London sunset panorama, click for a larger version

One of my favourite subjects is the City during the blue hour where electric lights balance with the sky, giving beautiful “night” time pictures with colour still in the sky and with detail in the buildings. Shoot too early, and you get daytime pictures with a tiny bit of colours in windows. Shoot too late, and you either lack detail in non-lit areas or get the lights completely blown out. But get the timing right, and you’ve got Mother Nature’s version of HDR, vastly surpassing the ones produced by Photoshop and its ilk. At least in my humble opinion.

Canary Wharf behind the Greenwich Naval Barracks

There’s a brilliant view from Greenwich Park towards London, but during the summer the park closes before it’s dark, and during winter I normally work in the blue hour. So with the Christmas break giving an opportunity to be out and about, I headed to Greenwich for a shot of Canary Wharf on Christmas evening. The light was fine, and during the shooting I swung the camera around and tried a panorama of London, mostly just for the fun of it. At home in front of the computer, I could see that the image was almost there. The composition was a bit off, and a few things could be improved, but I very much liked what I saw.

So yesterday I went back to make a panorama. One of the things that had annoyed me with my first test panorama was that it was very slim and long, so I turned the camera 90 degrees into “portrait” orientation. The result is still slim and long, but at least it’s 50% taller than it would otherwise have been.

St Pauls, Tower Bridge and The City

With the camera on tripod and levelled, I started to shoot just after sunset, and did panned series after panned series of pictures until it was completely dark. Arbitrarily I had the brightest view in the first frame and worked my way away from the sun towards the dark edge. It didn’t make much difference for the first few series where I could shoot the 12-15 images in a minute. Towards the end when I was working with 30 second exposures, a series took 10 minutes, so the sky darkened quite a bit during the series, and I wonder if it would have been smarter to start with the dark frame and work towards the light, to get less exposure difference. Guess that’s one to experiment with at some point.

Despite levelling as good as I could, the camera was tilting 0.7 degrees. It doesn’t sound like much, but it meant the final image was wonky, and I had to rotate it and trim off 5% of the height. I was expecting my levelling to not be completely perfect (note to self: insert sarky comment from my friend Mark who has witnessed my obsession with getting the tripod level) so shot with a shorter than necessary focal length, to have some pixels for cropping, and was glad that I did so.

The O2

I set the exposure manually so all shots in a series would be exposed equally (ignoring the change in ambient light), and exposed for the brightest part. Although it looks on the image as if there’s a lot of difference between the two sides of the panorama, it only measured 1/3 or 2/3 of a stop at the time. So the visual difference must be partly due to the darkening of the skies during the 10 minute pan.

Photoshop has a very neat automated panorama composition function. Give it a set of pictures and let it just get on with it, and after a few minutes it will have blended the pictures seamlessly and also smoothened any differences in exposure. I used the last fact to my benefit by selecting different white balances for the various shots, and as long as it’s a gradual change, Photoshop had no problems with it. The left side of the pano is 6000K (daylight) and the right side is 3700K (flourescent).

Detail from the Naval College in the middle ground, showing the picture was taken at 4:55

On the far left is the Shard, 6.6 km away, then comes St Paul’s Cathedral just over 8 km away, the towers of The City 7 km away, loads of different things, Canary Wharf only 3 km away and finally the O2 again about 3 km in the distance. The green line that cuts across the image, that’s the laser designating the Greenwich meridian. It is visible up to 60 miles (100 km) away from Greenwich.

I think I’m hooked and want to explore this genre of photography in more detail! In fact, I’m already making arrangements with my friend Steve to get up early over the weekend and try for the sunrise from Alexandra Palace on the opposite side of town.

The finished panorama, click for a larger version

3 discs

At the Thames Festival back in September, Steve found a great spot on a support for Waterloo Bridge, so I already have a set of fireworks pictures taken fairly close to the action, and fancied something different for new year, so I came up with the idea of long-distance fireworks pictures. It would mean not mingling with the front-row crowd, and it would give a different kind of picture. So I local people on flickr and facebook for help coming up with a good location, and spent Saturday afternoon driving around to check the actual view from various vantage points. Eventually I ended up Greenwich where a local gentleman told that all the locals usually gather at The Point which offers a brilliant view of London.

