I took this photograph on the same afternoon as the the one I used for the Photo Friday challenge – Childhood. I was going to use it for this week’s challenge – Treasured – but I didn’t think it was technically all that good, nor as aesthetically pleasant as the images I did use.

Nonetheless, having spent some time working on it, I’m reasonably pleased with how it turned out and do think it’s a nice image (if not an overly good one).

I also think that it does a good job of capturing the relationship between three of our daughters. When this was taken the youngest was just over nine months old and couldn’t walk unaided. But, from what I remember, she spent quite a lot of time being helped around by her older sisters and this image nicely captures the various ways in which they helped out with her care.

Despite spending quite some time trying to come up with something quirky for this week’s Photo Friday challenge – Treasured – I kept coming back to pictures of our children, not least because the remainder of the treasured things in my life are rather unimportant in comparison (other than my wife, but she’s had her fair share of pictures over the last couple of days ;-).

The photograph from which these three images were produced was taken one month before our daughter’s second birthday and shows her in an unusually calm mood. While she’s an undeniably cute child, she’s also something of a handful and rarely sits still long enough for me to take her picture – so I suppose I treasure this image because I don’t imagine there’ll be many more opportunities to take similar ones, at least not until she’s a bit older.

Like a number of the images I’ve used recently this was taken with my old camera, a Fujifilm FinePix 40i. As a consequence I needed to spend a bit of time removing some unwanted jpeg artefacts, but other than that I didn’t need to do too much else with it.

I took this sequence a few days ago not long after I woke up. It was one of those opportunities that you know will only last a few minutes so I took these from our bedroom window prior to drinking any coffee, or smoking any cigarettes – my usual two activities that normally preceed speech, let alone anything that even remotely requires some effort.

But the sky was just too beautiful to miss and after taking half a dozen shots (that turned out to be totally hopeless, not least because I shot them as jpep's rather than RAW images) I managed to concentrate well enough to get these.

All three of these images are roughly true to the original scene though I chose to darken all three of them. No matter how I tried to match them to how I remembered the scene, all three ended up looking either vaguely washed out or, worse, my attempts to get the colour balance correct seemed to introduce an unacceptable amount of colour noise.

So, while these images aren’t entirely ‘accurate’ I do think that they capture the mood, beauty, and some of the clarity of this early morning winter sky.

Over the last few years I’ve taken several thousand pictures of our children but wanted to take a new one for this week’s Photo Friday challenge. But none of my attempts over the last few days have been remotely suitable, not least I think because they have totally failed to capture anything even vaguely evocative of childhood. Or, put another way; while posing for photographs is inevitably something that happens when you’re a child, the resultant images often appear artificial and stilted and (in my experience) mostly fail to capture what I see as the defining characteristics of childhood – things like spontaneity, lack of self-consciousness, and the joyfullness at just being alive ... none of which can be faked or posed. at least not convincingly.

So, after rummaging through various albums, this is the one I decided on. It was taken around 18 months ago at Castle Hill, Huddersfield, and captures two of our daughters – just playing. It was taken with my old camera, a Fujifilm FinePix 40i, so isn’t quite up to the technical standard of some of my recent images, but I do think that it works well for this week’s challenge.

And finally, while I'd like to be able to say that my cropping of our daughter (on the left of this image) was intentional – to better represent the movement and vitality of the moment – it was actually a consequence of the shutter lag of the camera used for the picture. But, intentional or otherwise, I think it works reasonably well in this context ;-)

Yesterday I stated that I’d run out of images (suitable for presentation here) from my recent trip to Nottingham – but I found one more when I went through them again (I’ve now binned the rest of them, so there definitely wont be any more). I’ve included this one a) because the scene amused me (i.e. the claim that the shop is occupied when clearly there’s very little there), and b) because (at the moment) I think there’s something inherently interesting about reflections in glass.

Part of this interest is to do with actually ending up with an image that looks roughly how I envisioned it, and this seems quite difficult with images of this type. I’ve found that it’s something of a trial and error excercise to balance the three components of the image (the reflection, the scene behind the glass, and the glass itself) without ending up with something that either looks badly exposed or obviously post-processed. The only thing I’m not happy with is the writing on the message in the window. In this version it seems both too dark and a fraction too sharp but, at this image size, I couldn’t get it to look any more natural.

So, maybe I’ve included this image more on the grounds that it seems technically successful rather than aesthetically interesting, but I didn’t have anything else to use. No matter, it’s Photo Friday today so I need to go out and take some new pictures anyway :-)

I suspect that this may well be the last image from the photographs that I took last week in Nottingham as the rest, as best I can tell, aren’t likely to produce anything that I’d be happy to include. That said, I’ve often thought that I’ve exhausted the possibilities that a particular set of photographs provide, only to revisit them some time later and think of a new angle to take … so we’ll see.

