The Documentary Photographer

Back home from a short trip to the motherland, I’m reflecting on the photographs I took while I was away. Mostly, they were for fun. On two occasions I got serious: the photographs of my brother at work, and a series of photographs that I’m keeping up my sleeve as a surprise.

In all cases, they were taken with a 50mm lens.

Regular readers will know that I generally favour a wider field of view. However, the 24mm lens I own is fairly big and heavy. I didn’t feel like bringing it along to the Netherlands. Besides, this year I’ve been shooting more with the 50mm anyway.

Eight days with just the 50mm has made me realize just how versatile a lens it is. Just take a peek at the pictures I posted over the last week. In some instances it feels like a telephoto lens; in others like a wide angle. Quite remarkable.

I’m not going to say that only having a single focal length takes a bunch of decision making out of the equation, allowing you to concentrate on the photograph… Ah… I just did. Sorry. It is true though.

The main point I want to make in this short post is this: spending time with only a single focal length is a great training exercise. Thoroughly liberating, it also forces you to get to know the focal length intimately – its strengths, its weaknesses and, most importantly, its possibilities.

My only complaint? That I have to gaffer tape on the lens hood to stop if from dropping off. How is it that lens manufacturers can design and produce such wonderfully advanced optics, but not a lens hood that will stay put?

Unlike the previous Focus on Friday photographers, I’ve actually met Peter Cox. Several times, in fact.

You might ask why, apart from being a good friend, I’ve selected a landscape photographer to appear on a blog given over mostly to documentary photography.

Simple really. Who says documentary photography has to include people? To my mind, landscape photography is about documenting the natural environment around us. It records the world we live it and often reveals its breathtaking, heart-stopping beauty.

A volcano by Peter Cox. Actually, if you live in Europe, it's THE volcano. You know the one. (c) Peter Cox 2010

What appeals to me about a lot of Peter’s work is the immediacy that I feel looking at it. It’s almost as if there’s nothing between me and the scene. I could almost step into the photograph because it feels so real. That’s a hard thing to do.

Peter is also very good at spotting remarkable things where to the untrained eye they simply don’t exist. Take the picture on the left below. I think it’s genius. The swirl is only revealed thanks to a longish shutter time. In real time, it wouldn’t have such an impact. In the photograph, it does – something Peter pre-visualized.

Two of my favourite Peter Cox photographs. (c) Peter Cox

That in itself raises an interesting question. If a photograph can only show something by virtue of a long exposure that produces an image the naked eye can’t see, is it truly documentary? I would argue that it is. It reveals the world to us in a way we hadn’t perceived. It illuminates. The longish shutter speed helps to describe the swirl (which by the way is a magnificent contrast to the static rock in the background) that we otherwise wouldn’t see. It helps tell the story of the pool of water and of the landscape. And telling stories what documentary photography is all about.

That particular photograph tells another story. Look at the layers in the rock. How many centuries did it take to create them? And how many more for water and wind to erode the rock to its current state?

The final photograph here is another favourite. The Dark Hedges in Co. Antrim. They look as if they were designed by Tolkien. What I love in particular is the way Peter has revealed the structure and form of the branches. There is almost a motion to them. That takes craft.

The last day of 2009 brought a nice surprise.

While shopping for a suit, I found a copy of the January 2010 issue of Professional Photographer magazine with the results of its 2009 awards. I knew I’d been shortlisted in the Social Reportage/Wedding category, but didn’t know what had come of it. Turns out my entry, which was reproduced in the magazine, was commended. That’s jury speak for “Very Good, But Not Quite Good Enough”.

Still, better than a kick in the teeth, no?

Commended in the 2009 "Professional Photographer" magazine awards. (c) Roger Overall 2009

I should also point out that the results were recently announced for the European Photographer of the Year Awards.

I entered two categories … [drum roll] … and didn’t make a mark in either.

The next awards to be announced that are relevant to me are the National Photographic Awards here in Ireland. That’s not until the end of February, though.

My mother recently showed me a scrapbook. It contained postcards and photographs of England assembled by my Dutch grandfather from 1966 to 1977.

There is a photograph of him and my Dutch grandmother at the entrance of Westminster Abbey. There is also one of my grandmother, my mother and my father posing in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace.

