Gavin magazine issue 3

Parsons 1 email: [email protected]

GavinSept 14 issue 3

The magazine of Gavin Parsons Photography

Fishing the Jurassic coastLifestyle fishing imagery from Dorset

Precision Portraits

Ultra high definition, but realistic people pictures

Sports starin the makingCharacter study of young woman shooting for the top

Want to know how, where and when to catch it?

This is where you want to be!

Fishing• Forecasts • Reports • Locations • Tackle reviews • Tips • Marks


During a busy summer, I took

a couple of month’s break from

producing Gavin magazine. There

simply wasn’t enough time to

concentrate on the magazine. I had

several assignments to produce,

personal work and several courses

to run.

I also took some time to update

my portfolio with new work and

upgraded quite a few of the existing

pictures with new retouching

techniques. I’m not a huge fan of

overworking the retouching of an

image. I don’t take a subject from

one picture and put it into another.

I’m not a digital artist in the true

sense of the word. I don’t like to

create a picture that never existed. I

do like to enhance a digital capture

though and over the last few years

I’ve learned a lot of techniques that

enhance the images; lifting them

from photographs to something

that gives the image a depth of

definition, colour and richness.

If you haven’t seen my new

portfolio it is online now at

www.gavinparsons.co.uk, so please

take a look.

Page 10 Precision PortraitsA rebellion against smooth retouching

Page 18 Positive womenGirls need sportswomen role models

Page 24On locationSome new work from summer location fashion

2 Europe’s critter diving capitalUnderwater macro work in the Channel Islands

Page 38 Fishing the Jurassic CoastLifestyle fisherman project in Dorset

Page 42Top seller One of Gavin’s best selling images

Page 42 Amazing AutumnSeasonal images from Gavin’s library

Contents

Copyright notice: Every part of this publication is copyrighted. All images are copyrighted Gavin Parsons 2014. All rights reserved. No reproduction without prior permission from the copyright holder. All text and design are copyrighted and again no reproduction, alternation or usage of any kind is permitted without the permission of the copyright holder. To use any image or text please contact [email protected]

Page 4 Big Picture

A couple of stand alone pictures

32

38

18

BIG PICTURES

Gavinwww.gavinparsons.co.uk4

Scuba diverPictures of divers are very samey most of the time. They are often taken by underwater photographers with no idea of how to photograph on land or land photographers who pose them on a beach or a boat.

Most ‘real diver’ images are men. Whenever women are portrayed as divers they are skinny models dressed in a bikini. Very rarely do divers go diving in a bikini. Water conducts heat away from the body 20 faster than air. A skinny model, therefore, would last about as long as a snowflake in a desert in just a bikini. There’s also coral and rocks that cut bare skin very easily. A wetsuit is the standard dress code for 90% of scuba divers across the world. So I chose to represent that in a slightly different way. Underwater model shots are usually taken with fisheye lenses that distort terribly. So I took land portrait concepts and used them in the water – or rather right at the surface. The result is a real looking female diver photographed in an unusual way.

5 email: [email protected]

Gavin6 www.gavinparsons.co.uk

I love it when a plan comes togetherWorking on a Greenpeace assignment means anything can happen at anytime. I needed skills as a press photographer, wildlife photographer and commercial photographer. The job is a challenge and about as far away from a standard assignment as a giraffe’s head is from the floor. There is nothing usual about a Greenpeace assignment, which is why I love them. This shot was taken just after sunrise some 20 miles off the coast of Italy on the last day of my assignment. The Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise had been taking on the Blue Fin Tuna fishery which targets highly endangered Blue Fin Tuna that breed in the Mediterranean. As the tuna season closed, the campaign moved onto to illegal drift net fishing. However, after 6 weeks on the boat working seven days a week I was being relieved.

