In this issue

My Print of the week

1. My Print of the week

2. Frontispiece

3. On the Tyranny of the Frame

4. Waiata mo te Ata-the First Winds of Winter

5. Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

6. Endpapers

In 2006, the previously predictable cauldron of my life suddenly upended and spilt me out into an uncertain world.

I suppose I could have tried to pick up the mess and put it back in the pot, but something about the seepage leading out across the horizon fascinated me, and I wanted to follow to see where it led.

For a time, I moved as far away from civilisation as possible, finding a home on the edge of a temperate rainforest in the bottom corner of South Westland, twenty minutes drive below Haast.

It was wild and feral and wet and challenging. People who live there have a saying:

However, it was a peaceful place to lick my wounds and heal- apart from the rain, dampness, and mosquitoes.

When spring came, so did the whitebaiters, setting up their stands and campsites all along the rivers in the area. The area soon flooded with camper vans and caravans and people eager to cash in on the white gold coming up the rivers.

Early one morning, I walked with my camera across the road to the edge of the Okuru lagoon. It was the turn of the tide, and everything seemed to be in a Zen-like stasis. Ruth, the elderly woman whose 'patch' it was and who came there every year from Central Otago, watched me setting up my tripod.

"What are you doing?" She abruptly asked.

I slowly turned away from burying my head in the calculations required to use a tilt/shift lens and replied:

"I'm just making a photograph of the net in the tide. The scene speaks to me."

She snorted in disbelief.

"You have to be kidding me. It's only a bloody whitebait net. What's photographic about that?"

She turned away, shaking her head in disbelief, and went back to doing her dishes.

I've only ever printed this work twice. And one of those, whose title is Fishers of Men, is hanging on my wall until the day its actual owner comes to claim it.

Frontispiece

Atamaarie e te whaanau:

Good morning everyone:

Well, it has finally happened.

The long, yellow smile of summer has finally wiped itself from the face of the year, and the winds of autumn have crept over the mountains and into the Basin. It was going to happen sooner or later. Now later has become sooner.

After months of inscrutable skies without any change in their expression, the wild winds from the west are shaping the air, creating cloud sculptures like afterthoughts in the temple of the sky. Soft bolsters of cloud teeter precariously over the Takitimu mountains to the south, piling upon each other until the Sky Artist shakes his head in dissatisfaction and brushes them away. There are clouds like angel's wings in abundance, moistly pointing west. I suppose the artist in me loves watching the Master at work, observing His brushstrokes, working method, endless creativity and perfect perfection.

Last night He dipped his brush in cloud paint and swept a broad, generous arc from north to south across the canvas of the sky. I imagined him thinking to himself, "yes, that could work."

And it did. As the sun wandered behind the edge of the mountains, the sky flushed a beautiful salmon pink for a brief time. Then it was gone.

It occurred to me that perhaps I should have been out there with my camera, making its likeness. So I did the calculations, went through the possibility of the scene in my head, and realised it was never going to work.

There is an old wisdom in photography which says:

So it's not about acquisition.

It's about appreciation.

On the Tyranny of the Frame

In his book Stay this Moment, the great photographer Sam Abell talks about a time in his life when he had had enough of photography. Years of working for National Geographic had left him burnt out and hollow. So he decided to take a sabbatical in Japan and immerse himself in its culture. He talks about becoming very interested in Japanese garden design, particularly formal gardens. Then, one day, he had an epiphany. He realised that the art of photography lay in framing. And he returned refreshed and ready to work again.

Whenever we make a photograph, the simple fact is that whatever we do is surrounded by a frame. There is no escaping the tyranny of the frame. Photography is, when you boil it all down, about framing. Whether you use an iPhone or a view camera, it's a conscious act of selection, deciding what to put inside your frame. And it isn't an easy thing to learn. Placement of your subject material can become quite fraught as the locusts of composition "rules" come to feast upon the golden grain of your innocent ideas.

However, while most of us may understand where to place our subject material inside the frame, I wonder how many of us have ever thought about the structure itself, particularly the picture ratio with which we are working and its impact on our work.

Here is an example. Most of us work with a camera with a 3:2 ratio, also known as 35mm. Have you ever wondered who thought up that particular ratio? Why 3:2? What is the significance of that?

Well, there isn't one.

Here is the back story.

You can blame a German scientist named Oscar Barnack, who was working for the Leitz Optical Company in the 1920s. At the time, the company's primary purpose was making movie projectors and lenses for the film industry. If you've ever used a film projector and had to thread a reel into one (remember those times?), you know that the film passes vertically in front of a gate, guided by sprocket holes on either side. (Interestingly, a full feature movie has about 1 1/2 km of film per projection). So you know that the scene is recorded across the film rather than along it. So 16mm film has a ratio of 18 mm on the long side by 12 mm on the short side.

