It’s time to reflect on what’s happening with my practice since I – essentially – stopped shooting stills and moved on to video. It needs to be said, this hasn’t happened exactly like this – I’ve always shot stills alongside video, but video has always been project-based, not the casual shooting of stills. That’s changed – if I’m currently going out shooting, then it’s going to be video. 

I’ve learned lots. One of the first things is practical: if I’m looking at an image, whether still or moving, then I want to be able to look at it for a while. Hence, I need to make sure each take is around 30 seconds and – crucially – that I don’t mess around with ND filters, exposure comp, depth of field or any of that. I just need to set the shot up and let it run. The only thing I’m happy with changing is focus, to move that to where my attention goes, or where things are happening. 

This is instructive. It reminds me that there’s a pleasure in looking, whether the image is still or moving. There’s an ontological sameness, gazing, focussing on different parts of the image, weighing up, making sense, appraising. That’s probably because I’m looking at the image on a screen, the framing of an app reminding me of a certain parity. But that curiosity, and that meeting of inquiry with stimulus, is identical. 

But there’s a distinct difference in duration: to a certain extent, movement divorced from narrative, movement that’s reactive and reflexive, can appear abstract, ghostly. There is no hand making this movement: it’s not the movement of a car or a pan or a couple kissing. It’s movement not put on for the camera, but captured by it. It has agency beyond the frame. The world is revealed – or at least foregrounded – as alive and with its own agenda. 

It’s these kinds of movements that I seek out, have always sought out. Reeds waving in the wind. The play of patches of sun on concrete. A butterfly shooting across the frame. Clouds moving across the sky. Even the slightest wave of a dead twig suggests a continuity, foreshadows greater movement. 

Such movement, for me, jars against a too restrained, too formally literal composition. Composition that’s too neat, too obvious – this is the ground, this is the sky – imposed an order on the world that the movement demonstrates to be completely artificial. The shots I’m happiest with are ones you have to work at – using shallow depth of field to keep the moving trees blurred, having only the treetops against the sky, not having the banks of the river, looking up at the tree without roots or tips, avoiding horizontals. In the field I shot on Friday, there’s no structure to fix things, anchor things, like the motorway bridge. There’s no information. There’s just sense. I think, for this project, I’m moving towards the impressionistic. 

I’ve taken one or two shots that repeat the tree close-ups of ivy and weird shapes. These have fascinated me, for superficially, they are repetitions, but the slight movement provides a sense of the spatial completely different to the stills. In those, the tree is everything, and the background is scenery, whereas with moving image, the background has its own life, its own agency. It invites the viewer to look longer and more carefully. 

These are just tentative thoughts. I need to go back over David Campany’s Photography and Cinema (2008) to flesh this all out a bit. 

Campany, D. 2008. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books.