Purples and yellow

I got there around a quarter to 11, at which time there was just two other people. At 11:30 the area was packed. There were plenty of clouds and the occasional drizzle, but thankfully it stayed dry during the fireworks display.

Green

The idea of creating a panorama wasn’t very well thought through. The sky, and the smoke, constantly changed colour depending on the fireworks going off right at the moment. As can be seen on the images, one second everything was green, and the next it was all blood red. Fortunately I also took some shots before the fireworks kicked off, so when I got home, I managed to combine 6 into a wide-angle shot and overlay some of the others to add the location specific fireworks. But seeing that the entire view could be included in a 70mm shot, I should simply have shot a series of that view instead. Oh well, you live and you learn.

Red

The close-up shots of the fireworks are 3,000 x 2,000 crops from a 200mm shot, so had I had the time (which I didn’t), they could have been shot in higher resolution with a tele converter.

The London Eye is just over 8 km (5 miles) away from The Point as the crows flie, and the yellow arch visible to the right of The Eye is Wembley Stadium, 21 km (14 miles) away.

The city-lights needed 20 seconds at f/18, but 20 seconds at this distance was far too much for most of the fireworks and caused them to white-out completely. I ended up sacrificing detail in the buildings and shot a lot of the pictures with a shuttertimes between 4 and 8 seconds.

Panorama of 6 images (view equivalent to a 70mm lense) (click for hi-res version)

Cupcakes for sale

As well as running her own grooming parlour, Wagsters Grooming, Jenni also works as a groomer in local pet shop Creatures Great and Small, and Keith, the owner of the shop, had agreed to let her take over the shop for the day and fill up any extra space with fund raising things. Well done, Keith, the world needs more bosses like that!

There was a tombola with brilliant prizes, a table with interesting bric-a-brack, delicious home made cakes for sale, demonstrations from pet food companies James Wellbeloved and Royal Canin, lucky dip, guess-how-many-treats-are-in-the jar competition, sale of home made dog treats, a huge dressed-up dog, and as the star attraction, local reptile breeder Ann had brought a selection of reptiles and furry animals.

The dressed up dog was a crowd pleaser

The lizards also drew a crowd

We raised £600 in total, so well done to everybody involved, and particularly to Jenni for organising it all and making it happening. A lot of hard work went into the organisation, and Cancer Research was grateful for the contribution.

After a long day full of smiles and laughter, some of us ended the day in a local pub for a meal and a drink to celebrate a job well done.

Celebration at the end of the day

There’s a slideshow with additional pictures from the day and from the evening here.

Houses of Parliament with Westmnister Bridge in the foreground. 19:36, 1/6 sec, f/5.6, ISO 4000

This post was written exactly a year ago, but for whatever reason, I never got it posted. With it again being late September, the timings referred to in the post are accurate once more. So I hurry to get it posted.

I went on the London Eye to try to capture a few pictures of London from above during “the blue hour” when it’s dark enough to make the city sparkle like a carpet of diamonds, while there still is some colour and texture left in the sky. Although the pictures I got are “nice”, they are not quite what I had hoped for, and they don’t do justice to the absolutely amazing view I had from the top of the 135 meter wheel.  So this post is about what I learnt from the experience (warning: it gets quite technical and geeky); hopefully there will be a part 2 in the future where I avoid making the same mistakes again.

Evening or night-time photography is normally a quite slow, methodical experience for me. I like to have as low an ISO as possible to get clean, noise-free images and as small an aperture as I can get away with, to get as much front-to-back sharpness as possible. Plus, my 24-70mm lens gives beautiful sunstars at f/16 and below. This in turn means shutter times of several seconds, and thus requires me to have the the camera solidly locked down on a tripod to minimize any risk of movement.  The Eye doesn’t allow visitors to bring tripods, and even if they did, the movement of the wheel itself during a multi-second exposure would most certainly introduce blur. So I had to compensate with high ISO and wide aperture instead.

I bought one of their flexible tickets where you can just show up and get onto the Eye whenever you wish. That allowed me to wait at the entrance and try to gauge the light in the sky in order to decide when to get on. I set the metering to matrix metering, Aperture-priority with a fixed ISO that I varied between 1600 and 4000 during the ride.

