A bit of an up and down day yesterday – which meant I didn’t get around to post the latest image – and the world keeps spinning around! Anyway I’m up to my knees in Medieval abbeys Genoan wool traders so I got a bit distracted. In the middle of all this I went to my weekly art class. This time as opposed to creating mountains of paper I just file away and forget I’m going to do all the work in one of my large sketch books – it makes things a whole lot manageable.
Today was one of those very occasional days, when I wish I still had all my very expensive photographic gear. The inaugural Friends Life Woman’s Cycle Race passed nearby to me today and I thought I would brave the elements and have a look. For those of you who have never seen a cycle race in the flesh you haven’t missed much. If ever a sport was made for TV then cycling road racing is just that. The riders zip by you in a blink of an eye and then that is that you haven’t got a clue what is happening and what the significance of any of the rider is. This is why you need fast responding equipment with fast lens to boot. Cycle racing is great to watch on TV just not in the flesh unless there is a reason to do that. Which brings me back to today.
This week saw the first running of the Friends Life Woman’s Cycle Race. This race is apparently the only stage road race for women – whether that is true is another matter – but that was what I think the promoted said last night. Anyway, this was something unique and something worth braving the rain to see. So how to capture the action? This is when the longing for times past came in. I had the choice of an iPhone or a Canon G1x – neither were really that good at capturing quick action. I chose the Canon and as I stood at the side of the road awaiting the arrival of the bikes I suddenly realised that I didn’t really know who to use this camera for sports action. After some hasty flicking through the menu I just couldn’t get it to shoot on continuous mode. So one snap at a time.
Are the image any good – not sure but at least I can say I was there – the day the cycle race zip through my area in a blink of an eye.
Drive… like a pray
I no longer have a clue what a photograph is anymore…I really don’t. In the past it was fairly straight forward and usually had something to do with film or other media used to capture the image. Nowadays that distinction just doesn’t work. Yes you can still captured an image using analogue methodology but it will almost certainly end up being digitised and then … well it is an image.
A case in point are these two variations I made on the digital painting of Anne Hathaway I have been working on over the past couple of days. The original painting was made in the digital environment so it doesn’t really fit the description of a photograph. Yet the work I undertook to create the image is no different to that which I would have done if I had captured the image using a lens – so perhaps it is a photograph after all? Or are my photographs no longer photographs – if this is the case then no photograph worked on in a dark room is a photograph and so we had all better pack up right now.
Of course things get even more confusing when you consider the two images above. Both of these have been created by using exactly the same photo apps that I use to produce images captured on my iPhone. Does this now make them a photograph as they were manipulated digital images? (almost images captured using a camera obscura in one sense)
So am I a photographer or digital artist or both? I no longer feel the barriers between these distinct approaches to making images is worth a fig. To prove this consider this image, it was a ink, chalk and graphite sketch, captured and manipulated using an iPhone – just how would this be classified?
In the end who cares – I don’t but there are an awful lot of people who do – otherwise organisations such as the Royal Photographic Society would cease to exist. It is so confusing.
A design for life.
Well I think this is it and at the moment I feel really happy with what I have done which is unusual as most of the time after I have finished I somewhat doubt what I have done.
Another hour or so working on the Anne Hathaway portrait and time to take stoke. To help this process along here is the current portrait I’m working compared to one I made last year. The first thing to say is that the photographs that both were based on must have been taken either side of Ms Hathaway’s Oscar winning performance in Les Misérables. The second is that the previous painting was much more straight forward whereas the latest version is heading towards a much more romantic, almost neo classical, style. Now this interesting in that it was not what I intended but just developed as I worked on the painting. I’m not sure whether the painting is completed yet – I need to cogitate on this a bit more.
Dance away the heart ache.
Not sure if she is finished but I like the way things are going. See how I feel tomorrow.
Go West
Itches are a very powerful things. The urge to scratch them can be irresistible and yet some times you just can’t. I had that experience this morning when I saw a photograph of the wonderful actress Anne Hathaway – I just had to make a drawing of her – I have no idea why but the itch had to be scratched. However, I resisted for so long and then I just gave in – this is the result of an hour’s work.
Today has been a bit of back to the future as I had to dust down my old lap top and set it up for a meeting I’m have next week. This might seem taking preparation to an extreme but I had several things I needed to sort out on the machine and I wanted to make sure it would work.
The first problem was would it start? The machine is circa 2007 and hasn’t been used for at least 6 months. However, once it was plugged in – the battery was always a bit dodgy – away it went with the old familiar clunks and sounds of spinning as the hard drive sprung into life. After 10 minutes, yes it really was that long, the Windows Vista OS settled down and appeared to be very stable. I had switched the WLAN off so as to not get bothered by any updates I might be due and the machine seemed better for that.
