David Bennett

It Always Rains On ‘Show Days’

There is a tradition that it always rains on ‘show days’ and sure enough it started raining heavily as we approached the showground of the Great Yorkshire Show that is held in Harrogate in the north of England in July each year.

The Great Yorkshire Show is the largest agricultural show in England and, as we drove in and were guided by the stewards past fields full of parked cars, we envisaged a long and muddy tramp ahead of us from the car to the entrance gate to the show.

We parked and sat and waited out the rain. Through the steamed-up windows we sat and watched the comings and goings, trying to work out which way to walk to the showground.

As well as looking forward to enjoying the show, we were looking for opportunities to take photographs for the Animals category of our ecard collection. Consequently, the prospect of rain the whole afternoon was not what we had hoped for.

Then the rain stopped and the sun came out between banks of white clouds and we walked through the fields, dodging the puddles until we reached the track that led to the show.

Although the sky grew dark and threatening again during the afternoon – as you can see in the photograph above – it didn’t rain.

This sense of keeping one eye out for the unreliable weather is a facet of England that everybody learns to live with. It’s one of the jokes about the social interactions of the English that the first and most regular topic of conversation is the weather.

An Oddity

Agricultural shows are a long-standing tradition in England. They take place at various towns up and down the country, mostly in the summer months.

Yet these shows are an oddity in some ways. If a visitor from another planet were dropped into the Great Yorkshire Show, he might come away thinking that England was a country where everyone was involved in farming.

The fact is though, that the overwhelming majority of the people who attend the shows are urban dwellers because England is of course an urban society. It ceased being a network of rural communities generations ago

Yet going to these shows is like stepping into a parallel world of people who live and work in the English countryside, as though we rub shoulders with them every day.

Farmers And Their Animals

The English countryside is beautiful, but it is not quaint. English farms are amongst the most highly efficient and mechanised in the world.

Because of this mechanisation and efficiency there is a tendency to think that farmers regard their animals as ‘produce’ rather than as individuals. It is obvious however from watching the farmers at the shows that they have a caring relationship with their animals.

That was brought out very forcibly during the epidemic of foot and mouth (FMD) disease of 2001 when hundreds of thousands of cattle and sheep were buried in mass graves or incinerated under government orders to try to contain the outbreak. There were interviews on television then with farmers who were crying at the loss of their animals.

Foot And Mouth Disease

The evidence suggests that the outbreak in 2001 began when pigs were fed catering swill that contained illegally imported meat that was infected with the FMD virus.

FMD is an airborne virus. Pigs are relatively resistant to infection this way, but having eaten the swill they became ‘virus factories’ pumping out plumes of the virus into the air where it then spread to cows and sheep.

In the acute stage, the symptoms are blistering around the feet and mouth. Animals rarely die from the disease but the long-term effect is that they don’t regain full health and they are often in pain. Therefore the disease is a risk both to the welfare of the animal and to the farming economy.

At the time of the outbreak, many farms were off limits to visitors. Nor were the animals permitted to leave the farms. We remember visiting farms outside the known areas of contamination and driving and walking through shallow troughs of disinfectant that were set across the entrance to farms. Everyone entering and leaving had to walk or drive through these troughs.

2007 Outbreak

There was another outbreak of FMD in 2007, but by then the lessons of the earlier outbreak had been learned and the outbreak was contained in the south east of England and stopped.

There were no disinfectant troughs at the Yorkshire Show and if there had been a reported outbreak this year, I do not think the Great Yorkshire Show would have taken place.

The Main Event

It is farm animals that dominate the events at agricultural shows, and showing animals and winning rosettes is a serious business. This is so whether it is for cows, pigs, or any other farm animals.

However, we spent most of our time looking at the sheep, taking photographs for our ecards, and in talking to the sheep farmers.

Sheep

There are over 40 million sheep in the United Kingdom, which in a population of 60 million people means that one doesn’t have to travel far to see sheep in the fields.

About 50 per cent of the flocks are from the hill regions of Scotland, Wales, and the Lake District. They are cross-bred each year with upland sheep who are then bred with lowland sheep to encourage the best genetic mix.

That is why there are 70 breeds of sheep and a further 12 recognised crosses in the UK living everywhere from the harsh, hill areas in the north to the lowland ‘downs’ or valleys near the south coast.

Lamb

If you are wondering where the lamb that reaches British tables comes from, it is the male cross-bred lambs that are taken off to market at about three months old.

When they have been taken away, it’s eerie and poignant to travel past a field that was full of sheep a few days before and now see only the mother ewes.

Benefits And Dangers

While cross-breeding helps maintain the health of sheep, transporting sheep to different parts of the country at breeding season was cited as one of the reasons that the foot and mouth epidemic spread so quickly throughout Britain.

Breeds

Some of the breeds of sheep have delightful names and wonderful appearances to go with the names. For example, at the show we saw the Leicester Longwool breed of sheep that has long strings of delicate, silky curls that stretch like beaded curtains to the ground all along its body.

