In my favour...

As far as I am concerned, today is the last day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere; well, tomorrow is the autumn equinox, and traditionally the start of said season, so we must still be in summer. Whatever the thinking behind it all, it is a  day of brightness and grey, with a watery sun peering through the cloud blanket over the lower part of the UK. It is also windless.

It is one of those days that produces good light and leaden skies, and it is working in my favour. I am walking the beaches of Poole Bay, Dorset, by mid-afternoon; a macro lens on my camera, and looking for small subjects and detail to make photographs of. After an hour or so of wandering I decide to sit on a seafront bench and photograph whatever passes by, and it's a small yacht on the horizon that eventually becomes the subject of today's post.

The fact that I am using a lens designed to give its best performance when used in close in neither here nor there - it can still be pressed into use as a short telephoto for general shooting. I often use lenses that are designed for one application as something else: an ultra-wide for portraits, or a super-telephoto for landscapes (or even panoramas stitched-together in Photoshop), for example. No hard and fast rules.

There is a minimalistic feel to the picture - I always shoot such scenes when I come across them - and I use the different tone bands of the sea and distant clouds as part of the composition. The yacht is merely the focal point: very small in the frame, but once the eye sees the boat it is drawn to it time and time again.


105mm f/2.8D EX Sigma macro lens. 1/800 second at f/8. + 0.33 EV compensation. ISO 400


© 2012