected by the camera's fancy focussing matrix -- may be too great an engineering problem to be worth tackling. If so, what a shame.

But I will send a free A4 print of the image of your choice to anyone anywhere in the world who can show me how this can be done (by simple software settings) on any one of these cameras: Canon 45oD, Olympus E-P1, Panasonic LX3, Panasonic GF1!

Hyperfocal-ish... But, no matter how great the DOF, nothing
will stop the wind blowing stuff out of focus...

Heart of Darkness

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth".










It still is, sometimes, especially if you spend your lunch hour crawling around in the spaces under bridges and walkways. The horror, the horror, the horror!

Black and Blue

Another little set from this week's lunchtime wanderings. That third image is -- to my eyes -- compelling in a way I don't really understand. Despite the slightly out-of-focus blue surface (a risk with the E-P1 on autofocus, which is a little random) it all just works.

The Enemy Within

Last weekend I visited Romsey, a small market town near Southampton, to do the weekly shop. Normally it's a fairly sleepy place, but from the second I got out of the car I could hear that unmistakable quavering sound on the wind of enthusiastic semi-pro rock bands playing live. It was a very sunny day, and the town was heaving with people -- I had walked straight into the annual Beggars Fair, "a free festival of music, dance and street entertainment, around 70 acts in 20 venues in a day and a half of non-stop entertainment, all around the town of Romsey". Oh, God.

I do my best not be a curmudgeon, but being among the British middle classes en fête brings out the worst in me. It's the men, mainly. Over the last decade, a whole style of conspicuous consumption has evolved, whereby regional account managers and systems analysts are keen to be seen in public doing leisure. This involves elaborate hi-tech sandals, calf-length shorts, an expensive "leisure" shirt, designer sunglasses (which they, without irony, would call "shades"), and quite often an annoying (nay, idiotic) hat. An all-over tan and a close-cropped head to disguise the bald spot are also essential. And drink, lots of drink. Kenton from The Archers is their archetype. This is a style picked up on expensive foreign holidays, in yachting marinas, and on gap year adventures. Clutching pints, knots of these grinning dorks stand around at events like the Romsey Beggars Fair, doing leisure.

The younger generation are even more annoying. The junior regional account managers and their little gangs of drinking buddies clearly spend more time in the gym than is healthy, and want you to know it. Shirts off, gentlemen! Check the abs! (but you can leave your hat on). And they're all so tall and good-looking! I suppose they must throw away the duff ones when they're babies, like Spartans. And, amazingly, the fashion for elaborate upper torso tattoos has spread like a disease from its natural home among the disaffected and subcultural underclasses to, well, the junior regional account managers of Romsey. Astonishing. Ugly. Inappropriate. Intimidating. I could go on.

Such men as these think this world is their world by right, that their fit, rich, shouty, well-appointed masculinity is its own argument and justification. They are, I suppose, the Tory Party at play. But I say these men are The Enemy Within. If I didn't think I'd get my arse kicked all the way back to Southampton, I'd stand on a soapbox, and declaim:

Women of the world: for God's sake stop tolerating and encouraging these fools. Unreconstructed male vanity is a social poison: these preening gumps should not be admired, they should be forcibly made to take on a proper share of family life: cooking, tidying up, collecting kids from school, taking time off from work to arrange inconvenient hospital visits, and missing "must watch" TV -- yea, even The Big Match -- to watch tedious school entertainments. Being the regional account manager is really not that big a deal. And stop buying into this "boys like football, girls like shoes" bullshit: surely we threw out all that nonsense 30 years ago? And if you don't make your bloke put his shirt back on sharpish, act his age, and stop pretending to be David Beckham, it will all end in tears -- for you. Guaranteed.

As for me, I did my shopping and wished I'd brought a camera so I could illustrate this little rant. But I didn't.  Next time!

Hot House

Can't get enough of those graduation greenhouses marquees. Constructed from thick white PVC with transparent PVC windows, they're a seasonal treat. It's no joke standing around inside one, though -- when people talk of academic "hothousing", they're generally talking metaphorically.












Check the close-up of this last one: it's so hot in there that the face of the guy in the idiotic hat has melted into a Picasso:

These Are a Few of My Favourite Things

If, like me, you're attracted by the effects of time and wear and tear, then you are probably very fond of certain wabi sabi hotspots in your house, and reluctant to "decorate" them out of existence. The repeated passage of grubby hands over white plaster, the mark-making of those same small hands with pencils and crayons, the interesting way the ceiling plaster is crumbling just where the light from the garden projects soft colours through the gap in the curtains... These are all everyday visual delights I'll be sad to lose.

