Self Criticism
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Sometimes I take a photograph, think it’s quite good, and never really consider it beyond that point. I’m going to make the effort to analyse my own pictures a little bit more in future. It would be even better if I could remember to do it before pressing the shutter…
The photograph at the top is a good place to start. It’s a shot of Freya taken just outside the Old Boatyard restaurant in Arbroath. I loved the light that was coming in through the doors and windows that you can see in the second shot. I asked Freya to lean against the wall and look as relaxed as possible. Of course, nothing is more likely to make a person tense but she did a good job! I had the MZ-5n with me loaded with XP2 rated at 400 ISO. I think the shutter speed was somewhere around 1/30th and the aperture f2.8.
When I uploaded the pic onto my laptop I liked the look of it. It then suddenly struck me that it would have been a lot better if I’d asked Freya to sit on the floor with her knees pulled up. Had she sat in more or less the same spot, her face would have caught the shaft of light coming through the glass. As it was, I had to lighten her face a little in Photoshop.
The good thing is that it’s only six miles down the road to the restaurant and we’re there fairly regularly so I might have another crack at it.
The bottom photograph is another nearly shot. The subject is one of the two wind turbines that dominate Dundee’s eastern horizon. They’re the biggest windmills in any urban setting in the world-not a great claim to fame unless you’re in the company of eco warriers. The thing that attracts me to them is the fact that they seem so out of place amongst the working class streets of the adjacent Douglas housing estate. I haven’t had time yet to check out the best angles but I stopped off the other day on the way home from work to see what I could get. I used a slow enough shutter speed on the K10D, fitted with 70mm DA lens, to capture some blur in the rotor blades. It also caught a bit of leg movement in the guy who was crossing the road to the phonebox. It would have been great if his leg and one of the rotor blades had been at exactly the same angle but that would have been asking for too much! This pic is too cluttered for my liking so this is another one that I’ll revisit at some point in the future.
Source: Self Criticism
