This is about the process as much as the results, and the just-for-fun stuff. All photos © Gary Eason unless otherwise noted. Please visit Gary Eason Photography for commercial work, licensing and downloads and further information. 
Selected prints can be purchased through me, or direct for delivery to your own home or office through the Photo4me (UK-based) and the Fine Art America (US) sites.
Castle Stalker, dusk - the picture chosen for Susan Cooper's fan page
The famous children's author Susan Cooper is currently using one of my photographs for her official Facebook fan page.
The iconic Castle Stalker, on the west coast of Scotland, features in two of her books.
My picture, selected from a huge range available on the internet, portrays the castle in bright late afternoon light but with a backdrop of very dark clouds.
It is a tone-mapped image composed from multiple originals. This is a technique that is used to handle the very wide range of light inherent such a scene.
Ms Cooper's Boggart books, in which the castle appears, are lighthearted. But she is best known for darker and more atmospheric fantasies based on English and Welsh legend and it was felt that the mood of the photo was "just perfect for her".
I think of her as an American because that is where she has lived for many years. But I gather she was born in Buckinghamshire, where I'm based, and apparently says High Wycombe is where she rode her bike as a child, so I guess she felt a sort of affinity.
The photographs from which the image is compiled were made during a very wet trip to Scotland last year. I made several from the same location, or very near it.
I'm absolutely thrilled they bought it.
Sea Harriers over Choiseul Sound, 1982
I've been making further experiments with digitally-crafted aviation artworks. Whizz marks? - Well, they might be naturally occurring vapour trails. ... but, OK, mostly it's just comic book licence. They add drama and a sense of speed.
As does the ground rushing past beneath. In this latest image of Sea Harriers in action over the Falklands in 1982, I've adopted the technique used by the aviation artist Peter van Stigt, of a radial blur centred on the main vanishing point for the aircraft, rather than linear motion blur along the axis of travel. The idea is that the image splays outwards as it were, and I agree with him that it gives a better effect in a scene like this. I've also faded the strength of the blur through the image, so that the sense of motion lessens with distance - which is just how you perceive things - and picked out some middle distance rock details.
But the issue a friend of mine raised with regard to all these aviation works is: where is the observer? Are we ... on the ground? ... in another aircraft - somehow just hanging around or travelling alongside...? In response I would borrow what can be a very telling approach from literary criticism, to ask: who's the narrator? Because usually I am attempting to tell a story.
So you are seeing the scene from all of these perspectives, through a magical filter that is part camera, part time machine and part historical docudrama. In practice I tend not to worry about the issue. My aim is to create a sense of 'being there' that goes beyond what you would get from merely a still photograph.
My interest is primarily the aircraft rather than, say, a nearby tree or rock, so I opt for clarity in the aircraft details and let the surroundings whoosh past at what feels like an appropriate velocity - appropriate to the distance, field of view, and aircraft speed. I have to remind myself, if I feel a pang of loss that a great view gets blurred in the process, that these are aviation images not landscapes.
Does it work? I would really like to know what you think.
It's hugely exciting to be witnessing the birth of a very impressive new musical: VFTheatre's 1,000 Suns, An American Afterlife - many of the workshops and early rehearsals for which have been in my house.
I also did the promotional photography for them, although they have been responsible for the final publicity materials like the banner above.
They are going to be performing the show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer. They have lined up an excellent centrally-located venue on Northbridge from the 6th - 11th of August.
There's more info on the VF Theatre website, and on the Crowdfunder page they have set up to part finance the project - where there are some decent rewards if you are able to dip into your pocket. You can also follow developments on Twitter @1000SunsUK.
'Another day': Hurricanes from 17 Squadron RAF in northern France, June 1940
What does a spinning aircraft propeller look like?
You’re thinking I’m daft. Anyone who’s ever seen even an office fan knows what a spinning prop looks like.
Right. It’s just a blurred disk.
So why is it that in almost every photograph you’ve ever seen of a prop aircraft you can not only see but in effect count the propeller blades?
The answer is obvious of course: photographs are a sliver in time and if you are going to catch a moving aircraft without showing it as a blur, you need to have a fast enough shutter speed that it will also ‘stop’ the propeller.
