Author: basilisksam

Photographer and writer with special interests in vintage photography and equipment.

Categories
photography

How it all began

It’s going back some years now but finding this photograph got me interested in collecting old photos in the first place. Like many people I had some topographical postcards but this was the first time I started thinking about the social history to be explored in old photographs and real photographic postcards (RPCCs).

I found it in a box of old photos at a table-top sale in the Community Centre, Cromford, Derbyshire. It was with a bunch of other unrelated photos and postcards at a stall selling general bric-a-brac and antiques. There’s nothing to identify who it is or where it comes from and it’s a real photograph, not a postcard. There’s no studio name on it either. So it’s all a mystery still even though other people have tried to find out more about it.

Looking again at the man’s outfit it doesn’t seem very authentic. Her clothes probably place the time as somewhere in the Edwardian era. The backdrop says it’s a studio but why would the man dress up like this? Was it for a play or theatre review or was he with a visiting “Wild West” show though these were more popular in the late Victorian era?

It’s unlikely I’ll ever know the true story but if you have any ideas then do contact me.

Categories
photography

My favourite old photograph

Having a favourite photograph, old or new, is as absurd as having a favourite film or book. The item at the top of the list is likely to change from day to day, month to month, year to year. However this photograph has consistently been a favourite of mine.

Why? Because it’s mysterious and spooky and the atmosphere is made partly by the scratches and blemishes. What’s the girl smiling at and what does she have behind her back? It could easily be a still from a David Lynch film (Lynch would also be top of my favourite directors).

The photograph is bound inside a small generic cover with five other photographs, each 8cm by 8cm. On the reverse of the cover it shows “Processed by Rothgeb* Photo Service of Youngstown Ohio” who are apparently a member of the Master Photo Dealers and Finishers Association.

(*Rothgeb sounds like one of the Ancient Ones from an H P Lovecraft story doesn’t it).

Categories
occult photography Victorian

An Update on the Heretics Series

In the original Darkness Begins blog I shared details of my writing. The first novel in a projected trilogy is Alchemists of Time. Here’s some information about the first two books and an update on what’s happening with book three.

In Alchemists of Time:

1859 Benjamin Strutt and Jane Taylor practice the occult sciences and conjure demons. Daisy is trying to escape from the squalor, the violence and life as a prostitute in the dangerous rookeries and backstreets of a Victorian town.

1959 When Alex and Maxine move into an old house, Alex finds himself transported back to the time when Benjamin Strutt lived in the house. Unless he can learn the alchemical and occult arts that Benjamin teaches him he can never go home to his own time. And Bella Nightingale is already threatening the stability of time itself with a killing spree lasting more than a hundred years.

In Ghosts of Time:

Ghosts are just people lost in time….

After ten years living as a Victorian, Alex Harrison is not sure whether he wants to return to his own time of the 1960s. Maxine, Alex’s girlfriend, can’t even remember him after her timeline was altered. When an old enemy reappears the life of Alex and everyone he holds dear comes under threat and he must unite his Victorian family and his friends in the 1960s to defeat an evil that threatens to warp the very fabric of time.

What to expect in book 3 Well of Time*

It’s six months since the apocalyptic events at the end of book 2 and all is not well. Two of the Victorians find themselves transported to the late 1960s, Benjamin Strutt has disappeared from the 1869 house and those remaining are in disarray and under siege from fresh enemies. Meanwhile Alex and friends find they need to revisit their assumptions about time paradoxes to ensure their survival.

It’s early days in the writing process for book 3 so don’t hold your breath! I’ll try not to do a George RR Martin and leave it hanging for years and years.

I’ll update you on Loake and Patel book 3 in a later blog.

(*Potential for confusion with Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time I know).

Categories
photography

Painting with Light

Although I originally called my blog Where the Darkness Begins, to reflect the often dark themes of my writing, this revised blog is mostly about photography, which is nothing more than painting with light. The example above was taken at Portmeirion. On flickr I most often post photographs from my ever-growing collection of old photographs rather than my own work. No wonder then that I prefer to work in black and white rather than colour. (That’s not to say I don’t do colour work too).

For me there’s something much more mysterious and dreamlike about black and white photography than there is with colour photography. The fact that you are painting with light is made all the more obvious in monochrome. I also find that I am more inclined to make actual prints of monochrome photos than I am of colour photos. This is especially true when it comes to A3 prints where a good print will yield far more detail than can be seen in most colour prints and certainly more detail than can be seen on a computer screen.

