August 2022

This journal records the detail of my ten thousand hours deliberate practice studying art photography.

Hours 6,695 to 6,796

(September 2022)

---

31^st August

Hours 6,795 to 6,796

(½h) updating this journal

(1h) Amersham coffee club

(½h) editing the following images as suggested by the other members of the coffee club

---

30^th August

Hours 6,793 to 6,794

(1h) shooting Clavell Tower, both interior and exterior. Filling in some gaps, should I decide to enter these photos for an RPS travel panel

RPS definition:

• “Travel Photography: Photography which communicates a sense of place.”

TRAVEL GUIDELINES

• A submission’s concept may aim to depict; a region, a journey, a land, a community or a way of life.
• A Travel submission doesn’t have to be of distant place or foreign lands; it may start at home.
• A submission regarding a particular place may have one aim but may need to clearly show many different aspects or objectives of that place; the landscape, it’s people, it’s history, a geographical aspect etc. to avoid a repetitive element.
• A submission may be an opportunity to communicate 15 different visual elements of your aim and objectives within your chosen subject.
• There are no geographical limitations.
• It is advisable to avoid stereotypical images produced at workshops, course or tours. Although images produced at workshops, courses and tours are accepted.
• An informative element is desirable to all images, but not crucial. A pictorial image can be just as desirable where the clear intention of the images is about setting a scene, an environment or conveying an atmosphere or emotion.
• Camera techniques like HDR can be used as long as the element of truth is not altered.
• Studying other bodies of work by Travel Photographers may help, not to replicate, but to inspire. Find elements that could develop your own approach and understanding to Travel Photography.

(½h) updating this journal – backlog due to inability to access the internet when in Dorset

(½h) transferring images from my laptop to desktop – spot of processing here and there on the way.

---

29^th August

Hours 6,789 to 6,792

(½h) semi-astro photography of the Bay, shot at 3am

(1h) wide-angle shots within the Tower

(½h) shooting cliff-top landscapes from the walk to the east of the Tower

(2h) editing and processing the day’s images. In particular experimenting with in-built Capture One Pro styles – “Landscape Colour 2” possibly works well with the sniper images

… also pondering the possibility of making an RPS Associateship panel out of these images; in the Travel category.

---

28^th August

Hours 6,784 to 6,788

(½h) shooting ultra-wide angle shots (16mm) around and within the Tower

(1½h) shooting from the beach, both the people I was targeting sniper style yesterday and getting some shots of the tower

(½h) further sniper shots from the Tower of people on the beach at low tide

(½h) more sunset images from the balcony

(2h) editing and processing the day’s images

---

27^th August

Hours 6,780 to 6,783

(½h) early morning shooting from the balcony of the Tower, including a few panoramas

(1h) shooting “sniper” street photography images of people on the beach at low tide

(½h) sunset photography from the balcony

(2h) editing and processing the days images in Capture One Pro

---

26^th August

Hours 6,777 to 6,779

(½h) updating this journal – mainly notes on yesterday’s YouTubes

(1½h) re-shooting the “Magritte Mirror Image” photo(s)

Staying in Clavell Tower, Kimmeridge Bay, Dorset for 4 nights

(½h) shooting sunsets from the balcony

(½h) astro photography – deeply regretting having left my StarTracker at home

---

25^th August

Hours 6,773 to 6,776

(½h) updating this journal including adding images for earlier entries

(2½h) working on the “Two Thirds of an Expert Photographer” post

(1h) YouTube:

• The Photographic Eye: “Following Ernst Haas’ Advice Changed My Photography” – shoot everyday scenes in a new way
• Curious Muse: “Symbolism in 10 Minutes: Why Is It The Most Mysterious Art Movement?“
  • late 19th century, originally literary movement aiming to represent absolute truths through symbolic language and metaphor
  • first poet: Charles Baudelaire – “Les Fleurs du mal” (Flowers of hell); influenced by Edgar Alan Poe
  • visual artists: Paul Gauguin, early work of Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt
• MoMA: “Q&A with Curator Anne Umland“.

“I am not interested in shooting new things. I am interested to see things new.”

Ernst Haas

---

24^th August

Hour 6,772

(½h) writing up this journal

(½h) YouTube:

• Curious Muse: “Futurism Explained” – originally an Italian movement, early 20th century, that rejected past artistic techniques in favour of the fast and new
• “LESZEK BUJNOWSKI – Surreal Photography I“
• “LESZEK BUJNOWSKI – Surreal Photography II” – time spent looking to extract penny-farthing riders rom older images to include in composites.

---

23^rd August

Hours 6,765 to 6,771

(1h) editing some of the images from Tallinn and processing images for printing to be reviewed on Wednesday’s Amersham coffee meeting (tomorrow)

(1h) reviewing images whilst helping to steward the Amersham Summer Photo exhibition.

