3 hours in 100 square yards
After convincing myself that I need to be a lot more focused when out photographing, I decided to test myself by removing the ability to roam around and not going out to capture ‘good light’. This is just an exercise in composition (and still learning how to take LF pictures). The location I chose is one that I have been to previously near Ingleton which is in a farmers field (sorry Mr Farmer), here is the shot from my birthday last year.
It’s a good job I wasn’t going out looking for good weather as we’ve had nothing but near 100% fog and cloud cover for the last few days. It was also -2 degrees when I arrived and didn’t warm up much either. I managed to stick out the 3 hours although at one point I’d lost feeling in my knees, the fingerless gloves came in handy too.
The location is in the middle of classic limestone pavement country and it has a single tree growing out of the stones. All of the stones have been weathered in various ways and one of my pictures (inspired a bit by Paul Strand) was a simple abstract of this weathering.
I was mostly looking for compositions that didn’t include the classic ‘single item in foreground and a few leading lines’ but did suggest a three dimensional depth but used bold shapes and combinations of items to create structure. The first two compositions (seen below and at the top of this post) were intended to use the bold structural shape of the left hand rock to focus attention onto the tree but also onto the other stripe of grass. I liked the way that the colour of the grass changed to browns in the background. It would have been nice to have some feature at the top left hand of the first picture as that is where my eye tends to end up. The second is a less well structured composition but I like the plant life huddle up in the crack between rocks. The plant life can be seen in the first picture hiding in the jumble of rocks.
The next picture was as I was looking for well shaped plant life to provide a subject for ‘portrait’ style shot (i.e. the plan on it’s own, composition given by the shape of the plant and the rock it sits on or between). The moss was crested by a small patch of frost which made the whole a little more interesting. It was very tempting just to centre the ‘droplet’ of moss but I wanted to ensure that any lines in the surrounding rock didn’t pull attention away.
The final picture’s curves were the striking feature that grabbed my attention and the shapes of the lichen was a bonus. Getting the two rock shapes to nest well together and to ensure that there was enough background (the tree and stalks in the background right should be in focus in my LF shot).
Overall the exercise was enjoyable but I would have loved to have had better modeling light and at last some cloud structure with gaps so that I could play with shading of foreground/background. As it is, I’ve got some places to go back to now and I got to spend half a day thinking about composition.
