Shooting in the Cold

Landscape photography often entails having to work quite hard to get to the actual landscape itself. As a result a lot of landscape photographers are also keen hikers and trekkers, since this is what is often needed in order to find interesting compositions. After a recent hike into the Drakensberg with another landscape photographer, Carl Smorenburg, to chase some snow (which didn’t materialise unfortunately) someone suggested on post that I write about the equipment required to get the shot (thanks for the suggestion Jeff Dell).

Brave New World

So much has changed in the last few months. People keep asking each other, is this the new normal? Not to rehash the millions of words that have already been written regarding the state that the world find’s itself in, but this too shall pass. Back in 1918 it must have felt like the world was truly coming to an end. As horrific as the coronavirus is, it pales into insignificance next to the truly terrifying disease that was the Spanish flu. Still, Covid-19 is here and it is upended the way we work, and the way we live. At least for the time being at any rate. 

The Basics of Perspective Distortion

One of the ways in which photographers can make people see the world in a different way, is to use their lenses creatively to manipulate relationships within an image. The most basic way of doing this is arranging elements inside the frame in order to force the relationship. A Photograph of two doors in a symmetrical composition implies an equal, symmetrical relationship between the two doors (as above). A composition where one door is larger and an angle to the other implies depth and distance between the doors, as well as a visual hierarchy of what to look at first. The perceived distance beyond the door also creates a perception of distance and three dimensional space. Clever use of perspective distortion is one way to create this sense of space. 

New Year, New Decade, New Gear

The last ten years have been extraordinarily good to us as photographers. The first ten years of the millennium saw an incredibly fast paced development of digital photography that was really exciting to be a part of. Digital photography matured in the last decade though. In particular, I would say that we reached a basic plateau in image quality in about 2012 that marks a kind of baseline from which we still judge images at the beginning of this decade.