All that comes with it

What’s the best cure for all that ails you? Why buying a Nintendo wii of course! And we did it without having to join a single queue too.

I would just like to state for the record that those are hands, not weirdly misshapen breasts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about photography recently. People are often very complimentary about my photos, but the sad truth is that about 70% of the quality comes from our camera rather than me. I’m not being falsely modest here; I recognize that I have a fairly reasonable eye for a shot, and that I’ve become far more technically able in the last year or so (I now remember to take the lens cap off on six out of ten occasions for example). But I have a long way to go before I’d consider myself a proper photographer.

I’ve been watching Boston Pat’s project 365 where he takes a photo every single day with a mixture of admiration and jealousy. It strikes me as a wonderful way of both honing his skills and chronicling his day to day existence. Of course I could never do something so ambitious. It’s not that I’m too lazy; far from it. It’s just that Kerry won’t let me. Yeah, that’s it. She’s deliberately holding me back because if I become better than her at photography it will mean that she only holds superiority over me in intelligence, looks, common sense and general cleanliness.

But despite all this I have been making moves to improve my photos of late. I’ve bought another lens, I’ve borrowed a flash from Oli, and I’ve also been getting the occasional photography magazine.

The magazines have been raising a lot of questions for me. Questions such as “Who would pay £1166 for a camera tripod?”, “Why is every second photo in the magazine either of a hawk or a beach?”, and “I wonder how much those ‘models’ advertised in the back pages charge?”

But the question that’s posed me the greatest dilema is “How much photoshop is too much photoshop?”.

One of the magazines I bought had a tutorial in which you transform an image from this, into this:

I may have gone a little overboard on pepping up the colors, but there’s little doubt the second one looks better. But is it still a photo or is it now art? To some the distinction is meaningless, photo’s are art and that’s all that there is to it. I get that viewpoint, I sympathize with it, hell I even have that viewpoint. But I want my photos to be honest too.

I try to be truthful on the blog because I value it as a record as much as I value it as a creative expression. Sometimes I am tempted to bend the truth or to put words into people’s mouths just because it would be somehow more entertaining. But I’ve always resisted these urges. I only embellish the truth when my lies are so outlandish that people will instinctively know that I’m talking out of my arse. Similarly I’ve played with photoshop in the past, but never in an attempt to deceive.

Don’t get me wrong, I do doctor many of my photos. But only by tweaking the sharpness, or the contrast, or making them black and white. In the image above though I made both the zebra and the mountain in the background bigger, and then shifted them about so as to get a better composition. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that level of manipulation.

“So don’t do it then!” You say. And you’re right, the solution is that simple. But the whole thing has raised a question within me about documentary versus art, and it’s one that I’m finding stimulating to think about. And as you all know, there’s nothing in this world I enjoy more than stimulating myself.

We woke up to snow on Saturday morning. It was gone by the afternoon but at least the kids got to play in it for a couple of hours.

I morn for the winters of my youth when snow lay on the ground for days on end. Will my grandchildren ever even see snow I wonder.

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In July of this year I shall be walking 78 miles in 6 days in aid of the Joseph Salmon Trust, a charity founded by my close friends in memorial to their son Joseph who died aged 3 in April of 2005. Please look here for further details and consider sponsoring me. Thank you.

Sometimes I wish I lived in the southern hemisphere.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not an overwhelming desire. I don’t lay awake at nights fantasising about water swirling the opposite way down the plughole or anything. But there has been a little antipodean niggle in the back of my brain ever since I can remember.
 
Of course my brother isn’t doing much to help.  He’s recently immigrated to Australia and his blog is full of wonderful views of Sydney and Rainbow Lorikeets.  The bloody swine.
 
My urge to live down under was particularly to the fore on Thursday evening.  Christmas is celebrated in the summer in Australia, you see. Which means that if your friend receives a swanky new camera as a present, and you agree to go out with him and play with it, you will be out taking photos in the warm soothing Ozzie summer evening.  I, however, live in England. Which means that when my friend gets a new camera and we go out to play with it we do so in the freezing cold with rain being driven horizontally into our foreheads.
 
On Thursday evening Paul, Oli, and myself spent an enjoyable hour messing around with various knobs and buttons on our cameras amd taking photos of the M62 motorway in the dark. We then spent an even more enjoyable hour in the pub trying to massage life back into our frozen extremities. Despite the wind and the rain and the fact our only source of light was Paul’s toy Dr Who sonic screwdriver (*cough* geek *cough*) I had a really great time. It was the first time I’ve been out photographing with anyone other than Kerry, and it was rather refreshing not to have to wrestle for the sole camera all the time.

Despite him being a regular commenter on the blog and our social circles have overlapped for the past ten years or so I’ve not spent all that much time with Oli before. To be fair, the fact he lives in Scotland and only comes back to Yorkshire for Christmas and such like probably hasn’t helped matters. Anyway, he’s a jolly pleasant chap and i look forward to walking 78 miles together in July.

Most of the shots I got on our photo expedition were pretty box standard and clichéd, but I did get a couple of good ones by wiggling my camera about a bit. I really fancy having a go at light painting next.