A year ago I was at home, and bored with the limits put on our travels by the pandemic. Travel outside the UK was clearly going to be off the agenda for a while yet, so what to do? Maybe this was the perfect time to start a new challenge, one I had been considering for a while. I would launch a blog!
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In nature still water provides the best reflections. So most of the photos I have selected for this post are of reflections in water – but not all of them.
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There’s a wonderful world out there, and I can’t wait to be able to travel again to see it all. But while I wait I am lucky to have so many great memories of past trips, and so many photos of them too.
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Who says photographs have to be faithful representations? Sometimes it’s fun to play around with images to create something that’s quite wildly different from the original subject matter.
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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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Sofia’s St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral is not only a place of worship but also a memorial and a symbol of gratitude – the gratitude of the Bulgarian people to the Russian and Bulgarian soldiers who had earned the country its freedom.
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In the mid 1930s a young couple set sail on the SS Moldavia with a group of friends, cruising to Lisbon, Madeira and the coast of north Africa on what they termed a ‘proper holiday’. They captured their adventures in photographs which they carefully stuck into an album and labelled. Later they added to the album: photos of a walking holiday in Germany, camping in Devon and more.
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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.
