Some thoughts on practice / Major project development.

Working through the ideas of stripping out the superfluous detail associated perhaps with human perception and phenomena, the drive towards recreating not just landscape topology, but generally the black-and-white line drawings of what could conceivably be some halfway mediation between human and Peregrine perception. I've been thinking about some of the images that I was able to capture during the Easter holidays at Devil's hole in Jersey, on the more remote North/Northeast coastline. I came across these sheer cliffs almost by accident whilst touring the island with my wife. Imagine my joy when I looked up and saw a pair of peregrines, falcon and tercel, circling above the cliffs. Whilst I was able to take a few photographs using the camera built into my mobile phone, the birds were a little too far away by the time I was able to extract the phone from my pocket. Therefore, I've been left with some nice shots of the coastline and the habitat in which the peregrines live. I later even saw what appeared to be a falcon with Jessies (Falconer's short leather straps), attached to its legs, that appeared to be independent and becoming wild again. At least there was no sign of a falconer and the bird's freedom seemed evident.

 Photograph G.P. Hadfield (Apr 2017), 'The Devil's Hole', Jersey.

After coming home and processing one of the photographs digitally have been playing with the idea of vectorised graphics (through the use of Adobe Illustrator CC), and how I can strip out the superfluous details of colour and yet retain a semblance of edge recognition from the drawings.

Post-production photograph G.P. Hadfield (Apr 2017), 'The Devil's Hole', Jersey.
Digitally rendered with edge line detection. May 2017.

Photograph G.P. Hadfield (Apr 2017), 'The Devil's Hole', Jersey.

Post-production photograph G.P. Hadfield (Apr 2017), 'The Devil's Hole', Jersey.
Digitally rendered with edge line detection and colour removed. May 2017.

At the moment, I still feel that a truly digital shortcut towards recreating the visual images is less likely to work. There is much less sense of expression in the work compared to hand-crafted drawing, even if the drawing is made on a digital tablet. Nevertheless, I need to keep experimenting and reflecting on what seems to be working for me, and that which doesn't and should be abandoned perhaps. I just need to keep going!