Lighting is everything in photography. It can make an ordinary subject look intriguing, while the lack of it can make an interesting one look dull. Light that falls on your subject from the front will make it look flat and two dimensional. Side lighting is more interesting, creating shadows and bringing out textures. The last option is backlighting, which can be beautiful and dramatic.
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If tricks are the practice of fools, where does that leave trick photography? The genre is nearly as old as photography itself. Did those early experimenters pave the way for today’s explosion of in-camera and post-editing trickery?
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It won’t come as a surprise to anyone who follows this blog that I enjoy street photography and also taking more formal portrait shots of some of the people I encounter on my travels. It will also be no surprise that I enjoy playing around with editing. I especially like experimenting with monochrome, which can work well with characterful faces.
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Colombia is one of the most colourful countries I’ve ever visited, possibly the most colourful. So it seems counter-intuitive to present it in black and white. Yet however colourful the destination there are always likely to be at least a few images that I feel merit experimentation. Ones in which form dominates the composition. Ones with strong contrasts and patterns.
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It’s only eighteen months since Anne asked us to define our ‘photography groove’. My answer then was travel photography, and now that John asks much the same question about our favourite style or genre, the road we most often take, my answer remains the same.
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While a flower is transient, our images capture the memory of it forever. Maybe that’s why so many of us love to photograph them.
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Silhouettes are a great way to create drama in an image. By eliminating details they evoke mystery and can be enigmatic. They take to extreme the balances in contrast that we all work with in our photography.
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There’s a restraint, a rejection of what is not necessary, in Japanese art and architecture. What is left out is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.
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It could be argued that every photograph is a pattern. A flat two-dimensional representation of a scene broken down into shapes, and each shape into pixels. The technology in our cameras stitches the pixels together to reproduce the scene, while we as photographers choose and compose that scene.
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The presence of diagonals in an image creates a sense of movement. Our eyes naturally follow the line to see where it leads. Often diagonals are used to create leading lines, taking the viewer on a journey through an image to a specific point you want to highlight.
