A Walk in Pictures: Bolton Abbey

The day starts off unpromisingly, as we are woken at six by that sound of rain. I always find rain peculiar when camping, in that whilst a disincentive to emerge from the tent, this also provides peculiar proof of the success of the pitch, that the tent is waterproof and providing a defiantly simple home against all weather. There is also the less ideal fact that going to the toilet or making the morning cup of tea means getting drenched. By about eleven, it has eased off, and we drive towards Bolton Abbey, parking at the Barden Bridgecar park, where there is no charge; otherwise, parking on the estate leaves you £5.50 out of pocket. In spite of our awareness that the monies will be well-spent on the heritage of the countryside, this seems against the spirit and the art of rambling in nature.

On the other hand, this is a rich safari along well-maintained paths, through rugged and ancient woodland, following the course of the river Wharfe. Within five minutes of setting off, we have spotted our first kingfisher, which taunts us by flickering continually out of sight each time we almost reach his current perch. He is the essence of energy, a vital spark of blue; it is appropriate that kingfishers are the best sign of a healthy river, as something for which motion is such an apparent imperative can only be sustained by easy supplies of food. As if to confirm this observation, a few minutes later a heron pumps sedately overhead.

At a certain point, we turn away from the river and zig-zag our way up the contours of the valley, following the waymarked red route. Whether the red is for the danger of the precipitous drop that accrues to our left, or for the increase in cardiac activity required to climb it, I am not sure. As we move deeper into the woodland, however, the rain's earlier activities seem to have awakened something primeval; the perpetual mist seems to suck smell from the wet leaves and decaying undergrowth, and ferns surround us with their young spiral spines ready to unfurl into leaf over the coming weeks.

If the vegetation seems jurassic, it is apt that our next encounter is with one of the dinosaurs' ancestors. Ahead of us on the path, a rock stirs and lurches into motion; a common toad, unmistakable with his rough and dimpled skin, struggles his way into deeper cover (though not before I have had a chance to record the moment with a picture).

As we continue, we step from the Jurassic to the medieval. There, on the trees, peculiar "green man" masks entice us along, their porcelain eyes leading us, like Hansel, to a house made of sweets.

Or, at least, the ice cream shop. Here we pause momentarily, and I capture ducks skidding their way to the water; seen frozen in time, their landings are peculiar, like elderly gentlemen easing themselves into their seats, legs slightly ahead, wings reaching back to clutch to the air, but nevertheless landing with something of a drop and a lurch.

Crossing over the river at this point, our enticements along the path are no longer green men, but strange, fallen trees, with bronze coins inexplicably embedded in their trunks. Like uncanny growths, or perverted wishing wells, we are not sure whether they are acts of sculpture or vandalism.

Certainly, I am more excited by the discovery of one wholly-natural parasitism: this glorious fungal growth projecting from one mossy bough, the radial fans beneath them made clearly visible from this angle.

A little climb further on, and we reach our target. Seen framed through the trees as below, the abbey is a romanticist's misty, dreamy imagination set in stone, rooks circling the tops, a river beneath the abbey, and all long, long ruined.

What is Art?

There being no Euro 2008 on telly Because I am dedicated student of culture, on Sunday night I went to a debate entitled "What is Art?" which was being run as part of my university's arts festival. The panel comprised a philosopher, two directors of modern art galleries, a theologian, and the director of Resonance FM.

I will not rehearse the debate here, which meandered largely around familiar grounds, but I just wanted to note the way in which the various definitions put forwards in relation to the question might be used to transgress the boundaries between science and art. I jotted down some of the epithets each contributor put forward in answer to the "What is Art?" issue; these included:

• Accident becoming intention: the artist is never quite sure of the destiny of his or her work from the outset, and there is always the sense of the haphazard about art which is then justified as such only after it has been produced
• Reproducing consciousness in others: the artwork acts as a vehicle for the imagination by which the viewer can occupy the perspective with which the artist views a particular aspect of the world
  
• Pleasure: art is that which generates a response that transcends (note the romanticism) or stands beyond further expression or deconstructive analysis
  
• Utility: art can have a public function, either memorialising events to be shared by the community, or by generating a sense of excitement about the potential of a region or city (something the Resonance FM representative completely overlooked when he derided the Angel of the North as worthless kitsch - hardly something that will go down well with the residents of the rejuvenated Newcastle Gateshead, a destination whose numerous cultural sites receive more visitors per capita than London)
• Vision: this one, not surprisingly, was contributed by the theologian, but is probably not too far removed from the ideals of pleasure and reproducing consciousness in others

All of these examples seem fairly mainstream in aesthetic debates, although naturally no one example is capable of containing the full range of what might be, or what has been, considered as art (or, with equal applicability, literature or music). And the one thing missing from the list was ideology: art is whatever a particular culture defines as such because it suits the norms or incarnates the values that the culture wants to perpetuate. Clearly such a view is not one that curators of publically funded galleries can subscribe to. But enough Marxism; I want to focus really on the way in which each argument survives the translation across the disciplinary divide, into the sphere of scientific activity.

If accident becoming intention defines an artwork, does this not also describe Alexander Fleming's petri dishes, left unintentionally on a windowsill but leading to the understood phenomena of antibiotics? If art is the reproduction of consciousness in others, might this not also be the effect of scientific writing, the conventions of which should allow any other scientist to step into the shoes of his predecessor and see the world - albeit within an emotionally neutral framework - as if through his eyes when he conducted the original experiment? Certain scientific writing, such as The Origin of Species, has a clear aesthetic quality, able to generate pleasure in its reader through rhetorical means; but I suspect that the moment when the most dispassionate paper generates new knowledge is not unlike the moment in literature or art when you recognise what you had always known to be true in the world, but never quite so succinctly or elegantly expressed. The ideals of vision and utility pretty much speak for themselves.

