Odin's Chair - and Episode 85 of Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres

Odin's Chair, in Kirkcudbright, Scotland

The Galloway Hoard has been described as the richest collection of rare and unique Viking-age objects ever found in Britain.

Buried around 900AD, it was discovered in Dumfries and Galloway in 2014 by a metal-detectorist, and then eventually acquired by National Museums Scotland and whipped away to Edinburgh.

There is currently a display of some of the items in the Kirkcudbright Galleries, and to mark it's arrival, a giant, larger than life Viking Throne was commissioned to be set up for people to enjoy, clamber over, and take lots of selfies sitting on it.

Furniture designer and maker, Ian Cameron-Smith (https://cameronsmithdesigns.co.uk/) was approached to create the 3-times-larger-size chair, and he enlisted his son, also called Ian, to help with the rune carvings, along with Callum King to make the also-3-times-larger-size metal ravens to go on it.

I've known Ian for several years, so was delighted to be asked by Dumfries & Galloway Life to do a shoot for the magazine about it.

Along with Ian, Ian and Callum, we were joined by body builder, Adrian Philpot, dressed in a Viking outfit supplied by the Galloway Longfhada Vikings - a reenactment group based in Dumfries – to be our Odin.

Odin is the King of Asgard, and leader of the Viking Gods in Norse mythology. He has one eye, and two ravens - Huginn and Muninn (thought and memory).

However, as great as all this seemed in my head before the shoot, the reality of photographing anyone next to a giant chair is it makes them look tiny.

(your photographer now knows what it feels like to be a hobbit)

My solution, for the most part, was to use a wide-angle lens and get in close. This had the effect of making anyone nearer look much larger than the background.

Where lighting was concerned, it was a bright, sunny day. However, at the point we began the shoot, the sun started to disappear behind the building next to the chair, throwing it into shadow.

I set up an off-camera flash to the left, which emulated the hard light of the sun, and cast some nice shadows from the leaves of a tree next to it. I was also able to place a large reflector against another tree to the right, which was still in the sunlight, so was able to bounce some of that light back onto the chair and fill in the darker shadows. The combination helps to give a strong three-dimensional feel to the images.

The article about the Galloway Hoard, and the making of Odin's Chair are in the December 2021 issue of Dumfries & Galloway Life magazine.

Meanwhile enjoy Episode 85, where I chat about the Odin's Chair photoshoot and show more behind-the-scenes images. I also give critique on images submitted to the podcast.

And if you decide to click through and watch it directly on YouTube (rather than here on the blog), then you can watch the Live Chat Replay and see the comments people are writing in real time as the podcast progresses.

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1:58 - Welcome, what's coming up, greetings and comments
04:45 - Photographing "Odin's Chair"
26:58 - Introduction to the Critique Section
27:58 - Vandana - High rise architecture
33:30 - Sandra - side lighting on a still life
42:11 - Garry - old book pages
48:46 - Roy - wishing well
1:04:12 - Coming up next week
1:05:56 - End

If you found this interesting/useful/entertaining, then please consider supporting these podcasts and blog posts via buymeacoffee.com/kimayres

Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/kimayres – to be notified of new podcasts and behind-the-scenes videos.

And, or course, if you would like to submit a photo for feedback, or just ask a photography related question, then either email me or join my Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres Facebook group and I will put it into the following podcast:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/240842990388815/

31 Years - and Episode 84 of Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres

"My mother’s looking after the kids on Saturday evening," she said, casually dropping it into the conversation, as though her mother would quite often have the children to stay over for no particular reason.

"Perhaps I’ll pop round, if I’m not doing anything else," he said, trying to appear nonchalant while his mind raced on how he might get out of his sister’s birthday celebrations.

31 years later and Maggie and I recall how this embarrassing exchange led to the start of our relationship.

Happy anniversary, my love x

Meanwhile, enjoy Episode 84 of my podcast, where I review the images submitted to the Book Photo Challenge I set last week.

And if you decide to click through and view it directly on YouTube (rather than here on the blog), then you can watch the Live Chat Replay and see the comments people are writing in real time as the podcast progresses.

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2:10 - Welcome, what's coming up, greetings and comments
5:32 - Robert - set of old books
9:48 - Sarah - dictionary found on a walk in the woods
12:48 - Sandra - psalms 84;15
18:58 - Gary - close ups, and 'the spectral hand'
24:58 - Debbie - wedding register
28:14 - Sophie - engrossed in reading
31:30 - Ed - never to young to start on Naom Chomsky...
33:14 - Ben - the conscious mind
39:50 - Erich - book and head
45:52 - Nicola - book, stone and leaves
50:55 - Roy - a communication about excommunication
55:12 - Nurije - tea, biscuits and gardening
56:37 - Still Life is a chance to max out on composition techniques
1:04:44 - Jim - a photographer's desk
1:12:22 - Vandana - cook book
1:17:32 - Inga - bull mirror
1:22:09 - Stacy - still life with memento mori undertones
1:27:57 - Mac - colourful composite
1:34:50 - Rose-Marie - books, doll and briars
1:40:45 - Mandy - the book tent
1:44:30 - Viji - adventures in paper
1:47:55 - Coming up next week - Odin's Chair, and Critique
1:51:35 - End

If you found this interesting/useful/entertaining, then please consider supporting these podcasts and blog posts via buymeacoffee.com/kimayres

Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/kimayres – to be notified of new podcasts and behind-the-scenes videos.