The effect of this will vary with the speed of the prop’s rotation - which in part depends on the different phases of flight - and of course the shutter speed.
So the question that I have been grappling with is: what looks ‘right’?
Dead engine
I want to know because, in a new departure, I am developing a range of aviation-related digital artworks (for want of a better term).
These are photographically based, but the source material features a motley variety of prop rotations - from the total blur (rare) to the stationary (which looks just silly in my opinion - as if the engine has seized in flight).
I found that, to render them into photographic (or photorealistic) backgrounds it was easier, usually, to recreate the spinning prop from scratch. So I could make it look like almost anything I wanted.
I debated with myself whether to mimic the effect of an artfully chosen shutter speed - good blur but with discrete blades visible - which a crack aviation photographer will usually strive for. Think Paul Bowen, for example: http://www.airtoair.net/gallery/gallery-bombers.htm.
Or whether to recreate what you actually would see if you were right there. After all, in a typical air-to-air scenario, where is the viewer? Hanging somehow in space?
After a faltering start I’ve plumped for the latter. In the Hurricanes image above - with the viewer standing on the ground, I suppose - I started with a single prop blade, painted the tip yellow, and spun it into a circle (this worked better than spinning three blades). Then once it was pasted onto an aircraft I resized it and altered the perspective to fit - and adjusted opacity right down.
[UPDATE: 19 Feb 12] In response to online discussion of this approach and a review of more photos, I then also added some reflected sunlight 'shimmer'. This needs to be related to the surrounding light but i think it adds a good sense of depth and movement to the props.
But I’m far from being sure about all this. So comments welcome please (and “stick to jets” is not helpful, thanks!).
Winter field, panorama
I'd had this image in mind for weeks and weeks. I love the way the field sweeps down to the woodland here on the outskirts of Penn (we're in Buckinghamshire). All I needed was the right light. And today, I had that too.
For ages it feels like we've been living under a monotonous grey duvet of cloud. Mild enough, I grant you, but depressing all the same.
This morning was different. Sunshine! At one point when I looked out of my study I could also see dark slate grey cloud off in one direction. This combination always means dramatic landscapes, so I grabbed my camera and headed for the countryside - which, where I am, is less than a mile away.
I had to hang around for a while, getting rained on intermittently. But it was so worth the wait, as swathes of brilliant sunshine rolled down the ploughed field and sloshed up against the beeches in Common Wood on my left. Such a beautiful scene.
A brief update, partly arising from my last post. The first buyer of a print of Tree trunks I, which I was writing about in that, is an academic in the USA. So it turns out that the canvas she bought is hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago.
OK it's actually hanging in her office in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago - but that's still a good place to be. She e-mailed me a photo of it there, and wrote: "... your work is officially on exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago! And I've gotten lots of compliments."
I'm really pleased that she's pleased. This was sold through my Fine Art America portfolio, by the way.
Separately, I was also sent a mobile phone picture message of another photo of mine hanging on someone's living room wall. She'd been given it as a birthday present and thought it was "lovely". It was an 18in x 12in canvas of this Scottish landscape sold through Photo4me.
I rather like this! Sometimes I get to deal with customers personally. This happened recently for example with a chap in Minnesota, who'd come across a sunset photo on my own website which (by chance) featured a spit of land on which he had owned a lakeside cabin for 10 years.
He had bought a royalty free download - but in a size that was far too small to print it, which is what he was trying to do. Incidentally I think that although the numbers are clear on the digital download page, I may need to spell out what they mean for folk who are not familiar with the notion of uncompressed file sizes or the implications of photo resolutions.
Anonymous
Anyway it all ended well. I refunded his money and worked with him on what he was looking for, which led to his purchasing a canvas through my FAA site.
While it can involve more work, liaising with a customer about precisely what they want is rewarding.
But more often I have no idea even who has bought a picture online. I had a tantalising example of this recently when I made some black and white photos of landmarks in and around the City of London.
This is an ongoing project which includes some colour work - and a number of panoramas; it's hard to display those wider images adequately online, but that's maybe a subject to come back to another day.
I took the shots on a Wednesday, processed them over the next two days and uploaded them to my various outlets on the Friday. By Sunday, only one person had looked at this image of the Heron Tower (right) on my FAA portfolio. And whoever it was bought a 28in x 48in canvas of it!
