It was a fine day, so I took a trip down to Heywood Road to watch Sale FC take on Preston Grasshoppers. Continue reading “A nice day for watching”
A nice day for watching
Left behind
There is a school near where I live — a special needs school — that I pass nearly every day whilst out walking my dog.
Sitting on a park bench
I suppose quoting Jethro Tull’s Aqualung is a bit unfair on the subjects of these images, but I couldn’t resist.
These come from the same walk that I talked about in my last post (too long ago…). I’m only able to post them now because, well, I’ve only just got round to having them processed. These pictures were all shot on film — a medium I still enjoy using — and processing costs are a wee bit high, so I like to get a few rolls together to make it worthwhile. Continue reading “Sitting on a park bench”
On Market Street
Sometimes, things just don’t seem to be working for you: there’s a lack of inspiration, or you’re just not clicking (sorry) with the world around you, and you think that it’s going to be a bit of a wasted day Continue reading “On Market Street”
In the surf
Dogs can be an endless source of fun. I wrote just over a year ago about the challenges of photographing my dog in the snow. Continue reading “In the surf”
Respect the performer
I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy photographing musicians playing. There are other forms of performance, though, and these can be as much fun and as much of a challenge to photograph.
Something that might not be immediately thought of as ‘performance’ is delivering a talk or lecture. And yet, to do this well requires similar skills to any musical or acting performance. Continue reading “Respect the performer”
Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside
I’ve posted before about the great British seaside (and I’m sure I’ll do so again). Continue reading “Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside”
The city by night
Some cities wake up when the sun goes down, whilst others go to sleep.
York leans toward the latter – a vibrant tourist trap by day, by night it becomes the haunt mostly of the ghost walkers. One could be forgiven for thinking that everyone who is out in York at night is either guiding or being led on a tour of the ghost stories of the city. Continue reading “The city by night”
On eye magnets
A while back I wrote about how a photographer has choose whether or not to make major (or even quite minor) changes to an image.
My preference is not to take anything out of an image (I rarely, if ever, add anything) unless I have a compelling reason to do so.
The other day, I took a picture which, quite simply, had to be modified. This picture scored a perfect 10 for the presence of an eye magnet: a minor feature of the image that constantly draws the eye away from the rest of the picture.
This is the picture that I took of my friend Alison Diamond (top-notch sax player, BTW).
Do you see it? Well, you can’t miss it, can you? That target-shaped design just keeps pulling your eye to it. Its colour and shape stand out against the rest of the pattern, and that has the effect of it seeming to be an independent object. I suspect that, were I to print this picture, one’s first reaction would be to try to peel the round bit off—it looks so much like something that’s been stuck on, not even a part of the original scene.
There was no dilemma about this: it had to go. Not that I’m passing any sort of comment on the nature of the pattern or Alison’s impeccable choice in clothing. From a purely photographic point of view it could not remain there, other than as an example in a post about eye magnets.
(Since I was making that change, I felt I might as well get rid of the intrusive piece of mirror, since that was also adding nothing whilst being slightly distracting.)
The odd thing is that, in real life, you would barely notice that part of the pattern. Our brains process real-life views differently than they do static pictures. In real life things are 3-D, we interact with the scene—we’re part of the scene—we concentrate on different things. When we’re faced with a picture, however, the dynamic changes; we’re no longer part of the scene, we’re not interacting with it, so we’re free to change the focus of our attention. We also have a lot more time to examine everything in the scene, since it’s not constantly changing.
And thus we have one of the reasons why our photographs sometimes fail to bring back the memories that we have of the event. The art of photography includes the understanding of the different ways we react to real life and to images, and to modify the picture-taking process (and, sometimes, the post-processing) to account for that difference.
Changes
One of the benefits of having a dog (and not having to go to the office every day) is that you are forced to become a pedestrian. I spent too much of my life outside of the house in the confines of a car—because of the need to commute, or get the shopping in quickly and so on.
Walking and being exposed to the elements makes you much more aware of the natural world. Because you’re not insulated from cold and rain, and because your attention is free to wander, rather than watch the road, you see things at more visceral level than before.
I’ve mentioned before that there is a particular spot on my regular walks with the dog that has a special attraction to me. I can’t really explain why those particular trees from that particular position is something that I look forward to seeing whenever I go that way, but the fact is that I always take time to slow down and just watch those silver birch framing the willow.
And, of course, over the course of the last six months or so, I’ve watched (and photographed) the trees wake from their winter dormancy to full spring exuberance.
Here, then, are some pictures of the seasonal change in one particular stand of trees.
December
January
February
February
February
March
April
May
May