About Higgins and Macfarlane
Graham Higgins and Ngaio Macfarlane (alphabetic order) live in Somerset, in the South West of England. Both of us are photographers and artists, we feel that we bring an artist's sensibility to our photographs.
We try to see and photograph the landscape which surrounds us, along with the animals, flowers and insects which bring it to life. We have become extremely conscious of the fragility of all this and (we hope) that is reflected to some degree in our work.
Our artistic pretensions (if you will) also prompt in us a deep appreciation of elements of colour and form which, in turn, we incorporate into our photographs.
About the prints
Prints are a photographer's ultimate expression. We have readily adopted digital technology where it works in concert with the image-making process. However, as artists, we also have an acute appreciation of the contribution to be made by the choice of the right materials for the work, so we are very fussy about how we realize our prints.
For print work, we shoot on transparency (Fujia Provia), sometimes on 35mm, sometimes on 6x9cm medium format and sometimes on 5"x4" large format. We digitize the transparencies ourselves and, depending on the image, we will commission it to be printed on fine art paper by a professional inkjet printer or professionally rendered on photographic paper as a lightjet print.
Occasionally we will do the edition run ourselves, using archive-quality dye inks on an inkjet printer, printing on fine art paper and even high-quality artist's watercolour paper.
About Somerset
Somerset is often experienced as the flat bit on the M5 after you leave Bristol and before you get to Devon.
This is unfortunate because Somerset has some of the best and most varied countryside in the UK, ranging from the Mendips in the north, across the Somerset levels and down to the Quantocks and Exmoor in the south; from Glastonbury in the east, across the Vale of Avalon, down through the Vale of Taunton Deane to the Bristol Channel coastline which delimits the western edge of the county.
About this website
Bespoke, tuned precisely to fit our specific needs for both presentation & content maintenance and developed by ourselves using Turbogears. The artist's notes section uses Simon Willison's "plinks" variant of purple numbers to facilitate the referencing of individual paragraphs.
Throughout the website semantic web metadata is automatically integrated into the HTML (using RDFa) and has also been programatically embedded in the images (using a specialised image-oriented ontology).
A small Easter egg: we've hacked up an interface to Microsoft's Virtual Earth which shows the various locations we reference in our postings. It doesn't work in Safari which chokes on M$'s map controller javascript library, sigh.
