Tuesday 8 April 2014

A wasted two hours

This sunny afternoon I ventured forth for a couple of hours of landscape photography. It's time to admit defeat. Much as I enjoy walking around the great outdoors I can't make decent pictures of it. Not when I do it by the book with a tripod and all. I work at what I'm doing, carefully positioning the tripod and framing the shot, stopping down to increase depth of field,  and the best pictures, rather than the most technically perfect photographs, are the ones I grab hand-held at wide apertures so I can avoid wobbly-hand syndrome. Every time. The only reasonable tripod pictures had to be cropped to work. And they were shot using a macro lens.

Hand-held graphic landscape
I had the best of intentions. I was trying to make a point, again, about including pylons and turbines in a landscape of intensive arable farming. I failed as usual. I even made a black and white conversion as a nod to the second hand Fay Godwin book I picked up last week.


Locked down rubbish landscape
They kinda work but my favourite shot of the day is from the morning walk to the Post Office. A grab shot with the small camera of the laying of permanent practice nets at the cricket club. The trouble is it's the sort of picture I'm trying to avoid making these days. It says nothing much about anything other than itself. It's just arrangements of shape, colour and texture. Time to sit back and reconsider things, I reckon.


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