On a campaign though you take the opportunities that present themselves and as the ship moved into the campaign area, it came across an illegal fishing vessel pulling in its two kilometre plus long net. At just after 5am in the morning I was dragged out of my bunk and was on a small Rigid Inflatable Boat (RIB), camra in hand a few minutes later. I shot several images of the fishermen bringing in their illegal net then saw the Arctic Sunrise moving to station itself behind the fishing boat to get the shot Greenpeace would want. As it got into the right part of the frame the fishing boat pulled up a swordfish illegally caught. Greenpeace had the evidence to provide the authorities, and they had the perfect shot to show the world. job done.

BIG PICTURES


BIG PICTURES


What goes on down there?Just beside London’s Orbital motorway, the M25, is a shipping port. If you’ve every driven across the QEII Bridge and wondered what does on down there, well this is what goes on. Every day cargo ferries use a terminal to take freight to and from the continent. This image, taken to show the commercial shipping activities inside the M25, sees a Cobelfret ferry just leaving the terminal with the road bridge in the background and the typical hazy atmosphere of the lower Thames valley.

PrecisionPortraits

There is a backlash happening in the world of photography. The shiny robot-like skin of retouched advertising and fashion photography is being shown for the scam it is. Retouching software can render a

person’s skin so smooth you may as well photograph a wax effigy rather than the real thing.

Some digital art portraits do benefit from some smoothing. But I like to see the life of the person in their skin. You can tell a lot about how a person lived their life from their imperfections and so I turned retouching around 180° and emphasised the imperfections to create what I call ‘precision portraits’. Modern digital cameras can define a subject’s features so realistically that you can see the pores on their face plus the scars, grazes, skin discolouration, hairs and wrinkles and each one is a paragraph in the story of the person.

Achieving this look is a skillful use of lighting and enhancement. I am not taking anything away or adding anything, just enhancing what the subject has already.

As you will see it works with interesting faces and attractive faces equally. In fact, it works with all faces and I’m convinced they make people far more interesting and attractive to look at. Emotionless models with every piece of individuality purged by retouching are uninspiring to me. It’s the imperfections that make a person beautiful to me, not whether their face is symmetrical and smooth.. n

Portraits are about people’s lives so why are many photographers obsessed with obliterating the stories?

11 email: [email protected]


How do you get more girls interested

in Sport? give them some role models.

gavin met one of tomorrow’s sporting

hopefuls to see her role model potential

Positive+


Meet 16 year old Augusta Campos-Martyn. You won’t of heard of her ... yet. She is not quite a rising star, but she soon will be. She is one of Britain’s Olympic medal potentials in clay shooting.

Brazil will pass her by, as her sights are focused on 2020. She is moving up the British rankings and could soon see herself competing on an international level.

She is a focused young woman. When the eye defenders are in and her gun is shouldered, a determined look tenses her face and she taps into special reserves of speed, eye coordination and balance. She may not be running around a track or hitting a ball with a racket, but she is truly on the road to becoming a top class athlete.

However, like all women who partake is sport in the UK she is facing an uphill struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds. The UK is supposed to be a place of gender tolerance, but scratch sport’s sweaty surface and you find testosterone seeping out everywhere.

If you add up the air time female sport received this year the majority of it would be Wimbledon. And while tennis is an inspiring thing, it is a fraction of the sports available to women.

The government doesn’t help. In February 2014, the Sport Minister Helen Grant (you may have noticed she’s a woman) is reported to have said if women didn’t like unfeminine sports they should try cheer-leading (which isn’t a sport). Instead of inspiring women to get out and achieve, she reinforced

the stereotype that girls want to put on make up and stare dreamily at posters of boy bands and think a bit of sweat is icky. For many that perception may be true, but the way we get out of this situation is to look at the root causes of this.

Children like to look up to people. They want role models to emulate. Boys have overpaid footballers and girls get over made-up reality TV stars which no discernible talent.

I’m sure politicians would throw the likes of Jessica Ennis into the their argument that everything is fine. But Jessica made it against the odds not because of them.

And women are doing amazing things in sport. Most recently England’s women won the Women’s Rugby World Cup. Not bad for a group of non paid teachers, plumbers, vets and physios.

