Tooty Tooty Toot . . It's Hip To Be Square (Part One)

Greetings ship-mates!

It's a Saturday morning, the sun isn't shining and your ol' Cap'n Sheephouse has decided that it's time to renew the caulking on the decks.

The comfy familiarity of that piece of deck you always walk across? Begone with it. Gouge out that tarred rope and set to work. It needs to be renewed and different by the end of the day.

See, the world's a changin' faster than a spring tide and before you know it (if you're not careful) you'll be washed away.

Change is everything - follow that new current till it leads you to a promised land.

***

I have no idea what the above was about at all, but sometimes your fingers work in mysterious ways and maybe, just maybe, this has led on to an article that is about stepping outside of conformity. Whatever it is, sometimes the Cap'n lashes out with the cat o'nine-tails and you have to follow.

Anyway, the title of today's Weekend FogBlog alludes to a certain Mr. Alex Turnips of Sheephousecestershire, who in the strangest move I have ever seen from a teenager believes himself to be the soul-mate of a certain Mr. Huey Lewis. Who? you ask, mouth aghast, toast and bacon raining down upon your lap. You know,  . . . Huey Lewis And The News. That band from the 80's that liked golf and suits. Yes . . them!

I swear to you, Alex sees himself pulling up at the Old Course wearing a suit and a Pringle jumper and making a number of hole-in-ones whist an adoring audience looks on. This is very strange for someone of such tender years, because in a time of his life where it was set in stone (almost) that he should be raising a middle finger to conformity, he has done a particularly clever thing . . .

Look around you.

Youth these days, I feel sad for them actually, because on the surface they seem to have it all on a plate. Really. We have made sure that they have everything their hearts desire and they live (to a large extent, and I know that this is a bit of a generalisation) pretty untaxing lives.

They can communicate constantly without hogging the one household method of communication (which used to be the phone in the hall . . ) and escape for hours to worlds that someone has created for them by gaming, so that they don't even have to use their brains to create worlds from a printed page.

A lot of them seem to be ferried everywhere - no more standing at a bus stop getting soaked and arriving at your destination smelling like a musty ferret.

The privations I remember from my youth are no longer there - and it wasn't as if I lived a youth full of privations. On the surface it looks like they have it all.

That is entirely my generation's fault though, because we have taken away a certain very necessary thing from them: the need to struggle.

Think about it - there are no pricks to kick against, because they've all been covered up with soft spongy stuff to protect them. Instead of feeling a need to rebel against conformity we've made the world a safer (and less conformist) place for them! You can pretty much be your own person from an incredibly early age before you even know your self.

God knows though, if I were a youth of today, I'd feel I had to rebel against something - just take a look at that wall of hopeless defeat we've put up in front of them and then tell me they have it easy.

Despite this the riots of last year were nothing to do with knocking down that wall or even knocking on any doors that mattered. No dear reader, we've made such a bosh of it that when an opportunity came to try and change things, most of them saw it as nothing more than an opportunity to make a mess of innocent people's lives and get more stuff. How mucked up is that?

You can't even rebel through music anymore simply because it has all been done - my [punk] generation made sure of that. Yet thankfully you do still see lads and lasses of a certain age pursuing this path, because if they didn't what else would appall their doting parents?

Music is a BIG subject, but I feel I can write about it because that is how I have earned a living for the past 30 years.
From the rebellious youths point of view there are a million permutations: Death metal, Grime, Dub-Step, Toot, Rap, Math-Doom-Sludge, anything appended by 'hyphen core', you name it, think of a heady mix of the most unlikely things and it will have been done. Add in a goodly amount of swearing and voila! there's a ready youthful audience.

The likes of a band like Slipknot (who have had a shelf-life well beyond what I would have expected of them) still have an audience of youths who feel that in this bunch of middle-aged men they have a ready outlet for the uprising of hormones and glumness.  Yet there's nothing wrong with it.

This is where Mr. Turnips stroke of genius has come in, because when all around him is Uzi-toting, mother-hugging, death-grunting, black-studded, de-tuned, machine-made, faceless plastic* he has donned the uniform of a middle-aged man (metaphorically of course).