As the story goes, Barnack had many short lengths of unwonted movie film lying around his workshop. So, rather than waste it, he decided to make a camera to use the film. However, rather than running the film vertically, he opted to join two frames together and pass it through the camera horizontally. So a finished frame size of 24 mm x 36 mm, later known as 35 mm-a ratio of 3:2! And the first 35mm camera, the Ur-Leica, was born.

So, as photographers, we have a wide range of ratios available to us. We can choose 1:1, 4:5, 4:3, 16:9-the list goes on. Many of our cameras will allow us to select from several of these as we go. And, of course, purple people with a passion for panoramas (my penchant for alliteration-sorry) know all about stitching.

But which to use when?

Here is a rough rule of thumb. Think of it this way.

The most fundamental element of composition is the dot. In the words of the great artist Paul Klee,

A circle is a dot with space injected into it.

Pinch the corners, and you have a square. Extend any two parallel sides, and you have a rectangle.

And then the fun begins.

It's a question of formality. The closer your ratio is to the square (1:1), the more formal your composition will be. At the panorama end of the spectrum, things are much less formal. You are looking from right to left (or left to right), and in reading the picture, time is passing. To suggest time passing, lean towards the panorama end of the spectrum.

And what does this have to do with your composition? Your format/ratio is a tyranny that will impose itself upon you until the day you recognise it and begin to deal with it. Unfortunately, far too many of us blindly accept without considering it.

I have a place I love to go to when Elvis needs to leave the building. I go downtown, buy a coffee and then drive behind the town domain to the lake's edge. There is a particular place where I like to park, where there is peace and silence, apart from the murmuring of the lake and the rugged vastness of the mountains beyond.

A few mornings ago, sensing that it would be great to take the camera and be there as the sun came up, I parked the car and watched and waited to see what the light would do. Drifts of low cloud were beginning to burn off, and the sun off to my right was rising into a narrow gap.

At the moment, I have the use of Fujifilm New Zealand's GFX 100, a beast of a camera with a whopping 100-megapixel sensor. And, with all that horsepower, I want to use every pixel available to me.

The camera's native ratio is 4:3, unlike my regular camera, whose ratio is 3:2 (35mm format). Using the GFX 100 is quite a formal process, and although it's been beautifully engineered for spontaneity, somehow, the sound of the shutter makes me shoot less and think more, which isn't a bad thing.

I know that scene, and I know it well. I've made many attempts to resolve the complex compositional issues it presents. So, as the light rose, delivering a spectacular view, I got the camera out and began making compositions. You only get one chance at a particular scene, so I make plenty of exposures, varying the framing subtly as I go. It's worth noting that the view through the viewfinder is different to the perception you will have when studying the image on the LCD or, indeed, on your computer. You have to begin to see like your camera and the three points at which your perception may shift.

I was troubled by the clouds, which were less than perfect, raggedy distraught things that didn't add to the story.

Then I took a break and pulled out my Samsung phone to make a conversation for instant sharing on social media. A quick bit of SnapSeed, and off it went.

Then, when I looked at the picture, I preferred the composition from my phone to that from the Big Boy. It took me a little time to get it, and then the penny dropped.

It was all to do with the ratio.

The camera "sees" in 4:3. The phone is set to shoot at 16:9.

It wasn't a formal composition.

It was a panorama.

And why hadn't I seen that before?

Ah! Of course.

The tyranny of the frame.

Waiata mo te Ata-the First Winds of Winter

The first winds of winter

The winter wind has come to play.

After months of pouting and posturing and preening beyond the hunch-backed mountains,

of studying its reflection in the oceans,

of absentmindedly twirling and whirling

the resigned and restless seaweed in turgid tidal pools,

of fretfully fingering fretwork silhouette trees

clinging stubbornly to grey cliffs with stolid, stony faces,

while it waits for summer to pass,

of trying to blow the house of the seasons down,

it has had enough.

It hurdles the mountains to the south,

leaping up and over

in a sweeping, spinning churn of seething joy

and self-righteous indignation,

arriving in its swirling cloak of aerial pomp and circumstance

to clear away the last leaves of autumn’s tail.

It shakes clattering shivers of gold confetti from the trees

and strews it in secret, sacred patterns

onto the cooling, inward shrinking ground.

And, all the while

the blue-white metronome of the moon

is breathing in and out.

Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

From Cacao to Clitoria: Luscious 19th-Century French Botanical Illustrations of the Most Vibrant Flora of the Americas — www.brainpickings.org

To put our familiar lives in perspective and jolt us awake to the wonder of so much we have come to take for granted, let us picture this: It is the 1840s and you, like most of humanity, have never traveled more than a few miles beyond where you were born, have never met a person native to a differe

Losing the Birds, Finding the Words: Eve Ensler’s Extraordinary Letter of Apology to Mother Earth — www.themarginalian.org

“Our origins are of the earth.

Be Like Water: The Philosophy and Origin of Bruce Lee’s Famous Metaphor for Resilience — www.themarginalian.org

With his singular blend of physical prowess and metaphysical wisdom, coupled with his tragic untimely death, legendary Chinese-American martial artist, philosopher, and filmmaker Bruce Lee (November 27, 1940–July 20, 1973) is one of those rare cultural icons whose ethos and appeal remain timeless,

Apple Announces 10 Best Macro Images Shot on an iPhone — mymodernmet.com

A strawberry floating in a fizzy soda, the cavernous interior of a flower, and colorful sea glass are just some of the subjects covered by the winners of Apple's latest iPhone contest.

Last minute dinner sorted: Cook Cajun fish wraps and kumara wedges tonight — www.stuff.co.nz

Welcome to Dinner Sorted: Last Minute, a new daily edition of our weekly meal-planner Dinner Sorted. Each weekday, we’ll bring you a recipe for a simple, tasty dinner that will please your family without driving you off the deep end.

Design for Living — www.newyorker.com

In the English-speaking world, we are used to thinking of our greatest writer as an enigma, or a blank. Though there’s enough historical evidence to tell us when Shakespeare was born and when he died, and more than enough to prove that he wrote the plays ascribed to him, the record is thin.

The Blue Horses of Our Destiny: Artist Franz Marc, the Wisdom of Animals, and the Triumph of Beauty Over Brutality — www.themarginalian.org

“Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” wrote Mary Oliver in one of the masterpiece from her suite of poems celebrating the urgency of aliveness, Blue Horses (public library).

Two Hundred Years of Blue — www.themarginalian.org

With Carl Sagan’s poetic Pale Blue Dot on my mind lately, I have found myself dwelling on the color blue and the way our planet’s elemental hue, the most symphonic of the colors, recurs throughout our literature as something larger than a mere chromatic phenomenon — a symbol, a state of being,

Night Train to Riga — theamericanscholar.org

Most people think of Ayn Rand as a philosopher and novelist of ideas—a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism and a theory she named Objectivism. But she was born Alisa Rosenbaum, the daughter of a Russian-Jewish pharmacist who grew up in St.

See How Wisteria Trees Make Spring the Most Magical Time to Be in Japan — mymodernmet.com

The time between the middle of April and the middle of May is a magical time to be in Japan. It’s when the wisteria trees are in full bloom, and their beautiful vine flowers—some more than 30 feet long—transform otherwise ordinary places into fairytale locales.

End Papers

Seeing with the eyes of your heart

A wise friend once said to me,

I have been thinking about this for quite some time. And, whichever way I turn the jewel and stare into its many facets, there is a singular truth there.

When we use the word "see", generally speaking, we are talking about using our eyes, those two organs on either side of our nose. So the Great Illusion here is that we only see with our eyes, and even more illusory is that we tend to believe that each of us sees things in the same way. And we are in agreement.

But, of course, that is far from accurate.

Seeing is a product of the mind rather than a physical document. Our eyes capture and then transfer that data and an electrical form to our brain. At that point, the mind takes over and interprets what the brain has received.

Much of what we see is a collection of labels we have been taught/trained to recognise. It is easy to accept the labels rather than challenging them or, better still, ripping them off. All artists know this.

When somebody looks at my work, I'm often asked if "that's how it was."

They mean that what they see in my work is different from what they would have expected to see themselves.

My answer is relatively simple:

"yes, that's the way I saw it."

Sometimes I will add:

"that's the way I saw it with the eyes of my heart."

When we begin to see with the eyes of our heart, the world starts to look quite different, and of course, our relationship with it begins to change. We see what we feel rather than what the world would have us believe.

My feet are helping out here because I'm interested in seeing with my feet. I will often go outside to stand on the grass in the morning. I will close my eyes (to get them out of the way) and feel through the soles of my feet. What sensations are being sent to my mind?

How do my feet see the grass beneath them?

What is the colour of the grass as my feet see it?

And how do I express that?

And what happens when we see with the eyes of our hands?

Enough.

I'm going to leave you here with a beautiful quote:

May the week before you be filled with love, light and joy.

Ka mihi arohaa nunui ki a koutou

Much love to you all