London by night

Went to visit my daughter in London yesterday, took a few snaps in the evening that I quite like, London Eye from St James' Park and and Buckingham Palace

Rushes

In this one I am still thinking about the movement of the eye, I I feel that the rushes, being very upright, draw the eye up, but the diffuse background above the bulbous tops stops the eye from being drawn all the way out of the picture.  By not having any one particular rush as the focus, and by having a few spiral fronds and crossing stems I hope to have the effect of keeping the eye moving and this making the picture seem more energised and interesting than a simple picture of some rushes might otherwise be.

Wind in the Willow

This was another attempt to apply the roaming eye idea to give a sense of motion.  It is a bit difficult with a willow because the fine branches and leaves tend to form a consistent line that takes the eye our of the picture.  I tried to us the shadow an light to draw the eye back and add the counterpoint of stability to the motion.  Again I think this would work better as a large print, but I do think it mages to some sense of the energy of the tree.

Natural Dripping!.

 I love photographing hedgerows, wild plants and trees, but it is really hard to create an image of them that is genuinely interesting.  So, the other day I was thinking about Jackson ("Jack the Dripper") Pollock.  Now the thing about Pollock's work is that it looks like he just drips pint on the canvas, and you would think that anyone could do that, except when anyone does it somehow it just doesn't have what his paintings have.

Well I was thinking about how his paintings work, and I decided that a big part of it has to do with the way he captures and moves around your eye.  His paintings are full of resting points for the eye, where lines cross or drips fall, but as soon as your eye lands on one of them it is pulled of it by the profusion of lines - but it is never taken out of the picture, especially if you stand in front of one of them, at fulls size, rather than looking at a small version in a book.  So that is, I believe, more than anything what gives his pictures their energy and interest.

So I have been experimenting with trying use the same device in taking photos of hedgerows.Ideally the pictures would be printed up very large (except my camera is not good enough to reach the kind of size I would like).  But you can get an idea from the screen images.  I am quite pleased with the results so far:

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Double Rainbow over Cambridgeshire

Yachts in moonlight, the Gulf of Morbihan, summer 2015.

Full moon over the Gulf of Morbhian, 2015