Tag: Travel Words 2020 Photo Challenge

A Tarmacadamed Road? Or a Canvas for a Picture?

This week, Jude’s Photo Challenge invites us to look at texture again – but as the subject for our photographs, the focus of our interest.

I took my camera out for a walk (while I still can …).  Several ideas presented themselves, but nothing quite worked.  Back to the archive.

I’ve chosen some shots taken on common-or-garden asphalt roads.  Those roads are not themselves the subject, but they provide a grainy, characterful canvas.  Imagine those same shadows projected onto a large sheet of smooth white paper.  I think they’d be less interesting.

Three are taken on a small road near here, edged with a dry stone wall. One was frosty road in January.  One was taken at Masham Sheep Fair, with not a sheep in sight.  One is not a road, but a wall.  It’s the walkers who are on the path.

2020 Photo Challenge#11

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.