Water, Water, Everywhere

The area where I live is inundated by the worst flooding in this part of the UK in living memory. It doesn't matter where in the world you are, as New Orleans, Bangladesh or the tsunami in the Indian Ocean bear witness, the destructive power of water on the rampage is impossible to resist.

To watch a river in full spate, as I have recently where the River Avon flows through my village, is to be awed, frightened and compulsively drawn all at the same time. There is something mesmeric about fierce water.

Back in 1968, when I was on a course at the BBC's training centre, a severe thunderstorm got trapped in the Vale of Evesham, bouncing back and forth off the Cotswolds and the Malvern Hills. The next day, Evesham was awash and the Avon had burst its banks. Down on the sports field, I found a boat. Dressed to kill, I was off across the open water. I couldn't swim but who cared?

Floods are a novelty for some, a chance for adventure, as this one was for me. Earlier today a police helicopter was hovering over the village apparently searching for two youngsters missing from a dinghy. I thought the flood was fun back when I was nineteen. I was stupid.

Pixie finds this photo very amusing. Already I was training my jackets for a life with miss-shapen, bulging pockets and the comb-over hairstyle goes a long way to explain my lack of success on the dance floor although doubtless there were other factors.

Unstained Glass

It is an act of sheer perversity on my part, to take an image as colourful as a stained glass window and remove that which makes it remarkable.

Years ago, before colour printing became the norm, art books were printed in monochrome. Works such as those by Turner, Monet, Gauguin, Cezanne, in fact almost any painter for whom colour was everything (I'm discounting Whistler) had their rich canvases reduced, and that is the right word, to banal variations on grey. It did not work. These artists did not paint thinking how nice this would look if it was in black & white or a tasteful shade of beige. They did not think of trying a slightly lighter shade of burnt umber in order to satisfy the printer of 'The Master Painters of Britain', published in 1898. This book is typical of its era; the cover is pure Art Nouveau, the reproduction, Art Reductio.

A grey scale image is obviously unnatural and yet we invest in it such a perverse pride. If the first photographic system had been full colour, would we have monochrome, sepia, duotone, all those variations? I don't know. Doubtless someone would have experimented with it, it would have been in vogue for a while, like punk music or the maxi skirt, and then it would have passed on.

Yet we keep plugging at it, searching for scenes with just the right contrast range, fiddling about in processing with shading and gamma correction. I'm as guilty as the rest of them. Why? What's driving this quest for a pale imitation of reality?

Well I think it's because the end result is so satisfying, that's why. And that's just plain weird.

Deckchairs

These are the stuff of British comedy films, endlessly involved in third-rate comic sequences. Inept, weedy men in string vests try desperately to erect one without crushing any of the slightly more useful parts of the human anatomy. Looking on will be a deeply unimpressed, buxom woman in a grey plastic mac.

Now do I want to spend any time waffling on about these stripy digital entrapments? Not really but I can't think of anything else to do. They photograph well and usually come in interesting if basic colours; these were red and blue but I've wilfully removed that exciting visual stimulus. Please use your imagination.

They also blow about in an interesting fashion in much over a light breeze. They're made of good, honest basic materials - wood and canvas. As corporal support systems, they have stood the test of time. Any seafront worthy of the name in Britain will have them.

And that surprises me. Given the relentless onward march of the Health & Safety Executive, the standard bearers of the cotton wool society, how come we are still allowed to use them? When they fight back, they hurt. It can only be a matter of time before they are replaced with something rigid, bolted down, in white plastic and with really smooth edges. And I mean really smooth; something with the texture of crème fraiche or a really ripe cow pat.

Such will be progress.

More Mono

An urge has come, galloping over the horizon, stones flying, a bowl of dust swirling in its wake. Its name is Monochrome.

My interest was sparked while I was helping a friend choose her new camera. Shooting black & white was one of her requirements and it made me think about my own experience in the medium. In short, hardly any. Unlike Peter, I have no traditional background in photography although I did play about in the darkroom with a fair bit of monochrome in the early seventies. However that was through necessity rather than choice and because, as a film processor, I could lay my hands on free film, mostly unused tail-ends of 35mm natural history film shoots. I have also lit drama productions in a monochrome film noire style but never in pure chroma-free gloriousness.

So I've started to trawl through the thousands of images that infest my hard drive to see which have the potential to make it into the pantheon of black & white. What I'm looking for is simplicity, structure and gradation. The staircase yesterday probably fulfilled two of those and today's hopefully all three.

Mildly Obsessive

My writing is going through a bit of a trough at the moment, picking its way amongst the detritus at the bottom of the pond and occasionally splashing its imagined wellies through a murky puddle. Not sure why this should be but it happens from time to time - I haven't the discipline to write to order nor the motivation.

It's not as if my every wakening hour is filled to the brim with substance. I potter about. In fact I'm almost an obsessive potterer. Perhaps I have compulsive pottering disorder. It's also not as if I'm without input. I've spent plenty of time over the past few weeks with those who provide me with inspiration. I'm sure it's just a switch somewhere that I accidentally flip off and, being the age I am, cannot always find again in order to remake the contact and re-energise my literary trickle.

So I'll skip to an image which neatly encapsulates a couple of visual obsessions - staircases and diagonals. The building is a former school in Barnstable, Massachusetts and, while Pixie was searching the store for bargains, I was snapping the stairs. The original image is almost monochrome so I've taken it a step closer.

Globular Reflections

I've noticed a streak of narcissism creeping in lately and just to compound it, here's an image with thirteen of me, albeit small and insignificant and another with me larger but still a mere speck. They were taken using one of the many sculptural embellishments that are scattered around the small town of Stockbridge in Massachusetts.

My friend, Peter, freshly reinvented on the blog scene, is not above such devices; in fact he's often in a reflective frame. Last Saturday was his birthday and we celebrated by embarking on a gastronomic journey around the eateries of Worcestershire. This epic outing featured breakfast in Pershore, coffee at Bransford, a beer at Lulsey, a little snack at Alfrick, tea in Great Malvern, cake at Birlingham and dinner at Baughton. Some days you just can't avoid eating, fortunately. Unconventionally, in the UK at least, the morning started with cake after I tipped off the eponymous owner of Nicole's in Pershore that it was a significant day for my young friend. Obviously the single candle was a diplomatic gesture on her part.

Blind & A Yellow Spade

One of the many things that I've learnt from my friend Peter is that you should never leave home without a camera; I know other, saner people might suggest that having your pants on the right way round or carrying the front door key and perhaps some money would be better maxims. But for us, it's cameras.

On this particular day, deep in the forbidding, oppressive and terribly repetitive woods of New Hampshire, I came across this pool of water filled with what might appear, at first glance, to be old coins (just suspend your disbelief for a mo, please). I thought to myself - what a great setting for the yellow plastic spade that I just happened to be carrying.

And, without a camera, that would have been that. A tiny, illogical and immaterial art installation would have been lost. But it wasn't; the digits bear witness.

Later (nearly said 'back at the ranch' then - lucky escape) in the bathroom of my hotel I was taken with this projection of the sun's rays through a venetian blind (awful joke avoided there). I've spent a lifetime sticking beams of light though windows in the hope of emulating the sun but only nature can get those cool crisp parallels. Aren't they magic? If only we could get the damn thing to stay in the same place for the retakes.