It’s all about the light direction.

When you see a potential photographic subject it’s worth looking all round it to see how it’s affected by the changed in light direction.  It can make a huge difference.

Take this large dandelion sculpture in a fabulous Gloucestershire garden.  I chose a viewpoint where it was lit by the sun from directly behind.  It gave a lovely silhouetted contrast to the seed head “parachutes”.  I had only just found it, and would have preferred to have been there an hour or so before, so that I could have got the edge of the seed heads away from the background trees on the right-hand side.

I was just leaving another garden, this time in Worcestershire, when I spotted this lovely avenue of poplar (?) trees.  It looked like parts of France or Germany.  The late afternoon light threw an angled line of shadows across the road, and I framed it so one ran into the bottom right-hand corner of the frame.  If had taken the image a few hours earlier those shadows would have been completely different.

Sometimes the shadow is the image, and the object casting the shadow is actually irrelevant.  The early morning sunlight was passing through our plastic bread box, and with a bit of judicious placement all I got was the shadow of the box.  Direction of the lines of the oak worktop and the direction of the shadow cross to form an implied “X” shape.  Again, the direction of the light made the image.