The next problem was how to port a huge Adobe Illustrator file created on an Apple into an old Windows environment. The first step was to reduce the size considerably which wasn’t too problematic. Then save it onto a SD card and then open the file on the lap top. This seemed to go quite well until it came to backward compatibility. Up popped the dialogue box warning that this might not go as planned, my words not the softwares. Sure enough it didn’t and whilst the file opened it had put all the layers into one group – which was an unmitigating disaster. Back to the drawing board.
Eventually I solved the problem by saving the file on the iMac into a more compatible version and things worked really well. As a back up I also saved the file as a PDF and this seemed to be working ok. So far so good. The next step was creating an Access database on the laptop from a CSV I had exported out of FileMaker Pro.
Now for many years I was a bit of a wizard with Access. I had mastered Visual Basic and could make Access produce some impressive results. However, the last time I worked on an Access database was way before I had switched to Apple so, to say the least, I was rusty. However, once I had got into swing of things all the old memories came flooding back and the final result, whilst very fundamental when it came to data management, at least looked quite slick. I have to say the design interface of Access is far superior to the scatter brain approach of FileMaker. I guess if I could bothered to sit down and really teach myself FileMaker I might change my views – perhaps.
So things didn’t take as long as I thought and the problems were manageable. Actually as a stand alone computer the lap top is really good. Yes it is slow to start up and I wouldn’t like to do too much video editing on it but apart from that it does everything you might want from a laptop. However, I guess if a switched on the LAN then things might get a whole more complicated as all those updates try and screw the machine up. No best leave the internet alone and instead use the iPhone and iPad.
I have also come to some form of resolution about the way my art should move forward. I’m going to abandon my attempts to master painting on a large scale. Instead I intend to work in the more intimate environment of my sketch books with ink, water colours and gouache. I really suits the way I enjoy making art.
Anchors Awiegh
For lots of reasons day 10 didn’t exist. However day 11 saw me back to my old tricks – an early start and on the road to get the good light . This morning I was on the Cotswolds visiting the ancient stone monument called The Rollright Stones and boy was it cold!
For the one or two people who have been following my output over the years you will know that I have a number of projects bubbling away and the Rollright stones is a strange meting point for them all. Not only are the images part of Project LV One, they also are part of the Deep Time project – the stone used is the local Jurassic oolithic limestone – around 200 millions old as well as their construction being between 4000 and 5000 years old – deep time for human consciousness. The final part of this nexus is that they sit next to a salt way – which has consumed so much of my time over the past few years.
On a more boring point the photography today again demonstrated the marginal quality of the iPhone 5S when compared to camera roughly the same price – the Canon G1x. Now the Canon is no saint but the image it produces are superb, it’s just that you some times have to struggle to get the bloody thing to work the way you want it to or is it me? Anyway, I knew that when I bought the thing so it is an interesting challenge.
So back to the iPhone 5s. The image quality starts to collapse rapidly if you don’t have really good lighting conditions. One of the way you can get around this is by using Photo app – my favourite is KitCam and this enables the user to constructively capitalise on the iPhone’s limitations – I have made some really great images this way. It is the same with Pano function – use it in excellent lighting condition and don’t push it and the results are superb – however it is too easy to go beyond the quality threshold and when this happens the image gets very mush very quickly. I suspect I’m being too critical as most users will never view the images beyond either their iPhone or Facebook which are too small to really show the faults of the image quality.
So what is the purpose of this bitch about the iPhone? We are starting to enter the twilight zone of Macboy fandom when, to quote a very popular movie, ‘…everything is awesome…’ and don’t you dare say it isn’t. The WWDC is just around the corner when we have a series of much anticipated product launches – the speculation meter is already at 11. I love my iPhone and it is my camera of choice but it isn’t up to much when you compare it to a real camera.
I want it all
Well it only took me just over a week to not post a daily update but the truth is I’m going through a bit of a crises. I started my latest art class and whilst it a while since undertook a longish course I feel I’m starting to get a bit stale. I guess I need to clarify that – I feel I’ve taken life drawing as far as I can at this level. The question is do I want to take things to the next level at all? Or do I examine the digital realm further where I can produce images that I find rewarding? I don’t know the answer to that one but I what I am asking is where is all this leading me?
I have never had any pretensions to becoming a professional artist nor have I ever looked for any inner meaning in what I make – it is what it is and that is its own reward. What I want to do is produce things that I enjoy on an intrinsic level. I have explored painting in the real world and this has left me flat – I guess in part when I compare the results to my digital paintings they look so much better – in my eyes at least.
What I really enjoy is drawing and sketch book work. The thought of a long term project in the real world leaves my somewhat dead. So do I retreat into the world that has given my so much fulfilment or do I stick at something I don’t find that rewarding in the hope that the more I work at something the more I’ll get to love it? I don’t the answer and hence the crisis. Only time will tell the answer to this confusion.
Never Forget. An Ending.
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