Tag Archives: framing

the frame # 9 – cropping and extending

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MIA Bus Station, Florida, USA

Again – like swapping the camera blithely through ninety degrees – I think I have been cropping photographs fairly consistently during this part of the course, making a banner header for most of the exercise posts. I definitely like panoramas, on screen at least – I don’t think I often get any thing printed that isn’t fairly close to either square or a standard 3:2 frame…

Generally, any hesitations I have over changing the frame from what was shot,  come from reducing my ability to view (either as prints or on screen) large versions of the resulting pictures. The reason can be seen in the Miami Airport Bus Station picture, which was taken from a scan made by Snappy Snaps at the same time as they made me a set of 6″ x 4″ prints.

Looking closely at the original or not that closely at the crops, shows how low the resolution was for this. Also, while I don’t seem to mind isolating a small section of a negative, I am definitely reluctant to alter the aspect ratio. I’m not sure why, but I suspect that it has something to do with liking the regular conformity of a series of pictures, as much as anything. That said, there seems something horribly random about composing a picture through a viewfinder and then changing its shape radically later.

This probably ties in with a reluctance to desaturate digital pictures to make black and white images and the fact that I own one panoramic camera with a swing lens and quite a few medium format cameras that take square pictures. I also suspect that this is something I need to confront and get over.

Anyway, here are a couple of cropped pictures with comments inline with them when viewed as a slideshow:

1 – Miami Airport Bus Station, April 2014


2 – Alice – Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, May 2014

 3: All Souls’ Church from Oxford Circus, June 2014

All Souls' Church - Regent Street London. June 2014

All Souls’ Church – Regent Street London. June 2014

The idea of extending pictures is one that interests me. This (shot at the same time as I was doing Exercise # 5) is an attempt to get a decent, large, clean view of All Souls’. With a bit more work to neaten up the joins (not really visible here, but definitely present if you look at a larger version) it would be quite a good picture, I think, albeit a narrow one. It was manufactured from 3 portrait shot, meaning the overlaps were quite near the edges. More shots, or possibly more shots in landscape might have meant that the bits that matched were closer to the centre of the frame, with less likelihood of distortion.

I like the idea of creating long, thin (or short, wide) pictures of two parades of shops on the Lea Bridge Road, at the bottom of my street. I would like to make them from a large number of stitched together pictures, taken moving crab-wise along the edge of the opposite pavement. I have had one go already at the first of these (wonderful shops painted yellow, green, orange, pink, red and green etc) but realised as vans came along and parked obscuring the shops, that i needed to choose a quieter time to do this.

Once I have managed to get the series of shots (taken I think with the camera in portrait and with the shots overlapping by at least a third) I expect to need to do some perspective correction and then to spend ages stitching the pictures together manually. It should be worth the effort, even if its just to record what the shops were like at a set moment in time. Even better would be to come back and repeat the exercise in a few years, giving a sense of how the area has changed. Once I’ve got the first sets taken, I’ll  post here, and then leave them, and the shops, to mature like a good wine…

the frame # 8 – vertical and horizontal frames

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landscape & portrait

landscape & portrait

I’ve been taking pictures in both landscape and portrait throughout this section of the course (and # 4 is entirely portrait) and while I haven’t specifically gone out and done a 20 pictures both ways shoot, I think I’ve thought about which format suits a picture for pretty much each exercise I have done.

Also, looking back through the latest hundred and ten pictures I’ve posted to flickr, I see that about two thirds are landscape, a sixth are portrait and a sixth square.

I think the four to one ratio of landscape to portrait is as much down to the slight clumsiness of using a camera rotated through 90 degrees, rather than any inherent dislike of tall thin pictures, as I seem to remember that any time I’ve used a half-frame 35mm camera (which take two portrait ratio pictures on each frame) the majority have been portrait rather than landscape. A lot of it comes down I think – like an unwillingness to change prime lenses, particularly with screw thread fittings rather than bayonet, or to get out my tripod – to my laziness, something I am trying consciously to overcome over the course of AoP. But then, another thought on this  – and I’ve just spent 5 minutes playing with a camera, trying both eyes and rotating the camera each way – that it is possible that the awkwardness of using a camera rotated through 90 degrees may be greater for right-eyed, right-handed people, while I’m left-eyed and left-handed – certainly, the keyboard shortcuts for rotating an image generally are more faffy for doing so the way I generally have to (anti-clockwise, I think) leading me to think that most people twist the camera the other way, which certainly feels much less natural than the way I do. Which is some compensation at least for not being able to do the ‘keeping your left eye open, looking for the next shot while your right eye looks through the viewfinder sited towards the left-hand-side of a Leica’ thing, that Joel Meyorowitz does in The Genius of Photography…

