Oliver Wood Photography

It’s that time of year again, though the atmosphere is strangely subdued.

The Yule tide is going to be a solitary event (mostly) for yours truly this year, though there will be the usual round of get-togethers with brother and SIL which I am looking forward to as always.

My current employment situation could have been a lot worse if it wasn’t for so much support from ex colleagues, something for which I am deeply grateful. Networking opportunities seem to abound and hope springs eternal plus any other cliches that come to mind. An almost lost university friend has come back on the scene too, just before she is off to Africa on yet another amazing and purposeful adventure. Of course, it all serves to illustrate just how dull my existence is in comparison, but it is inspiring in its own way. However, I can’t think further than another technical job at the moment, though as always, the allusive Broadcast field beckons once again.

The noble ideals of situationism have become something of an obsession lately but now I have the opportunity to engage with other like-minded individuals through various Face Book groups. Situationism offers some form of inspiration and hope in the current circumstances. I think it is a golden opportunity to disengage with the ‘spectacle’ of consumerism and become more creative and truthful. They always say that hardship and adversity lead to enhanced creative insight and I tend to think that there is some truth in this, at least on a personal level. At one time the disengagement with the shallow and artificial concerns of consumerism lead to an enhancement of greater cultural and spiritual awareness on a societal level. Though now I feel that we have become too dumbed down, too automated by capitalism and the notion that you are what you own to ever reach the hights of transcendent living. The notion of creativity has been usurped by the ‘society of the spectacle’ to such an extent that now the idea of creativity is just another form of commerce. Creativity as a business plan, or vomit inducing Christmas TV schedule and not a cypher for the enhancement of natural lived experience.

Who knows what 2009 will bring, but we may just see the emergence of some form of radical ideal, or the development of a new cult idea; but I’m not holding my breath.

Music of the moment:-

Emanative When on Earth and Sun Ra When Angels Speak of Love

Emanative is a relatively new find (courtesy Giles Peterson) and a most enjoyable one. This experimental Nu Jazz outfit from London crosses a range of boundaries but their soulful songs are as smooth as velvet. Dear old Sun Ra is guaranteed to provide the perfect accompaniment to the most enchanted and thoughtful moods, enlightening our existence here on planet Earth long after his return to outer space.

Happy Yule to all my occasional fleeting and chance reader(s)

prestbury fields
Heading Up Top © Oliver Wood 2008

Its been very cold and sharp of late, quite pleasant in some ways as the air is clear and the quality of light is very conducive to landscape photography, more on that in a moment. I do like the winter months to be more or less ‘seasonally correct’. Of course, our skewed climate now means that we tend to expect the winter months to be a persistently gray damp and humid mess much like the sadly altered northern summers, with only an occasional and highly disruptive storm to break the monotony!

The current economic climate appears to be going from bad to worse with a frightening number of job losses in Macclesfield. I am currently ‘between jobs’ but as always being equipped with an anti bourgeois situationist out-look on life enables me to adapt to the circumstances very well. A disconnection from mindless ‘affluensa’ gives one a positive psychological advantage in times such as these. There is never the less, a curious sense of doom and foreboding, a feeling that somehow the world as a whole is about to become very much more unstable. I wish there were leaders that had the foresight to invent and establish an alternative mode for the capitalist world. Some form of econometrics that will be more appropriate to our future world of recycled product, environmental constraint and limited (or non-existent) natural material resources, some form of mutual cooperativisation is required I think?

On a lighter note, all this new found free time has enabled me to spend more time out and about with my camera and to take advantage of fleeting moments of sublimity which would otherwise have been missed. I am exploring the possibilities of black and white landscape once again with a particular interest in the effects of infra red photography and thus far without the use of any filtering. Next I want to try a 25A red filter on my Sig 10-20mm lens and then see if this has any marked effect on the tone mapping in IR. Apparently the IR effect is much more realistic in digital processing if one uses a red or IR filter on the camera.

I’m trying to create images that are fresh and not cliched or derivative in some way, though I have explored classic angles and tonal qualities too. The idea is to produce a collection of images, which have my signature compositional and subject style but which also allude to classic renderings. It is quite a while now since I last engaged with my local rural landscape in a photographic sense. This kind of setting can yield just as many opportunities for original creative imagery as any urban environment. It is just a case of re sensitizing oneself to the qualities of light and finding abstraction in the contours of the landscape and compositional angles and always being alert to those rare interactions of light and shape. I’m always open to this kind of setting by virtue of the fact that I do just find it to be more inspiring than any other, I think it is a particular connection with nature and the firmament that gives a natural space that extra edge. As with any form of creative expression the best work is always produced when the artist has a certain emotional connection with the subject. It is all about capturing those feelings and that special fleeting (and probably highly personal) sense of time and place.

One of the hardest concepts to embrace in landscape photography is minimalism. Yet there is a very inspiring group on flickr called (surprisingly enough) ‘Rural Minimalism’. I’m still trying to engage with this very concept in my own rural photography and it is not by any means easy!

Giles Peterson in the background as usual, it’s a good jazzy show this week (last week) with a ‘super rare jazz mix’ coming up, more Brownswood goodness. Right now we have Mama! Milk from Japan and a very curious slant on cinematic Euro jazz – wonderful stuff.

Total mileage 9,666.6 oh err!