click photo to enlarge
...I have five fingers.* What I meant to say before that joke intervened was (with reference to yesterday's thoughts on what morning light can bring to your photography), "On the other hand you can go out in the afternoon and just deal with what ever fate sends your way". A couple of days ago fate dealt me snow with fog sufficiently dense that the other side of a very large field could barely be seen, but not so thick that the sun wasn't making its presence faintly felt every now and again. Looking at the scene I immediately thought of Whistler's paintings - his tonalist style, his nocturnes and his waterscapes. Or perhaps Mark Rothko, a painter who said there was no landscape in his works.I probably wouldn't have taken the shot but for the sun. Its brave attempts to force its way through the murk gave a weak and watery spot of interest to the sky. That seemed to be just enough to work with the snow covered field with the odd pieces of earth showing, and the hedges, trees and buildings of the village on the horizon. So I framed a 1/3:2/3 split and took my photograph of not very much.
Minimalist photographs, "photographs of nothing", appeal to me, but aren't always easy to spot. Here's another one that I took last year by the sea where they can more often be captured, and here are some more thoughts on the subject from an early blog post.
* A Steven Wright joke.
photograph and text (c) T. Boughen
Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 50mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: +1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On
