Naiads

Creating images of women in the water has been a passion for me over the last few summers. I've had enormous fun styling (trawling vintage shops, doing a little sewing, testing in the pool) and shooting with the very generous help and patience of my model Hopewell.

It's been a steep learning curve. I've worked exclusively outdoors in natural light. I've done my best to control conditions with careful timing and positioning, and I've gradually learned how to realise practically what I can see in my mind's eye.

I've loved many of the resulting images, but they haven't tended to be very successful in competition. Maybe I love them mainly because they've entailed so much work, and they still don't look quite like I think they do. Maybe they seem strange and difficult to understand. But I'm determined to keep working on this theme regardless and to see what results.

'Naiads' is my most recent addition to the series, and the process of making this composite image has been great fun, though quite hard on my cloning finger (I should have used my Wacom tablet....). 

I originally thought of a combination of four images. In each of these, Hopewell had been spinning around in the water, creating effective movement in both the water and the trailing pieces of her gown. I'd shot from above, standing quite precariously on a diving board above the pool.

But I felt that the one at the top left looked too weird and inelegant, so she had to go. 

I kept the best three, and rearranged them.

While I loved the colours (the pink gown was a delight to photograph in the dark water), I knew that my compositing skills aren't yet up to combining all of these, and I converted the file to mono.

It also struck me at this point that the women were dancing in a circle, so I began to work towards this for my final image.

The many shots I'd taken around these particular images were plundered for extra sections of water surface. It would be impossible to show this as a natural scene, so I aimed to allow visible water movement around each of the women and to keep it very subtle in all other areas.

I had the finished image printed in Hahnemule's new metallic photo rag paper. It has an amazing glisten and gleam, creating the effect of a moonlit pool, with the women shining from the black water like pearls. I love it. It remains to be seen whether any judges will agree with me, but in this case, that really doesn't matter. 

In harbour

Nothing makes me happier than an evening visit to a fishing harbour with my 100mm lens. I have hundreds of images to prove it.

It's maybe a bit of a niche interest, a detail shot of the beautiful rust on a fifty-year-old prawn trawler. But this weekend I've been trying to go a bit more mainstream with some colour-themed grids of my harbour close-ups. I'll put them in my Etsy shop and hope that someone else in the world shares my love.

Girl in the water

It's our third shoot at the pool, and the images I imagined are emerging on the back of my camera. 

Although the day is bright and Georgia July hot, the conifers overhanging the water create enough shadow to let my lens see into the depths.

Hope is getting good at the breathing - enough in to stay under water, enough out not to float too high. Her limbs look graceful as marble refracted through the green.

The dress, which looked as though it belonged on an overly modest middle-aged choirgirl when we found it in the vintage shop in Athens, is moving like blush-pink seaweed, tentacle sashes circling as Hope twists in the water.

She's a Nereid, a girl in a trance, a drowned treasure swept in on a full moon tide.

Queen of the Skies

Gorgeous, dilapidated, hopeful, romantic, the Regina Caelis is moored at Cook Street slip, Portaferry. I watched her for a while at dusk yesterday, thrilled to see her three masts in full sail.

She's eighty years old. She was built in Denmark and worked in her prime in the Faroes deep sea fishing fleet. In her forties she became the property of an Austrian couple who taught at the Vienna Conservatoire and spent their holidays exploring the Scottish coasts with her.

 As I watched, several cars came to screeching halts at the sight of her unfurled sails, works of art in themselves.

More than one passerby, approaching with cameras, murmured about Pirates of the Caribbean, and yeah, word is that the owners were approached by the producers, wanting to use her in one of the films. But they wanted to blow her up. I'm glad she was spared that indignity.

Tiny stories 2: Bokeh

Bokeh: points of light, rendered blurry by a lens. Or by memory. 

Until, today, they all come rushing back into focus.

Your mums walk you together to your first day at primary school. You feel important in your check dresses. You both have swishy ponytails, like real ponies. Mrs McManus, your teacher, is waiting at the classroom door. Lara runs up to her and makes her laugh.

You sit at a table with Ellen and Grace. Four solemn faces. A plastic pot with four fat pencils. Four big pieces of paper, blank, ready for you to draw whatever you like. This is going to be perfect.

Ciaran moves into the estate when you're nine. His dad has a fishing boat, like your dad, and sometimes you talk to him down at the harbour. One day he shows you a black and yellow crab his dad caught. You squeal a bit, but really you think it's quite interesting. Ciaran can tell. He gives it to you to keep. 

Lara likes it when you wear the same clothes. Or, even better, mix and match versions of the same clothes. Like when you wear jeans and a pink t-shirt, and she wears pink jeans with a blue t-shirt. Yours are from the factory shop, but she says hardly anyone can tell.

Ciaran asks if you want to go to the cinema in Newtownards with him. His face is all red, even though he is quite tanned and has a lot of freckles. You have to ask your mum, because of lifts, and she dithers a bit. You're very young, she says. But she likes Ciaran, and you're allowed to go. 

