Claire 'Selkie' Dollin

Camera Bags: My name is Selkie, and I have a problem.

I do. There are some folks out there who have more than I own but I still think four might be a couple too many. There’s the first bag that was cheap and a security risk; and eventually the kit outgrew it. There’s the second bag, also known as the it-came-with-a-magazine-subscription bag. There’s the shoulder bag because I was carrying too much, now doing double duty carrying my lunch to work. Then there’s the behemoth. A Vanguard VEO T48 backpack in blue.

Ah but that doesn’t look so bad, you say. Oh, you don’t realise that this has far more in common with Doctor Who’s TARDIS than the colour. I packed and took it out for the day; wondered why by the end I could barely move… It weighed 17 pounds. That’s like having a year and a half old toddler strapped onto your back. I took it on to the scales in the bathroom to satisfy the curiosity of my friend, who thought she would need to dust off her CPR skills on me during the walk. So I’ll be honest, it’s big and cavernous, and I can’t imagine ever having enough kit to have it completely stuffed. I also can’t imagine being able to carry it when loaded either.

Optimism, thy name is Jet2 ground crew. It does pass itself off as hand luggage most of the time but good luck wedging it under a seat. There’s a lot to love about this bag. I won’t grow out of it. Mostly because I woundn’t be able to carry anthing bigger. It has a water bottle holder (that you can take off for travel by air) and attachments for tripod. You can move them around too. Tripod on the side? Done. Want to move it to the back (or front? What do you call the big flat outside edge?)? Yep, you can do that. I know that is the main point of tactical bags. The military want to make them as adaptable as possible and it easily spills into areas where people carry a very different collection of kits. I mean every photographer carries a totally different kit, search YouTube for kit videos if you don’t believe me. The bag’s internals do all sorts of magical things and it seems twice as deep as any other bag I’ve gone through. There’s a Joby Gorillapod 3K in there and I’ve not seen it for weeks now.

For all I talked about the weight I could put into it, there was no strain on my back. There’s a waist belt…THAT HAS POCKETS! Finally somewhere for the lens cap/car keys/face mask/change. One thing per pocket though; there’s not enough room for all of that at the same time. There’s a chest strap to secure and balance the shoulder straps, another large backpack standard. As someone with boobs there’s always some scepticism about these; the chest strap is removable and adjustable because they don’t always work with the anatomy.

I don’t have a front view (of me) so you don’t get to appreciate the space-time distortion that the chest strap creates. So maybe it’s time to have a look at those storm clouds on the horizon. Unlike it’s smaller stablemates, the 45T and 37T, there’s no top access and you can only go in one side, no matter how you set up in the innards. The top upside down zipper only leads to a little flat pocket good for spare memory cards and batteries, and the side I choose for my water bottle also leads to another little pocket that I relocated the waterproof cover to. They are slighly useless pockets, I’ll admit, but I’ve still managed to fill them with stuff. Although, this might not be the weak link in its design. Remember I mentioned my first bag had a security issue? It was a front access bag. One massive zip running the whole way round the front of the bag. Bye bye camera…? Soon as I noticed that it became a twitchy eye moment when I was out in public with it. Forever wondering if it was going to get stolen. Access through the back is the way forward my friends. With a bag this size you an undoubtedly carrying a vast amount of kit that will have cost you a fair amount of your hard earned money. You don’t want someone to just walk of with it because they could get an easy access zip open, and if they try to run off with the whole thing then I doubt they will get far before collapsing and needing CPR.

Where does this leave us? Lost? Confused? Having friends worry about my health? Endlessly searching for the perfect home for my camera and lenses? Probably. It’s a good bag. I’ve taken it on flights, hikes, boats and busses; and it’s as good looking as the day I lifted it out its delivery box. A box so big I could have posted myself out in. I love it really, even if I was slightly disappointed by the lack of top opening but I’ll survive. Right, I’m off to lift some weights so I can get it off the floor in time for next week’s shoot.

Weather

It never quite plays ball when you want it to…. I went to Glencoe last year. Hoped the weather would stay with the glorious sunshine I drove up in. It was warm and I genuinely considered ordering an ice cream when I stopped at Inveruglas. Not that I felt I needed to stop driving but there’s such a nice view down Loch Lomond.

Did it stay like that… Did it heck. The clouds rolled in when we got to the Clachaig Inn and then stayed stuck there. Went out to Glen Etive the next day and the mountains were hidden all day behind clouds. It was June so I don’t feel like I was asking for much getting to get some decent views. Glencoe and Glen Etive are home so some of the best views in Scotland. Even the big Hollywood movies turn up there from time to time. The now iconic image of Daniel Craig’s Bond standing next to his DB7 in Skyfall was shot in Glen Etive. Actually, now I think about it, the clouds were hanging about the mountains then too. I made an effort to try and not allow it to take away from the trip but it, eventually, did.