Then there is the Hampshire Down breed, with short legs, short muzzles, and a characteristic chubbiness – as you can see in this photo.

We have seen the Herdwick breed of sheep many times. This is the breed that was saved for the nation by Beatrix Potter on her farms in the Lake District.

These hardy hill sheep and other similar breeds like the Blackface and the Swaledale are a the top of the cross-breeding chain. They are crossed with Upland sheep like the Border Leicester which produces mules or half-breeds that are then crossed with the lowland breeds like the Lincoln Longwool and the Hampshire Down.

For the first time, however, we saw Herdwick sheep that had recently been shorn. Then we were able to see that they have long, elegant necks that are normally hidden by a coarse grey and white fleece or jacket as farmers sometimes call the fleece.

Talking to a farmer who farms in the Lake District he told us that he knows the face of each one of his flock of Herdwicks.

When six of his sheep were stolen earlier this year, he knew immediately which six faces were missing.

Sheep Shearing Exhibition

At intervals throughout the day two sheep shearers put on an exhibition of sheep shearing. One sheared used electric clippers while the other used hand shears.

The commentator explained that all shearers know how to use hand shears because they travel the world with their trade and sometimes they are called upon to work far from a source of electricity.

As we have seen before, such as when we visited Masham Sheep Fair, shearers wear short felt bootees to prevent themselves sliding about on the floor when it becomes covered in lanolin from the fleeces.

Of course the electric clippers worked much faster than the hand shears, but it was amazing how quickly the shearer with the hand shears clipped the fleece off an animal.

In fact the whole business was over so quickly that the shorn sheep looked as though they were unsure what had just happened.

We shoot most of the photographs for our ecards using digital SLR cameras. A few of our photographs are, however, shot on film and then scanned.

Whichever method we use to capture the photographs though, the aspect ratio of the images we use for our ecards – that is the length of the long side of the image compared to the length of the short side of the image – is 3:2.

Some people may think that the aspect ratio of an image changes with the size of the photograph.

The fact is though, that if the image is scaled up or down, the aspect ratio doesn’t change. The ratio of the length of the two adjoining sides is the same no matter how big or small the photograph is.

Photographs For This Blog
It’s a different story with the photographs we take for this blog. Here we crop the images in different ways to illustrate a story and to suit the layout of the article. Sometimes we also set the text so that it flows around the cropped photographs as in this article about tea.

Nature Photographs Suit A Panoramic Format
Images of trees and fields suit a wide format because the interesting parts of the image lay more or less in a horizontal line and a panoramic photograph mimics the way we generally look at the landscape.

Orientation
One thing that causes confusion is the use of the word landscape when talking about photographs. That is because as well as refering to trees and fields, etc., it is also used to describe which way up a photograph is oriented.

It is easier to show than to describe.

Both of these blue rectangles have the same 3:2 aspect ratio but one is in portrait orientation and the other in landscape orientation. Of course, the principle works whatever the aspect ratio.

Also, if I were to turn a panoramic image that was in landscape orientation on its side I would get a bookmark.

Large Elements In Photographs
Panoramic images works can also ‘work’ where there is a large element in the photograph, such as a country house set in a landscape. Here is an example of an image that is an amalgam of six images merged in Photoshop. It shows a country hall in South Yorkshire, England set in its surroundings.

The house and its grounds are now owned by the local authority for the benefit of everyone, though it was once a privately owned house in which one family lived.

The existence of these country mansions makes me think of the fact that in a more equal society the house would never have been built nor the trees planted. On the other hand, everyone can now enjoy the house and grounds because of the inequality that went before.

Portraits
Long, narrow, panoramic images can look great for landscapes but would look a bit unusual if used, for example, for a studio portrait. Having said that, a panoramic shot that shows the person and also includes some of the background can look good, as Arnold Newman’s 1946 portrait of the composer Igor Stravinsky shows.

Newman posed Stravinsky with his arm resting on his grand piano. Stravinsky is at one end of the photograph and the bulk of the photograph is taken up with the shape of the piano. It is a great example of the panoramic format working well for a portrait.

It’s an unusual portrait because the composer’s head and shoulders occupy only a six per cent of the total area of the photograph. Nonetheless it is a powerful photographic portrait.

Back To The Aspect Ratio We Use For Our Ecards
As I said at the beginning of this article, for our ecards we use the 3:2 image format. It is not just chance that we do so, and in fact the 3:2 aspect ratio has been the most popular format throughout the history of photography.

There is a very good reason why 3:2 is the most popular image format. It is a very good compromise – being neither too long and narrow nor too square – and therefore it suits a variety of subjects.

The Dominance Of The Three To Two Aspect Ratio
But though it seems to be a good all-round compromise, how precisely did 3:2 become the dominant ratio for film and digital cameras worldwide?

The History Of Film
There is no absolute reason that film had to be in this format, and throughout the history of film there have been many film formats other than this.

