Looking Back

This fortnight is devoted to reviewing what we have learned in Challenges One to Nineteen.

I decided to take a few new pictures to share to illustrate some of the subjects we have tackled.

Week #3 – Always take more than one photo.

One of several pictures I took of my new pergola under construction.

One of several pictures I took of my new pergola under construction.

One of several photos I took in the back garden.

Even when I was still using film and had to be careful about how many pictures I took I always took more than one shot of anything that I really liked. I did that not only to make sure I got a useable photo but to look at it from different angles. Now that I have a digital camera I always take multiple photos, even a simple task like taking pictures of the new pergola can turn into six or eight photos.

If you look at these photos you will also see that they contain a lot of vertical lines, the upright posts on the pergola and the fence and horizontal lines, the cross pieces of the pergola, the gutter and the weatherboard the house is made of. The second photo has the path as a leading line to draw your eyes onwards.

Week #5 – Leading Lines

Here is another photo with leading lines. The timber path leads your eyes on to the pergola and then continues down to the bottom of the garden. There is quite a lot of geometry going on here with the square shape of the pergola, rectangles and the triangle made by the open ladder.

Week #11 – Centrepoint

Here is a photo of Polly which I cropped to a more or less square with her eyes and nose  in the centre square of the grid. Below it is the original photo.

Week #15 – Cropping Tips

I’m a compulsive cropper. I probably started cropping pictures when  I started to learn scrapbooking. My instructor would show the group how a picture could be improved by cropping parts of it to make it fit more cohesively into the design of the page. Once I started using digital cameras I discovered editing software and found that by cropping I could turn a photo that I would normally had thrown away into one that I liked or a good one into a better one. I frequently crop photos to get rid of distracting objects. In the case of Living Barbie and Skipper the background was fine but I thought that the cropped photo made a better portrait.

My Living Barbie and Skipper

Here I have cropped the picture and also tidied up a few stray hairs on Barbie’s face.

One of several photos I took in the back garden.

Here I have cropped the large area of shadow.

Conclusion

Some of the things we have covered in the challenge so far are things that I was conscious of and thought about before I took a photo. Others were new ideas to me which I will try to consider in future. Sometimes you don’t have time to think, you just have to take the picture especially with action photos and wildlife but even then if you know the rules you may use some of them instinctively.