These two photographs are over 40 years old.

They will, with careful attention, still be around in 40 years’ time.

That is the beauty of prints. They come with a guarantee that we will be able to view them in the future.

Digital files don’t.

Optical discs corrode.

Hard drives fail.

File formats become obsolete.

If you want to ensure that you will be able to view today’s digital photographs at some point in the future, have prints made at a reputable lab.

A page from my Dutch grand parents' England scrapbook. Still "readable" after 40 years. (c) Roger Overall 2009

Each year, there are one or two wedding venues that reoccur in my diary more than most. This year, it was The Rectory in Glandore.

I also photographed regularly at the Roman Catholic church in Glandore this year, a venue previously unknown to me. I immediately fell for the place. For a photographer, it’s a wonderful building, with gorgeous light.

Incidentally, during 2009 I also photographed for the first time at the church in which I was married: the Star of the Sea in Ballycotton.

Here are some favourites from Sandra and Eric’s wedding in early September. Lovely people and a great combination of venues.

You guessed it. The Rectory and the RC church at Glandore.

This was taken over at the house where the groom was getting ready. I love the exuberence of the laughter. (c) Roger Overall 2009

I have a thing for mirrors and reflections. Just the way I'm wired, I suppose. There's added interest to the photograph because of the duplication of the bride looking in the mirror and the make-up artist looking at the bride - both their heads are at the same angle. (c) Roger Overall 2009

I also have a thing about placing the main subject way, way, way off centre in my photographs. Again, it's just something that happens instinctively rather than with any forethought. Typically, the subject ends up on the righthand side. We read from left to right, so I think that's the reason for many of my compositions. (c) Roger Overall 2009

See what I mean? (c) Roger Overall 2009

The bride arriving. What I like about this shot are the three phases of light. Dad in full sun light, bride halfway, bridesmaid heading into the darkness. (c) Roger Overall 2009

My favourite moment on any wedding day. Bride and groom finally get to say something to each other. (c) Roger Overall 2009

(c) Roger Overall 2009

A rarity: a posed photograph. How could I not, though with those windows behind? (c) Roger Overall 2009

Well wishers in Glandore. Everyone perks up on a wedding day, even people who have nothing to do with the occasion. Of course, it helps to be sitting outside in the sun with a pint looking out over a fine view (c) Roger Overall 2009

(c) Roger Overall 2009

I love photographing food. And this was a particular treat, because I love cheese too. A new interpretation of what cheesecake should be. (c) Roger Overall 2009

Back to mirrors and reflections again. Starting to wonder if I should seek help. (c) Roger Overall 2009

I’ve done quite a bit of food-related work in the past, and it’s something I enjoy. It’s also a business sector well suited to the documentary approach.

I’ve just added a gallery to the new website featuring photographs taken at a local bakery. It shows the kind of work we could only dream of when we were children. I mean, imagine how a seven-year-old would react if you told them that this was your day job:

The icing on the cake. A no nonsense approach at the Old Mill Confectionery bakery here in Cork. (c) Roger Overall 2008

Sometimes I feel like Homer Simpson.

Not just because I could stand to lose a few pounds, enjoy bacon and drink beer, but because I sometimes do silly things. Not intentionally. They just creep up on me in moments of mental fog.

Take this year’s entry for the Professional Photographer of the Year Awards here in Ireland. A lot of time and effort goes into qualifying photographs, from which a final panel of four pictures is chosen and entered into a particular category. It’s a process that takes six months. So you’d have to be some kind of numnutz to put in all the hard graft only to slip up on a basic mistake at the end. You’d have to be a real Homer.

That would be me.

Having pulled together a strong panel of commercial photographs, one I thought might just catch the judges’ eyes this year because it hung together so well, I discovered that one of the pictures had a big flaw. A super-sized honker of a fault, big enough for me to decide it would ruin the chances of the entire panel.

So what happened? How did a sub-standard image get entered into the preliminary qualifying judgings in the first place?