That's what I call a result - but all I know is that they live in Essex, England. It would be great to know what they liked about it and where it is hanging, all eight square feet of it.
So keep those feedback messages coming please: www.garyeasonphotography.com/contact.
Urgh: I have a streaming cold ....
Of the various images I have sold copies of these past few days, the one above is the one I'm particularly pleased about.
A discerning customer in the US has bought a canvas print of it - and unwittingly becomes the first person to have acquired the first example of a new departure in my photographic work.
With hindsight I can see that I began thinking along these lines (as it were), and working on these photographs, some time ago. They are a convergence of various key ideas:
Two works illustrate the way these thoughts have been developing. The first, Tree Lines I (below), depicts a line of trees in silhouette on the edge of a lake - in fact the sea loch, Loch Linnhe, in the west of Scotland.
Tree lines I, 2011
The scene was virtually monochrome to begin with, as shot; the pattern of light and waves in the foreground water lent itself to an extrusion into lines. I freely acknowledge this as my own response to others’ efforts to scrape or ‘smudge’ elements of a suitable digital image into lateral lines. My own technique is different and I prefer it.
The second work I would identify as central to my thinking is the one at the top of this post, Tree trunks I. I took this, predominantly vertical, representation of a pine wood and distilled it by abstracting a line through it that picks out all the various colours and tones. The natural and abstract images each stand alone quite readily, but work best side-by-side I feel.
The initial abstraction of Tree Trunks was essentially (not entirely) random. I have since pondered taking the image apart, one line of pixels at a time, and rendering each line into a separate abstraction. These could then stand as a series of some 3,000 discrete images (the original is a 3,296 pixel high crop). I may be getting ahead of myself - but I shall make more of these, because I'm fascinated to see what comes out.
Thinking about it, Reeds in the mist (right), which I made a year ago, naturally prefigures all this. It is a figurative image that I especially liked precisely because it is so naturalistically abstract.
Now, I'm no historian of photography or art but even I can understand that other people have been here before. I can see that this might be a form of geometric abstraction in a long line through Mondrian and Bridget Riley, for instance. I don't know how Bridget Riley's work has evolved - I shall find out - but to me it doesn't matter because I got here independently, which is what interests me, or as independently as anyone can who functions in a highly visual world.
All this thinking predated the record-breaking sale of Andreas Gursky's The Rhine II. I did not know that image until it hit the headlines, but I have to say I love it; I find it mesmerising. If you've persevered this far you can probably see why I might.
Pleasing
Talking of sales, which is where this post began, I've just had an unusually good week. It is peculiarly gratifying when people come along, by whatever route, and buy something that you have created - and I am duly grateful.
So I'll end with a photograph I made on a very unpromising morning on the north east coast of England. I had gone to Saltburn by the Sea - which is where I grew up, as it happens - to see what the dawn would be like. Not hugely interesting, in fact, because of the relentless 'grey duvet' that had descended on the landscape and stayed throughout my visit to the area, in September.
But, looked at optimistically, there was a certain liquid charm in the early morning light. I made a few photographs overlooking the shoreline, and a few more half way along Saltburn's pier - just at the line where the limpid little waves began flopping onto the beach.
One of them, looking up the coast towards Teesside's industrial outpourings, has just been bought by somebody - which makes me very happy, because it's a subtle image and I'm glad they appreciated it. I hope they like it when the print arrives. You can find it here in my Photo4me portfolio.
I'm rather pleased with this new photograph of mine showing two cock pheasants knocking seven bells* out of each other.
It was taken in a country lane on the pretty Cowal Peninsula in Argyll & Bute during my recent photographic trip. I came round a corner in the car and there they were, right in the narrow road, squaring up.
I stopped as quickly as I could and first grabbed my D3s. On trips like that I normally have both the Nikon and Olympus ready, one with a 24-70mm zoom on for close and middle shots and the other with the superb 50-200mm Zuiko and 2x teleconverter for as much reach as I can muster in case it's needed (at full stretch it's the full frame equivalent of almost 800mm/f7).
