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Gallery: in the mood
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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Gallery: it’s tricky!
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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Gallery: three ways of seeing
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!
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Gallery: creating the surreal in post-production
Salvador Dali said that, 'Surrealism is destructive'. It seems counter-intuitive to think of art as destructive, when it is such a creative process. Surely the purpose of art is to construct? And photography, as an art-form, creates or constructs a record of a moment in time. So perhaps to apply Dali’s definition of Surrealism to our photography, we need to partially destroy our images and distort that record in post-production?
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Gallery: fabulous florals in a spin
Of course spring flowers are glorious in their own right. We love to see them both for their beauty and because they herald summer days to come. But I’ve shared so many in the past. So when Terri asked to see some fabulous seasonal florals I wanted to do something different.
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Gallery: playing with bokeh
Bokeh is a Japanese word that refers to blur used deliberately to heighten the impact of a photo, by isolating its main subject. It is an aesthetic technique and shouldn’t of course be confused with poor focusing or camera shake (both of which I am also capable of at times!)
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Gallery: Great Tit three ways
There are purists who say that only the shot as it came out of the camera is ‘true’. Others allow for a bit of mild cropping and straightening, nothing more. But some of us like to go further in the post-production editing process. So I thought it was time I joined the One-to-Three Photo Processing Challenge.
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Gallery: two of a kind
One possible twist to the usual alternatives of colour or black and white is the use of selective colour. This can look quite gimmicky, so I prefer to keep the colours muted to tone in better with the grey shades.
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Gallery: creating an eerie unreality
Normally when I edit an image I do so with the intention of bringing out more clearly what I saw when I took it. However, sometimes it’s fun to take things to extremes.
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Gallery: seeing Shrewsbury in black and white
Near the English border with Wales sits the historic market town of Shrewsbury. Founded in the Middle Ages it still retains its medieval street patterns and some buildings from that time. It was an important wool trading centre for many centuries.
