Posts Tagged ‘photography’

En castellano As we strolled through the narrow back alleys of Cudillero we could hear the morning mass on telly through open windows. José Ángel timed it wrong and passed an old boy in his front garden just as the mass got to the sign of the peace so I had to wait while he shook hands with the old boy, his neighbor and a couple of other folk.

158 steps up to my house, he said... I only do it once a day.

I had bumped into JA while on the way to the cinema on Friday (to see The American, when it’s out in November in the UK don’t be fooled into thinking it’s an action thriller, it’s much more sombre, good though). We hadn’t seen each other for a good while and we agreed to head out and take photos again. He said when, I said Sunday? he said ok and there we were, a 7:30 start and to the coast to catch the early sun.

After the cliffs and beaches we wandered round Cudillero, it’s a typical Asturian fishing village, small colourful houses packed into the side of steep hills with pricy seafood restaurants at the bottom. We walked in search of pictures. After the handshake incident we passed a house up on the top level outside of which were hanging half a dozen spatchcocked dogfish. It looked like there was no meat on them so I asked what they were doing there. Drying, JA guessed, but he didn’t know so he asked the old boy in the doorway behind the stinky fish.

The flies found them quite appetizing

They were dogfish, shark of some kind, drying, to be used at christmas to make a traditional dish somewhat like bacalao (the classic salt cod you get almost everywhere in Spain). The old boy motioned us to enter, he was making a fishing lure, but he did more than that, all the walls were covered in shells and pictures made from shells and photos of him as a young man on his boat. We chatted for a while, asking if he still went out fishing. I’m 86 he said, they won’t let me. Your family? The damn government. He showed us some of his mounted shellfish, spider crabs with foot-long claws, mussels the size of baseball gloves, an 8 inch dried seahorse surrounded by dried clam shells. It’s my hobby, he said. As we chatted amiably he said the fishing was sometimes still good but the Basques, the Galicians and the Russians were ruining everything. He said he could understand why the Somali pirates did piracy.

He was a spry old boy, if I was running a boat along the coast of Spain I might be a bit worried.

Mientras paseábamos por las callejones de Cudillero oímos la misa de la mañana por la tele tras las ventanas abiertas. José Ángel eligió un mal momento y pasó por un viejo en su jardín al mismo momento que la misa llegó al “gesto de amistad” y tuve que esperar mientras se daba la mano al viejo, su vecino y unos otros.

Había encontrado a JA cuando iba yo al cine el viernes (para ver la película El Americano, cuando se estrenarán en noviembre en el reino unido no se engañe en pensar que es una película de suspense con acción, es mucho más sombría aun que buena). No nos habíamos quedamos en mucho tiempo y quedamos en salir para sacar fotos otra vez. El dijo ¿cuándo?, dije ¿el domingo?, dijo vale y ya estuvo, una salida a las 7.30 y a la costa para coger el sol temprano.

Después de los acantilados y las playas paseamos por Cudillero, es un típico pueblo de pescadores, con muchas casas pequeñas y de colores muy vivos que están en los pendientes, y abajo hay restaurantes de pescado caros. Andábamos en busca de fotos. Después del incidente de darse la mano pasamos por una casa en el callejón mas alta en donde se colgaban seis pescados (abiertos como libros). Parecía que no había carne así que pregunté por qué estaban allí. Secando adivinó JA, pero no sabía el entonces preguntó al viejo en la puerta detrás los pescados hediondos.

Eran gatas, un tipo de tiburón, secando para utilizarlos en navidad en la preparación de un plato típico, algo semejante a bacalao. El viejo nos invitó adentro, estaba haciendo un cebo pero hacía mucho más, en todos las paredes había conchas y cuadros hechos de conchas y fotos de el como un joven en su barquito. Nos charlamos un rato, le preguntamos si seguía pescar. Tengo 86 años dijo, no me dejan. ¿Su familia? El gobierno de mierda. Nos mostró unos de sus caparazones montados, un centolla con pinzas de 30cm, mejillones de tamaño de guantes de béisbol, un caballito de mar de 20cm rodeado de conchas barnizadas. Es mi hobby dijo el. Tras charlamos amigablemente nos decía que la pesca estaba buena de vez en cuando pero los Vascos, Gallegos y Rusos estaban arruinando todo. Dijo que entendía porque los Somalís hacían piratería.

Era un viejo dinámico, si fuese yo en cargo de una flota de pesca en la costa norte de España podría estar un poco preocupado

I’ve just updated my photo website with a series of pictures taken in the park in the middle of Oviedo. I have a set of prints from this work that I’m pretty happy with, and I’ve got to go out and do some more now the weather is good for park-sitting. Ricardo scanned the negatives and did the hard labour of making them presentable (as they are to appear on the student’s part of his website). I stood to one side and nodded.

I did do the incredibly difficult task of shrinking them and putting them on the server.

I’ve been playing for the last few days getting my new toy (an old iMac) full of my data and learning all about the command button and how we have to do things in Jobsworld… it’s shiny (the mac, or Jobsworld, take your pick).

Some of those B&W chemicals Originally uploaded by zeneziz.

I’ve done a couple of weeks of my photography course so far and I’m really enjoying it. It’s a private course run by an Oviedo photographer called Ricardo Moreno. He’s got a studio and darkroom just around the corner. I stumbled across it while I was looking for english academies (it’s in the same building as the fantastically named Brian School). His photos were all over the walls and they looked really good, when I chatted to him he was a fervent film photographer despite earning chunks of his crust from (digital) wedding photography.

The course doesn’t have a syllabus and when he asked me what I wanted to achieve I said I wanted to produce a film portfolio (I had shown him one of my best of flickr photobooks) and he said no problem.

It’s been a looooong time since I had darkroom time and I realised very quickly that when I was doing B&W stuff in school and university I was doing it very badly. I spent two hours producing one print the other day and really enjoyed the slowness of it, the patience required and the stepwise testing process and choosing what contrast and exact times I wanted. The end result is a print I’m really pleased with (the first from the Bronica- thanks Anne) and I like the fact that it’s not instant, not easy to produce, not instantly replicable. I won’t be ditching the digital by any means, but I’ll certainly make the most of a massive darkroom and lots of time to play.

3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433… Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

Here is the strobist page for the latest assignment.

Strobist is a blog and now a flickr group, run by a photographer for the Baltimore Sun. He does really creative things with small lights and at the moment he’s running lighting 102, a follow on from lighting 101 last year. Every few weeks there’s an assignment at the end of which he does a little discussion page, a ‘what we learned’ kind of thing.

My picture of Liz made that page for this assignment… I suspect the liberal use of pie as payment probably helped.