Hedgehogs on sticks and specular highlights...

My photography of late was getting a little bland, in my view, and it needed a bit of a shake-up to get things moving again. I had decided, before I left the house, to try a more creative approach, and packed three fast aperture lenses for the job. I had a location in mind - the Dorset Stour - but even when I arrived I still had no real  conception of what I would do. I needed to be inspired.

There was still a bit of localised flooding from all the recent rain, and my intended route on a mountain bike looked less-than-inviting when I arrived, so it seemed that the shoot would be less than successful. Quite why that should be (since I still had no idea as to what I wanted to achieve), was adopting a defeatist attitude. I needed to pick a subject and work it.

I started taking pictures of teasels (or hedgehogs on sticks, as friend and fellow photographer, Nic, calls them), shooting wide open for some creative blur, but it's not until I start to frame them as silhouettes, set against the specular highlights of the sun reflecting off of the river, that I start to see the possibilities of something good.

From this point on, things start to work for and against me in roughly equal measure. Autofocus refuses to work; the lens continually hunts for focus, and exposure is largely guesswork (in spite of the histogram). Switching to manual focus solves the first issue; experience and a large chunk of luck, the second. What I'm after is a pleasing pattern created by the what the Japanese refer to as bokeh; allowing the out of focus highlights to add significantly to the pictorial quality of the image. I make a good number of photographs, since there is no way to accurately predict when the fast-flowing water will produce the desired effect, and pick the one that jumps off the screen when opened in Photoshop. There is little in the way of colour in the final shot, so I convert it to mono using the Gorman-Holbert Method; adding the subtle blue tone during the process.

The best way I know how to kick-start my photography: Do something different.


300mm f/4D AF-S Nikkor. 1/3200 second at f/8.  -1.33 EV compensation. ISO 125. Monopod


© 2012