Month: March 2020

A Different Perspective

This is my second response to a photo challenge this week: that’s what happens when you get a bee in your bonnet.  I’ll settle down soon, don’t worry.

This time, Patti invites us to change our perspective when taking a photo.  Don’t just stand, point, shoot, she suggests.  Crouch, squat, get above the action, take a tour round it.

The weather being what it is, I can’t get out much with my camera, so these are all from the archives.

This first one is perhaps my favourite, taken in Gloucestershire.  I had to lie at the edge of a flower bed to get this shot of a house barely glimpsed through the ox-eye daisies.  Photography as exercise class.

Our friends Sue and Brian’s garden at Horton.

Here are some more shots, taken in much the same way, in gardens and fields.

I wish those alien leaves poking above the dead sunflower in Leran, France weren’t in the shot. This is a photo that’s not quite successful, technically, but It’s a shot I’d like to try again, because for me it’s very evocative of the place where it was taken.
Drystone wall, North Yorkshire.
Nosterfield Nature Reserve, North Yorkshire.
A meadow in Grewelthorpe, North Yorkshire.
Gasholder development at King’s Cross, London.

And here are two more.  The back end of a festive lunch, and flags at the EU Parliament in Strasbourg.

This really wasn’t a drunken orgy…
The EU Parliament, Strasbourg.

Click on any image to view the caption, and to see it full size.

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge # 86: Change your Perspective

 

Background? Or Part of the Story

Jude over at Travel Words has an ongoing photo challenge this year. Every week she asks us to consider a different aspect of photography, and look at ways of addressing it. I’m a bit late in my response, but … here goes.

How to photograph a subject using a background which is a pattern without distracting from the subject.

I chose three photos in the end, and in the case of the two taken at the Albert Dock Liverpool, I think the pattern becomes part of the story.

Here’s a double decker bus. A double decker bus which has been re-purposed as a diner. I could have gone in close and taken a ‘portrait’, but decided I wanted to show the bus as part of this community, serving among others perhaps, those unseen office workers in the geometrically-windowed building behind. Or even the deck hands in that ship.

Here, I was just inside a building near Tate Liverpool. All the action is outside. So this picture is back-to-front. The background is in the foreground, and behind it, the couple, waiting for … who knows? But they, more than the pattern, are the subject.

Finally, some street art in Hither Green, London. But which is the subject of this picture? The reflected light cast from an adjacent shop? Or the pattern-costumed whooping crane?

This has been fun and has made me start to think a bit more about my photos and how I might improve them. So thank you, Jude.