Stop Being Nice

Mum, June 2014.
Panasonic LX7, ISO 125, f2.3 @ 1/5sec
RAW converted to DNG in Lightroom, post processing to black & white in Silver Efex.
© 2014 Matt Brooker.

Since the diagnosis of Alzheimer's I've been photographing my mum a lot. I never really did before; birthdays and Christmas of course, but in general she wasn't keen, and in part she was just too familiar for me to think of her as "a subject." Now I feel an urgency to record her while she's still "in" there; conversely she's less attentive and either doesn't notice or doesn't mind being photographed anymore.

So far my approach is to photograph openly but discreetly; until Mum objects I'll continue making my record. Before I'd have been too afraid of risking upset, but now I feel compelled to save what I can from these dwindling days. Of course I wouldn't continue if I was distressing her - but so far I'm not, and I treasure what I've captured so far.

I think at one time I'd have felt pressure to make happy images, or to select for the most positive ones, but Mum's illness is not a happy business, and it feels more honest to try and balance the images according to what I see. Of course there are still good times, and those are in the mix, but much of Mum's life now seems to consist of a sort of "emptying out," both in terms of loss of memory and the discarding of once-cherished possessions that now lack significance.

By default, I'm shooting in colour, and mostly in 4:3 ratio, but when I saw this shot (which somehow had needed to be a square) it called out to be in black & white. The last couple of years, my black & white processing has become positively brutal; after decades of conservatively trying to carefully accommodate a full tonal range and not let the processing get in the way of the image, I've suddenly done a complete flip and now go for high contrast and high detail. These days I kick the shit out of my images; there's a wilful brutality and even deliberate ugliness to it that's completely liberating, like discovering punk in middle age.

I hadn't intended to shoot at such a slow shutter speed, but I was keeping the ISO down to get the best from the LX7's tiny sensor, and I underestimated the strength of the light. The result is better than anything I would have achieved intentionally; to me the odd merger of face and hand reflects the fragmentation my mum is experiencing as the Alzheimer's takes hold. I'd read interviews with photographers about photographing emotion, but it wasn't till I produced this that I began to have an inkling what they meant. For me, this photograph points the way to a new way of seeing, a new way of shooting. And that's what I always need; something new to try.

The older I get, the better and more confident I feel; the anxiety of youth lead me to waste far to much time and energy on trying to be "nice." Now I find I'm shucking a lot of that off; the way I shoot is becoming more assertive, the way I process is more brutal, my choice of subject matter far less accommodating of what I think others will approve of or understand. Whether this will produce anything good I can only find out by trying; at worst, I hope to be bad in more interesting ways.

Tiny Dalek Hordes

Dalek Hell, 2007
Canon G3, +4 Close-up lens

As a result of my recent Micro-Dalek-buying binge, I've been getting back into table-top photography. This was a favourite activity back in my teens when I got my first "proper" camera. It was my dad's old 1964 Canon FX SLR, which had neither TTL metering and nor even a multiple exposure lever.

My schoolmate Mark Wheeler's Japanese robot kit,
photographed circa 1985 with a 1964 Canon FX SLR, cheapo 35-135mm zoom
and two bursts of flash from an old Sunpak manual flash gun.

I nevertheless worked out a way of making multiple exposure shots of my mate's Japanese robot kits by shooting in total darkness, the camera mounted on a rickety tripod with the shutter locked open on "bulb", me stumbling around with an ancient flash gun in my hand, firing it more or less at random in what I hoped was the right direction. With no means of making an accurate exposure reading (or even of seeing what I was doing), I would get one barely usable shot out of every six rolls of film, but I probably had more fun with photography than I've ever had since.

Once I started working, I got a Nikon kit with proper macro lenses and even a multiple-TTL-flash set-up, but after an initial burst of enthusiasm it somehow all seemed too easy. On top of that, I realised that reliably shooting minatures was only the half of it; what I really wanted to do was create still photography versions of the sort of effects set-ups I saw in films. These relied on compositing a number of images onto a single frame, an activity could only be accomplished using incredibly expensive optical printing machines at that time.

