I returned to Avebury last weekend, being a few months since my last visit and a fair amount of photographic thinking and technique solidified since, I wasn’t expecting all the images to suck to the extent they did. I cannot be bothered progressing any image beyond the contact sheet.
This blog appears to be going down the toilet due to my inconsistent photography and inability to create an image worth a blog post, hence my posting frequency dropping off a cliff. On the bright side I am trying and failing which is better than not trying.
In my defence the day was heavily overcast. Avebury is also somewhat challenging, large standing stones in a very plain field does limit creative compositions to some degree. One thing I did notice is that on my previous trip to Avebury I had a wider angled lens, it helped add some drama which the standard lens lacks. I typically like to stand back from subjects and capture them in their natural surroundings. On my first trip to Avebury, I felt I was having to get unnaturally close to stones, It went against my instincts and I regretted bringing only a wide angle lens, but they were better images.
The bigger issue: my images are very conventional, boring in fact. Recently I watched a photographer youtuber, he has an overriding theme of finding images to capture anywhere. Whilst I liked his videos, I felt a little disconnected to this aspect in his photography. Sure, we can make a door handle inside an old church into a nice photograph, we can get macros of this and that, but the artist in me thinks, “What is the point?” If we are not making images that resonate with us, I don’t see any benefit to trying to make effective images of a subject we don’t care for. However, I am starting to think this photographer is constantly building his photographic vision with these little photographic diversions. I started thinking about some art books I bought last year that talked about artists having sketchbooks, sketching things from life that they found interesting, even though such sketches where not meant to be a final piece.
This small revelation has got me mildly enthusiastic about a third trip to Avebury with a radically different idea. What If I tried to create a more freeform, bat shit crazy project to create an actual sketchbook esq product as the result? A photographic visual playtime kind of book of “what the fuck” kind of experiments. I probably need to do something radically different; my photography is turning to shit.
Every overcast sky has a silver lining, if you were to travel far enough to see if that overcast sky did actually end, which it didn’t within the confines of Avebury and all the drive back up to Warwickshire, however, Avebury does have a very cute and stupidly cheap secondhand book shop. I got both books for £5. You know whilst John Hedgecoe does seem to have some very 1980’s beginners’ photography esq images, not meant to rock the fine art boat or scare too many middle-aged men away, he does seem to be able to pull off a bloody good image when he feels like it. It’s also quite a pragmatic book on composition etc without going too poetic or reverting to the 20C art educational idea of “Do whatever you want, it’s all art” He is a bit more of the Classical atelier mindset of nailing the conventions first. So perhaps the trip wasn’t all rubbish after all thanks to Mr Hedgecoe.
