Neil Gaiman once said, 'Picking five favourite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.' If you replace the word ‘books’ in that quote with ‘photographs’ you will know exactly how I feel. I have a similar reaction when people ask me which are my top three / five / ten places I’ve visited.
-
-
What we choose to leave out of a photograph matters as much as what we choose to include. And we are making such decisions every time we point our camera at a subject. But thanks to digital photography it is now very easy to make them retrospectively, when we come to edit our shots. Furthermore, we can take a single shot and test out a variety of options.
-
I have been taking photos since I was ten years old, so for almost sixty years. As a child I photographed my family, mainly on family holidays. As I grew older I documented school trips abroad, my time at university, and of course holidays.
-
First, a disclaimer: in calling this gallery ‘colours that complement’ I don’t mean 'compliment'. They won't be telling you how great your latest blog post was or how good you look today! No, today we are looking at colour theory.
-
T is the twentieth letter in the English language. It is, according to Wikipedia, the most commonly used consonant and the second-most commonly used letter in English-language texts. So it should be easy to find photographs of objects that begin with T, shouldn’t it?
-
There is little I like more than the chance to see the world, or at least a tiny part of it, from a different perspective. And that often means getting high up to look down. Whether from a plane, a hot air balloon, a tall building or a mountain (preferably reached by cable car!), things always look different from above.
-
If colour is the language of dreams, what about the many names we use to describe colours? Yes, we can say blue, red, green, yellow, pink, and everyone will have a mental image of each colour as it is named. But will we all have the same image? There are so many reds, so many greens, so many pinks … You get my drift!
-
We all have photos that didn’t make the final cut when selecting the best from a day’s shooting, but which weren’t so disappointing that we discarded them. Maybe they are significant to us because of the subject matter even if we don’t feel they represent our best efforts. Or maybe we keep them planning to try to work on them in the future because we feel they have potential.
-
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.
-
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?