Even where our recently installed kitchen has exposed a palimpsest of plaster colours and remnants of paint probably dating back to the house's origins in the 1930s... To my eye, it's more attractive as it is than repaired and freshly painted over.

But as an excuse for inaction it's wearing thin, so I've been documenting some of my favourite bits.

Flags of All Nations

If nothing else, the World Cup livened up our Staff Club. The flags were still there until quite recently, hastily gathered up before the arrival of the Proud Parents. "What, you mean the university staff drink beer and watch football in here??". 'Fraid so. But not while they're teaching your kids, honest.

Brazil & Cameroon

Switzerland & Brazil

An unknown emerging nation

Work Life

Big table or small tent?

The graduation ceremonies are upon us, and I had the surprise and pleasure of an old friend turning up in my office -- a fellow fugitive from Stevenage New Town -- whose daughter has graduated from our highly-rated School of Archaeology. We managed a condensed chat and a quick coffee before he had to resume parental duties.

It's strange, being visited in one's place of work. It almost feels more intimate than being visited at home. After all, we do spend an awful lot of our time at work, and tend to shrink or expand to fit the roles we play, and bend ourselves to these relationships we do not choose but which dominate our weekdays. On occasions when I have visited others at work, I have noticed what I took to be their discomfort at the breaching of a wall between two separate compartments in their life.



I am very lucky, in that my work and leisure personalities can and do have a high degree of similarity; I don't even need a separate set of "business" and "leisure" clothes. I also have the pleasure of working with an intelligent and constitutionally friendly group of people in a creative and stimulating environment. Others -- I think of my various friends who work as school teachers or in highly-pressured business environments -- have to put on a work persona like a suit every morning. This must be emotionally and psychically tiring.

Of course, the new government has plans to apply a lot more destructive pressure on this creative and stimulating environment. We have yet to see how this will work out. But I've had a good day today in a number of ways, and I'll save worrying about that for another day.

Mike Skipper

Our teachers and mentors hold a bizarre place in our lives that transcends reality and occupies the same sort of mental space as those inescapable recurring dreams that can take decades or a lifetime to shake off. I still find myself having repetitive, one-sided conversations with men or women I haven't met for 30, 40, 50 years, and of which they themselves have been utterly oblivious. Not least because most of them are now dead. Typical! What is more frustrating than a teacher who goes and dies before one has had a chance to set them straight? Or, more rarely but even more frustrating, one who dies before you have had a chance to thank them? Do teachers know about this endless esprit de l'escalier? I think they probably do, as they themselves were taught in their turn.

I have mentioned the name Mike Skipper a couple of times in this blog, in the posts "I'd Like To Thank..." and "Tears in the Stop Bath". For reasons I can't recall, I googled his name today, and discovered to my astonishment that he was dead. In fact, had I but known it, there was a memorial for Mike at Oxford Brookes University just a few weeks ago, the week before my friend John Wilson's memorial in Oxford.

Insofar as I have ever had one, Mike was my photography teacher. When I first moved from Bristol to a new job in Southampton in 1984, I decided to take a photography course run at the recently-opened Southampton branch of the Oxford Darkroom, which would teach the basics of developing film and making prints in a hands-on manner, and would culminate in an exhibition of participants' work.

We were a very mixed bunch that included a policeman, a teacher, a builder, and the various species of misfits that are familiar from any evening class environment. Mike would come down from Oxford to take our weekly classes, and he seemed very exotic to us, as he had only recently arrived from the USA. He was a small, dapper man, with cropped hair and a moustache and the sort of distinctive dress sense that led us stolid Brits to assume he was gay, which as far as I know he wasn't. He always wore highly-polished black leather lace-up shoes.

Mike Skipper's shoe

He was a very good, patient teacher. Our sessions in the darkroom were a revelation to me. He kept his own El-Nikkor enlarging lens in a pocket of his voluminous herringbone tweed overcoat, and would polish negatives vigorously between finger and thumb with a cloth before sliding the carrier into the enlarger, which made us gasp. I remember him showing us how to use our hands to paint with light to darken edges, and how to cup the light away from areas that would otherwise print too dark. Standard stuff, of course, but then so is learning to read.

