TopMeadow Journal

This journal was inspired by Eric Boutilier-Brown's Evolving Beauty site where he too keeps a photographic journal. This journal is experimental. I don't yet know whether I will keep it up. Time will tell.

Feel free to contact me by email, but be careful to make the obvious correction to the email address.
08 Nov 2003 Feeling frustrated at having taken no pictures lately, I took a camera for a walk around the neighbourhood, after rising late. The light was flat under an overcast winter sky, so I loaded Velvia. It is too late in the year to capture the full glory of the autumnal colours, but I hoped that I might get an "end of autumn" picture of a tree with just a few leaves remaining to capture the bleakness of the coming winter. I did not find what I set out for. Its not too late though - I may try somewhere else.

The trees I set out to find had been recently, and determinedly fenced in and the gate was locked. I contemplated climbing the fence, avoiding the barbed wire, but decided to try to find a way round it. Walking back to a gap in the fence I had noticed earlier, I was further deterred by signs of "Private Property, Access by Permission Only". I chatted to a bloke who arrived to pin a sign to the gate, who, it turned out, owned the land and gave me permission to enter, as I had hoped he would.

The notice was a warning that forestry work could be dangerous. Having seen the effects of ill thought out "management" on a nearby part of the woods I said I was in favour of leaving things to themselves. The work though is replanting and as I got into the woods I could see why it was needed and regretted my remark.

09 Nov 2003 Began the (re)design of the TopMeadow photographic site. Created this journal, split the book chapters into separate books and created an, initially minimal, portrait book. Published the site to the web and asked Google and Yahoo to index it.
18 Nov 2003 Preferring the smoothness of tone of the new image to the harshness of its predecessor, I scanned two new figure negatives and chose one to replace one of the images in the figure book. Choosing between the two was difficult. The model's head is better placed in this image, but in the other she is also lit from behind. A choice between light and form.
21 Nov 2003 I have never liked the background of n712-07. In my first attempt I processed it straight forwardly and again didn't like it. For the second attempt, on the left, I cut out the figure in the foreground, blurred the background in PhotoShop to make it appear out of focus and replaced the figure in the foreground. Apart from the cutting out being poor, I still didn't like the background so I tried creating a completely new one from images of walls and columns taken on my digital snapshot camera. This, the image on the right, works better and prints reasonably well.