Golden Belfast blues

The clocks went back last night and we're trapped in the darkest part of the year. I hate this. I thrive on light, and on winter weekdays I only see it at a distance through a classroom window. But a weekend walk in the sunshine always restores my sense of well-being.

Today, I wandered round Belfast's Cathedral Quarter with my new Daguerrotype Achromat lens and no particular plan apart from to see what thoughts emerged and to try to make a set of images that belonged together.

The sun was low, and shadows and reflections soon caught my eye. It's an area of the city that's both grubby and elegant, and it suits the style of this vintage reconstruction lens. Gold, black and deep blue appeared everywhere.

As seems to be the case every time I take it out, my amazing-looking brass lens caught people's eye too, and I had several conversations with other wandering photographers about it. I'm trying to use it in a thoughtful way, for imagery that suits its history and style, and these old streets are perfect for it.

At one point I heard a flute band passing down Royal Avenue and I kicked myself that I was too far away to take photographs. I'd love a slightly blurred collarette against one of these turn-of-the-century buildings.

It would make a great counterpoint to St Patrick's Church in Donegall Street, one of my favourite city centre churches...

I looked for frames in the architecture, low gold light, small unexpected details. A bit of happenstance, a bit of integrity. Typical Belfast.

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. 

Glimpses in the dark

My favourite lens is my 100mm f/2.8. It suits the way I see, a bit shortsightedly, focusing on an interesting small detail, with everything else fading off into the background.

I spent a happy couple of hours at the Ulster Folk Museum yesterday using it to pick out little details in the old houses - slivers of china or fabric lit by sunbeams in the dark rooms, reflections in wavy picture glass, shadows cast on cracked plaster.

I wanted to create a mood that was secretive and compelling, with hints of stories unfolding from the shadows. It was a good technical challenge too, working with what may look like pure black, but is really shades of darkness. I wish I had time to write the stories now, but they'll wait a little longer.

Safe

My workhouse obsession has been in full swing for a couple of years. It was sparked by the discovery that some of my ancestors in north Fermanagh had survived the Famine years of the 1840s only by entering the workhouse at Lowtherstown, now Irvinestown. Seeing their names and the descriptions of their pitiful circumstances in the workhouse records was a moving experience, and it set me off on a quest to discover more about their stories. 

The workhouse buildings at Irvinestown are long gone, but Bawnboy, County Cavan, built to the same plan, like all the Irish workhouses, made a fitting substitute. You can read more about my first visit to Bawnboy here - it was another cathartic experience. I read all round the subject of the famine and the workhouse. My most helpful guides were John O'Connor's 'The Workhouses of Ireland', Breege McCusker's 'Lowtherstown Workhouse' and the recently published 'Atlas of the Great Irish Famine'. I travelled to the Irish Workhouse Centre in Portumna, County Galway, where Steve Dolan answered every question I could think of and showed me round another incarnation of the building which Margaret, James, Catherine, Irvine and Thomas Elliott entered in 1848.

As I worked my way round the topic and visited the dreadfully atmospheric workhouse buildings, I decided that an audio-visual piece based on my own family's Famine story would be a good response to what I'd discovered. 

I was clear from the start that I didn't want to make a didactic piece, communicating historical information in a dry way, but a personal story, expressing the feelings of a real and relatable human being.

I chose Catherine, my great-great-grandfather James's little sister, as the focus of the work. To me, she became Cate, and I was delighted to find, when I came upon her details in someone else's family tree, that she was called this in real life.

I had a large portfolio of workhouse images I'd created at Bawnboy and Portumna. Now I needed Cate herself. Finding a famine-thin eight-year-old model was obviously out of the question, so I decided to focus on Cate as a woman in her twenties, thinking back to her experiences as a child. My model Hopewell personified the Cate of my imagination perfectly, with facial expressions and expressive gestures to communicate every moment of her journey. With her bare face, hair pulled back and handmade antique high-necked blouse, she became a thoughtful and damaged young woman from 1864.

Many of my workhouse photographs featured windows, as elegantly decayed architectural features and symbols of both imprisonment and escape. I couldn't believe my good fortune in locating, for Hopewell's "Cate" shoot, an old six-paned window which echoed strongly those of the workhouses. This became a key pivot point in the piece, with Cate shown first sitting outside the window, but moving behind it as the story recounts her admittance to the workhouse, her face partly obscured now by its bars. I structured a narrative that moved to and fro between Cate as a 24-year-old and the workhouse of her childhood, shown now as a near-derelict building. This was going to involve considerable suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewers, but I hoped that it would be effective.

My script was structured round Cate's experiences, told simply and clearly. My voice actress, Rosie, conveyed her words with total integrity, bringing them to life in a way that made me forget it was actually me who'd written them.

To provide contrast, I also included the words of the Matron of the workhouse, the visiting minister, the workhouse inspector Dr Denis Phelan (these words are taken from his real report into conditions at Lowtherstown), and an anonymous local man. Helpful friends and colleagues read these parts for me, populating the piece and lending it further authenticity.

Early in the process, I composed a simple lullaby for the Elliott family....

Safe, safe in my heart
I'll keep you safe in my heart
Stay near or go far, wherever you are
I'll keep you safe in my heart

As the script emerged, I decided to use the song at two key points in the drama: the moment when Margaret was separated from her children on admission to the workhouse (Charles Kickham's novel of 1869, 'Sally Cavanagh' helped me with this scene), and the tender moment near the end when Cate reveals her own current circumstances.

I composed all the music for the piece myself. I spent some time developing a palette of sounds to create the mood I wanted, with instruments such as a bouzouki, lute, cor anglais, flute, piano, folk percussion instruments and double bass. The style I chose is more contemporary than those of my other pieces, with no attempt to recreate the sounds of the nineteenth century apart from the presence of the simple lullaby. There's a recurring idea of a smear or glissando, referring to Irish traditional music but also aiming to cause a sense of disquiet.

The opening notes of the lullaby, 'Safe, safe in my heart...' became a motif which reappeared frequently in the score, always referencing the idea of keeping a child safe from harm. I also composed a theme for the workhouse itself: this can be heard for the first time when the matron starts to read the list of names of those admitted on 22 November 1848. (The 67 admissions she mentions for that date is an accurate figure.)

As well as the ubiquitous windows, a couple of other ideas emerged as visual themes within the piece. Flowers appear at significant moments. A cross transforms back into a broken workhouse window. 

'Safe' has been a labour of love. I hope that it conveys something of the desperation and tragedy that these people experienced, something of the possibility of redemption and the long shadow cast over everything that came later. I suspect it's not my last piece of work on the subject.

Click on the image below to see the finished piece on Vimeo.

Shoreline

It's cold. My default weekend outfit is an Aran poloneck, jeans and boots. My fingers don't really want to be outside, and I have a pair of outdoor photography gloves sitting in my Amazon basket, though frugality is procrastinating the actual purchase.

But this weekend it's spirit-liftingly bright and the better half of the year seems finally within sight. Yesterday I was at work till early afternoon, but the camera was in the boot of the car, waiting for a quick getaway to the beach.

I chose Millisle, gateway to a Peninsula circuit. The tide was almost fully in, and the shots I'd envisaged weren't going to happen. But there's always something beautiful to photograph, and my eye was drawn to the patterns on the sand at the edge of the water, where waves and sun combined in elegant sculpted textures. 

I took a series of almost abstract shots in gentle focus, until my fingers started expressing too much displeasure at the temperature. Time to click the button on my Amazon cart.

Pale seaside

Sometimes when I go out with my camera I know exactly what it is that I want to shoot. And most of my best images probably result from careful planning and research, though there's often a little happy coincidence in the mix as well.

But sometimes it's nice just to go out and see what appeals to my eye. Yesterday was a day like that. It was a dry, dull September afternoon and I felt like walking on the beach to clear my head. I did my customary round-the-peninsula drive. The seas and skies weren't looking particularly photogenic except in the most minimalist of ways. What drew my eye instead were the fading, drying sea plants all round the coastal route, seedheads and skeletal stalks standing delicate against the bleached blue-grey sky.

You can't see the sea in most of my images, but I like to think I've captured a little of the mood of the afternoon and the way the understated light can calm and revive.