Light and shade

Move something

Yesterday evening, Sparkly and I started a short burst of clutter-clearing, putting aside some things to give away to a charity shop, then discarding others. We both still feel we suffer from TMS: Too Much Stuff. Even so, after careful consideration, one or two pieces of deserving glassware were given an extended life, in a small, deep, west-facing kitchen window. Well, a sterile living environment can be just as creatively damaging as a junk-filled one.

Such material changes almost always bring something new into our living space. This afternoon, the strong, clear sun filled our kitchen with dozens of rainbow-coloured spectra, which were spilling out from a newly positioned cut glass pendant. One rather startling collection of hues slashed light and shade across the face of the drawer photographed here.

Different point of view

A brief experiment, just to see if I can avoid having to repeat myself.

Comments please: easier reading for you, or not?

Car wash

Carrying a small point-and-shoot camera with me everywhere I go is a great way to keep my photographic eye sharp. It functions as a sketch pad, enabling me to try new ideas, making shorthand visual scribblings any time and place I want.

There’s not much to do in a car wash except wait, once you’ve tidied up those out of date, self-adhesive windscreen parking tickets and retrieved lost biros from between the parking brake lever and the seat runners.

Next time you’re killing time as revolving brushes beat a soggy, bass tempo against your car’s bodywork, why not take a good look outside your car through streaming wet windows? There could be a picture to be made.

Fixing focus

Cathy asked me at work today if I’d “seen the window”. She’s a teacher who manages, among other things, a reading and reference library in a specialist college for young people who have little or no sight. That's no mean feat: the final Harry Potter tome expands to eleven volumes in Braille –- but I digress. Cathy’s a bit of a wordsmith herself, so I guessed straight away that she was talking about something unusual.

At first, from a distance, I saw a white blur on one of the double-glazed panes, the sort of mark an errant football might have made. When I got near enough, I was surprised to see the perfect imprint of a bird. It had been frozen in flight, the outline of its wing, body and beak traced delicately by what I assumed was dust, flung off in the violent collision.

Making the close-up picture you see below jogged my memory about a conversation I’d had recently. It was with an experienced professional photographer. He commented on the limitations of many point-and-shoot cameras. The problem facing me here was a common enough one: how could I force the automatic focussing to select the transparent foreground, when all it wanted to do was travel much further outside, rendering the more distant background tree leaves and fruit sharp, instead of the nearer feathery pattern.

In needed to find something in the same vertical plane as the ghostly pigeon. So I pointed the camera off to one side, gently squeezing the shutter release button only half-way down, deliberately locking focus onto the window frame. Then I rearranged my composition slightly. The laws of optics were satisfied, so I pressed the shutter release all the way down, to capture the sharp image I wanted.

Practicing this technique will also save you from making useless pictures of blurry animals behind pin-sharp wire fencing on those family trips to the wild life park.

Develop your style

It’s quite simple to develop your own personal style of picture making. You do this by making lots of pictures, as often as you can. Persevere, and your portfolio will become a visual history, recording your progress as a photographer with the passage of time.

This week, a friend asked me to look back through my files, to find a couple of black and white shots I made of some Adirondack chairs. They were taken about ten years ago, during my first visit to New England. I was borrowing a classic, twin-lens reflex film camera, which produced twelve negatives on a roll, each one two and a quarter inches square. Just for fun, I was seeing how I could fit my subjects into that format, printing them later in the darkroom without any cropping, as the example above shows.

This afternoon, when I got back from work, the September sun was streaking longer, and therefore more interesting shadows across the patio than it was in July. So I grabbed my digital camera, before the clouds moved in, then I played for ten minutes in my garden, making studies of a similar wooden chair .

What you see here are merely two of the pictorial punctuation marks taken from a decade of moving continually forward in the exploration of my photographic style. I’m currently appreciating the freedom of digital photography, which allows me to shoot as many frames as I like, with virtually no running costs.

I can’t wait to see how I’ll be working in the year 2017.