Waterloo Station, Shell centre in foreground, Canary Wharf in background. 19:32, 1/15 sec, f/4, ISO 4000

Below I have recorded timings, exposures and light values from the first, middle and last part of the ride. “Light value” is a measure for how bright a scene is, with LV 0 being a scene requiring 1 sec exposure at f/1 and ISO 100. See Wikipedia for a list LV values for typical scenes.

I bracketed all my shots, but found that the camera’s automatically calculated exposure was pretty good, so the values above are not a million miles away from the “ideal” exposure.

I was in doubt about what aperture to use, so I hedged my bets by shooting first a bracket series at f/4, and then another of the same scene at f/5.6. With the wisdom of hindsight, I should of course have checked the online DOF calculator, which would have told me that the hyperfocal distance for my 24-70mm lens even at f/2.8 would have been between 7 and 60 meter, meaning that at the distances involved, everything would have been in focus, even if I had shot with the aperture wide open and focused on the nearest building on the ground. So by shooting at f/4 or f/5.6, I essentially gave the camera a one to two stop disadvantage which resulted in longer shutter times than necessary (= higher risk of blur) and/or higher ISO (= more noise).

All my pictures have some unwanted reflections. The carts (or pods as they are called) are round, so it’s like shooting the world from the inside of a glass bottle. Normally the way to avoid reflections would be to press the lens against the glass, but with it all being curves, it was impossible to find a place where I could avoid the reflections. This was probably not helped by me having the (petal-shaped) lens-hood on the camera, as that also introduced openings between the petals where light (and thus reflections) could enter.

South Bank Centre, Barbican, St Pauls, Tower 42 and The Gherkin. 19:32, 1/15 sec, f/4, ISO 4000

So all in all, the lessons from this evening out can be summarised as

• Invent (and bring) a totally flexible lens hood that can be pressed against curving glass to avoid all reflections. Maybe a foam hood, or a contraption similar to a contour gauge? Don’t use a normal petal-shaped hood.
• Get (and bring) a Gorilla-pod to help hold the camera still, for the exposure times are going to be fairly long
• Shoot wide open, there will be plenty of DOF even at f/2.8
• About half an hour after sunset is a good time to plan to be at the top of the wheel. Entry via the “fast track” queue takes only a few minutes, and the wheel takes about half an hour for a full rotation (so 15 minutes to get to the top)
• Although the wheel moves, 1/8 sec shutter time seemed to be okay
• Consider using auto-iso, with a minimum shutter at 1/8 and camera in aperture priority set to f/2.8
• Bracketing is good, but it’s sufficient to aim for a 5-picture series with 1/3 stop interval (or a 3-picture series with 2/3 stops intervals).
• It wouldn’t hurt to bring a small spray bottle of eye-glass cleaner and a cloth (or maybe just wet wipes?) to get the worst greasy fingers off the glass

The exercise asked me to go out and find example of straight lines, and make 4 pictures of vertical lines and 4 pictures of horizonal lines. Ideally the lines should be strong enough to be the first thing a viewer would notice. I seem to have interpreted that slightly more literally than intended, and came home with pictures of man-made structures that are close to perfectly straight either horizontally or vertically.

Picture 1: Drainage grate	When seem from above, the perfectly straight lines of a drain cover appears vertical.
Picture 2: Waste bin	To make the waste bins “blend in” more with the environment, the local council have covered them in nice fence panel cladding, giving a very natural (!) looking set of vertical lines.
Picture 3: Garage door	Another example of planks forming perfect vertical lines, this time on a garage door.
Picture 4: Tall building	No set of vertical lines would be complete without the converging verticals of a tall building. As well as the corner of the building, the symmetrical columns of windows also form a set of vertical lines.
Picture 5: Balconies	Moving on to horizontal lines, this shot shows the front of the same building, with glass-glad balconies forming a set of parallel horizontal lines. The fixtures for the glass are arranged in columns which also imply a set of vertical lines.
Picture 6: Steps	Horizontal steps on an outdoor staircase.
Picture 7: Lens testing wall of shame	In some camera magazines and websites, it is popular to test lenses by photographing brick walls. This will quickly show any pincushion or barrel distortion in the lens. My lens seems okay, maybe courtesy of Lightroom’s automatic lens distortion correction algorithm. Oh, and parking is also not permitted, courtesy of Imperial Peking.
Picture 8: Roof tiles	Horizon lines formed by roof tiles, with slightly converging verticals, due to the inclination of the rood. I included the orange and green plants in the bottom right to have a focal point to break the symmetry.

