click photo to enlarge
One of what I consider to be my best photographs shows part of a stack of cafe chairs. In the past few years I've taken shots of other stacks of cafe chairs without improving on that first one, and without adding anything different or better to the image. It seems that, just as first time life experiences that you treasure can't be repeated, neither can photographs.However, the success that I felt I'd achieved with that photograph did encourage me to take pictures of other chairs and benches, and some of these I have liked. In fact, I was recently reviewing my images and discovered I'd shot examples of this type every single year, with some years having multiple images.
The other day I was a Lincolnshire church and a pile of stacked chairs in the corner caught my eye. In the UK there has been a trend in recent years of removing some (and in more than a few instances all) wooden pews from churches. This has been done because of falling congregation numbers - there isn't the requirement for all that seating. But other factors have been the demand for greater comfort (particularly from an ageing church membership) and the need for more flexibility in how much seating is put out, and where it is placed. Many churches now have a mixture of pews and individual, cushioned seats. Often these are stackable, especially where the church offers community activities such as musical concerts. That was the case with the seating in today's photograph. It was made of very thin, but seemingly strong, chrome tubular steel, and the cushions were either red or blue. The repetition and angles that they produced when placed together offered an interesting semi-abstract composition, so I left off photographing the architecture, took out my pocket camera and grabbed this shot.
photograph and text (c) T. Boughen
Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 12.8mm (60mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 400
Exposure Compensation: -0.66 EV
Image Stabilisation: On