I suspect that the most viewed images (artwork?) of the last couple of weeks were not paintings or photographs in a gallery in London, but those astonishing shots captured by the Phoenix lander on Mars, some 35 million miles away. What is so remarkable is the self-consciousness of the shots: here is little Earthbound me, looking at an image taken by a man-made machine, which is looking at itself (or at least its leg), on another world. The pictures are a medium for the mind, vicariously transporting me imaginatively so that I can feel what it must be like to fly (there's transcendence again) beyond Earthly limits, to plant my foot on another world. I am not sure that cognitively, my response to these images is far removed from that which I might have standing before a Picasso. Science might in and of itself possess aesthetic qualities, as a recently-published book entitled The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments implies.

On the other hand, bringing art and science into uncanny proximity encourages me also to note a contrast that might provide my own epithet to use in response to the question "What is Art?" With apologies to Heidegger, I would suggest there is between art and science a general difference between being and becoming.

As I have suggested above, science has many of the same agendas as art, though the methods and tones in which the enterprise is couched seem superficially different. However, the test of success for the process of science is a test of ends, of being; the test of a successful piece of art is one of bringing that art into being, of means floating independently of specific ends. There is no such thing as art, but art describes the process of creating the artefacts which might be given such a name.

The ideal scientific experiment will be replicable numerous times, with no unexpected deviation from the predictions of the model or formula. The model or formula may initially be revealed by accidents like Fleming's mould, but once that process has become known science aims to remove any possibility of the accident happening again; the test of scientific knowlege is its predictive quality: that the same conditions will produce the same state in comparable situations.

Art, however, is a process rather than an end, the becoming about of that entity that might (or might not) be named art once the process is complete. One of the panelists (the one for whom art was defined by its pleasure-giving capacity) noted that he played the accordion very badly, but that he enjoyed the experience of making music, even if his listeners found his results unbearable. Musical notation might be said to be like scientific writing, in the sense that it is a formal recording system that enables anyone able to read the system to reproduce the original product. Except, of course, the whole point of musicality is that there is no such direct correspondance. The accordion player may not be able to reproduce the notes with perfect fidelity, but this does not necessarily mean that the process of reproduction is - for him - unmusical; it is a process of becoming, of discovering a connection between the self and the music that is not definitively posited or founded in the score. One might make a similar point about literary language, in which the creative word floats freely of their author (even if, contra Barthes, the author is not quite dead), such that freshly creative interpretations of the same material are possible, even encouraged.

For the scientist, however, the failure to reach the anticipated end when he conducts an experiment signifies either a failure in the hypothesis, or in the methodology he is repeating, or that conditions not present in that original moment have had an unanticipated effect; such "errors" can, of course, turn out to be very purposive in leading science down new paths. However, the fact that if the second experiment fails to produce the same state of being as the first this must lead to further experiments means that the reproduction is not self-contained, containing within itself its end or purpose.

By contrast, for the accordian player, the fact that he fails to reproduce the notes with the fidelity intended by the composer is essentially irrelevant to his or her personal enjoyment and investment in the process (or becoming) of reaching that end (or being); he or she may want to reproduce the notes more accurately in the future, but the process itself will remain satisfying because it is one of new creation personal to him. Indeed, if the player reaches professional standard, the test of his ability will not be whether he can reproduce the musical consciousness of the composer by translating the score through the medium of the instrument, but the degree to which he or she is also mediating, that is to say, translating and interpreting the music in a newly productive deviation from the original intention.

So what implication does this contrast between being and becoming of science and art have on the question "What is Art?" Essentially, I think, it is to signify that the question what is art can not be grounded in any intrinsic quality of the artefact; nor can it be left ungrounded by talking romantically about metaphysical pleasure that cannot be referred to the mind of the creator or receiver; nor is the idea of utility particularly workable, given that econometrics cannot predict the social value of Guernica as opposed to the latest Damien Hurst installation.

Rather than a top-down approach to the question, by which the art is produced and we then must try to categorise it, the contrast between being and becoming operates in a bottom-up direction: art is whatever is produced with a sense of artistry, or art is the process of generating the thing that has the potential to be named "art." Though a tautology - or hermeneutic circle - it is a feasible definition because it refocuses attention not on the receivers of art but on the producers. The links that bind a viewer to art (or whatever is classified as "art") are potentially unrelated to any quality inherent in the artefact, perhaps intruding through ideology or preconceptions of what good art must do; on my model, there is a very definite connection between the artist and the production (art does not just spring from thin air), and any response to "What is Art?" must attend to the materialities (whether the cognitive processes in the mind of the artist, the nature of the medium being worked) that relate the artist to his creation, not those that flicker between a creation and a viewer.

Additionally, in spite of my contrast between science and art, this does not exclude the former from the potential of the latter: the child's process of discovering that a prism can split light into the rainbow may be treated as the artistic one of the child becoming conscious of a world otherwise hidden; likewise the process of the scientist discovery when something does not happen as expected might also be classed as art under my definition, no matter what the formal properties of the final result. If Fleming's experience of the growth of mould catalysed, for him, a comparable sense of personal growth, the process was artistic, regardless of the aesthetic qualities inherent (or not) in the green goo at the end of that becoming. On the other hand, not all science may be experienced with this cognitive way in the person conducting the experiment, whereas all art, or all science that is art, must be.

