When you’re out photographing and you notice something interesting the first reaction may be to snap a picture, you wouldn’t be wrong. The next reaction should be how can I make that better. Questions such as camera settings and where should I stand and how will that look need to be thought through. It may come naturally to envision a scene from a different vantage point or it may come from practice. Practice should take the form of thinking about how something will look from somewhere else and then going there and seeing for yourself. Technically you don’t even need a camera it just requires actually thinking about what you are seeing around you. Using a zoom lens gives more options but may actually hinder this type of creativity as it tends to make you stand where you are and try to frame a scene, rather than actively searching.
Here is an example. I saw this scene and took an initial image. I then noticed the curve of the shore and how the fence could make an interesting foreground element. So I left the trail and headed for the beach.
And here is the image that resulted. I did have to wait for the man trying to fly the parachute to get it airborne again and luckily this seagull was the bravest of them all and didn’t fly off.
I like the term Contre-jour it sounds more sophisticated than “Back lit” but really it does refer to photographs taken where the primary light source is behind the subject but not necessarily directly behind it as I have done here.
These images have me thinking about how often I use this technique, so I have just gone through some of my images to find other examples. This is by no means all of them but based on the number of images I had to look through to find them I can safely say I’m not being repititious when I do take an image like this.
UPDATE: Ok I found another one that I really like. It’s funny because until I looked at it again I had forgotten how a friend and I had rushed ahead so that I could capture this and we would still be able to make it back before dark. Based on the date this was 19 years ago.
As far as piles of rubble go this one smells pretty good. It has that aged wood smell of an old building only intensified by the fracturing and the light rain. This image came about when the excavator was going to relocate so I moved to this side and placed my Pentax PC35AF against the fencing. It’s difficult to ensure the fence doesn’t obscure the lens because it’s viewfinder is not through the lens, but with care and luck I was able to capture the moment that created this composition.
When I recently saw stacks of logs waiting to be processed I knew that I wanted to create an image that linked the raw materials together. These two images are merely an intermediate state for these trees and it is for the viewer to envisage a time before and after for them. Either as trees or the end products that surround us.
Like many people I love repeating patterns and am awed by things where scale is outside the norm. I noticed this log sorting yard while driving past on the highway but it wasn’t until I drove around on some back roads that the scale of it became clear.
It was raining quite heavily and I had limited time but I hope the images convey some of the scale.
Here is another attempt at dealing with images that require a scale greater than what a web browser generally affords. By clicking on the thumbnail you can navagate into the image and pan and zoom.
The imagery I think is clear even if the image isn’t. The steps in the cemetery look like a ladder which seems to be there to help achieve some form of ascension, even a tree has been removed to clear the path.
I haven’t had the time to do much photography lately and my studio isn’t ready for me to paint in yet so I thought I would take a moment to look at some older images that haven’t been published yet.
In order to see the world in new ways, well for me at least that is a desirable thing, it’s necessary to look at little things. This can mean going back to look closer at something as happened with this image. It would have been very easy to ignore this but the contrast of colour caught my eye and by careful framing with my Nokia N95 I was able to produce an image I like that is both about something and about the design of the image at the same time.
There was a tree that I wanted to take a picture of and I knew it was going to be just too big to capture in one image at the sort of resolution that I wanted. So I took multiple high resolution images with the intent of stitching them together in the computer. This leaves me with a new dilemma though, how to convey the size of the tree to a viewer on the Internet. I could have attempted to include something in the frame to give scale “Here Bessy, here Bessy…” but cows are notoriously bad at taking directions and even then I’m not sure the impact could still be carried through with a small image. So I’ve essentially taken control of the viewing experience and am presenting the picture in the form of a video.
And just to prove my point about impact here is a small web friendly version of the image.
