Life Observed

What is wrong with this picture? Scotland votes No to independence.  Crowds gather all over England to celebrate. It's that tree on the left.  Never ever chop a tree in half with your composition.

I've invented a new composition rule for photography. We've had the rule of thirds and various guides regarding symmetry. There are leading lines and foreground to background tension. This is the new New:  The L shaped composition.  Keep up with the trending Trends, it's all here on on this blog.

An image from twenty years ago this time.  This is on Jersey, a little piece of France that we own.  See the traditional fisherman's Volvo outboard motor perched at the rear of his time honoured glass fibre moulded boat. Despite the passing years, it is good to see that some things never change. Composition notes: Rule of thirds for the distant village. Sweeping diagonal ropes to counterpoint the boats. The leading line of the jetty draws the viewer into the picture. It's all there. 

Silent and green, yet strong enough to fell a tree. The Ivy of life will make fools of us all if we are not careful. Oh dear. That was deep. Normal flippancy will be resumed shortly.

Yes. It's another leaf picture. I can't resist leaves in sunlight, especially in Autumn when the colours are so intense.  I spotted this fine leaf at head height, one of the last on the tree, with deep shadow beyond. Light and shadow are another recurring theme of mine. I operated the camera one handed while holding the leaf still in the light breeze. It was just a matter of turning the leaf to get it face on and therefore all in focus. (We artists have our little tricks you know).

Suitable subjects for a high key image: A pair of yellow tomatoes. These are apparently ripe, and this is the colour they should be. Yes, it looks all wrong. No, they don't taste nice. Yes, Tomatoes are fruit. No, don't put them in a fruit salad.

We thought we had walked enough this morning and called a halt at a pub. So we are sitting with a beer, walking poles and a good lunch.  But wait. Right up there on the sky line is an ant on the hill. Someone has trekked up four hundred meters of mountain before lunch. That is very impressive. Now I need to sit down and relax for a bit.

The new phrase for "away from it all" seems to be Off Grid. Well that s where we find ourselves: Away from it all in a valley in the Lake District. Oh yes, this is life on the edge, I tell you: Of course "away from it all" is a relative term. In this case it means there are no street lights, no local shop and the Digital TV reception is a bit poor. However we still have broadband and Tesco will deliver your internet food order.

Photography: Where do you stand? What is your point of view? Actually your point of view matters.  Imagine you are walking down a lane and you see a nice patch of daisies looking up at the sun, and you decide to take a picture. The easy was is to point the camera at them (don't forget to zoom in to remove other distractions from the shot) check your composition, focus, camera settings, and then you take the picture. You will end up with something like this. Frankly this is a rubbish picture of some daisies and some grass. There is no drama or impact and no context in which to place the daisies. Now look what happens if you zoom out to the wide setting, place the camera on the ground, get in close (using the folding rear screen if you have one) and focus on the daisies with a half press of the shutter. Keep the shutter half pressed and recompose so the  rape seed crop and sky start to be visible. Now you have a picture with some merit.  Like I sa...

Our troubled friend here is having a hard time. Close inspection reveals the truth hidden in the ancient aphorism. Yes, the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence.

Afternoon at Lee on the Solent and a couple on the shingle are echoed by two boats on the flat water between Lee and the Isle of Wight. This was one of those happy coincidences that sometimes lift a grabbed shot above the ordinary

One of the composition tricks in a photographer's aresenal should be the leading line. Something about the picture that draws you into the shot. A corner to peek round, a path that you want to follow. Well, in that frame of mind, there are some pictures that just demand to be taken... OK, so there was more to this than frame and click. I had to place the footpath through the new crop in the right part of the frame, and then I had to wait for the cloud to do exactly the right thing to the field below.  They say all things come to he that waits.

Visual cues are everything. The out of focus background, the sharp foreground. These cues hint at depth in a picture. Artists know that hills and trees gradually fade towards the colour of the distant sky as they march towards the horizon. In this case, the mist between the viewer and the trees contributes the shades of grey and blue that give us the cues of depth

This is part of a short sequence using the Olympus Pen with the Zuiko 50mm macro. This combination is capable of producing very sharp images, and was well suited to the sharp low lighting at the weekend. Last year's leaf trapped in the greenhouse.

Water, Ice, Air Fence post and frost Two experiments with 16x9 aspect ratio crop

Now here's a question for you.  Imagine you just wrote a novel about phone tapping and you wanted an image for the cover to illustrate the theme. What might you use? I suggest you might end up with a picture of good old reel to reel tape.  I suppose an image of an audio cassette might work, but old fashioned tape seems to have entered the public consciousness as the tool of choice for evil back room boffins. The truth is that audio is recorded direct to computer disk or memory chip these days. I imagine a picture of a memory stick hardly says Watergate to the public imagination. This is strange since more and more people have never actually seen an old style recorder. I have a big box of old reel to reel tapes in the loft together with a 1970s unrepairable Tandberg recorder. All those years ago I would record a new LP directly to tape and then save the LP and play the tape. It was a long and imperfect process. How times change.

Sometimes you can give a picture impact by placing a light subject against a dark background. In fact, using contrasting brightness is a typical artist's trick.  Here however I am using contrasting colours to draw the eye. By comparison, let's try that same image in monochrome: These splendid Autumnal leaves seemed to stand out agains the rare but welcome blue sky, and careful positioning means the picture contains just enough and no more.

It looks like the Martians landed on Beacon Hill this weekend. Be on the lookout for 40 foot bipeds.

Today's post is all about the highs and lows of images, and grabbing the attention.  When constructing an image, you need to consider what your subject is. So much is obvious. You also need to think about the background, and select your viewpoint and lens to produce the best combination of the two. This first image involved a lot of walking around in a rural car park so I could get the contrasting colours balanced with the dark background. I was shuffling around while peering at the sky, waiting for the gap in the cloud that produced the fleeting splash of sunlight. This second image offered itself without all the shuffling. Inside the bars a solitary shaft of light from the window in the roof fell on the straw bales. I picked a position that gave me a dark background and composed this shot. Both examples needed exposure compensation to achieve the desired result, as discussed before.   Here we have another hay store next to the farm yard...

Farming has its setbacks, it isn't all leaning on gates and chewing a piece of grass, you know.  My wanderings yesterday revealed that the big 4WD Matbro loader is sick. The epicyclic gearbox in one of the hubs gave way and shattered a ring gear. This has to be an expensive thing to replace as Matbro are no more...