Beach life

We are blessed in this part of the Ireland - lots and lots of beautiful sandy beaches all around.  In the summertime - as I have complained about before (Ed: here we go again) - we get visitors...car-loads of them.   The visitors come partly because of the beaches and while I'm sure the local traders are happy about that, I'm not.  I like beaches to myself - or almost - and thankfully for about 9 months of the year things are just dandy that way.  Unfortunately we're coming into the 3 months of the year when things get rather busier.  Roll on September, eh?!

These shots were taken a while back at the White Rocks, just outside Portrush.  This post should have been titled Beach - Still Life, but I thought that was way too poncy for a title.  Anyway, here's a rock for you:

A rock

Almost a 3D look to this one, or is it 2D - or maybe it looks like it's just floating.  Anyway, the rock was looking all lovely and weathered and everything, half-submerged in the sand as it was.  It came up rather well on film I think.

Sand, rocks and some grass

The rocks in this last shot are more typical of the ones you get around the White Rocks area - and I rather liked the wee bit of grass growing beside them. Quite dark sand on this part of the beach - there is a lot of basalt around, as well as limestone.

I tried to go out to the White Rocks again recently, but was thwarted not by the weather as such, more by the effects of coastal erosion.  Seems the storms we'd had over the winter had washed away a lot of sand and access to the beach was nigh impossible - well, completely impossible for the likes of me who are a bit unsteady on their feet.  I did see a couple of pheasants though - a male and a female - and got very close to them, so it wasn't a completely wasted journey.  No snaps of the birds, though - I was in the car at the time.  Besides, capturing birds with a 35mm lens is pretty impossible - unless they are half-tame like the robin that my mother feeds cheese to every day:

Mother's cheese-eating robin

Toning

When I was last in the darkroom, which seems like an awfully long time ago now (before Christmas) I was having a lot of fun experimenting with toning - Selenium toning, to be precise.  This process not only makes the image more permanent on the paper, but also increases the blacks (Dmax) as well as giving the print a warmish, almost purple tone and removing the greenish cast that some papers have.  Some papers react better than others - for example, the standard Ilford Multigrade IV doesn't tone well at all, whereas Ilford's Fibre Warmtone paper does.  I've not tried the latter - although I did experiment with Fotospeed's RCVC paper and that did tone very nicely.   As I'm writing this I realise I'm dying to get back to having some fun in the darkroom again...

Here's a shot I snapped the other day.  It's the view I get when I step outside my front door, of the old sheds that in my grandfather's day were part of his butchery business.  The largest barn was where the animals were slaughtered and a very rusty old winch still lives there.  Nowadays, at this time of year, the swallows have a natural perching place on the wire rope.

Our yard, as it looks in Spring

When I scanned this neg I though how nice that would look printed, and either toned or even printed on lith.  Now as you know I'm not a big fan of Photoshop but it is necessary when you are working with digital images, even scans from negs.  So after a little poking around I came found PS's duotone effects.  This was a 'sepia duotone' effect.

Sepia duotone effect

It certainly warms up the original image, although one thing I find with most of the preset tones is that they are much too strong.  These are of course only the presets and with a little more time it might be worth learning how to configure things myself.  I'm just not sure I want to invest that much time and effort into Photoshop though.

There are of course many different toning chemicals available to the traditional darkroom printer, as well as Lith Printing, which I am really looking forward to experimenting with.  This is kind of how I would expect a Lith print to look, again using a preset PS duotone.

Lith effect

I think this photograph works really well in B&W and it might be one of the first I print if I ever get back in the darkroom.  The sink is all but finished - but I'm giving it shed-loads of gloss paint before I apply some yacht varnish, so it's another couple of weeks away from completion.  But it's getting there - honest.  

Nothing remarkable

I've been looking around the old Internet as of late - mostly photography-based blogs and stuff like that.  There are a lot of people doing very interesting stuff which makes my efforts seem very crude and ordinary by comparison.  Still, one has to start somewhere, right?

Someone I think is very good is Andrea Ingram and her blog is BoxesBellows.  Andrea lives on the Isle of Lewis, just off the west coast of Scotland and takes some very good snaps.  From time to time she goes all creative-like and comes up with something very special (usually in the darkroom) but a lot of the time she simply snaps away at anything and everything on Lewis.   The more I visit her site (and I do a lot) the more I really like her work.  At first glance it can look very mundane (sorry Andrea!) - yet another photograph of nothing much in particular, but then I look a bit more closely, then step back from it and it begins to grow on me.  A lot.  Click on the link and see for yourself.

So here's a very ordinary snap for you.

Nothing remarkable

I captured this little scene the other day with the new camera.  That's the River Bann by the way, and just out of shot is the village of Castlerock.

I quite like this - it kind of is what it is, if you get my drift.  What do you think?

