Simplify, simplify simplify

click photo to enlarge
I suppose, in a way, I was an early adopter of new technology. I had a home computer in the early 1980s when they became affordable, and I haven't been without one since. Similarly, I had broadband relatively early, and remember being told by an engineer that our house was one of only four in the neighbourhood who had a high-speed connection (as 1MB then was). On the whole I've valued the way a computer and an internet connection has enriched my life. However, as the scope of the offerings and possibilities of the internet have widened, I've become selective, adopting some innovations and rejecting others. Email, digital photography, blogging, online commerce and finance I've embraced. However, gaming, virtual worlds, Facebook and Twitter I've rejected. It may be a function of my age, but I find that now I have more time I'm simplifying my life and pro-actively choosing or rejecting every "next" thing that comes along. I find that if you don't do this then there's a danger that your life becomes like a shattered mirror - your view of the bigger picture is distorted and you lose the essential clarity that is necessary for navigating your way through life.

And, as with life, so with photography. Sometimes you've got to reject the wide view that your camera offers, with all its disparate details, and home in on that which is elementary and interesting for itself: in other words you've got to simplify things. A few days ago I was standing on the banks of the River Great Ouse at King's Lynn alongside a couple of boats, with the river beyond, the blue sky above flecked with white and grey clouds, and a shore full of nautical apparatus - masts, metalwork superstructures, buoys, cables, etc. Looking about me I felt there must be a few images to extract from the location. There was, and the image I post above is the best I got. The tops of the buoys outlined against the sky, a small detail of the whole scene appealed to me for that elementary simplicity - a few basic colours, simple shapes, textures and shadows. As I processed the RAW image into a JPEG I noticed that slightly increasing the saturation and contrast gave it more of the three-dimensional quality that also attracted me when I took the shot, and so that is how I present it.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 16mm (32mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/640
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Contrast and simplicity

click photo to enlarge
Language, thought and understanding revels in opposites. It seems that we better understand and appreciate one quality by familiarity with its opposite. Can one know true happiness without having experienced sorrow? Isn't generosity more recognizable and better appreciated if we have seen greed? Perhaps part of being human is to learn from the bad as well as the good, and to appreciate the good all the more when we know something of the bad.

In photography opposites are useful qualities on which to build images. Our photographs can emphasise darkness or light, compositions can be static or dynamic, colours can be muted or loud, and so on. I was thinking about this in connection with my image above. It shows a part of two shrubs in the garden of a couple that I know. They were deliberately planted together for the contrast between the copper and the lime green leaves. When I saw them I knew that I could use the gardeners' contrast photographically, so I selected a point where the two bushed met and took this image. Contrast and uniformity (which might have been achieved, though with less interest, by photographing one or other of the shrubs) are two more opposites that can form the basis of photographs.

Looking at the shot again I suppose it exemplifies a further quality- simplicity (whose opposite is complexity). Painters, musicians, photographers, in fact all artists, have much to say about the value of simplicity. The English fashion designer, Norman Hartnell (1901-1979) disparaged it saying, "I despise simplicity. It is the negation of all that is beautiful." The French painter, Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) was of a similar mind suggesting that "a taste for simplicity cannot endure for long." However, Leonardo da Vinci said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." As I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog the German architect, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969) famously said "Less is more", to which the American architect, Robert Venturi (1925- ) replied, "Less is a bore". So, as far as my simple shot of contrasting leaves goes - is it "more" or "bore"?

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 39mm (78mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On