Huey Lewis and the News might well have sung 'It's Hip To Be Square' but blimey could they have realised how dreadfully old they sound(ed) - even at the time. Nowadays who the hell listens to them apart from an audience remembering the glory days of leg warmers and ra-ra skirts?

Is Mr. Turnips liking of them an incredibly subtle form of rebellion where something that seemed old to me in my 20's now sounds even older at the age of 50?

Forget rebelling against the music your parents liked, this is rebelling by liking the music your parents didn't like . . .

It is a contra-reverso-back-to-tomorrowland.

More fiendish than a googly.

More devilish than backspin on a ping pong ball.

In a word he has rebelled.

Am I appalled?

Yes.

Will I let him wear a Pringle jumper . . . er . . .

I do admire his stance though . . .

***

But what, you might ask, has this taxi ride through the tides and mores of early life got to do with photography? Well, before I jumped in the driving seat and headed off across country with the wrong tyres on, I intended to write about the square photograph. 

And no, it isn't a picture of Mr. Lewis. 

No, I am talking about 6x6 cm, 2 ¼", or 2¼ Square, whatever you want to call it. 

The square photographic format had been around since before Franke and Heidecke came out with the groundbreaking Rolleiflex in 1929, and it's importance was further reinforced by numerous copies and then post-WWII by a certain Mr.Victor Hasselblad, but it is weird, because logically and visually a square photograph shouldn't work. 

Think about it, the world is a rectangular place. 

You watch rectangular TV pictures, which (apart from the world around them) is yer average human's primary source of visual stimulation; you look at mostly rectangular paintings; books are just rectangles on their sides, the computer screen you are reading this on is a rectangle; ok if you're smart-phoning this, then that's a rectangle on its end too . . . and that iPad you're hiding behind that cushion? Yep . . . do you get where I am going?

Why the hell would you want to look at a square photograph?

And yet, when it is done correctly, it is the seemingly most natural of formats.

This problem has been succinctly discussed by Mr.Aaron Siskind:

"We as photographers have basically so little to work with in a picture. There's a given space, which we repeat over and over again. It presents a problem because I may want to change the space without changing the dimensions of the space. I had this problem with the meaning of the divers in relation to the kind of space surrounding them. The picture had to be square because I was working with the Rolleiflex. No two square pictures are square in the same way. Some are heavy at the bottom, and so they extend beyond the square. Some become horizontal depending on how you weight the space with blacks, whites and intermediate tones. In the case of the divers, I wanted no clouds, only white (or grey) in the space enveloping the figures; seemingly endless space."

                                 

                                 

                                 

                                 

"No two square pictures are square in the same way."

There is genius and a deep understanding of the format in that sentence.

His photographs are just incredible images if you think about it; they balance so well and Mr.Siskind has sequenced them so that visually they make a balanced narrative. In a word, they are a master's sequence.

So folks, it can be done. It is really quite an achievement to make what, on the surface, seems like a fairly limited square view of our wonderful world, produce images so incredibly dynamic. And especially so when you realise that he was using a Rolleiflex with its fixed standard lens. No telephotos, no motor-drives, no digital spraying . . .

***

Bear with me reader, because we are nearly there . . 

Half the thing with square photographs is that your eye has to be attuned to the format - in other words you have to be like Mr.Huey Lewis, you have to think 'It's Hip To Be Square'.

Ignore what your brain is telling you about the fact it isn't a rectangle and concentrate. If you're using a Twin Lens Reflex, then you had better concentrate even harder, because that view of the world isn't just square . . .it is a tad dim and back-to-front!

This is a poor photograph, but basically you are looking down into the viewing area of a Rolleiflex . . that's the Cap'n's 'Indoor Shed' you can see . . .and it is back to front.

Adjusting yourself to the format you are using is obviously as basic as releasing the shutter, but there is something about the rectangular formats that fits the eye more naturally than the square. I think a lot of people find it easier to compose for a rectangle, and as I said before, I think this could well be to do with the fact that visually the world is slanted that way.

But this is about squares.

You have to think square, and that is a difficult way to think.

Personally I made many square photographs for quite a number of years and very few of them any good. It was only when I moved over to rectangular photographs (with the gift of a Nikon F from a friend) and then returned to making square ones, did I feel that I could make the format work for me.

