Shades of Autumn Photography Challenge

Lots of Brown images today to link in with the Shades of Autumn Photography Challenge's colour of the week, but the images tell a story of how I'm feeling right now.

I just had a Birthday and you know that feeling - 'times a ticking' ......

Feels a very long time since my heels were a'clickin

I'd like to pack a case....

and make an escape......

but alas its just wishing.

So I'll stay home and see

all the joys England gives to me

when harvests are done

and winter does come

but oh how I'd love

to break bread with my love in some sunnier climes........

wanderings in the woods

A gloriously sunny foggy morning led to some magical sights in our local doggy walking spot.

I dragged myself out at silly o'clock to amazing rays of light through the trees

glistening dew covering every surface

and the most spooky mist rising off the ground meeting the fog. The bench above has been 'relocated' from the adjacent golf course and sits in the middle of the field.

But the picnic benches in the picture above are a permanet fixture full of licky ice cream kiddies in the summer and huddled up doggy walkers stopped for a chat in the winter.

I spent hours wondering around as the sun rose along with the wellie boot wearers and it was lovely to chat as muddy mongrels jumped up to sniff my camera.

Each walker had a suggestion of their favourite part of the wood to photograph

and the highlight for me was the little water rats feeding alongside the robins and blue tits at

some bird seed that someone had left on top of a tree stump.

Perhaps it was the excitement but I only managed fuzzy pictures of them but it was wonderful

to take the time to just watch nature being beautiful!

thank you

Forever grateful to our fallen heroes

colours and lines

Running with last weeks posts about colour, black & white photography and the colour purple I clicked over for my daily fix of Kats blog and had a 'moment' when I saw her photograph 'Under the Bridge' This picture incorporates my colours and I could look at that picture for hours, it calms my soul. These are the colours I paint my figurative paintings in and I have clothes with patterns in these colours, so looking at this picture is heaven to me.
But it is a little more than that, the subject is 'me' too. There is Architecture, water, my new favourite decay and lines! How thrilling are lines in a photograph, sending your eyes backwards and forwards, around the picture and back to the beginning again. I have hundreds of pictures with 'lines' running through them and this links nicely with Kat's current
Exploring with a Camera theme of Opposing Lines.
'Red Leicester'

Red Leicester has so many lines that when I first saw the picture I had taken, it felt a little overwhelming. When taking it I was drawn to the colours I saw through the lens. The red made a striking foreground against the brown wood and the pale blues of the sky through the windows. The architectural elements were a secondary consideration even though I had gone to Leicester to capture architecture and pattern but all the opposing lines in the picture take your eye off in different directions and somehow it works.



So as with Kat's picture, take the colour away and I would still love it, which is what we have been trying to achieve in black & white photography, although it was the colour that I connected with first in both pictures.
I find this subject fascinating, that you can look at an image and LOVE it, its that subconscious 'knowing' that this picture is just perfect for you. Its when you begin to break down the reasons why you like it that it becomes really interesting and I listen intently to visitors to the Gallery, when after looking around at the many images on the walls they stop in front of one picture and are transfixed. Many times the first comment is "This picture is me" and then, usually when a puzzled friend asks why, they begin to break it down into "I love the colour" or "I love to look at boats" or "I love the pattern". Often people will come in looking for a picture that matches their living room and they leave with something totally the opposite. They come in with a practical head and they leave following their heart.
As I've mentioned before, as an artist you are aware that by painting onto white canvas you are baring your soul to the world with your creation. You are choosing the subject, the colours, the composition and presenting it for admiration and often criticism. Its a scary thing to do sometimes.

I wondered if the same where true of photography, do our pictures have our stamp on them in the same way, could you look at a photograph and say oh yes thats so and so's work. These ponderings inspired the 'Me Reflected Photography Share'
I had been looking for a picture in my portfolio that holds all the elements of the 'me inside' to put in the share and I hadn't found one. Kat's picture would be very close and I wondered why in all my time as a photographer I had never strived to take my perfect photograph and had never analysed what elements I would need in that picture. I have some pictures that I'm very proud of, as I'm sure every photographer does but they have all been reactive photography, something catches your eye and you take the shot. Its not so easy to manipulate nature or buildings into your perfect composition and if you do, it then begins to feel too contrived. Enter the whole debate about photoshoping and if you take out or add parts to an image is it cheating? ....... this is where my head begins to hurt and I realise I'm rambling way off track again and I still haven't loaded the dishwasher......

pictures from the allotment

"Take nothing but pictures, Leave nothing but Footprints"

Here are some more photographs taken from the allotment
I talked about yesterday, some of which I have sold in my Gallery and that has had me puzzling over the quote above.

'Frosted Flowers'

Photography is one of the very few things I do, with a growing family, that doesn't cost me money. Wandering along on my own with my camera capturing the 'magic' is mine and I don't have to pay a fee or a tax for any of it. The countryside is just there waiting for me with birds, squirrels, water voles, sheep and cows putting on a show that

doesn't cost a penny.

'Rays of Light'
But thinking about the quote, I do 'take'. I print my photographs and sell them, I get something out of all this natural giving and do I ever put anything back? Suddenly I feel very selfish and .. eek ... exploitative! Perhaps I'm over thinking it - hey I've nothing to feel guilty about today so lets invent something! hmmmm

'Smiling Flowers'

When my group and I visit the local nature parks and places of interest we pay for the car parks or we pay an entrance fee so thats fine, no guilt there and when I go to my favourite canal locations in this area I take bread for the shivery ducks so I supposed they don't mind being my muses for half an hour. The cows, well cows are such flirts they will happily pose for hours on end pulling funny faces for absolutely nothing. But how does it work when you are photographing something that in essence belongs to someone else, like the allotment, should you ask first?