The 1/3  that are square ones – and I should say here while we’re on questions of format, that I rather like square pictures and feel there are loads of things that suit the huge range of symmetries that are available to you –  are all medium format, from  6×6 negatives and positives, and simply show that I’ve been playing with a variety of mf cameras recently, rather than that I’m cropping stuff down from rectangles into squares, but anyway, cropping’s a different post entirely…

the frame # 7 – positioning the horizon

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Hackney Mashes - Sunday 29th of June, Morning

Hackney Marshes – Sunday 29th of June, Morning

A reshoot, as the first time I didn’t have my tripod with me and really, I should have. I also tried shooting over the Marshes and the Lea towards Clapton, but it the results were less good than these, taken just over the red bridge at the start of the Hackney Marshes football fields looking down towards the orbit and the olympic park.

  1. The emphasis is on the foreground, and the gorizon seems a long way away, with a great deal of space to cover before you would get there. Something – anything – happening in the foreground would have justified the emphasis on the space more though, here it’s just an – admittedly nicely curvey-bordered – expanse of grey.
  2. Better, but still too much empty tarmac. I had tried to get some painted writing, giving directions to some cycling or running event, that was closer and to the right into the shot, but my tripod was in the way of the joggers and cyclists and  the overall view of the grass as it stretched away to the horizon was less pleasing.
  3. Quite nice. The 50:50 balance between sky and earth is offset by the runner who links across the horizon into both.
  4. The sky and the distance starts being what the picture is about. You become aware of the cricketers and the runner is no longer crucial to giving some focus to the picture.
  5. The sky now dominates while the goals to the left and the cricketers both give a sense of scale to the picture while anchoring it to the earth somehow.
  6. But here, the sky is about to break free of the earth and the picture is almost flat again. Possibly just works because of the variety of buildings on the horizon. It might still work if the top was cropped slightly so the edge of the frame was at the top of the cloud on the left.

All pictures taken with a Nikkor AF-D 35mm 1:2 lens on a Nikon D50. ISO 200; f8; 1/640th – 1/1250, depending on how much sky was in the picture.

assignment 1 – personal review

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Demonstration of Technical and Visual Skills

  • Materials: as a totally online assignment, this only really applies to the way the pictures are laid out on the blog. I think the way i’ve laid things out on the virtual page demonstrates the beginnings of being able to control the way wordpress works, but I suspect that without the ability to work directly with the style sheet, I won’t be able to take this much further.
  • Techniques: the first part of the course has dealt pretty exclusively with the effect of different lens focal lengths, framing (both at the time of shooting and altering this as part of post-production) and the placing of objects within the frame;  I have consciously chosen the way I have applied this to the pictures – there aren’t any “happy accidents” – and things like fairly constant use of stopped down lenses to keep as much in focus as possible is deliberate; I applied techniques to the pictures I had decided to take, and generally they have turned out as expected.
  • Observational Skills: it was enjoyable to spend large parts of my day with a part of my head ticking away, translating things that were around me into usable representations of the abstract concepts that made up the pairs.
  • Visual Awareness: and likewise, I think I managed to isolate things in a way that allows the quality that made me notice them in the first place to be apparent, even if it is only in the context of the pair at times, rather than in a standalone picture.
  • Design and Compositional Skills: I don’t think any of the pictures jar as compositions, although the bit of the section I have probably most need to do more thinking about is the more formal stuff around balance and theories about the division of frames; the pictures feel right, but I don’t know if I could demonstrate why to my satisfaction yet.

Quality of Outcome

  • Content: some of the qualities depicted come across more strongly than others – I am unsure for example whether ‘smooth’ contains too many unsmooth elements, while ‘many’ feels nicely like a jostling throng of signs; generally though, I think all 17 photographs are worth looking at and engage the viewer on a level where they are not simply ‘a church spire’, ‘a man in long grass’, ‘a closed venetian blind’ etc
  • Application of Knowledge: the main knowledge required here was the ability to use my camera and to process the resulting images in a competent way; I  think I have achieved this.
  • Presentation of Work in a Coherent Manner: the commonalities between the pairs (one portrait, one landscape; the phonetic titles; the subdued colour) combine to tie the pictures together as a group, rather than leaving them feeling like a number of photographs that just happened to end up together; this is more obvious in the blog post, than in viewing the full-size pictures one after the other, but some of this sense of a conscious set still comes across, I think.
  • Discernment*: I think some of the subjects a unusual and tangential enough to qualify as showing discernment…
  • Conceptualisation of Thoughts & Communication of Ideas: as stated above, I think the pictures generally express what I want them to express; some do this better than others.