(1h) YouTube:

• The photographic Eye: “What To Shoot When There’s Nothing Worth Photographing” – use the WAKE acronym:
  • What am I trying to photograph?
  • Awareness: street photographers have great awareness of what can be a photograph
  • Keep taking photos – even if you don’t think they’re any good
  • Experiment
• Secret Knowledge: “Tracy Emin on Louise Bourgeois: Women Without Secrets” & “Part 2“

(½h) writing up this journal

(3½h) finishing and publishing the “Surrealist Photography” post.

---

22^nd August

Hours 6,763 to 6,764

(½h) shooting in the rain in Tallinn

(½h) updating this journal

(½h) editing and processing this morning’s images in Capture One Pro

(½h) further refining the memory setting on my Sony a7c including:

• setting the creative style to B&W for M1 & M2 for quick portraits/ moving subjects. This was the suggestion of Simon Ellingworth on the Amersham Studios Street Photography course in Soho on the 25^th of May. This makes one think more about the composition of the image than simply showing what is being photographed
• changing the focus selection colour from white to red for the above setting so that it is more visible

---

21^st August

Hours 6,761 to 6,762

---

20^th August

Hours 6,757 to 6,760

(1h) shooting in Tallinn Old Town early in the morning

(½h) editing and processing in Capture One Pro

(½h) updating this journal

(½h) shooting, Tallinn including the following 6 shot panorama of the UN chimney which featured in the Andrei Tarkovsky Sci-Fi film Stalker. I was attracted by the chains hanging from the netting-like structure close to the base of the chimney, presumably there to catch anything falling from the top!

(½h) processing.

(1h) YouTube:

• The Art Chanel: “Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama at Sotheby’s“
• Heni Talks: “Louise Bourgeois: ‘A prisoner of my memories’“

---

19^th August

Hours 6,754 to 6,756

(1h) updating/ restoring the memory setting on my Sony a7c which has just been returned from the repairers.

(1h) updating this journal.

(½h) shooting, Tallinn flower market and elsewhere, including the following of three friends shot at dusk

(½h) editing and processing in Capture One Pro.

---

18^th August

Hours 6,750 to 6,753

(½h) YouTube: “Albert Camus – 4 Principles for Being Present“

1. Focus on the small things – “The literal meaning of life is doing whatever prevents you from killing yourself” – conscious action is the key to success, making decisions to act
2. Just be yourself – resist the temptation to please other people by pretending to know more than you do or be more than you are
3. Stop looking for happiness and meaning – “living without appeal” – don’t spend all your time wishing for another life, enjoy this one
4. Live with passion – there is more than one thing you could be passionate about, and concentrate your efforts on those things.

(½h) writing up this journal.

(1h) helping Kevin McNally review primate images shot in Uganda

(1h) YouTube:

• MoMA:
  • “Max Ernst with curator Anne Umland“
  • “Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades with curator Ann Temkin“
• The Art Channel: “Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp at The Royal Academy, 1917“
• Overthink: “Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism“
  • Sartre starts by defining what Existentialism isn’t:
    • popular belief: bourgeois & quietist, i.e., supporting the political status quo by encouraging inaction. Sartre states that the reverse is actually true since the philosophy considers each decision to be an action to be taken in a very deliberate manner
    • pessimistic; again the reverse since Existentialism means that we are making choices for ourselves rather than giving in to a fatalistic approach to life. We have a lot of power and this is optimistic
    • subjective or individualistic; again refuted on the ground that interaction with other humans is fundamental and the choices we make, we make for all people
    • nihilistic, i.e., nothing matters; Sartre’s contention is that if God doesn’t exist, human life is all the more important as we are the people who determine the destiny of the human race
  • “Existence precedes essence” – the reverse is true if man were created by God, but if there is no God there must have been at least one being whose existence precedes their essence
  • The human condition is created by the actions that have been taken historically which result in rules and laws of behaviour
  • Anguish (anxiety), felt sense of responsibility for the actions we take
  • Abandonment (forelorness); there is no universal moral code that can dictate our choices, ultimately, we must make a decision and stand by it. We cannot not choose, even a choice to do nothing is still a choice. However, we can judge if our decisions are made honestly about the authenticity of the human condition of which we are part.

(1h) creating revised versions of the images discussed at the Amersham coffee meeting yesterday.

	…..	“Giant Man II” Re-cropped at the suggestion of Vic Attfield.
“Moon Slice” Previously, there was a mistake in the photoshop layers which meant that the background was completely black. This is now corrected to show a gradient from dark navy blue at the bottom to almost but not quite entirely black, blue at the top. This is intended to give the impression of looking through some atmosphere, at the bottom, up into deep space at the top.
		“My Double Secret II” Vic Attfield suggested that the block of colour to the right of the original Magritte image played an important part compositionally. I have added in the edge of the wall in my study and toned the colours to match the skin in the self-portrait. The background has also been switched so that the colours with the skin and wall are complementary.
“Wasted Life II” Background added.

