Light and shade

Happy apples

There’s nothing unusual about this photograph, except for the subject matter. I use it here merely to show you how much you can enjoy your photography, once you choose to carry a camera with you at all times.

The latest digital devices are so small, so light, so easy to use and offer such great value that there’s really no longer any excuse to be found for leaving them behind on a day out. You simply never know what you might encounter, and making snapshots to share what you find with your friends and families can be lots of fun.

These days, most mobile phones have perfectly adequate quality cameras built into them, so you don’t even have to carry a separate picture-making device if you don’t want to.

How do you like them apples?

Silhouettes

Simple objects can often benefit from being presented purely as shapes, devoid of distracting detail, stencilled darkly against a brighter background.

Most automatic point-and-shoot digital cameras will let you make a silhouette very easily. There's usually some kind of target area in the middle of the viewing screen, for fixing focus and exposure. My tiny camera has a black rectangle, which turns green when the electronics decide that everything is ready for me to take the picture.

The trick with a silhouette is to fool the camera a little. Instead of putting the whole clothes peg into that target area, I placed the clouds next to the sun there instead. Keeping the shutter button only half-way down made the camera lock onto the brightest part of subject, forcing the pegs to become much darker as a result. It's rather like making the camera squint against the light.

I made sure I also kept a small edge of one peg in there, which meant that the lens focussed near, keeping the pegs sharper than the far-away sky. Then I held that pressure, moving the camera to compose the picture I wanted. Pressing the button fully down captured the effect I'd created.

As with so many of these techniques, it's much quicker to do than explain. Why not try it?

Viewpoint

My mate Dave quietly acknowledges the struggle I have with my fear of heights, which is probably why he stumped up both our entrance fees to the bloke who was on duty at the base of the old stone lighthouse in Whitby last weekend.

I climbed manfully up eighty-one steps up, then edged stoically out onto a plinth surrounded by railings, and the customary battle of mind over matter began. I employed my most successful diversionary tactic to date: I set myself the task of coming up with a picture for this piece, which focussed my concentration sufficiently sharply to almost forget my height above sea level.

The point of this picture, apart from being simply yet another in my long-running series of “threes”, is to get you to start looking at how you can make the ordinary appear to be extraordinary, when viewed from an unusual viewpoint. The figures here have been drastically foreshortened by perspective, abstracted as shapes, set against a backgound, creating the kind of image we see less often, which is harder to read quickly, and therefore, I think, more interesting.

When I was a child, I was an avid reader, so my father used to bring me home a copy of The Children’s Newspaper once a week. It often published a photograph of an everyday object, shot from an unusual angle, which the reader had to guess. I was good at that, which might explain why I like constructing similar pictures so much.