I remember that year with great fondness. I set up my first darkroom in trays on the floor of an easily-darkened corridor of my flat between my bedroom and the living room, and hung my developed strips of film over the bath. Many nights I would print until the small hours. Going for a pee in the night could be hazardous, though, if I had been too tired to empty and wash the trays that evening. Looking at an old box of prints now, I find it hard to believe quite how bad they really are. Learning how to improve is a wonderful thing.

Mike and I got on well during the course -- our backgrounds and aspirations were not dissimilar, and I like to think it must have been clear that this was not a temporary enthusiasm on my part. At the exhibition that was the culmination of the course Mike took me aside and said some very kind things that convinced me I had started on a lifetime journey. After it was over, however, Mike went the way of all teachers (or perhaps I went the way of all students) and I never saw him again.

I knew he had started working as a technician at Oxford Brookes, and it appears he eventually made it onto the teaching staff. I get the feeling his career as a photographer never quite took off -- but then, whose does? -- but I do like the idea of Mike as a technician turning on successive generations of students to the skills and mysteries of the darkroom, and making them gasp as he burnished their precious negatives with a cloth from his pocket.

Mike Skipper 1984

But you were wrong, Mike, just WRONG about colour! I wonder if you ever changed your mind? I certainly did, and I would have liked the chance to talk to you about it. Oh, well.

Oi, Nazraeli, No!!

I've kicked myself a couple of times over not snagging copies of Todd Hido's books when they came out -- I like his work very much, and the books fall into that "instant pension fund" category I discussed a while ago. So I ordered myself a copy of A Road Divided as soon as it appeared.

I was less than delighted when it arrived, however: where I had anticipated a normal-sized photobook, this thing is an inflated 43 x 34.5 cm, difficult to look at without binoculars, and impossible to shelve. That's a normal octavo book on top of it in the picture, and the Guardian broadsheet newspaper beneath it. I stood on a chair to get the angle.



The pictures are, of course, excellent, but not well served by being presented gallery wall size. It's like trying to browse a stack of 20" x 16" prints in your lap. They're moody pieces, with large areas of featureless tone, and you're hardly going to be playing "Where's Wally?" with them. At that size you need to be about four or more feet away from the print -- I don't know about you, but my arms are not that long.

Notice also the blistered cover. Quality control at Nazraeli is clearly not what it might be. As the book lacks a dust-jacket, those bubbles are doomed to wear through pretty quickly. Luckily, I bought my (signed) copy from the Photo-Eye online bookstore, and they arranged a replacement (signed) copy direct from Nazraeli, who were generous enough to let me keep the original, too, which I will pass on to a good cause.

But this has to stop! I know everything is bigger in the US, but this is ridiculous... How do the publishers imagine anyone actually looking at such oversized books? On a ladder?

Surfer Ticket Time

Graduation ceremonies approach, and we're getting the place ready, putting up marquees and finally doing a little hoovering.

I've never understood the attraction, myself -- despite being moderately proud of my three and a half degrees, I've never attended a degree ceremony. People say that, like weddings, it's really for the parents. But then, I've never got married, either. In Joni Mitchell's words, "We don't need no piece of paper keepin' us tied and true" ... (or maybe in Bob Marley's: "Ain't got no surfer-ticket on me, man").

Beige Revelation

In which it is revealed that the silver lining itself has a beige lining. Make of that what you can.

Open Day

Once in a while, about three or four times a year, I have to spend a Saturday morning at the Enquiry Desk in the library. It's a rare opportunity for a back-room type like me to come blinking out into the spotlight, and do that helpful thing with the punters that makes librarians such a popular breed. It's nice to get all the smiles and (metaphorical) strokes.

Today was unusual, in that my Saturday duty coincided with a University Open Day. We had 12.5K registered visitors in one day -- busloads of parents with pre-uni teens in tow -- so I was unusually busy, smiling until my face ached, and describing how many books we have, and how this includes both a decent proportion of well wicked old ones (as one parent described them) and thousands of electronic titles, how long they can be borrowed for, and what a joy it is in general to be a student in Southampton.

The most pleasant side effect of all this was to see oneself as others saw one, and to appreciate, as several parents put it, how great it must be (is!) to spend one's working day in such a fabulous place as a university library, being brilliantly knowledgeable and helpful, innit?

There are worse things, it's true.

Rust Never Sleeps

A Discovery?