Demonstration of Creativity

  • Imagination: my approach to this assignment has been more observational than imaginative; I have seen pictures and then taken them rather than plucking an idea from my head and then making it flesh (or rather ones and nothings); I had some more obviously imaginative ideas for some of the pairs – an upturned glass which was half-full of ice and the same glass surrounded by a puddle of water for solid/liquid, say or using the same subject for each of the opposed pictures, finding the contrast in the same object – but these tended to clash with my dual-location scheme, and also would have slowed me down as, mostly, they involved a much greater degree of fabrication.
  • Experimentation: I have used equipment more consciously in pursuit of an affect than I have generally done in the past; the part one exercises were genuinely enjoyable to plan and shoot, at least in part because they involved actually putting theory (which generally i was aware of but had not actually worked through systematically) into practice.
  • Invention: as with Imagination, above, I think  I have approached this in a way that is more observational than inventive.
  • Development of a Personal Voice: The pictures have all featured subjects that are part of my day-to-day life, so in some way reflect who I am; however, I think I have more of a sense of fun, or humour, than these pictures suggest; over the remainder of the course, I must strive not to come across as so po-faced…

Context

  • Reflection: to comment on the qualities of my reflection in this “reflection” piece seems dangerously close to crossing the line into navel gazing; I quite like my belly button and am glad it’s not an outie, but don’t feel I can comment here further…
  • Research: I think I worked out a clear approach to the assignment and then set out and followed it, expanding my list of subjects as I went.
  • Critical thinking (learning log): I am happy with the way my log is developing as a record of my journey through the course, with the proviso that i need to speed up my writing up both exercises and the work I am doing – reading and looking – around the practical stuff. I realise that I need to get back into the way of just writing and getting it down rather than agonising over every phrase…

* I realised while writing this that my idea of what discernment actually is was a bit hazy.  So I looked it up:

‘As a virtue, a discerning individual is considered to possess wisdom, and be of good judgement; especially so with regard to subject matter often overlooked by others’ – Wikipedia (my emphasis)

initial contrasted pairs

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I have taken all the photos (I think – I leave space for indecision or panic to prove otherwise) for the “Pairs” Assignment, but have not done any writing up on the getting there. This -four contrasting pairs I had taken before I started this course – is a start…

Busy & Quiet
busy

london underground, 2010 – zorki-s

quiet

london underground, 2010 – olympus xa

Young & Old
young

moldova, 2006 – nikon d50

old

moldova, 2006 – nikon d50

straight & curved
straight

liverpool street station, 2007 – pentax espio 120mi

curved

kibble palace, glasgow 2007 – pentax espio 120mi

night & day
StB-night

moscow, 2003 – fujifilm finepix s304

StB-day

moscow, 2003 – fujifilm finepix s304

My first thought about these, is that they were all taken quite a long time ago. Possibly, I have stopped taking things that distil down to an opposable quality, but I doubt it. A better way would be perhaps to make other connections between the two photos in each pair: the London Underground; people in Moldova; glass roofs with iron framework; a tourist cliche in Moscow. And this then suggests that a contrast is only a contrast if it is seen in conjunction with its corresponding opposite. This seems a good place to start.

And then, there is the question of other contrasts and oppositions between the two pictures. The two pictures taken on the underground are very different by way of “feel”: one feels cramped and crushed (taken with a 50mm lens) one open and spacious (taken with a 35mm lens, which isn’t that much shorter, but I am much further away from the nearest thing you can focus on). “Young” is seen from a distance, but “Old” is a big close up. “Straight” is – just – colour and the main lines run vertically; “Curved” is black and white and the lines run through the frame horizontally.

The two shots of St Basil’s are probably the most one dimensional – what makes them interesting is that they are taken from a high viewpoint (out of the window of my room in the – now demolished – Hotel Rossiya) that is not normally available to people with cameras; I don’t think that is enough for their equivalent to be included in the assessment. Equally, Young and Old would work better as a pair, if they both weren’t standing on the right side of the frame.