Having now read the next pages in the course material, I realise that my interpretation is very litteral, and that I was expected to include some implied lines that was guiding the viewer’s eye.

Test shot for what should have been a sunflower sunset picture

Like last night. I had agreed with my friend Steve to meet up at Richard’s farm to shoot the sunset. Richard has a small patch with sunflowers and open fields towards the setting sun behind them, so it was going to be pretty. While driving there, the skies came alight, clouds lit from below turned the most gorgeous deep yellow tone, with rim-light around each cloud to set it apart from its neighbours. It was the kind of light on which many religious paintings are based, and that makes photographers reach for camera and tripod.

After quick hello’s and how are you’s, we got cameras set up, with a small kiss of flashlight on the front of the flowers, to avoid them turning into black silhouettes. Richard explained about the features of the land, with a creek over which the clouds always seem gather, which gives the most magnificient sunsets. And it was indeed beautiful. After setup, it was just a matter of waiting for the sun to get a little lower in the sky.

And then it happened. The clouds that should be in bands and have holes in them, through which the setting sun could shine, became dense and solid.

So the only picture I’ve got of the pretty sunset is the test shot at the top of the page, taken 20 minutes before the almanac said the sun would set. The “right” moment would have been 10 minutes later, but by then, the only colour was a soft, yellow glow on the horizon. It was the sunset that got away.

Sunflower sunset afterglow

A little later, around 20 minutes after sunset, the clouds broke up a bit and the horizon turned crimson in a way it never seems to do when viewed from the town. Maybe it’s just because there is rarely an unobstructed view to the horizon. The later shots, with shutter times between 1 and 2 seconds were made difficult by the wind gently swaying the sunflowers, resulting in a relatively bright flash-lit sunflower overlayed, but not perfectly, on top of a dark silhouette of the ambient-lit sunflower. On most of the pictures it looked like a badly botched Photoshop cut and paste job.

I've seen the bad moon rising, take 2

When it was too late for the sunflowers, we spent some time shooting roof silhouettes against the moon. Even skies that appear black have some colour in them that can be seen in a 30 second exposure. Steve put his camera in front of mine and light-painted it with the LED light in his phone. The LED light, although it appears white to the naked eye, has a green tint similar to flourescent lights. So normalizing that to make the white appear white again, emphasized the blues and reds in the sky. The white sinus curve is from Steve walking in front of the camera with the LED light aimed towards it. It was one of those accidental coincidences that you don’t plan, but which you afterwards look at and think “that actually looks quite cool”. I wonder if I should send it to the tripod manufacturer for consideration?

Happy accident, or clever product placement

So even though the sunset got away, it was a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Sometimes you don’t get what you aim for. But if you enjoy the process, then it’s still worthwhile.

Positioning a point

This part of the exercise asked me to take three pictures in which the subject is a single point, placed in different parts in the frame in each example, and justify the reasoning.

Picture 1: Crazing Cow	The frame divided by the Gracing Cow
The cow is placed to the right of the frame, to create space in front of it, so it can”walk into the frame”. It is centered vertically; this was done without much deliberate thought. Given that green grass is already an important part of the composition, I suppose it would have made sense to place the cow higher in the frame, to include more grass, and thus make the cow stand out more.
Picture 2: Park bench	The frame divided by the park bench
The bench has an implied direction; we know how benches work, and that you’re meant to sit on it and look at the scenery. It faces to the left. So I deliberately placed the bench at the left side of the frame to create some tension – what would a tired rambler see, if he sat down here? It gives a less harmonic view than if the bench had been placed at the right.
Picture 3: Airplane	The frame divided by the airplane
The plane is flying towards the right, so it has been placed to the left in the frame to give it space to “fly into”. Vertically it’s a bit above the centre line, but as there is no horizon in the sky, I don’t think that impacts the view much. The treetops at the bottom are included to give a sense of direction and scale.

Graphic relationships with the frame

The exercise goes on to ask me to “consider the graphic relationship that the points have with the frame” and notes that “the point implies a division, as in the exercise positioning the horizon“.

