Spring Songs - End of February

Spring Songs - Later in February

Spring Songs - Early February

The Submerged Sea - Cover Art

I have a new poetry pamphlet coming out in the spring and I am, not surprisingly, very excited about it. Like all my books (this will be the sixth), it is my baby. I have worked long and hard to make the words right and, also, the visual art because (as with my previous three poetry publications) the cover artwork (excluding the lettering) is mine.

It took a good deal of trouble and effort to make and choose the right image for the pamphlet and, as it is a photograph, I thought people might be interested to share in the process that went into it.

To begin with, I thought about the image I wanted, but I soon realised I didn't have the equipment to produce it (it would have involved underwater photography). So I thought some more and considered the photographs I already had. I selected about forty and no, breathe easy, I'm not going to display them all here, but here is a flavour. The pamphlet is called The Submerged Sea and the photographs are all sea themed. The seas in question are a mixture of british and international.

 Some of these photos worked better than others because of size, shape and quality of image. Others had a better "feel" to them. Specifically, I was looking for an image that captured the essence of the poetry, that would fit the cover size and shape of the pamphlet and that would allow the pamphlet's title and my own name as author to appear clearly, and, of course, I wanted the finished result to be eye-catching.

 I decided to take some new shots to create some more abstract, less naturalistic images. I took a vast ocean of photographs. Here is a taster. 

By now, combining the artistic photos with the natural ones, I had about ninety images, so I had some serious culling to do. I forced myself to be ruthless in eliminating images that didn't have the right feel, that had the right feel but were of a poorer quality, that wouldn't fit the landscape shape of the pamphlet cover without destructive cropping, that were too similar to others etc, etc, etc.

I managed to get it down to about thirty images, but that's still about twenty-seven too many, even if I wanted to provide the publisher with a choice of images.

Further painful culling ensued. I find it really difficult to reject my babies.

Eventually I got all the short-listed images on to a single computer screen and then eliminated those I liked least.

Then I slept on it.

When I woke up the next day, I repeated the process.









At some stage in the process, one or two of the images started to leap away from the others. They were the ones that, at each comparison, I liked the most. They tended to be the artistic and slightly abstract images I had specifically created with the pamphlet in mind.

Eventually, I narrowed it down to two images, my favourite and second favourite. I sent them off, fingers crossed, to the publisher in the hope that they would like at least one of them.

Fortunately they did. A photograph was accepted and a cover was created. The final photograph and the cover made from it are shown below.

The Submerged Sea (ISBN 9781907435591), a poetry pamphlet by J.S.Watts will be published by Dempsey & Windle in spring 2018.

Photographic Word Connectivity

It’s that time of year, the turning point and the time when I reflect on the preceding twelve months of this blog and/ or look forward to the next twelve. On previous occasions I’ve even produced a summary of photos from the outgoing year. I’m not going to do that this time around. If you want to see what I’ve been posting, you can always flick back through my posts for 2017. They are there and waiting.

This year I am going to approach things a little differently. I’m going to use my “annual reflection slot” to contemplate why I’ve subtitled this blog “a photographic experiment with words” when really it is mostly the photographic part and the words only get an occasional look-in.

I make no apologies for the prevalence of photos: first and foremost this is a photo blog – a chance to share my strictly amateur photographic experiments. Words, however, are important to this blog, both the relatively few posted on this site and those directly and indirectly alluded to, echoed or stimulated. In other words, there is a link, sometimes immediately obvious, sometimes not, between the photographs in this blog and the writing side of my life (check out www.jswatts.co.uk if you are not sure what the latter is).

Obvious connections include photos of my book covers  and images of locations within my novels . I also post the occasional poetry album where I upload a poem together with a collection of photos that I feel resonate with it.

In addition to the above, I attend literary events, such as the annual In Other Words Literary Fringe Festival in Cambridge, that I capture photographically and share here.

So far, so obvious. Less directly obvious, perhaps, is the fact that I photograph things I see around me: locations, objects and places, nature and wildlife and these things impact on my writing. As an example, I take many photographs of birds and you will find flocks of birds scattered across my poetry. Similarly, you can find echoes of the landscapes I photograph within my novels, short stories and poems.

The funny thing about echoes is that they just keep on echoing, even when you can no longer hear them. The images that don’t immediately relate to my writing or appear within it, still impact on me. They are the things I see, sometimes daily, and which shape my thinking, however obliquely.

The photographs in this blog provide a flavour of my world and my experiences within it. These are the things that colour my writing, both in large primary colour blocks and more discreetly muted tints. Basically, either overtly or hidden and sometimes only for me to know, there is a coming together or connection of images and words.

All being well, there will be many more images and some related words within this blog during 2018. Please feel free to pop back from time to time in order to check them out and share my echoes.