As I mentioned a while ago, I've been taking a look at some micro 4/3 camera and lens combinations, now that prices on the original models (Olympus E-P1 and Panasonic G1) have crashed. The story so far, should you care:

The G1 is a sexy little beast, covered in some tactile substance that the human hand finds irresistible: it's like holding a rather solid kitten. Mmmm! The articulated screen is a joy to use: why don't all cameras have one of these? I was not entirely convinced by the electronic viewfinder: it's brilliant in good light, but less so in low or very bright light. And, yes, as no doubt you've read elsewhere, the 14-45mm zoom is reassuringly solid. However, it quickly became obvious that the whole package was far from pocket-sized and covered in functional but inconvenient lumps and bumps, and that I'd really be looking at replacing my Canon DSLR if I were to seriously consider keeping it. So, reluctantly, I'll be passing it on.

The E-P1 is another matter. Having rejected the Olympus EVF as seen on an E-PL1, I was sold on the 17mm pancake lens and optical viewfinder combination. It just feels good, as does the whole camera -- it's simply a marvel of design and just-rightness. It's perfect in the way the original cassette-tape Sony Walkman was perfect. And it takes a decent picture, too. I have to say the collapsible 14-42mm lens is a bit wacky and a bit wobbly and longer than I really like when, um, erected, but a good size for a travelling companion.

But ... I think I have made a curious discovery.

When you start using it, you begin to notice that the area covered by the brightlines in the 17mm viewfinder seems to be rather less than the area covered by the rear screen (and captured by the camera). At first, I was puzzled. It was a classic case of not believing the evidence of your own senses. I mean, they must be the same, right? Perhaps it was just parallax? Damn it, this viewfinder is designed for this fixed focal-length lens and no other, isn't it? I was so baffled that I eventually opened the glory hole under the stairs and rummaged around for five minutes to find my tripod (yes, that's how baffling this was).

I set it up. I put the E-P1 on it. I lined up the view on the rear screen with some obvious markers about 10 feet away. I looked through the viewfinder. Nope: the two views were definitely not the same. Definitely a smaller angle of view in the brightlines... About, say, that of a slightly wide "normal" lens.

Hey, just a minute... I fetched the Panasonic 20mm pancake lens I happened to have next door, and attached it to the E-P1. I lined up the view, and looked through the viewfinder. Amazing. The brightlines were, pretty much, an exact match. How about that?

Have you read this anywhere else? That the Olympus 17mm viewfinder is a pretty sloppy match for the Olympus 17mm lens, but a decent match for the Panasonic 20mm lens? I certainly haven't. So, unless I have a freak sample of the viewfinder, I think this is something well worth knowing.

That is, that if you want a fast snapshot/street camera (that's "fast" as in aperture -- the Olympus autofocus is dreadfully slow -- I have yet to try the firmware update) with an accurate optical viewfinder and in-body image stabilisation, the combination to go for is an Olympus E-P1 plus Olympus 17mm viewfinder plus Panasonic f/1.7 20mm lens. Pass it on!

Me and My Shadow

Near Llandrindod Hall Farm, Powys

In a recent comment on the Brown Clee post, Gavin asked an interesting question. He wondered why I seemed to feel differently about those photographs taken at Brown Clee compared with, say, those that make up other "landscape" series, e.g. the ones I made at Mottisfont Abbey. I began to reply as another comment, but decided it was worth a post in its own right.

So, why do I regard some of my photographs differently to others?

Well, on one level, of course, we all do. An obvious reason is purpose. If, for example, I photograph a plate which I intend to sell on Ebay, my primary purpose is simply to show what the plate looks like. But -- if I have any idea what I'm doing -- I will also have a strong, secondary purpose, which is to make it look as attractive as possible to prospective buyers. And if I were a professional advertising photographer, I'd use all sorts of tricks to sex up that plate, to convince the target demographic that buying this plate is an essential lifestyle or status move. My intention would not so much be to portray the plate, or my feelings about the plate, as to stimulate the desire of an imagined purchaser of the plate.

The same goes for landscape: most landscape photography is pretty instrumental, too. "Look, here's a landscape -- isn't it magnificent? Oh, and look -- here's a flight schedule!". Skilled landscape photographers deploy a similar bag of tricks to the advertising photographer. The work of a successful landscapist like Charlie Waite is all about using viewpoint, time of day, isolation of subject, graduated filters, choice of lens, composition, etc., to produce a highly crafted view, primarily intended to appeal to the viewer's eye. Such work is rarely either very expressive of the person behind the camera, however, or the reality on the ground. It's rather classical in spirit -- pleasing variations within mutually-acceptable guidelines. One thinks of Alexander Pope:

True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,
What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,
Something, whose Truth convinc'd at Sight we find,
That gives us back the Image of our Mind.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

It's often work of this sort that attracts people to photography in the first place. You see it everywhere in books and magazines -- lavender fields in Provence, misty dawns in the Pyrenees, autumnal oak groves in the Dordogne, all catching that warm "magic hour" sunlight just so. But, although I respect the skill, that is not the kind of photography I admire or aspire to produce. Not least because so many others do.

