Dangerous stuff

That's right, I've been thinking again!The other day someone on TalkPhotography posted a link to "100 things about photography". Kinda interesting in a way. I was wandering round with a couple of cameras today and started making up a list of my own. For my way of working it proved to be a short list of things I need to make photographs:

1. A camera.
2. A good pair of walking boots.
3. An inquisitive eye.

That's about it. As I got some successful photos with both cameras I reckon the order of the list could be reversed, apart from the fact that without some sort of camera you're limited to making imaginary photographs. David Bailey said somewhere that he was seeing photographs before he had a camera - or something to that effect. I think most visually creative people do. Or if they don't mentally frame the pictures they see things which they find visually intriguing and remember them.

I continue to be interested in flatness, the arrangement of blocks of colour and texture within a rectangle and negative space.

The second picture shares some compositional elements with the first - colours, shapes - but it plays with the picture plane as the fence divides it and provides one of the visual clues which indicate depth and space. Which are both illusory in photographs as photographs are two dimensional.

Both those pictures were made with a DSLR and a 50mm lens. The more I use that combination the more I think I could manage quite well if that was all I had at my disposal.

The other camera I had with me was the X10. The secret to using any camera is to work with its strengths. For me the strengths of the small camera are two fold. It's close up capability and it's great depth of field. When the two strengths are used in tandem it becomes easy to make pictures of small things and place them in the context of their surroundings. These plants pushing through the tarmac of a disused car park behind the dunes is an example of this at work. It's also an example of nature recolonising areas that man has forsaken. The X10 might prove useful for exploring that theme further.

The depth of field that this camera provides is also a boon for making landscapes pictures. This is not one of my strong picture making points, but the dunes provide some elevation, and visual variation in comparison to the beach and the inland landscape round here which makes seeing pictures a little easier. Flat lighting doesn't help pick out the shape of the dunes, but the marram against the sand makes for patterns and visual depth clues.

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