Models shot on film with Nikon F4 and 28mm lens, circa 1994
Scanning and compositing done 1998

When I acquired my first Mac, with scanner and Photoshop, it occurred to me that I could start thinking about doing my own compositing; I had a go with some photographs I'd shot a few years earlier, but lack of time for model building rather put a stop to the whole business.

Switching to digital in 2001 sort of got me started again; the Canon G-series compacts I favour have a good built-in macro mode, plus the ability to take close-up filters. Indeed, I bought my original Canon G1 to photograph aircraft models for reference for a storyboarding job.

Radishes, 2006
Nikon D50, Sigma 18-50 f2.8 EX Zoom, SB-24 flash, Auto mode

Rather than getting back into effects-type model shots, I became interested in still-life, largely because I could quickly set-up shots around found objects (mostly leaves and foodstuffs) without needing time for model building (the results can be seen in my Filckr set, Macreaux). I did stray back to my roots a couple of times with whimsical photo-stories featuring toys; both Little Blue's Big Adventure and The Dalek Invasion Of Matt's Desktop, 2004AD involve not only close-up model photography, but effects work that would have been impossible for me a decade before.

From The Dalek Invasion Of Matt's Desktop, 2004AD
Canon G3; multiple shots combined to create artificial depth-of-field
Compositing and "exterminator" effects added in Photoshop 7

With Dalek Invasion, I also discovered the neat trick of taking the same shot several times at different focussing distances, then compositing the shots to make a single photo with a large apparent depth-of-field that's normally impossible to obtain when shooting miniatures (though the 1/8in chip on my Canon G3 meant I was getting pretty good depth-of-field to start with). Used along with a wide angle lens set at a low angle, this artifically extended depth-of-field makes miniature toys and models look life-size(see below).

If you look carefully at the in focus area in the shot above, it's actually nonsensical; instead of a plane of focus extending across the frame, it goes into the picture, keeping the Daleks in the background and the toys in the foreground equally sharp, while the wall to the right of the frame is always out of focus, even though it also extends front-to-back. The eye doesn't question it because it makes sense from a storytelling point of view; the important elements (toys and Daleks) are sharp, and the out-of-focus wall doesn't distract from them.

Again, lack of time put a stop to further playing about, but in the last month my new-found addiction to Product Enterprises Micro-Daleks has given me a ready source of models for new set-ups. For me, having stuff on hand to photograph is a big spur to getting stuff done.

Micro-Dalek Horde
Canon G3 with lens adaptor and +4 close up lens with 550EX flashgun,
f8 @ ISO 50 with TTL flash bounced off wall to left of shot

At about 2" tall, these Dalek toys are just large enough to allow for full articulation and a good level of detail. They're a little bit bigger than the Corgi ones I was playing with back in 2004, so they're easier to photograph. Even on the wide-angle setting, my Canon G3 can get in close enough for "upper body" shots. Some experimental group shots show that, even with foreground Daleks at frame-filling size, depth-of-field at f8 is reasonable. The shot above has some sharpening on the two closest Daleks, but even without it's much better than I expected; defocus is consistent with life-sized objects rather than the madly-shallow focus of the classic miniature shot. I reckon I could get complete front-to-back depth of field in two composited shots, when I'd anticipated needing four at least.

Nikon D50 with Sigma 10-20mm zoom, 10mm @ f22
SB-24 flash on Auto, bounced from wall on right

Almost as a joke, I tried my Sigma 10-20mm wide-angle, not expecting to get in very close, but thinking the angular distortion of the lens might yield interesting results. Then it occurred to me that at F22, the enormous depth-of-field of this lens might allow objects well within the minimum focussing distance to appear reasonably sharp. It worked better than I expected; you can make a Micro-Dalek fill the frame with reasonable defocus. The extreme angle of view really does make these miniature toys looks life size, though at f22 you get considerable image degredation (fringing) at the edge of the frame. The results were good enough to make me think about a close-up filter for this lens, though with a 77mm thread, it wouldn't come cheap*. In the meantime, I'll try the wide (FoV 24mm) adaptor on my G3, though I'm not sure what that will do to the close-focussing distance.

*And I've already blown the next three month's spending money on Daleks.