Disliking Leica

Anyone who has a hobby or interest involving technology has to have a pinnacle product, the example that is simply the best that it can possibly be so that once you own one, you can only ever look down upon the rest of your field. If you are a motoring enthusiast, for example, then it is pretty hard to beat a Rolls Royce Phantom or a Bugatti Veyron. Or if you are into home audio it is probably the Kharma range of hand crafted speakers. For photographers, there is only really one flag at the top, and it bears the name Hasselblad.

But even if you are a professional, the whole point about these products is that you cannot simply buy one. It is not just the cost, but the exclusivity: when there are only 300 Veyrons in the world, you cannot just pop down to your local showroom and slap a cheque on the table. Further, these things matter not so much for what they are, but for what they represent about your psychological investment in your hobby, and there is a sense in which owning one without being able fully to appreciate it devalues both your field and the product itself. So there is no point in using a Kharma speaker if you do not have ears attuned and trained to the nuances of the sound in produces. And even if I had the £15, 000 or so to buy the latest Hasselblad H3DII, it would be hard to enjoy using it. I would always be conscious that with my limited photography skills and repertoire of techniques, it would be equivalent to me owning a Veyron but only ever driving it at 30 miles per hour. Great engineering deserves great and appreciative users.

So for most of us ordinary folk who are neither lottery winners, nor experts in our field, we have to lower our ideals to a more realistic level. It may not be possible to own a Kharma speaker, but if you put a Bang and Olufsen in your living room, you will notice the quality immediately, and people will still draw a breath when they see that you have one. You may not get on the waiting list for a Bugatti Veyron, but buy a Ferrari Maranello and you will still turn heads in the street.

And, for we photographers, if the Hasselblad is a niche product there is one legendary brand of cameras that most of us do lust after. This is the camera beloved of the Magnum photographer and its founder, Henri Cartier-Bresson, the camera used to document the human world over the last half century, most notably today used by the great Sebastiao Salgado. This is, of course, the Leica.
There is an air of mystique surrounding the Leica. With its quirky, 1950s looks, it seems to refuse the advance of technology, implying instead that someone back then discovered the alchemical secret of the ideal camera, and hence the Leica has no need to be incessantly developed and upgraded like a Nikon or Canon. As a rangefinder, the Leica has no mirror, and its shutter instead produces a legendary whisper, barely interrupting what Bresson termed the "decisive moment" when the photo is captured. And, unlike a professional SLR, the Leica is small, unobtrusive and subtle, which is why Bresson found it ideal for his candid photography.

Whilst for under £100 you can today pick up a used Nikon F4 body, among the best 35mm SLRs ever produced, a Leica M4 body, often viewed as the best of Leica's legendary M series cameras, will set you back £1000. It is a price tag just exceptional enough to retain its air of exclusivity, but tantalisingly within reach to make it a realistic dream.

So it is with great sadness that I read that the Leica brand has not withstood the transition to digital. Michael Kamber is a top photojournalist, who used a Leica M8 - the first digital incarnation of the M series - in his recent assignment in Iraq. This was the sort of assignment to make any photojournalist reach almost automatically for a Leica. War reporting demands a camera able to take reliable shots almost instantaneously, to be unobtrusive in socially sensitive situations, and to be rugged enough to withstand harsh environmental conditions. In spite of the admirable record of the 35mm Leicas over the past half century, however, the latest digital Leica appears to have failed in all three respects, according to Kamber's report: the camera at times failed to start; its memory card slot is difficult to access, making it hard to swap cards when a soldier is threatening to search the photographer; non-recessed or flimsy buttons kept switching as the bumped against his flak jacket; it had severe issues with exposure and white balance; it performed poorly in low light.

Although damning, the review appeared quite objective, as the sample photographs (and their comparisons with a Canon 1D) showed evident deficits. I am not sure quite how to describe my response to the article. If I say it was as if a religious believer had stopped believing in God, that probably overstresses my sensibility, but there was certainly a sense that the reliable star towards which I was unconsciously aiming my photographic learning curve had suddenly become unstable, veering uncertainly. Although usually one buys a better camera to facilitate one's photography, the inverse was true for the Leica: I knew that when my photography became good enough, I could justify owning one. Of course, the Leica M4 has not suddenly become a bad camera just because its latest variant appears deficient. That, I guess, remains the gold standard (to the Hasellblad's platinum). But it is a gold now tarnished; or, perhaps a better metaphor, it is as if the bloodline of the great cameras, and their great users, has become bastardised.

The Act of Reading

The act of reading has to be one of the most uncomfortable activities devised in the name of leisure. Consider what is asked of the reader, when presented with a book. Here we have a device that dictates its own position with absolute authority. It is to be held not more than fifty centimetres from the face, else it will truculently dissolve its meanings to an inky smudge. The arms must therefore lock themselves at right angles to the body, neither moving forwards nor wavering, lest the print give up its contract with the eyes that are desperately trained on a sliver of word at a time.

Of course, one can rest the book at a table, or upon a desk, in which case all manner of props come into play, all with the sole purpose of keeping this object static. For it will insist on moving. Should you dare turn your back for an instant, pages will spontaneously leaf themselves backwards. Thus are pens, scraps of paper, food, tissues all recruited to mark the spot, such that the book over time becomes marked with an indelible debris of tomato ketchup, tea stains, snot. If you do keep attention for long enough, though, the book will become restless, transferring its weight from its right half to its left, necessitating subtle shifts in whatever tower - usually constructed from other books - you had devised to prop it at a forty-five degree angle.