The England women’s football team qualified for the World Cup held next year in Canada and I’d put money on them not crashing and burning in the initial stages.

In almost every sport you can think of British women are dominating forces. Yet where is the sponsorship? Where are the multimillion pound TV deals?

On pretty much every level the finance side of sport is failing our young female hopefuls. That lack of finance to help rising stars make it, is hampering new stars in the making.

Without role models what incentive do girls have to put down their Babies and pick up a ball, racket, club, bat, studded shoes or indeed a gun?

Augusta is lucky, she has a dedicated father who believes passionately in his children and their future.

She has an amazing presence about her. She is intelligent, and articulate and will go far whether she makes it to the Olympics or not. Personally I hope she does make it because she will be another building block in the solid foundation woman’s sport has in the UK.

After the photoshoot, I interviewed Augusta and found her insights on her career, sporting life and the future of female sport insightful and fascinating.

Sadly when I started to offer this interview to the media I was met with a wall of silence. Not because it was poorly written, because no one even asked to even see it.

It seems the Television sector is not the only media outlet keeping a lid of women’s sport. Women’s magazines seem to carry on the myth that most women are only interested in what people richer than them are wearing, who they are dating or splitting up with.

I do not believe this is healthy for an upcoming generation in a Britain that is supposed to be generating equality for all.

To produce a generation of head strong, confident young women who will inspire the next generation means a change in attitude of the media as a whole. The raw material is waiting just down the chronological path. All the media has to do is open the door and let the likes of Augusta come walking through.


OnlocationUpdating a portfolio means testing new locations, models and techniques. Here are a few of the results from this summer.

Model agency: PurpleportModel: Stuart Mcintosh


Model agency: PurpleportModel: Tann Marie


How do you find a creature the size of your little finger tip that can change colour to match the seabed? The answer is to ask Toyah Tomkins to dive with you. The co-owner of Bouley Bay Dive centre on Jersey has a

special gift for spotting critters so small you need a magnifying glass to see them properly.

Divers travel to the other side of the planet to find great critter diving, but there’s no need. Jersey’s creatures may not have flamboyant, pygmy or mimic in their name, but they are no less special to see.

Bouley Bay is a small, fairly secluded inlet in north western Jersey, one of the Channel Islands. The Islands sit in a privileged position as they are at the northern range of some Atlantic and Mediterranean critters. In southern England, if you know where to look and search hard enough, you may find Anemone shrimp and the black face blenny, but Bouley Bay is home ground for these animals.

I know a diver who will look in every single Snakelocks anemone under Swanage Pier to find the enigmatic electric blue flecked shrimp. He hardly ever finds one. One dive in Bouley Bay, even in the early season, produced a shrimp in 1 in 4 anemones. That’s a pretty good hit rate considering the shrimps don’t show themselves until the water is 12°C. While I was there, the water temperature fluctuated between 13° and 11°C. So it was borderline whether I would find any, but I found them on virtually every dive.

Pictures of shrimps in anemones taken in Indonesia or the Philippines often win underwater photographic competitions. If that’s your goal, then consider the delicate green and purple of the snakelocks anemone and the clear and electric blue of the shrimp. It’s a sure fire competition winner. The trouble I encountered was surge. My few days in Bouley coincided with a north easterly blow between 12 and 20 mph, which pushed in a swell and chop. It never got bad enough to stop diving, but even slight water movement sways the anemones like a Rastafarian in a hurricane. The shrimps were buffeted around; I was buffeted around, and I could only imagine what the poor anemone was thinking. To and fro I went, the shrimp went and the anemone went, about as in time as a 1st round drop out in Britain’s Got Talent.

