In a Northern Hemisphere winter, seeing flowers can always lift the spirits. Whether it’s a rare winter-blooming plant in a garden, a vase in the home or photos from past summer or journeys, the sight is always a welcome one.
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Photography can be a tricky medium. To all intents and purposes, it appears to provide a faithful representation of a true scene. But ever since it was first invented photographers have found ways to fool the viewer. Creating double exposures in the darkroom, adding details by hand or removing them …
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The soft delicacy of flower petals can give them an ethereal, dreamlike quality. And a bit of creative photo editing can enhance that impression, A blurred background, combined with soft focus, can make the flowers seem to float in a hazy, dreamy space.
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The smallest things can trigger a memory: a song, a scent, a throwaway remark. Yesterday, for me, it was a single word, a place name: Monneville. Very many moons ago, in my teens, I spent about ten days living in Monneville as a pupil on my school’s French Exchange programme.
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There’s a common mistake most of us make when starting out in photography. We spot an interesting subject, point the camera and take the picture. Great, we think, but what we often fail to do is take notice of what is behind our subject. The problem is that our brain has a habit of filtering out unnecessary information seen by our eyes, but the camera captures everything.
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I think we all recognise now that the genie is out of the bottle. Mankind has created AI and now needs to learn how to harness it for good while avoiding the many pitfalls.
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I’ve had several exchanges of comments with blogger friends about the merits or otherwise of editing flower shots in monochrome. Some, like me, find the textures and shapes attractive, while others bemoan the loss of colour.
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It’s not too difficult to take a photograph of an object, person, animal or scene. Choose your subject, point your camera and press the shutter. A modern camera (or phone) will do all the work for you in terms of making sure the subject is in focus and well exposed. But how do you photograph a mood?
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If tricks are the practice of fools, where does that leave trick photography? The genre is nearly as old as photography itself. Did those early experimenters pave the way for today’s explosion of in-camera and post-editing trickery?
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Often I observe some with a phone or camera taking a single photo of a sight and moving on, in a hurry to reach the next. In the pre-digital days when every picture taken meant a hit to your wallet, that made some sense. Today it strikes me as strange, but then I am rarely happy with my first shot of anything!