Portraits always seem to work better in black and white, like this studio photograph of Arabella. Have a look at Best Portrait Photographers for some more examples – there are one or two colour photos but the majority are in black and white. I’d add Robert Mapplethorpe to the list but be careful where you point that browser if you go looking for his work!

Here’s another one of mine, a personal favourite. This is my step-daughter Kate descending the stairs at Caulke Abbey. It’s the contrast between light and dark that make it for me.

Here’s Kate at Caulke Abbey again but this time I’ve accentuated the light. Most of these photos have had some adjustments made using Nik Silver Efex Pro, the software I consider to be the most essential to have for black and white photography. We nearly lost Nik when it was  acquired by Google in 2012 and development ceased.  However Nik Collection was acquired from Google by French software firm DxO in late 2017 and since then it has continued to be developed and improved.

Without darkness there is no light. Without light there is no darkness

Categories
Colors photography

Minimalism in Photography

Defining minimalism in photography is difficult although some general rules of thumb can be stated, such as have a simple subject, use lots of negative space, ensure distance between yourself and your subject. However people can be very picky about what can be labelled minimalist. Try posting on minimalist groups on flickr for instance and you’ll soon come across people who’ll tell you that you’re doing it wrong.

I’d argue that my photo at the top if this post is a minimalist photograph. However, is the next photograph minimalist or not?

It’s the same place (I’m obsessed with the ridge opposite my home) and it certainly uses lots of negative space but some would argue (and have argued) that this is a landscape photograph but not minimalist.

Again my camera is pointing in the same direction but zoomed in. Is this a minimalist photo or an abstract photo or another landscape?

Ask yourself the same questions about the photograph above.

I’m still looking in the same direction but pointing the camera at the sky to achieve this Rothko-esque image. I’ve not done any post production on this photograph, it’s exactly as it was taken.

This one’s water flowing over metal at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

And finally take a look at Rhine II by Andreas Gursky which sold at auction for over 4 million dollars and this photo was edited to take out a factory and dog walkers!

Categories
photography

Marjorie Sear, Ballerina 1939

Miss Marjorie Sear in a beautiful hand-coloured photograph. This is the only colour photograph of her from a recently acquired and comprehensive set of Marjorie and her friends all in dance poses. Many of the photographs are dated around 1939 and this is likely to be from the same period.

I first came across Miss Sear when I bought a set of 22 sepia photographs of her. When I acquired this set the only identification was the envelope in which they came addressed to “Miss Sear.” They came in an envelope from Jerome Ltd of Kings Cross Road London. They were all date stamped 31 March 1939. It wasn’t until I was later able to acquire two more sets of photographs from the same source that I was able to identify her as Marjorie Sear. One photograph records her age as 15 on the reverse but there are obviously some when she is older and a few when she is younger.

A black and white version of the coloured photograph.

About half of the 60+ photos feature Marjorie with her friends in various dance costumes both on stage and outside. Whatever happened in their later lives they were clearly all enthusiastic dancers and liked to dress up.

As ever I am amazed how family treasures such as this set of photographs can disappear into salerooms and ebay having been lost or discarded. I know that these photos came from a house clearance and so I assume Marjorie Sear is dead and there are no relatives who survive her and want to keep her memory alive. How many more marvellous documents of social and personal history have been lost for all time? You can see the full set of photographs of Marjorie and her friends in this flickr album.

Categories
photography

About Cabinet Cards

I’ll be posting examples of my own collection of old photographs starting with cabinet cards. Cabinet cards were first produced in the 1860s but did not reach peak popularity until the 1880s by which time they had largely replaced the smaller carte de visite. Soon cabinet cards would also be overtaken by the introduction of the Box Brownie in 1900 making it possible for everyone to make their own photos.

The cabinet card shown at the top of this post is a fairly typical example of the ever-popular family group. I used this as part of the back cover design for my book Alchemists of time. Tracking down details of the studios and photographers who made these cards is not an easy job. Even when we have  the name of the studio on the card it’s more likely than not that the studio disappeared many years ago and often without trace. There are resources that can help but that’s a topic for another post.

It’s always nice to find cards from your own locality, in my case Derby and Nottingham, though the same problems of provenance apply. These two are from Derby, one a portrait of a girl, the other a “candid” shot of a woman sprawled out over chairs. Who said all Victorian portraits involve someone standing straight and with a serious expression?

