Capturing the Essence

flowery path, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Sorry for the lack of posts. In my defence, I’m hoping to post a couple of ‘guides’ (I use the term incredibly loosely) on how I do colour toning on my black and white shots, also another one on different ways to make your skies pop.

A couple of people have asked how I do it and whilst I’m not anything close to an expert, I can certainly answer the questions from a purely personal point of view. I’ll hopefully have the ‘guides’ up by the end of this week.

Anyway, I really enjoyed my trip to Bristol, a beautiful city…flawed perhaps by a crappy airport experience but you can’t have everything.

Finally I’ve had two requests for large prints this week, which is great, I’m always flattered when people want to put my work on the walls of their houses. Thank you.

I’ve probably mentioned that I try and look at 100 pictures a week…which should mean I look at 5200 a year, and try to emulate what I see in the good ones in the vain hope that one day I’ll take a good photo. One of the things I really like in some peoples photos is how they capture the ‘essence’ of a place or a subject in an innovative way.

I probably haven’t’ explained that very well, so let me show you some examples from photogs much better than me. In Teds picture of the Mandril, you don’t need to see the rest of the picture to know that there’s a big monkey not in the shot. Ted is a master at this, he uses unusual subjects or shapes and combines them with contrast and lovely black and white treatments to create very special, almost minimal photographs that tell stories about wildlife, urban American architecture and people. He also knows how to shoot fireworks!

Todds amazing shot “Moving Forward” tells so much and yet shows so little, crumbling wall, basketball hoop, blue sky...but look deeper. There’s the lines of what was possibly the roof of a demolished building, this line runs along the diagonal of the shot and almost works like a graph or chart, plotting the decline of the neighbourhood. But there’s hope in the shot too, the new, gleaming basketball hoop and the sunny sky give us a sense of optimism that’s at odds with the gloomy forecast that is hinted at in the decaying wall. I like the fact that the wall is painted, someone took pride in the wall and took the time to paint bricks, people are (or were) proud to live here. Could it be that the 'graph' isn't plotting the neighbourhoods decline but it's revival? I don't know and it's dichotomy that makes the photo so profound. This shot works on the aesthetic level in terms of composition and colour but there is layer upon layer of depth too. Todd has a set called ‘rural poetry’ which is one of the finest sets on Flickr. If you want to see what ‘capturing the essence’ is all about then look at Todds work.

Do you get it? Doing an awful lot with very little. That was my photographic task for this weekend. Guess what? It’s really, really difficult but the only way to get better is to try. I headed out with the camera on Sunday and took a walk through the fields to south of my home town of Nairn. The weather wasn’t great and I was struggling for inspiration, the sky was really flat and gray and recent heavy rain left everything looking a bit washed out.

The shot at the top of this weeks blog post is probably the ‘best of a bad bunch’, I was trying to capture the essence of the footpath, surrounded by wild flowers on a dreary afternoon. I think my choice of aperture (f3.5) could have been better, as the stuff that’s out of focus is maybe too out of focus. I did very little with this in terms of post processing, just cropped and tweaked the levels. What’s more valuable is what I’m learned about photography by trying. Every day’s a school day!