Andrew Cairns

My original intention with this blog was to mix my interest in photography with some local history - and from time to time throw in some genealogy stuff (remember my first post?).  Of late I've been more into photography than anything else (as you know, right?).  Posts on the genealogy front have been a bit sparse, apart from a couple of old shots of mother, so let's put that right.

My mother's dad - my Grandpa - had a brother, Andy Cairns.  Unfortunately I don't have any photographs of him at all, which is a shame.  Andy joined the Royal Irish Rifles in 1916, lying about his age (he was 16 at the time, said he was 19) and was discharged due to a dodgy ankle in 1918 (Army records state that he hurt his ankle falling out of a tree some years before enlisting - my guess is he was probably after apples).  His reasons for joining the army we will never know, but bearing in mind this was 1916 in Ireland, my guess is that 3 decent meals a day had something to do with it.  His dodgy ankle notwithstanding, on his Army discharge papers it states that 'He answered his country's call' and with his £20 discharge money he went to Philadelphia.  There he met and married a certain Selina M Henry, whom my mother was named after.   We all thought Selina Henry was American, but after a bit of digging around it transpired she too originated from Northern Ireland.

Selina Henry

My grandpa's brother and his new wife Selina had a child, Andrew, who was born in 1925 in Philadelphia.  Tragically Selina died when Andrew was just 5 years old, and his father brought him back to grow up in here in Ireland - my mother can remember him being around when she was young.  Young Andrew joined up with the US Army on Christmas Eve of 1943, when he had just turned 18 - a good looking young lad he was to, as you can see:

Andrew Cairns, US Soldier

On this photograph he has written 'With Love to Aunt Marion' - Marion would have been my grandmother, also known as Minnie (or just Grandma to me).  Here is Andy in the prime of his life...

Somewhere in Europe during WWII

Andrew survived the war and returned to Philadelphia, enrolling in college to study photography (!), but was killed in a car crash in 1950, when he was 25.   Sad not just for the loss of his life, but for the fact that his partner Dorothy was at the time pregnant with their daughter, who was born never knowing her father.  Times must have been very hard for them, for Dorothy applied for an State pension, based on Andrew's war service.  This application was rejected by the State of Pennsylvania on the grounds that Andrew had enlisted from Northern Ireland (even though he had been born in Pennsylvania and was living there at the time of his death).

And that, we thought, was that.  Andrew's father had lost contact with the family after WWII, his partner Dorothy wrote for a while but as the older generation in Ireland died out the links were lost.

It is truly amazing what you can find on the Internet these days, with a little perseverance.  There is a website called FindAGrave.com and people from all over the world upload photographs of headstones to it.  Some people spend their days wandering around graveyards, taking photographs of headstones that look interesting to them.  Through this website I stumbled upon Andrew's headstone in Greenmount Veteran's Cemetery, Philadelphia:

Headstone with Andrew Cairns, his mother and her parents, Philadelphia

Alongside Andrew we see his mother's name (Selina M Cairns) and her parents, Robert and Elizabeth Henry, originally from Belfast.  This was an amazing (and extremely lucky) find and my mother was quite emotional when I showed it to her.  Both mother and son died very young - Selina when she was 24 and her son Andrew when he was 25.  My mother got a lot of comfort knowing that Andrew's resting place was beside his mum.

I should perhaps add that through this connection on my family tree (on Ancestry.com) I have met a very lovely person from the West Coast of America who is descended from the Henry line.  We have corresponded very frequently - and it turns out there are lots of Selinas in her family tree.  The 'original' Selina (i.e., the oldest one we can trace) was Selina McCaughey/McCaghey, born in Co Antrim in 1829, died 1939 in Bangor, Northern Ireland.  Sometimes it seems like a very small world.

Inspiration

Sometimes inspiration is hard to come by.  There is more than one way to approach your photography of course.  One way is to plan a shoot, reconnoiter the location beforehand, know where you are going to stand, what camera/lens/film combination to use, what time of day/weather conditions you want and so on.  That's what the Michael Kenna's of the world do.  The other way is simply to go out and about without a clear vision and simply see what presents itself to you.  I'm mostly in the latter camp these days.  I'm getting better at always carrying a camera and the more I do, the more I'm convinced that there is always something to photograph - even on days when inspiration appears rather thin on the ground.

I wrote yesterday a little about the idea of photographing the same place again and again and this is something I can see myself doing more of.  Yes you can go visit somewhere new and get great enjoyment from that, but there is a real challenge in finding new ways to photograph a familiar place. Perhaps partly the reason for thinking like this is that my lack of mobility means I'm less inclined to jump in the car and drive long (or even short) distances these days.   But maybe also the familiarity you have with a place gives you an advantage - perhaps you are more able to see beyond the obvious.

