Atlantis

My latest images feature the stunning Rose, wearing a beautiful dress called “Atlantis.” It’s a mesmerizing creation, with layers of delicate, transparent fabric building up the sea’s colour palette of blues, aquamarine and turquoise. As she turns, the dress floats and flounces, catching the light in gentle waves. Rose needed to be transported to a very special setting, rather than the castle courtyard at Lincoln, where I was able to photograph her.

I have given the first image a working title of “Cordelia, Born of the Sea” (Cordelia is from the Celtic language and means “…of the sea”.) The gown’s name “Atlantis”, inspired the underwater world in my second image, below that.

I hope you enjoy these images and the discussion of “provenance” that I have added.

Cordelia, Born of the Sea

Atlantis

Provenance

New rules from our international umbrella organisation (FIAP) are going to require all constituent images of composites, entered into their World Cup competition, to be available for inspection on demand. The new rule is causing a bureaucratic nightmare for many local clubs and organisations, for many reasons, not to mention that photographers may have lost the original constituent images, deleted files or, like I have sometimes, just taken a “bit of something” on the mobile phone, added it to the composite then deleted from the phone in the need to declutter! For any sports and nature photographers who might capture in jpg, they often delete all the unusable images, so may not have the before and after shots required for evidence.

The club’s competition secretary is responsible for collecting all these images together and I know how impossible that it can be even just to get an entry together, let alone all the evidence of provenance now required. We did not have prior warning of the rule changes, and even if we did, it would be difficult to comply. Already, many organisations are wondering if it is all too much trouble and a few I know are already pulling out of the World Cup this year, for fear of being unable to gather together all the elements of their various members’ work. Nobody wants to risk disqualification.

We have always trusted photographers before and yes, now and then, a cheat is found, and not only in composite work…there have been a number of instances of image theft of seemingly traditional work too. If someone has a tendency to cheat they will do so, whatever the medium! AI is now another way to infringe the rules but there is no need to potentially suspect every entrant to a competition, in my opinion.

In view of this new trend, I decided to see how much trouble it is to keep the images for “Atlantis” at the editing stage.

Lightroom Collections

When the FIAP World Cup rules were published, I had already made “Cordelia” and anyway that one only has 4 components, so it’s not too difficult to find them retrospectively, if I need to. However, I saved all the images for “Atlantis” into a Lightroom Collection at the making stage. There were originally 20, but I excluded one from the final “cut”. Making a Lightroom collection is a quick and easy way to keep them all together, so long as all the images are all in the same catalogue and you don’t divide your catalogues up into different years, for example. Images in different catalogues will cause a difficulty and most compositors go into their back catalogues to look for particular picture elements…my tank fish were taken years ago at “the Deep” on a little lecture tour around East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire.

So, here are thumbnails of all the images that went into “Atlantis”, published simply as a thumbnail sheet.

After the portrait of Rose are six photographs which I used to create different aspects of the sea bed… only a very little part of each was used in some cases. Then there are the coliseum and temple buildings, followed by five village pictures that were only used for their climbing plants, which simulated underwater plants. The last five images are the various sea creatures.

My club has decided not to enter the FIAP World Cup this year. It’s a shame, but the extra layer of admin has taken some of the fun out of it for us – not that we believe any of our members are cheats, just that it will be difficult for them all to find the requisite proof of not cheating, at least retrospectively, when you remember that we may go back several years to find enough images of the right standard to challenge at world level! Perhaps, going forward, we can “do as I did” and keep the images at the editing stage in a place we can easily retrieve them for inspection. I doubt that FIAP will have a change of heart.

Feel better Chris, after that little rant? Well, no not really, but at least I have found a way to move forward for myself.