The Cardiff Sun
If you’ve been listening carefully, or even if you’ve desperately tried to ignore it, it’s highly possible that you’ve heard me whinging on about the loss of my beloved Canon 5d. When I say loss, I mean broken, but either way, I’m at a loss without it. If you aren’t interested in the technicalities, you can spare it by moving to the next paragraph. For the camera geeks among you, I’ve been getting an Aperture reading of f/0.0, suggesting that the lens is not mounting correctly. Initially I thought this was a camera issue but after sending the body away for repair I was told that no such fault could be found. Obviously I had checked the camera with two lenses to make sure that it was definitely the camera and not the lens so I was baffled. Then I tested both of those lenses with my friends Canon 50D. Yep, you guessed it – both lenses had the same issue. What are the chances? Damn that lightening.
My friend Tom Cranmer was coming up from Reading to use the services of my flatmate Phils’ car body shop. Someone had kindly keyed the drivers door and etched the word “MATT” into the bonnet. It was going to take a few days to get it sorted so the obvious thing to do was go out and find some lovely tree’s and sheep and stuff to photograph, but with the 5D still at the doctors it looked like I’d be shooting the revolutionary iPhone. Cranmer, however, had recently bought a Canon 40D as his back-up camera and generously allowed me to use it for a few days.
Now, call me a camera snob, or perhaps quote some cliche about how only a bad craftsman blames his tools… yada yada yada, but I can only analogise it like… well, like someone had replaced my mountain bike for a child’s tricycle. Imagine – there was Cranmer cycling up ahead of me on his professional speed racer telling me to hurry up, but my wheels wouldn’t go fast enough and I felt like throwing the bike in the bushes, crossing my arms with a frown and stomping off in a strop. It’s not the best analogy, but you get my drift. One of the biggest challenges was the lack of full frame sensor combined with not being able to shoot with the 16mm wide angle lens that I’m used to. The combined effect was like trying to shoot wide pictures with a telephoto lens. I did slowly become accustomed to the camera though and accepted the fact that the clearly inferior sensor wasn’t going to give me quite the results I’ve become used to. Hmph…
What I didn’t expect was two days of beautiful winter sun, so I traded the usual documentary project for the much rarer artistic equivalent. Indeed this is my disclaimer towards those who may come on my website, see documentary splattered everywhere and then look at the images in this post. Therefore, these images have nothing to do with my documentary work. There are no physical manipulations, but there are colour changes that do not conform to photojournalistic standards.
Every now and again I like to venture more artistically with photography. This is one of those occasions. I hope you enjoy seeing something a bit different from me.
It’s one of those shoots where the images tend to do most of the talking, so I’ll tell you that they were taken over the course of the last three days and leave it at that. We began in the now disused Blaengwynlais Quarry on Rhiwbina Hill near Castle Coch, then moved to a nearby field near Tongwynlais for the sunset shots, and on the last day we walked around the Ton Mawr (Cemex) Quarry between Taff’s Well and Radyr and followed the footpaths through some fields near the Garth.