Long story short – the IPPA uses an online submission system (which, by the way, is terrific) and I uploaded the wrong version of the image. I should have realized sooner – like when the photograph received a much lower score than I anticipated during the judging. At the time, I put the score down to a lapse of sanity among the judges – something regularly commented upon by photographers. Now I can see they were right and my sloppiness has come home to roost.

Doh!

The final national judging doesn’t allow any room for error. When we get to this stage of the awards process, the stakes are high and only the best work will do. A minor imperfection in a photograph (or indeed a whopper) can undermine the chances of an entire panel, regardless of how good the other three are. So out went the commercial panel and a valuable lesson learned. Entering awards is an exacting process better undertaken by Lisa than Homer.

I’ll still go for the single image award in the commercial category, but that doesn’t have the same cachet. Portfolios is where it is at.

Mercifully, I didn’t have all my eggs in one basket. In fact, out of the three panels I intended to enter, the commercial one was the weakest. I also have panels lined up for the the pictorial/travel and the reportage wedding categories.  The latter is by far my strongest suit. The problem here was reducing a dozen very strong photographs down to a quartet. Artistically, I’ve had a great year, producing my best work yet. Anne and I spent a good bit of time this afternoon discussing various picture combinations for the final panel. We’ll know in February, when the winners are announced, whether we chose the right one.

A grab shot of the layouts we came up with for the 2010 IPPA/RSA Photographer of the Year Awards this afternoon. Only later in the day did I discover the flawed photograph in the Advertising/Commercial panel (c) Roger Overall 2009

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Ireland has had a rotten week.

It hosed down out of the heavens pretty much 24/7 every day this week. Monsoon-like. Or in the Cork vernacular: monsoon, like.

And there was that incident in Paris.

While the latter hurts, there is no doubt that it is the former that is going to hurt the country more. Businesses will suffer badly. And round our way, we most likely won’t have any fresh tap water for a while because the floods contaminated the water supply.

[As an aside. I do sympathize with the Irish regarding the football. Being half-English, I still feel the pain from the Hand of God. Come to think of it, the other half of me is Dutch. Football fans will know that Holland had its own Argentine nightmare in the World Cup. Similarly, both England and Holland have a thing about Germany. Both also have a rich naval tradition. And produce fine matured cheese ... Hang on ... Isn't it odd how you never see England and Holland in the same room together ...? ... Sorry, got sidetracked there]

By way of a miracle, today was a gorgeous autumnal day. Which was lucky for the couple whose wedding I was photographing. The rain is set to return tomorrow, they say.

Not everything went according to plan, though. I was supposed to start the day photographing the groom in Mallow. For those of you who don’t know, Mallow was built in a river, rather than beside it. A plump swan landing on the river is all it takes for it to burst its banks. Let alone a full-on, multi-day downpour.

So I abandoned that plan and headed straight to Fermoy, where the bride was getting ready. For those of you who don’t know Fermoy, let’s just say that it was built in the river Blackwater rather than beside it …

I arrived early and decided to take some scene-setting shots for my bride and groom.

The river Blackwater in Fermoy, Co. Cork after torrential rainfall over several days. (c) Roger Overall 2009

World's most pointless sign spotted in Fermoy, Co. Cork. (c) Roger Overall 2009

The darker side of all of this is that businesses are going to suffer badly from the flooding, especially as many local SMEs wouldn't have been able to get insurance cover following flooding in previous years. (c) Roger Overall 2009

At my Friday morning BNI meetings we spend a lot of time talking about dream referrals. The kind of referral that gets you excited, as well as swelling the bank account. For years, I couldn’t really tell you what that was for me.

That’s because I’m an idiot.

Well, not entirely, but the answer had been staring me in the face since mid-2004. That’s five years that it was right there in front of me and I didn’t see it.

Why the blindness?

It’s easy to say that life got in the way and I got distracted. Keeping a business afloat and paying a mortgage can easily divert you from your true course if you let it. I did.

That isn’t the real reason, though. The real reason is that it has taken until now for me to realize fully what it is I want to do with my photography. Without that direction, it’s impossible to say what a dream referral is. Even if you’ve already had one, done the work, and told everyone how great the assignment was.

But now I have my compass point, so it’s easy to recognize the assignment for what it was. A dream assignment.