So, for the assignment, where do I start? I will accept that the contrast will need more than just the subject matter to be activated, although the abstract state will not necessarily need to be obvious from just one of the pictures. Beyond this, one or more technical oppositions – long lens v short lens; portrait v landscape – will help in expressing the contrast. I will try and introduce formal contrasts to highlight the differences between each photo in a pair.

Other things that may not be necessarily obvious – each photograph in the pair being taken in a place with different connotations, say – can also help with this. I shall take one photograph of each pair in one of two locations. I shall try and ‘rhyme’ elements of various pictures, giving some idea of a series of connections greater than just the contrasting states depicted. I hope overall there will be some unity that ties the whole assignment together.

Let’s see shall we…

the frame # 4 – different focal lengths

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Shot during my walk in Glasgow necropolis 3 weeks ago and described in that post. To recap, I was using a Pentax Spotmatic F loaded with Fuji Superia 400 asa. The negatives were scanned at Snappy Snaps on Byres Road and aren’t that high resolution, but are adequate for on-screen use or making 6 x 4 prints. I have not spent too long trying to get the colour balance the same across all 6 prints, as this is not what the exercise was about (said he, by way of excuse).

Here are the pictures:

In all cases (apart from the last which was shot a couple of stops more open, to allow for the teleconverter) the pictures were all taken at f11 to keep everything in focus from the foreground to the far distance.

I don’t think I have ever actually done this  before (unless you count the first of the introductory exercises which involved a much smaller difference of focal length) and, although I knew in theory what would happen, it’s good to have that confirmed in practice. The things that leap out at me are both the way that detail in the background becomes ever clearer and the way the perspective flattens as the focal length gets longer. Also, the usefulness of carrying a tripod was hammered home here – it made both composition and eliminating camera shake with old heavy equipment much, much easier. And for the record, I think I like the 85mm shot best…

the frame # 3 – sequence of composition

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The Indecisive Moment

oca-1.3-header

Shot on a Sunday when the Walthamstow farmer’s market was taking place in the open space off the high street, by the library.

It was another bright sunny morning and with me was a Nikon D50 with a Nikkor 24mm 1:2.8 manual focus lens. This gave the equivalent angle of vision to a 35mm lens on a full frame camera – plenty wide enough to get near subject in without having to back off too far in the confined spaces between stalls, but not so wide that there was a lot of distortion around the edges. My intention was to take exposure and focus out of the equation by stopping the lens down to F11 and sliding infinity focus to the point between f8 and f11 on the lens’s depth scale. At ISO 200, this gave a useable shutter speed of 1/125th sec, if I exposed to compromise between the need to not overexpose the areas lit by the sun while still getting detail in the shaded areas under the stalls’ awnings.

Also of course, this is the classic formula since the 30s for street photography – fixed focal length 35mm lens set to the hyperfocal values. forcing you to get close to your subjects. I shot 4 sequences at the market. Below are the combined results of the middle two (which in effect ran into one another) with comments.

1 - approaching the market

1 – approaching the market

A reasonable opening – cropped for the header, above – giving a fair idea of the area covered by the market, but nothing special. The two figures moving in towards the stands are ok, but would be much better if the were slightly to the left of the first row of stalls. To get this better, I could have moved off to my left and waited for another couple of people to enter the shot, but didn’t, feeling it would be better to get in closer, rather than spend time getting a more perfect establishing shot.

2: veg stall #1

2: veg stall #1

Moving straight in towards the central stall nearest me, I took this. There is a nice array of shoppers’ faces to the left and centre, but not enough of the two stall-keepers and the fact the bigger of the two is nearer the camera means there’s always the likelihood of him blocking his smaller partner. Also, there isn’t much sense of what they’re selling. I could have gone a bit to the right, but instead went left.

3: veg stall #2

3: veg stall #2

Foregrounded vegetables and almost a nice picture with the shopper making interesting shapes as he reaches for something, while not obscuring the stall-keeper’s expression. And the background is shaded enough to fit the exposure of the people under the awning. So – not bad but, annoyingly, a leaflet pinned to stall’s upright almost does obscure the stall-keeper, and the woman with the blue dress and yellow shoes is neither there nor not there. A bit closer and more angled down from slightly to the left would have cleared the shopkeeper more and removed the woman from the frame. However, it was a fluid moment and didn’t come together like this again.

