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April 7, 2012
6

Reception and Presentation

This was always going to be an evening of exultation and intrepidation I had every confidence in Kitty Dough (who designed the invite), Larry Warner the exhibits curator and all of the staff and volunteers at the Aquarium; I just had to make sure I didn’t mess it up!
I had made a practice run of the presentation a few days earlier. This was taking place in the perfect location. I was to share the room with a 285,000-gallon shark tank ”Graveyard of the Atlantic” that’s 35-foot long and 14 feet tall. As well as the sharks, and numerous smaller fish which sometimes become dinner, the  tank holds a 1/3 scale replica of the USS Monitor, which lies just off Cape Hatteras at a depth of 210 feet. The room is essentially lit by the dull blue glow coming through the 5.5 inch thick acrylic window of the tank. The projector screen seemed massive, like a small cinema, and combined with the powerful projector made my images look awesome. I spent a lot of time getting used to a wireless mouse because I was using Adobe bridge for the slideshow which enabled me to use big files and zoom right into the images.

Meeting and greeting was at 6pm around the exhibition cabinets. This helped to guage the interest level and questions my audience might have; and calmed my nerves. There was a great spread of Anglo/American food available that had either been bought from the next State that likes to call itself a commonwealth, or homemade like the scones.

7pm was the presentation. Kitty introduced me to the audience numbering 50+. The talk was far more than my photographs, although there was a fascination in the way I construct my images from as many as 100 seperately taken frames. This exhibition, to me, had always been about introducing Manteo to it’s twin town through it’s surrounding coast, river and, originally shared, history. Using old maps, the North Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty map and Richard Larn’s shipwreck map, I took my audience on a journey from Marsland Mouth on the border with Cornwall, along the Hartland coast, across Bideford Bay, up the Torridge into Bideford, around Saunton Sands to Baggy Point, along to Briery Cave at Watermouth, into Combe Martin and it’s caves which were mines; and finished off on the Exmoor coast at Wringapeak, near to the Somerset border.

It was supposed to be a half hour presentation and in practice it had been 45 minutes to I had vowed to cut it shorter. But, when I get excited I can’t stop; so it was more like 50 minutes, plus questions which were many. Nobody seemed to mind the length except perhaps my ever supportive wife Sadie who had been gesticulating ‘cut it’ and ‘wind it up’ but I hadn’t noticed! Sadie is also credited for all of these photographs.

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April 6, 2012

The Exhibit

18 months ago I was invited to exhibit at the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island. It’s been a massive 2 weeks for me, working up to ‘Great Britain’s Graveyard of the Atlantic’ which opened on Thursday 5th April. And it’s not been plain sailing at all. The exhibition prints were made within the State and this foresight for possible problems paid off. We arrived in Manteo, the Dare County seat and home of the Aquarium late on 22nd March and the very next day opened the package containing the exhibition mounted giclee prints.

After very little time I started to notice strange marks in the highlight areas of the prints and it was all too obvious that the prints, packaged face-to-face, had migrated some of their rich dark areas onto the light areas of their facing images. There were other odd finger shaped smears, odd in that the process of manufacturing the prints has no human contact until they are packaged. Charles from Mastercolor of Greenboro had been very helpful throughout the process of getting the work made since the end of February, and he was as devastated as I with the result which he hadn’t seen. Sample prints on different paper stock where UPS’d straight away and arrived on Wednesday 28th. The face-to-face packaging had been an issue but confounded by the saturated black pigment ink that didn’t want to stay put. I chose a giclee lustre similar to the prints I’d ordered from Germany for Silver Bonsai Gallery, on the Island, to stock. The finished mounted prints arrived on Friday 30th and Sadie, Kitty Dough (exhibitions co-ordinator at the Aquarium) and I hung the show that afternoon. I should perhaps say created the installation as that is a better description of the artwork.

Me and Kitty Dough, who has been a star throughout the past 18 months

I opened this post with the 18 months of lead time; organisation was crucial with this show. Normally I might turn up to a gallery with a car full of framed images and make design decisions with the work in the space, returning some images to the car and making an exhibition of the work that works best together in the space. But there was no space for those kind of decisions here. A working scale 2D model of the display cabinets has been on my computer for months and has changed many times until the final images, sizes etc where fixed. Even here I decided in the end to have sixteen 16×20’s and two 16×16’s so that a little interchangability was still possible – and it was needed!

The Aquarium staff, who have been encouraging and supportive throughout, were thrilled with the exhibition prints, and amazed at how quickly they were installed using 3,4 and 6 inch space bars cut from some old foamex. But the icing on the cake, that the Aquarium staff had never seen, were the 200 postcard sized ‘snapshots’ that I’d had printed as supporting work for the exhibition. These where carefully placed to look like a random collage of images taken on the North Devon coast over the last 7 years.

The first international exhibition in the North Carolina Aquarium was installed and open to the public.

March 14, 2012

Supplementary Photographs

This blog has been put aside a little over the last month with a greater concentration on my Facebook posts and with all of the work I seem to have this year including the build-up to my major American exhibition. One of the good suggestions from North Devon’s AONB team, which is funding the exhibition prints through their Sustainable Development Grant, was to include more than just caves. This was a great advice and I’ve been inspired through earlier posts to put my pictures of North Devon’s caves in context through other more general landscapes of the coast here, all be it in extreme weather.

