Starting up the blog again!

I live and work in a remote valley in South Wales. My studio is next door to my house so I often spend each day either at Poppit Sands photographing the beach or tucked away in the darkroom, happily breathing in the chemicals as I struggle with learning how to create silver gelatin prints.

This is about it - this is what I do each day. So I have decided to start up a blog again that I stopped over a year ago. I hope that I can update the blog with my discoveries and how things progress as well as why I do what I do.

Keith Carter Quote

I found a great quote about Keith Carter fron Bill Wittliff - I hope that he doesn't mind me repeating it here -

'That is his bent: to keep moving, to keep working, to keep challenging himself to go ever deeper, to keep risking the horror of losing his way because there’s no map or chart beyond his own instinct to guide him – and there are never, ever, any promises at the end. Believe me, you’ve gotta have a lot of ass in your britches to live with these kinds of uncertainties on a daily basis.'

Balancing sharp and soft

I now have a definate choice to make when I start work each day - to dive into the sharper intense images like Poppit or London - or work through the softer more subtle images from Windows into Winter for example. I know pretty soon if I have made the right choice as it either flows or it doesn't. I still find it interesting that you can look at an image all day and not see its possibilities - then the next day you get it right away and it is done. Take the image below for example. It took me a long time before I saw what it could be.

Latest London Work

The London work is moving along with a number of new trips planned soon. The place is so full of exciting and monolithic buildings it is sometimes hard to stop and think straight when you are there.

Shooting with no viewfinder

A Return to Simpler Things

After a long period of thinking in a certain way I have found it interesting to almost 'wipe' my mind clear and begin afresh with something as simple as it gets - with not even a viewfinder fitted - to see if the most simple of images can create emotion or reaction - and if it can then is it worth studying further - or is the secret in the fact that it wasn't studied and measured and tested beforehand?

More London work

I am still working on my London shoots. There is such a mass of information collected from my London visits that it is taking a while to make the cream rise to the top, so to speak. This way of working is so different to Poppit - where weekly visits of 12 shots each was the norm - but I can still feel the rush of excitement as I stood in front of these buildings, the same way as I used to feel while shooting the sands at Poppit.
Which is a good sign.

The London work so far can be seen at http://www.mgjackson.co.uk/gallery_420688.html