                                   

I feel that I achieved a balance within the square with this photograph, and even though it is a single image I feel it has a narrative flow.** 

Remember the saying: "One picture is worth a thousand words"? 

Well, with regard to my humble effort I think that there is a story to be told with it or a story to be interpreted from it. The decision is yours, and thank you for your time.

It was made with my Rolleiflex T and I was using a #1 Rolleinar in a way it wasn't designed to be used.

The exposure was 1/30th of a second at F16. I placed the foliage on Zone VI ad have printed down from there.

The film was (sniff) Ilford FP4+ at EI 50 and it was developed in Kodak HC110, Dilution H for 20 mins.

I used fairly normal agitation for the first 5 mins; intermittent until 10 mins and then I left it to stand until 20 minutes.

***

I realise this has been a long haul this week, so thank you for your time.

Believe it or not, Part 2 of 'Tooty Tooty Toot . . It's Hip To Be Square' is next week, but I think I shall make it more . . how shall we say . . Zen.

Stay Square mein fronds. Over and out.

* I could have easily slipped into lip-smackin' thirst quenchin' . . Pepsi

** I don't necessarily think that you need a sequence of photographs to have a photographic narrative. It is popular today to have a huge run of images and say that you have a narrative going. I'll counter this by saying that any single one of Sebastian Salgado's images (I am particularly thinking of Workers) would make a narrative in its own right. 

Drink Entire Against The Madness Of Crowds

Greetings m'Dearios, for 'tis time to straddle your nadger and prepare to gallop across the bacon counter . . . yes, another Weekend FogBlog is upon us and in an unashamedly commercial manouevre, I am going to urge you all to purchase a copy of Ramblin' Syd Rumpo In Concert.

This album of greatness from the 1960's meant one thing in the Sheephouse household . . . Fun.

And yes that is Fun with a Capital F, because such is the genius of it, the sheer eloquence and power of the English language contained therein; the oppulence of innuendo and the mind-bendingly weird words quothed, that should you not laugh at all upon hearing it, you are officially dead.

Remember, this is the record that circa 1965 (as far as I can work out) gave the word GRUNGE to the English language .

It is one of the things that has made your Ol' Uncle Sheephouse who I am today, and I will "tether my nadgers to a grouting pole, because the old grey mare is a grungin' in the meadow" such is my pride at being associated with it.

    

(To the right of this page you'll find a 'Sheephouse Approved' item. I am sorry to put a blatant plug on something like FB, it is an experiment really . . . for the price of a pint in these parts, you can experience what I am talking about. Ignore the terrible, shameful cover, also I urge you to ignore Track 17 onwards, as they are just supposed vfm add-ons. Up to Track 15 you have the whole album and it is pure comedy Gold.)

Anyway, commercialism out of the way, basically the above had a huge influence on my love of language. I pinched my brother Chris's copy when I was about 8 and never looked back. At that tender age, I couldn't believe anything could ever be as funny, and you know for all the 'sophistication' you supposedly get as you get older, personally, there's still a wee boy happy to play this on a hand-me-down Dansette and listen to it again and again and again, laughing out loud the whole time.
There are still people in the world today who would consider Syd to be too risqué!
Really!
So I urge you to laugh in their faces before hitting them on the grommet with a wrought-iron splunger.