---

17^th August

Hours 6,746 to 6,749

(2h) writing up notes from yesterday’s YouTubes in this journal.

(1h) Amersham coffee club where my Magritte style images were discussed. In general:

• The lighter of the two “Magritte Mirror Image” pictures was preferred
• The “Giant Man” image was liked, probably more than any of the copies of Magritte paintings
• The “Moon Slice” needs to be lighter

(1h) YouTube, The Photographic Eye:

• “Learning Photography skills with Annie Leibovitz“
  • Love your subjects – be passionate about the things you photograph
  • Steal compositions from fine art paintings
• “The Liquid Light Rule“
  • use of combination of ICM and flash.

---

16^th August

Hours 6,742 to 6,745

(1h) updating this journal and associated Flickr site.

(1h) updating the “Surrealist Photography” post.

(2h) YouTube:

• The Canvas: “Why Did Edward Hopper Paint This Clown?” – 1914, “Soir Bleu” rarely seen in his lifetime
  • A Parisian cafe scene featuring a melancholic white clown which is presumably a self portrait
  • Hopper says elsewhere, i.e., regarding his 1951 “Rooms by the Sea” picture that all paintings are a self-portrait and quote by Johann von Goethe:
    • “The beginning and the end of all literary activity (here Hopper commented “For ‘literary,’ substitute ‘artistic.’ It works for that too”) is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, moulded, and reconstructed in a personal form and an original manner.”
  • The painting was made before Hopper had any commercial success. Hence the identification with the clown without his audience and the sense of loneliness and despair for which he later became famous
  • Comparison with Jan Matejko’s 1862 “Stańczyk” – “Sad Clown Paradox“
• Louisiana Channel: “Robert Crumb: It was just too disturbing for most people, too weird.”
• Contemporary Art Issue: “The Story of: Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010)“
  • abstract autobiographical works
  • twisting spirals representative of the desire to rid herself of the bad memories of her childhood
  • married an American and became associated with the New York school of Abstract Expressionists (Pollock, Rothko, et al.)
  • became famous at the age of 70, with an exhibition at MoMA, and created her most famous work in the 28 years thereafter. Cell installations:
    • “Each cell deals with a fear (…) My reminiscences help me live in the present and I want them to survive. I am a prisoner of my emotions. You have to tell your story, and you have to forget your story. Your forget and forgive. It liberates you.”
      – Louise Bourgeois
• Sean Tucker: “Advice for the Shy Street Photographer“
  • Fishing rather than hunting
• Overthink: “Sartre’s theory of the Look” – genuinely ambivalent as to how important this is to photography. Main ideas:
  • looking at a person, with self awareness and the ability to look back, is fundamentally different to looking at an inanimate object
  • when a person looks back at you, your centre of reference changes to your assumptions about their assumptions about you as the object of their gaze
  • this is a precursor to the concepts of “male gaze” & “white gaze” in which the above doesn’t happen and the person being looked at never moves beyond the status of an object
• The Canvas: “Why is This Reproduction Prohibited?“

---

15^th August

Hour 6,741

---

14^th August

Hours 6,738 to 6,740

(1h) preparing images for Wednesday’s coffee meeting.

---

13^th August

Hours 6,736 to 6,737

(2h) creating the following revised version of my earlier “Wasted Life” image, again inspired by Magritte’s “Double Secret”. I wanted to get a sunny, optimistic sky over a grey and forbidding sea. There is some reflection of the sky in the sea to make them match.

I think the complementary colours, blue vs skin tone, work quite well.

---

12^th August

Hours 6,732 to 6,735

(2h) creating the following version of Magritte’s “Double Secret” painting using the images of Babbage’s Difference Engine shot at the Science Museum yesterday.

“My Double Secret”		Magritte’s “Le Double Secret, 1927”

(2h) creating a first draft on the Moon Slice image, below left, inspired by a painting at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, right.

I consider this to be an exercise in aesthetics, i.e., creating balance in the composition given that the image is not that similar to the painting that inspired it.

Note: the background is a gradient from dark navy blue at the bottom to almost but not quite black, navy blue at the top. I will print with a black boarder so this gradient will hopefully be more apparent. The blue give a sense of distance, psychologically with the bright yellow of the mood being interpreted as closer. The lighter blue at the bottom of the image hints at an atmosphere through which the scene is being view, i.e., from Earth rather than outer space.

---

11^th August

Hours 6,728 to 6,731

(1h) Science Museum shooting elements for a potential composite.