You talk to Ciaran all the time at home, but this is weird at first. He doesn't seem like his normal self.

The film turns out to be really frightening, though, and after you let out a scream and he laughs and puts his arm round you, it's all fine. As you leave the cinema, you agree on a much less scary version of the plot that you'll both tell your parents later.

You and Lara do your homework together most week nights. She copies your French and science. She tells you that you would be so pretty if you plucked your eyebrows. She leaps up, vivid and eager, and fetches her mum's tweezers. She'll do it for you. She watches her mum do it all the time. Lara's mum is pretty, so you hold still. It hurts much more than you expected, and it looks quite patchy afterwards. Lara says it'll be gorgeous when the patches grow back in.

You and Ciaran are sitting quietly on the harbour wall. Penny for your thoughts, he says. You were thinking about nothing in particular. You turn towards him and smile. He smiles at the same time, big and bright, and holds your hand tighter.  

It's Lara's idea to have a girls' picnic on the beach. Once the sandwiches and cans are done, you end up lying like four sardines on her granny's rug, sharing secrets and staring out eastwards. 

Sharing secrets is also Lara's idea. Usually you hate this, but somehow the hot hazy exam-weather afternoon and the circling gulls lull your guard down. Ellen and Grace's secrets are stupid things about lifting lipsticks from McCarthy's chemists. Yours is about Ciaran.

You talk slowly, watching a trawler on the horizon. You don't see her face.

Today fast forwards. You catch your breath from time to time, for the peonies on the pew-ends in the church. His jawline, with one tiny shaving cut. Dancing on the dock to Etta James in triple time. Your mum's smiles and her old Chanel perfume, which she keeps for good. Glasses and glasses of Moet and Chandon, like it's raining stars inside your head.

Lara and Ciaran falling, laughing, through the confetti into the turquoise Beetle and driving away from the harbour into married life, tin cans rattling like hell from the back bumper.

Harbour skulks

I've spent a couple of evenings skulking round the peninsula this week. It's been the perfect end to a day spent in an air-conditioned building doing stuff with sound and education and marking exams.

Even driving down the road, with the sunroof open on the old-skool Micra, makes me breathe more easily and kicks my mind into a more creative gear. If it was a film, I'd have something cool playing on my stereo too, but the last thing I need to hear after a day at work is music. Silence, which isn't silence but the hundred sounds of the fields and sea, is what I want.

It's bliss to sit on a bench outside the Portaferry Hotel in the sunshine and eat a bowl of mussels. The guy beside me tells how you can see five castles from here, and you can. Then the hotel minibus pulls up right in front of us, replacing that fairytale panorama with some well-maintained white Renault. Castle guy gives him a comical earful and our view is restored.

Then it's across the cow-parsleyed bends of the Cloughey Road to Portavogie, where the most lovely, most weathered fishing boats rest. Sunday is the best day to find them in harbour, but in the evening you can can often catch them returning from their day's work. 

I spend a while getting nice camera angles on the Crimson Arrow, which is having some work done in the yard. A gentleman approaches and tries to sell me the Crimson Arrow. It belongs to his brother. It's only 48 years old. You can make a great living in prawn fishing these days.

I have a vision of myself in sailor trousers and big sunglasses, lifting pretty prawns out of the Irish Sea in a vintage fishing net, against the background of my very cool faded red trawler. The photographs would be excellent.

At which point the Sapphire Stone sails in and I notice that actual fishermen seem to wear woolly hats, dungarees and rubber boots, and they have paid minimal attention to the styling of their decks while out on the seas. They also seem to have caught a lot more prawns than my intended net would ever manage.

So I reluctantly terminate my negotiations on the Crimson Arrow and wander off to shoot some reflections in the oily water. The light is lovely and there are miles of coastline still to enjoy this evening.

Ardglass, and the side of his face

J is visiting from Florida, and it's a beautiful day, so we set out on a showing-off-the-County-Down-coast driving trip, the one that always makes me think of Van Morrison's song Coney Island. We do stop off at Ardglass, though neither of us likes pickled herrings, and we won't be eating mussels till later, in the Mourne Seafood Restaurant.

We like Ardglass. Fishing harbours are one of my favourite types of place for photography, and it's good to be there with someone who shares my enthusiasm. Good to be with him, full stop.

He draws my attention to other interesting things in the town that I hadn't really noticed, like the abundance of medieval tower-houses and the little stone bathing hut on the rocky beach.

We need a cup of tea, as part of J's tea-appreciation training programme, and a helpful young lad tells us about Doyle's tea shop round the front. It's great - cake with proper whipped cream and excellent pots of tea. It's also great that we just manage to beat the entire Mid-Ulster Walking Club to the best outside table. It's such a warm day that we take our coats off. In March! County Down is pulling out all the stops.

I still have those Van lyrics running through my head.

I look at the side of his face as we sit together squinting into the sun, and I'm thinking, wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time?