'Cold Cabbage'
I went to take pictures in Leicester at the Highcross Centre, a gem of patterns and architectural elements for any photographer and I got 'told off' by security. It hadn't occurred to me that I would need permission to photograph outside the building at 8am but the manager from Waggamamas (which had an amazing reflection of the building in the window ) came out and told me to go away and then the heavys descended in the form of a gadget laden security guard, who directed me to the Management Suite to get my okays. I tried to show her on my camera that I was infact taking pictures of the stunning blue sky against the supporting steel of the top most corner of the centre but apparently in that part of Leicester even the sky belongs to the big boys and us mere mortals cant have a piece of it without permission.

'Dawn of an English Morn'

The same thing happened in my local Co-Op (a large department store) They have some amazing displays in their homewares department, lovely patterns made by repeated objects and shiny, sparkly things hanging in rows holding reflections to die for. So I was snapping away with my i-phone in order to put them on my Instgram page and I have to admit this time I did feel a little sheepish but I wasn't going to sell these pictures, I was just taking them for the joy of the capture when oops wrist slap by the manageress
" I can't let you take photographs, you might be a competitor trying to steel our ideas"

I'm hoping to take a model to Calke Abbey to capture some Vouge like shots against the blistering shutters in the abandoned rooms. Now I know I'm going to need permission for that and I suspect its going to cost rather a lot for the privilege. I haven't plucked up the courage to make the phone call yet......

the colour purple

Thinking again of colour from Wednesdays post, the photograph below works well in black and white because of the impact of the light and shadows and the depth created by the foreground flowers, the middle ground field and the far ground trees.


Add colour and most people would rather look at the picture below as we are so used to looking at flowers as colourful things, that once our eyes see the colour its hard to go back to being without it.

'Lilac Dancing Flowers'

I'm linking in with The Shades of Autumn Photography Challenge and this weeks colour Purple with this photograph as it one of my favourites in my initial portfolio, I think because of its fairytale like quality. It was taken on a very cold frosty morning and these flowers were the first in a winter allotment to catch the first rays of the morning sun, hence the title, as they almost look like they are dancing with happiness at the arrival of the day and the warmth!

Sadly this allotment that I visited to take photographs for a number of years is no longer there. The old man who loved it had been given the small plot to tend on a farmers field, across the road from his remote house in the countryside and this year, when spring came, the farmers crops grew over the land where the allotment used to be and I realised he had gone. It was a sad day. Imagine the thrill one day in late summer when I stopped my car and saw the old mans flowers had returned and were fighting for their space amongst the corn, I wonder how many years they will come back.

I thought about trying to contact his family to give them some of the photographs to remember him by but I never introduced myself to him, I only saw him a couple of times over the years, bent over tending the ground or hurrying back into his house. He didn't seem to welcome intrusion into his world, so to talk to his family would be a little odd. Perhaps I should have posted some through his door while he was still here, as a thank you, as he must have seen me out of his window, parked by the side of the road, snapping away in all weathers.

I read a quote on photography 'Take nothing but pictures, Leave nothing but footprints' and thats just what I did at the allotment, should I have done more?

black & white project

The project I set at the latest photography club was black & white photography. I took along a whole lot of objects and left the group to position them and the lighting to produce dynamic shots.

The idea was that arranged well, everyday objects can have huge impact in black & white.

It was so interesting to observe the different approaches of each person and how some objects enthralled and others did not inspire them.

The spoons for example were largely untouched but arranged on a mirror, given a harsh light overhead and a grainy edit afterwards I think they look good.

The cards and dice were most popular along with the dominoes and produced some fabulous shots by the group once we had the lighting right. Arranged on a simple black bed sheet with two small table lamps, the contrast and shadows were thrilling.
Half of the challenge was to be able to envisage how the shots would look in black and white as most of the cameras were taking shots in colour. My SLR can be set to black & white but I knew many of the others cameras couldn't so I had taken mostly objects that were deliberately black and white to make the challenge easier.

But for the second part of the project I'd also taken several brightly coloured objects, such as fruit and this the group found most challenging to arrange into a composition that would be dynamic without colour.

Think about the senses that you are using when you engage with an object, take a strawberry the first sense engaged is sight, you notice first the colour - bright red! Take that away and what else have you got? Smell -but how do you photograph smell? Touch - pick up a strawberry, close your eyes, what do you feel? its texture, little hairs, leafy bits -but how do you photograph that interestingly?

Have a go at photographing an object that is all about its colour but aim for a dynamic shot of it in black & white - its a challenge but it draws you into the process of really bringing out all that objects qualities in a photograph.
An example is this green apple. Take away the colour - what have you got?

Apples are shiny, they are juicy, they are round!

Polish the apple with a tea towel to really bring out the shine, stand it next to a window to emphise the shine or add light by shining a tourch onto it or even as in this shot - both!

The juicy and refreshing quality can be emphesised by spraying it with water. The lighting will make the droplets glisten adding to the effect.

Finally a shadow of an object will show its shape clearly, so stand a piece of card behind the apple and position the tourch to cast a perfect round shadow onto it.
Here is a picture of the very glamerous set used to create the photograph!