4: veg stand #3

4: veg stand #3

I skirted round the back of the stand to the other side, getting more of an idea of the produce offered but moving me too far away from the action and interposing the rather annoying and soft flowers in the foreground. The two shoppers and the stall-keepers almost make a nice diamond/square, and the timing of passing over both goods and money almost comes off, but a half step to my left would have been better.

Also, the background (the north side of the High Street) is obviously much, much more strongly lit than the stalls. #3 is definitely better, I think. I took one more shot from the same angle, moving from landscape to portrait (5) but it is no better (though might work cropped square).

6 - phone man #1

6 – phone man #1

I’d been clocked by the people at the stall, and rather than get involved in some form of interaction with them, I turned away to my right and saw this where the man on the phone in the centre and the V-shape of the two angle produce racks caught my eye.

7: phone man #2

7: phone man #2

I pressed on and took 7…

8: phone man #3

8: phone man #3

…moved in closer and – having been spotted and being unable to read whether my taking pictures was viewed as good, bad or neutral because of the man’s sunglasses…

9: phone man #4

9: phone man #4

…I pulled back again. The closer shot with him looking into the lens (8) works best, I think with the awning and the stall forming a rough oval around him.

10: phone man #5

10: phone man #5

The man finished his call and began to move away; I moved closer again and quite like the abstract planes of the over-exposed background, the array of veg and the flatness of the awning in the top left and centre, framing the three people in the bottom left of the frame. If the aluminium pole wasn’t hiding the bearded man, and the woman wasn’t leaning out of the left of the frame, it might be quite a nice picture. Half a step left?

No! – I had already noticed the jam and chutney stall in the background, and had moved off to the right and gone around the stall to get closer. If the aluminium pole wasn’t hiding the bearded man, and the woman wasn’t leaning out of the left of the frame, it might be quite a nice picture. Half a step left? No! – I had already noticed the jam and chutney stall in the background, and had moved off to the right and gone around the stall to get closer.

11: chutney #1

11: chutney #1

I took this. It’s got good clean edges and the various planes as you move away from the camera are broken enough by the numerous rectangles formed by awnings, signs and other stuff to let your eye settle on the grounp of people – 2 adults, two children and the stall-keeper – with the interaction between the keeper and the boy on the right centring the group and giving the picture obvious narrative possibility. But other than squares and rectangles, there’s nothing going on in the left half of the picture. I stepped in and round…

…and someone pushed a pushchair in from the left of the frame. I tried to compensate and 16 almost works, but the hand coming in from the left holding the pushchair distracts from everyone else’s focus on the central area of the frame.

16: chutney #5

15: chutney #5

I stepped back. Again this works, I think, with the slightly off centre grouping of red or crimson people and objects surrounded by blues and whites is quite pleasing, and would probably become more so with a slight crop to remove some of the seated people to the left and to move the main stall more off centre. I stepped back in closer, and it all fell to pieces somewhat (16).

And then – 17-20 – I moved round to the side to try and get something of everyone’s faces; it sort of worked but there was a gulf between the stall-keeper and the shoppers if the picture was portrait (although I quite like the jam-bottles) and when I tried landscape – 21 – it’s a bit better, but not lots better. Tilting down a bit might have helped here.

22: chutney #

22: chutney # 12

I went round towards the back of the stall and took this before realising the whole sequence had probably peaked somewhere between 11 and 15. Admitting this, I explained what I was doing to the stall-keeper, took a conventional portrait of the stall-keeper and left….

24: the stall-holder

24: the stall-holder

All in all then, not the best day’s shooting I’ve ever had (If I’d been Garry Winogrand, this would probably have been one of the films that wouldn’t have got developed; and I’m sure Cartier-Bresson had days when only thin boys jumped over unreflective puddles behind the Gare Saint Lazare…). Some of the results – particularly with a couple of slight crops – are ok, I suppose. I don’t think I ever came particularly close to seizing a decisive moment (and the continually changing relationships between numerous people make this harder of course), but possibly with the object of the exercise being to document the moving into position as well as the final “good” composition, that was never going to happen here.

“Good” photography was made harder by the preserve stand’s awning casting a very persistant reddish cast on everything; I’ve included some pictures as shot and some at least partially colour-corrected.