Another addition to the show will be almost 200 snapshot sized photographs that I’ve taken on the ND coast from over the last 6 years. This blog is a set of rusty images from the MS Johanna and other related photographs. I was interested to see how a large metal ship can slowly disappear and start to blend in with the rocks with their natural iron content and with yellows and browns of the wider landscape. If only plastic did the same!
The exhibition in the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island will be in two large glass cabinets, 8ft wide by 5ft high and 15inches deep. The supplementary images, along with some tourist postcards will line the bottom shelf of each cabinet and give a real context in terms of place for my fine-art images hung above. This will emphasize how two coasts with the name ‘Graveyard of the Atlantic’ are so different; one a sandy beach the other a rocky shore.
There are more supplementary images here: The Iron Coast
January 31, 2012
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MS Johanna

My working practice seems to have the construction of an image as an inherent part of it. This picture of the MS Johanna in a gale at high tide wrecked on Hartland Point was constructed from 4 photographic frames taken over a 10 minute period. I made 54 separate RAW images from a fixed camera viewpoint between 09.31 and 09.41 on December 16th 2011. The finished print reflects my memory of the place and of the experience of being there at that time.
The key reason for needing to combine frames for this image has to do with the limitations of the camera. Our eyes instantly focus as we observe a scene so that the foreground, middle and background appear all in focus to us. To achieve this depth of vision I am forced to use a very small aperture in the camera lens and compensate this with a slow shutter speed. But my memory of these terrific waves breaking on the quay is of that frozen moment when they reach their zenith before they come crashing down again. To capture that moment I needed to use a fast shutter speed and compromise that with a wide aperture which made the background, and the all important shipwreck, out-of-focus.
Other reasons for combining frames in this image was the sky which I was able to make more like I saw it by exposing it for less time and making it darker. The aperture in our eyes alters automatically; as we look at something lighter it closes and as I have found in many dark caves the aperture opens and in time the rods in the eye take over from the cones. I also chose a frame where the MS Johanna was both visible and light enough to make out against the background cliffs.
It had always been my intention in the planning of this photograph that it should be a combination of the wind, storm, high tide, waves, the wreck of the Johanna and to include a stretch of the Hartland cliffs as a setting. Although I shot 126 photographs in total within a ? hour period I had done this with the goal of this one image in mind.
As a comparison I?ve included a picture made last summer of the same shipwreck.
January 30, 2012

Heavy Weather

I?ve been doing a lot of reading about shipwrecks and lifesaving in preparation to my Graveyard of the Atlantic exhibition this April. This title has become an inspiration to me. The North Devon coast has approximately 10 shipwrecks every mile but most of them don?t stay around for too long. One of the oldest still visible is the Sally of Bristol wrecked in 1769 on the beach at Northam Burrows. But you don?t have to photograph a shipwreck to evoke the Graveyard of the Atlantic. So I?ve been out in all weathers (except sunny and fine) trying to show why this coast got its name.
The photograph above was made in the early morning light, high tide in a gale at Hartland Point in December. The MS Johanna, which was wrecked here 400 metres from the lighthouse (which is behind me) can be seen in the far distance. More details about this image can be found on my blog post MS Johanna. This is not the kind of weather you would want to be out at sea and it is easy to imagine how easily a ship could go down especially in the days before modern navigation; once a sail has been torn or a rudder broken you?re totally at the mercy of the sea. 
Heavy Weather, a new set of images to supplement my cave photographs, will be at Schooners Cafe in Appledore from Saturday 11th February.
I have a new series of photographic workshops starting with an Introduction to Digital Photography on Saturday February 11th. The complete list is as follows:
Photographic Workshops in Devon, Winter 2012
Introduction to digital photography 10am – 5pm – ?50

A practical days workshop learning to gain control over your camera, shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, flash etc, setting it up for optimum quality under any given lighting, and making better pictures through composition. Numbers limited to a hand-full.

Saturday 11th February in Bideford
Saturday 25th February in Barnstaple
Thursday 1st March in South Molton
Thursday 8th March in Bideford

Half Day Intro to digital photography 2.00pm – 4.30pm – ?25

A ‘sit around the table’ workshop to get to know your camera better. You’ll learn about shutter speeds, aperture, ISO, flash and setting your camera up for optimum quality.

Wednesday 22nd February in Bideford
Wednesday 14th March in Barnstaple
Painting with Light 6pm – 9.00pm – ?25

An evening workshop celebrating the dark nights of the Winter. You’ll learn how to make ‘long exposure’ photographs using coloured lights, flames, sparklers and hand-held flash.

Wednesday 7th March – Northam Burrows (Westward Ho!)
Photographing your own Artwork 10am – 5pm – ?50

I have a wealth of knowledge and experience of photographing 2D artwork, jewellery and ceramics and I’m willing to pass this on to artists eager to improve their own image making camera skills. Although this workshop is for a small group (max 5) I also offer it on a 1:1 basis for ? a day for the same price.

Wednesday 15th February in Bideford
Introduction to Photoshop 10am ? 5pm – ?50

Opening an image file and adjusting levels, contrast, brightness and colour balance. Rotating, resizing and cropping an image. Placing an image or images into a new file. Using layers and history. Participants will need to be computer literate i.e. use a computer on regular basis and understand the basic controls. Small group (max 4).

Thursday 16th February in Bideford
Intermediate Photoshop 10am ? 5pm – ?50

Using tools, masks and filters to manipulate your image. Tools used in this session are: marquee, move, lasso, magic wand, eraser, paint bucket, eyedropper, hand and zoom. Making a contact sheet and using batch production. Adding type to your image. Participants will need to be computer literate i.e. use a computer on regular basis and understand the basic controls. Small group (max 4).

Thursday 15th March in Bideford

More Workshops in the Summer:

1 day Workshop: Learning to Look – Theory and Practice

10 week Evening Class: Introduction to Digital Photography