Next to each picture, I have placed a black and white version showing how the frame is being divided by these implied lines. I think the division is clearest on picture 2, where the upper left quadrant created by the lines contains the sky and the horizon, whereas the other three quadrants seem to work as a foundation for the picture.

On picture 3, the background is very neutral – apart from the trees, it’s all a featureless blue sky. While I can see that there is this implied division, and that placing the subject away from the centre makes the picture less static, I’m not sure what else to make of it. It feels like the division is only useful if there are something in the background, like in picture 1 and 2.
 

The relationship between points

This exercise asked me to photograph two normally occuring situations in which there are two points, and then compose and take the pictures without preconceptions.

Picture 4: Two grazing cows	Implied relationship between the two cows
The two cows are roughly the same size in the frame, so neither becomes more of a focal point than the other. There is a slight angle between them. Despite there being no focal point in the physical centre of the frame, there is a very static feel to the picture. This is because of the equal visual weight the two cows have, and the mid-point between them being the centre of the frame. Had I thought more about the picture in advance, I should have ensured that one of the cows had been more in the foreground, to allow it to dominate the picture more.
Picture 5: Two eyes	Implied relationship between the two eyes

One of my newfound bovine friends also posed for a close-up of her beautiful eyes. Eyes are normally very strong focal points; humans, as well as animals depend on being able to interpret other animals’s intentions by seeing their eyes in a split second, in order to know whether they are faced with a friend or a foe. The two eyes seem to “fight” over the viewers attention. This creates a tension, and it becomes a difficult picture to “read”. Whilst it’s an interesting effect, it doesn’t make it a relaxing picture to look at – despite cows being such relaxing animals.

Bonus picture

Lunchtime

I can warmly reccomend cow photography as an enjoyable and relaxing hobby. Although they’re not exotic, dangerous animals, and although you don’t have to travel to Africa to find them, they are still photogenic well worth a picture. And as a bonus, they tend to move slowly enough that it’s easy to walk around the herd and position yourself, and unless spooked, they are amongst the most peaceful animals you’re likely to encounter. I know I’ll be going back to check up on them over the comings months, before they are taken indoors in October.

Tam said that’s easy, it’s just a shadow of an illusion… from a dream.

Well, I don’t actually think she used the word “easy”. She’s too polite for that. But if you’re like me, you’re thinking, “can you run that one past me again, but this time in slow motion, please”. So that’s what I said, and Tam explained.

It's not a picture of a jogger in Cantabria, Spain. It's a an illusion of freedom, energy, strength, good health, youth, being in control

Like most things where you’re presented with a finished result, it has to be deconstructed and put back together again to make sense. So start with the dream. The dream is the desire to be loved, accepted, looked up to, respected. The dream is the desire / hope / want / emotion that the picture will eventually try to sell. As the photographer creating the picture, I need to know which emotions I want to convey, which desires I want to burn stronger, what hopes I want to ache more in the viewer (feel free to substitute ‘you’ for ‘I’).

The illusion is “this is what you want”, “this is how you will look, and since you like the look, you will be liked when wearing it”. The picture is showing a clothed attractiveness. Clothing makes a person; that’s the illusion and the illusion is that the attractiveness of the model projects his or her desireability on to you.

She is desirable, pretty, strong, youthful, flirty. Do men think that she's good looking and about to unbutton that top? Of course they do! She's not a victim of sexism, see the slight disdain in her smile and the way she's looking down at the viewer; she is in control. Will men be as attracted to you, if you wore that top, and will you be as much in control? Look into her eyes... of course they would!

The shadow is of course just the image. It’s not reality, but merely a reflection of the scene in front of the camera. A reflection, or a shadow, of the three-dimensional illusion turned into a flat two-dimensional picture. It’s the photographer’s job to use all the tricks in the book to tranlate that illusion into something that still blinds and evokes the same emotions when it’s a page in a glossy magazine.

It all sounds sensible to me, and when I think about it, it’s not that much different from any other condensed communication training course: Know what you want to say, decide the best way to get the message across, deliver the message as best you can (normally followed up by “check for feedback”, and “adjust the message as necessary”, which in the fashion world would translate into monitoring sales and profit figures).