(1h) Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

(1h) Tate Modern – revisiting the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition.

(1h) updating this journal.

---

10^th August

Hours 6,724 to 6,727

(1h) processing the images of the Newcombe boys jumping into our swimming pool

(1h) Amersham Coffee meeting.

(2h) creating the following version of Man Ray’s famous Lips painting.

---

9^th August

Hours 6,720 to 6,723

(2h) working on cloud extraction techniques where a combination of quick selection of the cloud plus a luminosity mask seem to work best. The former makes the middle of the cloud opaque whereas the later ensures that the edges fluffy. Where, the new background is anything but sky blue, some adjustment to the blue hue is necessary to make the overall colouration convincing.

---

8^th August

Hours 6,717 to 6,719

(1h) updating this journal

(2h) working on cloud extraction techniques including using different colour spaces such as LAB and CMYK, the later affording a slight advantage as the cyan is separated from the grey. But no big deal.

---

7^th August

Hours 6,715 to 6,716

(2h) experimenting with the extraction of clouds from the sky. Managed to separate the clouds from the sky by making the sky a consistent blue colour, overlaying with a solid colour layer of the the sky colour, and applying the subtract blend mode. Adding this back to anything other than the plain blue background however, doesn’t work very well!

---

6^th August

Hours 6,711 to 6,714

(2h) experimenting with the extraction of clouds from the sky – no success.

(2h) YouTube:

• The Canvas:
  • “Was Dali a Fascist?” – despite being able to defend his fetish with Adolph Hitler, his support for Franco and general political behaviour runs very counter to the Surrealist’s left-wing agenda
  • “The Persistence of Memory“
• CAI: “How to Stand Out as an Artist“
• T. Hopper: “5 photography Lessons from Edward Hopper’s Painting!“
  1. The inner & outer would of the image
  2. Make the common uncommon
  3. Timelessness
  4. Pictorial depth
  5. Stay True to your Colours
• The Nerdwritter: “What Is The Treachery of Images?“

“Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.”

Edward Hopper

---

5^th August

Hour 6,710

(1h) updating this journal and the associated Flickr site particularly with regard to the images of Classic cars for last weekend’s shoot at the Stoke Poges Horticultural show..

---

4^th August

Hours 6,707 to 6,709

(1h) writing up this journal, mainly with regard to The Garish Grackle’s analysis of Magritte paintings watched on YouTube yesterday.

(1h) working on the latest Amersham Beyond Challenge, #32, Mobile App Art – downloaded and started experimenting with SnapSeed.

(1h) adding my work to the draft “Surrealism Photography” post.

---

3^rd August

Hours 6,702 to 6,706

(1h) preparing images for printing for the Amersham Exhibition later this month.

(1h) Amersham Coffee club

(½h) editing some of the classic cars from lest week’s

(½h) sending my selected images of Sarah & Mark’s wedding to Mark Collins who will be making the initial version of the book.

(1h) Watching more of The Garish Grackle on YouTube – discussion of several Rene Magritte images with which I am less familiar.

• “The Cast of Pyrenees (1959)” castle on an oversized rock inexplicably floating in a clouded sky above the sea
  • the shore is an invitation to embark on a journey
  • whilst the picture itself is foreboding, the rock itself is not rising like a rock of hope in an optimistic sky over the rough dark sea. The castle on top of the rock heightens this feeling
  • “if painted by anyone else, the castle would be kitsch, but this has such honesty that one can almost see his soul”
• “The School Master (1954)“
  • man in bowler hat in front of a desolate landscape with the crescent moon directly above his head
  • again, this shows optimism in a foreboding landscape
  • a dignified man in an otherworldly world.
• “The Heartstrings (1960)” – flat landscape, with distant mountains, dominated my a large open rimmed glass holding a cloud
  • The glass is a sublime representation of something greater than ourselves
  • A reflection in an existentialist world raising question of the mysteries of the universe
  • “Magritte is a doctor for the crisis of consciousness afflicting the world since the start of the 20th Century”
  • “As a whole, the piece is an invitation to a heightened state of reality”. [The very definition of surrealist art.]

(1h) creating the following which was an attempt to reinterpret the Magritte face in the balloon – not all experiments work:

---

2^nd August

Hours 6,698 to 6,701

(1h) working on the “Surrealist Photography” post

(1h) creating the following version of the famous René Magritte image:

(1h) selecting between my and Mark’s images for Sarah & Mark’s wedding album. Mark’s images are generally brighter than mine. So may have to do some normalisation to make them look consistent.

---

1^st August

Hours 6,695 to 6,697

(½h) selecting images to submit to the Amersham Exhibition

(1½h) updating this journal, all the new month admin and the documentation of the process for the new month admin.

(1h) writing the “Two Thirds of an Expert Photographer” post.

---

(July 2022)