None however has been as popular as the 35mm film that has been used by countless millions of people worldwide since the early Kodak and Leica cameras gave people the portability and ease of use they wanted.

In Thomas Edison’s Laboratory
The reason that the format became the most popular may simply be that the earliest roll film made for the new ‘compact’ cameras was in 3:2 format and the momentum grew from that.

That film was made in the 1890s by William Dickson in Thomas Edison’s laboratory.

What Dickson did to make the ‘new’ film for still photography was simply to cut lengthwise down the 70mm movie film stock supplied to him by the Eastman Kodak Company. Then as they say, the rest is history.

Putting It In The Frame
Of course, film is cut into rolls to fit in the camera, so it is the really the size and shape of the metal frame or mask that sits in front of the roll of film in the camera that determines the actual frame size and shape of the photographic negative.

Without that frame or mask, a roll of film is just that – a roll – and the individual frames can be any size at all, so long as the lens will focus a sharp image on it.

After a few false starts and a bit of haggling, the size of the frame or mask was settled on by Eastman Kodak at 36 x 24mm -which is of course the 3:2 aspect ratio because 36 is one and a half times 24mm.

And it is the shape of the frame that is really what we are talking about when we speak about the aspect ratio of the individual photograph recorded on a roll of film.

So for the best part of a century the film that you or I would buy from the store – whether made by Kodak, Fuji, Agfa, Ilford, or any of the other brand names that were once common but of which many no longer exist – would be 35mm film made to fit cameras that produced images in a 3:2 image format.

The Transition To Digital
Kodak, Nikon, and Canon were among the earliest manufacturers of digital cameras for the mass market. They already made film cameras so it was probably a matter of simple economics for them to make digital cameras that used the parts they already used in their film cameras.

Or perhaps they simply decided to stick with the 3:2 aspect ratio that people had become used to.

This aspect ratio is used in the dSLR (digital Single Lens Reflex) cameras we use and have used here at Quillcards – the Nikon D700, the Nikon D60, and the Nikon D200.

And that is why the photographs for the Quillcards ecards are in the proportions they are. That and the fact that the 3:2 aspect ratio is still a good compromise and suitable for all kinds of subjects.

Compact Point and Shoot Cameras
As digital cameras matured, camera manufacturers recognised that they were free to make camera sensors in any aspect ratio they wanted. As a result, the manufacturers of many compact point and shoot digital cameras have opted for a slightly squarer 4:3 format.

Some manufacturers even offer a range of formats within the same camera. Of course, what that really means is that when the format is changed, the frame masks off part of the sensor.

The compact camera that I use as a digital ‘notebook’ is the Panasonic LX3. It has a standard rectangular 3:2 format sensor but it also has a mask operated by a switch that changes the format to 4:3 or 16:9. It also has a custom setting in its menus that enables 1:1 or square format.

Cropping The Image
Of course once any photograph has been taken it is always possible to crop it to a different format. I took this with a Nikon D200 camera so the original image was 3:2. I isolated the model’s face in Photoshop and cropped it to the 1:1 square format image you can see here.

Where Is All This Leading?
As you may have heard, a large number of Polaroid images were sold at auction by Sotherby’s in New York a few days ago under an order of the court following the bankruptcy of the Polaroid Corporation.

Among those sold were Polaroids of and taken by some famous photographers and artists such as Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh, William Wegman, Robert Frank, Andy Warhol, and Chuck Close.

If you are not familiar with the work of Chuck Close, he is a painter who paints very large photo-realistic paintings. In the case of the Polaroids though, he made a montage of his own face built up from a number of Polaroid photos.

Polaroid photos have a very recognizable shape. They are more or less square, but set within a frame that has extra depth at the bottom – all of which gives the shot a particularly attractive ‘finished’ look.

With the sale of the Polaroid Corporation to PME, the future of Polaroid as a brand is uncertain but if you are interested in Polaroid products, the Impossible Project is a good place to look for them.

From Polaroid To Poladroid
Now there is an application that enables anyone to take a digital image and make it into a Polaroid lookalike. The software can be downloaded from the Poladroid website.

I shot this photograph in India on the banks of the river Ganges at Varanasi. I shot a normal 3:2 image with a Nikon D60 and Nikon 35mm AF-S lens. Then I put the image through the Poladroid application, and this is the result.

The weather has been changeable – first sunny, then rain, then some sun again and then more rain – all in one day. Then in the late afternoon the sun came out again and we went for a walk in Middleton Wood, which is near Ilkley in North Yorkshire.

The woods were carpeted with bluebells, which looked especially attractive with the sun slanting through the trees in the late afternoon.

For a close-up photograph of an English bluebell showing how the flowers all grow on one side of the stem, see our bluebell article here. In contrast, the flowers of the Spanish bluebell grow all around the stem, so the plant grows upright.

We will be adding these photographs to our ecard collection within the next week.

We will also be adding photographs from our India trip to our ecard collection, so look out for those also.