I know my current set up isn’t waterproof. Ok, the 24-105mm lens IS proofed as it belongs to Canon’s pro range but the body would suffer if I did it too much. The body has been pretty soaked before, I should really stop doing that. I once stood for an entire afternoon getting shots of a parade in Glasgow and never paid too much attention to the drizzle till I got home. Maybe one day I’ll win the lottery and upgrate to a full mirrorless setup, or be able to get a Canon 6D Mark 2. The 6D I see as the end of the line for me with DSLR bodies; going full frame and weatherproof at the same time. However, back to the subject, clouds don’t always mean rain. It’s living with the grey of winter that really gets me down photography wise, as it doesnt seem like there’s much colour out there.

I suppose the lesson here is to work with what you have, even if what you have doesn’t seem like much. Photoshop’s sky replacement is never going to fix those clouds. I’m sure I coud use it to change something, purple clouds maybe? I’ve been accused of messing with the sky before. The intense blue of the sky from Mount Tiede in Tenerife was no fake, I assure you. Just this real sky from high above the little fluffy clouds over an otherworldly terrain that has played the part of alien planets in film and TV. It’s a dark sky location for star gazing for a reason and just generally beautiful. BUT we can’t always be in the blue skies and warm temperatures of Tenerife.

“I can see the curve of the Earth from here!”

So where am I going with this little wander down memory lane? Two big takeaways – one…. Stop letting the weather stop the camera getting out. Take the grey with the summer colour and work with it. Second…. Never Photoshop a sky. Keep it real. I did this anyway but I’m not for changing. We don’t always have beautiful blue skies and fluffy white clouds here in Scotland so why lie about it?

Auditorio de Tenerife

A genuine architectural highlight of Santa Cruz is sitting right next to the harbour and it’s kinda hard to miss.

I mean how can you walk past this structural beauty. A few years back I was on a tour bus and was told that it was designed to look like a wave. Though when you stand where I was when I took that shot there was more of a ship’s bow look about this view. Never the less it is very much part of the expressionist movement. Such an unusual building, it was the star of a Dcotor Who episode. Series 12, episode 3, Orphan 55; in case anyone is interested. The unusual spa on a nuclear wasteland of planet earth. They also did some filming up around Mount Teide for that episode. The rocky volcanic landscape filling in for the wastelands.

Building took a very long time to come to fruition. The auditorium opened in 2003 but it was way back in 1970 when it was decided that one should be built. Going through a few architects too before Santiago Calatrava Valls had the final design and the budget had some issues, climbing from 30 million to 72 million Euros, but there’s many buildings around the world that have back stories like this (I’m looking at you, Scottish Parliament building….).

The sheen on the building is due to the fact that it is covered in tile fragments. It is smooth and cool to the touch, just in case you were wondering. It was lovely to get this close to it for a change. Rolling past on a tourist bus didn’t do it justice. I only managed to get a couple of shots from the bus the last time I was in Santa Cruz.

It does however give a sense of scale to this tidal wave of a building and it leaves it’s own mark on the skyline. Here’s a fun little thing if you do go up to the building. Walk around towards the back and look down to where the sea crashes against the rocks… Except those rocks aren’t just changed by the sea but by an artist who climbs out there and paints the portraits of famous musicians.

It’s not often you see Mozart, Sinatra and Britney Spiers so close together in a gallery. I do feel slightly sorry for “Fill” Collins though.

Japanese Garden

Outside of Dollar in Clackmannanshire there’s a Japanese garden that is over one hundred years old. It’s open to the public and is amazingly tranquil and beautiful.

Referred to as “the most important Japanese garden in the Western world” (Prof. Suzuki) She Raku En, or the place of pleasure and delight, was the original idea of Ella Christie back in 1908. She was an unusual woman for her time as she travelled extensively throughout Asia during her life. She brought in Taki Handa, another fabulous woman ahead of her time, to design the garden. It was a complicated history after that as it was destroyed in 1963 and the main home of the Christies was demolished, however the garden has been re-established since then. If you want to see more of the history and how the garden has developed I suggest you have a look at their website – https://cowden-garden.myshopify.com

Each of the elements in the garden have meaning and it’s a genuinely fascinating place to spend a day. They also have a lovely cafe onsite too (because we know that’s important after shooting).

