Looking for beauty

click photo to enlarge
Visitors to photography forums will have heard people bemoaning the fact that the area in which they live isn't photogenic, and that they have to travel miles to get good images. It's hard to have sympathy with this view, or the mindset of someone who wants to take photographs of conventionally beautiful places, but is unwilling to recognise, or look for, the different kind of beauty that will undoubtedly exist where they live.

When I lived in Lancashire I regularly walked along both banks of the River Wyre where it widens into an estuary that flows into the Irish Sea at Fleetwood. It's a flat location that, on one side, has the debris of 150 years spread along its banks - the rotting hulks of wooden ships, old sea walls and their newer replacements, industrial sites that have closed, the wrecked remains of a once thriving fishing industry, newer chemical manufacturing plants and a municipal dump. The other side is more rural, with saltmarsh, pastures, cereal fields, a golf course and nature reserve. As I walked the area I found plenty of subjects at which I could point my camera. Many weren't beautiful in the usual sense, but did offer a harder sort of attractiveness, as well as undoubted fascination. In this sometimes bleak area I usually got my best landscape shots when there was an interesting sky. A photography lesson that it took me a while to learn is that just as a sunset can make any subject look wonderful, a sky with cloud and light can add drama, beauty and contrast to the most unpromising scene, even an expanse of cold, flat winter water and a factory with a tall chimney.

This contre jour shot looking upstream from Knott End uses the factory on the left as balance for the sun on the right. The distant blocks of flats and Blackpool Tower add a few more details to the flat horizon.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 62mm (124mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/1000
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -2.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Fog and photography

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"It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog", Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Polish-born author

Fog is much used as a metaphor. Its literal obscurity and lack of clarity, the way it can bewilder and confound our senses and lead to confusion, is often used by writers to illuminate and illustrate their poetry and prose. In the quotation above Conrad uses it to explain a truth that we often forget in our awe and adulation of the "great and good" - that great triumphs are often achieved despite rather than because of the actions of the protagonists who are often shielded from the reality of the situation by blissful ignorance!

I suppose that if you live in an area that is prone to fog - say Newfoundland - you might well wish for less of it. But if, as in the UK, it is a meteorological phenomenon of the "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness", with occasional visitations at other times of year, then its appearance can be enchanting. For the photographer fog presents great opportunities: the horizon is suddenly very near; the silence that appears to accompany the arrival of fog, and the indistinctness of objects on the periphery of vision seems to make you depend more on your eyes. Colour is beautifully muted by fog, and silhouettes present themselves in places where they never do in clear daylight.

My photograph of this yacht, undergoing some refurbishment, fastened to a jetty in the tidal reaches of the River Wyre at Skippool, Lancashire, would normally have a background of river, distant riverbank and more distant hills and sky. It would be quite a busy backdrop. However the fog has removed all this visual clutter to leave simple, strongly outlined shapes against a soft, moist background. In fact, the fog has given me the chance of a better image than I would usually get at this location. I decided to simplify a little more by presenting the shot in black and white to give greater emphasis to the shapes. For this image I used a wide zoom lens at 22mm (35mm equivalent), and set the camera to Aperture Priority (f8 at 1/400 second), ISO 100, with -1.0EV.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen