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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“Just a bunch of flowers”: that’s the kind of self-deprecating comment I make about some of my pictures when I’m actually pleased as punch. Very helpful at the moment for me also to see your zoomed picture of the butterfly, as I have been wondering whether to upgrade my RX100iii to the vi and have been dubious whether the zoom end of the lens would be good enough. Seems it is.
I wonder if you have come across “Miksang” photography? With your interest in colours, shapes and structures, I think you would really warm to its approach. Just do a search on “Miksang” and see where it takes you. You are quite right: it’s what you SEE that counts and that is what Miksang is all about.
Thanks, John!
No, I’d never heard of ‘Miksang’ ..their website and descriptions look terribly ‘worthy’, and their galleries seem to be all on Facebook ..and I’m not interested in having my details harvested by Facebook, so I haven’t looked at their galleries.
But our ideas seem to align. I don’t fancy being ‘trained’ by anyone – odd, heh? considering that I teach photography ..we-ell, I did, until Covid struck!.. but I s’pose that I don’t really teach “photography”, but just encourage people to think how best to express ideas through photography. I don’t say “You have to do such’n’such..” so much as “Now go and take a photo of ‘balance’, or ‘foresight’ or ‘beneficence'”. “Uh-uh ..what?!”
I suppose, in thinking about it, a lot of my photos are ‘Miksang’ ..but I didn’t know the word for it. Thanks for enlightening me.
– David.
You’re one who I believe likes colour because I remember you being struck by the colours of the clothes in a photograph of sightseers at the Qutab Minar I posted way back. I think you need to plan a trip to India. You’ll get colour and pattern and form to your heart’s content, not that you’re doing badly wherever you are.
Thanks Farhiz.
But from what I understand, and see in photos, in India absolutely grotesque poverty sits cheek by jowl with exuberance and wealth and magnificence, and I don’t think I could cope with that. How could I take photos with an expensive – or even cheap – camera, when people are begging in the streets for some kind of livelihood? Why would I want to go to India when I read about men’s inhumanity to women – and children – there?
I’m sure that it’s a wonderful-looking – or even just plain wonderful – country, in many places ..but why should I make hotel owners richer when there are people there with hardly a penny to their name?
Sorry; it’s not for me.
“..makes me want to get out and take some of my own..” ..we-ell, in these rather depressing times I haven’t taken – or hadn’t taken – any photos myself this year ..till just a few days ago, when we went to a wedding on the sea shore, and I took lots of pics ..that was really very cheering!
(It’s so long since I’ve done this, and I’m not sure if this’ll work on Macfilos, and it’ll need Mike’s permission to link to it anyway, but this might show a picture from the wedding; here goes:
..but if nothing shows there, then just imagine it to be a nice picture of a bride being walked not down the aisle, but down a sandy path to a beach!)
‘What matters is what you see’. That is important for both the photographer and the viewer, and sometimes even the subject/s. With large groups of subjects I often say ‘if you can’t see the lens, the lens can’t see you’. Unintended consequences or serendipity often produce great results, of course. I have lost count of the number of times this has happened to me. I can never get used to that term ‘file’ as it reminds me of my early days as a public servant when all of human life was recorded on paper in large khaki coloured covers. I know that the term ‘file’ originates in ‘computer speak’, but, to my mind, it commodifies the photographic process. ‘Photograph’, ‘photo’ or ‘image’ do me just fine. As for colour, I am going to show a John Hinde image in my next article, so sunglasses will be advised for readers.
William
Oh, loverly: John Hinde picture postcards ..that reminds me of the fifties!
(I asked Patrick Lichfield – who grew up on a large family estate of their own – how he took up photography, and he said that when he was a little boy, and played by himself, he pretended to be “Mr Frith” [..Francis Frith, who took innumerable photos of the British seaside, and other places..] so Patrick went all around the estate taking pictures of all the different spots he could find ..rather like M. Lartigue’s childhood!)
Excellent collection of images all tied together through color and snapshots of things you saw.
Well done David. Enjoying these photos and makes me want to get out and take some of my own.
Hello David.
A great eclecticism of images (“Eclecticism” – Spooky?).
Light at the end of the tunnel is my favourite. You’ve caught it wonderfully, and brought us there with you.
Big camera, Tiny camera. Big sensor, Little sensor. Doesn’t matter, it’s the images that count, you illustrate that very well.
And very impressive how the markedly downsized Photoshrinkr pics present on the iPad. Instructive.
“..Big camera, Tiny camera. Big sensor, Little sensor. Doesn’t matter, it’s the images that count..”
You’ve put it better than I could have done myself!
– David.
David, an interesting miscellany of viewable pictures. I enjoyed them. Thank you. The staircase to the loo is amazing.
Then you’re thinking exactly what I was thinking ..which is the point of it all!
– David.
Lovely colours and commentary, you will have worked out by now that I’m not overly struck by the kit I use, provided I get the image I want. For me using a narrower range of camera’s seems to lead to a greater consistency in images.
I do love the kaleidoscope image though David, I’d be proud of that one.
I’d be proud of you being proud of it! Hope you’re recovering from the nasty bat bug ..get well soon – David.