It was a dream for a couple of reasons. Exotic travel (Suriname and Guyana), a frightening number of inoculations (breaks the ice at parties), an interesting and tricky subject (bauxite shipping through the jungle), a very appreciative client (JP Knight), a reasonable pay day, and total creative freedom. That last one is the key. Creative freedom allowed me to shoot in a very documentary way. I didn’t know it at the time, but documentary is my passion. I love photographing people living their lives – be it their working lives or their private lives. Now that I do know that, it’s easy to look back on the assignment and see it for what it really was.

All of which means that at BNI meetings I can now articulate what a dream referral is for me. That’s just as well. I haven’t chased work like it since, so I have some catching up to do.

I’ve posted some of the photographs from the shoot with JP Knight below, with some commentary on each one.

Bauxite in Suriname is mined in the coastal jungles and shipped to a refinery near Parimaribo. This photograph shows how narrow the Cottica river gets and the skill it takes to push empty and full barges to the mine and back. The ability of the master to get two huge barges and the tug pushing them around some tight bends was incredible. The wheelhouse is elevated high above the tree line to maximize visibility. Mind you, they don't stop at night, using powerful spotlights like the one on the left to see the trees (c) Roger Overall 2004

A barge pushing two empty barges passes one with full loads on either the Cottica or the Commewijne river in Suriname - I forget which as they merge at one point before joining the Suriname river. Like the previous photograph this is notable for me because it was one of the last I took for a commercial assignment on film. Fuji Astia 100, if you're interested. (c) Roger Overall 2004

Bauxite being loaded at the mine in Suriname. I liked the gesture of the hands, which is almost celebrating the delivery of the wet bauxite as if it were manna from heaven. (c) Roger Overall 2004

Dusk on the Commewijne river in Suriname. I had hoped for something more dramatic as the sun was setting. Again, another photograph shot on film. (c) Roger Overall 2004

And then the sun set - (c) Roger Overall 2004

In Guyana, the bauxite is shipped in a dry state to a loading station on the coast where it is transferred to a drybulk carrier that takes it to a refinery overseas. (c) Roger Overall 2004

A bauxite barge on the Berbice river in Guyana. Quite a story to this picture. It was taken the day after we were supposed to go up river to the mine by speedboat. However, the boat almost tipped over and I nearly lost all my camera gear. We did, in fact, lose JP Knight's local MD over the side. Consequently, we decided it was too dangerous to continue, so the next day we hitched a ride on a small plane that picked us up by the side of the road next to a sugar cane field near New Amsterdam. Seriously, I'm not kidding. As we flew south, we saw one of JP Knigtht's barges and I managed to get this shot that shows the expanse of the river as it approaches the sea. I'll never forget the plane ride. There were drafts coming from places in the fuselage that had nothing to do with the air conditioning, which wasn't working anyway. Just sayin'. (c) Roger Overall 2004

A geared drybulker loads bauxite into its holds from JP Knight barges moored alongside. The master of one of JP Knight's tugs looks on. People who know me know that I have a bit of an attraction to reflections. I'm just hard-wired that way. (c) Roger Overall 2004

I get asked a lot whether I shoot colour photographs. It’s a by-product of showing a lot of black and white stuff.

Actually, I really like colour. It’s just hard to incorporate it into a photograph properly. I’m no Jay Maisel, Ernst Haas or Steve McCurry, and if you’re not careful the colour can overwhelm the photograph and the story you’re trying to tell in it. Red in particular can be a pig. You can have your subject big in the picture, in one of the strong compositional locations but if there’s something in the photo that’s red, you’re stuffed. That’s where the eye will go.

Still, occasionally I get a colour picture that just works and would lose big time if it were converted to colour.

I’m working on my website at the moment, adding some galleries. In my back catalogue, I came across this picture, which will be appearing in one of the new galleries soon. It was taken in Suriname a few years ago while I was on the best corporate shoot I’ve ever done. In fact, it merits its own post. Check back next week for that.

The managing director of JP Knight was so excited about this shot that he made me enter it for a FujiFilm Professional Merit Award. It got one. Taken in Suriname, it shows a shipment of bauxite (the raw material for aluminium) being shipped down river from a mine in the jungle - (c) Roger Overall 2004