Botany Bay Beach

At the end of the Botany Bay road is the plantation. Through the plantation grounds and across a boardwalk is one of the most amazing beaches I've ever seen.

On a sunny day, the colours were a bleached palette of sky and bone. The beach is shallow, but strewn across it are the skeletons of ancient coastal trees, like a dinosaur graveyard. The storms of the last few years have shifted and destroyed some of these - I'd seen some amazing older images of branches reaching up from the water against the sunrise - but it's still very atmospheric.

I'd planned this as a location for my good friend Silas Fretwell, and the noble J obliged in his modelling duties, as pelicans wheeled overhead, fluffy white clouds floated southwards and the sun beat down with beautiful cruelty.

The road to Botany Bay

This was one of the most atmospheric places we visited in South Carolina.

If you live in Northern Ireland or you're a Game of Thrones fan, you might be put in mind of the Dark Hedges, near Armoy in County Antrim. This is the road to Botany Bay Plantation, near Edisto Beach, 3798 miles away.

It's the same idea - an avenue of trees lending grandeur to the approach to a stately house. But these are southern live oaks rather than beeches. And the road is surfaced with sand. And only two other people passed by in the half hour that we spent there.

The quiet, the quality of the late afternoon southern light, and the sense of history all around made travelling the road a special, almost spiritual experience. I'm sure I'm not the only one to have imagined stories and films rising from every bend in the road.

In a place like this, stories start romantic, but it doesn't take long before painful historical facts intrude and you see the reality of the lovingly tended plantation grounds. It's a landscape built up to grandeur on slavery, fading into decline ever since, but still beautiful.

When you come from Ireland, you're used to finding that your history has a traumatic flip side and beauty is troubled. Maybe that's always the way.

(Looking backwards from the more elegant angle of the shoot...)

Low Country squares

A holiday within a holiday - at the end of July, we spent a few days staying in a lovely house belonging to generous friends in Green Pond, South Carolina.

Relaxation-wise, it was fabulous: a morning spent strolling round Beaufort; buying shrimp directly from Elijah at his trawler at Bennett's Point (turned out a pound of shrimp apiece was really quite a lot, but we ate it all no problem); driving the sandy roads overhung with live oak and Spanish moss; walking in the grounds of the derelict Old Sheldon Church at Yemassee; visiting the beautiful Wildlife Management Areas nearby; getting very sandy in the lively waves at Edisto Beach and, best of all, spending a day amongst the skeleton trees of Botany Bay Beach. 

Photography-wise, it was a gift too. The colours of the landscapes, distinctly southern, and the quality of the light, especially after a rainstorm, were inspiring. And since Silas Fretwell was driving me about in his Jeep, he made an appearance in a couple of shoots - more from those later, perhaps.

Really, we only scratched the surface of what this beautiful Low Country area has to offer. I left full of ideas for future work and so thankful for the kindness of the friends who enabled us to visit so easily and happily.

Shadows

This week I visited one of my favourite photo locations, Old Car City in White, Georgia. It's always a harsh day out, with high temperatures and mean biting insects, but I was really looking forward to adding to my portfolio of fabulous paint and chrome textures on abandoned vintage cars.

I spent most of the morning focusing on one particular car, a 1940s Buick Special sitting in perfect leaf-dappled light, hoping for a nice set or even a panel of images.

In fact, it's always a challenge to shoot in this light - very bright in the sun, quite dark everywhere else. I was working with a tripod and a shutter release, using live view to save bending over to peer through the viewfinder for every single shot. It took a while to make this combination work, but after a while I thought I had it sorted.

We went for a well deserved lunch break in the diner across the road, and I checked my images more carefully. They were all slightly out of focus. I had totally not handled things in live view.

I was really frustrated to have spent so much time and effort on some well framed shots which were completely useless.

The afternoon light wasn't working on my Special. But I did, sort of, get my tripod/shutter release/live view/focus combination to work. It was a useful reminder of how much I don't know, to try to be positive.

I wasn't loving my tripod much, though, by this point, so I switched to hand-held and concentrated instead on some darker shots, with shadows and suggestions, a little bit Gothic. A slight salvage of a painful day.

Car Guy

My new AV, Car Guy: click on the photograph below to see it on Vimeo...

This one has been a challenge, technically and emotionally.

After the unexpected success of Matthew Loney's Miracle, which built up a little collection of trophies and medals from various national competitions during 2017, I was suffering from a bad case of impostor syndrome. I was very pleased with Matthew Loney, but I'd had so little experience of AV work when I made it that I felt its success was a bit of a lucky accident. It was frequently praised as being very different. And it was, because I didn't really know what was the usual thing for an AV.

February sees the start of the 2018 AV season, with the NIPA festival as the first event, and I felt that I needed to make something new - but also that whatever I made, it would never be as good as Matthew. This is a paralysing attitude. It's one I see often in my own students. I'm sympathetic to it, but when someone else is feeling this way, I'm great at proffering sensible advice and encouraging them to move on. It's much harder when I'm the one paralysed.

I still have the syndrome, but I made the AV too. I got started by deciding that I was right, it would never be as good as Matthew, and that was ok. Instead, I treated it as a chance to try some new things. There's a voiceover. It's half the length, but I still wanted to convey a cohesive story. And it's in colour.

This proved to be a good approach. The always supportive J helped me with the script. We spent several happy evenings over the Christmas holidays lounging on the sofa, arranging fragments of text on a plastic tray from WyseByse, arguing over individual words, high-fiving each other when we hit on a good phrase. 

Working out the technicalities of the voice tracks was a good learning experience too, once I'd constructed a pop shield from a coat hanger and a pair of tights, having forgotten to borrow a real one from work. We recorded several takes to get the voice right, though it was freakish how easily J was able to sound like an 80-year-old. I chopped the best track up into multiple segments, which made moving the voice around to work with the music track and slides much more flexible in my PicturesToExe AV software.

The music is my own. I wanted to keep it simple, with just piano and bass and very little else. The mood is influenced by cool jazz of the 1950s, when the cars and Car Guy would have been in their teens. The music starts with a little two-note motif, G - E, a setting of "car guy" - and this idea, backwards, forwards, decorated, filled in, and at different pitches, permeates the whole score.

The heart of the story is Car Guy himself, beautifully played by my friend's dad. And in a way, he represents the best of all our dads, with his homespun wisdom, his integrity, his mild humour and his understated but longstanding love for Isabella.

I hope it all comes together effectively for viewers - I'd love it to come across as touching, and for you to enjoy wandering through that southern scrapyard as much as both Car Guy and I have done.

Fair day

One of the regular highlights of my North Georgia summer is a visit to the Georgia Mountain Fair at Hiawassee. 

If you're looking for pig races, bluegrass played by elderly gentlemen in dungarees, handmade bowed psalteries, shingle-splitting demonstrations, a superhero costume for your cat, exquisite turned bowls, frisbee-catching rescue dogs and a decent-sized midway - and, really, who isn't? - then this is the place for you.

J was a gentleman, carrying my camera bag, throwing darts at balloons so that I could make friends with the photogenic Warren, and winning some goldfish with pingpong balls.

The sky was perfect, the colours harmonised, and I was quite excited about some of the shots I'd taken. But when I got home and looked at them more carefully on my computer, I was gutted to see that in my favourites, the ones of Warren and the people on the Yoyo ride, my shutter speed had been too slow, and they're not quite in focus.

Gentleman J suggested that we should return later in the week and I should run in and redo my shots in a more professional manner. It was a kind thought, but the fair is an hour's drive away, and it was unlikely that I'd get the same lovely evening light as I did the first time. Lesson learned. I'll take it on the chin.

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.

The Fourth

A small town parade. Fire trucks, historic re-enactors, garden maintenance companies, the sheriff, on his own, throwing out candies to the crowd.

A hundred faces in the crowd that I'd love to photograph, but can't, for politeness.

Too much heat, but excellent lemonade.

Pulled pork and fireworks once the sun sets. A dodgy-looking tripod made from a telescope stand, some bubble wrap and a wire coathanger.

Makes a nice change from the Twelfth.