HNC Photography

It’s all over. Officially. The certificate arrived in the post (much like the Higher one, although this one actually made it to the right address this year) and my former class mates are off onto the HND. I’ll do mine next year once I’ve worked a bit and paid off a few bills.

So I thought I’d do a bit of a collection of the different work I’ve accumulated over the year of work. So the year started with the still life unit, so there was some studio work but we went outside with lego for It’s a Small World. Then I took it further as the unit ended with the tiny model railway people re-enacting Hands, Face, Space. Some of the other work from the Still Life unit appeared in my more general Autumn post.
New year, new lockdown and we did most of Portraiture in our own homes and I ran a little short on models. The final term was Documentary photography and my final project was Unsafe Spaces. In which I discovered that Photoshop could really use a spell checker function. The Applied Photography unit showed that there was more than just taking photos… The infrared or ultra violet were pretty different although quite easy to do on a basic scale. A more practical application of the infrared was the trail camera. Watching Indy at night wasn’t exactly riveting but it was something I wanted to try for a long time. Finally there was an accumulation of work in an over haul of the Portfolio and the way this site looks.

So it’s just a matter of wait and earn… and hope they let me back in next year…..

Down the Coast

I’ve been wandering round the Ayrshite coast recently. Does help that I go on a weekly walk with a friend and we relocated the walk (previously it was the local park) to the beach at Troon. Which is somewhat the inspiration for this. We’ve ventured to other parts of this coast line before like Culzean Castle. Hard to believe that was 2 years ago when my camera body was still new and I was yeat to darken the doors of the college to study for my Higher or HNC.

There’s some beautiful sunsets there in Troon. Slightly further north there’s the tiny hamlet of Portencross. I heard about this place through the Sunday Shoot Group (it’s what I call them, there isn’t an official name). They went to Portencross long before I joined and it stuck in my head as an idea. So I set off before my walk on Sunday to get a few shots in.

I was slightly broken after all the walking. Turns out my new camera bag is great but does weigh in at about 17lbs (and that’s with my iPad not the full MacBook). It’s a bit of a stretch for me at the moment, going to have to work on my fitness levels for carrying it any length of time.

Return to the Murals

So ages ago, OK it was 2 years ago, I went out and found some of the Glasgow murals. I’ll admit that they can be hard to shoot to be honest. One of my lecturers recently pointed out that you are taking a photo of art and it’s not always successful, because art is beautiful in its own right. However it’s always a good day out when I go shooting with the Sunday crowd.

I try to take something a little different but it’s tricky. These murals have probably been snapped by 50% of those walking by and plenty go looking for them and there’s even a guide website now. None of this will stop me going after a full set and they do keep adding to them. The Billy Connolly ones are pretty recent additions to the collection.

These are from the larger mural of Scottish wildlife that I had a previous go at on the Bank Holiday Hunt. This time I was quite taken with the arch in the stonework that underlies the mural and has been worked into the design.

Off The Visual Spectrum

Cast your mind back to school, science class to be exact, because we’re going to be looking at the Electromagnetic Spectrum. Don’t want to go there? It’s ok ‘cos I’m explaining it anyway.
The spectrum is all of the different types of sources of electromagnetic radiation stacked together by wavelength and frequency.

So it contains gamma radiation, x rays, microwave and radio. Wedged in there is the visible light, the stuff we normally choose point cameras at. While we are still in our mental classroom remember that old phrase they used to trot out? Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain? It’s the order of the colours in the visible light spectrum with violet hanging out at one end and red at the other, this is where we’re headed off to with this experiment.

Infrared photography is really popular at the moment. There’s plenty of strange white trees and dark skies on Instagram. There’s over 200,000 uses of the hashtag #infraredphotography on Insta, it’s a feed full of the most amazing images. Of course, this technique also how some cameras work in the dark, like the trail camera I was playing with only last week. That’s a super useful feature on security and CCTV systems.
There’s a few different ways of getting in on the infrared art trend. You can get an older DSLR camera altered to remove the inbuilt infrared filtering system (you can do it yourself if you are brave/stupid). There’s infrared film, if you are into that. You can get yourself an infrared filter and try it that way on your camera. Or there’s a shortcut if you get a filter and a camera phone.

You just hold the filter over the lens on the phone and take a photo on a bright day. It’s going to come out all red but a little in phone edit to convert the image to black and white at it’s done. That’s how the 2 images above with trees were created. The one of the buildings and the city street? That was the same filter on my DSLR but it’s just not as impressive in an urban environment.

