Shooting in the Cold

Landscape photography often entails having to work quite hard to get to the actual landscape itself. As a result a lot of landscape photographers are also keen hikers and trekkers, since this is what is often needed in order to find interesting compositions. After a recent hike into the Drakensberg with another landscape photographer, Carl Smorenburg, to chase some snow (which didn’t materialise unfortunately) someone suggested on post that I write about the equipment required to get the shot (thanks for the suggestion Jeff Dell).

Brave New World

So much has changed in the last few months. People keep asking each other, is this the new normal? Not to rehash the millions of words that have already been written regarding the state that the world find’s itself in, but this too shall pass. Back in 1918 it must have felt like the world was truly coming to an end. As horrific as the coronavirus is, it pales into insignificance next to the truly terrifying disease that was the Spanish flu. Still, Covid-19 is here and it is upended the way we work, and the way we live. At least for the time being at any rate. 

The Basics of Perspective Distortion

One of the ways in which photographers can make people see the world in a different way, is to use their lenses creatively to manipulate relationships within an image. The most basic way of doing this is arranging elements inside the frame in order to force the relationship. A Photograph of two doors in a symmetrical composition implies an equal, symmetrical relationship between the two doors (as above). A composition where one door is larger and an angle to the other implies depth and distance between the doors, as well as a visual hierarchy of what to look at first. The perceived distance beyond the door also creates a perception of distance and three dimensional space. Clever use of perspective distortion is one way to create this sense of space. 

New Year, New Decade, New Gear

The last ten years have been extraordinarily good to us as photographers. The first ten years of the millennium saw an incredibly fast paced development of digital photography that was really exciting to be a part of. Digital photography matured in the last decade though. In particular, I would say that we reached a basic plateau in image quality in about 2012 that marks a kind of baseline from which we still judge images at the beginning of this decade. 

The Shoot More share Less Idea

As the new year rolled past I found myself taking a significant break from the internet and the constant flood of imagery that scrolls through our lives courtesy of our numerous devices. The break was both refreshing and eye-opening and was also unintended (I haven’t taken a complete break from work in about twelve years as all breaks invariably involve writing, shooting, social media and marketing). The unintentional nature of the break - thanks to an inundation of family, the virtual Christmas shutdown and lengthened holiday due to the serendipitous days that Christmas and New Year’s fell on - meant that I never intended to be away from social media, or any of the usual photographic related writing that I usually do when ‘on break’. The sense of relief and lack of stress that resulted was both unanticipated and surprising. It is now becoming recognised that social media has a darker side, causing anxiety and depression in its users (see this article in The Independent). Photographers, by nature of the fact that we produce imagery, seem to have to stay lock-step in sync with social media…or do they?