And, or course, if you would like to submit a photo for feedback, or just ask a photography related question, then either email me or join my Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres Facebook group and I will put it into the following podcast:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/240842990388815/

Remember - you have no chance of winning...

"Remember," said Mark's text, "you have no chance of winning!"

I was touched by Mark's thoughfulness just as Maggie and I were heading off to this year’s Dumfries and Galloway Life Awards, in which I was a finalist for the Visual Artist/Maker category.

This all makes much more sense if you know about my experience last time I was in this position, 4 years ago, which Mark and I had been reminiscing about a couple of days previously.

See - The Jekyll & Hyde transformation of being an award finalist

I didn’t want to go through that mental assault course again.

I’ve been to the D&G Life Awards several times, usually as a guest for someone else, and it's fun evening out.

I tend to know at least half a dozen or more of the people who are up for the awards in different categories, and this year I noticed, with a certain amount of smug pride, 4 of them had photos I'd taken, being displayed in the programme and projected onto the screen when their category was announced.

Trevor Leat, who was the actual winner in our category, I’ve known for many years, so I was genuinely delighted he was the one collecting the award.

But as I’d feared, just like last time, from about half an hour or so before, my mind began turning to thoughts of being up on stage, shaking hands with the sponser and being photographed holding my rightful award.

I could feel my enjoyment of the evening getting hijacked by that part of my brain which as a 4 year old child wouldn’t let anyone else play with his toys.

As the winner of the category was announced in the one prior to ours, I turned to Maggie and said, "Remind me…"

She looked me in the eye, held my gaze, and then with all the love and support of a woman who has been my soulmate for nearly 31 years could muster, said,

"Kim - you have no chance of winning!"

And finally, I was able to relax.

This year the awards were live streamed onto YouTube, so if you'd like to see the point where I had no chance of winning then here's a link to that part in the video (4 hours and 5 minutes in):

https://youtu.be/_cdnvhZSvyE?t=14702

The Book Photo Challenge - and Episode 83 of Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres

Books are incredible things.

They can contain knowledge, expertise, thoughts, dreams, facts, fictions, photos, paintings, sketches, graphs, numbers, text – all bound up and created to pass ideas and information to another mind.

They are also physical objects made to be a particular size, have a particular colour palette, weight and texture.

Every book was designed with an aesthetic in mind.

The Challenge I'm setting for next week's podcast, then is Books!

It could be a book on it's own, or combined with other objects in a still life.

It could be several books together creating a pattern, or a library.

It could be held by someone, be read to someone else, or worn as a hat

Close up and macro, highlighting a piece of text, a note in the margin, or a finger running over it.

Wide angle and distorted, creating leading lines to significant other aspects of the image.

At a distance, but where context becomes an extension of the narrative.

How will you respond to the Books Photo Challenge?

See how you get on – I'm really looking forward to seeing what people are going to produce! But if you find you're struggling, then you can still submit a photo you're having difficulty with - just explain the problem and I can include suggestions and ideas in the podcast too.

Place your photo (just the one please) into the Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres Facebook Group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/240842990388815/

or email it to me if you don't do Facebook

Try and get it in before the end of the weekend, or by Monday (15th November) at the latest. Anything that arrives on Tuesday runs the risk of not being included in the podcast.

You can use a phone, tablet, point-and-shoot or DSLR (or mirrorless).

And then, make sure you tune in to YouTube - https://youtu.be/oK3Vi0QQ3Z0 - on Tuesday 16th November at 7.30pm (UK time) where I'll go through the photos, and give comments and feedback, and hopefully we will all become inspired by some of the submissions to go and try out new things with our photography.

Meanwhile enjoy Episode 83, where I go into more detail and give examples of using books as the inspiration for photographs.

And if you decide to click through and watch it directly on YouTube (rather than here on the blog), then you can watch the Live Chat Replay and see the comments people are writing in real time as the podcast progresses.

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2:02 - Welcome, what's coming up, greetings and comments
06:17 - Introduction to communication via books and photography
13:14 - Ideas for photographing books
30:19 - Introduction to the Critique Section
31:28 - Ben - a leaf and backlighting
40:55 - Viji - folded pages and different crops
49:30 - Matt - 2 subjects and a large gap
58:28 - Inga - shadows in a portrait
1:10:20 - Coming up next week - The Book Photo Challenge
1:13:50 - End

If you found this interesting/useful/entertaining, then please consider supporting these podcasts and blog posts via buymeacoffee.com/kimayres

Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/kimayres – to be notified of new podcasts and behind-the-scenes videos.