Worst, though, is the trial of reading in bed. One's vision of the bedtime reader is the hairnetted housewife, herself propped by mounds of downy pillows, her dog-eared romantic novel supported by a mound of goose-feather duvet. Here she half-lies, half-sits, in perfect readerly comfort, until her husband's foot is heard on the bottom stair, from which point a scurry of activity ensures that, by the time he reaches the top, lights are off, she has been asleep for hours, and it is not only the novel's romance that has been tidily closed for this evening. But this warm vision of domestic ritual is impossible to enact in any house other than the snug double-glazed mansions of middle England. Dare to live (as does this reader) in a damp, stone cottage, for example, and night brings with it a tyranny of cold, that taunts the innocent reader with a Catch-22. For in this environment, one must choose whether to sacrifice the body to the mind, or vice versa. If one chooses to snuggle deep into the blankets and preserve the body's warmth, the arms alone can be allowed to protrude, but must do so vertically, holding the book directly above the peeking head; arms thus soon tire, and the book is cast in shadow from the anglepoise above. The alternative is to turn to the side, contorting the spine and using creased elbows as support for the rapidly leadening neck. Finally, one can satisfy the body's craving for warmth, and simply sleep, leaving the book dead on the bedside table. It is wrong to suppose that intellectuals are dedicated to the life of mind rather than body; witness the goose bumps, the back ache, the dry eye, all sustained in refusing dreams in favour of the imagination invested within this small cuboid.

Of course, all these exertions and stresses are worth it, for the worlds to which the good novel will remove the reader can dull the ache of limbs better than any pharmaceutical. The keen reader lives for those moments of total immersion, when he or she forgets that this physical world exists at all. But such moments are made more ideal by the sudden discovery - the sudden happening upon - a reading position of infinite comfort which, having been found, allows the activity to be sustained for hours. Such positions are not signposted; they are not marked in a library or known in the ergonomics of a favourite chair. They are hidden, like secrets, around the everyday house. They come upon one who, having stood to put the kettle on, finds himself standing at the kitchen window with the light cast just perfectly on the page. They are lurking on the bottom step of the stair, when one meant to go and fetch something but has suddenly thought to sit and reopen the book which distracted him from the job in the first place. There is one on that particularly mossy patch in the garden, which, when hit by the warming sun at the right moment of the day, accommodates your posterior like a King's silk cushion.

And there! There is one in Peter Vilhelm's masterful painting "Girl Reading in an Interior." She is leaning against the sharp edge of a hard-looking chair reading an open book, or perhaps a thick letter. It should be uncomfortable, but is instead the picture of comfort happened upon fortuitously. Diagonally from upper left to the floor in the centre, is cast a sunbeam. From right to left, her weight is pressed on a delicate outstretched leg, and she has found herself as featherweight as the cast of incorporeal light that her stance mirrors. She did not mean to be here. She had been en route from the imagined front of the picture - the position of the viewer - through that closed door on the left, through which surely awaited some vital task or arduous chore. But something diverted her, and she found herself suddenly in this unfurnished, anonymous corridor - far removed from her designated "reading" chair in the stately drawing room of this comfortable suburban house - totally exorcised from her body, living completely through those other consciousnesses nested deep in the words on the page.

The Terror of Photography

Poor Phil Smith. There he was at the turn-on of the Ipswich Christmas lights, wielding his swanky SLR camera, when he was hauled out of the crowd by a police officer. Demanding to see his licence - he neither had nor needed one - the police officer then used stop and search powers, ordered all the pictures to be deleted, and instructed Mr. Smith not to take any more. Perhaps if Mr. Smith, like the rest of the crowd, had been using mobile phones or pocket cameras, he would have been all right. The trouble was, he looked a bit too professional for the policeman's liking. He may even have been a terrorist.

In reality, as the BBC's report explains, it was the policeman - a special constable - who was entirely in the wrong, as the Suffolk Police later admitted. Nevertheless, the incident does indicate the problems of photographing in public, in a general era of paranoia about bombs and paedophiles. Take this advertisement from the Metropolitan Police, which warns "Thousands of people take photos every day. What if one of them seems odd? Terrorists use surveillance to help plan attacks, taking photos and making notes about security measures like the location of CCTV cameras. If you see someone doing that, we need to know. Let experienced officers decide what action to take."

Now I have taken thousands of photos, and I am - hands up - a fanatic...when it comes to photography. But if one of my photos seems odd, it is due to my creative limitations rather than my designs as a terrorist. But I can quite easily imagine a situation in which I take a photo of a public building (which will invariably include CCTV cameras) and then - like any good photographer - keep a record of weather conditions, location and the like, for future reference on my photoblog. Observed to be doing this, everyman is a potential Smith, if he happens to wield his camera at the wrong time or to look a bit weird - and don't we all, squatting and peering with one eye shut through the viewfinder?

Recognising the current state of affairs, MP Austin Mitchell, a keen photographer and chair of the Parliamentary All-Party Photography Group, has now tabled a motion in the House of Commons, calling on the Home Office to educate police about what powers they do have to prevent photographers, and to educate photographers about their rights.

The law, as it stands, says that "you are fine unless you're taking picture of something inherently private" (Solicitor Hanna Basha). Photographers have every right to take photographs in public places, although - quite rightly - there are restrictions around certain public and military buildings, and under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, police officers may randomly stop someone without suspicion if the area is considered a likely target for attack (hardly likely in the case of the Ipswich Christmas lights, unless you consider ex-Eastender Letitia Dean a political target). Nonetheless, this (surely?) does not mean that they have the right to order the deletion of images if they are subsequently found to be entirely appropriate. It certainly does not mean that serious photographers need a licence to work in public places. Nor does it mean that they require the written permission of everyone they photograph (imagine the hassle shooting the London Marathon!).