***

This aside into the well-tilled earth of childhood is a way of leading you into the main point of this FB. Basically, a myriad things make up you as a person, but one of the deepest (besides a knowledge of yourself) is a sense of place and it is something we as modern and mobile citizens of the 21st Century have almost lost.
Having lived for so long in a city (and truly being a country boy at heart) sense of place means more to me now than it ever has. It has led me in my photographic adventures to try and find small, quiet places that have a sense of depth to them. That depth of feeling from such places has become a substitute for a longing which entirely takes me back to living in an ancient old cottage in the middle of nowhere with my Mum and Dad. The cottage (and I'll give it its full original name - Three Wells Cottage) was on a site above a steep drop down a riverbank. There were three natural springs on the bank as well as a river and (to me) there was a feeling about the place that it had long been a stop-off point for thirsty travellers. The water from the springs was sweet and good and there were well-trodden paths down the steep incline. I was incredibly lucky - I had a riverbank of some 2 miles to play along, I could walk and talk (to myself) and above all watch and listen. That powerful solitude (and it was incredibly lonesome at times) formed a deep well-spring of feeling for nature within me which I have never lost.
Being city-bound though, it is difficult to fully experience the country life (to say the least!), but as they say, where there's a will there's a way, and in my own inquisitive way, I have discovered places both nearby and further away which sort of have that same quiet solitude to them.
Maybe you are fortunate enough to have discovered such places in your life. They are to you (in a way) secret. It could be a room where you can be alone or a small corner of a field, an old graveyard or a mountain, but wherever it is, it is yours (for a while). It feels good doesn't it!
(Now the following little bit will take us away and on a slightly circular path . . but don't worry fearless FB'ers . . we'll get back on the main path in a minute!)
It was quite the thing in our ancestors day to travel little further than the fields surrounding the village. Some daring souls risked the next town on a market day. Long treks were considered gruelling and dangerous and populations generally stabilised themselves to certain areas. Obviously this all changed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and though the said change was inevitable it wasn't necessarily for the better, because something was lost.
I've never read about anyone thinking this way before, but it's my opinion and I'd love to know what you think:
Back in the mid-1990's I started thinking about my ancestors* and how their lives might have been and I realised that with all the movements and upheavels of modern society something incredibly important has been lost to modern man - namely . . .wait for it . . . the hearth.
Now that to you dear reader will sound totally bonkers, but the use of the word hearth doesn't just encompass the actual physical fire-burning centre of homes for millenia, it has become in my mind a concept which encompasses home; the feeling of being at home; somewhere with a rich loam in which one can root one's soul; and, vitally, one's family. My hearth is my family: my wife and my son, they are where I want to be, but strangely and contrary to this too is the feeling that before I die I have to live once more in the countryside, which is where my true roots are. The countryside is also hearth to me.
So, whilst my family and I have to live in the city for work and education, when we escape the hamster wheel we go to quieter places.
One day, God willing, we will uproot ourselves from the city and find somewhere quiet and with a sunny aspect.
But for now, we have to make do and make the efforts to find places that are brimming with solitude.
Places that could be called hearth.

***

Having a love of hillwalking I have lugged photographic gear to many different places, some barren and wild with no trace of any feeling at all and then, some that are extraordinary.
One of these is below.

(My notebook says: "This is the weirdest most secret place on earth. Can't help feeling that in wading in, I violated it - there is a strong presence to the place that is haunting. I did say thank you though!")

I simply would love to tell you where this is, but you see dear reader I am being selfish, and I cannot. It is not far from where I live, but it is a convoluted journey. Wending your way along quiet and ever-narrowing lanes you really feel like you are heading into the depths of nowhere. The crazy thing is, it is a popular destination for visitors of a Vibram wearing persuasion**, and yet I wonder how many have actually seen the place like this.
I have visited it in all sorts of weather, from bright sun, to mist and slight snow, hard perma-frost, to high white cloud cover, and every time it has looked different. It is a very secret place. To me I can well imagine it being a spot where the spirits of nature were worshipped in ancient times - it simply has that feel to it. Being there in the early morning, and hearing the sound of rushing water, it is quite easy to be carried back millenia.
The photo was made with my beloved Rolleiflex in early October. I was knee deep in icy mountain water but I didn't care. The Rollei was on a tripod, and the tripod took days to dry out properly, but it was worth it. I had no towel with me so ended up removing my trousers and drying my feet on them!
I think the spirit of the place has been captured sufficiently on a humble roll of Ilford FP4+.
It is a full-frame photograph, no cropping and the FP4+ was rated at EI 64 and developed in 1:3 Ilford Perceptol.
I wish I could use FP4+ more often these days as it is an incredible film, and especially so with Perceptol.
The print is un-retouched and was made on Grade 2 Ilford Galerie, developed in Moersch Eco print developer.
WYSIWYG!


