Shadows (Two Photographs)
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These are the fun street photographs that are both simple but made interesting by shadows. Photographers often talk about the importance of the time of day, emphasizing sunrise or sunset. What you don’t hear enough about is the rest of day when the sun is angled making for interesting shadows.
Montreal Windows (Two Photographs)
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Montreal is a a bigger, busier city than Ottawa and provided more opportunity and some additional challenges (like traffic) for my kind of city photography. Both photos are HDR, originally shot in B&W, processed in colour and filtered back to B&W.
Surreal Windows (Three Photographs)
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These photos should speak for themselves. I just wanted to say that the one with the ladder does have a colour-cast, sometimes they actually enhance the photograph. Once in a while working on photos that are somewhat abstract is refreshing.
Chairs (Three Photographs)
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If a photography student complained to me that they could find nothing to photograph, before flunking them, I would tell them to take a selfie. I agree sometimes the mood doesn’t hit and you are otherwise absorbed making things difficult for photography. Familiarity with a place sometimes blinds us, but it can help us see changes and anomalies that make great photographs. I could go back to this deck to re-shoot the chairs but the likelihood of them being stacked like this and the light being right are almost nil. I’ll go back for other reasons.
Contrast (Three Photographs)
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In photography contrast can mean many things, including tightening the tonality, contrast between colors. contrast between objects etc. A very flexible word. These were taken on different days but contrast is an obvious choice for this series of photographs. In my experience people see the connection even if they cannot articulate what connects these types of photographs.
Abstracts (Three Photographs)
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A good guide to say if you like a shot is to ask if you would put it on your wall. You are not likely to get much attention with a shot that you don’t like. Not everyone likes abstract photography, and it‘s easy to see why. But if you want to experiment, especially with composition, its a great way to try out your ideas.
Some Reflections and Further Comments on Aperture (Two Photographs)
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Shot with a Fuji XT-2, and a 23mm lens (aspect ratio equivalent to a 35mm lens) at F8. You will notice that pretty much everything is in focus. In landscapes and photographs of events, crowds, and large objects it is not always feasible to use a small F Stop like F 16 and get sharp pictures and everything in focus. A depth of field calculator could provide, for any given F Stop a definitive distance to focus on ( say ten feet out) called the hyper-focal distance that would make sure everything is in focus. Or if fiddling with your smartphone is too much, use this rule of thumb, focus one-third into the scene this should get most everything in focus, not as much as the calculated hyper-focal distance but good enough. When we use larger apertures (smaller F Stop ) we get the exact opposite effect; selective focus (where your focus is on something close and everything behind is more or less out of focus). A large aperture also allows more light to reach the sensor therefore avoiding having to use a higher ISO and generate noise.
