Travel photography - Luke Duggleby, Larry Louie, and James Morgan

I came across the photography of Larry Louie and James Morgan as prize winners in the Travel Photographer of the Year Competition in 2010. My tutor, Michael Kinsey also suggested Larry Louie and Luke Duggleby as modern photographers that I might find interesting.

James and Luke are both commercial photographers working for magazine and corporate clients on photojournalism type assignments. Larry, in contrast, is an ophthalmologist by profession who practices in North America. Larry photographs remote parts of the world as a pass time.

Each of these photographers has photographed in Indonesia and have included portfolios of Indonesian subjects on their websites.

Larry Louie - Indonesia 2006 (Java and West Papua)

Luke Duggleby - The Salt Book - Kusamba, Bali and Savu, Indonesia

James Morgan - Papua Elections 2012

As I am familiar to some extent with these Indonesian locations and conditions, I chose these particular photos to review as guidance on these photographers approach and style.

Larry Louie

Larry's series of photographs of Java and West Papua are visually dramatic black and white pictures. The composition and enormous tonal range make the images strongly eye-catching and he clearly merited the Photographer of the Year award. I would differ however with the observation made on his website that his photography is "Realism at its best". For me, on the contrary, these photographs portray an visually exaggerated view of these scenes and places. The images seem to be touched up that they represent an imaginary ideal of the world. This is somewhat similar to the comment that images of women in magazines do not portray what women are actually like. These are very memorable images, but they convey little sense of the actual place.

Luke Duggleby

Luke, on the other hand, is taking photographs in locations without the stunning scenery and colourful characters photographed by Larry. Traditional salt production in Bali is taking place on a rather nondescript beach with local people dressed in their everyday clothes. The location is Savu is similar, although the ground is rocky. Nevertheless, Lukes photographs use compositional techniques of framing, asymmetry, pattern and so on to produce images which are visually interesting. The colour and light seem totally natural, and I had no impression that the colour, contrast etc had been adjusted at all.

His sequences of photographs portray the various stages of natural salt production without individual captions. An overview describes each stage of the process, so that a viewer can work out for himself or herself what is happening in each picture.

The photographs are limited to scenes of salt production and he includes no images of other aspects of villagers lives, for example where they live, is there a school, how is the salt transported and sold. As a section of a book on natural salt production, the scope of these photographs was presumably limited by the brief for the book.

I noted a similar limitation looking at his photographs of the whaling village on Lamalera Island in Indonesia. He clearly must have spent a week or more in the village to take the variety of creatures that are shown in his photographs. In this series, the photos focus on the extraordinary process of fishing in this village. I would also have been interested to see more of village life away from the whaling.

James Morgan

James sequence of photographs about the run up to the 2012 election in West Papua are most definitely a form photojournalism. James sequence of photographs depict an event rather than a place. Whilst the sequence of photographs describe the process of this event, the captions add some key information on the role and activities of the people and the place. I feel that the captions are essential to assist the viewer understand the images.

The photographs juxtapose the strongly held traditions on one side against western style shopkeepers, religion and processes of government on the other. James uses a wide angle lens close up to the subjects for a lot of these photos. One effect of this is to draw the viewer into the scene. He nevertheless varies composition and viewpoint to compose strong visual images (I admire the way he gets himself right into the centre of these scenes). The style is high contrast with vivid colours. I assume that most are natural light, with possibly some fill flash for the locations under shade.

Conclusions

These photographers represent three very different styles of what might be described as "documentary/photojournalism". All appear highly professional but their photographic objectives would appear quite different.

• Larry Louie's photographs can stand alone as iconic images. These are artistic in the sense that he reveals the beauty around us which we do not normally see. We do not have the perception nor do we look with sufficient attention.
• Luke Duggleby's photo-essays in contrast take the viewer on a voyage of discovery. The viewer is left to explore for himself the location and to form his own impressions of the people and the place. I felt as if I had been on the beach at his side and had seen for myself the salt making activities. (I would not have come back with photos as good as his however).
• James Morgan's photo-essays go one stage further, in that they show a society that is virtually impossible for us to understand or experience. Even if we were with him, we would probably not understand who the people are, what they were doing and why. In fact, we would probably be unwise to visit these places, even if we wanted to. His photo-essays come with an opinionated commentary which provides insight into the complexity of human society and its problems.

