'The year is two thousand and seventeen.' and 'I don't entirely know what I'm doing.' have the same amount of syllables. Coincidence? Probably. Dumb intro to a blog post? Definitely. (Trust me, it's better than my attempt at cobbling together a metaphor involving that chair being, like, a brain, and the gap in the back-support being the part that knows what's going on.) In any case, going about things without much of a clue seemed to be the theme for the new year's first two rolls of film.
With Christmas cracker paper crowns adorned and subsequently composted, and a leather jacket/frilly pink disco shirt combo danced in, rigorously cleaned of NYE glitter and re-hung in the wardrobe, 2016 said goooodbye in a deep and chronologically almighty lowing that I can imagine years, were they to talk, to udder- I mean utter. 2017 said hi in the form of a hangover, Fuji Superia 200, and trips up and down the Exe estuary.
I didn't know where I was going, I didn't really know what I wanted to take photos of, I didn't know quite yet how exactly the aperture and shutter speed choices in varying levels of light I'd made in previous photos affected the images, I didn't know how quickly the tide comes in when out on the mud plains until I was distracted by a cool broken barrel and then finally looked down to find that the water was around my ankles and had to splishsplashingly run back to shore. The best way to learn however is to just go and do. So, I did.
Teignmouth pier. It was a particularly grey day. I had intended to go to Dawlish, but just kept on driving to this nearby town that I'd never really visited. My secondary school was a rival to the school here.
Having not been to Teignmouth before I decided to get myself lost. I chose a squabble of seagulls in the sky as a waypoint and ended up in a small bay in which a boy showed me a crab claw he'd found.
Under Teignmouth pier. A man took a photo of me taking a photo of the waves. I learnt here about how the dark begs a lower aperture (and/or a steady hand) and in turn reduces the amount that is in focus.
Here was a lesson in checking the edges of the frame and making sure the exposure is correct. The boat blended in with the overcast background as I blended in with the sand, crouching lower and lower.
Inside Teignmouth pier. I enjoy the noisiness of arcades- 10ps tumbling, various video game beepings and machines spewing long lines of prize tickets. However, on this day, the place was empty and eery.
Finding myself in an industrial port area with large machinery and trucks chugging past me, I spotted a beautiful vivid blue and gold kingfisher perched on a ladder below me. Alas, I wasn't fast enough.
As the sun assumedly went down (I hadn't seen it all day, the cloud cover just got... darker) I met a cat on the way back to the car. In my haste to take the photo before impending strokes, I missed the focus by a bit, highlighting the grass patch in front of him/her/meow. Anyway. I still like the photo.
These five photos came together in a small huddle and said to me 'Sam, don't shoot directly into the sun. Buy a lens hood at least. Geez.' Wise guys. But, they had a point- turns out I'm not super keen on lens-flare.
I found the chair at the side of the harbour. Metaphors aside, I wondered as to the sweet, albeit brief, relationship between what I figured to be a fisherman and his thick Frijj chocolate milkshake.
First photo of the new roll, loaded in while sitting on the conveniently placed chair. The passage ahead was another way to get to the estuary- this one involving scaling the bank to the left, getting tangled in a tree, and jumping over deep muddy puddles under the bridge.
A boat. A blue boat. I thought back to old books I'd find in my grandparents' stu..dy.. piano room...(?) whatever it was- there were these tiny encyclopaedias each about a single topic, bugs, fish, toadstools, boats, and they just felt like small spell tomes or the diary of an explorer. I wanted to get that straight on documentative.. miniwizardadventurerjournal vibe, but with a 50mm lens I struggled to get it all in the frame. The mud was deep around the vessel, so I had to go and find big rocks and logs to throw out and make stepping stones/precarious balancing pedestals far enough away to fit the boat in my viewfinder.
There was another boat, but no angle looked right, so I snapped a picture of its anchor's chain. A manmade shape/pattern amidst a natural mishmash is something I quite like.
Further up the estuary towards Starcross was another tunnel which I had absolutely never noticed before despite having passed it everyday for years on my way to secondary school.
I found a thing. I have no idea what it is, or what it does, but I decided that climbing on it would be a good idea. I couldn't help but see some sort of antiquated tank from this angle.
This was the cool barrel that distracted me enough to almost get marooned at sea (can you be marooned at estuary?) Anyway. I like this one. There's an object that is clearly the subject with a background that isn't just superfluous, but helps put the foreground into context, the framing of the puddle is nice and someone told me the barrel looks like an elephant, so that's good. Obviously.
Told you the tide came in quickly. From the shore I walked along a large pipe to snap this facing the railway. This way I didn't have to wear waders. (I'm seriously considering buying some- there are some really cool shipwrecks I'd love to wander around.)
Stone to block to tower. I went inside that tower as a kid, or at least, the hall connected to it for a meal that I attended with my family. I was wearing a green jumper. When I took it off to reveal my green t-shirt underneath someone commented on the.. greenness of my attire. From that day I decided to stop wearing so much green.
I went under the pier. Through the slats of wood to my left I met a kayaker seemingly surprised to see a non-wetsuited person so close to the water's edge. We talked about the tide- I was naturally still in shock as to how fast it comes in. Did I mention how fast it comes in?
The air is pretty noisy at home- lots of not so social-media-esque tweeting. Crows nest in trees across the road from my house. The sparrows that live in the roof hop around bushes just outside the bathroom window when I brush my teeth in the morning. We've come to an agreement in which I can look at them without them flying away in return for me not being a very large upright cat that will somehow eat them from the other side of the glass. Pigeons, blackbirds and the occasional pheasant turn up in the garden. One time we had a peacock join the fray. I figure it escaped the castle grounds nearby.
One of my favourite photos. This is the third boat in this post. A hat-ship. A shiptych. The power of thr..sea? Puns ashore- I mean aside, this was a port of departure (point* I'll stop) for me in terms of having faith in the images I was creating.
The boat above was shot after I'd slipped and slid down this muddy walkway. I love the houses in Topsham. It's a stunning town and great for pubs. Important. There's an antiques centre by the estuary with like, 3 or 4 floors of strange peculiar odd.. oddities. I saw a couple of masks in there that I'm pretty sure would've turned me into a green faced yellow suit wearing eccentric had I worn them.
What were you even thinking trying to permit yourself to moor your vessel in the area of this lockpit? Honestly. These were taken by the Turf Hotel, further down the river from the Double Locks which you can get to from the Quay in Exeter. I'd mentioned in an earlier post that this was my first job. The beer garden is enormous and is totally rammed on sunny days. Before we used buzzers to let patrons know their food was ready and that they should meet us by the front doors to collect it, we would have to shout their table number. I was a young teen. My voice was naturally in a state of squeaky croaky ridiculousness. "FORTY twOOWOOEEHEEP" would garner a laugh or a hundred from the field of people.
Snappy Snaps was about 10 metres ahead of me when I decided it would be a good idea to take the film out of the camera. I had not wound it back. Damien Hirst-ing it, the light let in chopped the cows in half. I'd climbed over a fence and sidled along a wooden beam across a river, edging closer to these guys in the hopes that they wouldn't mistake me for hay, to get this photo and all. It's still nice, in it's own glowy kind of way.
2017's literal mooing was its way of letting me know how this is to be a year for making mistakes and learning, trial and error. I think, really, the doing, just doing, is the path to finding the images that I want to make.