Rabbit man is one of my personal favourites, this time from a Nottingham studio. I suspect the rabbits were bred to eat rather than being pets but we’ll never know.

Black for mourning is often to be seen as is white (for purity?)

And what’s this dog thinking?

And finally I couldn’t resist inserting myself into a cabinet card, the surround being from a Victorian photo album designed to take cabinet cards.

( If you think you’ve seen or read some of this before it’s quite possible as my former blog imploded so I’ll be recreating entries here).

Categories
photography

Experiments in pictorialism

Wikipedia says “Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of creating an image rather than simply recording it. …. For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer’s realm of imagination.”  The rest of the Wikipedia article is comprehensive and is linked to some famous examples. I recommend it if you want find out more.

So I set out to try and produce some photographs in pictorialist style. I started with this shot. I was the photographer and model was Arabella.

After some experiments and online research I managed to produce my own Photoshop action. And this was the result:

I then tweaked the photo more before posting it to my flickr stream. (I can’t remember exactly what I did with this one to get the result). It’s the photo at the head of this blog post. Overall I was pleased with the result though I can never be one hundred per cent happy with anything!

Later I tried some actions produced by Gavin Seim. He’s a photographer I have a lot of time for and he produces some high quality actions. There are a lot of people online forever hawking photoshop, brushes, actions and other extensions to Photoshop and I usually find their results pretty pedestrian. Seim’s the only one I rate highly and I use a number of his actions. So his pictorialist actions are based on works by Hamilton (a controversial figure now), Stieglitz, Orton and Coburn. I give a result for each of these below but it should be said that there are different mixes and a likely infinity of changes to the actions if you have the patience to work with them.

Finally I generated an AI version using Openart AI. Actually I generated a lot of versions, all using my original photo of Arabella as reference, but this was the closest it came to a pictorialist photograph.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is OpenartVersion.jpg

So which version is best, by which I mean which is the closest to pictorialism? I’d like to think it was the one I ended up posting on flickr but you may think differently.

Categories
photography

Some thoughts on AI, Art and Photography

I’ll have lots to say on AI in future postings but for now I want to confine my remarks and thoughts to the types of software that can be used to make and enhance creative assets. There are lots of them about and they are easy to use but how good are they and what is my experience with them?

As a keen photographer my go to program is Photoshop and just lately it’s been touting its AI capabilities and I’ve had cause to use those new capabilities. Take the pair of photographs at the head of this blog. On the left I have a photograph of the ballerina Erica Mulkern taken earlier this year. I was very pleased with this shot but I couldn’t help noticing that part of Erica’s right hand was out of the frame making it less than perfect. The photo of Erica on the right is after I used Photoshop’s creative fill action to make her right hand whole again. It took a couple of iterations to get right but it wasn’t time consuming. Can you tell that the right hand photo has been changed artificially? I suspect not but I know and it doesn’t make me happy. I’m not opposed to tweaking photos, no one is except the very few photographers who believe if it isn’t captured in camera it isn’t a pure photograph. In general I and most photographers will use filters, cropping, changing white balance, using third party filters etc., to achieve a desired result. But in all those cases I’m in charge of where to crop, how strong to make a filter and so on. In the case of Photoshop’s generative fill it’s just a matter of dragging a cropped area and letting it create the fill (half a hand for instance) or specifying in text what you want to see. It feels like some of the creativity is being taken away from the human creator.

But there was worse to come and you can see why in the two “photos” below.

I’m not the kind of photographer who’s just interested in one type of subject. I like to try my hand at many different things although I have an abiding interest in Victorian and Edwardian photography. Recently I’ve been reading and researching the topic of pictorialism in art and photography and decided I’d like to try my hand at reproducing something similar to the likes of Steiglitz or Clarence White. So, I looked up some examples of pictorialist photographs, experimented with using Photoshop layers to achieve the desired result, hired a model, travelled to a suitable location, took several hundred photos, imported them into Photoshop and post processed them to get the look I was aiming for. On the left you can see one of the photos of Arabella made to look something like a pictorialist photo. In other words to get to that photograph took a lot of time and effort and collaboration.

On the right you can see a photograph (or is it?) produced by Openart AI when given the prompt “A barefoot woman in a floaty dress in pictorialist style.” Time to generate this picture? About 30 seconds. This is the first time ever that I’ve been impressed by software purporting to be AI driven. Clearly I’ve not been paying sufficient attention.