Do these photographers have relevance for my travel photography? I suggest that they all do in their different ways:-

• Do I want to see the iconic sights of the countries that I visit? This seems to be the basis for the mainstream tourist industry and for example, the cruises to far flung parts of the world. Like most people, I am attracted to the stunning photographs of places that I have not yet visited, and this will often encourage me to travel somewhere new.
• I enjoy exploration to discover things for myself when the opportunity arises. Watching fisherman working on a beach or walking around a rural area is often fascinating. I would like to collect my own impressions of holidays encompassing the regular daily lives and character of the places we visit, not just the famous sights. I have started in a limited way by writing a blog on our visit to Patagonia and will endeavor to develop this on future trips.
• Whilst I would love in my imagination to do investigative photojournalism like James Morgans, in reality this would not be desirable or practical. I am happy to take pleasure from looking at his work and the work of others like him.

An active portrait- photography

When I met Keith at his allotment, it was bright and sunny as forecast. However, it was also windy and quite cold. It was clear that using a tripod was not a good idea as it would take time to set up and move, which would mean getting unnecessarily cold. Furthermore, the camera might not be very steady on my medium weight tripod in the blustery conditions.

Process of shoot

I took a sequence of over 50 photos over the space of 15 minutes, initially with Keith just standing with a spade, and then in various positions as Keith dug up and cleaned the earth from various vegetables, and placed them in his wheelbarrow.

I used viewpoints so that the sun lit Keith's figure from various angles. I did not, however, take photos with the sun directly above the camera, as the low bright sunlight would have made Keith squint too much.

I mostly asked him to look at the camera when I wanted to take a photo, although I took a few with him looking at what he was doing.

Photographs

I selected three photographs from the shoot to write about.

Cleaning soil from Jerusalem artichoke

Nikon 18-200mm at 82mm: Iso 160 f8 for 1/160th second

I am looking at Keith from the side and he is looking over his shoulder towards the camera. The sun is coming from the left, flat onto Keith's face, but his eyes are looking slightly away from the sun towards me. His eyes are shaded by his hat and barely visible.

The background of the greenhouse and rooftops of the neighboring houses are brightly lit and quite prominent. Keith stands out against background reasonably well, and the background does convey the environment of a suburban allotment. I feel however that greenhouse behind Keith is rather too large and significant in the frame. It competes with Keith's figure more than I want.

A handful of leeks

Nikon 18-200mm at 55mm: Iso 160 f8 for 1/100th second

In this photo, Keith is square to the camera with the light from the left hand side. The sunlight was slightly veiled so that the shadows are not as dark as earlier. Keith has some leeks in one hand and his spade in the other forming the base of a triangle with his face. He is looking at the lens and his eyes are just in the light. He is smiling suggesting a feeling of pride and satisfaction with the leeks he has grown.

The background of allotment plots, a fence and rooftops is rather messy. However, none of the items in the background is individually prominent, and they adequately show the immediate environment. As a result, the background contributes to the image but does not compete too strongly as a visual element in the frame (compared with the greenhouse background in the previous photograph).

Hoeing

Nikon 18-200mm at 150mm: Iso 160 f8 for 1/250th second

This is one of the photographs I took when Keith was hoeing between seedlings. The narrow space around the seedlings meant that Keith needed to watch carefully what he was doing.

I prefer this image where he is focussed on what he is doing over some others where I asked him to glance at the camera. One reason is that the lighting and angle of his head reveal the strong features of his face. His concentrated expression is also be a factor in favor of this image.

Some of the photographs I took in this sequence included his hands and more of his torso, and others did not. Reviewing the sequence, it does not seem necessary to include his hands and torso. Indeed, the images including hands and more of the torso seem less effective as a portrait because the face is so much smaller in the frame.

Techniques

I have touched up these photographs in various ways in Lightroom:-

• To lighten the shadows which were very dark in these lighting conditions
• To tone down bright areas of the background
• Some cropping and dust spot removal

I also had a difficulty in managing exposure levels. I checked the first few photographs on the back of the camera and these were enormously overexposed. I took care subsequently to make sure that the metering point was on Keith's face not his jacket, which corrected the problem. I put the problem down to metering on the jacket instead of his face. Reflecting on this later, I realized that it may have been better in such high contrast conditions to set exposure manually, as the correct exposure should be relatively constant. I have now discovered that the camera had inadvertently been switched to spot metering instead of matrix metering. This accounts for the extreme exposure level when metering on Keith's jacket.

