The Occasional Photographer - a new project

Photos are worth 1000 words, so they say. I disagree, photos need words to give them a bit on context, hence the photo captions.

In this new project I have gone a little bit further, I have create short, very short stories around some of my photos.

The first issue is available, free, to view, read and download here.

If you'd like to create your own issue, or contribute, contact me. You can also make some suggestions for future topics by leaving a comment below.

A day, 20 photos

Taking photos is selecting a slice of our surroundings, extracting something from it's context and hope that its strength suffices to explain the whole.

In this exercise I challenged that by not looking for the photo itself but what was around the photo I would have normally taken. I then put my photos of the day together and looked at them to see what they said about what I selected to keep of that day.

There is a chronological and geographical order to these photos, that gives them a context.

Although what I think gives them a more meaningful context is the fact that these images where taken after my bottom-to-top exercise.

There are shots here that I would not have taken before that, and this is what this collection of snaps is about: it's showing how my way of seeing a shot has changed. 

That has added a new context to my photographies.

There are some interesting discoveries, like the pigeons, the real and the plastic substitutes on places where the real ones are not welcome, the obvious landmarks and the familiar often taken for granted. All these are my daily surroundings and yet I don't often notice them.

Painting with light

The basic element of photography is light.

Although technology can kill magic, photography still retains a bit of it because it's in the hands of the photographer to decide how much light to 'trap' and how to do so.

I recently played with my zoom lenses to capture movement. I set myself in a corner of Ludgate Circus and took shots for about half an hour. When I reviewed the shots at home this one stood out.

Ludgate Circus is a notorious black spot for cyclists. I witnessed the death of two of them last year. In a way, I see this ghostly photo as a homage to them. 

The black figure on the right, chasing the cyclist wearing the white top, could be the bleak ripper. I also like the way the darker colours concentrate on the right. Whilst the cyclists on the left, all wearing bright colours, have, once again, avoided danger. All in a very impressionist style that's not necessarily easy to achieve in photography. 

This photo has not been manipulated at all. I don't think I could have planned it. It just was a wonderful accident, the king of accident that happens to photographers who stay put in one place taking photos for half an hour.

I also think that this photo have the added value of knowing where it was taken and how many accidents have taken place in that spot. A single image on its own cannot always tell a story, hence this note.

I am pleased to say that no cyclists were injured whilst this photo was taken.

Looking up, looking down

Most of the time a photo is just a frame, from different angles with different settings, but just one frame at the time. This means one view of one scene.

I recently challenged myself to review that concept and I came up with the idea of taking four views of the same scene in what I call from to bottom to the top.

I came up with the plan when considering how composition rules dictate that in landscape photography one should always aim at dividing the frame 50-50 between ground and sky, or 75-25 even, with some exceptions.

For a whole day I made a point of shooting every photo 'from the bottom to the top' as in taking four photos that included 100% of the ground, 50%, 25% and 0%. The images below illustrate this idea.

I don't think these results will change anyone's views on the principles of composition. I do hope, however, to encourage others to try something similar, to look lift the camera up and see the resulting images as context for that photo they initially wanted to take. 

Because this blog is about images and notes, I am going to be making a lot of emphasis on context and sometimes, like in this case, the context is provided by other frames that are not always part of the final picture.

River Thames view from Millennium Bridge, London, 2016

These, like all the photos in this blog, are free of any manipulation because I want them to be raw and I want to recapture the manual approach to photography.

What's in a name?

Sometimes one has to start by justifying one's name. Perhaps because the name is what people will remember more easily - rarely one can claim truly outstanding features that render the name unnecessary.

The name of this blog has a double intention that I feel will not be necessarily obvious because the notes are not meant to be technical, just playful asides that make fun of the visual nature of photography and the fact that notes are written words (with the exception of musical notes, of course).*

And this is just what I am going to be doing over the next few weeks, marrying words and photos.

Please do stay tune to see how this shapes up!


*Visual notes such as drawings are sketches.