Systems of Delivery

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Now this is an interesting article for all you long-exposure freaks out there,

Shifting Places

I had an opportunity to move to Canada so I took it and ended up in Vancouver. Didn’t know a soul there. The only friend I had at first was my camera. Quickly I became engrossed with the activity at YVR - Vancouver’s international airport. Living in the US for so many years where an overkill of security measures leads to regular run ins with the law for being where you shouldn't be, I found it a novelty to be able to stand at the end of a runway with screaming jet liners mere fathoms overhead.

 

More experiments with time and exposure lengths ensued.

And scale.

 I documented other parts of Vancouver’s geographical culture. The water infuses this metropolitan area with much of it’s character. The shot I was most pleased with in my six months of residence was a tanker sitting still far out in the Georgia Strait as the days light began to dissipate. 

Light quality is perceptibly different to a photographers eye even within a small radius of a given latitude. I can usually pinpoint a location near enough in images or movies shot on the west coast from the quality of the daylight.

The Fog in the Night

Taxis in Fog

Fog. Nothing like it to produce beautiful pictures. Subtle, subdued, dampened. Gives a texture to the atmosphere that light & motion passes through to produce an ambience that never fails to strike a chord.

The French photographer Brassai was a master of fog in the night. A masterpiece of his shows a figure leaning from behind a civic rotunda in the fog of a night. Highly suggestive, dangerous. Beautifully shot, likely with a large format camera with a huge open aperature since the figure is tack sharp.

I like the taxis as the subject of my piece because of their classic throwback design (well, it's a throwback now). A very minimal quality to the shot too. Of course if I had the patience and genius of Brassai there would be another exciting element in there - a figure to the curb in raincoat and revolver at the end of an outstretched arm.

Going Native

                                                                                             Side by Side, Oakland, USA, 2008

They type of image I used to take a lot of.  I was a dedicated nocturne then. The results long-exposure reveal fascinate me. The sense of inertness and stillness in the night. Time waiting, time passing. Ever since I moved away from California I find myself attending to such images far less. Maybe it was a California thing, warm evening air, the native styling. In the past 18 months I've resided in three countries and each move is reflected in my photography not simply by different subject matter. It has also affected the content in other ways too. This has got me thinking that photography, the eye and the practice, is a reaction to one's surrounding, to the culture of where ever you are at. I've gone from roaming around at night photographing old factories and cars, freeways in Northern California to the raw dramatic landscapes of British Columbia. Now I seem to take pictures of the natural features of British countryside and French coastline.
Increasingly my pictures have less of an artistic edge and have become more literal. Not sure what I think about this. My foray into stock photography is no doubt responsible for some of this. I also find that being at home, well, that always takes a while. The artistic is dependent on how comfortable you are with what you photograph, what it makes you feel. And, for me, this is born from familiarity. To be familiar is to become native and the methods of different expressions, interpretations and experimentation ensue. One is at home with one's subject.


                                                                                 Messy Business, Quiberville, France, 2012