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.
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When I travel I always want not just to capture the big ‘sights’ but also the tiny details. I often photograph something that perhaps could be found anywhere: a leaf, a stone wall, a ripple on the water. But I found it here in THIS place and I want to capture it.
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Speaking figuratively, Sofia is not a black and white city. Its history is too complex, its architectural influences too diverse. But like any city it lends itself to black and white photography.
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Often I observe some with a phone or camera taking a single photo of a sight and moving on, in a hurry to reach the next. In the pre-digital days when every picture taken meant a hit to your wallet, that made some sense. Today it strikes me as strange, but then I am rarely happy with my first shot of anything!
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Paris, like most cities, is full of colour. Street art, flower markets, shop windows, mellow old stone, green (or autumnal) trees … I could go on. But it is also full of striking details that translate well to monochrome images.