It’s simply a good mnemonic, to remind the photographer, me in this instance, that we’re dealing with emotions, intangible things, illusions and dreamscapes. The picture is not trying to sell a dress, it’s trying to sell an idea to the viewer. It’s trying to get her hooked on the illusion that she’ll be as attractive and as loved as the model, all her worries will disappear and she too will be wearing that care-free smile, if only she could have that particular dress.

At first sight, these are children's graves. German refugee children to Denmark towards the end of WWII. But the real nightmarish dream is about children dying for their parent's mistakes, the meaninglessness of war, the cheapness of human life and the easiness with with life is discarded

This also makes it quite easy for me to see where I have been going wrong when I’ve been shooting models. It has typically been with the Essex Strobists, and my workflow has typically been about getting one of the available models, getting an interesting location that isn’t already full of other photographers, placing a couple of lights, putting the model in the middle of the lights and adjusting the exposure, and then finally giving some vague instructions. Something a la “now give me a sexy look” or “can you stand like this, but lean your head a bit more to the left, more, more, yes, that’s fine, and now your hand a bit more up, yes, that’s fine”. It’s all based on what I think at the time looks “good”. Shutter clicks a few times, because it’s always good to have some spares, and the model works with the pose, changing things slightly in between the clicks. Afterwards, at home in front of the computer, I try to figure out which of the pictures “talk” to me and convey some sort of message, and they’re the ones I chose to work more with.

So, going back to Tam’s words, what I’m normally doing is I’m throwing everything into a mix, almost closing my eyes, and then not really thinking until I see the shadows (have the pictures in front of me), and at that time, I’m trying to pick the most interesting shadow to work some more with. When I’m looking at the shadow (picture) I might be able to recognise some of the illusion, but there’s often little sign of the underlying dream or emotion.

It's but a shadow of an illusion, but the dream is about hope, new beginnings, turning a leaf and the re-awakening to life. The mill symbolises an era where things were less complicated, a romantic flashback to a time that maybe once was.

If the model looks sexy on the picture, it’s because the model is sexy, and the message often seem to be “look: a pretty and sexy model”. While that might be a good message for a lad’s mag, it’s not going to sell the dream of “you could be sexy as well, if only ….”.

So I’ve got it backwards, it seems. And rather than continue stumbling through luck, using some sort of “instinct” for what looks good, I want to start taking more control of the messages conveyed by my modelling pictures, even before there’s a pose, and long before there’s a shadow of a flashgun in sight. The next Strobist shoot is on the 20th, I’d better get my thinking cap on already!

Following this deconstruction of the process that goes into the creation of a carefully constructed fashion photo, we went on to talk about how different symbols and words trigger different emotions. I still need to think some of the ideas there through in some more detail, but I look forward to hopefully get the same “aha-moment” when it all clicks again.

Many thanks to Tam for helping me to realise these things, and for wrapping it all up in a single, easy to remember sentence: It’s just a shadow of an illlusion… from a dream.

Introduction

I started by thinking about what I thought would be the easiest of them all, namely “large/small”. It was going to be easy. A German Shepherd is definitely large. But compared to a car, it’s actually quite small. So I had to find a large car to shoot. But hold on, compared to a house, a car is fairly small. A house is small compared to a tower block, which is small compared to an oil tanker. But an oil tanker is still not large, compared to a city, a county or the ocean. So I gave up finding something that was inherently “large” and realised that each of these different adjectives or qualities only really have meaning when compared against their opposite number.

While I could then have just picked two things with one being smaller than the other – a German Shepherd and an oil tanker, say, I thought this wouldn’t really bring the point home. So I decided to make pairs of pictures where there is something connecting them (for instance, they’re both pictures of a dog), and that something is what shows the contrast. Like a German Shepherd (large dog) and a Chihuahua (small dog). Actually, I wish I had thought of the dogs 9 months ago!

Some of the ideas I came up with were very obvious, but there were others where the connection between the images were maybe more tenuous. So when I had my 16 pictures completed, I asked some friends to have a go at pairing them up and see if they could figure out which contrast each pair was meant to illustrate. The results of this little informal test surprised me positively: Most friends got the majority of pairs “right”, and each pair was “successfully” identified by at least one friend.

In the explanations below about the logic I used for each pair, I have retained the original picture numbers from the blog post my friends commented on. It means the pictures do not come numbered sequentially here, but it makes it easier to compare my thoughts to how the pictures were seen by other people. I think a lot of the learning from this exercise is precisely through such comparisons.

