Or not, depending on my mood
I went out for a little wander tonight to try to take some new images of Leytonstone all lit up at night – so here we have a local Moroccan cafe, the underground station, the bus station, McDonald’s, and the Walnut Tree pub 🙂
PS The reason I’ve grayscaled them all is that I had my white balance all wrong tonight so they all had a yellow tinge to them – oops!
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Lights
I was really pleased to capture the smooth shapes created by the lines and curves of this dynamic shot as I was coming up the escalator in Canada Water Station towards the exit the other day. And although taken in colour, it almost looks monochrome by design. I was hoping for a sharp, slick image but sadly on downloading it to my laptop I can see it’s either not properly focussed or I’ve got camera shake – or maybe both…
I’m not always very good at capturing things on the move, especially like here when I’m the one on the move in difficult lighting, without something going wrong and ending up with a slightly blurry or fuzzy photograph. I can often see what I want to take, but don’t always manage to translate that immediate vision into reality in time… oh well 😦
Still, I like the image enough to share with you all, so hopefully you like it too? Onwards and upwards, and hopefully the more I try, the better I’ll get 🙂
I’m just no good at taking pictures of people – not only planned portraits of people I know, but also up close and personal candid shots of strangers, too.
Photographing people in public causes me such a lot of anguish. Over they years I’ve tried to overcome my fear of intruding into some unknown someone’s privacy, of risking maybe causing offence, resulting in the risk of creating a scene, but even when I tell myself – look, just go for it, take the damned shot – my inevitable prevarication and hesitation means either the moment has gone, or I’ve completely lost my nerve, or I take a half-hearted quick snap that is poorly framed or out of focus or just plain wrong, and I immediately regret it.
A perfect example occurred yesterday – I was walking along the street, camera in hand, and as I passed by a cafe I saw just inside, beautifully framed by the window a couple sitting together chatting quite intimately, with a rectangular neon-style “Open” sign just above their heads to the right. I could have just lifted my camera up and taken a shot from where I was, but I felt so uncomfortable I just coudn’t do it. I know that with street photography it generally is a case of ‘you snooze, you lose’, but there’s something about that potential face to face, almost eyeball to eyeball encounter I really struggle with.
So instead I tend to settle for photographing people’s backs as they walk away, or if taken from in front I do try keeping my distance so they remain unrecognisably anonymous. Like this lady with her shopping trolley, crossing a pedestrian walkway over the main road and railway. I quite like this image, but I feel I would have liked the one not taken from the cafe even better…
Things that have made me smile this week include:-
Playing around with online filter effects applied to photographs originally taken by me – this orange-pink flower nestling in green leaves first had an art filter applied, before I inverted the image colour-wise then greyscaled the end result. I find this overall masking kind of experimental digital post-processing great fun to do, and I really love the way the subdued monochrome finish here really highlights the smooth flowing lines of petals and leaves 🙂
Finishing a warm and welcoming hand-made crochet baby blanket for our as yet unborn sixth grandchild – she is due to be born around the end of the year ❤
Talking to my 82 year old dad on the phone tonight – dad has been in hospital for the last four weeks, but thankfully got home today – definitely something to smile about 🙂
A weathered wooden memorial bench in an East London cemetery for this week’s Cee’s B&W Challenge: Benches 🙂
Monochrome graffiti and street art birds painted on the walls of buidlings here in Leytonstone celebrating the world-wide success of local lad Alfred Hitchcock 🙂
I suddenly remembered taking this image of the entrance to the Stables Arches in Camden from under another archway – I really liked the unusual framing at the time, so it seemed a perfect contender for Nancy Merrill’s Photo a Week Challenge: Opening 🙂
