Life Observed

A return visit to Houghton Lodge . I do recommend this place near Stockbridge, it is small and perfectly formed. We were far from the madding crowds on bank holiday Monday. O, what bliss. The essential tea shop has been extended and I found this lovely artistic arrangement on the wall at one end. I decided to frame it tight, so both composition elements leak out of the edge of frame.  This is normally anathema but rules are made to be broken in my book* *This particular book has been torn up on more than one occasion.

Clearly this afternoon sunshine won't last long. There's a storm brewing. This is the art of counterpoint, the business of placing one thing against another to emphasis context and contrast. In this case the west facing end wall of a 19th century coaching inn in Marlborough shines against a threatening sky. It is always a good thing to keep your eye open photographically for little moments of contrast like this one. Half a minute later the moment was gone and the sunshine vanished.

I like minimalist images .

Here's a nice minimalist image made possible by the recent snowfall. This strange tree lives outside our house and produces strings of these single bladed winged seeds. They stay there all winter and most of the next year for that matter. At this season they are quite visible as the new leaves have not yet appeared.  I've never had a decent picture of them because the fussy background would ruin the shot. Here, the undisturbed snow has created a nice clean backdrop and a cool counterpoint for the warm colours of the seeds.

Plain and simple. We have had some beautiful blue skies recently: Here are some rooks perched at the very top of a tall tree, surveying the landscape before they fly away to spend the afternoon just messing about.

Summer. Sunshine (for a change), and all across Britain, old Morgans are being teased out of their garage slumber and on to the road. I've never had a convertible car, and I am amazed at how many of them you see when the sun shines. You don't see that many driving aroung with the hood up in the winter. I wonder what is going on. Are there really that many people who keep a rag top in the garage as a spare car just for use in the summer? So here's to the Morgan. A classic 1930s car photographed with a classic 2012 Olympus digital SLR using a classic 1980 Tamron SP90 lens...

It's time to change camera gear again. In the past six months I sold two cameras and a lens and have bought two new cameras and a lens. My gear is becoming smaller, cleverer and regrettably more expensive but it produces better results* Here's one of the first pictures from the new 45mm m4/3 lens that arrived yesterday. This is yet another sharp Olympus lens that will be ideal for portraits and narrow depth of field shots like this one below. The autofocus is lighting fast, which is always a bonus, however it does look rather like a toy compared to their pro lenses. *If the photographer points it at a half decent subject.

Another minimal picture today. Obvious Ingredients: Limewashed golden stonework, shadow and sunlight Hidden ingredients: Members of the public that stopped in the passage waiting for me to take the picture. How kind... (In fact it was a telephoto shot well over the heads of your average punter, but it was kind of them to indulge me)   Oh, and lots of Black . I do like black in pictures ...

Here's an exercise in minimalism. I spotted this back lit blossom yesterday, backed with a shaded wall.  This required some fancy footwork with the camera to get the exposure correct:  I used spot meter for the blossom combined with +1EV compensation to get the right range of tones while keeping the background nice and black. Quite often, less is indeed more:

Spotted in town this weekend, on the side of a shop: This Minimalist Sundial.  This is how it works: If the shadow points downwards then it's daytime, if the shadow points up, it is night.

Freezing fog fills the valley, and the farm lane suddenly seems to lead nowhere . Sometimes less is more when it comes to painting a picture or telling a story.

On the theory that less is more , here is a picture with even less.  In a moment of clarity I realise that this is the elusive Unit 4 on our trading estate. It seems to be this large, black, windowless shed. I've never seen anyone go in there.  It's all a bit of a mystery.

Here is a little blast from the past, or is it...? This new old Morgan is one of their re-issued designs. This is a faithful recreation of the 1966 car, in an original '66 colour. It runs with a modern Ford twin cam engine, but retains the wood frame and sliding pillar suspension. Something for the enthusiast....

Angle not Angel.. This corner shot of St Nicolas here in Newbury emphasises the angles of the stonework, aided by the diffuse sunlight from the south east. Our ugly friend in the top corner has appeared on these pages before , while the lion bottom right seems to have fallen asleep. I assume stonemasons get bored with shaping line after line of straight edges and have  a craving for a carving which leaps out of the corners. You can find this lovely luminous and angular experience under the entrance to the great house at Basildon Park in Berkshire. The deeply rusticated stone and the warm daylight combined to make a very tempting target on our visit one summer. This shot is a matter of timing. You have to imagine the place full of tourists. Catching an empty moment takes some planning and patience.

Now I wonder what this mad alien structure might be, peeping round the corner of this Victorian street? Inside, its just as curved. A truly mad, brave and iconic building.. Shame about the acoustics though. Yes. You knew it was the Guggenheim all the time didn't you.. Buildings as startling as this take on a life of their own and enter the public consciousness just by force of their character. The Guggenheim is a modern art gallery. I admit I have a problem understanding modern art and I'm sure I'm not alone in this. If your work of art needs an A4 poster next to it explaining to the viewer what they should be feeling when they look at it, surely you missed your target. Turner didn't hand out explanations with his sunsets... I have a theory.  It seems to me that the quality of the art inside a gallery is inversely proportional to the quality of the building. Take the Guggenheim, the Tate at St Ives , and the Tate Modern as examples. All ...

Fancy a silhouette? First you need to take control of your camera metering, so that it ignores the large black object that you carefully placed in the foreground, next compose and shoot. Here's an example from Salzberg. It doesn't have to be a small object nearby, it could be as big as Salisbury Cathedral, if the lighting is right.. This lone tree made a suitable subject against the Watership Down skyline one Winter a few years ago. Surely a case of less is more. This was a late night shot at dusk in the Dales. It was a case of applying enough exposure compensation to force the foreground to black and bring out the colours in the sky.

If you keep your eyes open, there are all sorts of views and scenes to had. Here are some random items I have spotted in passing and deemed worthy of a shutter press: This is the wood shed at Houghton Lodge near Stockbridge in Hampshire. A place well worth a visit if you like a nice country garden. I have indeed posted a blog on this subject in the future. Anyway, the woodshed: A nice combination of shapes and colours I thought. Now this odd mixture of round and straight (looking perhaps like an old millstone in the country) was in fact found in a back yard in Reading. The round thing is concrete and the wall is the back of a shop. It looked peculiar and out of context, and so it got snapped... A generic repeated pattern picture. These nicely stacked chairs ( a theme I have visited before ) were looking at me from a corner in a National Trust property. The light and shadow made the picture for me.. This hollow Elm tree stump was posed in the middle of...

My watchword when composing a picture is always "what can I leave out?". This maxim reminds me to look round the viewfinder carefully before that fateful shutter press. So, we must ask ourselves "Is less more", and can we take minimalism too far.... On holiday in Cyprus Here we are on the beach near Polis. I could show you a picture of the sand and the sea, but that would just be another sea and sand picture. I could show you a nice sunset over the Akemas peninsula (and I may well do that one day) but that's just another sunset. So, how do I give you a flavour of a Mediterranean holiday? This is my best shot: Sun, sky, sunshade. It doesn't matter where it was, it was clearly a very nice day :-) A Midsummer night This was taken on the longest day very late at night. This is a time of year I love a great deal, but we pay for it dearly. All those lovely late evenings must be paid for in November and December. I wanted to show the dusk and ...