I think it is a good exercise to have done and a better one to have thought about, but the thing I always find nerve-wracking about taking pictures in public places – the spoken or unspoken negotiation that goes on between you and the strangers in your pictures – was made worse by the need to document getting into postion as this removed the ability to get in place and then take one, or two quick shots before moving away. I felt very uncomfortable and – by the time I’d gone to a nearby pub to review what I’d done over a soda and lime – I was quite drained by the experience.

the frame # 2 – object in different positions in the frame

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oca-1.2-7This is the exercise where you shoot a subject that is relatively small against a fairly flat background. As Walthamstow is under several flight-paths, it seemed a good idea to  try shooting aeroplanes against a cloudless blue sky. I did this on the same day as I took the ‘movement’ pictures‘ and made the horrible mistake of forgetting that for short exposures, I didn’t need to have the ISO set at its lowest and least sensitive (which was of course needed to be able to take long exposures in bright sunlight). Ah well!

I had with me my Nikon D50 and on it I had a Nikkor AF-G 70-300mm zoom. The intention was to use the zoom at its longest, giving the equivalent of a 450mm lens on a 35mm camera; this meant that I needed to set the shutter speed to at least 1/500th sec to avoid camera shake, leaving me with little option but to have the lens wide open at f5.6. And this, if you look up the lens’ performance on line, means that your pictures will be soft, as zoomed to the max, it needs to be at about f11 before it’s acceptably sharp. this is before you add in the effect of several thousand feet of hazy air. Of course, I could have upped the ISO to 800 and got f11, but I didn’t. Dolt! Idiot! Anyway…

…here’s the results (each individual photos rather than crops of a single picture), in order of (my) preference:

I think the reasons for my ordering them like that are:

  1. Comfortably in the air, with space to fly into…
  2. A sense of ascent somehow – the angle of the fuselage to the bottom of the frame; the space above?
  3. Descending…
  4. A bit meh, but okay – would – might? – work if tighter, and sharper…
  5. Better if nearer the top of the frame
  6. Uncomfortably close to the edge; on a different day (or a different subject) I might like this…

Most of these seem to be based on the sense of narrative given to the the picture, creating a sense of before and after the moment when he picture was taken. The impact is based on how off-balance the picture is, with the “extremely off balance” version (6) and the “equilibrium” versions (4 & 5) working less well that the off-balance-but-not-too-much ones.

Also, even at 1/500th second, it was fairly hard keeping the camera steady enough for focus – 1/1000 would have been better, so I tried tracking several aircraft before I latched onto this one and managed to get more than a couple of pictures with it in the frame where I wanted it before it decreased dramatically in size as it flew off towards Heathrow.

As a last technical note, it’s worth noting that the underside of an aeroplane will be several stops lower (f4 v f16) using “sunny sixteen” exposure calculation making it very hard to get detail on the bottom of the wings, if you can see the fuselage sides and top, particularly if the plane is painted white…

sunday on the marshes

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Walthamstow - Shutter Speed and Motion

Nikkor 35mm f2 AF-D; 1/60th; f22. ISO 200.

A good, productive morning, taking the pictures for the last two Getting To Know Your Camera Exercises (the movement ones) and also managing to get raw material for the first two of the Framing Exercises.

I headed down to the Lea Valley Marshes and spent the best part of an hour with my D50 on a tripod, focussed on a t-junction where there was likely to be a fairly steady stream of cyclist, joggers and people walking dogs, working through shutter speed and aperture combinations, and then crossed the river into Clapton, sat on a bench set a little back from the navigation’s tow path and panned with cyclists as they went past.

For the second framing exercise (Objects in Different Positions in the Frame) I took advantage of the numerous flight paths that cross the Lea Valley and the cloudless blue of the sky to take pictures of planes as they went overhead. Startlingly difficult, using a long lens (the full extent of my longest zoom is 300mm) to keep it all steady, shoot, reframe and not lose the (auto)focus. I think I have the pictures I need, but took way too many…

Then, on the way home, for the first of the framing exercises (Fitting the Frame to the Subject) I noticed a unit (?) a stockade (?) – it certainly isn’t a shop or a garage –  selling tyres, with a fair amount of signage outside, and decided to try a sequence of pictures of it, rather than go out again later and use a nice, orange and west-facing (so not lit yet) corner shop as the subject of the exercise.

I’ll write up each exercise separately, once I’ve edited the pictures for them…

So, a lot of ground broken, but plenty to do in terms of analysis and writing everything up. Two immediate thoughts on the days shooting: the first ties into the ethical question of whether its ok to take pictures of people in public spaces  the other regarding my rather tired digital camera. Both of them are covered in other posts, here and here…