The Artful Engineer

After saying in last week’s post that I do not take as many shutter speed variations of moving water as I should, here is a counterexample where I took eight separate images ranging from 1/8 second to 1/250 second. Typically, I might take two: a fast one and a slow one. It’s really a question of laziness: both being lazy now behind the camera and wanting to be lazy later in front of the computer, because I don’t like looking through lots of barely distinct images (hmmm…do I like the 1/45 or 1/60 one better…hmmm…oh, 1/30 looks good…but 1/90 isn’t bad…).

In this case I just rattled off eight variations and avoided choosing by just blending them all together. (It’s not faster to do, but is definitely more interesting. Kind of like taking a surface street instead of an overcrowded freeway.) The diagonal middle area uses the longest shutter speed and the upper left corner and lower right corner use the shortest. The areas in between slowly transition from one to the other. I really like the overall effect in this case. I also tried the reverse, with the fastest shutter speeds on the main diagonal; that looked a little odd.

This next image combines two things I enjoy photographing: run-down buildings and brick ones. I also like the strong geometry of it. There is some tension in the composition—which I don’t mind—that I think comes from a combination of being biased off-center to the right and heavier on the left hand side where the shadows and cloud are.

This next image is more balanced, despite having three unrelated things going on: the window, the bird-shaped cloud, and the clump of trees on the hill. They are arranged in a nice stable triangle. One detail that adds a lot to this, I think, is the ladder reaching up towards the clump of trees. I’m also grateful that some of the window panes are missing. (I found them that way, if you are curious.)

This rusty bolt and washer were on the building from the previous image. I had to crop in a fair bit because, despite taking a number of images, I didn’t succeed in getting one where the camera was parallel to the subject and it starts to get out of focus just off the right edge. The original image is about twice as wide. The physical challenge here was that this bolt was a little higher than my forehead, so I had to hold my camera slightly overhead and use the rear screen to compose. It was an awkward way to photograph an unforgiving scene (close-ups inherently have very little depth of field) and I didn’t quite nail it—more of a glancing blow. Since returning from England, I purchased a new tripod that is bit taller than I am and a lot taller than my old one; my struggles making images in similar situations is a perfect example of why I upgraded.

Did I mention the vicious thistles growing against the base of the building? They didn’t help.

The final three images this week feature individual trees. The first of these, below, has the tree at the intersection of the walls and an expanse of the valley below in the background. The bottom half of the image is warmer and the walls are prominent, whereas the upper half is cooler from the blue haze and there are lots of walls in miniature that echo those in the foreground. This image is as much about the background as it is the foreground, though, giving a sense of scale and depth to the overall landscape. I didn’t really appreciate this until I cropped this picture square to use as the featured image for this post.

The “featured image” for a post is the image that gets used, for example, on the home page as sort of a big thumbnail to reference the post. If I don’t happen to have a square image in a post, I always make a second square version of one to use for this purpose. Cropped square, there is a lot less background and this image is all about the tree rather than the greater landscape. So even though the two sides may seem like unnecessary negative space, they aren’t.

This image is of the same tree but viewed from a lower spot well off to the right from the previous camera position. I don’t know why someone went to so much trouble to build this wall two-thirds of the way across a field and then stopped. It accomplishes nothing. There is probably a story there—someone going off to war, perhaps, or a teenage son who was routinely punished for bad behavior with building another 20 feet of wall until he became less incorrigible, and eventually did or ran away to sea. No way to know.

Despite the inexplicable wall, above, everything in the scene is neat and tidy and so is the composition, with the tree just right of the centerline and the end of the wall (and dark shadow) balancing it just left of the centerline. The image below, however, is very much the opposite: the leaning tree is scraggly, the wall just peters out and replaced by a barbed-wire fence with posts planted all willy-nilly. I expect that sheep can travel around the end of this wall every bit as easily as they can around the wall above.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s post. Next week’s Yorkshire images will include some limestone pavements, which are interesting geological features and great fun to photograph.