I've spent the last few days being very reflective about my photography in general. This is for a variety of reasons. It probably coincides with a conversation that I had with another photographer on Thursday night, and how my photographs have fared in recent club competitions. Some of the images (two are in my blog flicker photo stream) have scored fairly well but are a little 'so what' for me. However, images that I have tried to make with a different feel to them have not done so well. Oh its because deep down I'm a sucker for a soft grainy image or dark silhouettes. What does this have to do with allotments and gardening you may well ask.
It has begun to dawn on me that the photographs I most widely exhibit actually appear on my blog. Yet I do not exhibit them or take them as a 'photographer' they are often just snaps taken as a record of activity, sightings and of us having fun. This feels weird now I've said it. To be honest its rare that I take my decent camera to the allotment, so am I really a photographer. Wouldn't a photographer be more diligent? Do blogs with highly composed images tell you whats been going on warts and all, they may just be feeding the aspirational gardener within. A little plan that I'm concocting to aid my demonstrations of gardening expertise is the the use of photoshop - it will be much needed to improve the look of my plot as the seasons progress and my usual disasters occur. I might just clone an area of successful cultivation in someones post, say a row of nice peas then just paste it into one of my plot photos. That really would be armchair gardening.
In truth, looking back through my blog I like the image on my last post. Its a TTV (through the viewfinder) image of snowdrops, each time I happen to view it I smile slightly. Sadly, if I had lots of those sort of images in each post it might look like I was trying to hard and it also might get stale quite quickly. It may not be sustainable to produce this sort of image all the time, especially as this is a created image using a specific technique its not an accurate representation of the snowdrops. However I do want to push my image taking further and the blog gives me a reason to take pictures. To try new techniques, but does this fit with the style of my blog. So how do you know what the right balance is.
It appears to be that I am wrestling with these two points at the moment
- Would my blog have a better impact if more of its pictures were composed in a more arty way?
- Is there anything wrong with a picture of some freshly turned earth and a 'I did this today' post?
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