St. Audrey's Bay, Somerset

So, what is? I have already mentioned the work of Thomas Joshua Cooper several times. Cooper is the ultimate romantic landscape photographer, a driven man, fulfilling his unique vision in conditions of sometimes melodramatic peril, lugging his antique Agfa view camera into the remotest corners of the Atlantic coast or onto Norwegian glaciers, sticking religiously to a "one lens, one exposure" mantra. You may find his work too dark, too samey, too mysterious, even rather frightening. TJC couldn't care less.

Or perhaps Susan Derges. Obsessed with the camera-less photographic image, she is to be found at midnight when there is a full moon, dunking large sheets of Cibachrome into the tide on Devon beaches or into the wooded streams of Dartmoor, like a priestess of some sort of hi-tech haruspicy. It does sound utterly mad, but what sensational, unique, inimitable, expressive images result! I doubt Susan Derges cares much what other people think of her work or her methods.

Or Jem Southam. In some ways the mirror image of Thomas Joshua Cooper, Jem is the ultimate post-romantic landscape photographer, a driven man, fulfilling his unique vision in conditions of sometimes comic bathos, lugging his view camera and ladder repeatedly into the same familiar corners of the English south coast, sticking religiously to an "overcast light only, absolutely no Sturm and Drang!" mantra. You may find his work too blandly-lit, too samey, too mysterious, even disturbing. Jem is amused by, but indifferent to, his detractors.

But, seeing as this is my blog, what about me? Apart from admiring the work and attitude of certain outstanding contemporary photographers, what differentiates those images that I hoard into series, and those I regard as "one offs"?

The simplest answer is that I like there to be a genuine coherence about my series / sequences, usually one combining unities of time, place, approach and technique. The underlying project has to be there. For example, the images of the River Test at Mottisfont were the result of a two year project, with access granted to the grounds in the closed season, using the same camera and film. Their coherence is not accidental. Whereas those Brown Clee photographs are of a place I've only visited twice, under particularly strained emotional conditions, and using a technique (scanned 120 film) which I have now pretty much abandoned. If there were, say, a few hundred of them there might be some sort of highly condensed sequence to be extracted. But there aren't: you only get 12 images on a 120 roll of film, and I think I shot a couple of rolls on each visit.

Now, it is true that I have a vast hoard of 6x6 and 6x4.5 negatives which remain largely unscanned. Buried in there are plenty of classic landscape "views" with enough edge and interest to warrant pulling together, one day, as a sort of retrospective series, and the Brown Clee images might find a place there. But a lot of them are what I refer to, semi-facetiously, as "holiday snaps"; I went to this place, I saw this view, I took this photograph. For example, I have quite a large body of work from our annual visits over the last 30 years to the Welsh Borders. But it doesn't cohere and, above all, it doesn't penetrate beneath the superficial attractions and quirks of the area.

I'm never convinced by the kind of results I get from brief visits. I'd never make a good photojournalist. That's what I mean when I refer to these images as "holiday snaps". We'll always be mere visitors in Wales, unless and until we decide to retire there, and have to cope with what really happens in that wonderful landscape: the limited shopping facilities, the rural postal service and health service, the absence of mobile phone and broadband coverage, the decline of the hill farming economy, the ageing population, locals' resentment of incoming retirees, etc., etc. Then I may finally have something to say about the place!

And it is important to me that I have something to say, that I am not wasting your time and mine if I ask for your attention. And that "something" has -- for me -- to be more than simply calling attention to or illustrating something as self-evident as, let's say, the beauty or magnificence of a landscape "to Advantage drest". You can do that for yourself or, if not, buy books and postcards. What I am interested in is the expressive, narrative and poetic possibilities that images combined in sequences can generate; I'm just not so interested in the kind of stand-alone imagery that someone might use as their PC wallpaper or buy as a greetings card.

So, yes, although I like those Brown Clee photographs -- I wouldn't have shown them otherwise -- they do not really satisfy me. They lack a proper context, and they need the stimulating company of other photographs; it is not yet clear to me whether I can provide either. And I certainly can't imagine anyone wanting to make them into greetings cards.

Issigeac, Dordogne, France