Saturday 18 May 2013

A fox II


Oh, a fox, I thought II
(scroll down to view the start of this dialogue) 

After processing the first image of the fox, and subsequently modifying it, I decided that there was scope for a better rendition. A return was a suitable response. To try again. This is different from a re-visit to make a time-lapse image of the scene, as I have done with other sites. 

So I headed back out. By placing the camera on an extended mono-pod and thrusting it up into the air I was able to make a composite image.

This is the result;

Oh, a fox, I thought version #2

Thursday 9 May 2013

A fox

Oh, a fox, I thought

Some time has past since I did this work, so this commentary has both the advantage and disadvantage of some time to reflect. The disadvantage is that I no longer feel connected to the experience, those fleeting and nuanced intensities of concentration and feeling that constitute the experiences in the field. The advantages of time passed are gestation and analysis. By leaving this and concentrating on the rest of life the work, the processes and experience are digested. Time and space have changed.
Checking my field notes, there is the following text written after the discovery of the fox;

Gunshot in the distance, on the other side of Shomere. Makes me wary - danger of being mistaken in my movements for prey, makes me extra vigilant, less confident or comfortable here edgy, just as I had been all day. Light is fading but I continue on looking for more possibilities.
A fresh cartridge and a scatter of feathers, no corpse. I do two more linear pieces crossing the edge of the flooded wood, the water/ground edge as it is now. Stillness. Now the wind. 
Across the edge #1








I give up and move back to the track out of the wood. Dark skies as I walk, glad to be on my way and I nearly miss the fox, lying on the side the track, Dead. Small, unmarked. There for a short time. Oh, a fox, I thought.
At these moments I know that these are composites of a set of circumstances;

1st- The Object, I recognize something that resonates with the In Flux project. 
The fox. - is a suitable subject/object.
A second object, behind is a tree-fall, this layers the image.
An earlier manifestation – the image of the corpse of a dog (is it a dog?) a temporal reminder, spatially different, but this time connected through object.


- Fox as both a cultural and environmental object/subject, also suitably multiple in possible audience responses.
- Time of day- dusk is suitable, matches the object.
 

I struggled with the light and some strange colour shifts occurred but succeeded.

Almost dark when I got back.


That was the end of a long text and a long day, as I remember it. This was my first visit to the fox. This is how the image turned out in the beginning;

Oh, a fox I thought Version  #1


 





































 Returning to the text from my field notes, it never occurred to me that the fox might of been shot by the gun in the distance. I think the fox had been dead long before. There was no sign of why it died.

The making of this and the subsequent fox images is a good example of how perception, engagement and experience in the environment works. It also raises some interesting questions about the cultural environment too.

Firstly in the text I start talking about subject / object, it is obvious at this stage I wasn't sure which term to use, but what is it I'm alluding to?

Object suggests objectivity and would offer a detached assessment of the fox, as a species, a biological entity (Vulpes vulpes, to give it it's Latin name). This generalizes the thing before me, rather than considering the animal itself as a recently deceased creature. My prior knowledge can and does augment this understanding. I know a certain amount of information from two distinctly different positions, learnt knowledge and previous experience, (encounters with other foxes and associations of triggered memories). At the point of the first encounter and the making of the first image this is all I have to go on, but further research alters my subsequent responses. A set of subsequent actions have been set in motion.

As I have suggested above, one aspect of learnt knowledge comes from science, from biology and ecology. A further learnt aspect, that I would describe as cultural (science is cultural of course, but it is always an attempt, based on facts and evidence, to create a trans-cultural position, or a communicable truth). The scientific knowledge I bring to this encounter is limited to my own understandings, and different from the understandings of others. There is, therefore, no reason for me to explain what I know, in that this is not available in the subsequent works.

When I encountered the fox, I did not consider it in a scientific way, as an object of study, primarily my response was twofold, the anticipatory excitement of finding something to make work about and a sadness, a melancholy, experienced on encountering the corpse,of a life cut short, the life of a young fox, recognised as an individual. The object of interest, then, is more a subject.

When considered as a subject, in this case it is the subject of a photograph, or the subject of interest as what I am drawn to as I work in the environment, I move from a state of simultaneous perception, a state in which I am taking in all the stimuli of my senses simultaneously, wholly as a constant temporal experience of the entire environment as I encounter it, to concentrating on the subject of interest. In this project I then have to work out how I want to make a composite image of the scene, as a piece of work. To do this I have to work back toward simultaneous perception, to observing the scene in front of me as an environment including my subject of interest. As my field notes above state, there is a second subject included in the scene, a tree-fall, the subject of many other works in this project. So from only having one subject there are now two, both of which indicate changes to the land as I continue to encounter it. Part of the decision making process that is going on is about how to include this in the composite image. The fox, as the main subject is at my feet and easily included, but I must proceed to position myself (and therefore the camera) in a position that will include the tree-fall. 


There is a tension between the two elements in the as yet unformed composite image. They vie for my attention at the expense of all the other elements of the scene. The fox is the strongest element. The one that elicits a strong response in me,  the tree-fall is something I consider useful as a potential reference to other works in the project. A thematic repetition, different from temporal repetition, but repetition none the less.

Once in position, then the extent of compositing is my next consideration, What are the edges of the image? As I look there are no edges to what I see, I only need to move my eyes, my head or my whole body to broaden my visual perception of the scene. This is also continuous, not static, in the way that photography seems to still time. I start the compositing with an idea of the scope of the scene to be depicted, but I rarely find that the computations that follow in post-processing the image correspond to how I see it in the scene, but this is hardly ever exact.. Repeated practice has meant that I have more control of this than I had in the past with earlier images. Additionally, even if I have established theoretical boundaries to the compositing process I do often decide to extend the edges, either on the basis of further interesting content lying just outside the conceived edge, or because I am not certain that I have captured enough shots to form the edge, and hence over compensate.

In the case above, I was unhappy with the aspect ratio of the result, not expecting it to be so high in relation to it's width, I decided to crop the image;




Oh, a fox, I thought Version #1 (cropped version)

I also stretched the image downwards to take away some of the distortion to the body of the fox, a result of post-processing. 

More on the fox in my next posting.