The other day, when the Nikon arrived, I loaded it up with film and just walked out around the house, ready to photograph anything just to test the camera.  Now I'm not saying any of the resulting snaps are masterpieces or anything, but I was mildly happy with them, given that I practically know every leaf and tree in the garden.  One of my favourite quotes is by Gerry Winogrand, who said something along the lines of 'I photograph something to see how it looks when photographed' - the fact is that the world does look different in print (or in scan, as we have here).

It's a plant

The next one here really needs a wee birdy sitting on the post, but none was available at the time...

Where's the birdy?

Interesting depth of field in this one...taken with the lens wide open of course, at f/2.8.  The post is sharp and although the wire in front of it is reasonably sharp too, behind the post the sharpness falls away very quickly.  I must take that shot again, perhaps with the focus point slightly behind the post.  This particular lens (180mm) clearly has an 'interesting' character to it and I think I'm going to enjoy using it.

A project

A place I know well is Portstewart Strand.  A 2-mile long stretch of sand between Portstewart and the mouth of the River Bann near Castlerock.  I got into the beach a few years ago when Missy was going to the local primary school.  After dropping her off I would take the Dog-Hound-Thing to the beach, where he would chase after the ball for a while.  Although Missy goes to Coleraine High School now I still like the beach for a morning stroll - good soul food it is!  I did try a few other venues when Missy moved schools, but with my mobility issues sometimes I didn't feel very safe, particularly since I'm usually carrying a camera.  So most days I go the extra mile or so and head back down to the beach in the mornings.  The D-H-T still likes to chase the ball, though he's getting older now (10 this year) so these days is content with carrying the ball more than chasing it.

I'm considering having a photographic 'project' this year and that project may well be 'Portstewart Strand'.  I have in mind a sort of '12 months of the year' thingmy.  I'm on the beach every week of the year - although I tend to go less frequently in the summer months since it does get very busy.  In the winter time I'm there every week no matter what.  It can be quite cold (understatement of the year, that) but to my mind much preferable, since there are only the regulars on the beach - mostly dog-walkers like myself  You do need the right gear, of course.

Here's a few shots with the new Nikon from a day or two ago. This particular day the wind was really very cold and so I headed into the sand dunes, which tend to be a little more sheltered.

Towards Castlerock from the sand dunes

Lovely grainy sky in this, methinks.  The old FP4+ in DD-X, as usual.  I must get round to trying some new film/developer combinations.  There are so many around and variety. as they say, is the spice of life.  However, I like the quality DD-X gives me and I seem to be able to get consistently good results (or results I like, anyway) from it.  Since I haven't been into film again for very long (less than a year) it's good to stick to one combination while honing your processing technique.  So I can see myself sticking to FP4+ and DD-X for another while and then maybe being a little more adventurous.

The beach to themselves...well, almost

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of this project.   The challenge is to seek out different views of the same place - but since there's a couple of miles to work with that shouldn't be too difficult.  The good thing is this being Ireland you can take the car onto the beach, so on the days when the legs aren't working too well (that would be most days these days unfortunately) then I can drive fairly close to where I want to be.

Depth of field

For the last few years the online photographic world has been obsessed with bokeh.  Now I've mentioned this in a previous post not so long ago, but I came across a couple of old slides from The Archive which prompted this short discussion on the nature of bokeh.  Man how I hate that word.  It means how an out-of-focus background looks.  Not how much the background is out of focus - which is a consequence of how far the subject is away from the camera and the aperture used - but rather how the out-of-focus areas are rendered.  And that, my friends, is lens-specific.  Some lenses give it a smooth, creamy look, others are harsher in how they behave.

If the lens is fully stopped down, as it might be for a sunny day and a fast film - say at f/16, then there isn't going to be much depth of field to talk about - most everything that's in the frame will be in focus.  On the other hand, with the lens fully open, at maybe f/2 or f/2.8 there is going to be a lot of the frame out of focus.  The faster the lens, the shallower the depth of field will be at full aperture.  With luck your subject will be in focus (assuming that's what you want  and that's not always the case - right?!) and the background out-of-focus.

Because different lenses behave differently, lots of photographer-type dudes and dudettes just love to try different lenses and see how they render those out-of-focus areas.   In this post you can see some interesting bokeh in black and white.  Here area couple of colour shots for your interest - both with shallow depth of field and a blurry backgrounds:

Interesting background rendering

Just look at all that swirly stuff in the background!  Now the question is, do you like it, or not?

What about this one?

Cabbage white butterfly on thistle

I'm not sure 'bokeh' can either be judged as 'good' or 'bad' - just different.  Some might say if the background detracts too much from the subject - with either good bokeh or bad bokeh - then that's a Bad Thing.  I think that the photograph is what it is - in the above snaps there is a definite subject (in focus) and a background (out-of-focus) and the viewer is aware of both elements of the photograph.  If the photographer wanted, he/she could have cropped in real close to remove any background - so it's there for a reason.

I like the way different lenses render scenes differently, in a similar way to how different film/developer combinations behave.  It all adds to the richness of photography.