Many of the pictures draw on lessons learnt in the TAOP exercises completed prior to this assignment, and many have been documented in individual blog posts. Where that the case, I have added a hyperlink to the relevant blog post. Each of the pictures is also hyperlinks that will jump to a larger version of the picture. The complete set of larger pictures is on this page.

Straight / curved
Picture 1 (straight): Cucumber salad	Picture 11 (curved): Sliced cucumber
This was probably the most tenuous of all the pairs, and it was the only pair that only one friend got “right”. Steve even got as far as matching all the other pictures and all the other contrasts, and then concluding “[...] which has left me with your cucumber close up, and the bowl of salad, which don’t really fit straight/curved, which means I’ve gone wrong!” Well, you were right, Steve. The common theme of the two pictures is “cucumber”, and in the salad they have been cut into identical, straight sticks. So the salad represents “straight”. On the macro-shot, we see the curved outlines of cucumber slices overlaying each other several times, so that represents “curved”. I did also have a picture of the cucumber sticks on a chopping board, from before they were turned into salad. That would probably have made the contrast more obvious, but I thought the salad picture was a nicer picture.
Moving / still
Picture 2 (moving): Army cadets marching during Remembrance Parade	Picture 3 (still): Legionnaire at Armed Forces Day in Brentwood
The common theme here is “soldier”, with the fluid movement from the long exposure of the marching cadets representing “moving” while John, standing perfectly still next to Union Jack, represents “still”. The assignment aside, I like the picture of the cadets for the symbolism I see here: Their hands appear to interlock as part of a long, strong chain while the lines created by the movement blur from their red poppies look almost like they are being targeted by the laser scope of a gun. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it!
Many / few
Picture 4 (many): They were also pretty once	Picture 7 (few): Naked branches
The theme for this pair is “leaves”. The fresh, young daffodil is surrounded by last year’s abundance of leaves, so this represents “many”. As a contrast, the branches of the tree, seen against the winter sky, appear naked and almost void of leaves, so it represents “few”.
Picture 5 (narrow): Traffic chaos on Moore's Place	Picture 8 (broad): The M25 on car-free Sunday
Two pictures of “roads”, with the 8 empty lanes of the M25 stretching across the frame and showing “broad” while Moore’s Place, where there’s not even enough space for a car and a pedestrian side-by-side shows “narrow”. I wanted to use the emptiness of the motorway to emphasize the wide expanse of concrete, so when it came to the narrow side street, I waited until there was several cars at the same time trying to turn into it. I think it gives an almost claustrophobic feel to the picture to highlight just how narrow the street is.
Continuous / intermittent
Picture 6 (continuous): Seagulls by Southend Pier	Picture 14 (intermittent): Water drop
The common theme between the two pictures is “water”. On the Southend picture, I tried to emphasize the vastness of the place in several different ways. The line made by the posts with gulls lead the viewer’s eye across the wide expanse of smooth water, and the sky has been allowed to dominate to further give the impression of this being big nature. I had to cheat a little in Photoshop to give the pier an extra section to also make that reach across the frame and help give the impression of a vast “continuous” scene. As a contrast, the water drop that is about to hit the crown created by a previous drop shows that we’re here seeing the result of a slowly dripping, “intermittent” water source. The water drop picture is actually two frames overlaid in Photoshop; that was easier than getting the timing exactly perfect to catch the drop just before the impact.
Pointed / blunt
Picture 9 (pointed): Scared balloon with needle	Picture 10 (blunt): Dear John
The theme for this pair is the shape of the needle and the pencil; we could call it “pointed things”. When I planned the shots, I started with the pencil, thinking it was clearly going to be the example of something pointed. But then it occurred that when seen close-up, the tip of a pencil is actually rounded and worn, so I chose that to illustrate “blunt”. To bring the point home further, the pencil is placed on top of a blunt letter. In contrast, the tip of the needle is sharper and pricklier, so it becomes the image for “pointed”. A picture of a needle on its own appeared bland to me, so the balloon was added for a bit of fun.
Large / small
Picture 12 (small): Goslings	Picture 15 (large): Swan
The common theme is “birds”. The cute goslings were not a pre-planned shot, but simply one of many from a nice spring day in the local park. They are obviously youngsters, so they represent “small”. The picture of the swan, on the other hand, was carefully planned and thought out. I wanted to shoot the swan from up-close with a wide angle lens to let the perspective exaggerate the size of the swan and make it appear vastly larger than anything else in the scene. I placed the monopod against the bottom of the lake and sat down to wait. The local wildlife didn’t much like photo equipment in their lake, so it took quite a while before any swan was brave enough to come as close as I needed it, but eventually this one did. Most friends recognised these two pictures as a pair, but some attributed them to “many/few” which also makes perfect sense.
Light / dark
Picture 13 (light): Gabrielle	Picture 16 (dark): Grace and Ruby
Two pictures of “children”, with the contrast being so obvious I should probably expect the political correctness police to come knocking on the door soon. Gabrielle, with her straw-coloured blonde hair, light complexion and bright background is a high key portrait representing “light”. Grace, and her niece Ruby, with their dark skin and black hair represents “dark”. After trying my hand at a low key portrait of my dad for Christmas, I was trying to get Grace to pose separately in dark clothes for a low key portrait later on, but it was one of those things that just never happened.
Liquid / solid
Picture 17 (liquid / solid): Aqua
For the single picture demonstrating the contrast between “liquid” and “solid”, I made this photo of a water bottle. A bottle is normally fairly solid and hard, but although the bottle shape is clearly recognisable, it appears liquid. And it is. The bottle is actually made out of baby oil which can be forced into rough shapes that stay for a lot longer than if you try to make a shape out of water (I learnt this the hard way!) The label floats on top of the oil, but took a bit of time to get placed right, so it has started to soak up the oil. Looking at it again, I’m not sure whether I should have gone without the label at all, but that’s too late now. The ice cubes surrounding the bottle are theatre props made of plastic, so at least I didn’t have to work hurriedly in fear of them melting.