If you are a keen photographer, or just a concerned citizen of a liberal democracy, I urge you to write to your MP asking them to support the motion, or at the very least to sign the petition on the Downing Street website. I have just done this, although living in the countryside the greatest danger to my photography comes from the cow rather than the policeman.

Nikon D50: An Unreview

About a year ago, when I first got my Nikon D50, I promised to post a review once I had experienced using it. Well, so busy was I taking photos, that this has got put off until now. Having said that, I have realised there is not much point me posting a review, since others have got there before me and done so in more detail than I could hope to reproduce. Digital Photography Review have prodded, probed and tested the technical quality of the camera in their typically rigorous way, and the camera came out trumps. Nuff said.

So rather than a review, an unreview. Let's start with the premise that I, like most other people, love this camera. For my uses, it is nearly faultless. But not quite. In my unreview, then, here are the five things I dislike about the D50:

1. There is no LCD backlight. Although the eyepiece information gives shutter speed and aperture, it does not display ISO, metering pattern, or white balance setting. For complex night time shots (such as this one), a backlight on the top LCD display would be of great benefit.
2. Probably my most common error when using the camera is that I forget to change the ISO with each new shoot. If I go from shooting at night at 1600 to shooting during the day (which might require 200), I end up with noisy pictures in the latter. Of course, this is not so much a fault with the camera as with my bad practices: I need to get into the habit of resetting all my manual options every time I finish a shoot. Nevertheless, for an entry-level DSLR a warning in the viewfinder when the ISO is set too high would be a help. Additionally - though not necessarily a function you would expect from a camera in this price bracket - an ISO priority mode would not go amiss.
3. As far as the quality of the photographs goes, when shooting in RAW at low ISOs it's difficult to see how the quality might be improved (given that megapixels matter little when publishing photos primarily to the web, as I do). However, one consistent problem (and one that is by no means unique to the D50 or to Nikon's in general but is common across many cameras) is that the white balance can be off when under tricky lighting conditions, such as incandescent bulbs or scenes with a large bias to one colour. If shooting in RAW, this can usually be rectified; these shots of the cathedral, for example, were way off in the original and required post-processing to match the true colour of the stone. However, the photos I shot at my sister's graduation were more problematic. Here, the people were standing in the sunlight against a shaded green backdrop of shrubs and trees. Because of the green bias in the scene, the skin tones came out wrong and, skin being notoriously difficult to colour in any circumstances, trying to process these to match the tones on the portraits with the colour of the background proved very difficult. Of course I could/should have manually set the white balance for the skin tones beforehand, or used white balance bracketing. Nevertheless, for a casual user, such advanced features might be difficult to use, and you would rely instead on the automatic functions of the camera, which are not quite perfect and foolproof.
4. Another technical issue is not with the camera body, but with the standard kit lens, the 18-55mm DX. For my relatively undiscerning eyes, it is quite difficult to tell how the quality of the image with this lens might be improved: it is sharp at either end of the focal range, provides good colour rendition, and is relatively fast with its 3.5 aperture. The autofocus is relatively responsive. However, the manual focus is very slack. For macro work, if you need to focus manually and are pointing the camera down the focus ring will slide around. It lacks the solid feel of an older, heavier, manual lens, such as the Vivitar 210mm I have borrowed before.
5. Finally, as is the problem with all technological toys, I want more. An ISO that runs from 100 to 3200. Ten or more megapixels. A burst mode that runs to more than 4 shots when in RAW mode.
   

But is this lust enough to prompt me to upgrade? At some point in the future, and if I continue to enjoy my photography, then I would. As second-hand Nikon D80s or D1xs appear on Ebay, the temptation would probably be too great to resist. But I have no idea how much these cost at the moment, because I have not bothered to look. When I was deciding which camera to buy, I spent hours browsing the second-hand market and reading reviews. Apart from questing for a longer lens, I have not visited Ebay since I got the D50. This has to be a good sign.

So how, then, has my photography changed through the use of this camera? Oddly, in spite of all the high-tech wizardry, the feature that has made the greatest difference to my photography is also the most mundane component: the battery. With a battery life that runs to several thousand images, as opposed to less than 100 for my Coolpix 2100, I am able to pick up my camera bag and go without any preparation. I go to town, I take my bag. From my computer desk I see the evening light start to change, I grab the camera and run. Because I do not need to worry about whether the camera is ready or not (and when the battery does start to go the indicator gives you about 100 shots of leeway to get to a power point), I can shoot on impulse. Spontaneous images such as this sunset, or this frost, would not have been possible without having the camera always by my side.

And because of the fact that I now use the camera several times a week, familiarity has bred an understanding of shutter speeds, apertures, sensitivities, focal lengths and so on, understanding that I could not have gained with pleasure from a textbook, or without a great expense of film through a conventional SLR.

Of course, knowledge is worthless without its application, and the camera is the tool that gets done the job of what starts with the artistic, seeing eye. Are there images that I would not have shot before, because I had neither the experience gained from using a digital camera, nor the functions of an SLR as opposed to my previous compacts? Looking at the last 100 images that I have posted to The Pequod, the answer is a qualified "yes". Of these, about a quarter would have been impossible without advanced equipment, reliant as they are on my ability to control aperture or shutter speed. A further 25 or so were quite experimental shots, which I would probably not have expended film on. This leaves about half the photographs reliant not at all on the quality of the camera but the intrinsic quality of the original scene. But as I admitted in a post very early in my photographic career, great cameras play a minute, technical part in great photographs. Great photographers, on the other hand, always make great images. It's just that when the two work together, the results can be spectacular, and I have more confidence that one day I (though not a great photographer) will produce the idealised, unrealisable perfect shot with this camera, than with any other.

