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Signs of the previous Leap Year.
OK, so 2020 was the previous leap year, and we all know what started happening then. Those days though are already starting to seem like another world; one with real restrictions and real fear. One thing that happened in the UK during the Covid epidemic and lockdown was the sudden proliferation of signs telling us how we should behave. Lots of those have completely gone now, and I think it’s important that the traces of those remaining are recorded. To that end I am making sure I photograph Covid signs whenever I come across them. This is on a bus shelter in Ledbury, Herefordshire. It’s a plastic film telling us…
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Focus on your focus
Cameras these days are like science fiction devices compared to when I first started taking pictures. Back then everything was manual; setting the exposure, focusing, film winding. Now we have all these wonderful automatic tools at our disposal, and auto focus has come on in leaps and bounds since the first, rather clunky, iterations. That does not mean that it’s foolproof, nor does it mean that you should just let it do its work without any input from you. Here are three examples of different focus issues. Some auto focus systems need edge contrast to do their job, and when there’s not much edge contrast they can hunt around for…
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Up & Down or Side to Side?
In my “Movement in Photography” talk I mention the difference it makes to an ICM image if you move the camera in one direction, compared to moving it at right angles to that direction. Information at right angles to the direction of camera movement tends to get spread out, whereas information in the direction of camera movement is accentuated. Take these tree images as an example: In this first image I have moved the camera, (my mobile phone – 2 second exposure), in generally the same direction as the tree trunks. Although there is a bit of horizontal information, most of the image is of near-vertical shapes and textures. In…