With travel photography impossible right now, I challenged myself recently to see how many interesting details I could photograph within a mile of my own front door. I followed a path I have taken almost daily over the last year or so, and very many times before that. It took me along a couple of suburban streets, past the tennis courts and into our favourite local park, Walpole.
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The world as we see it is full of colour. So it may seem counter-intuitive to take black and white photos, but by draining an image of colour you can draw attention to its other qualities. Texture, contrasting tones, patterns and shapes can all be more obvious in a monochrome shot.
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When photographing flowers I like to get really ‘up close and personal’; to peer deep into their hearts. And if an insect such as a bee wants to join me on that adventure, so much the better.
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Some say that a photo should be a direct representation of what we saw as we clicked the shutter. I say, that is impossible. The eye, like the camera, may see the true picture, but the brain tends to see what it wants to see, and the photo may therefore disappoint.
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Today, everyone is arguably a photographer, shooting images with their phone cameras almost every day. But when I started, as a child in the 1960s, photography was a hobby, and a relatively expensive one at that. Only the keenest photographers went on the journey from taking family snapshots to an obsession with getting the best from a camera, trying to create something both memorable and beautiful.
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When you press the shutter on your camera you capture a fleeting moment, and when you share the photograph with others you share that moment. If you play around with a photo enough, it will end up very far from where it started, and yet a trace of that moment remains.
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When I was about ten I was given my first camera, a Kodak Brownie. And my father, himself quite a keen photographer, taught me a few of the basic rules of photography. The most important of these was, you must always have the sun behind you when you shoot. Sorry, Dad, but that’s just not true!
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'There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes.' (Pablo Picasso)
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In street photography the moment is everything; press the shutter too soon, or too late, and as Cartier-Bresson said, the moment is lost.
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In photography the word ‘monochrome’ is usually used to describe black and white images. But although all black and white photos are monochrome photos, not all monochrome photos have to be black and white.