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: Prophetic Walter Benjamin

One of my favourite proverbs about the joys and struggles of writing comes from Walter Benjamin: ""In the areas with which we are concerned, insight only occurs as a lightning bolt. The text is the thunder-peal rolling long behind." Inspiration, when everything suddenly becomes clear, is a mere flash in the process of creativity, and everything after is the solemn grumble of getting that one idea onto the page in words (as of the last few weeks, when I seem to be finding writing unaccountably difficult, my intellect certainly seems stuck in this clouded and muggy phrase).

Rereading Benjamin's 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," though, moments of striking illumination abound. Benjamin's opening paragraph meditates on the way Marx's critique of capitalism was a prediction of how it would affect the proletariat, rather than an analysis of its conditions of the day. Coincidentally, read from the twenty-first century, Benjamin's work seems similarly prophetic.

Unlike the hand forgeries which preceded lithography, photography, film and audio recording, Benjamin argues that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries placed art in an era of mechanical reproduction, which necessarily changes our perception of art itself. In particular, Benjamin argues that the "aura" of an original, "the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced" is depreciated and lost in the reproduction. Further, the authentic work of art had its original value in ritual, and what mattered was the fact of its existence (visible to the spirits) not its display before man. In the age of reproduction, however, art is intended precisely for its own exhibition since the place of its birth, such as a temple or sacred site, is irrelevant when it can be copied and placed in any context; thus an alternative cult – the "theology of art" for the sake of art – is born.

Projecting these ideas, I wonder what Benjamin would have made of modern art. Benjamin observes that "From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the "authentic" print makes no sense." I suspect he would have welcomed Warhol's cloned visions of Marilyn Munroe or drinks cans as endorsing the concept that in an age of machine printing and photography, there can be no such image that is original, only versions of each other. On the other hand, consider contemporary installation art, which is criticised precisely for its self-indulgence, its theology of itself. Here, works such as Tracy Emin's "My Bed" alienate the masses because it cannot be reproduced for them to observe anywhere or anywhen other than the one particular gallery in which it is installed at that moment. Denying the possibility of mechanical reproduction, this restores the value of the original, precisely because of its dependence on context to give it credence as "art" rather than an artefact of the everyday. Once created and installed in a gallery, there can only be one unmade bed; once any other bed (the one I get out of each morning) is similarly "unmade," it lends value to the original, rather than (as mechanical reproduction does) depreciating or losing the essence of it. As Benjamin observes, "Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority." To unmake a bed, as we are all capable of doing technically, is to acknowledge the "aura" of Emin's original act of unmaking as making a new artwork; it is this awareness that anything attempting to reproduce the original will actually be fake that underlies the comment that "I could have made that" and the counter-argument, "But you didn't".

In the literary arena, as well, Benjamin's work seems prescient, though because of its understanding of the history preceding its moment. Andrew Keen has just written a book entitled The Cult of the Amateur; its subtitle – How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture – implies the empowering of the "cult of the amateur" as a new result of a recent technology which takes the possibility of reproduction to infinity. Keen argues that the world of Web 2.0, in which content is generated by the user rather than the traditional model of a single authoritative producer, calls into question the reliability of information, preventing true creativity and argument from flourishing. But is the age of the blog, You Tube and Wikipedia really as radical as Keen makes out? Here is Benjamin (remember, this is 1936, not 2006):

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for "letters to the editor." And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. In the Soviet Union work itself is given a voice. To present it verbally is part of a man's ability to perform the work. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.

Not having read Keen's book (and not sure as a blogger that I want to), I am unable to comment on the validity of his polemic. But Benjamin does reminds us that rather than riding the crest of the radical web in our critiques, we ought to go back much further into the origins of mass (re)production in the nineteenth century. I suspect that Keen's complaints will turn out to have many precursors, and in being too wary of the future he may overlook the fact that he is himself the intellectual product of a collaborative past in which singular authorship was a misnomer.

What captivated me most about Benjamin's essay, however, were his comments on that other key interest on mine besides the literary, photography. Benjamin has much of interest to say on film and the relationship between the actor, camera and the viewer in comparison with that between actor, stage and audience in a theatre; he makes a comparable number of incisive remarks about the still image as well, remarks I hesitate to paraphrase, and thus fail to do justice to the wonderful fluidity of Benjamin's argument. Rather, I would quote one paragraph in full:

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones "which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions." Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person's posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

That last sentence articulates what excites me most about photography. Whilst I enjoy taking landscapes and nature shots, there is inherent in these a nostalgia, which I identify after reading Benjamin's essay as the loss of the invisible aura of the scene: the context of the walk on which the landscape was shot, the wind in the hair and the cold flush of a cheek momentarily forgotten as a scene unfolds, the excitement of seeing the rare butterfly crossing the path. In contrast, photographing abstractions, using the lens to travel and make accessible the "unconscious optics" of the world, is creative in a way that is in itself original. The camera both isolates the world in its frame, and flattens two of its dimensions (time, and depth). Whilst they may not be the finest images, I love it when I am able to wield this visual scalpel to excise from the original scene, and to create something new, a work of art in the age of digital reproduction. Here are three such examples:

Can You Learn Photography?

