This week’s assignment took me right out of my comfort zone. It is to use the zoom while taking the photograph.
I have never done anything like this. I spent most of the week thinking about it and avoiding the task. Then I finally got around to it, and took hundreds of images. I like this one best. It is marbles on a lightbox, with lots of Lightroom tweaks. I did use a tripod, but you can see that there is still a little shake in the zoom.
The same photo, in colour and black and white. I have just spent time getting into the detail of Snapseed photo editor on my tablet and phone.
This week’s challenge has been to take a high key overexposed black and white photograph. Here in the south of England we get snow rarely – some years not at all. So when I woke up earlier this week to find we had a light snowfall overnight, I knew that I had to get out and take my photograph for this week’s challenge. These are some white crocuses in our back garden.
I have neglected this blog this year. Like many others, I tend to lose motivation for photography at this time of year.
Yesterday I went on an evening photowalk in Portsmouth. I was experimenting with lenses and techniques, including in the processing on the pc at home. As you can see, a black and white treatment won out on 3 of these 4 photographs.
For 2023, I have signed up for an online photography class. Each week there is an online lesson and a challenge to produce one image using those techniques.
Lesson no 1 has been a gentle introduction. The challenge is to take a photograph in which the main subject is in sharp focus, and other elements blurred, i.e. using very narrow depth of field. I took a photograph of a chess board set up in The Queen’s Gambit position, and here it is. The colour image is the original – we are under strict instructions not to process the image in any way, and this is what I uploaded to the class page. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to play around, and so I present the processed black and white version as well.
I was taking photographs of the garden this morning, after a heavy overnight frost. These 2 photographs are taken through a window, focussing on the condensation inside the window and the frost outside.
photography by Gabor Kovacs 