The serendipity of colours and shapes

Idly spinning through a smaller iPhoto selection – I’d left home without my external solid-state disc of photos – I wondered what it was, or rather “is”, about some pics which really made me grab them.

Here’s a selection, and the reason(s) why I think they work. As the Americans say, however, Your Mileage May Vary.

Seeing this butterfly on a flower in Italy, high in the hills, I wondered if my teeny, pocketable Sony RX100MkVI could zoom close enough to catch it, clearly and sharply enough. Answer: “Yes!” The little Sony has the equivalent of a retractable 24-200mm lens, and this was at its full-stretch of 200mm (…but as it’s really a 9-72mm lens on the Sony’s small sensor, it’s actually a 72mm focal length, at f/4.5).

Why do I like this? The vividness of colour, and the bright white blip at the end of the butterfly’s antenna, which brings attention out to the tip of its right wing.

This was just a bowl of flowers on a windowsill outside a house.

Now I’m rather colour blind, so I can’t name colours very well, but the dazzling brilliance of the yellow and the reddish-blue(?) flowers behind them just made me stop in my tracks!

Just an array of colours and shapes… on some steps going down to the toilet in a Paris café. It’s the vertical slices of mirror which make this such a kaleidoscope of patterns. I HAD to catch it!

Instead of a photo out of the window of a Paris taxi, I shot a view of where we were going, as shown on the driver’s GPS. Like a ‘wide-angle’ view, it shows much more of our route than if I’d just taken a photo out of the window. There we were on a real road, but as if we were driving in a computer simulation!

This blast of colour sums up Paris for me. It’s Fouquet’s restaurant on the Champs Élysées, and what could be tastier than all these odd shapes and colours, contained within a white circle?

I was given some special glasses, a couple of years ago for Christmas, to help correct my colour-blindness. This is the photo I took to say, ‘Thank You!’ (…of course, I shot it in a mirror, so what looks like my right hand is actually my left hand.)

Beginning to see a pattern here? …Bright colours, simple shapes?

The light at the end of the tunnel: on a boat trip with friends through a short tunnel on one of the canals in Ghent, Belgium.

The castle at the end of the tunnel. I like the cascading hands, cameras and the head at the left of the picture invoking the cascading crenelations of the castle at which they’re gazing.

This is rather muted, but it invokes, for me, Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’, Cartier-Bresson’s ‘Man Cycling down a Street’ …you know, the one with the curved railing and the steps… and also the famous curly-whirly Vatican staircase.

I like the human in the otherwise impersonal setting, and the splash of bright white sunshine on the right, giving more lines and bars.

This is my legs and my shoes standing on a rug we were given. Shapes, colours; that’s it. I tried to understand “modern art” when I was at school but just couldn’t get it. I remember reading Norbert Lynton’s art crits in the Manchester Guardian, and he was saying something like “…what’s in the picture is what the artist wants you to see…” or words to that effect.

So this isn’t a picture of trousers, or my shoes, or part of a rug: it’s the impact those things had on me as I looked down. It’s there to say, “Look at the shapes and colours right before your eyes!”

This is another of those “What the f…?” pictures, saying “What’s going on here?” It’s colours and shapes, and four people looking the same way.

The whole picture says to me, “It’s incomprehensible!” ..I don’t read or understand Japanese, I don’t know what they’re doing or what they’re looking at, so it’s “inscrutable” defined! I relish it for the shapes and colours…but it has no meaning.

Of all the people who are looking the other way, a little child looks at me.

Of all the people who are looking another way, a young girl looks at me.

Blam! All those colours and shapes zooming off to infinity; yet another colourful kaleidoscope!

Finally…a landscape.

But, for me, it’s not really a ‘landscape photo’: it’s not supposed to be a representation of a particular place. It’s just an assortment of shapes and colours, blue, white, green, light and shade…and the oddity of seeing a cloud not up in the sky, but down, resting on a hill.

It has a trace of human effect in it—the winding road. But it’s essentially colour, space and calmness. It’s a photo of not this particular place, but simply of “tranquillity”. Taken with a 16mm lens on a Leica M9.

The others were taken with an assortment of different cameras: Ricoh GXR, Olympus EM-1, Olympus (digital) PEN-F.

The camera doesn’t matter—just like the brand of paintbrush doesn’t matter, or the brand of cup you drink your tea from doesn’t matter.

What matters is what you SEE!

(All of these photos have been ‘optimised’—had their file sizes shrunk by about 85%-90%—using a program called ‘PhotoShrinkr’, which makes file sizes much smaller, and therefore much faster to load on the web—without ruining their colour or sharpness).

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