“SHARP AND SHOOGLY” - THE STORY BEHIND “VERNAL MOOD#1”

From childhood I've enjoyed writing stories.  I had more than my fair share of battles with imaginary enemies, scrapes and bloody noses and was never going to be anything other than a soldier, but creative writing was always there, I suppose I was a sort of budding warrior poet. 

Years down the line and an instructor in the RAF Regiment I started to develop an idea for a story, originally planned as a novel, set in the post Battle of Culloden Highlands of 1746 involving a re-incarnated Gaelic goddess, the Stone of Destiny (on which Scottish kings were traditionally crowned) and time travel, and no, apart from being set in the Highlands,  it was nothing like Outlander!  Then, a few years before I left the RAF, I saw the film “Braveheart” and it’s fair to say, and I never thought of it this way until recently, and it does sound very dramatic, it totally altered my life. Since I'm a group of injuries moving in close formation, when I left the RAF a few years later I decided to shelve plans to go on the bodyguarding circuit and instead turn my Highland fantasy fiction story into a screenplay.  

And that was how it was going to be. I’d completed a number of re-writes and the screenplay even got read by a Hollywood script reader. However, it was too long, which I knew but it’s fitting the story into the allotted time that’s the hard part. Maybe I should have gone with the novel!  

I persevered though, and it was while resting my brain during another re-write that I picked up an old album of hill walking photographs... and had an epiphany. I never intended to leave the writing behind and one day I may get back to it, but photography had me hooked, partly I suppose because, like any immediately visual artform, you can see an instant result which is not the way it goes with a screenplay. It also meant I was back out in the fresh air carrying a heavy bergen full of kit which is more like my natural environment.  

Starting with traditional daytime photography, it wasn’t long before the screenwriters brain bored of documentary landscapes and I started looking for other options and came across photo Impressionism, which I assumed was a new thing but which it turns out is as old as photography itself.  

So, I started playing around with various techniques - and there are many – settling on two in particular; Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) and “In-the-round” photography.  

In the former technique the photographer deliberately moves the camera around while the shutter is open, in focus or not, to arrive at anything from a painterly effect all the way to pure abstract. And you can do it however you want, the only limit to what you can capture is your imagination. Beware, though... if you have a go at ICM you may trigger apoplexy among some. A friend of a friend is a photography teacher and was horrified that after years of teaching students how to frame a shot and focus properly that anybody would wave a camera around with the deliberate intention of making a photograph blurry! There is of course more to it than that. 

In the latter technique the photographer circles a subject, often a tree but it can be anything, and takes any number of photographs of it, keeping the subject lined up in the frame throughout, in my case entirely in camera using the multiple exposure function on my 5Ds which enables me to see the previously taken images superimposed on the actual view through the live view screen. Like ICM, how many photographs you take is dictated purely by the artistic vision. You can do a full 360 circle around the main subject if the image calls for it, though, so far, I haven’t needed to.  There are many ways to employ either of the above techniques, even putting them together if that’s what’s called for. 

 “Vernal Impression”, which can be seen top of the page and on the cover of “Book of Years” a collection of poems by American poet Doug Ramspeck, is an example of that process in what I light-heartedly call a “Sharp and shoogly”, (“shoogly” being a Scots dialect word for shaky). With this technique a series of properly focused “in-the-round" shots are combined with ICM, with added textures applied in Photoshop if needed. The sharp shots have the added bonus of saving photography teachers from going in to melt down too, since all the established principles of photography still apply. 

Having recced this location well in advance I planned to come back when the blossom was on the trees and a calm May evening fitted the bill. Unfortunately, when I got there the grass immediately Infront of this blackthorn tree had been mostly flattened by cows that had at some point laid down on it. Not ideal, and no other angle worked because of the much taller trees that surrounded the scene out of shot on all sides behind me, along the banks of the River Lossie, into which the blackthorn would have blended.  

Nevertheless, I gave it a go and the blending process unexpectedly worked in my favour. I shot the scene, as planned, using nine images in about a 180 degree arc and fortunately the unflattened grass on either side of where the cows had been blended out the flattened area, a fluke at the time but worth remembering for future reference.  

Then of course, having figured out how to get Impressionist results I like, I had another epiphany while out under a star filled Highland sky which led me into night photography. As a result of that - and a long time reworking this website - I haven’t done much Impressionist work of late, but I’ll get back to it, and this time I plan to combine the “sharp and shoogly” with nighttime “light painting”.