Homage to Ansel Adams

As I pointed out a few posts back, April marked the 25th anniversary of the death of Ansel Adams, my favourite photographer. Today's walk was in his honour. Below: the Jeziorki wetlands, taken from the ul. Dumki side.

Whenever asked which camera he used, Adams would always reply, "the biggest I can carry." He tended to use the 10"x8" view camera, always on a tripod. The negative, some 60 times larger in surface area than a 35mm negative, yielded results of the highest possible quality.

Above: Silver birches on ul. Trombity. To ensure the pictures were in as sharp focus as possible, Adams would opt for fine-grain, low-sensitivity film, long exposures and small apertures. Which is what I aimed to do today. All these pictures were taken with the camera on my sturdy wooden tripod, exposures from 1/5th to 1/20th second at f22 to f25. ISO on the Nikon D80 only goes down to 100.

Above: Narrow potato field alongside ul. Nawłocka. I wonder what Ansel Adams would have made of digital photography; whether he would have adapted to it or stayed true to large format film. And if he'd made the jump - when. Would he have been satisfied with 10 megapixels?

Above: view from ul. Nawłocka looking towards ul. Trombity. Adams was a perfectionist. It's much easier perfecting images digitally than chemically!

The Nikon D80 offers the option of shooting in B&W. Why would anyone wish to do that? Well, one thing it can do is in-camera filtering. I had this set to 'red', which darkens blue skies and makes red objects (such as the poppies in the foreground) lighter.

Some anniversaries missed

Twenty-five years ago last week (well almost, on 19 May actually) died Sir John Betjeman, Poet Laureate, and my own favourite poet. His death followed on within weeks of the deaths of Ansel Adams (22 April 1984), my favourite photographer, and Count Basie (on 26 April 1984), one of my favourite musicians (to this day), and a great influence in shaping my musical preferences.

I was introduced to Betjeman's poetry at school; we covered a book called Ten Twentieth Century Poets for 'O'-Level English, back in the early 1970s. Upper Lambourne was the first poem of his I read, and it resonated immediately, as did all his works, evocations of the Edwardian England where he was born. Fragments of his television poem Metro-land has been often quoted on this blog, it inspired me to make many journeys into rural Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire as a youth. There's much spirit of place about his work, something that continues to be very important to me.

Count Basie's music I first heard at university. As Cultural Affairs Officer at Warwick I staged the university's first ever May Ball in 1980, which had a VE-Day theme. I booked the Ray Shields Orchestra, an excellent big band playing Glenn Miller dance tunes. Ray Shields also dipped into the Count Basie songbook for a number of tracks from the Atomic Mr Basie album, which I bought on music cassette and played to death over the years. It's currently Moni's Favourite Album of All Time Ever, as well serving for me as a gateway into the world of jazz.

Ansel Adams' black and white images of the American West had long had a powerful appeal on me, inspiring me to install a darkroom in my house in Perivale. My photography then was also predominantly landscape (as it is to this day); like Adams, I'm essentially seeking to capture the emotional effect a scene has upon my consciousness. My technical appreciation of photography comes from reading Adams' trilogy of technical books, The Camera, The Negative and The Print. I wonder what Adams would have made of digital photography.

This time last year:
Twilight in the garden

This time two years ago:
Marian shrines in our neighbourhood
Garden sprinklers in the spring heat
Late May reflections

Dawn patrol

We woke at 04:30 and set off down ul. Trombity towards the marshes at the end of the road. Sunrise was at 04:57; the first pic was taken quarter of an hour earlier, homage to Ansel Adams' Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.

Wearing Wellington boots we intended to wade through the shallower marshes towards where the black-headed gulls live. Before we got to the end of the road, we watched the sun rise through the trees.

The gulls were already up and settled in their habitat (below). We could hear the distinctive call of bullfrogs - like someone blowing over the top of an empty jug. I've yet to see a bullfrog. The gulls were far noisier. They did not take kindly to having their territory invaded; they were up in the air wheeling around, squawking loudly and protesting my presence. The picture below shows how many black-headed gulls live in this area; I counted around 80 individuals in this shot (taken at the equivalent of 50mm focal length).

As the gulls wheeled around me, one particular individual seemed intent on dive-bombing me while issuing a distinctive squawk. I followed this one (to the right of the pic below) with the lens; again and again he tried spooking me into turning away. Note the white leading edges of the gulls' wings, a distinguishing feature. After I'd got my shots, I wandered back towards ul. Dumki. Three gulls followed me, as if they were escorting me off the premises. Meanwhile, a solitary bittern continued making his bottle-blowing noise.