As for this image, there are two things that I like about it. The first is that it’s an image that I wouldn’t normally have thought to take; i.e. a remote control isn’t (at first glance) an inherently interesting object/subject. But I suppose that one of the things I've been doing recently is using the camera to look at the world in a way that I wouldn’t normally, and that includes focussing on the mundane and the everyday. The second thing I like is the contrast between the remote and the diffuse ‘glow’ of the sofa in the background: for me it’s resulted in what I see as a warm and somehow comforting image. That said, that may say more about my mood at the time rather than anything about the image itself: I was visiting a friend, I was relaxed, and I was comfortable. So perhaps I’m overlaying the image with my memories of its creation rather than interpreting the image itself.

No matter, I like it either way.

This is another picture I took while in Nottingham recently, though the original is rather dissimilar to the version presented here. It's an image of a small sculpture that’s affixed to a wall (this version has been rotated 90° counter-clockwise) of, well, a fork, a mouse (of sorts, I think), and another bit (which I should have investigated more thoroughly as I now have absolutely no idea what it is).

When I took the photograph I did intend to take a straight shot, on the grounds that it would have been an interesting image. But I didn't do a very good job of it and all my attempts to make it look as it should fell short of anything I’d be happy presenting here. So, this is the result.

Basically it’s a combination of Posterizing the image then applying Photoshop’s Plastic Wrap filter. I know that I've used both these effects before (here and here) but this is the first time I've combined the two.

While this image looks as though it’s a reworked version of my previous entry it’s actually based on a separate image, though constructed on much the same basis.

All things considered, I prefer the previous image but I’ve included this one because its construction perplexed me somewhat. I would have assumed – given that this image was taken under similar conditions to the previous one (though the light source was blue rather than red) – that this image would have been broadly similar to it’s red counterpart. And in the final result they aren’t all that different, but this was a much harder image to create. I think, in part, that the problem was a perceptual one, i.e. the colour contrast of the previous image required very little manipulation to get the final result to look as it did. With this image it was much more difficult to get the overall ‘feel’ right (i.e. faithful to the original). Many of my initial attempts looked very ‘flat’, as though the tea-light holders were made of perspex rather than glass. I suspect that this may be something to do with working with the a predominantly blue image, but I really have no idea quite why this would be the case.

This is one of a number of pictures I took on a recent visit to a friend in Nottingham, and is of three tea-light holders in front of a Mathmos Tumbler lamp – one of the ones that changes colour as you rotate it.

The only real change I’ve made to this image is that this is each half of the image is made up of one half of the original. I took this in rather dim lighting and didn’t notice that the frontmost tea-light holder was scratched. So, rather than bin the image (which I didn’t want to do as this is the only one out of about fifteen shots that’s even half decent), I cheated somewhat with Photoshop.

That said, I think the final image is a little more ‘precise’ (or maybe ‘striking’ would be a better term) than the original.

“Structure is not ‘external’ to individuals: as memory traces, and as instantiated in social practices, it is in a certain sense more ‘internal’ than exterior to their activities in a Durkheimian sense. Structure is not to be equated with constraint but is always both constraining and enabling. This, of course, does not prevent the structured properties of social systems from stretching away, in time and space, beyond the control of any individual actors. Nor does it compromise the possibility that actors’ own theories of the social systems which they help to constitute and reconstitute in their activities may reify those systems.”

Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press (p. 25)

I took this series of images in Nottingham over the last couple of days and decided that they would be suitable for this week’s Photo Friday challenge, Structure. I’ve written more about these images on my main blog, particularly in terms of what I see as the extremely negative political and social implications of this poster campaign.

This picture (and the resultant two images) were taken earlier today and while they’re technically a bit weak, I do quite like them. At this time of year it seems that most people turn on their lights for the evening but don’t immediately exclude the world by closing their curtains. Perhaps it’s because darkness tends to fall at a busier time of the day than in other seasons, or perhaps it’s just that this is a time of day when such things are most noticeable. Either way, as I look out of our attic window now (around two and a half hours after this was taken) some of the lights have been turned off, and the curtains are firmly drawn.

As for the quality of these images: digital cameras, on the whole, don’t seem all that great at capturing images in low light and the main problem I had with this photograph was colour noise. It isn’t massively noticeable in the versions presented here, but in the original image it was quite pronounced. One (partial) solution I’ve found – that does a much better job than any of the techniques I’ve tried – is Fred Miranda’s ISOx Pro plugin that does seem to be able to minimise noise without overly comprising an image’s detail.

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The original version of this image had two people facing one another in the double window to the left of the door and, photographically speaking, it was a much stronger image. But, and this is a big ‘but’, it was pointed out to me that taking pictures of people in their own homes at the very least constitutes an invasion of privacy, and at worst is probably illegal. Hmmm ... good points. So, here's the not so interesting, ‘but I’m not going to be arrested, sued or thumped because of it’ revised version.

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