And, or course, if you would like to submit a photo for feedback, or just ask a photography related question, then either email me or join my Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres Facebook group and I will put it into the following podcast:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/240842990388815/

Imposter Syndrome? Moi? - and Episode 82 of Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres

"I'll be glad when it's all over!"

"You'll be great," I said. "You've done this kind of thing loads of times before. Once you're up there in front of everyone, you'll be panicking for a few moments and you will fall into 'mode' and that part of you will take over, and you'll be fine."

"I don't know why I even signed up to this..."

"Because at the planning stage it sounded brilliant, and afterwards you'll look back with a sense of achievement. It's just the bit in between that's crap and full of overwhelming feelings of Imposter Syndrome," I said.

"Well that's very true, but I doubt it's something you experience." It was said more as a statement than a question.

"Of course I do. All the time."

"What? You? No way!"

"Why do you think I understand exactly what you're going through?" I said.

(a more or less word for word conversation I had last week)

Imposter Syndrome is the overwhelming sense that everyone else knows what they're doing but you're out of your depth, and at any moment someone's going to notice, catch you out, and reveal you are not as good as anyone thought you were.

Utter humiliation is only a hair's breadth away.

If this sounds familiar, then it just means you're not a psychopath, and have a certain degree of self awareness.

It is something pretty much everyone experiences from time to time, and some people experience on a daily basis.

Creatives – artists, makers, writers, actors, models, presenters, the self-employed – in fact anyone who has to at some point put themselves in front of other people where they might be judged - more or less live with this feeling constantly.

And most people think they are the only one experiencing it.

For the most part it comes out of the fact that we only ever see other people's final, polished, creation, whereas we are very aware of all the stuff that's gone wrong before we were able to submit ours.

I'll do a photo shoot where we need 6 edited images for publication or promotion.

I'll take 400.

By the time I have whittled it down to the best 15 to choose from, I've had to get rid of 385 photos that weren't up to the mark.

And some of them were downright awful.

On the first sweep I'm having to delete all the ones that were out of focus, where the subject was blinking, where the camera settings were wrong, where the equipment failed, where I clicked too early or too late.

On the second sweep, I'm having to get rid of all the ones that were technically fine, but the composition was boring, jarring, or giving the wrong message.

And even the selected finalists will have to be edited and polished up – they are not quite good enough as they happened in the camera – they can always be improved by lightening a bit here, darkening a bit there, cropping that bit out, subtly colour adjusting this bit, or even removing that section entirely and pasting a different one in from another photo.

So if someone looks at one of my final, published images and remarks that I'm a great photographer, all I can think is, "Yeah, right – you might think that, but you have no idea that the vast majority of my photos are shite, and this time I just managed to get lucky and was able to rescue some and polish them up to make them look better than they were."

Of course no one wants to hear that – especially clients who you've just charged a wodge of money to. So instead you say, "That's really kind, thank you!"

There has never been a single photo shoot I've gone to where – as I'm putting on my shoes and coat ready to leave - I haven't been overwhelmed with fear that this time is going to be the one where I am going to fail utterly, be shown up as an incompetent photographer who has just been lucky in the past, and is now going to experience total humiliation.

Every time, my wife tries to reassure me that I always feel like this, and that once I'm there I will fall into "mode" and be fine.

Every time I think it's easy for her to say that, but this could well be the time when I'm finally going to be revealed as not being good enough.

So far though, no one has caught me out... yet...

Meanwhile, enjoy Episode 82 where we review the images submitted to the Halloween Photo Challenge I set last week.

And if you decide to click through and view it directly on YouTube (rather than here on the blog), then you can watch the Live Chat Replay and see the comments people are writing in real time as the podcast progresses.

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2:03 - Welcome, what's coming up, greetings and comments
6:20 - Megan - day of the dead face painting
13:18 - Rose-Marie - silhoutted trees and birds
15:48 - when cropping limbs, don't crop at the joints...
18:09 - Jack - light painting
21:39 - Innes - zombie nun composite
30:28 - Robert - cemetary
33:28 - making sure a submitted photo is on theme
36:57 - Viji - Mahalaya Paksha
42:45 - Roy - fun run, and emerging from the grave
47:15 - Mac - 5 pic composite
50:00 - Jim - pumpkin floral display
54:13 - Nicola - scissorhands
58:58 - Garry - muslin and a Venetian mask
1:03:12 - Coming up next week - Photographing books, and Critique
1:06:30 - End

If you found this interesting/useful/entertaining, then please consider supporting these podcasts and blog posts via buymeacoffee.com/kimayres

Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/kimayres – to be notified of new podcasts and behind-the-scenes videos.

And, or course, if you would like to submit a photo for feedback, or just ask a photography related question, then either email me or join my Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres Facebook group and I will put it into the following podcast:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/240842990388815/