I reached a level of frustration that only just fell short of

biting through my regulator mouthpiece. Thankfully, as in space, underwater no one can hear you scream. Every time the shrimp entered my viewfinder looking like a grandma on a rollercoaster, my camera failed to focus fast enough and I missed the moment. Time and again this happened. I moved from one anemone to another and suffered the same frustration. I only grabbed a handful of sharp pictures with a shrimp in frame. But this can happen in the tropics too. My saving grace was from start to finish I’d only driven 25 miles. I got on a ferry at Poole and got off in St Helier a fraction over three hours later. The expense was minimal. No expensive airline tickets, no costly carpark fees, and no baggage restriction. I had everything with me and could jerry rig a camera set up without feeling frustrated that I’d had to leave anything behind.

Glutton for punishmentAfter the shrimp, I moved on to another subject that proved almost as frustrating to photograph. The seabed of Bouley Bay is rough sand and is covered in juvenile flatfish. It is hard to distinguish separate species. I could spot sole and turbot, but there must also have been plaice, flounder, dabs and topknot among the hundreds of tiny fish. In places the sea floor seems to jump up and skitter away in a dozen directions as the flatfish fled. I caught the movement and followed, but as the fish landed, it blended perfectly into the sand and more often than not completely vanished. As I found it again, the damn thing jumped up and took off. I must have looked like a buffoon lifting off the seabed and dropping back. Either that or like a dog trying to catch a fly.

There were some larger flatfish around (too big for my macro lens set up), plus an undulate ray and another photographer spotted a large torpedo ray, which can produce electricity in high concentrations. Which is why they are also called electric rays.

These are not unheard of in Bouley Bay, but then it’s one of those places where anything can turn up. Last year a sunfish was spotted near the harbour wall; seahorses are encountered from time to time; octopus could make a comeback after fishing was banned and, in certain years, the seabed is alive

Bouley Bay is big on little things

Europe’s critter diving capital

Continued on page 36


Anemone Shrimp are cool little critters and easy to find in Bouley BayHard to spot, the Brown shrimp, or Crangon crangon

Toyah Tomkins, and her bionic eyes floating after a dive in Bouley Bay, Jersey

Small and difficult to spot, the Little cuttlefish is tricky to photograph as well. This shot demonstrates just how tiny they are

The little cuttlefish is a bobtail squid and is able to change colour and disappear in an instant

These are normal grains of coarse sand


with either spidercrabs or mating seahares. The latter are a type of nudibranch. I’ve seen them in the

UK quite a lot about the size of an average thumb. In Jersey they come fist sized. And I was there to catch them mating. It wasn’t it seemed, a swarm year, when the seabed is covered in stacks of them, but they were around in good numbers. Mostly there were couples with the odd single male hanging around. I played the voyeur for a while, but seahares are sensual and slow in their lovemaking and I quickly grew tired of seeing nothing much happen and moved on.

From the ridiculous to the even more ridiculousAs you can guess, Bouley Bay has a lot of critter activity. And as I said previously Toyah is a superwoman at finding them, but she outdid herself with two particular species. One is the rather blandly named Brown shrimp. It’s a terrible name for a particularly alien looking creature so I’m going to call it by its Latin name Crangon crangon.

Crangon looks like it might have burst from the chest of John Hurt and be about to hunt down Sigourney Weaver in the Hollywood blockbuster Alien, had it not been about as big as my little fingernail. It lay in the sand, blending in about as well as the alien from the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Predator, and looked like a baby mantis shrimp. It was ugly, yet impressive and made another species to my list of critters.

I have though, saved he best for last. At the beginning I talked of a creature that could change colour to match the seabed and is the size of the top of your little finger? Well meet the little cuttlefish. Early in the season, most are the size of your little finger nail, if not smaller. A 1 pence coin dwarfs them and Toyah found loads, because the girl has bionic eyesight I think. The little cuttlefish is not a baby common cuttlefish. In fact it is not actually a cuttlefish at all, but a species of bobtail squid. It grows to 5cm and starts life less than a centimetre. For mere mortals they are impossible to spot. Toyah found about 20 in my time in Bouley Bay.