So at the other end of the spectrum, literally in this case, is ultraviolet. You can get yourself a converted camera to shoot in UV, it’s the same as the infrared conversion but it becomes “full spectrum”. There’s some other kit you might need to pick up as well. This is probably a route folk would go down if you are serious or in dermatology. It shows up skin damage as UV light is what is responsible for your fine sun tan, or your daft sun burn, or your very worrying skin cancer. Fun fact – if you put on sun block and take a shot of your face it would look like you had put paint on it because it’s blocking the UV.
Still we can have some fun with this without a load of kit and expense.

I worked in the USA at a summer camp back in 2009 and this is in an expired passport…. Would you allow this woman to look after your child?

So if you get yourself a black light (yup, just like in the clubs or on CSI – I’m showing my age here) then you can make the most amazing things show up. Just block out most of the light so they become really bright. In other words, shoot in the dark. So money, driving licences, passports, etc all have security protection using different methods. One is to have a printed layer that would normally be invisible to the naked eye over it. When the document is checked with a black light there’s a chance that a fraudster would not have gone to the bother of creating this design as well. This one surprised me as I assumed it would not be in the same chance of being copied as a passport itself. The passport it is in was before the biometric era and was rather boring under UV light. The biometric passport I have now is fascinating, there’s a different animal on every page. Those images are taking a little longer to edit as I don’t want to share my passport number or any details on the internet for all to see.
When you get bored of looking at all the bank notes you can find… there’s the world of UV makeup that makes for fab fashion images (if you find someone more skilled at applying makeup than me, obviously).

So did you survive your trip back to science class? Was it worth it? It’s completely worth giving it a try. I’ll probably be giving infrared a few more goes.

Trail Camera

spypoint

So I’ve made jokes about my lack of skills in the wildlife photography department… Very occasionally I get a little luck, like ol’ Jazz Hands here. But as part of my HNC I got to play with a proper trail camera, like someone who really tracks down animals and not just hopes that a heron will stick their landing in front of me.

It was actually a lot of fun to play with (and I’ll be honest here it was playing). I don’t have any real animal tracking skills and I don’t own the trail camera, so decided to put it where it wouldn’t be stolen and where I know there’s an animal to capture…. So it was placed in Indy’s stable to capture her movement overnight and it worked.

Here she is! I never catch her sleeping so this is really a bit of a treat.

So here’s some hard facts – it’s a Spypoint Force Dark Trail Camera and if you want to buy one Wex is charging £149 (at time of me writing anyway). This model can take photos, video and time lapse both in the dark, using infrared, and in colour. It has a 12 megapixel sensor and is “weather proof” (so I wouldn’t dunk it in the river). It takes a whopping 8 (eight) AA batteries (unless you can put your hands on a rechargeable battery unit for it but that will set you back about £65). However, it does have decent battery life for those 8 AAs. I used some bargain Kodak labled ones and got 4 full 18 hour stints out of them and they were only at 50%. In each of those nights there were about 650 images. This seems OK by my standards and matches what is stated on the websites for it surviving 7 days out in the wild.

I suppose that this isn’t the mose exciting use but I don’t know of any badger setts to stalk. I do know where some deer usually pass through for food but didn’t have long enough to trial that one out as an idea. Maybe next time.

Portraiture

I have a sort of existential dread and cold sweat that comes over me when I think about telling models (or indeed the poor friends and family) that end up in front of my camera what to do. So when portraiture came up in the course there was a little panic. This is probably the only time the coronavirus has been helpful as I could mostly work with people I knew to get the work done.

Clockwise from top left – With a Precious Object, Through Glass, Without a Face, Self-portrait in the Style of an Artist (Picasso in this case) and With Movement.

My poor mother… She hasn’t quite gotten over the shame of wandering round the building we’ve not long moved to dressed in my Harry Potter cosplay robe. Each of these images had briefs of their own. The self portrait is built of 6 different images and was almost a bit of a cheat. I didn’t want to turn my camera on myself directly, at that time anyway, so built it out of old selfies. The thing is I can take good shots of people if they don’t know it.

Clockwise from top left – Work from my Higher at the Christmas Style Mile Carnival and the SEC Craft Fair, a shot from the night photography workshop in Edinburgh and my personal favourite, The Shoe Seller in Tenerife.

None of these were posed…..And I almost prefer these to formal, posed images. Heck “The Shoe Seller” is a bit of a portfolio fixture at this point. I accept that there’s a definite need for images that are posed. It’s maybe just not my thing just now. Need to work on it though because I’ll need to do a studio shoot or two when I get back into the college buildings.