Video: Chatting to Ashley Carr in Stourport (part 2)

A couple of months ago I went to Stourport and met up with Ashley Carr. This is part 2 of the video I made, if you’d like to see the first part, you can find it here. If you’ve watched the first part already, you might be happy to know that it continues in exactly the same slightly ranty vein.

The conversation kicks off with me and Ashley talking about the power of the brain to learn light and distance. Ash talks about how practising judging the light and then checking yourself with a light meter can very quickly help you learn to read daylight with relative ease. I then reflect on how in the early days of my return to film I used a Voigtlander Vito B and came unstuck with the imperial distance scale. I then mention that I went on to teach myself distance with my first Leica M4-2. In fact, it might have been the Voigtlander R2A, I can’t quite remember, but it’s by the by anyway…

We then move on to talking about framing, and how Ash feels that film slows him down and encourages a sense of knowing when to take a picture and when not to. He then talks about how 35mm and indeed digital encourage a less strict mentality since he has the ability to shoot more frames. Ash reflects on how this impacts him within his work as a professional compared to how he shoots personally.

We then talk about limitations and constraints and the benefits of working within them – if you read this website often, you’ll know this is a particular favourite subject matter of mine. I then briefly touch on working in a linear way and how I find committing to either shooting black & white or colour when I first pick up a camera, even if it’s digital, benefits me.

The conversation then drifts on to the importance of consistency in photographic style, and then how Ash’s work and the narrative it tells is much more based around images as part of a series rather than single “hero” images. We then talk a little bit about how this has been impacted by social media and how there is now an increased pressure to create single images that tell a whole story by themselves.

Hopefully, there’s something interesting in there, but even if you don’t find it interesting, you might find the fact that I clearly have no idea how to use the meter in my Nikkormat; a theme that manages to span the whole video…

Just a final note – apologies for the sound being a bit crap in places. My mic picked up some interference a few times which meant we were reliant on Ash’s for me too.

Enjoy

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