🧙♂️ I’M BACK, I’M BACK, YOU KNOW IT… when you see crow pics over Derwent Water.
The usual message arrived from the Avanti West Coast railway company after my trip up here yesterday, asking me what I thought of my trip.
I never normally reply, not wanting to come across as a miserable wingeing pom. I mean, what’s an hour or two’s delay between friends, right? But yesterday I was tempted to tell them to their face that I found their service shocking.
How late was my train from Euston to Penrith yesterday? Well, stone the crows, it wasn’t! It was bang on time. OK, two minutes behind, but that’s nothing. Over the last few years coming up here regularly, I can’t remember when that’s ever been the case!
Apparently, they are officially the worst train line in the UK, so I guess I was lucky.
Crows, though (no, I didn’t stone ’em!), and just around the corner from Crow Park, to boot. Birds are one of my greatest photographic pleasures, both here in the Lakes and in Paris, so it doesn’t take long for one to sneak in to a shot or three.
As I’m obsessed with colour, I rarely publish black and white, or monochrome images and sometimes I feel that’s a bit of a shame. So, I’ve recently decided to produce some sort of grey or single-hued version of all the photos I publish from now on.
Here’s a softly-tinted example of today’s shot and I absolutely love it.
In black and white photography, the play between shadows and light, and the graphical composition of the photo is far more important and obvious. What you can get away with in colour can come across as a mushy mess in grey if you’re not careful.
Many people (and galleries) prefer black and white photography or associate it much more closely with ‘proper art’, rightly or wrongly. Unfortunately, just shooting (or publishing) in black and white doesn’t automatically qualify you as a great artistic photographer. Indeed, it can cruelly expose your weaknesses.
It takes a particular awareness and foresight to shoot a scene with a black and white final shot in mind. It’s a good skill to develop, because if you are looking for striking contrasts and interesting shapes even when shooting in colour, all of your photos will improve, however you end up showing them.
I often advise people to only publish one photo of a particular scene – your most brilliant one – however painful it might be to ‘reject’ all the rest. If you must publish more than one shot of the same subject, if you are illustrating an article, for example, make them different enough to each stand out in their own right.
So, what about publishing differently processed versions of the very same shot, as I have done here? Isn’t that even worse than bombarding people with slight variations on a theme? Not necessarily. It’s all personal taste, of course, but by putting different versions of the same image side by side, you can have fun playing with some crazy processing options. You can also highlight the image Warhol-like through repetition – a key photographic element illustrated even here by the repeating posts and their reflection.
People also love to say which picture they prefer and why, which can get some interaction going. So… which version do you prefer and why?!
Happy repeating!
The Laggard of Lakeland 🌄
🧭 (Lakeland Chronicles No.39)
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