* Inspired by a marvellous short story from the Master . . Mr.Frank Herbert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_GM_Effect
If all you've ever read by Frank is Dune and the billion awful follow-ups to the original genius novel then I highly recommend reading his other books!
** Hillwalkers

Up Close & Personal

Listen. What's that sound? It's like a cross between a lonely sea monster (thank you Mr. Ray Bradbury) and a fog horn, way out beyond the reef, where the dark ocean starts to shelve away to night. Yes, its the sound of another FogBlog!

On that salubrious note, I will greet one and all a jolly good morning.

Today's post deals with an oft overlooked (and much beloved by me) accessory for ye olde Rolleiflex, namely the Rolleinar. These close-up lenses were made in 3 different magnifications namely #1, #2 and #3. As close-up lenses they excel - you've never seen anything as sharp, you've never seen 'bokeh' as nice. They are extraordinarily good, and parallax corrected too. The people behind the design of the Rolleiflex really thought everything through - everything fits and everything works so well, you rarely have to think much about accessories at all.

However despite their abilities as close-up lenses, one day I discovered another use for them. Messing around, I focused in really close on something and then changed my view so that what I was seeing was something from nearer infinity, and bingo, I discovered that by racking the focus in and out on subject matter that wasn't a close-up, you had a wonderful, variable soft focus lens.

I love Clarence White's photographs, and I also have a massive respect for anything from the Photo Secession, and I found that by using the Rolleinars in this way I could achieve a faux Pictorialist effect. I think it works, if you like what you see, feel free to comment.

This photograph was taken in some woods on the edge of a caravan site we were staying at at Crocketford in Dumfriesshire; the weather had been the usual mix of shower-dodging and things were getting really stormy quite early. What I think about this photograph is that it can either be threatening or friendly.  You could get a feeling of threat from it (as in nothing is as clear as it seems; what is that shadow lurking up ahead? etc etc) but to me it is more friendly and hopefully touching on some of that Pictorialist Romanticism whilst being a tad ethereal at the same time.
Who'd have thought some densely planted Pine and Birch could have been so transformed by light.
Camera was my old Rolleiflex T, with a Rolleinar #1 fitted. Film was TMX 100 developed in Barry Thornton's 2-bath developer. It was a cinch to print on Grade 2 paper, and I printed it slightly lighter as the original lighting was a bit too oppressive.
In the words of Joe Satriani: I like it. 

Lucky Findings

Morning, as they say around these parts, and it is. Not as cold as it has been thank goodness.
This post is going to extol the sheer enjoyment of walking around with the right camera.
You're probably muttering to yourselves, what? and you could well be right. I wander a lot with a 35mm camera and it is fine, but there's certain things that deserve the breadth of greys that you will only get with 120-size film.
The strange thing about this is, that just using medium format isn't always a guarantee of tone. My main camera for a number of years was a 1960's Rolleiflex T - quite possibly (well any Rollei really) one of the greatest cameras ever invented; negative size was the ubiquitous 6x6 cm,  however I have at times struggled to get a spaciousness of grey tones.
A number of years ago I had a Pentax 67 for a very short time - it was great but totally unreliable, as well as having the loudest shutter on the planet (akin to a bird scarer actually). I returned it to the vendor, and missed it like mad. Last year I had the opportunity to buy a Koni-Omega Rapid 100 - yes it has problems like the film advance which is the most strange thing ever, and its rangefinder is a tad dim, but the lens, gosh it's a beauty. Mine is the 90mm Super Omegon a direct descendent of the original Hexanon in a different shutter. It's a Tessar design, but actually one of the very sharpest lenses I own.  Very versatile, AND attached to the correct 'walkabout' camera (see where I am going here) just the thing for wandering around with just in case the unexpected turns up . . .which in this case it did. It wouldn't have looked half as nice in 35mm.

This TriCool machine was pure happenstance, found in some old mill buildings along the road from me. What it was for I have no idea . . however it was obviously three times cooler than any other machine on the planet.
The scan doesn't do the negative justice. Film was TMY2 400 at EI 400, developed in the rather marvellous HC110 Dilution G. This was a compensating dilution as extolled by Mr. Ansel Adams, and I really like it. HC 110 is very active, but using this dilution semi-stand gives an enormous palette of greys. The camera was handheld, and yes, the white specks everywhere are what you think they are - God bless the pigeon.
There y'go, you've maybe learned something and it wasn't too painless was it.