10 Photography Thoughts

It's well past time Councils all over the country had to prune back the trees and cut back the undergrowth - un-tended growth is ruining the photgenicity. 

Take the shot at right angles or straight on. Taking the shot at an angle, especially upwards, introduces awkward perspectives, unless that's the effect you want

Don't try to frame it in the camera. Take a wider shot and crop. With all those megapixels, there will be plenty left to give a decent image.

Make a silk purse out of a sow's ear with brutal cropping.

Sometimes a place has (say) seventeen good photographs in it, and when you've go them, you're done with it.

There's something wrong with my eyesight, because every shot I take is off-vertical. Every. Single. One. 

 
You can never have enough sky, but you can have too much foreground - late nineteenth-century wide-angle plate shots of empty Parisian streets and squares aside.

I am never talking a photograph of plants or flowers again. Ever.

Sometimes you can't get what you want in the shot - just try taking a good photograph of the Reaper drone at the RAF Museum, Hendon. With an X-E4 and a 35mm lens. I tried - wouldn't work.

Photos has a Hide Photograph option - use it if you can't bring yourself to delete something truly average.

BONUS: You can never have too much bright sunny blue.

Feeling Jaded About Taking Photographs

When I get ambushed by a really nasty cold and cough - the kind that means I need to sleep in a chair and gives me aching ribs from the coughing, so I can't mope on the couch because if I do, it will set off a coughing fit and have me hacking up.... okay, you don't need any more details - when I get one of those, the best thing to do is start a project that requires minimal physical effort, and not much intellectual effort either, along with a fair degree of repetition.

Like going through my photograph collection, marking up the bangers, deleting the duplicates and the boring stuff that makes you think "WTF did I take that?", exporting the "meh" stuff, just in case you want to re-habilitate something. Also filling in the locations, since the X-E4 doesn't do that.

This exercise made me realise how few days I took photographs, and how limited my range of subjects was / is.

The last time I did any travelling off my beaten track was three weekends in 2013, and three trips in 2011. 2011 convinced me that travelling / holidays are best done with others - unless it's an annual week out from the domestic relationship - and the 2013 trips were done with a little group from my gym. (Ah, those were the days.) Once I'd reached that point, holidays were just expensive ways of entertaining myself for sixteen hours a day without any of the resources I had at home.

There are only so many shots I can take of the Barbican, the Thames, the West End, the City, the London Parks, and my "local area", before it gets repetitive. Same goes for pictures of autumn leaves lying around a tree, the Waterloo Bridge commuter peleton at 08:30, reflections of anything in any window, food, cups of coffee, cranes, building sites, long queues of red buses, little architectural features on the sides of buildings, people caught in the rain, crowds in markets, and so on and so forth. I started to get a distinct sense of the Been There - Done That's.

And I'm just going to say this. Anyone who says there's always something to photograph no matter where you are, has never lived in the suburbs, and never seen a potentially striking view obscured by trees that should have been hard-pruned four years ago. Large parts of modern towns and green spaces are simply un-inspiring and same-y. The UK can often be dull, dull, dull.

I admit, I'm getting old and more than a little jaded ("bored or lacking enthusiasm, typically after having had too much of something") and I know that a man who is tired of London is tired of life, but I suspect daily life was a lot more exciting in Dr Johnson's day.

On the other hand, out of 5,400 photographs, I have 390 Favourites, which is 7%, and that's not bad.

Still Life with Judie Tzuke

A long while ago, I was experimenting with using the Zuiko lenses from my old OM10 on the X-E4, and this happened. I have since re-arranged the room and it isn't there anymore.

Portland Hardware

Yet another one of my dead-pan photographs. What's notable about this is the amount of detail inside the store by tweaking various shadow / brightness / contrast variables. The original does not look that clear.

The Entrance To The Park Is Hidden Here

Blink and you'll miss it. We only knew because someone who knew the area told us. And of course, this photograph gives you absolutely no clue as to where the road might be! Which is almost kinda the point.

The Many-Coloured Railings Picture

I got through the I-have-to-sit-in-the-chair-to-sleep bit after a couple of nights, but since have just not been feeling like rushing out of the front door. "Weak as a kitten" about does it.

The Steps With A Turn Picture (Maryon Park)

Time to play catch-up again. I came down with a god-awful cold at the end of August, and have been recovering ever since.