I started out my photoblog in an attempt to learn photography, through getting feedback on my work. I quickly found, though, that as with my own comments on other photoblogs, most comments tend to be complimentary, and along the lines of "good shot." This is always nice, but it is not particularly instructive. Rather than a failure of the collective imagination, this is partially due to the inevitable difficultly of articulating in words what makes a good picture. But, having taken photography seriously for a few years now, I have come to the conclusion that another reason for this lack of direct advice is that in the art there is not much to "teach," let alone to "learn." What I mean by the latter is that, with modern cameras in the digital age, much of what used to be a skill of metering, focusing, developing is now done automatically, or is pretty self-evident simply by getting to know your camera and post-processing software. On the technical side, one comes up to speed pretty fast. Further, on the creative side, most images fairly obviously compose themselves, following the golden rule of thirds much of the time, whilst any bad composition can be improved in post-processing.

That is not to suggest that photographers don't get better. I hope that I have improved, and think it's fantastic that today we have such a lively web-based community in which to interact and exchange ideas and images. But I think that my improvement lies mainly in my being able to see intuitively what will make a good photograph (take my Fountains Abbey shots, for example) rather than my ability to use my tools in any special way. I have learnt more by practice, and less by actively learning.

The point of this lengthy reflection is that my most recent post is, I think, a rare example of a photograph I have learnt to take, through reading books and through looking at other photographers' work. It is an image I could not have captured before, not just because I would not have "seen" the shot in the moving sea, but because I would not have had the technical know-how. Walking around Tynemouth lido at dusk, I realised that I could execute a technically more difficult shot. In this case, I wanted a long exposure that captured the sense of movement in the sea, but being handheld I knew I couldn't really use anything much longer than half a second if it was to look like sea, rather than a blurry mess. So I decided that by using a bit of flash, I could capture the rocks sharply but, by setting the exposure manually, could also keep the sense of dynamism in the sea. I am really pleased with the outcome, not just because of the shot as a finished product, but because I was putting into practice a technique I learned. I am not, and will never be, a naturally gifted, hence great photographer; but it is positive to realise that I can improve through time and with experience.

The Dangers of Photography

There is an organic farm near where we live, and its stars are the herd of highland cows, who look disarmingly cute with their shaggy, orange fringes. However, appearances can be deceptive. Wanting to get a particular shot (to be posted in the photoblog in a couple of days), I invaded their field, whilst they are still about 20 metres distant. Inquisitive, however, they began to wander towards me, and I became aware of the size of their horns, a feature that outweighed my delight in their beauty. As they began to run, I leaped over the fence. Panting, I turned and realised that I had left my camera bag over the other side of the fence, where it was being licked to a soppy black by the rough tongue of this fellow.



Luckily, with a gentle pat on its nose, I was able to apologise for having entered their territory unannounced, and he then backed off and allowed me to retrieve my gear.

Photoblogger

Since I got my Nikon D50, my photography has shot up a gear in terms of quantity, although you can judge for yourself whether it shows any qualitative improvement. Because of this, whereas before I was uploading two or three photos a month, I am now putting on two or three a week.

I found when I switched to using Blogger that I was writing more, being less put off by the need to upload two separate files, and change titles and breadcrumbs and dates and menu lists and so on. So in relation to the Photography section of The Pequod, I have got rid of my old XHTML ways of doing things and switched to using the PHP photoblog script, Photoblogger. After a bit of fiddling around to incorporate my templates and upload my old photographs in the order I wanted, I have decided that it is nothing short of fantastic. Now to add photos I click one button to upload, type a title and description, and I'm done. An RSS feed automatically points to the newest post, so I can register the site on Photoblogs, and I also get a full gallery facility, search options and an automated commenting system (no need to copy and paste from emails).

Nicholas Carr and Yochai Benkler may be arguing over whether bloggers and photographers are going to be paid for producing their content in three years time, but one thing of which I am certain is that talented programmers such as Sylvia Trommer who wrote Photoblogger stand to make a significant amount of money by providing the tools bloggers and photographers need to get their work published with as little technical fuss as possible.

The Grammar of Landscape

Writing in the Guardian Review this weekend, Richard Mabey uses a phrase that struck me as quite apt. Recollecting how he learnt to see the signs of his natural surroundings, Mabey talks about the “grammar of landscape.” Myself an amateur photographer, my girlfriend a geologist, both of us have been taught through our disciplines more closely to understand the underlying constructions of the environment. Taking Mabey's analogy further, we have learnt to see how hills rhyme in valleys and peaks, how changes in the quality of light punctuate the day, why limestone dashes in white scars across valleys, to know the snaking bends of a river as a past tense indicator of the period of its existence. It is revealing the “grammar of landscape” that is the art and practice of both photography and the environmental sciences. But if grammar is the construction, it is not the writing itself. What I particularly like about the phrase is that understanding does not exclude the aesthetics of landscape, which are intuitively felt in the air on your face, in the unlimited frames of the eye, in the sounds of water and wildlife. Like literary criticism at its best, the skill of being a close reader is to show how that art takes the unique forms it does, without losing the quality of its spontaneous and uncritical experience.

Images at the Baltic

The publicity for Samuel Taylor Wood, whose Still Lives exhibition runs at The Baltic until September 3rd, acclaims her "compelling psychological portraits in photography, film and video." But whose psychology is being examined?

For example, in the piece that I found most arresting, Wood filmed David Beckham sleeping. In his celebrity life outside of football, we are used to seeing him in the glossy pages of Hello magazine, child or wife in one hand, cellphone in the other, trapped in a moment of a busy - and apparently fairly ordinary - life. On the pitch, television cameras pursue his sweeps down the right wing, chase the glorious arc of his crossed ball, track in slow motion replays the agression of his tackles. By focusing on him asleep, however, Wood removes him as far as it is possible to be from both of these contexts.

