Wednesday, January 15, 2025

The Art of Accepting What’s There

Every photographer hopes for spectacular lighting conditions and weather that is kind to his or her composition. The plain fact is that we don’t always get those things (I was sunny when I left Adelaide, and the grey skies and rain began at the first stop, Melbourne), and we work with what we have—making a silk purse from a sow’s ear at least some of the time! But when you’ve travelled across the world and have a particular day available for walking out and shooting what’s there, you make what the conditions give you, and with any luck you can come up with something that’s worth looking at. This was my first day in Sunderland in November 2011 (I don’t have accurate dates, I forgot to set date and time when I cleared the flashcard for the trip!), and I would be occupied at the conference at the university from the following day, so this was it—sight seeing, if possible, through mist and drizzle. Well, I went out and walked, and I shot all sorts—Roker Park, Mowbray Park, the Wintergardens, the museum, street scenes, the river, the foreshore. It’s the same outing as my post “Nature’s Effortless Drama,” and one or two others. This is a view over the lower river, looking out into the North Sea. Sunderland is a busy port for shipping, and the river is a highway for trade. This picture has almost the texture of a watercolour, created by a buildup of washes to depict the flat, misty conditions. This is what it looked like, and I recorded the thick, hazy day in all its glory. I think there is aesthetic appeal in this—the starkness, the apparent “hardness” of the day, metaphorical, if you will, of the bulwark of human industriousness against the impersonal forces of nature. A bright, sunny day would give this view a very different emotional context, but here the dreary weather asks the viewer to think more deeply about the scene. Colour and contrast were adjusted slightly in Irfanview. Fuji FinePix S5600. Image by Mike.

 

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

One Sunset Among Many

 

Over the years I’ve had the chance to photograph many sunsets, sometimes with long series of frames capturing the whole event. This was one such occasion, on the way back from a drive down the Fleurieu which had taken in Hindmarsh Falls not long before (July 17th, 2017). The vantage point was an overlook on the highway down Sellick’s Hill, giving a wonderful view out over the Gulf St Vincent, and the weather front approaching from the southwest over the sea was the perfect medium through which the declining sun could work its magic. I have dozens of frames from about this point to late in the event when colours had faded to pastel shades, but I can’t get enough of those with the richer tones. There was no photographic trickery here, just point and shoot at fair telephoto settings to exclude the silhouetted shoulders of hills. No enhancement was done, this is what it looked like and what the camera recorded. Fuji FinePix S5600. Image by Mike.