a good days photography

Three friends and I had a photography day out at Bradgate Park, a local location for us and had a fine, if a bit blustery day. I love windy days, it creates nice natural blurry bits on photographs and we were lucky with some lovely shadows created by the bright sunshine and dark rainclouds which thankfully we were only on the edge of.

The photograph above works really well as the angles are perfect. The fence beginning at the bottom right leads your eye diagonally into the picture towards the left and back again to the right, with the stream taking over and leading you left again towards the centre and off along the river and trees into the distance.

I learnt about 'travelling around the picture' on a photography course at the beginning of the year and it makes you look at the composition of your shots so differently while your taking the photograph. The end result is much more interesting.

This one on the left doesn't have anywhere near the impact, its still a pretty shot but theres not enough in the foreground to grab your eye and only one direction to travel in the photograph. It was so interesting that for the first hour or so none of us could 'get into it' We had a huge park with so much to see but we were all uninspired or maybe it was that we were overwhelmed with large areas and only got into the flow of it when we found some smaller things to photograph.

This picture works well, the centre of the pine cone is the first thing that catches your eye with the body drawing your eye along it towards the back of the photograph. Rather than standing above and taking a shot of the long pine cone this is a much more punchy angle and setting it bottom left gives a much more dynamic shot.
Standing in our group chatting about our photographs we suddenly noticed a huge caterpillar at our feet and he caused the most excitement of the day! He made a disinterested muse and not one of us got a focused shot of him which was strange but I do like this one.