Conclusions

From this project, I would choose A Handful of Leeks as the best contextual portrait. Hoeing is not an image that I would normally have taken, but I feel that this was visually the best portrait that I took of Keith.

In this project, the execution differed significantly from my plan. With greater experience, I would probably have recognized earlier that use of a tripod was unlikely to work with a subject who was moving around.

Finally, I should remember in difficult lighting conditions to consider setting a fixed manual exposure rather than using the camera's meter.

An active portrait - planning

I asked my brother in law, Keith to be my subject for this project. He grows vegetables on an allotment and when I spoke to him about this, he was planning to dig up some vegetables and do a little clearing up. We arranged to meet late morning on a day forecast to be bright and dry.

Prior to this, I looked at The English Garden magazine from November 2010 to see what portrait type photographs they had, in particular the situations, poses and background.

I liked this photograph by Richard Hanson of the gardner at Houghton Hall. The pose, holding a spade shows what is happening in an uncluttered background. Other photographs in this magazine showed full length poses: one of a gardener filling a wheelbarrow with a clump of grasses, another showed Tony Buckland tamping down soil around a newly planted trees. Both of these were strongly sidelit with the subject looking at what they were doing, away from the camera.

There was no opportunity to reconnoiter the location, so I did not know what the allotment would be like as regards plants, sun and shade, backgrounds etc.

My aim was to place the camera on the tripod and use a newly purchased radio shutter release, so that I could talk to Keith whilst taking photographs. On the other hand, I recognised that I would also need to be mobile:-

• I would need viewpoints for different lighting angles (frontal, sidelit, maybe backlit?)
• Sometimes Keith would be standing up, whilst at others he would be close to the ground.
• I would also need to move around searching for a background without too many distractions.

I thought that I could take a couple of photos hand-held, and then place the camera on the tripod for a longer sequence of photos.

I planned two sequences of photos:

• Frontal light: standing and bending down, facing camera and side-facing, fully body and head and torso, looking at lens and looking at hands.
• Sidelighting: standing and bending, facing camera, fully body and head and torso, looking at lens and looking at hands.

Other notes I made were to show Keith some of the photos at each stage, and to consider using manual focus.

An active portrait - preliminary exercise

Whilst on a group walking holiday in Patagonia in November, we visited a sheep farm in the Argentine pampas. After lunch, the farmer told us about the operation of the farm, and then went on to give us a demonstration of herding sheep and shearing sheep.

I took a sequence of photographs, starting when he was talking and answering questions, with the intention of capturing a moment with a suitable posture.

Argentinian sheep farmer - talking

Nikon 18-200 mm at 62mm: Iso 160 f5.6 for 1/250th second

He was talking fairly slowly to us in Spanish so that our guide could translate his words into English. However, he lifted his head and eyes only occasionally and his facial expression was relatively subdued. Hence the portrait is an adequate record shot but I feel it lacks directness and vitality.

I also took a sequence of contextual portraits whilst he was showing us around his farm.

Sheep farmer and one of his dogs

Nikon 18-200mm at 70mm: Iso 160 f5.6 for 1/1000th second

His affection for animals was clear when he was with his dog and his sheep.

Farmer with lamb

Nikon 18-200mm at 95mm: Iso 800 f10 for 1/30th second

Sheep farmer with his Merino ram

Nikon 18-200mm at 18mm: Iso 800 f7.1 for 1/80th second

I think the best picture that I took of him was whilst he was shearing one of his sheep.

Farmer shearing a sheep

Nikon 18-200mm at 24mm: Iso 200 f6.3 for 1/30th second

His face is in profile as he is focussed on holding the sheep and clipping away its fleece. The sheep is barely recognisable, but this composition with the fleece spread around the farmers legs was more effective than others in the sequence that I took.

Conclusions

In looking at exhibitions of portrait photography, I am drawn more strongly to active portraits (for example portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mary McCartney) rather than posed portraits (e.g. Irving Penn). This a skill that I admire and would like to emulate.

The farm visit was a good chance to try taking "interview" and "contextual" portraits in the field. However, this was a situation where I was not in a position to influence, let alone control the subject. On reflection, I felt that I should do the exercise in a situation where I could influence the pose and position of the model, as recorded in the following posts.