I got off a few shots through the windscreen with the Nikon. Here's the scene:
I then switched to the E3 and took a few more, before carefully opening the driver's door and getting the lens into the angle. It was a very quiet lane and it was safe to stop right where I was. I checked the camera settings, upping the ISO to 1000 which was giving me about 1/500th speed on a fairly wide aperture.
The birds seemed oblivious: eyeballing each other, strutting and circling, occasionally rushing - and then every now and then having a full-blown dust-up. These actual physical encounters were momentary and of course as the shutter fires, you can't see the image briefly.
I was excited when I knew I'd taken a great shot as they both jumped several feet into the air, claws out, wings flapping. Fantastic!
Or not. Imagine my disappointment when I checked afterwards and found this:
As I was pressing the shutter release they had jumped above my framing! Ho hum. You learn something every day.
Still, I did also get the marvellous one above. In fact it's the better image I think, on reflection, because their tussle was so quick - such a blur of fluttering feathers - that it is only in the stilled moment that I could see that one of them had turned completely upside down.
So, maybe fate was looking out for me after all.
- - -
* Where does that expression come from I wonder?
There is something fascinating about the urban periphery. I don't mean shanty towns; in fact I mean the opposite. Instead of people crammed into makeshift habitats, I mean habitats that were fully intended to be peopled, but are not.
I can remember, when I was a boy, exploring in some local woods with our pet dog and coming upon, first, lots of rhodedendron bushes among the woodland, a sign of cultivation, then the back of a big old mansion, all derelict and smashed. Spooky to wander around and peer into. (Years later it was done up and became the Rushpool Hall Hotel, and very splendid it is).
On the Costa Blance in Spain some years ago, I remember driving and walking around an abandoned holiday resort: roads all laid out with drains and lamp posts, but overgrowing with grass. Deserted buildings; an empty swimming pool.
Today I happened to turn down a side road on the Cowal Peninsula in Argyll and Bute, just to see where it went, and stumbled across Polphail. Cordoned off, after a fashion, with temporary site fencing, it was easily visible from a concrete access road along which a public footpath was signposted.
What a weird place. It looked to be fairly modern - 1970s, maybe; concrete-built two-storey accommodation blocks, with all the windows smashed and a few wall-sized graffiti cartoons of people. Spooky as hell - especially when I heard, from within one of the darkened rooms, a deep, guttural, hacking cough.
Signs say bats live there. Apt.
My camera's GPS metadata places it at this lat/long: 55.87047667, -5.30587667. Here's the place on Google's Streetview, although the caravans at the entrance have now been moved some way further back. There are warning signs on the fencing that it is an offence to disturb the bats.
I thought it might have been a holiday home project that had failed. But, searching later, I found that it had been built in the North Sea oil boom as housing for workers who were going to construct concrete rigs in a huge dock excavated nearby. But the rigs never got made so it was never occupied. Here's a BBC News report.
The demolition promised a few years ago clearly has not happened; however, a smart new marina promised in the old dry dock is now up and running, and very swish it looks.
Here's a Scotsman report on the graffiti project, and of course I have some photos on my site. There is a much fuller set of photos on Flickr.
Interesting, turning down side roads.
You probably know that I have a thing about sailing, but my first love was flying. It's just that circumstances over the years made it less accessible. Less accessible but not inaccessible.
I was at John Lewis buying a vacuum cleaner (can I get some product placement dosh here please?) and emerged to the most fantastic late afternoon cloudscape as heavy rain showers rolled across the South Buckinghamshire landscape.
What has this to do with flying? Well, Booker airfield - properly, Wycombe Air Park (EGTB to pilots) - is just around the corner and I figured it would afford an open vista. Which it did, as you can see. The clouds really were something to behold. It is unusual to have a backdrop so dark that you'd think I must have walloped a hefty filter over it. But no, this is unretouched apart from standard tidying up.
The plane taxiing for takeoff, by the way, is a Robin DR 300-180R, a French design made by Avions Pierre Robin. This particular one, registration G-BLGH, is used as a glider "tug" by Booker Gliding Club. In other words it tows sailplanes to altitude then releases them to realise their true function.
I made several photos over a cup of tea at the airfield cafe, then headed along the ridge a little way to the outskirts of Flackwell Heath and contemplated the landscape there. Eventually I made up a panorama of that view too.
