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Gallery: should I stay or should I go?
One thing I learned during the pandemic was that it is possible to have a good time holidaying in my own country. With travel abroad impossible we turned to UK options and managed to have several lovely short trips in the spaces between lockdowns. And of course like everyone, we explored our immediate area more thoroughly than in the past, seeking out places we’d never previously visited or finding new surprises in old haunts.
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Gallery: meet me on the corner
There is something about the idea of a corner. Who knows what might be around it? Whether on a city street or a quiet country lane, there is a sense of anticipation about what might be revealed.
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Gallery: pick a word (August)
Thomas Jefferson said, 'The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.' This is a maxim I would do well to follow, but I too rarely succeed in doing so.
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Gallery: photographing poetry in motion
There may be poetry in motion, but it’s not necessarily easy to capture that poetry in a still photograph. Despite that, we all try from time to time, and there are various techniques we can use.
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Friendly Friday Challenge: all or nothing?
Let’s consider how much of your image is occupied by your main subject. Often the answer to that is, quite a lot of it. But you can take this to extremes, either filling the frame completely or leaving lots of empty space around your subject. Both can be effective, in different ways.
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Gallery: travel photography is my ‘groove’
For those of us who grew up in the sixties, groovy was the feeling we all aspired to. Groovy was exciting, fun, cool (another sixties word!) Too young to really be part of hippy culture, it nevertheless influenced my tastes in fashion and music. Getting ‘in the groove’ was where I wanted to be, even if as a schoolgirl I was probably very far from being so!
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Lens Artists Challenge: picking favourites
How good are you being self-critical when it comes to your photography? Can you easily pick out the best of your shots and are you comfortable rejecting those that have been less successful? I confess I’m pretty rubbish at it.
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Gallery: pick a word (July)
Can one word describe a photo, or a photo define a single word? That’s the challenge set by Paula in her monthly Pick a Word post. Five words, five photos inspired by those words.
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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: abstract shapes and colours
Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.
