When it comes to colours, while the hot shades of red, orange and yellow make a big splash, the cooler ones may be easier to live with as they evoke a sense of calm, serenity, and tranquillity. These are the colours of nature, the sea, the sky, grasslands and forests. Blue is associated with coolness and peace, and green with balance and freshness.
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Photographs are a wonderful way of capturing the world around us. Whether we’re aiming for pure realism or something more creative, for the most part we include recognisable subjects in our images. But without context, photos don't always give a proper sense of scale. They lack the cues, context, and perspective that our eyes and brain use to judge size and distance in the real world.
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What makes an English country garden? Is it the choice of plants? The generously filled herbaceous borders? Perhaps a wall, a gravel or brick path, and a statue or two?
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When I searched for interesting quotes about zigzag lines I was surprised to find relatively few. But of those I found, many talked about journeys, which as a keen traveller appealed to me. After all, aren’t zigzag journeys often the most interesting and rewarding?
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Photography is all about contrasts of course. Without those variations in lightness and darkness our images would be dull and flat. Whether contrasting black and white in monochrome shots, or harmonising and contrasting the shades in our colour shots, effective contrast is key to a good result. But the term can also relate to our choice of subject matter.
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In a foreign country the everyday can seem unfamiliar. Different food, different customs, different houses, different ways of dressing and moving around. Sometimes the most familiar sights are the famous ones. We’ve already seen them so many times in films, on TV and on other people’s photos that we think we know them already.
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All of us have places where we feel at home and are comfortable. Places where we can find all the necessities of life. And animals are no different. A sloth must live in a tree, a whale in the sea, a lion on the plains of Africa, a bee where there are flowers.
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Shapes and lines are important elements in photographic composition, but how often do we stop to consider them? I think I am more aware of lines than I am of shapes, to be honest. I look for leading lines and for dynamic diagonals in particular, but I’m less likely to look for specific shapes.
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There’s a common mistake most of us make when starting out in photography. We spot an interesting subject, point the camera and take the picture. Great, we think, but what we often fail to do is take notice of what is behind our subject. The problem is that our brain has a habit of filtering out unnecessary information seen by our eyes, but the camera captures everything.
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Yes, connecting is everything. It is through connecting to others that we find ourselves. And what better way to connect than to travel? But when we meet people from other countries on our travels, it’s usually a fleeting connection at best; valuable but not maintained. My involvement with Virtual Tourist, however, has enabled me to make genuine friends all over the world