Cleverly lit, like a Titian or a Michelangelo, swathes of light lie across his face like soft brush strokes, structures of shadow bringing out his angular jaw. He is heroic in his physical looks, a canonised statue in his peaceful sleeping. This is a static vision of the transcendent, an iconic aid to contemplation. Then, suddenly, he twitches and the hand on which his head lies shifts slightly. The image now revealed as playing video suddenly switches its focus, accusing the viewer as voyeur, a media obsessive pruriently spying on this most famous face in its intimate moment. Ironically, however, this is one interior video log to which no one can have access. Caught in this unusual transitional medium part way between print and screen, neither celebrity nor sportsman, his face transcribes with infuriating partiality the complex dreams going on behind the mask, beyond the reach of the lenses of the pap.

In contrast to this, there is no subtlety in Wang Du'sSpace-Time Tunnel, which is exhibited on the floor above Wood's work. An elaborate steel and chicken wire construction, the viewer (participant?) walks through its hunched and dimly lit shape, which is punctuated regularly by TV screens above and left and right. Playing live broadcasts from stations around the world, they assault with bursts of noise, in different languages, a diaspora of programmes: shopping channels, music TV, news. In an attempt to draw a single strand of coherence out of this clutter of competing narratives, people seem drawn to what is familiar: I found myself pausing before News 24, reading the ticker tape update on the Lebanon conflict; the German or Austrian couple ahead of me halted suddenly, and turned to watch a Deutsche TV sports show.

At the end of this disorientating tunnel, is a child's slide. Having been bewildered by the strange images, one is suddenly puzzled by this everyday one, and I halted at the top, uncertain as to what I was supposed to do. It seemed incongruous that this is how to leave this serious piece of modern art. But with no other way out, having glanced quickly over my shoulder, I skidded and scuttled awkwardly until a few metres before the end, at which point I stood and walked the rest of the way, unwilling to face the waiting Baltic "crew" member in a liberated, but awkward, position on my arse.

Going Digital

The bug started in the sales last Christmas. In the window of Jessops was a bright red poster advertising a Panasonic Lumix FZ20, for just £199. At first, I just walked past, dismissing Panasonic as one of those electronics giants simply piggy-backing on the digital photography revolution, not in the same league as Nikon or Canon. Or Leica? Curiosity getting the better of me, I did some research, and I discovered that this was actually an award-winning camera, with a lens produced by one of the finest manufacturers. Armed with this knowledge, I ran to Jessops, only to discover that they had sold out nationwide within 24 hours of the sale.

And so it began. I have always maintained that the majority of great images can be captured by almost any camera, in most circumstances. As I said in a previous post, it is the eye that sees over a prolonged period rather than the camera that snaps in a few milliseconds that is primarily responsible for a good shot. With that disclaimer, however, physical equipment is still an important factor, and I was I was beginning to feel limited by mine. Framing landscapes on my film compact was difficult, because of the parallax, whilst my little digital could not quite achieve the resolution needed for anything more than macro or portrait work. Having got a new tripod, night shots on my film produced reasonable results (as in my image of Gateshead), but they were clearly nowhere near professional quality with options to control shutter speed. There have been several occasions when I have wished for some way to control depth of field, as well as focus. I like to keep post-processing to a minimum, but without decent exposure controls on my camera, it was inevitable that the curves and levels tools were going to receive heavy use in GIMP.

So for the six months following Christmas, I scoured E-bay for bargains, and read the reviews on DP Review; I signed up for Jessops’ bargains bulletin, and kept an eye on the used equipment window of my local camera shop. One day a Canon EOS 300Da appeared in the latter, and although it had been sold by the next day when I had had time to read the reviews, I was convinced I needed to raise my sights past a Superzoom compact (the category into which the Lumix falls) and go all out for a DSLR, with its near-infinite potential for expansion.

Finally, I settled on a Nikon D50, and today, armed with three or four lower priced quotes, I marched into Jessops and demanded a good price. Although I managed to get only £15 off, the price for what was last year the top entry-level DSLR was a great deal. It may only be 6.1 megapixels, unlike this year’s comparable models, but these will still blow up to a couple of metres square at 200 d.p.i. should I need it (which I won’t). Resolution may sell cameras to the naive, but it is the body and lens which matter, and with its chunky feel and a feature set that matches that of its bigger brother the D70, this camera had the edge (and the price margin) over its closest rival, the Canon EOS 350D. I will post a more detailed review of the camera on this blog in a few weeks once I have fully explored its features, and I will keep track of how my skills and photography change (hopefully for the better) in the photos section.

Chromasia

As featured by the BBC and Time Magazine, the Chromasia website is an exemplary photo blog. Often featuring images from around Blackpool, it casts an area I (unfortunately) know well in a new and beautiful light: the colourful neon of the fair, storm clouds rolling off the sea, stunning sunsets, the cast of blue over beach. Technically perfect, and artistically innovative, with a lively readership and owner offering comments which help to educate the viewer in how to take better photographs, visit the site now, and you will want to go back every day.

Kienholz at The Baltic

The exhibition of Ed and Mary Kienholz*, in what is the first showing of their work in the UK for 30 years, is both expansive, sexual and violent, and minutely detailed, intimate and comic.

In one of the pieces entitled Bear Chair, from which I had to turn quickly away, a bear straddles a doll-like young girl tied with frayed rope to a small chair, the words, "IF YOU EVER TELL I'LL HURT YOUR MAMA REAL REAL BAD" scratched into a child's dressing table. But in the corridor leading up to the small room in which it is contained, the walls are covered with dollar bills, the artistic product of an amusing domestic anecdote: Kienholz, desperate for a particular screwdriver, made a watercolour and stamped on it "For Nine Screwdrivers," ultimately trading this unique piece for a set of tools of his neighbour; from this small barter, others followed, from a Mercedes to a fur co