Once they know they’ve been spotted, bobtail squid leap from the seabed, squirt a blob of ink and bolt. The ink blob is about the same size as them and any attacker is supposed to go for the ink rather than the squid, which instantly turns the same colour and texture of the surrounding seawater or sand and, in essence, disappears.

They are stunning little creatures, defiant, bolshie and enigmatic. They are my favourite from my time in Bouley Bay.

I had seen a multitude of critters. I could have paid thousands of pounds and travelled to the ends of the earth to find muck diving in warmer water as good. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The frustrations of photographing such creatures was far outstripped by the joy of seeing them and diving with them. n

Fishingfossil coast

the

The work of fishing guide working the Jurassic coast


Sean McSeveney is a sea fishing guide. His home patch is the waters around Portland Bill in Dorset and along the pebble strewn mass of Chesil Beach. The area is a stunning location that attracts landscape

photographers, bird photographers and holidaymakers in their droves The majority of pictures you see from the region are postcard type landscapes. So I wanted to portray the area in a different way and found Sean via his website fishingtails.

Fishing photography falls into the lifestyle genre and needs to show people with a passion battling the elements. The sea around the UK can be a beautiful place, but it can just as easily be unforgiving and brutal. I wanted to portray both and have worked with Sean for many months to find the right conditions.

One of the best days was last October when an easterly moving storm hit Portland Bill, making the bass fishing an exciting possibility on the east of the island.

Arriving before sunrise we scrambled down a rough and overgrown track in the dark. The damp ground and heavy camera back pack almost got the better of me and I was close to twisting an ankle, bruising some coccyx or smashing my face in a few times.

The sun was about to rise and the sky in the east was turning a pinkish colour, which quickly turned to red. The cloud sat heavy over Portland and rain was threatened for the morning, so I had to make the most of this opportunity and got to work.

Sean obliged by standing of a rock that was being pounded by the waves. He was soaked a few times, but seemed to enjoy it like a dog in a river on a hot day.

As the sun rose, the sky behind him turned a stunning

orange and yellow and then, after a brief glimpse it was gone and that would be the last we’d see of it all morning.

On another day Sean and guests he was teaching to lure fish visited a small bay to the east of Weymouth. It was a bright sunny day that didn’t really hold too much promise photographically, but the sea can throw a curve ball like an Indian fast bowler. Part way through the session, a sea mist rolled down the English Channel and engulfed the sun creating a macabre light that I could use. The billowing clouds of mist interacted with the shimmering sunlight behind it creating a yellow haze that pulsated between intense sunlight and deep cloud. It was like something out of a video game.

Some lifestyle photographers forget light is the essence of photography and instead concentrate on the action. Fishing photography, for me, allows me to capture both.. n

fossil coast

Sean and clients in a sea mist

It’s important to show fishing is an adventurous pastime

Parsons 41 email: [email protected] like high energy environments and so to does Sean

Portland Bill looking good in the early morning

Action and light are key to creating a great shot

Bass fishing requires stealth and dedication as portrayed in this image


TOP SELLER

International TradeThe world would be much poorer without the shipping industry. It moves goods around the globe and has allowed humans to utilise commodities on a global scale. The internet may have made the world a smaller place, but try pushing a potato down a phone line!

It is a highly lucrative industry and one that needs great imagery to show itself off. Because, as well as being profitable, the competition is immense in all fields. Ports, shipping lines, container supplies, ship owners, agent services and all the other parts of the industry face fierce competition. So it stands to reason that a good image is crucial.

That’s why images like this which show services at their best are good to have

43 Parsons email: [email protected]


When the weather takes a wet turn in September/October and Scottish rivers start to swell Atlantic salmon migrate upstream to their spawning grounds, leaping waterfalls in their way.

AMAZING AUTUMNSeptember is the month for the stunningly beautiful Fly agaric fungi to emerge from the ground. They only grow in particular places, luckily I know a good spot.

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Gavin magazine issue 3

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Transcript of Gavin magazine issue 3