A SECOND IRON AGE

 Ten years ago, I was working for the Communications Team in the NHS in Sefton and we took delivery of a new camera to use for press coverage. A Canon EOS 550D with a 55mm lens arrived in the office and it was the first opportunity I had to examine a professional level digital camera. Although, not exactly a high end, studio quality model, compared to the tiny compact point and shoots I had been used to, it was a very capable device. Previously, we had been using a small Fuji camera with a fixed lens, which was quite good, but nowhere near the quality offered by a Canon. Making up an excuse to put the camera through its paces, I took it home one evening to look it over and then the following morning, stopped off at Crosby Marina on my way into work in Merseyside. In 2005 Crosby had been chosen as the location of an art installation by Anthony Gormley, consisting of 100 cast iron figures, distributed along the beach a kilometre into the tideline. 'Another Place' consists of full body casts of the artist himself, and was originally intended as a temporary exhibit, but despite some objection to the installation, was eventually to become a permanent fixture. 

Before seeing them in situ, I was not especially impressed with the concept, as I felt it was a somewhat narcissistic idea to plant models of the artist up and down a section of attractive coastland. So it was a good excuse to visit the site and see how they had become part of the landscape and also a major tourist attraction.  It was early May when I visited and I got to the beach around 9.00 am. Aside from a few dog walkers and joggers, the beach was deserted and a light misty rain had begun to fall. To my surprise, the figures were distributed along the beach and quite far out into the sea, in such a way that they were quite unobtrusive and I was quite taken aback at how little they actually impinged on the immediate landscape.

Although each figure was an identical casting, the action of the elements had weathered them quite harshly in the intervening ten years and each one had become home to various species of lichens, sea moss and barnacles, which coupled with the deep red rust colour made them quite striking to look at.

I photographed as many as I could access easily, as the tide was fast approaching, to record the weathering on the faces and torsos and took some distance shots as the figures further out into the tideline gradually disappeared under the waves. As the weather began to deteriorate and the mist closed in, it became very easy to think that the heads and shoulders of the distant figures in the surf were real people and the whole installation began to make sense. The official description suggests that the figures are intended to explore the relationship between the human body and the elements, but the figures stood gazing out to sea are much more suggestive of diaspora, emigration or the simple desire to see 'another place'. When I began to study Creative Writing the following year, the installation so impressed me that I used it as the inspiration for an early tone poem, and it established the concept of using images as the basis of poetry, which I would use to much greater effect some five years later.

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CENTON 500MM MIRROR

Fast forward once more to the present day and having recently picked up a Centon 500mm F8 Catadioptic lens, I was looking for an opportunity to test it. The lens is essentially a small reflector telescope, which uses small mirrors to condense the focal length. About the size of a can of soup, with a fixed aperture of F8, it really only comes into its own when there is a lot of light available. The image quality is far from sharp, compared to newer telescopic or zoom lenses, but does have a distinct softness and 'vintage' quality. 

SOVIET MTO 1000 MM MIRROR

Like the huge russian MTO lenses, I already own, it is difficult to focus and really needs a tripod to stabilise, as being a manually operated lens, the slightest movement can have considerable effect on the viewpoint. Having tested it briefly on the landscape outside my home, I was keen to try it out in the field. Having a day off mid week and with a recent run of good weather, I decided to re-visit the Iron Men as the subject of a test shoot. I packed the Centon, the Achromat and my favourite Industar Pancake lens and headed off early morning on the train. Despite the previous three days being bright and sunny, the Friday was misty and a little cloudy, but the early morning sun was predicted to poke through and the mist lift by around 9 am.

When I arrived things looked distinctly unimpressive, with a deep sea mist still clouding the horizon and hiding the Burbo Bank Wind farm, some 10 k offshore, that I was hoping to photograph with the Centon. I set to with the Achromat and my iphone, as looking at the tide, I could see it was already advancing, with a high predicted at 11.30 am.

Conditions were not dissimilar to my last visit, with low light and very few visitors on the beach.

Having taken a few shots, I thought I would swap out the Achromat for the mirror and try and get the wave marker post, before the tide covered it again. Unfortunately, the cheese plate that I use to attach the viewfinder to the back of my camera needed to be unscrewed and moved back, to accomodate the larger diameter Centon and the universal adaptor.

This was where my problems began, as can be seen on the unadjusted photo above, there was nowhere to rest any of my equipment while I swapped out lenses and as I attached the camera to the tripod, the thumbscrew on the cheeseplate had tightened up, so that I couldn't loosen it. With the tide now coming in quickly and the breakwaters ahead of the wavemarker already submerged, I decided to pull back to the seawall and examine the camera securely. With the lens removed and the equipment safe and dry, I found the screw would not budge, so I opted for wiggling the plate and the viewfinder to try and loosen it. After about ten mins of fiddling and main force, the screw relented and I was able to fit the adaptor and the lens. With everything in place, I took off the dustcap and tried turning on the camera. Nothing. As is often the case with a device of this age, the battery performance isn't the best, so I swapped out a spare battery. Still dead. I demounted the lens and checked the camera over, but everything seemed cosmetically sound and the battery had been checked for charge before I left. I put everything back together and resigned myself to an iphone only shoot. After having a quick snack and a drink, I gave the camera another a try and amazingly, it started without a hitch. Battery level seemed fine and experimentally, I popped in the other battery to get an idea of charge. Still a good two out of three bars showing, so I put it down to either my manhandling earlier, or just recalcitrance on the part of the camera. 

By this time, the tide had covered most of the beach, so I set up the tripod on the sea wall and tried to get a few shots of the distant wavemarker, as a test for the Centon. The light was still pretty dismal and cloudy, so the results weren't great, but gave me an idea of its capabilities. The lens has a 30.5 mm rear filter mount and comes with a series of Neutral Density filters, which affect the focal plane in some fashion. I had attached a 2 stop ND and a small green glass corrective filter at the rear, before leaving. I should have cleaned both before setting off, but in my haste, forgot. 

The above shot of the wavemarker was taken with the mirror lens and although very heavily processed and changed to monochrome, still shows the overall softness of the image, which gives an almost antique feel. 

I got a few more shots of the iron men receding into the sea, then swapped back out to my trusty Achromat. It was only when I got home and checked the shots in Lightroom, that I realised how much dust was getting into the lens, due to the removeable Waterhouse stop allowing access and the process of swapping lenses in the field. Even so, out of a total of 60 photographs between the camera and the phone, I got about five or six keepers.

One of the iphone apps I used is called XP4N and is designed to simulate the Leica XPAN Panoramic camera, by producing extra long anamorphic images. It comes with a variety of presets too, allowing a straight daylight shot, black and white, neon effect and ethereal, which adds a slight glow or subtle halation effect.

This final shot is one of the slightly better images of the wavemarker, taken with the mirror lens, with considerable cropping and some post sharpening.