Closing thoughts

During the assignment a lot has happened. After recovering from a traffic accident last year, I prioritised my time to look after Denise who was slowly losing her final battle against cancer. When she passed away, I spiralled into a depression that I’m finally beginning to believe I will eventually see the end of. So this assignment has taken me over 8 months to complete. Quite a lot of time for 17 pictures. From a learning perspective, one of the problems with that is that many of the thoughts I had when I made the pictures have faded, and a lot of the reasoning presented above is my current thinking, rather than careful notes made at the same time as the pictures. Still, some things are just the way they are, and I make no apology for the choices I made.

Many thanks to the friends who took the time to share their impressions of the pictures with me. It really helped me realise just how easy it is to interpret the same picture in very different ways.

My assignment is to take 8 pairs of pictures to illustrate contrasting concepts. So I have taken 16 pictures, and made sure that the two pictures in each pair has something in common that connects them, while at the same time depicting two contrasting opposites.

The 8 contrasts are:

• Large / small
• Many / few
• Broad / narrow
• Continuous / intermittent
• Pointed / blunt
• Light / dark
• Still / moving
• Straight / curved

So just to repeat: Out of the 16 pictures below, there is one that is meant to show “large” and one that is meant to show “small”, and the subject on these two pictures have something in common that makes them a pair. Likewise for “many / few” and each of the other contrasts.

The 16 pictures are shown below in completely random order. So the pictures shown next to each other are not meant to be a pair (although, the randomnes generator might have ordered things neatly, you never know). They’re just shown in two columns to be able to fit all 16 pictures in less space.

I would like to check whether it is possible to deduct (or guess) which pictures form a pair, and which contrast they represent. So that’s where I would like your help. If you do have a few minutes, have a look at the pictures, and leave a comment saying which ones you think are paired, and which contrast you think they represent. This is not a test of your ability to interpret the pictures, it is a test of my ability to convey the contrasts as pictures. So please don’t “cheat” and read other people’s comments before you have made up your mind, as that would skew the results.

Picture 1	Picture 2
Picture 3	Picture 4
Picture 5	Picture 6
Picture 7	Picture 8
Picture 9	Picture 10
Picture 11	Picture 12
Picture 13	Picture 14
Picture 15	Picture 16

 
Thanks in advance for the help!

Update 31/7/2011: I have (finally!) completed the blog post that will go with the assignment. So pairings I had intended, and some words about how and why, can be found here.